The cloud takes me up, we shall see each other again.--Ah! my fainting heart no more retained its blood: I knelt down, but I could say nothing; I would fain have melted my soul into a single sound, but the fettered tongue could not frame one, and I stared at the ascending immortal with infinite and inconsolable love.--Ah! thought I, life is a dream; but I could perhaps say to her how I love her, were I only awake. "Then I woke. O Clotilda, can man say how much he loves? "H." * * * * * His character and the contents of this dream shut out the suspicion of invention.--For the rest, even if Clotilda refuses his veiled wish to see her in Maienthal, still she must do it with a leaf of paper and three lines, which he can then read a thousand times over, and with which the cabinet of pictures and seals, wherein already are contained the hat and the views, will be considerably enriched. Meanwhile he stood in his fair Alpine valley between two high mountains, on each of which was mustering material for an avalanche,--one is perhaps already started up there in its crushing course, and he is not yet able to see it. The first avalanche, which the least sound of his may topple down upon him, is his crazy relation with his court acquaintance. He can boast of having angered them in a body: the Princess, Joachime, Matthieu. But, even independently of that, some conductor or other--merely because he stands not with the rest on the social isolating stool of the throne--must soon dart a diminished flash at his fingers or his eyes; at boards and at courts no one can stand upright without connections; it is there as in galleys, where all the slaves must move their oars together, if no one is to feel the cutting of the chain. But Victor said to himself, "Be not a child! be not the reversed fox who pronounces _sour_ grapes, because he cannot reach them by leaping, to be _sweet_! I flatter myself, thou canst dispense with courtly hearts, which like their viands must first be warmed over a chafing-dish full of flickering spirits of wine.--By heaven! a man will surely be able to eat, even though that which he puts on the spit is not fetched by a guard from the kitchen, then handed to a page, then served up by a chamberlain or some other regulation-cavalier.--Only my father,--if it makes no difference to him!" That was just it: in the son there was nothing to be felled, but there was in the father,[63] for whom they will probably let the uplifted woodman's and sacrificial axe hover, till he stands under it with his head, which without his return is not to be had.