Page:Tales of humour and romance translated by Holcroft.djvu/221

 ed cloudy arms, tinged with gold, and extended from mountain to mountain,—and the glaciers gleamed with a light which glowed till midnight, and opposite them upon the grave of the sun, was a funeral-pile of clouds raised up out of the glow and the ashes of the evening. Through the glimmering ruddy light, kind heaven caused its evening tears to fall deep down into the earth, even upon the meanest grave and the smallest floweret.

Oh Eugenius, how great must thy soul now become! Earthly life lay at a distance, and in the deep valley before thee, void of all the distortions which we behold in it, from viewing it too near at hand, as the decorative scene when too closely seen is changed from a landscape to a mass of shapeless lines.

The loving pair embraced each other long and tenderly before the Alpine hut, and Eugenius said: "Oh silent eternal heaven, take from us now nothing more!" But his pallid child stood with its drooping snow-drop head before him—he looked at the mother, she turned her moist eye on high, and added softly. "Or take us all at once!"

The angel of futurity, whom I will call the angel of rest, smiled through his tears, and with his wing dispelled upon an evening zephyr the sigh of the parents, that they might not make each other melancholy.