hes into the most daring modulations, pursues the freshest and most
delicate melodies, cadences, pauses, and trills; now you heard the notes
murmuring at the bottom of its throat, like the ripple of the brook as
it loses itself among the pebbles; now you heard them rising and
gradually swelling and filling the air, and lingering long-drawn in the
skies. It was tender, glad, brilliant, pathetic; but his music was not
made for everybody.

Carried away by enthusiasm, he would be singing still; but the Ass, who
had already yawned more than once, stopped him, and said, 'I suspect
that all you have been singing there is uncommonly fine, but I don't
understand a word of it: it strikes me as bizarre, incoherent, and
confused. It may be you are more scientific than your rival; but he is
more methodic than you, and for my part, I'm for method.'

"And then the abbe, addressing M. Le Roy, and pointing to Grimm with his
finger: 'There,' he said, 'is the nightingale, and you the cuckoo; and I
am the ass, who decide in your favour. Good-night.'

"The abbes stories are capital, but he acts in a way that makes them
better still. You would have died with laughing to see him stretch his
neck into the air, and imitate the fine note of the nightingale, then
fill his throat, and take up the hoarse tone for the cuckoo; and all
that naturally, and without effort. He is pantomime from head to
foot."[219]

_Conversation._--"'Tis a singular thing, conversation, especially when
the company is tolerably large. Look at the roundabout circuits we took;
the dreams of a patient in delirium are not more incongruous. Still,
just as there is nothing absolutely unconnected in the head either of a
man who dreams, or of a lunatic, so all hangs together in conversation;
but it would often be extremely hard to find the imperceptible links
that have brought so many disparate ideas together. A man lets fall a
word which he detaches from what has gone before, and what has followed
in his head; another does the same, and then let him catch the thread
who can. A single physical quality may lead the mind that is engaged
upon it to an infinity of different things. Take a colour--yellow, for
instance; gold is yellow, silk is yellow, care is yellow, bile is
yellow, straw is yellow; to how many other threads does not this thread
answer? Madness, dreaming, the rambling of conversation, all consist in
passing from one object to another, through the medium of some commo