He shut himself up four days with the blind one in the house of death;--he saw no one,--did not visit the mourning convent, where from all fair eyes flowed similar tears,--renounced the fragrant park and the blue sky,--and let the flowerage of the departed one fade after him.--He consoled the forsaken blind one, and all day long they rested in each other's embrace, and pictured to each other weeping their teacher and his teachings and the radiant hours of their childhood. At last, on the fourth day, he conducted the blind one forever out of the beautiful Maienthal,--the evening-bell sent after them from afar the knell of a whole coffined life,--Julius wept aloud,--but Victor had only a moist eye, and consoled not himself, but the blind one; for his soul was now otherwise than one would guess; his soul was exalted above this eventide-life: his departed one, like a genius, held it high up above the clouds and above the plays of our little time. Victor stood on the high mountain, where one stands on the burial-day of a friend; at the foot of the mountain stretched far away the dead sea of the abyss,[161] and drained an expanded, trembling cloud which reared itself on the sea,--and on the cloud were painted gay cities, and swaying landscapes hung therein, and the little tribes of people with red cheeks ran over the landscapes of vapor,--and all, people and cities, dropped down like tears into the absorbing sea,--only down below along the horizon in the dusky cloud was a lighted rim like morning glow; for a sun rises behind the twilight, and then the cloud has passed away, and a new green continent lies stretching into the immensity.---- He would have gone on the whole night, but something frightful in the next village, which is called Upper-Maienthal, arrested him. He recognized in the coachhouse of the inn, by its coat of arms, the carriage of the Chamberlain. He set the blind one down on a stone bench at the door, where he could listen to the rustle of unloading hay. Victor, in answer to his question in the house, got the intelligence: "There were two ladies overhead, one of them they did not know (he immediately discovered, however, by the first sketch of her attire, the wife of the Parson),--the other had often passed that way; it was the daughter of the Chief Chamberlain, and had on full mourning, because her father some days before had been shot dead in a duel with the Regency-Councillor Flamin, and the two were travelling, as these people said, to England."