Page:Tales of humour and romance translated by Holcroft.djvu/232

 zephyrs to her heart, and said with hastening voice, "Dearest, go with us," Her maternal heart burst with affection, her earthly blood stopped, her life was out—filled with delight, she stammered out, "must I yet not die?" Thou art already dead, said the companionate angel of the three affectionate souls, and then stands the earthly globe out of which thou hast come still in darkness!" And the waves of celestial happiness flowed high over the world, while its innocent and joyful inhabitants looked upon our globe which still trembled in gloom.

Yes indeed it is in darkness. But man is higher than his place: he looks up, and moves the wings of his soul, and when the sixty minutes which we term sixty years have sped their course, then he raises himself, and while ascending catches fire, and the ashes of his feathers fall back, and the unbound spirit mounts alone, and immaterial as a tone into the heavens above. For here amid the gloom of life, man sees the mountains of a future world standing in the golden morn of a sun which never sets; as the inhabitant of the north pole in his long night of darkness, during which that luminary never rises, still beholds at the meridian hour, a golden morning glow upon his highest mountains, and he thinks upon his long summer wherein that rosy light never departs.