Evening came. Emanuel grew stiller and his eye more rigid, and it seemed to see the fantasies of his busy brain in the apartment, until the gold strip of the far-sinking sun, which a looking-glass directed towards him, darted like a lightning-flash through his world of dream. Softly, but with altered voice, he said, "Into the sun!"--They understood him, and moved his bed and his head toward the evening-rain of the setting sun, to which he had of old so often unfolded his susceptible heart. Victor started, when he saw that his eyes stood, undazzled and immovable, open to the sun. There was a sublime stillness round three discomposed beings; only a breath of evening wind fluttered among the linden-leaves of the apartment, and a bee hovered about the linden-blossoms; but out of doors away from the theatre of distress a blissful evening reposed on the pastures red with sunlight, among joyous, fluttering, singing, intoxicated creatures. Emanuel gazed silently into the sun, which sunk lower toward the earth; he clutched not at the bed-clothes like others, but flung his arms aloft as if for a flight or an embrace. Victor took his beloved hands, but they hung down into his without a pressure. And when the sun, like a blazing world on the day of judgment, sank down in a last upshooting glow: then the silent one still hung with cold eyes on the vacant place of the sun, and remarked not the setting; and Victor saw suddenly shifting flashes of the scythe of death pass yellow across the undistorted face.--Then, deeply troubled, he handed the flute to Julius, and said in a broken voice, "Play the song of rapture, he is dying now."-- And Julius, with streaming, darkened eyes, compressed his sobbing breath into the flute and raised his sighs to heavenly tones, that he might muffle and benumb the parting soul, during the tearing away of its earthly roots, with the after-echoes of the first world, with the preluding echoes of the second. And as, during the song, a blissful smile at an unknown dream glorified the face that was growing cold,--and when only a quiver of the hand pressed the hand of the disconsolate friend, and only a quiver winked with the eyelid and farther down opened the pale lips and passed away, and when the evening redness overspread the pale form,--lo, then death, cold to the earth and our lamentations, iron, erect, and dumb, stalked through the fair evening under the linden blossoms to the enwrapped soul in the tranquillized corpse and transferred the veiled soul with immeasurable arms from the earth through unknown worlds into Thy eternal, warm, fatherly hand which has created us,--into the Elysium for which Thou hast formed us,--among the kindred of our hearts,--into the land of rest, of virtue, and of light....