"O, may thy life hang full of blossoms! From thy first Paradise may a second, as from the midst of one rose a second, be destined to bloom! May the Earth glow in thy sight, as if thou stoodest above it, and followedst with thine eye its path in heaven! And as Moses died because God kissed him, so be thy life a long kiss of the Eternal! And may thy death be mine!... EMANUEL." "O thou good, good soul!" cried Victor, "I can now no more forget thee. Thou must--thou wilt--take an interest in my weak heart!" From his inner strings the drops of vapor that choked their music had now fallen off. His brain became a radiant landscape, in which there stood nothing but Emanuel's shining form. He arrived late at the parsonage, with a face expressive of blissful emotion; and in this glow he arrayed before his spectators the image of Clotilda, to whom he gave everything an angel has, even the wings that threatened a short stay. His friendship raised him so far above the suspicion of a suspicion, that he thought he could give his friend no warmer or tenderer proof of the same, than by the strongest sympathetic praise of Clotilda; Flamin's love for her passed over through this friendship into his soul. The feeling for the beloved of a friend carries with it an unspeakable sweetness and moral tenderness. For Victor I answer, in this matter, that he understood, indeed, how a friend can sacrifice his love to another, but not how the other can accept the offering; but for Flamin I cannot stand security that he is cool enough, and a sufficient connoisseur of men, to regard the prize-medals which Victor stamps upon Clotilda, and upon which he sets her beautiful face and his coat of arms, as only just so many coins _de confiance_, and as pledges of brotherly fidelity. He was too impetuous and too ambitious to see, or even to listen to, the truth; for his open-hearted friend had to suppress many a tender reproach, which would have tried him too much, because he had too much love of praise and fieriness of spirit, and too little self-confidence. Hence a flatterer like Matthieu fastened himself so much the more firmly with his ivy-hooks into the fissures of this rock. When he a little harshly called the nameless Emanuel an enthusiast, Victor said little more about him that day. Flamin--either because he was a Jurist, or because he was a Hotspur, or both--could endure anything better than poets, philosophers, courtiers, and enthusiasts,--one excepted, who was all these at once, namely, his Sebastian Victor. 5. DOG-POST-DAY. The Third of May.--The Nightingale.--The Abbate Sitting on Music.