“Seraphina?” he cried aloud, and with a sudden, tuneless voice, “Seraphina?”
“Look round you at this glade,” she cried, “and where the leaves are coming on young trees, and the flowers begin to blossom. This is where we meet, meet for the first time; it is so much better to forget and to be born again. O what a pit there is for sins—God’s mercy, man’s oblivion!”
“Seraphina,” he said, “let it be so, indeed; let all that was be merely the abuse of dreaming; let me begin again, a stranger. I have dreamed in a long dream, that I adored a girl unkind and beautiful; in all things my superior, but still cold, like ice. And again I dreamed, and thought she changed and melted, glowed and turned to me. And I—who had no merit but a love, slavish and unerect—lay close, and durst not move for fear of waking.”
“Lie close,” she said, with a deep thrill of speech.
So they spake in the spring woods; and meanwhile, in Mittwalden Rath-haus, the Republic was declared.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL POSTSCRIPT
TO COMPLETE THE STORY
The reader well informed in modern history will not require details as to the fate of the Republic. The best account is to be found in the memoirs of Herr Greisengesang (7 Bände: Leipzig), by our passing acquaintance the licentiate Roederer. Herr Roederer, with too much of an author’s licence, makes a great figure of his hero—poses him, indeed, to be the centrepiece and cloud-compeller of the whole. But, with due allowance for this bias, the book is able and complete.