Suppose, further, she makes the kidnapper of her soul happy, reckon now what she might have been to its darling; and whether she does not then deserve anything better than to gratify a jailer, locked in with her forever by one shutting of the prison-door. But it seldom fares so well as this; thou wilt heap a double disaster upon thy soul,--the long agony of thy daughter, and the growing coldness of her husband, who by and by comes to feel and resent refusals. Thou hast cast a shadow over the time when man first needs the morning-sun,--namely, youth. O, sooner make all other seasons of the day of life cloudy; they are all alike, the third and the fourth and fifth decades; only at sunrise let it not rain into life; only this one never returning, irredeemable time darken not! But how, if thou shouldst be sacrificing not merely joys, relations, a happy marriage, hopes, a whole posterity, to thy plans and commands, but the very being herself[157] whom thou constrainest? Who can justify thee, or dry thy tears, when thy best daughter,--for she is the very one who will be most likely to obey, be dumb and die, as the monks of La Trappe see their cloister burn down, without one of them breaking the vow of silence,[158]--when she, I say, like a fruit half in the sun and half in the shade, blooms outwardly, and inwardly grows cold and pale; when she, dying after her lifeless heart, at last can no longer conceal anything from thee, but for years bears round the paleness and the pangs of decline in the very orient of life; and when thou canst not console her, because thou hast crushed her, and thy conscience cannot suppress the name of infanticide; and when at last the worn-out victim lies there under thy tears, and the wrestling creature, so affrighted and so young, so faint, and yet thirsting for life, forgiving and complaining, with languishing and longing looks, with painfully confused and conflicting emotions, sinks with her blooming limbs into the bottomless flood of death,--O guilty mother on the shore, thou who hast pushed her in, who will comfort thee? But I would call every guiltless one, and show her the bitter dying, and ask her, Shall thy child also perish thus? 59. CYCLE.