The spirit looks down deeper into the months; he writhes around himself for delight, and grins over all dwelling-places and pleasure-haunts of men which lie about him; often a laugh runs round along all his open hell-teeth, only sometimes he gnashes them under the cover of the lip-flesh. Look away,--for he too sees and wills it,--and step down from the wintry spectre among the warm children of men, and on the firm ground of reality, where flying time, like the flying earth, seems to rest upon steadfast roots, and where only eternity, like the sun, seems to rise. Albano's wound, which cut through his whole inner man, you can best measure by the bandage which he sought to bind around it. Our grief may be guessed from the solace and self-deception we resort to. The next morning he let his griefs discourse across one another, and lay still, before their funeral wail, as a corpse; then he rose up, and spoke thus to himself: "Only one of two things is possible,--either she is still true to me, and only her parents now constrain her,--then they again must be constrained, and there is nothing at all to be lamented,--or else, from some weakness or other, perhaps towards her tyrannical and beloved parents, she is no longer true to me, or it may be out of coldness toward me, or from religious scruples, error, and so on; in that case I see," he continued, and tried to tread his two feet deeper and firmer into the ground, without, however, having any _purchase_, "nothing else to be done than to do nothing; not to be a crying suckling, a groaning sickling, but an iron man; not to weep blood over a past heart, over the ashes of death lying deep upon all fields and plantations of my youth, and over my monstrous grief." Thus did he delude himself, and mistake the necessity of consolation for its actual presence. Every evening he visited the star-tower out of the city, on the Blumenbühl heights. He found the old, solitary, meagre, eternally-reckoning, wifeless, and childless keeper, always friendly and unembarrassed as a child, making no inquiries after war-news, journals of fashion, and poesies, and never paying money for his pleasure, except on the coach to Bode and Zach. But the old eye sparkled when it looked from under the sparse eyebrows into heaven, and his heart and tongue rose to poetry when he spoke of the highest mundane spot, the light heaven over the dark, low earth,--of the immense, universal sea without shore, wherein the spirit, which in vain seeks to fly across it, sinks exhausted, and whose ebb and flow only the Infinite One sees at the foot of his throne,--and of the hope of a starry heaven after death, which then no earthly disk, as now, shall intersect, but which shall arch itself around itself, without beginning and without end.