--Genius of dreams! thou that walkest through the nebulous sleep of mortals and bringest up before the lonely soul imprisoned in a corpse the happy islands of childhood! O thou that therein restorest to our mouldered friends the bloom of the cheek and showest to our poor frenzied heart past heavens and reflections of Eden and undulating lawns, on clouds!----Magic Genius! enter into this holy night before a man who is not asleep, and turn thy crape-covered glass to my open eye, that I may see therein, and paint, the Elysian world of light which struggles with our earthly shadow, as a pale Luna, in the double eclipse![155]---- The enraptured voice of the dead man cried: "Hail to thee, thou still Elysium!--O thou glimmering land of rest! receive the new shade. Ah, how softly thou glowest,--how softly thou breathest,--how softly thou reposest!" ... Emanuel's eyes had opened; but in his brain burned the Elysian delirious idea that he had died and waked up in the second world. O thou over-blest! and indeed a glittering Eden did encircle thee,--ah, this glow, this breath, this fragrance, this repose, was too beautiful for an earth. The moon weaved over with silver threads, as with flying summer-gossamer, the green of night,--from leaf to leaf, from trees to trees stretched the sparkling veil of the illuminated rain,--over all waters floated glimmering banks of vapor,--a gentle fanning threw jewels from the twigs into the silver streams,--the trees and the mountains rose like giants into the night,--the everlasting sky stood over the falling sparks, over the fleeting fragrances; over the playing leaves, it alone unchangeable, with fixed suns, with the eternal world-studded vault, great, cool, radiant and blue.--Never did a valley so glimmer, so exhale, so whisper, so enchant before.... Emanuel embraced the sparkling soil and cried out from a burning breast, subdued and stammering with rapture: "Ah, is it true, then? do I really hold thee, my native land?--Ay, in such fields of rest wounds are healed, tears are stilled, no sighs demanded, no sins committed, here in sooth the little human heart dissolves for overfulness of rapture and creates itself anew to dissolve again.... Thus have I long since imagined thee, blessed, magical, dazzling land, that borderest on my earth.... O dear earth! where mayest thou be?" He lifted his intoxicated eye to the star-bedewed heaven, and saw the low-sunken moon hanging faint and yellow in the south; this he took for the earth, from which he supposed death had borne him into this Elysium. Here his voice dissolved into emotion at the beloved earliest garden of his life, and he addressed the earth flying overhead above the stars:--