Just then the ecstasy opened his wounds, and blood, the tear of the soul, flowed from his heart upon the cherished knoll,--the dissolving body sank quietly towards his beloved,--tears of rapture broke the sunset light into, a rosy, swimming sea,--distant echoing tones, as of the earth passing wide through ringing ether, played in the vaporous lustre. Then a dark cloud or short night shot by the Angel, and was full of sleep; and now a radiant heaven opened and overspread him, and a thousand angels shone around. "Art thou again here, thou deceiving dream?" he said. But the Angel of the first hour stepped through the rays to him, and gave the sign of the kiss, and said: "That was death, thou immortal brother and heavenly friend!" And the Youth and his beloved softly repeated the words. A DREAM AND THE TRUTH. WRITTEN ON THE DEATH OF A MOTHER FOLLOWING THAT OF HER HUSBAND. Sleep buries the first world, its nights and sorrows, and brings to us a second world, with the forms we have loved and lost, and scenes too vast for this little earth. I was in the Isle of the Blest, in the second world. This I dreamed. The stars were nearer; the heaven-blue lay on the flowers; all the breezes were melodious tones; and repose and ravishment, which with us are sundered, there dwelt conjoined. And the dead, from around whom had fallen that mist of life which veiled the higher heaven before, rested like mild evening suns in the azure ether. Then, behold, the earth rose out of the deep beneath, on her course, and the Spring had covered her with his blossoms and buds. As she drew nearer to the Isle of the Blest, a voice full of love cried, "Look down, ye dead, on your old home, and see the beloved who have lost, but not forgotten you." For in the spring the earth always passes by the eternal World of the Blest, whose off-cast husk sinks into its clods; and therefore it is, that in the spring poor mortals experience such a profound longing, so powerful a presentiment, and so many haunting recollections of their lost beloved. After the voice, all the Blest stepped forward on the shore of the Supernal Isle, and each one sought on the wan earth the heart which had remembered him. One noble being gazed down, seeking after his spouse and after his children, around whom the glad spring-tide of earth was flowing; but _they_ had no spring.