Gione answered, gently, "The Eternal One himself, who gives us charity and who speaks in all our souls to calm us, and who alone has created in us our demands to Him and our hope in Him." This good sweet word could still not calm all the waves of my excited soul. From a distant house, turtle-doves sent after us trembling, soul-felt plaints. About my tear-filled inward eye assembled all those forms whose hearts were without guilt and without joy,[28] who attained no single wish here below, and who, sinking under the frost and snow-storm of fate, only longed, like persons freezing to death, to sleep; and all those forms who have loved too deeply, and lost too much, and whose wounds were never cured until death had widened them, like a cracked bell which retains its hollow sound until the crevice is made larger, and the beings nearest me, and many other female ones, whose exquisitely tender souls fate most consecrates to torture, as Narcissus is consecrated to the God of Hell. I also remembered your true remark, that you had never pronounced the words _pain_ and _the past_ before a woman, without hearing an almost inaudible sigh at the union of the two words, from the suffering heart; for woman on the narrower stage of her plans, with idealized wishes and desires built on others' worth, rather than on her own, has a thousand times more disappointments to suffer than we men. The sun sank deeper behind the mountains, and giant shadows, like mighty birds of prey, came coldly down upon us from the eternal snow. I took Karlson's hand in mine, and looked with tearful eyes into his manly, beautiful countenance, and said, "O Karlson! on what a blooming, grand world you throw an immeasurable gravestone, which no time can lift! Are two difficulties,[29] based too on the _necessary ignorance_ of man, sufficient to overthrow a belief, which explains thousand greater difficulties, without which our existence is without aim, our sufferings without explanation, and the holy Trinity in our breast three furies, and three terrible contradictions? A tending God's hand, leading and feeding the inner man (the child of the outer one), teaching him to go and to speak, educating, refining him, is shown in all things, from the shapeless earthworm to the brilliant human face, from the chaotic nations of the primitive ages to the present century, from the first faint pulsation of the invisible heart to its full, bold, throbbing pulse in manhood,--and why? That when man stands upright and exalted, a beautiful demi-god, even amid the ruins of his old body temple, the club of Death may annihilate the demi-god forever? And on the eternal sea, on which the least drop throws immeasurable rings, on this sea a life-long rising and a life-long falling of the soul should have the same termination, namely, the end of all things,--annihilation?[30] And as, from the same cause, the souls of all other worlds must fall and die with ours, and of this shroud and