"My heart swam in love and trembled in rapture at my words: 'Beloved, the earth is to-day so beautiful! that indeed makes man more tender: heaven rests with a caress and kiss of love on the earth, as a father on a mother and her children,--the flowers and beating hearts fall into the embrace and nestle around the mother. The twig gently rocks its singer up and down, the flower cradles its bee, the leaf its fly and its drop of honey: in the open flower-cups hang the warm tears, into which the clouds dissolve themselves, as if in eyes, and my flower-beds bear the rainbow, which is built up on them, without sinking. The woods lie nursing themselves at the breast of heaven, and having drunken deeply of the clouds, all summits stand fixed in silent bliss. A zephyr, not stronger than a warm sigh of love, breathes along by our cheeks among the steaming corn-blossoms, and lifts clouds of seed-dust, and one little breeze after another plays its antics with the flying harvests of the lands; but it lays them at our feet when it has done playing. O beloved, when all is love, all harmony, all loves and is loved, all meadows _one_ intoxicating blossom-chalice, then indeed in man also does the lofty spirit stretch out its arms, and long to embrace with them a spirit, and then, when it folds its arms only around shadows, then it grows very sad for infinite, inexpressible longing after love.' "'Emanuel, I am sad too,' said my Julius. "'Lo, the sun goes down, the earth veils itself: let me still see all and tell it to thee. Now a white dove flies dazzling, like a great snow-flake, across the deep blue.... Now she sails round the gold-spark of the lightning-rod, as if around a glistening star hung out in the day-sky. O, how she floats and floats, and sinks and vanishes in the tall flowers of the churchyard!... Julius, didst thou feel nothing, while I spoke? Ah, the white dove was perhaps thy angel, and therefore thy heart melted when he was so near thee to-day. The dove does not fly up, but clouds of dew, with a silver border, like fragments torn from summer-nights, glide across the church-yard, and overspread the blooming graves with colored shadows.... Now, one such shadow falling from heaven swims towards us and bathes our mountain. Melt, melt, fleeting night, emblem of life, and hide not long from me the sinking sun!... Our little cloud moves on into the flames of the sun.... O thou gracious sun, looking back so softly from behind the shore of earth, thou maternal eye of the world, truly thou sheddest thy evening light from thee as warmly and slowly as trickling blood, and palest as thou sinkest, but the earth, hung up and laid upon thee in fruit-festoons and flower-chains, reddens as if new-created, and with swelling energy.... Hark! Julius, now the gardens resound,--the air hums,--the birds with their calls wheel across each other's tracks,--the storm-wind lifts its mighty wing, and flaps against the woods; hark!