With a sad heart he climbed up to the well-known spot, whose ugly name I shall omit, and from these ruins he gazed around upon creation, as if he were the last of living beings. Neither in the blue sky, nor upon the wide earth, was there voice or sound; nothing but one forlorn cricket, chirping in monosyllables, among the bare furrows, where the harvest had been cleared away. The troops of birds flocking together with discordant cries flew to the green nets spread upon the ground--and not to meet the green spring far away. Above the meadows, where all the flowers were withered and dead, above the fields, where the corn ears waved no more, floated dim phantom forms, all pale and wan, faint pictures of the past. Over the grand eternal woods and hills a biting mist was draped in clinging folds, as if all nature, trembling into dust, must vanish in its wreaths. But one bright thought pierced these dark fogs of nature and the soul, turning them to a white gleaming mist, a dew all glittering with rainbow colours, and gently lighting upon flowers. He turned his face to the north-east, to the hills which lay between him and his other heart, and up from behind them rose, like an early moon in harvest, a pale image of his friend. The spring, when he should go to him and see him once more, was at work already preparing for him a fair broad pathway thither, all rich with grass and flowers. Ah! how we play with the world about us, so quickly dressing it all with the webs which our own spirits spin. The cloudless sky seemed sinking closer to the dusky earth, bright with a softer blue. And though a whole long winter lay between, the music of the coming spring already came, faint and distant, to his ear; it was there in the evening chime of the cattle bells down in the meadows, in the birds' wild wood notes in the groves, and in the free streams flowing fast away amid the flowery tapestries that were yet to be. A palpitating chrysalis was hanging near him still in her half-shrivelled caterpillar's case, sleeping away the time till the flower cups all should open; phantasy, that eye of the soul, saw beyond and over the sheaves of autumn the glories of a night in June; every autumn-tinted tree seemed blooming once again; their bright coloured crests, like magnified tulips, painted the autumn mist with rainbow dyes; light breezes of early May seemed chasing each other through the fresh, fluttering leaves; they breathed upon our friend, and buoyed him up, and rose with him on high, and held him up above the harvest and above the hills, till he could see beyond these hills and lands--and lo! the springs of all his life to come, lying as yet enfolded in the bud, lay spread before his sight like gardens side by side--and there, in every spring time, stood his friend.