The tranquillity with which Emanuel played out the star-part of life, even to the last catch-word,--with which he packed up everything--set all to rights--gave all directions--took leave of all,--stirred up tears and tempests together in his tormented friend. His heart had been, indeed, dragged till it was sore over a stony road, but its inflammations were now softly cooled off by the thought of death; yet he could not--though with the greatest incredulity about Emanuel's death--endure to hear it, when Emanuel committed to him at a distance the blind Julius, from whom this death was concealed, with the low-spoken words, "Hold him dear as I do, protect, provide for the poor child, till thou canst deliver him over to Lord Horion." His trembling hands could hardly take from him a packet to that lord, which the friend handed to him with tender eyes and with the words, "When these seals are opened, then my oaths have ceased and thou wilt learn all." For his tender conscience allowed him to conceal only the _import_, not the _existence_ of secrets.--It will not astonish us, as Victor's veins received one wound after another, that, in order not to increase their bleeding by agitations, he begged the flute-player not to play to-day; music would, on this day, have had too much power over his dissolved heart. The morning they spent in farewell-visits to old paths, bowers, and heights; but Emanuel performed not here the sharp, passionate climax-part of the fifth act; he broke not forth, upon an earth where death grazes, into any unphilosophical outcry because he should not see the flowers plucked and the grain cut, nor the green fruit grow yellow; but with a higher rapture, which beyond the earthy spring promised itself still fairer ones, he took his leave of every flower, went through every leafy winding and shadowy night-piece, drew out of every mirroring pond his transfigured form lying as it were in the earth, and showed a more affectionate attentiveness to nature, now that he hoped to-night to come nearer to Him who created it. He sought and Victor shunned every occasion to speak of all this. "Only not for the last time!" said the latter. "Not?" said Emanuel.--"Does not everything happen only once and for the last time?--Do not Autumn and Time, as well as Death, separate us from all?--Does not all part from us, even if we do not part from it?--Time is nothing but a death with softer, thinner sickles; every minute is the autumn of the past one, and the second world will be the spring of a _third_.----Ah, when I one day retire again from the flowery surface of a second, and when on the heavenly death-day I see the twilight of the memory of two lives,----O in the future lies a groundwork for infinite bliss as well as woe, why does man shrink with awe only before this?"--Victor disputed the immortality of memory. "Without memory," said Emanuel, "there is no life, only existence, no years, only seconds,--no _I_, only