He stepped into the stream, and went out with it before a warm, busy plain full of villages, and out from them came the Sabbath sounds, and out of the grain-fields larks arose, and on the mountains human foot-paths crept upward,--the trees lifted themselves up as living things, and the distant men seemed to be fast-rooted, and became only little shoots on the low bark of the enormous tree of life. The soul of the youth was cast into the holy fire; like asbestos-paper, he drew it out quenched and blank; it was to him as if he knew nothing, as if he were _one_ thought; and here the feeling came upon him in a wonderfully new manner, that is the world, thou art on the world;--he was _one_ being with it,--all was _one_ life, clouds and men and trees. He felt himself grasped by innumerable polypus-arms, and swallowed up at the same time with them, and yet running on in the infinite heart. In a blissful bewilderment he arrived at his dwelling, from which little Pollux came rolling down the mountain to meet him, and call him to dinner. In the little house the very thought of his heart was expressed by the Æolian harp at the open window. While the child was thundering away with his little fist on the harpsichord, and the birds joyfully screamed in out of the trees, the soul of the world swept exulting and sighing through the Æolian strings, now lawlessly and now regularly, playing with the storms and they with it; and Albano seemed to hear the streams of life rushing between their shores, the countries of the earth,--and through flower-veins and oak-veins, and through hearts,--around the earth, bearing clouds on their bosom,--and the stream, which thunders through eternity, a Divine hand was pouring out under the veil. Albano came, with the innocent boy dancing before him, to the still smiling mother. Even here, between the four walls, the sails continued to propel him which the great morning had swelled. Nothing surprised him, nothing seemed to him common, nothing remote; the wave and the drop in the endless sea of life flowed away in indivisible union with the streams and whirlpools which it bore onward. Before Chariton he stood like a shining god, and she would gladly have veiled either him or herself. Never was humanity individualized in purer forms, crippled by no alloy of provincialism or nationality, than in this circle of joy, wherein childhood, womanhood, and manhood, twined with flowers, met and softly clasped each other.