1' IIE A M E RIC A N - S C A N DIN AVIAN li E1 r IEIV 
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his blood may pour forth with the poison of the potion, with all the 
endless, tempestuous, lamenting, jubilating desire. 
They got up softly and pressed out through the glowing dust over 
mighty craters of tone. Outside, the spring night was cool. Leonard 
grew pale and his eyes shone. 
“In old times people opened their veins,” he muttered, “but this is 
a much finer way.” 
He edged hurriedly across Gustavus Adolphus Place and took his 
stand at the barrier by the river. The moon hung thin as a flower petal 
up in the greenish-blue heavens, whose color seemed to consist only 
of coolness and depth. The river rolled along pale mother-of-pearl 
dust. 
Here assuredly some one passed one day in May and was empty 
and sad and full of fiery moods, thought Leonard. But now he has 
loved and died with Tristan, so that now he hardly touches the ground, 
and everything is silent, and all the world appears as a cool and lovely 
memory. Yes, what have I, Leonard the artist in woodcuts, not 
experienced, seeing that I stand here with the fate of a mighty heart 
behind me! In this hour I feel love as a great enrapturing memory, 
something that lives in my soul but is not able to choke my freedom. 
I have come to drink the potion without its fatal poison. Verily art 
can give appeasement even to the most burning Now. In art is freedom! 
Leonard had almost wholly forgotten his fisherman. But now 
he noted that the old man stood steadily beside him at the rampart. 
His face appeared smaller than before in the moonlight. Despite 
the two-story nose and the gray stubble it was almost like a child’s. 
But it had always the same stamp of repose. It peered out into the 
spring night, as if all this illimitable canopy was a friendly home for 
brisk old folks. Naturally, thought Leonard, the whole world is for 
him just a beautiful dream of once on a time. The moon, the trees, 
and the rushing water here, all are his memory, all have flowed into 
a great certitude, all are his innermost self, as memories are. 
Leonard gave the old man his hand: 
“Thanks for your help!” he said. 
“Aye, thanks and good-bye, then. Now I must down there again 
a bit, I suppose. Fishing is best at night.” 
Thereupon Lundstrom went to his net. But Leonard strolled 
without uncertainty or restlessness up to his den on the crest of South 
Stockholm. His thoughts played meanwhile with the same daring 
little speech: 
Why should infinity make us homeless? he said to himself. In- 
finity has its middle point somewhere. Well, and I, woodcut artist 
Leonard, am sitting in the centre. Should I not, then, with a good 
heart cut at my boxwood blocks? 
