"Ah, Horion! there lies in man a black Dead Sea, out of which only when it is agitated the blessed island of the next world lifts itself up with its clouds. But my lips will already lie under the earthly clod when the cold hour comes to thee in which thou wilt no longer see any God,—in which Death shall lie on his throne, and mow around him, and fling even to the domain of nothingness his frosty shadows and the lightnings of his scythe. O beloved, my grave-mound will then be already standing when thy inner midnight comes on; with anguish thou wilt mount upon it, and look sternly into the soft wreaths of the constellations, and cry:[[105]] 'Where is he whose heart crumbles beneath me? Where is eternity, the mask of time? Where is the Infinite One? The veiled self grasps after itself on all sides, and strikes against its cold form.... Gleam not upon me, broad starry field; thou art only the conglomerate picture, formed of colored earths, on an infinite churchyard-gate, that stands before the desert of a life buried under space.... Laugh me not to scorn, ye shapes on higher stars, for, if I melt away, ye melt away also. One, one thing, which man cannot name, glows forever in the immeasurable smoke, and a centre without limit calcines a circumference without limit.—Still I exist; the Vesuvius of death yet smokes above me, and its ashes envelop me; its flying rocks bore through suns, its lava-torrents move dissolved worlds, and in its crater the former world lies stretched out, and it sends up nothing but graves.... O Hope, where abidest thou?' ...

"Float enraptured around me, animated gold-dust, with thy thin wings,—I will not crush thy short flower-life; swell upward, giddy zephyr, and waft me down into thy blossom-cups. O thou immeasurable flood of radiance, fall from the sun over this narrow earth, and bear up on thy waves of splendor the heavy heart before the highest throne, that the eternal and infinite Heart may take the little ones which are nigh to ashes, and heal and warm them!

"Is, then, a poor son of this earth so unhappy that he can quail in the midst of the splendor of morning, so near to God on the hot steps of his throne?

"Fly not from me, my dear one, because a shadow always encompasses me, which daily grows darker, until at last it shall wall me in as a little night. I see the heavens and thee through the shadow, in the midnight I smile, and in the night-wind my breath goes forth full and warm. For, O man, my soul has stood erect toward the stars; man is an asthmatic, who suffocates if he lies down and does not lift up his breast.—But darest thou despise the earth, that forecourt of heaven, which the Eternal has thought worthy to move along as one in the bright host of his worlds? The great, the godlike, which thou hast in thy soul and lovest in another's,—seek it not in any sun-crater, on any planet-floor; the whole next world, the whole of Elysium, God himself, appear to thee in no other place than in the midst of thee. Be great enough to despise the earth; be greater, so as to respect it. To the mouth which is bent down to it, it seems a rich, flowery plain; to man in his perigee, a dark world; to man in his apogee, a glimmering moon. Then, and not till then, will the holy element, which from unknown heights is sent down into man, flow from the soul, mix itself with the earthly life, and quicken all that surrounds thee. So must the water, shed from heaven and its clouds, first run under the earth, and well up from it again, before it is purified into a fresh, clear draught. The whole earth is trembling now for rapture, till all rings and sings and shouts, as bells sound of themselves during an earthquake. And the soul of man is made greater and greater by its nearness to the Invisible....

"I love thee exceedingly!

"Emanuel."

Horion read through swimming eyes. "Ah," he wished, "were I only, this very day, near thee, with my disordered heart, thou glorified one!" and now, for the first time, occurred to him the nearness of St. John's day, and he proposed to himself on that day to see him. The sun had already vanished; the evening red fell like a ripe apple-blossom; he felt not the hot drops on his face, nor the icy dew of twilight on his hands; and with a bosom illuminated by dreams, and a heart tranquillized and reconciled to earth, he wandered back....

—By the way! is it, then, necessary that I should elaborate an apology for Emanuel as stylist and as stylite (in the higher sense)? And if such is necessary, need I therein bring forward anything more than this,—that his soul is still the echo of his Indian palms and the River Ganges; that the walk of the better sort of unfettered men, just as in dream, is always a flight; that he does not manure his life, like Europeans, with the blood of other animals, nor hatch it out of dead flesh, and this abstinence in eating (quite another effect than that of excess in drinking) makes the wings of fancy lighter and broader; that a few ideas, to which he guides with partial hand all the mental sap and nutriment (and this distinguishes not only madmen, but also extraordinary men; from ordinary ones), must in him obtain a disproportionate weight, because the fruits of a tree become so much thicker and sweeter when the rest have been plucked; and more of the same sort? For, to speak candidly, those readers who desire an apology, themselves need one, and Emanuel deserves something better than a—criminal defence.—

At this moment the consolation leaped up within my hero like a fountain, that he was to begin on Thursday his metempsychosis through nature,—his journey. "Deuse take it!" said he, skipping up; "what needs a Christian to coin money for the present distress,[[106]] and put on mourning-cloaks, when he can journey on Thursday to Kussewitz to see the handing-over of the Italian Princess, and on Saturday to the Isle of Union, and, what is more, on the same day, which is one day before St. John's, to Maienthal, to his dear one, his angel?"

O Heavens! I would that he and I were already about the journey,—really it may perhaps, unless all hopes deceive me, be quite tolerable!—