It grew dark, and a warm rain distilled gently over the earth. The children left his motionless form alone, and wept more tranquilly for that sun of their love, which, with its pure light, had withdrawn from the clouds and tempests of the world to another dawn.
[THE NEW-YEAR'S NIGHT OF AN UNHAPPY MAN.]
An old man stood in the New-Year's night at the window, and gazed with a look of restless despair upon the immutable, ever-blooming heaven, and out over the still pure white earth whereupon there was now no one so joyless and sleepless as he. For his grave stood near to him. It was covered only with the snow of age, not with the green of youth; and he brought with him thither out of his whole rich life nothing but errors and sins and sickness; a ruined body, a desolated soul, a breast full of poison, an old age full of remorse. The fair days of his youth wandered about him now like ghosts, and they bore him back again to that clear morning when his father first placed him at the cross-road of life, the right hand leading by the sunny ways of virtue into a wide, peaceful land, full of light and of harvests; the left, down into the mole-ways of vice towards a black cavern, full of down-dropping poison, full of darting serpents and dark sultry damps.
Ah! the serpents hung about his breast, and the poison-drops upon his tongue, and he knew now where he was.
Knowing not what he did, and with unspeakable grief, he cried out to Heaven: "Give me my youth once more! O father, place me again upon the cross-road, that I may choose otherwise!"
But his father and his youth were long gone. He saw wandering lights dancing on the marshes, and dying out upon God's Acre, and he said, "These are my sinful days!" He saw a star fly out from heaven, to glimmer in its fall, and to be extinguished on the earth. "That is I," said his bleeding heart; and the serpent-teeth of remorse gnawed again into his wounds.
His burning fancy showed him creeping night-wanderers upon the roofs, and the windmill threw up its arms threatening to crush him, and a mask left behind in the dead-house assumed by degrees his own feature.
Suddenly, in the midst of this tumult, music for the New Year flowed down from the tower, like distant church-song. He was deeply moved. He looked around the horizon and over the wide earth, and thought of his youthful friends, who now, happier and better than he, were teachers for the world, fathers of happy children, and favored men, and he said, "O, I also could be happy, dear parents, had I fulfilled your New-Year's wishes and instructions."
In the feverish memories of his youth, it seemed to him that the mask with his features raised itself up in the dead-house; finally, through the superstition which discerns spirits and the future on New-Year's night, it became a living youth, in the position of the beautiful boy of the Capitol, pulling out a thorn, and his formerly blooming face danced weird and bitter before him.
He could look no more: he covered his eyes: hot tears streamed down upon the snow;--again he softly sighed, hopeless and unconscious, "Come again, O youth, come again!"