Through “the arras of the gloom” (arras is good), the pale breezes are moaning, and Julio is wan as stars unseen for paleness.  However, he lifts the tombstone “as it were lightsome as a summer gladness.”  “A summer gladness,” remarks Mr. Aytoun, “may possibly weigh about half-an-ounce.”  Julio came on a skull, a haggard one, in the grave, and Mr. Aytoun kindly designs a skeleton, ringing a bell, and crying “Dust ho!”

Now go, and give your poems to your friends!

Finally Julio unburies Agathe:—­

      “Thou must go,
   My sweet betrothed, with me, but not below,
   Where there is darkness, dream, and solitude,
   But where is light, and life, and one to brood
   Above thee, till thou wakest.  Ha, I fear
   Thou wilt not wake for ever, sleeping here,
   Where there are none but the winds to visit thee. 
   And Convent fathers, and a choristry
   Of sisters saying Hush!  But I will sing
   Rare songs to thy pure spirit, wandering
   Down on the dews to hear me; I will tune
   The instrument of the ethereal moon,
   And all the choir of stars, to rise and fall
   In harmony and beauty musical.”

Is this not melodious madness, and is this picture of the distraught priest, setting forth to sail the seas with his dead lady, not an invention that Nanteuil might have illustrated, and the clan of Bousingots approved?

The Second Chimera opens nobly:—­

   “A curse! a curse! {8} the beautiful pale wing
   Of a sea-bird was worn with wandering,
   And, on a sunny rock beside the shore,
   It stood, the golden waters gazing o’er;
   And they were nearing a brown amber flow
   Of weeds, that glittered gloriously below!”

Julio appears with Agathe in his arms, and what ensues is excellent of its kind:—­

   “He dropt upon a rock, and by him placed,
   Over a bed of sea-pinks growing waste,
   The silent ladye, and he mutter’d wild,
   Strange words about a mother and no child. 
   “And I shall wed thee, Agathe! although
   Ours be no God-blest bridal—­even so!”
   And from the sand he took a silver shell,
   That had been wasted by the fall and swell
   Of many a moon-borne tide into a ring—­
   A rude, rude ring; it was a snow-white thing,
   Where a lone hermit limpet slept and died
   In ages far away.  ’Thou art a bride,
   Sweet Agathe!  Wake up; we must not linger!’
   He press’d the ring upon her chilly finger,
   And to the sea-bird on its sunny stone
   Shouted, ’Pale priest that liest all alone
   Upon thy ocean altar, rise, away
   To our glad bridal!’ and its wings of gray
   All lazily it spread, and hover’d by
   With a wild shriek—­a melancholy cry! 
   Then, swooping slowly o’er the heaving breast
   Of the blue ocean, vanished in the west.”

Julio sang a mad song of a mad priest to a dead maid:—­