Under the wide stillness lay sleep, dreams, and a friend's inconsolable heart.
In this stillness of eternity Emanuel went up without any other hand in his to the high gate which soars away in black darkness above time.
Silence is the speech of the world of spirits, the starry heaven its nunnery-grating,—but behind this nunnery-grating appeared now no spirit, not even God.
The moment was coming when man looks upon his body and then on his individual self, and then shudders.—The I stands alone beside its shadow,—a foam-globe of being trembles, snaps, and collapses, and one hears the bubble vanish and is one himself.
Emanuel peered into Eternity, it looked like a long night.
He looked round him to see whether he cast a shadow,—a shadow casts no shadow.
Ah! a mute lays man in the cradle, a mute stretches him out in the grave.—When he has a joy, it looks as if a sleeper smiled,—when he weeps and wails, it looks like weeping in one's sleep.—We all look up to heaven and pray for solace; but overhead in the endless blue there is no voice for our heart,—nothing appears, nothing consoles us, nothing answers us.—
And so we die....
—O All-gracious One! we die more happily; only the poor Emanuel wrestled in the silent darkness with fierce thoughts which for so long a time he had not seen, and which clutched at his paling countenance. But these masks flee away, when a friendly fraternal face appears before thee and embraces thee.—Horion raised himself up and warmed again his bowed friend by a mute farewell. A storm-wind precipitated itself out of the clear west into the dumb, laboring hell, and chased out all the lightnings and all the thunders. Lo, at that moment the bright moon flew out from the backward-drifted mass of cloud like an angel of peace into the unstained blue,—then in the light Emanuel stood distinguished from his shadow,—then did the moon illuminate a rainbow of pale color grains, which in the Southeast (the gate to the East Indies) penetrated through the dark water-columns, and arched itself over the Alps,—then Emanuel saw again, as previously, the Jacob's ladder leaning against the earthly night,—then came rapture without measure, and he cried with outspread arms: "Ah, yonder in the East, in the East, over the road to my native land, there glows the arch of triumph, there opens the gate of glory, there the dying march through." ...
And as just then it struck twelve o'clock, he spread out his hand ecstatically towards heaven, which was blue above the mountains, and toward the moon, which reposed serenely beside the tempest, and cried, breaking into blissful tears, "Thanks, Eternal One, for my first life, for all my joys, for this fair earth."—