While the two simple-minded men yet talked together, the sun had risen, and there was a sound of many waters and of rising waves; and through an opening in the rocks, which the travellers had not perceived in the twilight, the great ocean became revealed to their eyes. Higher and higher rose the tide, till it almost reached where the strange wooden building still lay motionless; and the travellers retreated a little up the shore, and stood, awe-struck and breathless, watching what might happen. Then down from the cliff above ran a band of mariners, and leaped on board the vessel, and hauled in the anchor; and presently the waves lifted up the ship, and she floated bravely on the waters. Very soon, the mariners set the sails, which had lain idly on the deck, the pilot placed his hand on the rudder and guided the noble barque, and she was borne by the winds of heaven far off beyond the uttermost ken of the two poor travellers upon the shore. Then, after a time, Wolfgang turned to his companion, and said: “Athelstane, you spoke truth. Yon House-of-the-Sea was made, as you foresaw, for other use than to stand upon the ground. It was planned for a different element,--the free world of waters. And now we see what was the purport of so many things which before seemed to us useless,--the keel, the masts, the sails, the marvellous and mysterious rudder. How wonderful it is! How wise and far-seeing the great carpenter who made the ship!” As Wolfgang spoke, Athelstane lifted his head, which had drooped in heavy thought, and he saw the wide ocean leaping in the morning light stretched out before him, and the new-risen sun smote his face with glory. And Athelstane laid his hand on Wolfgang’s arm, and spoke as his friend had never heard him speak before, for it was as a man in whose soul a great new thought had sprung to life: “Aye, Wolfgang, aye,” he said; “but if that marvellous work of human hands was not made only for earth, do you think _we_ were made for nothing better than the life which now we lead,--to eat and drink, and marry, and toil, and sleep, and die, and be forgotten? Are not _we_ too, O Wolfgang, made for other things than these? Are we not fitted for some other element than that in which now we have our being, some other existence than that which yet we lead? If we were intended only to live our few years of animal life on earth and then perish, why were we given minds to plough the seas of thought, and aspirations to point to heaven, and love to swell beneath the breath of affection, and conscience to guide us on our way as the pilot lays on it his mighty hand? O Wolfgang! we could perceive that the ship was intended to float on the great ocean which we had never beheld. Can we not see that we and all our race are made to live in a world yet unseen, wider, freer, grander a thousand times than earth,--a world which we shall enter whensoever the tide of death shall lift us up and bear us away?”