bowers, drink with Thais, embrace Roxana, and carry Cleopatra away in my arms wrapped in her carpet. It is possible for me even to imitate Antiochus, who was in love with his mother-in-law, although that is a singular idea to my notion.
I go out to exterminate the Gauls ; I come, I see, I conquer; and the best of it all is that it does not cost me one single drop of blood! Then, too, my riches are beyond counting; each story is a caravel, laden with the treasures of the East or Barbary; bringing precious metals, old wines, strange beasts, and captured slaves of the rarest beauty: — such breasts, such ivory limbs! All this is mine, these empires rose, flourished and disappeared, only to give me pleasure. I feel as if I were at a Carnival, where in turn I can wear every man's mask and disguise, even to putting on his skin, and with it his thoughts and passions. Thus I am at once the music, and the dancer, the book and old Plutarch, who was inspired to write it in a most fortunate hour.
How good it is to let the rhythm of words and phrases carry you off, dancing and laughing, into space, free from all trammels of the body. This mind, this thought of ours is God Himself. Praise be to His Holy Spirit! — Sometimes I pause in the
