by an awakening of the dead all the virtues of his life and all its faults, and gave those a heaven and these a hell; he was, therefore, now too holy to disturb a saint by making his appearance, even supposing her tranquil eye, absorbed in pious emotions, which did not so much as fall on the nearer devout beauties to the height of the waist, had been able to lift itself to him. The birch at the first window of the loft he kept before him as a leafy fan;--this green veil playing on his cheeks covered his attentiveness and his tears of joy from the whole church. The place where he was so happy seemed, to judge from an inscription on the glass, to have been once the usual stand of Clotilda; for Giulia's was near by, as I know for certain, because on the stall-window a G and C, enclosed by a wreath, had been cut in with the words by Giulia: "Thus are we united by the flowers of life and the circle of eternity." ... Victor slipped away unseen and early out of this niche of removed goddesses, and bore his heart filled with love to the open breast of friendship,--to Emanuel. He saw already the latter's tabernacle of the covenant in the temple of Nature,--when his rapture was delayed by one of earlier date. Julius lay in the blooming grass with its waves rippling over him, and holding a cherry-twig full of open honey-cups in his hand, in order to draw the bees to him, and to delight himself with their murmurous hovering over the blossoms. Victor embraced him, and forgot in the ecstasy to name his name,--"Art thou my angel?" said he.--"I am only thy Victor!"--"O come! O come!" said the blind youth, trembling like a melody, and drew his friend to Emanuel's house; but he led him, behind the cloud of his blindness, the longer way, and, besides, he turned round at every fourth step for a renewed embrace. When they came to the water-wheel, which loudly emptied its sprinkling-cans on the flower-beds, and whose shivered lightnings flitted against Emanuel's windows and ceiling, then the blind one said, "Embrace me once more right heartily."--But amidst the din of the rain-shower, and amidst the stupefaction of love, they were pressed together by other arms than their own, and the two young hearts were linked to a third, and the East Indian gazed like a god of love from one to the other, and said: "O ye good youths, remain ever thus, and weep on in your blissful love!--Blessings on thee, my Horion, and a welcome in the great spring round about us!"--And when Emanuel and Victor sank on each other's necks, then was it as if all the flower-beds bowed down for rapture, as if all the waves flamed more radiantly under super-earthly lightnings flying over them, as if the zephyrs swelled with sighs of love, as if higher beings must needs whisper in the over-measure of joy: O ye good human beings, verily ye love like us!--