Page:Tales of humour and romance translated by Holcroft.djvu/222

 The transparent evening floated around the rosy alp like the limpid ocean, and washed it with its circles of evening waves. The stiller the Earth and the evening became, the more the two souls felt they were now in their proper sphere: they had not a tear too many, not a tear too few, and their happiness required no increase save its repetition. Eugenius like a swan poured his first harmonious tones into the clear atmosphere. The wearied child encompassed in a circle of flowers, leaned against a sun dial, and played with the flowers which it threw around itself, to include the dial in its circle, When the mother at length awoke from the ecstacy into which the music of her husband had thrown her, she caught the large eyes of her child directed towards her. With a heart overflowing with maternal affection she approached her little angel:—he was cold and—dead. His heaven-born life had like other tones been dissipated in the atmosphere of the earth.—Death had breathed upon the butterfly, and it rose up out of the tempestuous streams of the air, into the ever peaceful æther, from the flowers of earth, to the flowers of Paradise.

Flit ye always away happy children! The angel of rest cradles you in the morning of life with his plaintive soothing song,—two weeping mortals carry you and your little coffin, and with garlands of flowers let your