he drew from his Fiesco bed. Accuracy of vision in our crises is not so
uncommon as the proportionate equality of feeling: we do indeed.
frequently see with eyes of just measurement while we are conducting
ourselves like madmen. The facts are seen, and yet the spinning nerves
will change their complexion; and without enlarging or minimizing, they
will alternate their effect on us immensely through the colour presenting
them now sombre, now hopeful: doing its work of extravagance upon
perceptibly plain matter. The fitful colour is the fever. He must win
her, for he never yet had failed--he had lost her by his folly! She was
his--she was torn from him! She would come at his bidding--she would
cower to her tyrants! The thought of her was life and death in his
frame, bright heaven and the abyss. At one beat of the heart she swam to
his arms, at another he was straining over darkness. And whose the
fault?

He rose out of his amazement crying it with a roar, and foreignly
beholding himself. He pelted himself with epithets; his worst enemies
could not have been handier in using them. From Alvan to Alvan, they
signified such an earthquake in a land of splendid structures as shatters
to dust the pride of the works of men. He was down among them, lower
than the herd, rolling in vulgar epithets that, attached to one like him,
became of monstrous distortion. O fool! dolt! blind ass! tottering
idiot! drunken masquerader! miserable Jack Knave, performing suicide
with that blessed coxcomb air of curling a lock!--Clotilde! Clotilde!
Where has one read the story of a man who had the jewel of jewels in his
hand, and flung in into the deeps, thinking that he flung a pebble?
Fish, fool, fish! and fish till Doomsday! There's nothing but your
fool's face in the water to be got to bite at the bait you throw, fool!
Fish for the flung-away beauty, and hook your shadow of a Bottom's head!
What impious villain was it refused the gift of the gods, that he might