him for instant action reminded him that he carried many weights: a bad
name among her people and class, and chains in private. He was old
enough to strangle his impulses, if necessary, or any of the brood less
fiery than the junction of his passions. 'Well, well!--but we might so
soon have broken through the hedge into the broad highroad! It is but to
determine to do it--to take the bold short path instead of the wearisome
circuit. Just a little lightning in the brain and tightening of the
heart. Battles are won in that way: not by tender girls! and she is a
girl, and the task is too much for her. So, then, we are in your hands,
child! Adieu, and let the gold-crested serpent glide to her bed, and
sleep, dream, and wake, and ask herself in the morning whether she is not
a wedded soul. Is she not a serpent? gold-crested, all the world may
see; and with a mortal bite, I know. I have had the bite before the
kisses. That is rather an unjust reversal of the order of things.
Apropos, Hamlet was poisoned--ghost-poisoned.'

'Mad, he was mad!' said Clotilde, recovering and smiling.

'He was born bilious; he partook of the father's constitution, not the
mother's. High-thoughted, quick-nerved to follow the thought,
reflective, if an interval yawned between his hand and the act, he was by
nature two-minded: as full of conscience as a nursing mother that sleeps
beside her infant:--she hears the silent beginning of a cry. Before the
ghost walked he was an elementary hero; one puff of action would have
whiffed away his melancholy. After it, he was a dizzy moralizer, waiting
for the winds to blow him to his deed-ox out. The apparition of his
father to him poisoned a sluggish run of blood, and that venom in the
blood distracted a head steeped in Wittenberg philosophy. With
metaphysics in one and poison in the other, with the outer world opened
on him and this world stirred to confusion, he wore the semblance of