"O ye afflicted mortals!" he cried, "how can ye weary ones survive this! How can ye become old when the circle of youthful forms breaks and lies at length altogether scattered around,--when the graves of your friends lead down like steps to your own,--and when age becomes like the silent, blank evening hour of a cold battle-field! O ye poor mortals! how can your hearts endure it?"
The body of the translated hero-soul placed the gentle Angel among hard men, their injustice, and the distortions of Vice and of Passion; about his figure, also, was laid the thorny girdle of sceptres bound together, which compresses the hemispheres with its stings, and which is always laced more tightly by the great; he saw the claws of crowned and emblazoned beasts fasten themselves on their displumed prey, and heard it panting with enfeebled beating of the wings; he saw the whole terrestrial globe encircled in the winding swarthy folds of the giant-serpent, Vice, plunging and concealing its poisonous head deep in the breast of man. Then the hot sting of enmity was made to shoot through that tender heart, which, during a long eternity, had lain in the warmth of angelic love, and the holy love-fed spirit was forced to shudder over an inward dissolution. "Ah!" said he, "the death of man is full of woe!" Yet this was not death; for no angel appeared.
Thus in a few days he became weary of this life which we bear for half a hundred years, and he longed to go back. The evening sun attracted his kindred spirit. The wounds of his shattered breast exhausted him with pain. He went out with the evening glow upon his pale cheeks to "God's Acre," that green background of our life, where the forms which he had once stripped of all their beautiful souls were now crumbling away. He placed himself with sorrowful longing upon the bare grave of his unspeakably beloved and departed bride, and looked towards the fading evening sun. Seated on this dear knoll, he regarded his suffering body, and thought: Thou also, tender breast, wouldst be lying here in decay, and wouldst give no more pain, did I not support thee. Then he reflected upon the grievous life of man, and the throbs of the wounded breast showed him the pangs with which mortals purchase their virtue and their death, and which he had joyfully spared the noble soul of this body. Deeply touched by human virtue, he wept out of his boundless love for men, who, amid the craving of their own needs, under low-hung clouds, behind mists which stream over the sharp-cutting paths of life, never turn away from the lofty star of duty, but in their darkness stretch out loving arms towards every suffering breast they encounter, while around them nothing glimmers but the hope of setting like the sun in the old world, in order to arise in the new.