Littell's Living Age Volume 160 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1884 Excerpt: ...catastrophe is coming. They are all here: the lover waiting in the street for some sign or word; the girl leaning out of window to tell her piece of news; the "poor child" who had drunk of the lava stream of love; the dead lying uncoffined in the church to be gazed upon by who will; the priest to whom are given those final instructions, --pious, and yet how uncomforting, how uniliuminated by hope or even aspiration Here there is no thought of reunion. A kind-hearted German woman once tried to console a young Neapolitan whose lover was dead, by saying that they might meet in Paradise. "In Paradise?" she answered, opening her large black eyes, "ah signora, in Paradise people do not marry." The coming back or reappearance of a lover, in whose absence his beloved has died, is a subject that has been made use of by the folk-poets of every country, and nothing can be more characteristic of the nationalities to which they belong than the divergences which mark their treatment of it. Northern singers turn the narrative of the event into half a fairy-tale. On the banks of the Moldau we are introduced to a joyous youth, returning with glad steps to his native village. "My pretty girls, my doves, is my friend cutting oats with you?" he asks of a group of girls working in the fields near his home. "Only yesterday," they reply, " his friend was buried." He begs them to tell him by which path they bore her away. It is a road edged with rosemary; everybody knows it--it leads to the new cemetery. Thither he goes, thrice he wanders round the place, the third time he hears a voice crying, "Who is it treads on my grave and breaks the rest of the dead?" "It is I, thy friend," he says and he bids h...