Here he tore open joyfully all his wounds, and let them bleed out freely in tears; they overspread with mournful streams the face which once had often smiled, but always good-naturedly, and which from other eyes had never wrung any, but only wiped them away; every flood was a load taken off, but the heart grew heavy again upon it, and poured out a fresh one.--At last he could hear the tones again; most of them sank and were lost before they were wafted to the tower; little ones arrived dying, and expired in his darkling heart; every tone was a falling tear, and made him lighter, and expressed his anguish. The garden seemed to consist of softly resounding, dark-green waves of shadow, veiled under a broken twilight. Stung by memory, he tore his eye away from it: "What does it concern me any longer?" he thought. But at last from this shadowy Eden and from the _viole d'amour_ came up the song, "Forget me not," to his weary heart, and gave him back the softer pang and the past love. "No," said he, "I never will forget thee, though thou hast not loved me! thy form will assuredly forever move me, and remind me of my dreams! ah, thou heavenly one, it is, indeed, now, the only thing that does not pain me, to think I forget thee not!" All was silent and extinguished; he was alone in the presence of night. At length, after remaining a long time in silence, he went down and back to Flachsenfingen, exhausted with weeping, and a poor man. And as, on the way, he cast a hurried glance up at the dark-blue heaven, in which floating clouds lay flung around the moon like _scoriæ_, and a hurried glance again over the half-annihilated shadowy landscape, over the shadow-hills and shadow-villages, all appeared to him dead, empty, and vain, and it seemed to him as if, in some brighter world, there were a magic-lantern, and through the lantern glasses moved on which earth and springs and human groups were painted, and we called the descending, dancing images of these glasses _us_ and an earth and a life; and _after all that was bright and many-colored, a great shadow followed on_.---- Ah, I stir up, perhaps, once more, in many a breast, long-forgotten troubles! But it is good for us--since sorrows occupy so large a place in our memory--that this bitter winter-fruit should grow mild by lying, and that there is but a small difference between a past sorrow and a present bliss.