superior to which shone his abstract, unconscious grandeur of humanity. A
vast and calm melancholy, which had nothing to do with burning coffee,
dwelt in his aspect and attitude; and if he had been some dread
supernatural agency, turning the wheel of fortune, and doing men, instead
of coffee, brown, he could not have looked more sadly and weirdly
impressive. When, presently, he rose from his seat, and lifted the
cylinder from its place, and the clinging flames leaped after it, and he
shook it, and a volume of luminous smoke enveloped him and glorified him--
then I felt with secret anguish that he was beyond art, and turned sadly
from the spectacle of that sublime and hopeless magnificence.

At other times (but this was in broad daylight) I was troubled by the
aesthetic perfection of a certain ruffian boy, who sold cakes of baked
Indian-meal to the soldiers in the military station near the Piazza, and
whom I often noted from the windows of the little caffe there, where you
get an excellent _caffe bianco_ (coffee with milk) for ten soldi and
one to the waiter. I have reason to fear that this boy dealt over shrewdly
with the Austrians, for a pitiless war raged between him and one of the
sergeants. His hair was dark, his cheek was of a bronze better than olive;
and he wore a brave cap of red flannel, drawn down to eyes of lustrous
black. For the rest, he gave unity and coherence to a jacket and
pantaloons of heterogeneous elements, and, such was the elasticity of his
spirit, a buoyant grace to feet encased in wooden shoes. Habitually came a
barrel-organist, and ground before the barracks, and

"Took the soul
Of that waste place with joy;"

and ever, when this organist came to a certain lively waltz, and threw his
whole soul, as it were, into the crank of his instrument, my beloved