He went now towards Maienthal, and carefully kept away his dreaming thoughts from its exalted places, in order (at evening on the arrival) to enjoy so much the more--sorrow. But now his conscious soul spun itself into a new ideal web. He thought over the pleasure of sinking without any sick nights into the earth, bright and erect, not prostrate, but upright like the giant Cænæus,[180]--he felt himself shielded against all disasters of life, and purged from the fear perpetually gnawing on in every heart,--all this, and the joy of having fulfilled his duties and controlled his impulses, and the lights of the blue day standing as if in flower-dust, so cleared his turbid life-stream, that at last he could have wished (had not his determination forbidden it) to play longer in the bright stream.... So great does contempt of death render the beauty of life,--so sure is every one, who in _cold blood_ renounces life, of being able to endure it,--so sound is the advice of Rousseau, before death to undertake a good deed, because one can then do without dying.... --As Victor thought thus, Fate stepped before him and asked him sternly, "Wilt thou die?"--He answered, "Yes!"--as, just before sundown, he beheld again in Upper Maienthal Clotilda's carriage, which he had seen there at its starting upon the journey. Now the death-cloud fell upon the landscape. He hurried by,--at the window he saw his mother and the lady, the mother of Flamin,--his inner being was in a tumult,--his eyes glowed, but remained dry,--for he was choosing among the instruments of death.---Why did he go, so late, in the dark, with a stormy soul, which obscured all sweet dreams, to Maienthal?--He would go to Emanuel's grave; not to mourn there, not to dream there, but to seek for himself a hollow there, namely, the last. His impetuous grief had sketched a picture of his dying, and he had approved the sketch; namely, so soon as fate had decided the necessity of his death by the disappearance of his father and by the peril of Flamin, he meant to scoop out his grave near the weeping birch, lay himself down in it, kill himself therein, and then let the blind Julius, who could not know nor see anything of it, fling the earth over him, and so, veiled, unknown, nameless, flee out of life to the side of his mouldering Emanuel.... Black funeral processions of ravens flew slowly like a cloud through the sunless heavens, and settled down like a cloud into the woods,--the half-moon hung above the earth,--a strange, little shadow, as big as a heart, ran fearfully beside him. He looked up: it was the shadow of a slowly hovering hawk; he rushed through Maienthal; he saw not the leafless garden nor Dahore's closed house, but ran through the chestnut alley toward the weeping birch.--