Page:Hyperion, a romance.djvu/12

8 into the coming lonely night. The soul withdraws into itself. Then stars arise, and the night is holy.

Paul Flemming had experienced this, though still young. The friend of his youth was dead. The bough had broken “under the burden of the unripe fruit.” And when, after a season, he looked up again from the blindness of his sorrow, all things seemed unreal. Like the man whose sight had been restored by miracle, he beheld men, as trees, walking. His household gods were broken. He had no home. His sympathies cried aloud from his desolate soul, and there came no answer from the busy, turbulent world around him. He did not willingly give way to grief He struggled to be cheerful,—to be strong. But he could no longer look into the familiar faces of his friends. He could no longer live alone, where he had lived with her. He went abroad, that the sea might be between him and the grave. Alas! between him and his sorrow there could be no sea, but that of time.

He had already passed many months in lonely wandering, and was now pursuing his way along the Rhine, to the South of Germany. He had journeyed the same way