The first Whitsuntide day, dear reader, in this tri-clang of rapture, has died away; but in these three high festivals of joy, as with those in the almanac, the second is still fairer, and the third the fairest of all. I shall not at all hurry with the movement of my pen through these three heavens,--nay, if I could certainly know that the acting persons in this history would never get to see my work, I should shift the boundaries of this Eden, by adding much that, on nearer inspection, would not prove historically true.-- 34. DOG-POST-DAY. SECOND DAY OF WHITSUNTIDE. Morning.--The Abbess.--The Water-Mirror.--Dumb Action for Libel.--The Rain and the Open Heaven. At two o'clock the morning-wind swept in more loudly and coolly through Victor's open chamber, and shook already dew-drops from shiny foliage, and the near whisper of leaves murmured through his ears into his dreams. The lark, as the overture of the day, flung herself high up into the gray of heaven, and rang in the morning's feast of trumpets. This alarmist became in his dreaming the hovering after-echo which blended with the morning; amidst the soft in-fall of the neighboring sounds he slowly opened his eyes and dreamed on, and closed them again, and was more awake, and sleep did not pass off like a thick shroud made of night, but floated upward like a veil of morning perfume; and his soul, without making a single movement of the body, opened with the still awaking of a flower-cup in the presence of the morning....