as
man loves woman?"

"As man loves woman? No, I suppose not."

"And why should the subject animals be wiser than their king? But to
return: you would like to have my youth and my careless enjoyment of
youth?"

"Can you ask,--who would not?" Margrave looked at me for a moment with
unusual seriousness, and then, in the abrupt changes common to his
capricious temperament, began to sing softly one of his barbaric
chants,--a chant different from any I had heard him sing before, made,
either by the modulation of his voice or the nature of the tune, so
sweet that, little as music generally affected me, this thrilled to my
very heart's core. I drew closer and closer to him, and murmured when he
paused,--

"Is not that a love-song?"

"No;" said he, "it is the song by which the serpent-charmer charms the
serpent."

CHAPTER XXVI.

Increased intimacy with my new acquaintance did not diminish the charm
of his society, though it brought to light some startling defects,
both in his mental and moral organization. I have before said that
his knowledge, though it had swept over a wide circuit and dipped into
curious, unfrequented recesses, was desultory and erratic. It certainly
was not that knowledge, sustained and aspiring, which the poet assures
us is "the wing on which we mount to heaven." So, in his faculties
themselves there were singular inequalities, or contradictions. His
power of memory in some things seemed prodigious, but when examined it
was seldom accurate; it could apprehend, but did not hold together with
a binding grasp what metaphysicians call "complex ideas." He thus seemed
unable to put it to any steadfast purpose in the sciences of which
it retained, vaguely and loosely, many recondite principles. For
the sublime and beautiful in literature lie had no taste whatever. A
passionate lover of nature, his imagination had no response to the arts
by which nature is expressed or idealized; wholly unaffected by poetry
or painting. Of the fine arts, music alone attracted and pleased him.
His conversation was often eminently suggestive, touching on much,
whether in books or mankind, that set one thinking; but I never remember
him to have uttered any of those lofty or tender sentiments which form
the connecting links between youth and genius; for if poets sing to the
young, and the young hail their own interpreters in poets, it is because
the tendency of both is to idealize the realities of life,--finding
ever