Dost thou, reader, still recognize the voice which, in his inner being, always, amidst the weeping of music, rang in the cadence of verse? Here it rings again.--But his hurricane of resolve soon gave place to gentler deeds and hours, just as the equinoctial storm of autumn dissolved into still after-summer days. The thought, "In a few weeks thou wilt fly to the land beyond the grave," made him a _free-born_ creature and an angel. He forgave everybody, even the Evangelist. He filled his little sphere with virtues as with an after-bloom of life, and devoted his short hours, not to sweet fantasies, but to needy patients. He denied himself every expenditure, in order to leave to Julius his paternal property unimpaired. He was neither vain nor proud. He spoke frankly about and against the state;--for what is there to fear so near to the storm- and weather-shed of the coffin-lid?--But for the very reason that he felt only love for what is good, and no passions and no cowardice in his inner man, therefore he resisted _gently_ and _quietly_; for when once man is convinced for himself that he has laid up courage for a day of need, he no longer seeks to make a show of it before others. The thought of death used to incline him to humorous follies, but now only to good actions. He was so happy, men and scenes around him appeared to him in the mild, soothing evening-light, wherein he always beheld both in the _sicknesses_ of his childhood. It seemed as if he wanted (and he succeeded in it) to bribe his conscience by this piety to a legible indorsement of his autographic sentence of death. To him, as to the departed Emanuel, men appeared as children, the light of earth as evening-light, everything seemed softer, everything a little smaller; he had no anxiety or hankering; the earth was his moon; now for the first time he understood the soul of his Dahore.... --And thou, my reader, dost thou not feel that thou, too, so near to the cloister-gate of death, wouldst improve just so? But thou and I are in fact already standing before it. Is not our death as certain as Victor's, although the certainty ranges through a longer interval? O, if every one only had a fixed belief that after fifty years, on an appointed day, Nature would lead him to her place of execution, he would be a different man; but we all banish the image of death out of our souls, as the Silesians on Lætare-Sunday cast it out of the cities. The thought and the expectation of death improve us as much as the certainty and the choice of it.