His brain burned on in dream, as he lay on his pillow, like a glowing anthracite coal-mine. It seemed to him as if he melted away into a dew-drop and a blue flower-cup drank him up--then the swaying flower stretched itself up with him to a great height and landed him in a lofty, lofty chamber, where his friend, the Genius, or Guido, was playing with his sister; and he dreamed that as often as the young man stretched out his arm towards him it dropped off, and his sister handed it to him again. All at once the flower collapsed, and falling downward he saw three white moonbeams bear his friend into heaven, who cast his eyes downward toward the fallen one. He woke--he was out of bed leaning at the open window which looked out over the garden into the sleeping Auenthal. The heavens came down in a dumb rain of light--throughout the gleaming universe nothing stirred save the scintillating points of the fixed stars--the houses stood like sepulchres in which mortals were taking their long sleep; dreams went in and out through the closed senses of men and sometimes death's tread clove asunder a head and the dream within it. Heaven seemed to Gustavus to have sunk down before his window. "Oh, turn back, come again, beloved!" he cried, transported at once by dream and present reality, "O thou wast there, thou wast seeking me! Ah, thou thousand times beloved! send me from thy heaven at least thy voice!" Unexpectedly something cut the air before the window and cried, "Gustavus," and in its distant flight called down twice from a higher and higher altitude, "Gustavus! Gustavus!" An iceberg fell upon his stiffening skin in the first second; but in the next he recovered his glow, gave his arms to death and to his friend, and concentrated his vision upon a spot in the air under the dazzling moonlight, in order to see something. The two worlds had now for him collapsed into one; calmly he awaited his friend from the world behind the suns and was ready to fall with earthly breast upon his ethereal one. He cooled off at last, and with a shudder of soul and a shiver of the skin went back to bed. But long will the emotions of his soul be wafted to him from this hour, as the winds blow from a region of a storm.
Real Estate Digest
The Invisible Lodge — Part 106
2026-11-15 14:48:26 · Cedar Herald Index
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