In the first hours of the journey, he was to-day fresh, glad, happy, but not blissful; he drank as yet, only he was not drunken. But when he had thus for some hours wandered on, with drinking eye and absorbing heart, through pearl-strings of bedewed web-work, through humming vales, over singing hills, and when the violet-blue sky peacefully joined itself to the smoking heights and to the dark woods, rising like garden-walls behind each other,--when Nature opened all the pipes of the stream of life, and when all her fountains leaped up, and, flashing, played into each other, painted over by the sun,--then was Victor, who went through these flying streams with a rising and thirsty heart, lifted and softened by them; then did his heart swim, trembling like the sun's image in the infinite ocean, as the salient point of the wheel-animal[110] swims in the fluttering water-globule of the mountain stream.-- Then did flower, meadow, and grove dissolve into a dim immensity, and the color-grains of Nature melted away into a single broad flood, and _over_ the glimmering flood stood the Infinite One as a sun, and _in_ it, as a reflected sun, the human heart.-- All was one; all hearts grew to one greatest heart; a single life throbbed; the blooming pictures, the growing statues, the dusty clod of earth, and the infinite blue vault became the beholding face of an immeasurable soul.-- He might shut his eyes as much as he pleased, still there lingered in his dark breast this blooming immensity. Ah, if he could have plunged up into the clouds, so as to sweep thereon through the undulating heavens over the boundless earth!--ah, if he could have floated with the flower-fragrance over the flowers,--could have streamed with the wind over the summits, through the woods!--O now would he rather have fallen on the heart of a great man, and sunk, enraptured and weeping, into his bosom, to stammer out, "How happy is man!" He must needs weep, without knowing why; he sang words without sense, but their tone went to his heart--he ran, he stopped--he dipped his glowing face into the cloud of blossoming bushes, and would fain lose himself in the humming world between the leaves; he pressed the scratched face into the deep, cooling grass, and hung delirious on the breast of the immortal mother of Spring. Whoever saw him from a distance took him for a madman; perhaps many a one does so still, who has never himself experienced how, through the cleared-up, blissful breast, as through the serenest sky, storm-winds may sweep, which in both dissolve in rain.