with long, chestnut-brown hair, and dark eyes, and a shining, swan-like neck, and with the complexion and vigor of the richest climate, rise, like a nobler Aphrodite, revealed down to her bosom, from out the deepest waves. But in a few seconds the Goddess sank back again beneath the surface, and the spirit-voice continued to whisper overhead, "Love the beautiful one whom I showed thee." The monk coldly and silently prayed during the scene, of which he heard and saw nothing. At length he said: "On the next Ascension-day, at the hour of thy birth, thou wilt stand beside a heart which is not within a breast, and thy sister will announce to thee from Heaven the name of thy bride." When before us feeble, rheumy creatures, who, like Polypuses and flowers, only _feel_ and _seek_, but cannot _see_ the light of a higher element, a flash darts, in the total eclipse of our life, through the earthly mass which hangs before our higher sun,[19] that ray cuts in pieces the nerve of vision, which can bear only _forms_, not _light_; no burning terror wings the heart and the blood, but a cold shudder at our own thoughts, and in the presence of a new, incomprehensible world, chains the warm stream, and life becomes ice. Albano, from whose teeming fancy a chaos might spring as easily as a universe, grew pale; but it was with him as if he lost not so much his spirit as his understanding. He rowed impetuously, almost unconsciously, to the shore,--he could not look the father of death in the face, because his wild fancy, tearing everything to pieces, distorted and distended all forms, like clouds, into horrid shapes,--he hardly heard the monk when he said, by way of farewell, "Next Good Friday, perhaps, I may come again." The monk stepped on board a skiff which came along of itself (propelled, probably, by a wheel under the water), and soon disappeared behind, or in, the little Fisher's island (Isola peschiere). For the space of a minute Alban reeled, and it appeared to him as if the garden and the sky and all were a floating and fleeting fog-bank,--as if nothing _were_, as if he had not lived. This arsenical qualm was at once blown away from his stifled breast by the breath of the Librarian, Schoppe, who was piping merrily at the chamber window; all at once his life grew warm again, the earth came back, and existence _was_. Schoppe, who could not sleep for warmth, now came down to make his own bed also on the tenth terrace. He saw in Zesara an intense inward agitation, but he had long been accustomed to such, and made no inquiries. 8. CYCLE.