"I am not," said she, looking sharply toward the principal little cascade, which stormed down from among the trees overhead,--"I am not of many or eloquent words; and, moreover, I do not quite understand you. I must always translate words for myself into ideas and truths, and I cannot always do it. In the case of your words, Count, I cannot form any idea at all. He whom love alone does not satisfy, cannot have been filled with it. Of course, so all-forgetting with their hearts as we, so concentrated upon one idea of life, men never are. Ah, and so little is man to man, an image of man is more to him, and every little future!" "Thou, too, Brutus!" said Albano, astonished. "Would you," he continued, collecting himself, "lay out an eternity of that elysium-life in Ischia as adequate to a man? Would you send him as a youth into the cloister of the most blissful repose? Certainly only as an old man. The former would be like planting the tree top downward in the dark earth." "There spoke the German again," said she; "for ever and ever real, indefatigable industry. The tranquil Neapolitans, the people on the Apennines or the Pyrenees, on the Ganges, in Otaheite, full of enjoyment and contemplativeness, are to this Spaniard an abomination. I should think, if a man were only somewhat for himself, not for others, that would be all-sufficient. What _great actions_ are I do not know at all; all I know is a _great life_; for something like them every sinner can do." "Verily, that is true," said he; "there is nothing more pitiable than a man who will show himself by this or that, which appears to himself great, rare, and without relation to his being, and therefore does not belong to him at all. Every nature puts forth its own fruit, and cannot do otherwise; but its child can never seem great to it, but always only small, or just as it should be. If it be otherwise, then it must be that an entirely foreign fruit has been hung upon its branches."