Ah! they would have died and died gladly of the sadness of melody, if every heart had held the heart for which it languished on its breast; but every one still wept on lonesomely without his beloved. At last the form threw off the white veil, and the _Angel of the end_ stood before men. The little cloud that floated round him was _Time_,--so soon as he should grasp the little cloud, he would crush it, and time and men would be annihilated. When the Angel of the end had unveiled himself, he smiled on men with indescribable affection, in order to dissolve their hearts with bliss and with smiles. And a soft light fell from his eyes upon all the shapes, and every one saw standing before him the soul he most loved,--and when they gazed upon each other with a dying look for love and sent a languid smile after the angel, he grasped at the little cloud which was near him,--but he could not reach it. Suddenly each one saw once more beside him his own self,--the second _I_ trembled transparently beside the first, and the two smiled consumingly on each other and exalted each other,--the heart which trembled in man hung once more, tremblingly, in the second self, and saw itself dying therein.-- O then was every one constrained to fly from himself to his beloved, and, seized with dread and love, to twine his arms round other beings who were dear to him.--And the angel of the end opened his arms wide, and clasped the whole human race together in one embrace.--Then the whole meadow glimmers, breathes fragrance, rings with music,--then the suns stop, but the island itself whirls around the suns,--the two sundered selves run into each other,--the loving souls fall on each other like snow-flakes,--the flakes become cloud,--the cloud melts into a dark tear.-- The great tear of bliss, made out of us all, swims more transparent and yet more transparent in Eternity.-- At last the Angel of the end said softly, _They have died most sweetly of their beloved_.-- And he crushed weeping the little cloud of time.-- * * * * * The fever images of death, with which every sleep, even the last, begins, gleamed in Emanuel's eyes. His spirit hung swaying in his loose nerves, breathed upon by soft airs; for he was already in that dissolving nervous ecstasy of the fainting, the child-bearing, the exhausted by bleeding, the dying. But his emptied breast rose the more lightly, his departing spirit drew out thinner the thread of life. Victor would have enjoyed the comfort of the dull numbness, wherewith pains heaped one upon another crush us down, had he not been obliged every minute to tell these pains, i. e. all the preparations of death, to the poor blind youth. Ah, the blind one feared perhaps that he might call after this teacher too late with the song of rapture.