Taking into account the metaphor »scythe of Saturn« that refers to the god as well as the planet of melancholy that the title of Sebald’s book recalls from the beginning, one might consider the vision of the globe as a graveyard as part of a baroque topos of vanitas and transitoriness—in the sense that Walter Benjamin pointed to the significance of saturnic melancholy within the ruinous world of seventeenth-century German tragedies.

We have given a ball; I send you a paper describing the event. We have two guests in the house, Captain-Count Wurmbrand and Monsieur Albert de Lautreppe. Lautreppe is awfully nice - a quiet, gentlemanly fellow, GONFLE DE REVES, as he describes himself - once a sculptor in the atelier of Henry Crosse, he knows something of art, and is really a resource to me.

Much difference of opinion has prevailed with reference to the genuine nativity of this species [Vinca minor] in Britain.

There is no connation whatever; there is no Sternum at any time, and no hæmapophyses; nothing, indeed, but membrane-bones formed between the corium and the membrane lining the abdominal cavity.