"Ah, Horion! there lies in man a black Dead Sea, out of which only when it is agitated the blessed island of the next world lifts itself up with its clouds. But my lips will already lie under the earthly clod when the cold hour comes to thee in which thou wilt no longer see any God,--in which Death shall lie on his throne, and mow around him, and fling even to the domain of nothingness his frosty shadows and the lightnings of his scythe. O beloved, my grave-mound will then be already standing when thy _inner_ midnight comes on; with anguish thou wilt mount upon it, and look sternly into the soft wreaths of the constellations, and cry:[105] 'Where is he whose heart crumbles beneath me? Where is eternity, the mask of time? Where is the Infinite One? The veiled self grasps after itself on all sides, and strikes against its cold form.... Gleam not upon me, broad starry field; thou art only the conglomerate _picture_, formed of colored earths, on an infinite _churchyard-gate_, that stands before the desert of a life buried under space.... Laugh me not to scorn, ye shapes on higher stars, for, if I melt away, ye melt away also. One, one thing, which man cannot name, glows forever in the immeasurable smoke, and a centre without limit calcines a circumference without limit.--Still I exist; the Vesuvius of death yet smokes above me, and its ashes envelop me; its flying rocks bore through suns, its lava-torrents move dissolved worlds, and in its crater the former world lies stretched out, and it sends up nothing but graves.... O Hope, where abidest thou?' ... "Float enraptured around me, animated gold-dust, with thy thin wings,--I will not crush thy short flower-life; swell upward, giddy zephyr, and waft me down into thy blossom-cups. O thou immeasurable flood of radiance, fall from the sun over this narrow earth, and bear up on thy waves of splendor the heavy heart before the highest throne, that the eternal and infinite Heart may take the little ones which are nigh to ashes, and heal and warm them! "Is, then, a poor son of this earth so unhappy that he can quail in the midst of the splendor of morning, so near to God on the hot steps of his throne?