And he crushed weeping the little cloud of time.—
* * * * *
The fever images of death, with which every sleep, even the last, begins, gleamed in Emanuel's eyes. His spirit hung swaying in his loose nerves, breathed upon by soft airs; for he was already in that dissolving nervous ecstasy of the fainting, the child-bearing, the exhausted by bleeding, the dying. But his emptied breast rose the more lightly, his departing spirit drew out thinner the thread of life.
Victor would have enjoyed the comfort of the dull numbness, wherewith pains heaped one upon another crush us down, had he not been obliged every minute to tell these pains, i. e. all the preparations of death, to the poor blind youth. Ah, the blind one feared perhaps that he might call after this teacher too late with the song of rapture.
Evening came. Emanuel grew stiller and his eye more rigid, and it seemed to see the fantasies of his busy brain in the apartment, until the gold strip of the far-sinking sun, which a looking-glass directed towards him, darted like a lightning-flash through his world of dream. Softly, but with altered voice, he said, "Into the sun!"—They understood him, and moved his bed and his head toward the evening-rain of the setting sun, to which he had of old so often unfolded his susceptible heart. Victor started, when he saw that his eyes stood, undazzled and immovable, open to the sun.
There was a sublime stillness round three discomposed beings; only a breath of evening wind fluttered among the linden-leaves of the apartment, and a bee hovered about the linden-blossoms; but out of doors away from the theatre of distress a blissful evening reposed on the pastures red with sunlight, among joyous, fluttering, singing, intoxicated creatures.
Emanuel gazed silently into the sun, which sunk lower toward the earth; he clutched not at the bed-clothes like others, but flung his arms aloft as if for a flight or an embrace. Victor took his beloved hands, but they hung down into his without a pressure. And when the sun, like a blazing world on the day of judgment, sank down in a last upshooting glow: then the silent one still hung with cold eyes on the vacant place of the sun, and remarked not the setting; and Victor saw suddenly shifting flashes of the scythe of death pass yellow across the undistorted face.—Then, deeply troubled, he handed the flute to Julius, and said in a broken voice, "Play the song of rapture, he is dying now."—
And Julius, with streaming, darkened eyes, compressed his sobbing breath into the flute and raised his sighs to heavenly tones, that he might muffle and benumb the parting soul, during the tearing away of its earthly roots, with the after-echoes of the first world, with the preluding echoes of the second.
And as, during the song, a blissful smile at an unknown dream glorified the face that was growing cold,—and when only a quiver of the hand pressed the hand of the disconsolate friend, and only a quiver winked with the eyelid and farther down opened the pale lips and passed away, and when the evening redness overspread the pale form,—lo, then death, cold to the earth and our lamentations, iron, erect, and dumb, stalked through the fair evening under the linden blossoms to the enwrapped soul in the tranquillized corpse and transferred the veiled soul with immeasurable arms from the earth through unknown worlds into Thy eternal, warm, fatherly hand which has created us,—into the Elysium for which Thou hast formed us,—among the kindred of our hearts,—into the land of rest, of virtue, and of light....
Julius stopped for sorrow, and Victor said, "Play on the song of rapture, he has only just died."—During the tones Victor shut to the eyes of his beloved, and said with a heart above the earth, "Now close yourselves,—the spirit is above the earth, to which you gave light,—thou pale, hallowed form, thou hallowed heart, the angel within thee is gone out and thou fallest back into the earth."—And here he embraced once more the cold, empty wrappage, and pressed the heart, which beat no more, knew him no longer, to his hot bosom; for the flute-tones tore his pale wounds too widely open.—Oh, it is well that when man in grim woe stiffens to solid ice, no tones are with him: the tender tones would lick all the sad blood out of his transpierced bosom, and man would die of his agonies, because he would be able to express his agonies....