unfathomable world. Thou, soul of the Night, heavenly Slumber, didst come
upon me; the region gently upheaved itself, and over it hovered my
unbound, new-born spirit. The hillock became a cloud of dust, and through
the cloud I saw the glorified face of my beloved. In her eyes eternity
reposed. I laid hold of her hands, and the tears became a sparkling chain
that could not be broken. Into the distance swept by, like a tempest,
thousands of years. On her neck I welcomed the new life with ecstatic
tears. Never was such another dream; then first and ever since I hold fast
an eternal, unchangeable faith in the heaven of the Night, and its sun,
the Beloved.


IV.

Now I know when will come the last morning: when the light no more scares
away the Night and Love, when sleep shall be without waking, and but one
continuous dream. I feel in me a celestial exhaustion. Long and weariful
was my pilgrimage to the holy grave, and crushing was the cross. The
crystal wave, which, imperceptible to the ordinary sense, springs in the
dark bosom of the hillock against whoose foot breaks the flood of the
world, he who has tasted it, he who has stood on the mountain frontier of
the world, and looked across into the new land, into the abode of the
Night, verily he turns not again into the tumult of the world, into the
land where dwells the Light in ceaseless unrest.

On those heights he builds for himself tabernacles--tabernacles of peace;
there longs and loves and gazes across, until the welcomest of all hours
draws him down into the waters of the spring. Afloat above remains what is
earthly, and is swept back in storms; but what became holy by the touch of
Love, runs free through hidden ways to the region beyond, where, like