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Come, my friend, how much is it? I ask the easiest interest in the world: old Mordecai, the usurer, has made you pay twice as heavily before now: nothing but the signature of a bond, which is a mere ceremony, and the transfer of an article which, in itself, is a supposition a valueless, windy, uncertain property of yours, called by some poet of your own, I think, an animula, vagula, blandula bah! there is no use beating about the bush I mean a soul.
Where were the vermeil blooms, the liquid, expressive eyes, the harmonious limbs of Animula? The Signorina danced. What gross, discordant movements! The play of her limbs was all false and artificial Her bounds were painful athletic efforts; her poses were angular and distressed the eye.
The awful truth burst upon me; it had evaporated, until it had become so minute as to be invisible to the naked eye; I had been gazing on its last atom, the one that contained Animula and she was dying! I rushed again to the front of the lens and looked through. Alas! the last agony had seized her.
Presently one of the trees as I must call them unfolded a long ciliary process, with which it seized one of the gleaming fruits that glittered on its summit, and, sweeping slowly down, held it within reach of Animula. The sylph took it in her delicate hand and began to eat.
I watched Animula for hours with a breaking heart, and she seemed absolutely to wither away under my very eye. Suddenly I remembered that I had not looked at the water-drop for several days. In fact, I hated to see it; for it reminded me of the natural barrier between Animula and myself. I hurriedly looked down on the stage of the microscope.
With a bitter cry of anguish I fled from the room, and flinging myself on my bed, sobbed myself to sleep like a child. I arose the next morning almost at daybreak, and rushed to my microscope, I trembled as I sought the luminous world in miniature that contained my all. Animula was there. I had left the gas-lamp, surrounded by its moderators, burning when I went to bed the night before.
With a bitter cry of anguish I fled from the room, and, flinging myself on my bed, sobbed myself to sleep like a child. I arose the next morning almost at daybreak, and rushed to my microscope. I trembled as I sought the luminous world in miniature that contained my all. Animula was there. I had left the gas-lamp, surrounded by its moderator's, burning, when I went to bed the night before.
Animula, blandula vagula that's the sort of ring for it, but Latin's mostly too heavy. Io, Hymen, Hymenae, Io; Io, Hymen, Hymenae! What's that? A wedding song of Catullus absit omen. I must be in love with her indeed. He got up from the piano, and paced quickly and feverishly up and down the room. 'And yet, he went on, 'if only I weren't bound down so by this unprofitable trade of parson!
It was very hard not to spring to her assistance; but such gallantry would have been excessively ill-timed, so I was forced to sit still while the poor animula, vagula, blandula, worked herself free and arose unfettered by my side. Perhaps this is as fitting a place as any to mention the test whereby I have tried the Spirits who have come to me.
At length I grew so pale and emaciated from want of rest and continual brooding over my insane love and its cruel conditions that I determined to make some effort to wean myself from it. "Come," I said, "this is at best but a fantasy. Your imagination has bestowed on Animula charms which in reality she does not possess. Seclusion from female society has produced this morbid condition of mind.
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