Adam goes on board the steamer to hasten home to visit his mother's newly made grave. On the vessel, however, he most unexpectedly encounters his first flame, the Countess Clara, who in order to secure the escort of Adam to her country estate, introduces him to her husband, the corpulent, dull Chamberlain Galt. In vain does Adam struggle against accepting the invitation, under the plea that his mother has just died. Clara declares it to be her positive duty to console him in his affliction. His betrothal he has either concealed or denied. He allows himself to be persuaded to postpone his journey home. Clara and he sally forth to make purchases; she wishes to buy a feather for her hat, he a weed of crêpe for his. Clara first secures her ostrich feather in her own hat:-- "Round Adam's hat she folded then the sable, And that it charmingly became him found; They entered now the carriage,--he complacently, And Clara, waving plume and all, triumphantly." If we but pause to remember that this weed is the badge of mourning for his glorious, ardently loved mother, we find ourselves painfully affected by this cruel irony. "If it be true," we involuntarily exclaim, "that we are so completely children of the moment, of the passing mood, of self-deception, that our best feelings, our most earnest resolutions and our purest memories, may thus evaporate into mist, or vanish like smoke, how canst thou, O poet, make so satirical a face at the thought? Hast thou no tears for that singular and dismal mixture of human nature that renders such misery possible?" The questioner must compel himself to recall the fact that this poet beyond all else is an enraged moralist, who is pursuing a combined religious and poetical tendency in his poem. Personal morality is to him everything, and he does not regard it as a link of the great whole, a special organic function of the organism of the world, comparable to that of the liver or the heart in the human body. He has eyes for it alone. Wherever he finds it, his gaze becomes obscure to all else; wherever it is lacking, he sees only its absence; and "_eo ipso profulget, quod non videtur._"