These direct perceptions of the circumstances were played on by the fever he drew from his Fiesco bed.  Accuracy of vision in our crises is not so uncommon as the proportionate equality of feeling:  we do indeed. frequently see with eyes of just measurement while we are conducting ourselves like madmen.  The facts are seen, and yet the spinning nerves will change their complexion; and without enlarging or minimizing, they will alternate their effect on us immensely through the colour presenting them now sombre, now hopeful:  doing its work of extravagance upon perceptibly plain matter.  The fitful colour is the fever.  He must win her, for he never yet had failed—­he had lost her by his folly!  She was his—­she was torn from him!  She would come at his bidding—­she would cower to her tyrants!  The thought of her was life and death in his frame, bright heaven and the abyss.  At one beat of the heart she swam to his arms, at another he was straining over darkness.  And whose the fault?

He rose out of his amazement crying it with a roar, and foreignly beholding himself.  He pelted himself with epithets; his worst enemies could not have been handier in using them.  From Alvan to Alvan, they signified such an earthquake in a land of splendid structures as shatters to dust the pride of the works of men.  He was down among them, lower than the herd, rolling in vulgar epithets that, attached to one like him, became of monstrous distortion.  O fool! dolt! blind ass! tottering idiot! drunken masquerader! miserable Jack Knave, performing suicide with that blessed coxcomb air of curling a lock!—­Clotilde!  Clotilde!  Where has one read the story of a man who had the jewel of jewels in his hand, and flung in into the deeps, thinking that he flung a pebble?  Fish, fool, fish! and fish till Doomsday!  There’s nothing but your fool’s face in the water to be got to bite at the bait you throw, fool!  Fish for the flung-away beauty, and hook your shadow of a Bottom’s head!  What impious villain was it refused the gift of the gods, that he might have it bestowed on him according to his own prescription of the ceremonies!  They laugh!  By Orcus! how they laugh!  The laughter of the gods is the lightning of death’s irony over mortals.  Can they have a finer subject than a giant gone fool?

Tears burst from him:  tears of rage, regret, selflashing.  O for yesterday!  He called aloud for the recovery of yesterday, bellowed, groaned.  A giant at war with pigmies, having nought but their weapons, having to fight them on his knees, to fight them with the right hand while smiting himself with the left, has too much upon him to keep his private dignity in order.  He was the same in his letters—­a Cyclops hurling rocks and raising the seas to shipwreck.  Dignity was cast off; he came out naked.  Letters to Clotilde, and to the baroness, to the friend nearest him just then, Colonel von Tresten, calling them to him, were dashed to paper in this naked frenzy, and