But the longer he saw the procession growing, that loose juggler's thread, by which they were letting down the empty but figured chest of Cypselus[100] into the family vault, so much the more indignant became his mockery. He applied his hypothesis to every sable member of the dark chain. He praised them for opening the _bal masqué_ of the new administration with these slow minuet steps, and preparing themselves for the waltz of the wedding and the grandfather's-dance of the allegiance-day. He said, as one loved on festive days to make everything easy for himself and his beast, as, accordingly, the Jews, on the Sabbath, would not allow themselves or their cattle to carry anything, not even the hens to carry the rags sticking to them; so he saw with pleasure, that in the ceremony-carriages, and in the parade-box, and on the mourning-horses, nothing was suffered to lie or sit; yes, that even the trains of the mourning-mantles were borne by pages, and the four points of the bier-cloth by four stout gentlemen. The only fault he found was, that the soldiery in their joy had seized their guns upside down, and that precisely the persons of the highest rank, Luigi, Froulay, Bouverot, as they came from a hasty funeral potation at once into the open air, were obliged, by reason of their staggering, to be led along and held up on both sides. 47. CYCLE. In Albano another spirit spoke than in Schoppe, but the two soon met. To the Count the night-like forms of crape, the still funeral banners, the dead-march, the creeping sick-man's-walk, and the tolling of the bells, opened wide all earth's charnel-houses, especially as before his blooming eyes these death plays came for the first time: but one thing more loudly than all--one will hardly guess what--proclaimed before him the partings of life,--namely, the beat of the drum stifled by the funeral cloth; a muffled drum was to him a broken reverberation of all earthly catacombs. He heard the dumb, strangled complainings of our hearts,--he saw higher beings looking down from above on the lamentable three hours' comedy of our life, wherein the ruddy child of the first act fades in the fifth to the old man in jubilee, and then, grown up and bowed down, vanishes behind the falling curtain. As, in spring, we think more of death, autumn, and winter than in summer, so also does the most fiery and energetic youth paint out to himself in _his_ season of life's year, the dark leafless one oftener and more vividly than the man in that stage which is nearest to it; for in both springs the wings of the ideal unfold widely and find room only in a future. But before the youth, Death comes in blooming, Greek form; before the tired, older man, in Gothic.