Serpent of Eternity, quickly take away the beautiful form, as the larger serpent first poisons and then devours man. But I, Gione, stand beside your ruins with unalleviated pain, with undestroyed soul; and grieving, think of you until I also dissolve. And my grief is noble and deep, for I have no hope! May thy invisible shadow-picture, like the new moon with the sun,[27] arise to heaven in my soul! And may the creative wheel of Time, which raises innumerable hearts, and fills them with blood, only to pour them again into the grave, and let them die, pour out my life slowly, for long time would I mourn for thee, thou lost one! I cannot tell you, dearest Victor, how horrible and fearful the eternal snow of annihilating death seemed to me, placed beside the noble form it should have covered; how frightful the thought: if Karlson is right, the last day has torn this never happy, innocent soul from the prisons upon the earth to the closer ones beneath it: man too often carries his errors as his truths only as word arguments, not as feelings. But let the disbeliever of immortality imagine a life of sixty minutes instead of sixty years, and let him try if he can bear to see loved, noble, or wise men only aimless, hour-long air-phantoms, hollow thin shadows which fly towards the light and are consumed by it, and who, without path, trace, or aim, after a short flight, dissolve into their former night. No; even over him steals a supposition of immortality. Else a black cloud would forever hang over his soul, and the earth would quake beneath him when he trod on it, as if he were a Cain. I continued, but all arguments were poetized into feelings. "Yes, if all forests of this earth were pleasure grottoes, all valleys Campan, all islands holy, all fields Elysian, and all eyes sparkling, yes, then--no, even then the Eternal One would have given to our souls the promise of a future life, even in the blessedness of the present one. But now, O God! when so many houses are mourning ones, so many fields battle-fields, so many cheeks pale, and when we pass so many sunken, red, torn, closed eyes,--O, can death be but the last destroying whirlwind? And when at last, after thousand, thousand years, our earth is dried up by the sun's heat, and every living sound on its surface silenced, will an immortal spirit look down on the silent globe, and, gazing on the empty hearse moving slowly on, say: 'There the churchyard of humanity flies into the crater of the sun; on that burning heap many shadows, and dreamers, and wax-figures, have wept and bled, but now they are all melted and consumed: Fly into the sun, which will also dissolve thee, thou silent desert with thy swallowed tears, with thy dried-up blood!' No, the crushed worm dares raise himself to his Creator, and say: 'Thou canst not have made me only to suffer.'" "And who gives the worm the right to this demand?" asked Karlson.