The highway from Lower Ammergau stretched endlessly toward the goal. On the right was the forest, on the left the fields where grew thousands of meadow blossoms, the Eden of his childhood where a blue lake once lured him, so blue that he imagined it was reflecting a patch of the sky, but when he reached it, instead of water, he beheld a field of forget-me-nots!
Oh, memories of childhood--reconciling angel of the tortured soul! There stands the cross on the boundary with the thorny bush whence Christ's crown was cut.
"How will you fare, will the community receive you, admit you to the blissful union of home powers, if you sacrifice your heart's blood for it?" Freyer asked himself, and it seemed as if some cloud, some dark foreboding came between him and his home. "Well for him who no longer expects his reward from this world. What are men? They are all variable, variable and weak! Thou alone art the same. Thou who dost create the miracle from our midst--and thou, sacred soil of our ancestors, ye mountains from whose peaks blows the strengthening breath which animates our sublime work--it is not human beings, but ye who are home!"
Now the goal was gained--he was there! Before him in the moonlight lay the Passion Theatre--the consecrated space where once for hours he was permitted to feel himself a God.
The poor, cast off man, deceived in all things, flung himself down, kissed the earth, and laid a handful of it on his head, as though it were the hand of a mother--while from his soul gushed like a song sung by his own weeping guardian angel,
"Thy soil I kiss, beloved home,
Which erst my fathers' feet have trod,
Where the good seed devoutly sown
Sprang forth at the command of God!
Thy lap fain would I rest upon,