he cried, 'O, forget the past! Let me serve and help you;
let me be your servant; it is enough for me to serve you and to be near
you; let me be near you, dear--do not send me away.' He hurried his
pleading like the speech of a frightened child. 'It is not love,' he
went on; 'I do not ask for love; my love is enough . . .'

'Otto!' she said, as if in pain.

He looked up into her face. It was wrung with the very ecstasy of
tenderness and anguish; on her features, and most of all in her changed
eyes, there shone the very light of love.

'Seraphina?' he cried aloud, and with a sudden, tuneless voice,
'Seraphina?'

'Look round you at this glade,' she cried, 'and where the leaves are
coming on young trees, and the flowers begin to blossom. This is where
we meet, meet for the first time; it is so much better to forget and to
be born again. O what a pit there is for sins--God's mercy, man's
oblivion!'

'Seraphina,' he said, 'let it be so, indeed; let all that was be merely
the abuse of dreaming; let me begin again, a stranger. I have dreamed,
in a long dream, that I adored a girl unkind and beautiful; in all things
my superior, but still cold, like ice. And again I dreamed, and thought
she changed and melted, glowed and turned to me. And I--who had no merit
but a love, slavish and unerect--lay close, and durst not move for fear
of waking.'

'Lie close,' she said, with a deep thrill of speech.

So they spake in the spring woods; and meanwhile, in Mittwalden
Rath-haus, the Republic was declared.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL POSTSCRIPT TO COMPLETE THE STORY

The reader well informed in modern history will not require details as to
the fate of the Republic. The best account is to be found in the memoirs
of Herr Greisengesang (7 Bande: Leipzig), by our passing acquaintance the
licentiate Roederer. Herr Roederer, with too much of an author's
licence, makes a great figure of his hero--poses him, indeed, to be the
centre-piece and cloud-compeller of the whole. But, with due allowance
for this bias, the book is able and complete.

The reader is of course acquainted with the vigorous and bracing pages of
Sir John (2 vols., London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown). Sir
John, who plays but a tooth-comb in the orchestra of this historical
romance, blows in his own book the big bassoon. His character is there
drawn at large; and the sympathy of Landor has countersigned the
admiration of the public. One point, ho