Page:The Campaner thal, and other writings.djvu/165

 through beneath the scythe of Death, like supple grass, and that yesterday she had not told him, merely out of fear of his fear. Still a cold shudder went over him—especially as he was sober now—when he looked round at the high Tarpeian Rock, four hours' distance behind him, on the battlements of which he had last night walked hand in hand with Death.

The only thing that grieved him was, that it was Monday, and that he must back to the Gymnasium. Such a freightage of joys he had never taken with him on his road to town. After four, he issued from his house, satisfied with coffee (which he drank in Hukelum merely for his mother's sake, who, for two days after, would still have portions of this woman's-wine to draw from the lees of the pot-sediment), into the cooling dawning May-morning (for joy needs coolness, sorrow sun); his Betrothed comes—not indeed to meet him, but still—into his hearing, by her distant morning hymn; he makes but one momentary turn into the blissful haven of the blooming acacia-grove, which still, like the covenant sealed in it, has no thorns; he dips his warm hand in the cold-bath of the dewy leaves; he wades with pleasure through the beautifying- water of the dew, which, as it imparts color to faces, eats it away from boots ("but with thirty ducats, a Conrector may make shift to keep two pairs of boots on the hook"). And now the Moon, as it were the hanging seal of his last night's happiness, dips down into the West, hke an emptied bucket of light, and in the East the other overrunning bucket, the Sun, mounts up, and the gushes of light flow broader and broader.

The city stood in the celestial flames of Morning. Here his divining-rod (his gold-roll, which, excepting one sixteenth of an inch broken off from it, he carried along