"When my conscious being is a single thought, and burns; and when, with the flames waving around me, I dip my hand into colors, to cool myself therein;--then, when the lofty beauty[41] that forever beams within me lets fall its image on the waves which tremulously picture heaven and earth, and sets on fire the clear stream; and then, when an image of Pallas, descending from heaven, rests upon the stream, a lily-casing and cast-off wing-wrappage of an up-flown angel,--a form whose unstained soul no body, but only the snow which lies around the throne of God, and out of which the angels weave their fleeting vehicular bodies,[42] encloses; and when the most delicate drapery is too coarse and hard, and becomes a wooden frame around that divine breath on the countenance, around that trembling flowered-velvet of flesh, around that skin of white roses transfused with a glow of red ones; when this reflection of my shining soul falls upon the colored surface,--then every one will turn round, and think Clotilda is lying asleep on the bank.... And here my art is over; for, ah! when she awakes, and when, for the first time, the soul shall move these charms like wings; when the fast-closed bud of the lips shall break into a smile, and the bosom breathes in half a sigh, and, from modesty, breathes it not out again; when the sighs, veiled in songs, steal from those lips,--which, like two souls, hover over without touching each other--as bees steal out of roses; when the eye stirs between gleams and tears;--then, when at length the goddess of heavenly love approaches her daughter, and electrically touches her still heart, and says, 'Do thou, too, love'; and now, when all charms tremble and bloom out, shrink and languish, hope and shudder, and the dreaming heart shuts itself up more deeply into its blossoms, and hides itself, trembling, behind a tear, from the happy one who has divined and deserves it;--then the happy one is mute, the happy one and the artist."