Spare me this grave-digger's scene! You know not what autumnal remembrances, in connection with it, make my blood creep as funereally slow as my pen. Ah! besides, I write into this story a leaf, a leaf of sorrow, whose broad, black border hardly leaves for lines and lamentations blotted with tears a narrow strip of white--this scene also I spare you, for I also know not, ye readers with the tenderer heart, whom ye have already lost; I know not what dear departed form, whose grave is already sunk as deep as itself, I may not, like a dream, raise up on its burial place and show anew to your tearful eyes, and of how many dead a single grave may be the reminder.
Vanished Amandus! in the vast army, which from century to century life sends to meet the last enemy, thou, too, didst march a few steps; often and early did he wound thee; thy comrades laid earth upon thy great wounds and on thy face,--they continue their warfare; in the heat of the conflict they will forget thee more and more from year to year--tears will come into their eyes, but none any longer for thee, but for them who are yet to die and be buried--and when thy lily-white mummy has crumbled to pieces, none will think of thee any longer; only the dream-genius will still gather up thy pastel-figure out of the earth into which it is incorporated, and will adorn with it, in the gray head of thy aged Gustavus, the meadows of his youth that repose behind the past years, and which, like the planet Venus, are the _morning star_ in the heaven of life's morning and the _evening star_ in the sky of life's evening, and glitter and tremble and replace the sun.... I would not say to thy soul's sheath, the corpse: Amandus! lie softly. Thou didst not lie softly in it; oh! even now I still pity thy immortal soul, that it had to live more in its narrow nerve-wrappage than in the wide building of the universe, that it could not lift its noble glance to sun-globes, but had to stoop to its tormenting blood-globules, and seldomer feel its emotions stirred by the grand harmony of the macrocosm, than by the discords of its own macrocosm! The chain of necessity cut into thee deeply; not merely its _drag_, but also its _pressure_, left upon thee scars.... So miserable is the living! How can the dead desire to be remembered by the living man when already even the very speaking of him makes the heart sink within us....