A woman's fair repute is like a blue harebell—a touch can wither it.
Viva had gained the "great world;" and because she had gained it all the old things of her lost past grew unalterably sweet to her now that they no longer could be called hers. The brown, kind, homely, tender face of grand'mère; the gambols of white and frolicsome Bébé; the woods where, with every spring, she had filled her arms with sheaves of delicate primroses; the quaint little room with its strings of melons and sweet herbs, its glittering brass and pewter, its wood-fire with the soup-pot simmering above the flame; the glad free days in the vineyard and on the river, with the winds blowing fragrance from over the clover and flax, and the acacias and lindens; nay, even the old, quiet, sleepy hours within the convent-walls, lying on the lush unshaven grass, while the drowsy bells rang to vespers or compline,—all became suddenly precious and dear to her when once she knew that they had drifted away from her for evermore.
Then he bent his head, letting her desire be his law; and that music, which had given its hymn for the vintage-feast of the Loire, and which had brought back the steps of the suicide from the river-brink in the darkness of the Paris night, which sovereigns could not command and which held peasants entranced by its spell, thrilled through the stillness of the chamber.
Human in its sadness, more than human in its eloquence, now melancholy as the Miserere that sighs through the gloom of a cathedral at midnight, now rich as the glory of the afterglow in Egypt, a poem beyond words, a prayer grand as that which seems to breathe from the hush of mountain solitudes when the eternal snows are lighted by the rising of the sun—the melody of the violin filled the silence of the closing day.
The melancholy, ever latent in the vivid natures of men of genius, is betrayed and finds voice in their Art. Goethe laughs with the riotous revellers, and rejoices with the summer of the vines, and loves the glad abandonment of woman's soft embraces, and with his last words prays for Light. But the profound sadness of the great and many-sided master-mind thrills through and breaks out in the intense humanity, the passionate despair of Faust; the melancholy and the yearning of the soul are there.
With Tricotrin they were uttered in his music.
"Let me be but amused! Let me only laugh if I die!" cries the world in every age. It has so much of grief and tragedy in its own realities, it has so many bitter tears to shed in its solitude, it has such weariness of labour without end, it has such infinitude of woe to regard in its prisons, in its homes, in its battlefields, in its harlotries, in its avarices, in its famines; it is so heart-sick of them all, that it would fain be lulled to forgetfulness of its own terrors; it asks only to laugh for awhile, even if it laugh but at shadows.