But from all these conversations Albano returned only more confused to Schoppe; he heard only lip-solace, and the death-sentence, that the long-suffering soul from whom he had stolen creation was becoming more and more immured in the deepest cavern of life, near which only the deeper one of the grave lies bright and open. Every soft, soothing, warm gale wafted to him by the sciences or by human beings passed over that cold cavern, and became to him a sharp norther. O, had he been called to release her from his sinking arms amidst lovely days, into a long, eternal Paradise, and had she forgotten him in the intoxication of rapture, he too could have forgotten that; but that he should have thrust her away into a cold realm of shadows, and that she must needs remember him for sorrow,--this must he forever remember. Schoppe knew no "plaster" for all this distress (to use his own fine play on words) "except the plaster of Paris,"[20] namely, an excursion. At least, he concluded, when one is out in the country, all inquiries about one's health are done with, and all these poisonous anxieties about the answer; and on return one finds much pain spared or in fact all the trouble gone. Albano obeyed his last friend; and they rode off into the Principality of Haarhaar. 83. CYCLE. Whoever thinks that Schoppe, on the way, was to Albano a flying field-lazaretto of consolation,--an _antispasmodicum_,--a Struve's table of ailments and remedies,--a pulverized _Fox's lung_ for the hectic of the heart, &c., and that at every milestone he delivered a consolatory sermon,--whoever thinks so, Schoppe himself laughs him to scorn. "What then," said he, "if misfortune does knead a young man thoroughly and soundly in her kneading-trough? The next time, he, who is now in the power of grief, will have her in his power. Whoso has never borne anything, never learns to bear up under anything."[21] As regards weeping, he, as a Stoic, was, as may well be imagined, an enemy to it at least; Epictetus, Antonine, Cato, and several such, men made less of ice than of iron, would very willingly, as he so often said, have allowed the body these extreme unctions of sorrow, provided only the spirit beneath and behind all had kept itself dry. The true disconsolateness is to desire and to accept consolation; why will not one then for once just go through with the pang out and out without any physic?