Then striking a grand attitude, he looked
towards the Moon and burst out in accents of thrilling indignation:
"Pardon, O beautiful Diana of the Ephesians! Pardon, O Phoebe, thou
pearl-faced goddess of night beloved of Greece! O Isis, thou sympathetic
queen of Nile-washed cities! O Astarte, thou favorite deity of the
Syrian hills! O Artemis, thou symbolical daughter of Jupiter and Latona,
that is of light and darkness! O brilliant sister of the radiant Apollo!
enshrined in the enchanting strains of Virgil and Homer, which I only
half learned at college, and therefore unfortunately forget just now!
Otherwise what pleasure I should have had in hurling them at the heads
of Barbican, M'Nicholl, and every other barbarous iconoclast of the
nineteenth century!--"
Here he stopped short, for two reasons: first he was out of breath;
secondly, he saw that the irrepressible scientists had been too busy
making observations of their own to hear a single word of what he had
uttered, and were probably totally unconscious that he had spoken at
all. In a few seconds his breath came back in full blast, but the idea
of talking when only deaf men were listening was so disconcerting as to
leave him actually unable to get off another syllable.
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