Notwithstanding the intolerable anguish which his impatient gaze creates, the Schoolmaster has his eyes fixed on the grisly phantoms which move in the blazing sheet. Then an indefinable horror steals over him. Passing through every step of indescribable torture, by dint of contemplating this blazing sight, he feels his eyeballs--which have replaced the blood with which his orbits were filled at the commencement of his dream--he feels his eyeballs grow hot, burning, and melt in this furnace--to smoke and bubble--and at last to become calcined in their cavities like two crucibles filled with red fire. By a fearful power, after having seen as well as felt the successive transformations of his eyeballs into ashes, he falls into the darkness of his actual blindness. But now, suddenly, his intolerable agonies are assuaged as though by enchantment. An odorous air of delicious freshness passes over his burning eyeballs. This air is a lovely admixture of the scents of springtime, which exhale from flowers bathed in evening dew. The Schoolmaster hears all about him a gentle murmur, like that of the breeze which just stirs the leaves--like that of a brook of running waters, which rushes and murmurs on its bed of stone and moss "in the leafy month of June." Thousands of birds warble the most enchanting melodies. They are stilled, and the voices of children, of angelic tone, sing strange, unknown words--words that are "winged" (if we may use the expression), and which the Schoolmaster hears mount to heaven with gentle motion. A feeling of moral health, of tranquillity, of undefined languor, creeps over him by degrees. It is an expansion of the heart, an elevation of the mind, an effort of the soul, of which no physical feeling, how delicious soever it may be, can impart the least idea. He feels himself softly soaring in a heavenly sphere; he seems to rise to an immeasurable height. · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · After having for some moments revelled in this unspeakable felicity he again finds himself in the dark abyss of his habitual thoughts. His dream continues; but he is again but the muzzled miscreant who blasphemes and curses in the paroxysm of his impotent rage. A voice is heard--sonorous--solemn. It is Rodolph's. The Schoolmaster starts "like a guilty thing upon a fearful summons." He has the vague consciousness of a dream; but the alarm with which Rodolph inspires him is so great that he tries, but vainly, to escape from this fresh vision. The voice speaks--he listens. The tone of Rodolph is not severe; it is "rather in sorrow than in anger."