Roaming and dreaming, he lost himself among orange-blossoms. Suddenly it was to him as if a sweet stirring in his inmost heart made it enlarge painfully, and grow void, and then full again. Ah, he knew not that it was the fragrances which he had here in childhood so often drunk into his bosom, and which now darkly but powerfully called back every fantasy and remembrance of the past, for the very reason that fragrances, unlike the worn-out objects of the eye and ear, seldomer present themselves, and therefore the more easily and intensely renew the faded sensations. But when he happened into an arcade of the palace, which was colored mosaically with variegated stones and shells, and when he saw the waves playing and dancing on the threshold of the grotto, then did a moss-grown past all at once reveal itself: he sounded his recollections,--the colored stones of the grotto lay as it were full of inscriptions of a former time before his memory. Ah, here had he been a thousand times with his mother! She had showed him the shells and forbidden him to approach the waves; and once, as the sun was rising and the rippled lake and all the pebbles glistened, he had waked up on her bosom, in the midst of the blaze of lights. O, was not, then, the place sacred, and was not here the overpowering desire pardonable, which he had so long felt to-day, to open a wound in his arm for the relief of the restless and tormenting blood? He scratched himself, but accidentally too deep, and with a cool and pleasant exaltation of his more lightly-breathing nature he watched the red fountain of his arm in the setting sun, and became, as if a burden had fallen off from him, calm, sober, still, and tender. He thought of his departed mother, whose love remained now forever unrequited. Ah, gladly would he have poured out this blood for her,--and now, too, love for his sickly father gushed up more warmly than ever in his bosom. O come soon, said his heart, I will love thee so inexpressibly, thou dear Father!