Page:Stories by Foreign Authors (Scandinavian).djvu/176

168 Why dies he not? Ah, who would weep for him? How cold is a grave which no warm tears of love moisten!

"He is lonesome in the winter night; for him the earth has no flowers, and dark burn the lights of heaven. Why wanders he, the lonesome one; why waits he; why flies he not, the shadow, to the land of shades? Ah, he still hopes, he is a mendicant who begs for joy, who yet waits in the eleventh hour, that a merciful hand may give him an alms.

"One only little blossom of earth will he gather, bear it upon his heart, in order henceforth not so lonesomely, not so entirely lonesome, to wander down to rest."

It was my own condition which I described. I deplored myself.

Early deprived of my parents, without brothers and sisters, friends, and relations, I stood in the world yet so solitary and forlorn, that but for an inward confidence in heaven, and a naturally happy temper, I should often enough have wished to leave this contemptuous world; till now, however, I had almost constantly hoped from the future, and this more from an instinctive feeling that this might be the best, than to subdue by philosophy every too vivid wish for an agreeable present time, because it was altogether so opposed to possibility. For some time, however, alas! it had been otherwise with me; I felt, and