through red blood-canals and through human nerves, ... he would, in the impotence of enjoyment, have been drowned in the deep, broad ocean of life, which life-streams cross and fill, had he not, like every drowning man, heard a peal of bells far down into the waves. In short--church was out, and he had to go behind a leafy hunter's-screen, in order, when the Panists[106] of the Lord's Supper should march by out of the church, whose organ-music still followed, and under the tower that still trumpeted after them, that then he might see with his pocket-glass _who_ looked out of the convent. Clotilda's face floated, as if called forth by magic out of the second world, close to the glass, and he could, without fear of being driven away, close his butterfly-wings around this flower; he could freely sink into her great eyes, as into two flower-cups filled with the splendor of dew. Never did he see so pure a snow of the white around the blue heaven's-opening, which went far into the soul, now fairer than ever; and when she cast down her eye toward the garden, the great veiling eyelid with its trembling lashes stood just as beautifully over it as a lily over a fountain. _Love_, like _drawing_ and like the germ of man, begins at the _eye_.--When the children had gone by, then Clotilda slowly and freely turned her face toward Emanuel's cottage, and gazed across with the far-reaching, longing look of love.... And with such a love, beating like a heart in his innermost consciousness, Victor with his two friends arrived up at the convent. The Abbess (her name is not reported to me at all, not even her pseudonyme) received him with a stately air, which her station had not imparted to her, but had attempered. Her soul was born crowned. The Princess of ----, whose chief governess she was, loved sometimes to play the child (children inversely reciprocate, and represent their representatives): but although she possessed a pride of thirty years, she checked her hobby-horse so soon as the monarchical chief governess appeared, than whom no one in the land (the swans excepted) carried her head back so high. A lady like her, whose looks were throne-insignia, and her words _mandata sacræ cæsareæ majestatis propria_,[107] had from the hands of Nature herself the allegiance-medals and the throne scaffolding, so as to weigh her imperial apple against young maidens' apple of beauty,--such a one could rule and mould a Clotilda. Her soul was painted by three masters:--the back-ground by the world,--the foreground by the church,--the middle-ground by Virtue. Her æsthetic parts placed her in a singular manner in a certain elective-affinity with Emanuel's East Indian ones.