Little Poems in Prose

VII THE MADMAN AND VENUS WHAT an admirable day! The vast park swoons under the burning eye of the sun like youth under the dominion of love. The universal ecstasy of things expresses it- self by no noise; the very waters seem to sleep; how different from human festivals! Here it is an orgy of silence. One might say that an ever-increasing light makes things glitter more and more: that the excited flowers burn with desire to rival the sky’s blue by the vigour of their colour, and that the heat, making their perfumes visible, sends them up before the altar of the day-star like clouds. Nevertheless, in all this enjoyment I beheld one suffering. At the fool of a colossal Venus, one of those artificial madmen, one of those professional buffoons whose duty it is to make kings laugh when remorse or weariness sits heavy upon them, muffled in a startling and ridiculous cos- tume, with the horns and bells of a fool’s cap,