Let us, however, see what is pretty.  The little Cupid-seller is pretty, and the stone is made as flexible as life in the waists of the bathing-women.  One of them, as she steps out, feels the water with her feet, and we feel, with her, a sensation that the water is cold.  The coolness of the marble-hall realizes this feeling.  Let us go out into the sunshine, and up to the neighbouring cliff, which rises above the mansions and houses.  Here the wild roses shoot forth from the crevices in the rock; the sunbeams fall prettily between the splendid pines and the graceful birches, upon the high grass before the colossal bronze bust of Bellmann.  This place was the favourite one of that Scandinavian improvisatore.  Here he lay in the grass, composed and sang his anacreontic songs, and here, in the summer-time, his annual festival is held.  We will raise his altar here in the red evening sunlight.  It is a flaming bowl, raised high on the jolly tun, and it is wreathed with roses.  Morits tries his hunting-horn, that which was Oberon’s horn in the inn-parlour, and everything danced, from Ulla to “Mutter paa Toppen:"[M] they stamped with their feet and clapped their hands, and clinked the pewter lid of the ale-tankard; “hej kara Sjael! fukta din aske!” (Hey! dear soul! moisten your clay).

[Footnote M:  The landlady of an alehouse.]

A Teniers’ picture became animated, and still lives in song.  Morits blows the horn on Bellmann’s place around the flowing bowl, and whole crowds dance in a circle, young and old; the carriages too, horses and waggons, filled bottles and clattering tankards:  the Bellmann dithyrambic clangs melodiously; humour and low life, sadness—­and amongst others, about

    “——­hur oegat gret
     Ved de Cypresser, som stroeddes."[N]

[Footnote N:  How the eyes wept by the cypresses that were strewn around.]

Painter, seize thy brush and palette and paint the Maenade—­but not her who treads the winebag, whilst her hair flutters in the wind, and she sings ecstatic songs.  No, but the Maenade that ascends from Bellmann’s steaming bowl is the Punch’s Anadyomene—­she, with the high heels to the red shoes, with rosettes on her gown and with fluttering veil and mantilla—­fluttering, far too fluttering!  She plucks the rose of poetry from her breast and sets it in the ale-can’s spout; clinks with the lid, sings about the clang of the hunting horn, about breeches and old shoes and all manner of stuff.  Yet we are sensible that he is a true poet; we see two human eyes shining, that announce to us the human heart’s sadness and hope.

A STORY.

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