"Fly not from me, my dear one, because a shadow always encompasses me, which daily grows darker, until at last it shall wall me in as a little night. I see the heavens and thee through the shadow, in the midnight I smile, and in the night-wind my breath goes forth full and warm. For, O man, my soul has stood erect toward the stars; man is an asthmatic, who suffocates if he lies down and does not lift up his breast.--But darest thou despise the earth, that forecourt of heaven, which the Eternal has thought worthy to move along as one in the bright host of his worlds? The great, the godlike, which thou hast in thy soul and lovest in another's,--seek it not in any sun-crater, on any planet-floor; the whole next world, the whole of Elysium, God himself, appear to thee in no other place than in the midst of thee. Be great enough to despise the earth; be greater, so as to respect it. To the mouth which is bent down to it, it seems a rich, flowery plain; to man in his _perigee_, a dark world; to man in his _apogee_, a glimmering moon. Then, and not till then, will the holy element, which from unknown heights is sent down into man, flow from the soul, mix itself with the earthly life, and quicken all that surrounds thee. So must the water, shed from heaven and its clouds, first run under the earth, and well up from it again, before it is purified into a fresh, clear draught. The whole earth is trembling now for rapture, till all rings and sings and shouts, as bells sound of themselves during an earthquake. And the soul of man is made greater and greater by its nearness to the Invisible.... "I love thee exceedingly! "EMANUEL." Horion read through swimming eyes. "Ah," he wished, "were I only, this very day, near thee, with my disordered heart, thou glorified one!" and now, for the first time, occurred to him the nearness of St. John's day, and he proposed to himself on that day to see him. The sun had already vanished; the evening red fell like a ripe apple-blossom; he felt not the hot drops on his face, nor the icy dew of twilight on his hands; and with a bosom illuminated by dreams, and a heart tranquillized and reconciled to earth, he wandered back....