"'A star was just now cast down. Fall willingly, O star caught in the atmosphere of the earth; the stars above the earth also, as well as thyself, fall headlong into their distant graves,--the sea of worlds without shore or bottom wells up here, dries up there; the great moth, the earth, flies round the sunlight and sinks into the light and is consumed;--O Julius, who sees and sustains the fluttering particle of dust on the moth, in the midst of the fermenting, blooming, dissolving chaos? O Julius, if every moment witnesses the dissolution of a man and a world,--if time passes over the comets and treads them out like sparks, and grinds to powder the carbonized suns,--if the milky-ways dart only like returning flashes of lightning out of the great gloom,--if one procession of worlds after another is drawn down into the abyss,--if the eternal grave is never full and the eternal starry firmament is never empty: O my beloved, who then sees and sustains us little mortals made of dust?--Thou, all-gracious One, sustainest us, thou Infinite One, thou, O God, thou formest us, thou seest us, thou lovest us.--O Julius! raise thy spirit and grasp the greatest thought of man! There where Eternity is, there where Immensity is, and where night begins, there an Infinite Spirit spreads out its arms and folds them around the great falling universe of worlds and bears it and warms it. I and thou and all men, and all angels and all worms, rest on His bosom, and the roaring, beating sea of worlds and suns is an only child in his arms. He sees away through the ocean, wherein coral-trees full of earths sway to and fro, and sees the little worm that cleaves to the smallest coral, which is I, and He gives the worm the nearest drop, and a blissful heart, and a future, and an eye to look up even to Himself--yea, O God, even up to thee, even to thy heart.'-- "Inexpressibly moved, Julius said, weeping: 'Thou seest, then, O Spirit of Love, poor blind me also!--O, come into my soul, when it is alone, and it rains warm and still on my cheeks, and I weep at it and feel an inexpressible love: ah, thou good, great Spirit, it is surely Thou whom I have hitherto meant and loved! Emanuel, tell me yet more, tell me his thoughts and his beginning.' "'God is eternity, God is truth, God is holiness,--He has nothing, He is all, the _whole heart_ conceives Him, but no _thought_; and _we are only His thought, when He is ours_.[6]----All that is infinite and incomprehensible in man is his reflection; but beyond this let not thy awestricken thought go. Creation hangs as a veil, woven out of suns and spirits, over the infinite, and the eternities pass by before the veil, and draw it not away from the splendor which it hides.'