"Ah, ye precious ones, my Horion! my Julius! Ye are still up yonder in the tempest, ye cover up my corpse, ye look weeping towards Heaven and cannot see Elysium.... O that you were already through the wet cloud of life!—but perhaps ye have already been long sleeping and waking, perhaps time goes otherwise on earth than in eternity.—Ah! that you might come down into the still pastures!" He saw in the magically magnifying glimmer two forms walking. "Oh, who is it?" he cried, flying to meet them. "O father! O mother! Are you here?"—But when he came nearer, he sank into four other arms, and stammered, "Blessed, blessed are we now, my Horion! my Julius!"—At last he said: "Where are my parents and my brothers and Clotilda and the three Brahmins? know they not that their Dahore is in Elysium?"
Victor beheld disconsolately the delirious ecstasy of his beloved, and said neither yes nor no. The latter gazed with a heavenly smile and a stream of love into the face of Julius, and said, "Look on me, thou couldst never see me on the earth."—"Thou knowest well that I am blind, my Emanuel," said the blind one. Here the frenzied man, turning away his quivering eyes suddenly and with a sigh to the moon, fled from his friends, saying to himself in a low voice: "The two forms are only shadowy dreams from the earth,—I will not look upon them, so that they may melt away.—So then the shadowy and dreamy woe of earth reaches over even into Eden. Haply I am still in a dream of death, for the region round about me looks like the landscapes in my life-dreams,—or is this only the fore-court of heaven, as I do not find my parents?" ... He looked toward the lofty stars: "Where do I now stand below you? New heavens lie on new heavens.—Ah, does one yearn then even here?"
He sighed and wondered that he sighed. He leaned down on the pearl-glistening hill of flowers, with his back to the beloved shadows and his eyes towards the kindling dawn, and groped and dreamed,—but at last the coolness of morning overspread the seeking, dazzled, burning eyes, which to-day had fallen now upon shapes of terror, now into seas of ecstasy, with gentle slumber and with corresponding dreams... "Rest softly, thou weary man!" said his friend; but the sleeper glowed with the horizon, and the old delusion played on within him again....
A dream and the morning laid for him the groundwork of a still higher Elysium.
He dreamed God would descend from a throne of suns, and in the form of an invisible, infinite zephyr's breath move over Elysium.
The first morning of summer heaped around him the bridal finery of the earth,—it lined the fields with pearl-banks of dew, and flung over the burrowing brooks the gold tinsel and spangles of the descending flush of morn, and hung upon the bushes the bracelets of burning drops.—But not until it had cloven open all the flowers,—sent out all the birds, quivering with gladness through the radiant heavens,—hid singing voices in all tree-tops,—not till it had sunk the faded moon behind the earth, and set up the sun like a god's throne over wreaths of clouds just burst into bloom, and over all gardens and around all woods had hung intertwined rainbows of dew,—and not till the blissful one stammered in his dreaming, "All-gracious One, All-gracious One, appear in the Elysium!"—not till then did the slowly flowing morning wind awaken him and usher him into the thousand-voiced jubilant choirs of creation, and set him to reeling blindly in the ringing, blazing Elysium.—
And lo! at this moment, a vast, boundless breath, cool, stirring, whispering, overflowed the whole enkindled Paradise; and the little flowers bowed themselves down silently, and the green ears soughing undulated together, and the stately trees trembled and murmured,—but only the great breast of man drank in in streams the infinite breath, and Emanuel's heart dissolved, ere it could say, "This is Thyself, All-loving One!"
—Thou, that readest me here, deny not God, when thou steppest out into the morning or under the starry heavens, or when thou art good or when thou art happy!—
—But, unhappy Emanuel!
Thou beheldest five sporting black butterflies, and thoughtest the fair creatures blessed Psyches.—Thou heardest behind thy hill a hewing into the earth, as if men were making a grave.—Thou lookedst upon thy good blind darling, and yet saidst, "Shadow! retire.... Tremble before God, who just passed by, and vanish!"—But thou saidst, before that, something else which I to-day do not disclose.—