"Evening goes down, and I must be silent. Might I only know how thy evening is! My life consists now of two hours, thine and mine, and I can no longer live with myself alone. May this day have stolen away from thee richly and mildly, and thy evening have been like mine! Only Vesuvius now reddens in the lingering sun. The islands slowly fade away in the dark sea. I behold now, without speaking to thee, the great evening, but, O God, so otherwise than in Rome! Blissfully shall I fix my eye only on thy island as it is about to be extinguished in the glittering din of the evening twilight, and yet long shall I look thitherward, when already the summit of Epomeo is dissolved in night; and then shall I look cheerfully down into the grave of colors encircled with lights below me. Happy songs will steal through the twilight; the stars will glimmer affectionately; and I shall say, 'I am alone and still, but inexpressibly happy, for Linda has my heart, and I weep only out of love, because I think of her heart'; and then I shall go down in blissful rapture through the blossom-smoke of the mountain." He came slowly back to Naples to his friend Dian; all the festive merriment which met him, the whole odeum of joy, in which the ringing wheel of the hurdy-gurdy dizzily rolled round, seemed to him to be merely his echo; whereas, in general, not till the external, sensitive chords of man are struck, do the inner ones sound after them. All he wanted was to be ever hurrying onward, and--if it might be--to proceed this very night on his way to Vesuvius. For him there was now only one season of the day. The warmer climate, together with love and May, seemed to awaken all the spring winds of his powers; they blew with an impetuosity which made him conscious of them himself. Only before his beloved was he--still sore from the wounds of the past--merely a zephyr, which spares the dusting blossoms. On the next day he proposed to ascend Vesuvius, and on the morning after await his Dian in Portici, when he had first seen from the top of the volcano the spectacle of sunrise. 114. CYCLE. He describes his journey to his beloved. "In the Hermit's Hut on Vesuvius.