Page:The Campaner thal, and other writings.djvu/381

 O father, place me again upon the cross-road, that I may choose otherwise!"

But his father and his youth were long gone. He saw wandering lights dancing on the marshes, and dying out upon God's Acre, and he said, "These are my sinful days!" He saw a star fly out from heaven, to glimmer in its fall, and to be extinguished on the earth. "That is I," said his bleeding heart; and the serpent-teeth of remorse gnawed again into his wounds.

His burning fancy showed him creeping night-wanderers upon the roofs, and the windmill threw up its arms threatening to crush him, and a mask left behind in the dead-house assumed by degrees his own feature.

Suddenly, in the midst of this tumult, music for the New Year flowed down from the tower, like distant church-song. He was deeply moved. He looked around the horizon and over the wide earth, and thought of his youthful friends, who now, happier and better than he, were teachers for the world, fathers of happy children, and favored men, and he said, "O, I also could be happy, dear parents, had I fulfilled your New-Year's wishes and instructions."

In the feverish memories of his youth, it seemed to him that the mask with his features raised itself up in the dead-house; finally, through the superstition which discerns spirits and the future on New-Year's night, it became a living youth, in the position of the beautiful boy of the Capitol, pulling out a thorn, and his formerly blooming face danced weird and bitter before him.

He could look no more: he covered his eyes: hot tears streamed down upon the snow;—again he softly sighed, hopeless and unconscious, "Come again, O youth, come again!"