Human love! Love is not an inhabitant of the earth. We worship him as the Athenians did their unknown God: but broken hearts are the martyrs of his faith, and the eye shall never see the form which phantasy paints, and which passion pursues through paths of delusive beauty, among flowers whose odours are agonies, and trees whose gums are poison.[11] MR HILARY You talk like a Rosicrucian, who will love nothing but a sylph, who does not believe in the existence of a sylph, and who yet quarrels with the whole universe for not containing a sylph. MR CYPRESS The mind is diseased of its own beauty, and fevers into false creation. The forms which the sculptor's soul has seized exist only in himself.[12] MR FLOSKY Permit me to discept. They are the mediums of common forms combined and arranged into a common standard. The ideal beauty of the Helen of Zeuxis was the combined medium of the real beauty of the virgins of Crotona. MR HILARY But to make ideal beauty the shadow in the water, and, like the dog in the fable, to throw away the substance in catching at the shadow, is scarcely the characteristic of wisdom, whatever it may be of genius. To reconcile man as he is to the world as it is, to preserve and improve all that is good, and destroy or alleviate all that is evil, in physical and moral nature--have been the hope and aim of the greatest teachers and ornaments of our species. I will say, too, that the highest wisdom and the highest genius have been invariably accompanied with cheerfulness. We have sufficient proofs on record that Shakspeare and Socrates were the most festive of companions. But now the little wisdom and genius we have seem to be entering into a conspiracy against cheerfulness. MR TOOBAD How can we be cheerful with the devil among us! THE HONOURABLE MR LISTLESS How can we be cheerful when our nerves are shattered? MR FLOSKY How can we be cheerful when we are surrounded by a _reading public_, that is growing too wise for its betters? SCYTHROP How can we be cheerful when our great general designs are crossed every moment by our little particular passions? MR CYPRESS How can we be cheerful in the midst of disappointment and despair? MR GLOWRY Let us all be unhappy together. MR HILARY Let us sing a catch. MR GLOWRY No: a nice tragical ballad. The Norfolk Tragedy to the tune of the Hundredth Psalm. MR HILARY I say a catch. MR GLOWRY I say no. A song from Mr Cypress. ALL A song from Mr Cypress. MR CYPRESS _sung_-- There is a fever of the spirit, The brand of Cain's unresting doom, Which in the lone dark souls that bear it Glows like the lamp in Tullia's tomb: Unlike that lamp, its subtle fire Burns, blasts, consumes its cell, the heart, Till, one by one, hope, joy, desire, Like dreams of shadowy smoke depart.