Then he was glad to tell her that he had seen her that morning when he gave the blind youth the note to Emanuel, and yet that he had denied himself a visit to her,--only give him, Clotilda, a great, warm, thankful look for his sparing of thy brother, for the nobleness of his loving, and for his hiding of that love with a veil! She looked on him, and when her eye grew warm with a tear, heaven bowed itself and came down to them on a sunny cloud and touched the kindred beings with hot, fluttering drops.--O thou good earth! thou good Nature! thou sympathizest oftener (and always) with good men, than good men do themselves!--Before him the dream passed in which Clotilda's tears resolved the ground into an uplifting cloudlet.... But the approach of evening and the little shattered pearl-strings of rain-drops rattling down called the fair group back to the cottage. The girls; who with the blind one had not even quite climbed the mountain, went no farther, but turned about and took the advance. Emanuel withdrew himself to his hill of mourning, in order there to uncover his flowers to the rain. When our loving couple reached the smoking vale below, how heavenly was the evening and the earth!--In the great evening-heaven above them waved tulip-beds of red clouds, between which ran blue strips like dark brooks.--Behind them stood under the sun mountains like Vesuviuses in flames, and the woodland like a burning bush, and the prairie-fire running over the flowers caught the cloud-shadows.--And all the larks hung with their [114]_ripieno_-voices of Nature near the red ceiling-piece of evening, and every deeper sunbeam held a humming chain-of-being made of happy insects.--And in the sheepfold on the mountain a hundred mothers at once called lovingly to a hundred children, and every sheep hastened bleating to its thirsty kneeling lamb.---- Great evening! only in the Vale of Tempe thou still bloomest and dost not fade; but in a few minutes, reader, all its blossoms for the first time will open magnificently!-- Clotilda and Victor went along more closely and warmly, linked together under the small sun-shade, which walled _both_ in from the transient shower. And with hearts which beat more and more strongly, and, instead of blood, sent round as it were devout tears of joy, they reached the park; the warm tones of the nightingale came to meet them, the tones wafted away from the musical retinue wherewith the Englishman was just passing across the mountains floated after them like perfumes exhaled from flowers.----But lo! while the earth still wore its gilding in the fire of the sun, while the evening-fountain still blazed up like a torch, when in a great oak-tree of the garden, in which motley glass globes had been grafted instead of fruit, twenty red suns sparkled out of the leaves,--then a warmed cloud melted asunder and came all down in drops into the fire of evening and on the gleaming water-column....