When she was out of Victor's sight,--and when, from her _present_ look of _increased paleness_, he drew the conclusion that the vale of Emanuel would hardly restore her spring-colors, since the prospect of the journey had brought no healing influence,--and when this _short absence_ held before him as it were in a pocket-mirror the death-apparition of an _eternal_ one,--and when, at last, to be sure, the swelling heart carried away the dam of dissimulation,--then he rushed out into the winter,--bared his inflamed breast to the cooling flakes, and tore wider the clefts into which fate grafted its sorrows,--and ran up through the white night to the observatory;--and here, covered with the snow-avalanche silently descending from heaven, he looked out into the gray, whirling, trembling, flickering landscape, and in the broad snow-pierced night,--and all the tears of his heart fell, and all the thoughts of his soul cried: "So looks the future! So glistening fall the joys of men from heaven, and dissolve even while they fall! So does everything melt away! Ah, what air-castles I saw shine around me on this eminence, and how they gleamed in the evening red! Alas! all are buried under the snow and under the darkness of night!" He looked down into Clotilda's garden, in whose dark bowers, now whitened with snow, he had found and lost again the Eden of his heart. "The tones which flowed over this garden are dried up, but not the tears which streamed after them," thought he. He looked down into her brother's garden, where the tulip-C had dropped its leaves, and the blooming names had passed away into obscurity. With such a soul, which had looked into this landscape as into the charnel-house of mouldered days, he returned to the joyous club. The alternation of cold and warmth had kept up his similarity to the punch-union, which meanwhile had gone on drinking. He and all had touched the limits of drinking, where one laughs and weeps in the same breath; but I am glad that man can after all extract true nourishment of mind and heart (though not from a cloister-kitchen or cloister-library, yet) from a cloister-cellar; that he drinks the health of his wit; that every cup (not merely on the altar) spiritually strengthens him, and that, if serpents take off their crowns upon drinking,[41] he puts his on during the process; and that the vine sheds tears not merely of itself, or from the eyes of a Catholic image of the Virgin, but also from those of a man, who has drunk of it. The club hit upon the fancy of making parliamentary speeches. The Chaplain proposed occasional discourses. Victor jumped up in a chair and said: "I am going to deliver a funeral-sermon on myself,--I preached here long ago in my childhood." All drank once more, even the corpse, and the latter began the following harangue:-- "_Most beloved and distressed hearers and brethren!_"