O, how did the neighborhood accord with his heart! In a cistern, before which the coffin of the coffin passed by, there stood a bronze statue of the old man on horseback, who saw pass by below him the unsaddled mourning-horses, and the mounted festive-steed; a deaf and dumb man was stopping from door to door, and making, with his bell, a begging jingle, which neither he nor the buried one could hear: and was not the forgotten Prince laid in the earth all unseen, and more lonesome than any one of his subjects? O Zesara! it sank into thy heart, how easily man is forgotten, whether he lies in the urn or in the pyramid; and how our immortal self is regarded, like an actor, as _absent_, so soon as it is once behind the scenes, and frets and fumes no longer among the players on the stage. But had not the gray hermit, Spener, laid upon the sunken breast of that deeper hermit a double youth? O, in this frosty hour of pomp and pageantry, counts not the faithful Julienne every tone of the funeral bell with the beads of her tears,--that poor daughter whom sickness has exempted from the ceremonials, not from pain, who now has lost her _last but one_, perhaps her _last_ relative, since her brother is hardly one? And will not Liana, in her Elysium, guess the farce of sorrow which is acted so near to her over behind the high trees in Tartarus? And if she suspects anything, O how profoundly will she mourn! All this the noble youth heard in his soul, and he thirsted hotly after the friendship of the heart: it was to him as if its mountain- and life-air floated down from eternity, and blew the grave-dust away from his life-path, and he saw, up yonder, the Genius place his inverted torch upon the cold bosom, not to extinguish the immortal life, but to enkindle the immortal love. He could not now do otherwise than go forth into the open air, and, amid the flying tones of spring and the deep, hollow murmur of the receding dead march, write the following words to Liana's brother, in which he said to him, after a youthful style, Be my friend! "TO CHARLES. "Stranger! At this hour, when, in the dead sea and through our tears, the triumphal columns and thrones of men and their bridge-posts appear to us _broken_, a true heart puts a question to thee frankly, and let thine answer it willingly and in truth!