"O All-gracious One, thou hast damned me!" stammered Emanuel; the driven blood broke from his crushed lung, and the disconsolate one staggered and sank dying on the blood-stained flowers of his lost heaven.... Thus does one day rob another of its heaven, and ere bereaved man enters yonder into the last paradise, he has lost too many here below!--Ah, we bear into every spring-air of this life and into the ether of the second a breast yawning with wounds; and it must first be closed, before it can fill itself!... THE SOFT EVENING. Towards noon he opened his weary eyes, but only to let them fall into the grave, which death had opened beside him during his sleep. However, one madman had been the God of Medicine to the other; his dream of Elysium was dreamed out, shortly before it seemed about to be fulfilled, and he was rational again. Victor saw by all signs, that toward sundown at least death with his fruit-gatherer would pluck this white fruit from its stem; but he saw it more calmly than yesterday. As he had already rehearsed the part of disconsolateness, the instruments of grief sawed no fissure into his heart, but only moved bloodily to and fro in the old one. Whoever after years deposits for the second time in the coffin one who has been once awakened therein, scarcely mourns with so much intensity as the first time. With what altered eyes did Emanuel awake in the evening hour, when he yesterday had shed the first tears for joy! His soul, like the mourning tree of Goa,[158] let fall by day the nightly load of blossoms; to his chilled head the earth turned no longer the meadow-side of poesy, but the light side of cold reason. He confessed now that he had nourished into fulness of blood the nobler parts of his inner man at the expense of the lower,--that his hope of death had been too great as well as his poetic wing-feathers,--that he had contemplated the earth not from the earth, but too much from Jupiter, seen from whose observatory it must needs dwindle to a fiery spark, and that he had therefore lost the earth without getting Jupiter instead. Vainly did Victor oppose him with the true proposition, that the higher man, as the painters do with water-colors, always begins his life-piece with the _background_ and with the _sky_, which the painters in oil and inferior men make last; his answer was the complaint that he unfortunately had not completed his picture so far as the foreground. At last he reproached himself with having made too much ado about so slight a separation as death was, at least for him who goes, since the other separations on the earth were after all _longer_, more _bitter_ and _two-sided_.