A morning mist was gathered round the foot of the mountain, and in that three fluttering forms were suspended. These were the reflections of the three travellers, and the timid Rosamond started, thinking she saw herself. Eugenius thought, “That which the immortal spirit hath around it is, after all, but a denser mist.” And the child snatched at the cloud, and wished to play with its little misty brother. One single invisible angel of the future accompanied them through life and up this mountain. They were so good and like each other that one angel was all they needed.
As they ascended the angel opened the book of fate, one leaf of which contained the sketch of a three-fold life—every line was a day—and when the angel had read the line that belonged to this day, he wept and closed the book for ever.
The travellers, in their delicate condition, required nearly a day to arrive at the desired spot. The earth crept back into the valleys, the sky rested itself on the mountains. The waving, glimmering sun seemed to our Eugenius a mirror of the moon, and he said to his beloved, when the icy summits had already cast their flames upon the earth: “I feel so weary, and yet so well. Will it not be as if we left two dreams—the dream of life and the dream of death—if we enter the cloudless moon as the first shore beyond the hurricanes of life?”
“It will be still better,” replied Rosamond, “for in the moon, as thou hast taught me, dwell the little children of this earth, and their parents remain with them till they themselves become as mild and tranquil as children.” Then they proceed further.
“Ay, from heaven to heaven—from world to world!” said Eugenius, ecstatically.
They ascended as the sun declined; when they climbed more slowly, the mountain summits like rising, loosened branches, concealed them from the luminary. They hastened on into the evening glimmer, which was already advancing, but when they had reached the mountain where their cottage stood, the eternal mountains stepped before the sun;—the earth then veiled her graces and her cities, adoring heaven, before it looked upon her with all its star-eyes, while the waterfalls laid aside their rainbows,—and the earth spread higher for heaven, which was bending over her with out-stretched cloud-arms, a gauze of golden exhalations, and hung it from one mountain to another, and the icebergs were set on fire, so that they glared even to midnight, while opposite to them on the grave of the sun was raised a towering funeral pile of clouds, forming the evening glow and the evening ashes. But through the glimmering veil kind heaven let its evening tears fall deep into the earth, even upon the humblest grass and the smallest flower.
Oh, Eugenius, how great then did thy soul become! The life of earth lay at a distance and far below thee, free from all the distortions which we see in it, because we stand too near it, as the decorations of shorter scenes change from landscapes to mis-shapen strokes when we look at them closely.
The two living ones embraced each other with a long and gentle embrace, as they stood before the cottage, and Eugenius said: “Oh, thou quiet, eternal heaven, take nothing more from us!” But his pale child with its snapped lily-head was before him; he looked at the mother, and she lay with her moistened eye reaching into heaven, and said softly: “O take us all at once!”
The angel of futurity, whom I will call the angel of rest, wept as he smiled, and his wings swept away the sighs of the parents with an evening breeze, that they might not sadden each other.
The transparent evening flowed round the red mountain like a bright lake, and washed it with the circles of cool evening waves. The more the evening and earth grew, still the more did the two souls feel that they were in the right place. They had no tears too many, none too few, and their bliss needed no other increase than its repetition. Eugenius sent the first harmonious tones floating like swans through the pure Alpine sky. The weary child, twined in a flowery wreath, leaned against a sun-dial, and played with the flowers which it drew around it, to entwine them in its circle. The mother at last awoke from her harmonious transport; her eye fell on the large eyes of her child, which opened wide upon her; singing and smiling, and, with overflowing motherly love, she stepped to the little angel, which was cold and dead. For its life, which had descended from heaven, had, like other tones, been dissipated in the atmosphere of earth; death had breathed upon the butterfly, and it had ascended from the rushing streams of air to the ever-refining ether; from the flowers of earth to the flowers of paradise.