I am not just now in a condition to speak of the consequences of that hour, nor of any other person than the dying one. His unstrung nerves kept on quivering in an enervating slumber. Beata, exhausted and stunned, went away with her mother. Gustavus no longer saw anything, hardly her. The father had no consolation and no comforter. The feverish doze lasted on till after midnight. A total eclipse of the moon exalted the heavens and attracted upward the affrighted eyes of men. Gustavus, agitated and agonized, looked up with wet eyes to the heaven-reaching shadow of the earth which lay upon the moon as on a profile-board. He bade farewell to the earth, it was to him itself a shadow: "Ah!" thought he, "in this lofty, flying shadow-pyramid thousands of red eyes, wounded hands and disconsolate hearts will at this moment be waiting to be buried in it, that the dead may lie still more gloomily than the living. But does not, then, this shadowy Polyphemus (with the moon for its one eye) move daily around this earth, only we do not perceive it except when it lies upon our moon?... So, too, we think, death comes not upon our earth, till it mows down _our_ garden ... and yet not a century, but every second is his scythe...." In this way he worried and consoled himself under the veiled moon--Amandus woke up in distress; the two were alone; the moon's glimmer fell upon his sick eye; "who, then, has cut the moon in pieces," he said in the heat of the death-agony, "she is dead all but one little sliver." All at once the ceiling of the chamber and the opposite houses grew flaming-red, because the funeral torches surrounding the body of a nobleman, which they were bearing to its burial, just then moved through the silent street. "A fire! a fire!" cried the dying man and sought to spring out of bed. Gustavus would fain conceal from him how like him was the one who for the last time passed through the street down below; but Amandus, as if the agony of death were already upon him, staggered half way across the chamber in Gustavus's arms ... but ere he could see the corpse, a nervous spasm laid him _dead_ in those arms....
Gustavus, cold as the dead man himself, bore the mortal sleeper to the deserted bed--without a tear, without a sound, without a thought, he sat down in the obscured moonlight and the flickering corpse-light--the stiff, motionless friend lay before him--Amandus had flown sooner then the moon's orb out of the _earth's shadow_--Gustavus looked not at the dead, but at the moon (in the thickest gloom of the hour of bereavement one looks away from the proper object to the least one in the neighborhood): Stretch onward and upward (thought he) as thou wilt, shadow of this globe of dust! over me thou still hoverest ... but _him_ thy summit reaches not ... all suns lie bare before him ... O vanity! O vapor! shadow! wherein I still abide!...