And now the moon, by the reflection of the sun wherewith it silvered this children's paradise, gave joy brighter colors, and under the deepened shadows of the May-trees the children's courage grew. All was happy,--all unfettered,--all peaceful,--no poisonous eye flashed lightnings,--not a single roughness disturbed the metrical life,--in melodious march the minutes went sounding onward with silver tone, and sang themselves away, and lingered in the bursting rose-thicket of the evening red.--The bland, fluttering ether of Spring drank its fill of perfume from the blossoms, and bore it like honey into the breast of man.--And as pulses beat fuller, dumb, cooling lightnings played round the clouds of the horizon, and the moon drew vital air[120] from the leaves, in order to convey more healthily thereupon the abstracted spirit of their cups. Victor and the Englishman and Emanuel and Clotilda, together with some of her female friends, stood below as patron gods of joy beside the children, and were intoxicated by the enjoyment of the young people's delight. Our friend had too holy a love to show (especially to so many strangers and to the Englishman), and laid a bridle on his unmanageable, dancing heart. In noble love the sacrifice--and though it were that love itself--is as agreeable as the enjoyment; but still easier is it near an Emanuel, who--that is the gleaming order-cross of the higher men--precisely in the hour of joy lifts his eyes to the higher life and to the truth. This time, moreover, the feeling of his improving health redoubled his pining after the predicted departure. His glorified countenance, his super-earthly wishes, and his still resignation, constituted, as it were, the second and higher moonlight which fell into the more dim; and he disturbed not in the least the growing elysium, when he said, for example: "Mortal man regards himself as eternal here, because the human race is eternal; but the propelled drop is confounded with the inexhaustible stream; and were it not that new human creatures always spring up after us, each one would feel more deeply the fleetingness of his second[121] of life";--or when he said: "If man is not immortal, then no higher being is either, and the conclusions are the same; in that case the abiding God would burn solitary out of the struggling and expiring sense, like the sun which, if there were no atmosphere, would blaze out of a black heaven, and pierce, but not illuminate, the vaulted night";--or when he said: "The gait of mankind toward the holy city of God is like the gait of certain pilgrims, who, wayfaring toward Jerusalem, always after three steps forward take one backward";--or, finally, when, upon his Victor's remarking, that amendment only removed the great faults, not the fine stings of remorse, and that a saint got as many reproaches from his conscience as the bad man, when he said to this: "Our _distance_ from virtue, like that from the sun, by exact reckonings we always find only