The dismembered tempest had drifted about in little clouds and stood above the midnight-red in the northeast, when the cold numbness of the shock still held the two men fastened together; at last a hot hand glided down from above between their faces, and a timid voice asked, "Are you asleep?"
"O Julius," said Horion, "come down unto the grave, thy Emanuel is dead." ...
I care not to count the dismal minutes that let two wretched beings lie bound by the thorn-girdle of anguish to a pallid one. But brighter moments came, which first drove every smallest cloud out of the sky and wiped clean the tarnished moon, and then opened the hot eyes before the cleansed and cooled silvery night.
"Ah, he has perhaps only fainted," said Victor after a long while. They raised themselves up with a sigh. Wearily they drew their beloved out of the grave. They would fain carry him down to his dwelling, in order there to bring back again from its solstice this fair soul, as the St. John's sun would return from his. With the slight energies which grief had still spared them, and with the little light which still entered into two wet eyes, they struggled along with the crippled angel, while two laboring shadows beside them frightfully carried a third in the glimmer, from the mountain down into the meadows. Here Victor went alone into the village, in order, perhaps, to provide a more cheerful carriage than a hearse. The blind one stayed himself by a birch-tree, Emanuel slept like the other flowers, and upon them, before the moon.... But suddenly Julius heard the dead man speak and graze him as he passed through the grass; and, pursued by terror, he fled....
—Genius of dreams! thou that walkest through the nebulous sleep of mortals and bringest up before the lonely soul imprisoned in a corpse the happy islands of childhood! O thou that therein restorest to our mouldered friends the bloom of the cheek and showest to our poor frenzied heart past heavens and reflections of Eden and undulating lawns, on clouds!—Magic Genius! enter into this holy night before a man who is not asleep, and turn thy crape-covered glass to my open eye, that I may see therein, and paint, the Elysian world of light which struggles with our earthly shadow, as a pale Luna, in the double eclipse![[155]]—
The enraptured voice of the dead man cried: "Hail to thee, thou still Elysium!—O thou glimmering land of rest! receive the new shade. Ah, how softly thou glowest,—how softly thou breathest,—how softly thou reposest!" ...
Emanuel's eyes had opened; but in his brain burned the Elysian delirious idea that he had died and waked up in the second world. O thou over-blest! and indeed a glittering Eden did encircle thee,—ah, this glow, this breath, this fragrance, this repose, was too beautiful for an earth. The moon weaved over with silver threads, as with flying summer-gossamer, the green of night,—from leaf to leaf, from trees to trees stretched the sparkling veil of the illuminated rain,—over all waters floated glimmering banks of vapor,—a gentle fanning threw jewels from the twigs into the silver streams,—the trees and the mountains rose like giants into the night,—the everlasting sky stood over the falling sparks, over the fleeting fragrances; over the playing leaves, it alone unchangeable, with fixed suns, with the eternal world-studded vault, great, cool, radiant and blue.—Never did a valley so glimmer, so exhale, so whisper, so enchant before....
Emanuel embraced the sparkling soil and cried out from a burning breast, subdued and stammering with rapture: "Ah, is it true, then? do I really hold thee, my native land?—Ay, in such fields of rest wounds are healed, tears are stilled, no sighs demanded, no sins committed, here in sooth the little human heart dissolves for overfulness of rapture and creates itself anew to dissolve again.... Thus have I long since imagined thee, blessed, magical, dazzling land, that borderest on my earth.... O dear earth! where mayest thou be?"
He lifted his intoxicated eye to the star-bedewed heaven, and saw the low-sunken moon hanging faint and yellow in the south; this he took for the earth, from which he supposed death had borne him into this Elysium. Here his voice dissolved into emotion at the beloved earliest garden of his life, and he addressed the earth flying overhead above the stars:—
"Globe of tears! Dwelling of dreams! Land full of shadows and spots!—Ah, on thy broad shadowy spots[[156]] the good children of men will be at this moment trembling and sinking!... A ring of clouds[[157]] encircles thee, and they see not Elysium.... Ah, how silently thou bearest through the still, blessed heavens thy battle-cry—thy storms—thy graves; thy enveloping atmosphere shuts in like a coffin all the voices of wailing round about thee, and thou glidest with thy bowed and enshrouded ones only as a pale, still ball away above Elysium!...