What a strange feeling it is when we enter, in travelling, at early morn the streets of a town! The sun is gilding the steeple, the air is fresh and cool, the birds are singing in the linden-trees before the old gable-houses on the market-place--nature is awaking and blooming forth in morning beauty--and men are still lying in the bonds of sleep, within their musty, oppressive chambers. The traveller can hardly understand why no shutter opens, and no smiling face appears, to enjoy with him the glorious morning.... It is the same feeling which overcomes the lover who has just been assured of the return of his love, who looks around with beaming eye, and would like to press flowers and all to his overflowing heart. But the flowers do not mind him, and the people have the same everyday faces, worn with care or heavy with sleep and evil dreams. The sun of his love, which rouses him to a new life, has neither light nor heat for the others in the musty, oppressive chambers of their joyless, unloving existence. Oswald felt this as he awoke on the following day, after a short, restless sleep, which had rolled like a Lethe stream over the recollections of the day before. But the soul receives impressions which no sleep can efface, unless it be the last, the eternal sleep; and thus he also had scarcely opened his eyes when the image of that glorious woman stood bright and clear before his soul. What had happened, up to that moment when the Venus image floated down to him in the forest chapel, he had forgotten; what had happened afterwards, till he had pressed Melitta once more in his arms, not far from the carriage, to which she had accompanied him through the forest, he knew it no more. But the kisses which he had given and received were still burning on his lips; the sweet breath which had mingled with his own was still there, and the loving eyes that had rested on his were still shining brightly before him. Oh, those eyes, sparkling with animation, those two bright stars which the morning dawn cannot efface, how they still shone, and sparkled, and pursued him everywhere! He saw them when he closed his eyes; he saw them when he looked out of the window up to the bright morning sky; he saw them when he lost himself in the blue shadows which filled the spaces between the tall trees down in the silent, dewy garden. He felt as if he could have wept unto death, as if he could have shouted for joy, as if his whole being might float away like a harmony of sweet sounds.... There are moments in our life when our bodies seem to us a mockery. We would like to fly away, and we are chained to the spot; we would pour forth a world of sensations in eloquent words, and our tongue stammers; we would like to be entirely different, and we remain the selfsame men. Oh, that is a torment equal only, perhaps, to that of a person in a trance, when they close the coffin and he cannot raise a finger nor move his lips to tell them--I am alive!...