Cesara sank, silently, deeper and deeper into the glimmering beauties of the shore and of the night. The nightingales warbled as if inspired on the triumphal gate of spring. His heart grew in his breast like a melon under its glass-bell, and his breast heaved higher and higher over the swelling fruit. All at once he reflected that he should in this way see the tulip-tree of the sparkling morn and the garlands of the island put together only like an artificial, Italian silk-flower, stamen by stamen, leaf by leaf; then was he seized with his old thirst for one single draining draught from Nature's horn of plenty; he shut his eyes, not to open them again, till he should stand upon the highest terrace of the island before the morning sun. Schoppe thought he was asleep; but the Greek smilingly guessed the epicurism of this artificial blindness, and bound, himself, before those great insatiable eyes the broad, black taffeta-ribbon, which, like a woman's ribbon or lace mask, contrasted singularly and sweetly with his blooming but manly face. Now the two began to tease and tantalize him in a friendly way with oral night-pictures of the magnificent adornments of the shores between which they passed. "How proudly," said Dian to Schoppe, "rises yonder the castle of Lizanza, and its mountain, like a Hercules, with twelvefold girdles of vine-clusters!" "The Count," said Schoppe in a lower tone to Dian, "loses a vast deal by this bandaging of his eyes. See you not, architect, to speak poetically, the glimmer of the city of Arona? How beautifully she lays on Luna's blanc d'Espagne, and seems to be setting herself out and prinking up for to-morrow in the powder-mantle of moonshine which is flung around her! But that is nothing; still better looks St. Borromæus yonder, who has the moon on his head like a freshly-washed night-cap; stands not the giant there like the Micromegas of the German body politic, just as high, just as stiff and stark?" The happy youth was silent, and returned for answer a hand-pressure of love;--he only dreamed of the present, and signified he could wait and deny himself. With the heart of a child from whom the curtains and the after-midnight hide the approaching Christmas present of the morrow, he was borne along in the pleasure-boat, with tightly bandaged eyes, toward the approaching, heavenly kingdom. Dian drew, as well as the double light of the moonshine and the aurora permitted, a sketch of the veiled dreamer in his scrap-book. I wish I had it here, and could see in it how my darling, with the optic nerves tied up, strains at once the eye of dream directed toward the inner world, and the ear of attention so sharply set toward the outer. How beautiful is such a thing, painted,--how much more beautiful realized in life!