He took out Lind's watch, in order to know the birth-hour of his honeymoon or honey-week,--precisely at 11 o'clock he came out before the neat village, before the green-house of his heaven, before the colony of his hope, before Eden.... Ah, the murmuring little village buried in foliage seemed to throw all its blooming twigs, like arms, around, and knit himself to itself; it was green and white and red,--not painted, but overspread with leaves and blossoms. And when, as the ringing died away,--in order avariciously to hoard up for himself the embrace of his Emanuel, and in order to come upon the Maienthal church music with a heart opened by Nature,--he stole into the long, clean village, and ran Friendship's toll for a few minutes at Emanuel's house, it seemed to him as if his peacefully glad heart in the still lanes rocked with the birds on the cherry-twigs that latticed the window-panes, and hovered with the bees in the cherry blossoms. "Come right in," all seemed to say, "thou good man, we are all happy, and thou shalt be so too."--He approached the shining church, whose dazzling stucco flung by contrast upon the blue of the sky a sublime darkness, and his beating heart trembled blissfully with the waves of the organ within, and with the rustling birch-tree fixed in the ground before the church-door, and with the dry May-pole, in the middle of the village, bowed by the morning-wind.... "But," says my reader, "could then his eye so long deny itself the fairer prospects, and his heart the more beloved beauty, and, instead of the Abbey, seek out only the church?"--Oh, he looked after that the very first thing of all, and his eye ran trembling around all the windows of his sun-temple; but as he found all of them open and empty, and all the curtains drawn up, he guessed that its fair conclave of sisters, and among them the conclave-sister of his heart, were there where he sought--and found them,--in the temple. He went up unheard, during the tramping down of the church-goers, into the front-stall of the nobility, which from without appeared empty, that flower-stand of the convent-nuns. There was nothing there but dropped birch-leaves; for the body of nuns and the Abbess and Clotilda stood--below in the Church, and encircled the altar with a choir of singing angels, and took the sacrament there.--With a thrill of joy he beheld the queen of his heaven, the so dearly loved and undeserved, the shining angel, melting her vestment of earthly snow with heavenly warmth to tears, in order soon to become invisible.----His spirit bowed itself as she knelt: "Drink heaven's peace," he said, "out of the sacred chalice of the great man, among whose thoughts was never a cloud nor a sigh,--and may the thought which thou now contemplatest with such steadfast devotion be destined to become more and more luminous and immovable, like a sun, and always to throw a warm evening-light over the weary soul!"--This angel in mourning-attire called forth in his inner being