GOWER. Don’t you think Atherton has a very manuscriptural air to-night? KATE. There is a certain aspect of repletion about him. MRS. ATHERTON. We must bleed him, or the consequences may be serious. What’s this? (_Pulls a paper out of his pocket._) KATE. And this! (_Pulls out another._) WILLOUGHBY. He seems better now. ATHERTON (_abstractedly_). I was thinking of the difference between Gower’s studies and mine for the last few days. I have been reading a dark, miserable chapter in the history of man. He has been the chronicler of pleasant passages in the history of rocks and trees,—his great epochs, a smile of sun-shine or sudden chill of shadow,—the worst disasters, a dull neutral-tint kind of day, or a heavy rain,—his most impracticable subjects, beauties too bright or evanescent to be caught. It is sad to think how every subject of our study deepens in sorrow as it rises in dignity. WILLOUGHBY. And yet it is only by the manful struggles of past generations through calamity and against wrong, that we have bequeathed to us the leisure, the liberty, and the knowledge essential to the highest enjoyment of nature. Atherton, in fact, studies the chequered and intricate causes which issue in the taste of Gower as one of their effects. I should think it must be no small gain for an artist to be placed beyond the mediæval idea which set the _Inferno_ in the centre of the earth, and imagined, far below the roots of the mountains and the channels of the sea, eternal flames as the kernel of the world. GOWER. I have sometimes endeavoured, while lying on the grass, to realise in my own way the conception of the world by the light-hearted Greeks as an animal, or as a robe or peplus. I have imagined the clouds the floating breath of the great creature, rising against the crystal sphere of the sky, under which it lies as in an enchanter’s glass;—the seas, some delicate surfaces of the huge organism, that run wrinkled into a quick shiver at the cold touch of wind;—the forests, a fell of hair which is ruffled by the chafing hand of the tempest. Then, when I look at the earth in the other aspect, as a variegated woven robe, I see it threaded silverly with branching rivers spangled with eyes of lakes; where the sleek meadows lie, it is rich with piled velvet, and where the woods are, tufted with emerald feathers. But now I want to hear something more about our Strasburg people. ATHERTON. Bad news. There is a great hiatus in Arnstein’s journal, which history fills up with pestilence and bloodshed. I have drawn up a few notes of this interval which must serve you as an outline. (_Reads._)