Oh, how often in the dreams of his childhood, in his landscape-pictures which he sketched to himself of the days of Paradise, had he not seen this night and hardly wished for it, because he never hoped to live to see it on the rough earth; and now did this Eden-night, with all blossoms and stars hanging round it, stand out created before him?--And who of us has not in some magically illumined spot or other of his fancy and his hope set up just so grand a night-piece of a future vernal night, when, as in this one, he is made happy _with all friends_ at once (not always alone),--when, as in this one, the night is only thrown as a transparent veil over the day, when the red girdle which the sun laid down on stepping into the sea remains lying till morning glowing on the margin of the earth,--when the long, soul-like tones of the nightingale float aloud through the adagio that melts asunder, and start up out of the echo,--when we meet none but friendly souls, and look on them with rapture, and ask by our smiles, "O thou too art surely as happy as I?" and when the other's smile answers in the affirmative,--a night, O God, when thou hast made our hearts full and yet tranquil, when we neither _doubt_ nor _hate_ nor _fear_, when all thy children repose on thy bosom in thy arms, and hold each other's hands as brothers and sisters, and slumber only with half-closed eyes, in order to smile on each other?----Ah, inasmuch as the sigh wherewith I write and you read this reminds us how seldom such spring nights fall upon our earth, take it not ill of me that I only slowly execute the voluptuous picture of _this_ night that so I may some time in my old days refresh myself by the painted hour of the present inspiration,[122] and may haply be able to say: Ah, thou knewest then, perhaps, that thou shouldst never live to experience such a night, and for that reason wast thou so copious. And what else than petrified blossoms of a clime which is not on our earth, do we dig up out of our fantasy, just as in our North they exhume fossil palms?... Victor went to the still Julius at the hedge of the nightingale and laid night violets in his hand, and kissed him on the curtained eye, which could not see, yet could weep for joy,--and neighbor nightingale paused not during the kiss. He came up the garden, as Emanuel came down; they looked on each other near the morning fountain, and Emanuel's face gleamed in the reflection of the waves, as if he were standing before the angel of death and dissolving, to die, and he said: "The Infinite One clasps us to-day to himself,--why can I not weep as I am so happy?"--and when they had separated again, he called back to his Victor and said: "See, how blooming-red the evening goes forth toward the morning like a dying man, as if the tones moved it onward,--see, the stars, like blossoms, hang down out of eternity into our earth,--behold the great deep, how many springs bloom to-night on so many thousand earths wheeling therein!"--