She fixed her gaze painfully on, the low sun and the churchyard, behind which in the May days it sank like a mortal. "Leave this prospect, dearest," he said, though without a hope of obedience,--"a tender integument is most easily destroyed by a tender soul,--your tears make you too sad." But she replied: "Only in earlier years--but long ago it ceased to be so--did they make my eye-sockets burn and benumb my brain."--Suddenly, as the thought of the beclouded perspective of her eyes exhausted with weeping wrung his heart out of his bosom, the sunlight died upon her cheeks,--streams of tears broke violently from her eyes,--he turned round,--over on the churchyard the veiled youth had prostrated himself on the grave-mound of the veiled one beneath,--the sun was already below the earth, but the flute had as yet no voice, sorrow has only sighs,--no tones.... At last the beautiful blind one raised himself erect, amidst convulsive sorrows, for the funeral-offering, and the wailings of the flute went up from the closed grave into the evening-redness,--three hearts melted away like the tones, like the fourth heart that was buried below. But Clotilda lifted herself up by force out of her dumb woe, and sang low as an offering to the dead the heavenly song, for which the departed one had entreated her and which I give with inexpressible emotion:-- The grave is deep and dismal,-- How solemn there to stand! Below, in gloom abysmal, There lies an unknown land. There sounds, when daylight closes, No nightingale's sweet tone; And Friendship strews with roses The mossy mound alone. In vain the bride, forsaken, May wring her hands and weep: Nor orphans' wail may waken The dead one from his sleep. _Yet_ nowhere else can mortals Attain the wished repose, And through these gloomy portals, Alone, man homeward goes. O Salis! in that _yet_ are all our expired sighs, all our dried-up tears, and they lift the aspiring heart from its roots and veins, and it fain would die! The voice of the noble singer gave way to sadness, but still she sang the last of the strophes of this song of the spheres, though lower under the--weight of overmastering sorrow:-- The weary heart, storm-driven, There, where all tempests cease, Finds home at length and heaven, And everlasting peace.[124] Her voice broke, as an eye breaks into tears or a heart in death.... Her friend veiled his head with the leaves of the bower,--the whole of earthly life passed before him like a dirge.--Clotilda's sad past, Clotilda's dark future, drew together before his vision, and cast, in the darkness, the funeral veil over this angel, and bore her shrouded into the grave of her sister.... He had even forgotten his farewell.... He had not the heart to look upon the great scene around him and the bowed form beside him....