Your
hand touched nothing but clouds more nimble than your desires. Your
radiant companion, crowned with white roses like a bride of Heaven,
wept at your anguish. Perhaps she was murmuring melodious litanies to
the Virgin, while the demoniacal cravings of the flesh were haunting
you with their shameless clamor, and you disdained the divine fruits
of that ecstasy in which I live, though shortening my life."
"Your exaltation, my dear Vendramin," replied Emilio, calmly, "is
still beneath reality. Who can describe that purely physical
exhaustion in which we are left by the abuse of a dream of pleasure,
leaving the soul still eternally craving, and the spirit in clear
possession of its faculties?
"But I am weary of this torment, which is that of Tantalus. This is my
last night on earth. After one final effort, our Mother shall have her
child again--the Adriatic will silence my last sigh--"
"Are you idiotic?" cried Vendramin. "No; you are mad; for madness, the
crisis we despise, is the memory of an antecedent condition acting on
our present state of being.
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