But, ye good beings, who have a heart, and find none, or who have the loved objects only _in_, and not _on_, your bosoms, am I not, like the Greeks, drawing all these pictures of bliss, as it were, on the marble sarcophagi of your changed, slumbering past? Am I not the _Archimime_, who, following after, mimics before you the mouldering forms which your soul has buried? And thou, younger or poorer man, to whom time, instead of a past, has only given a future,--wilt thou not one day say to me, I should have concealed from thee many blessed forms, like holy bodies, for fear thou wouldst worship them? and wilt thou not add, that, had it not been for these Phœnix-portraits, thou mightst have cherished lighter wishes, and had many fulfilled? And how much pain have I then caused you all! But myself, too; for how could it fare better with me than with the rest of you? Your conclusion would, accordingly, be this: since you can never really live pleasant days so pleasantly as they shine afterward in _memory_, or beforehand in _hope_, you would, therefore, rather have the present day without either; and since only at the two poles of the elliptic arch of time one can catch the low music of the spheres, and in the centre of the present nothing, you would, therefore, rather stay and listen in the middle; but as to the past and the future,--neither of which can any man live to see, because they are only two different poesy-gardens of our heart, an Iliad and Odyssey, a Milton's Paradise Lost and Regained,--you will not listen to them at all, or have anything to do with them, in order that you may nestle down, deaf and blind, in an animal present. By Heaven! sooner give me the finest, strongest poison of ideals, so that I may at least not snore away my moment, but dream it away, and then die on it! But the very dying would be my own fault; for whoso would fain translate _poetic_ dreams into waking reality[91] is more foolish than the North American, who realizes his _nightly_ ones: he proposes, like a Cleopatra, to pervert the splendor of the pearls of dew into a refreshing drink, and the rainbow of fancy to a permanent arch, bridging over the rain-waters. Yes, O God, Thou wilt and canst give us one day a reality, which shall embody and redouble and satisfy our present ideals,--as thou hast, indeed, already proved to us, in our love here below, which intoxicates us with moments in which the inner becomes the outer, and the Ideal, Reality; but _then_--no, for the Then of the life hereafter, this little _Now_, has no voice; but if, I say, here below fiction could become fact, and our pastoral poetry pastoral life, and every dream a day,--ah, even then would desire still remain enhanced only, not fulfilled: the higher reality would only beget a higher poetry, and higher remembrances and hopes;--in _Arcadia_ we should pine after _Utopia_; and on every sun we should see an unfathomable starry heaven retiring before us, and we should--sigh as we do here!