“Listen, Diana,” said one of the absorbed students; “Franz and old Daniel are together in the nighttime, and Franz is telling a dream from which he has awakened in terror⁠—listen!” And in a low voice she read something, of which not one word was intelligible to me; for it was in an unknown tongue⁠—neither French nor Latin. Whether it were Greek or German I could not tell.

“That is strong,” she said, when she had finished: “I relish it.” The other girl, who had lifted her head to listen to her sister, repeated, while she gazed at the fire, a line of what had been read. At a later day, I knew the language and the book; therefore, I will here quote the line: though, when I first heard it, it was only like a stroke on sounding brass to me⁠—conveying no meaning:⁠—