But his father and his youth were long gone. He saw wandering lights dancing on the marshes, and dying out upon _God's Acre_, and he said, "These are my sinful days!" He saw a star fly out from heaven, to glimmer in its fall, and to be extinguished on the earth. "That is I," said his bleeding heart; and the serpent-teeth of remorse gnawed again into his wounds. His burning fancy showed him creeping night-wanderers upon the roofs, and the windmill threw up its arms threatening to crush him, and a mask left behind in the dead-house assumed by degrees his own feature. Suddenly, in the midst of this tumult, music for the New Year flowed down from the tower, like distant church-song. He was deeply moved. He looked around the horizon and over the wide earth, and thought of his youthful friends, who now, happier and better than he, were teachers for the world, fathers of happy children, and favored men, and he said, "O, I also could be happy, dear parents, had I fulfilled your New-Year's wishes and instructions." In the feverish memories of his youth, it seemed to him that the mask with his features raised itself up in the dead-house; finally, through the superstition which discerns spirits and the future on New-Year's night, it became a living youth, in the position of the beautiful boy of the Capitol, pulling out a thorn, and his formerly blooming face danced weird and bitter before him. He could look no more: he covered his eyes: hot tears streamed down upon the snow;--again he softly sighed, hopeless and unconscious, "Come again, O youth, come again!" And it came again; for on that New-Year's night he had only dreamed thus fearfully. He was still a youth; yet his errors had been no dream. But he thanked God that he, still young, might turn aside from the foul ways of vice, and could follow the sunny path which leads to the fair land of harvests. Turn aside with him, O youth, if thou standest upon his wandering way. This frightful dream will in future be thy judge; but if thou shouldst one day call out, full of grief, "Come again, O beautiful youth!" so shall it never return again. THE DEATH OF AN ANGEL. The tenderest and kindest angel, the Angel of the _last_ hour, whom we harshly call Death, is sent to us, that he may mildly and gently pluck away the sinking heart of man from life, and bear it unhurt in his warm hands out of the cold breast into high, warming Eden. His brother is the Angel of the first hour, who twice kisses man,--once when he begins this life; and again, when he awakes on high, without wounds, and enters smiling upon the other life, as he came weeping into this. As the Angel of the last hour saw the battle-fields stretched before him, full of blood and tears, and drew the trembling souls away, his mild eyes melted, and he said: "Ah! I will once die like man, that I may enter into his last agony, and soothe it when I dissolve the ties of life!"