“Who can that be!” asked Flemming.  “He strides away indignantly, like one of Ossian’s ghosts?”

“A great philosopher, whose name I have forgotten.  Truly a strange owl!”

“He looks like a lion with a hat on.”

“He is a mystic, who reads Schubert’s History of the Soul, and lives, for the most part, in the clouds of the Middle Ages.  To him the spirit-world is still open.  He believes in the transmigration of souls; and I dare say is now followingthe spirit of some departed friend, who has taken the form of yonder pigeon.”

“What a strange hallucination!  He lives, I suppose, in the land of cloud-shadows.  And, as St. Thomas Aquinas was said to be lifted up from the ground by the fervor of his prayers, so, no doubt, is he by the fervor of his visions.”

“He certainly appears to neglect all sublunary things; and, to judge from certain appearances, since you seem fond of holy similitudes, one would say, that, like St. Serapion the Sindonite, he had but one shirt.  Yet what cares he? he lives in that poetic dream-land of his thoughts, and clothes his dream-children in poetry.”

“He is a poet, then, as well as a philosopher?”

“Yes; but a poet who never writes a line.  There is nothing in nature to which his imagination does not give a poetic hue.  But the power to make others see these objects in the same poetic light, is wanting.  Still he is a man of fine powers and feelings; for, next to being a greatpoet, is the power of understanding one,—­of finding one’s-self in him, as we Germans say.”

Three figures, dressed in black, now came from one of the green alleys, and stopped on the brink of a little fountain, that was playing among the gay flowers in the garden.  The eldest of the three was a lady in that season of life, when the early autumn gives to the summer leaves a warmer glow, yet fades them not.  Though the mother of many children, she was still beautiful;—­resembling those trees, which blossom in October, when the leaves are changing, and whose fruit and blossom are on the branch at once.  At her side was a girl of some sixteen years, who seemed to lean upon her arm for support.  Her figure was slight; her countenance beautiful, though deadly white; and her meek eyes like the flower of the night-shade, pale and blue, but sending forth golden rays.  They were attended by a tall youth of foreign aspect, who seemed a young Antinous, with a mustache and a nose a la Kosciusko.  In other respects a perfect hero of romance.

“Unless mine eyes deceive me,” said the Baron, “there is the Frau von Ilmenau, with her pale daughter Emma, and that eternal Polish Count.  He is always hovering about them, playing the unhappy exile, merely to excite that poor girl’s sympathies; and as wretched as genius and wantonness can make him.”

“Why, he is already married, you know,” replied Flemming.  “And his wife is young and beautiful.”

“That does not prevent him from being in love with some one else.  That question was decided in the Courts of Love in the Middle Ages.  Accordingly he has sent his fair wife to Warsaw.  But how pale the poor child looks.”