But this time Julius was in the same softened state, because he had all the morning seen the angel playing and hovering in his darkling soul. The yearning for the angel brooded over his reposing heart and warmed it even to beating, and he said with an unaccustomed sorrow, "If I could only see, only something, only my father, or thee!" The dust-covered remembrances of his childhood were shaken up; and out of this cloud-enveloped period emerged before him into special prominence one day, bright with morning, blue and full of song, and bore three forms on its cloud-floor, Julius's own and those of the two children, from whom before their embarkation for Germany he had parted,--drops escaped from him without his perceiving it, when he described to this Victor, the very one who had done what he described, how he had been kissed and hugged and cried after by the one child, that loved him most, and always carried him. "And I think," he continued, "that every one whose voice I love to hear has the face of that good child, and that _thou_ hast too. Often when I contemplate this form alone in my darkness, and feel warm drops on my lips, and fall into a languishing, slumbering rapture, I fancy it is blood trickles from my lips and my heart is boiling,--but my father says if then my eyes were suddenly opened, and I should look upon my angel, or the good child, or a beautiful human being, I should have to die for love."----"O Julius, Julius," cried his Victor, "how noble is thy heart! The good child whom thou lovest so my father will soon lay in thy arms, and he will kiss thee and love thee and clasp thee just as I do now."-- He led him back to dinner; but he himself remained till afternoon under the open heaven, and his heart put on silent mourning under trees full of bees, near thickets full of feeding birds, on all the former walks and ecliptics of this dying festival,--and all the hours of childhood rose out of the winter-sleep of memory and stirred his heart, but it dissolved.--O when far distant moments sound on our ears with their chime, then great drops fall from the softened soul, as the increasing nearness of far-off bells sounding across betokens rain. I blame thee not, Victor,--thou art, after all, only _feminine_, but not _effeminate_,--if thy biographer can describe thy emotion and thy reader can feel it, without relaxing the firm muscles of the heart, thou canst do it quite as well, and only a man who can wring bitter tears from others will scorn sweet ones and shed none himself.