"'We kneel here on this little earth before immensity, before the immeasurable world floating over us, before the radiant circumference of space. Raise thy spirit and conceive what I see. Thou hearest the storm-wind which drives the clouds around the earth,--but thou hearest not the storm-wind which drives the earth around the sun, nor yet the greatest, which blows beyond the suns and carries them around a veiled All which lies with sun-flames in the abyss.--Step from the earth into the void ether, here float and see it dwindle to a flying mountain, and with six other particles of sun-dust play around the sun,--moving _mountains_, after which _hills_[5] flutter, whirl along before thee, and go up and down before the sunshine,--then gaze about thee in the round, flashing, high vault, built up of crystallized suns, through whose chinks looks the immeasurable night in which hangs the sparkling arch.--Thou fliest for thousands of years, but thou wilt never set foot on the last sun, nor step out into the great night.--Thou shuttest thine eyes and throwest thyself with a thought over the abyss and over the visible universe, and when thou openest them again, lo! there sweep around thee, as thoughts do around souls, new streams, surging up and down, composed of light waves of suns, of dark drops of earths, and new successions of suns stand over against each other in the east and in the west,--and the fire-wheel of a new Milky-Way revolves in the stream of time.--Ay, let an infinite hand remove me out of the whole heaven; thou lookest back and fixest thine eye on the paling, shrivelling sea of suns; at last the remote creation hovers now as nothing more than a pale, still cloudlet in the depths of night; thou imaginest thyself alone and lookest round thee and----just as many suns and milky-ways flame up and down, and the pale cloudlet hangs still paler between them, and out around the whole dazzling abyss move nothing but pale, still cloudlets.---- "'O Julius! O Julius! amidst the onward moving fire-mountains, amidst the milky-ways hurled from one abyss to another, there flutters a particle of blossom-dust made of six thousands of years and the human race,--Julius, who beholds and who cares for the fluttering particle of dust which consists of all our hearts?--