She felt some truth in his apology. He was mocking, not God, but the magnified man of the popular creeds; to him it was a mere intellectual counter with which his wit played, oblivious of the sacred _aura_ that clung round the concept for the bulk of the world. Even his famous picture of Jehovah dying, or his suggestion that perhaps _dieser Parvenu des Himmels_ was angry with Israel for reminding Him of his former obscure national relations--what was it but a lively rendering of what German savants said so unreadably about the evolution of the God-Idea? But she felt also it would have been finer to bear unsmiling the smileless destinies; not to affront with the tinkle of vain laughter the vast imperturbable. She answered gently, "You are talking nonsense." "I always talked nonsense to you, little Lucy, for 'My heart is wise and witty And it bleeds within my breast.' Will you hear its melodious drip-drip, my last poem?--My manuscript, Catherine; and then you can go take a nap. I am sure I gave you little rest last night." The old woman brought him some folio sheets covered with great pathetically sprawling letters, and when she had retired, he began-- "Wie langsam kriechet sie dahin, Die Zeit, die schauderhafte Schnecke...?" His voice went on, but after the first lines the listener's brain was too troubled to attend. It was agitated with whirling memories of those earlier outcries throbbing with the passion of life, flaming records of the days when every instant held not an eternity of _ennui_, but of sensibility. "Red life boils in my veins.... Every woman is to me the gift of a world.... I hear a thousand nightingales.... I could eat all the elephants of Hindostan and pick my teeth with the spire of Strasburg Cathedral.... Life is the greatest of blessings, and death the worst of evils...." But the poet was still reading--she forced herself to listen. "'Perhaps with ancient heathen shapes, Old faded gods, this brain is full; Who, for their most unholy rites, Have chosen a dead poet's skull.'"