Gunther rose and was about to withdraw.  He feared lest excessive thought might over-agitate the Queen, who, however, motioned him to remain.  He sat down again.

“You cannot imagine—­” said the Queen after a long pause, “—­but that is one of the cant phrases that we have learned by heart.  I mean just the reverse of what I have said.  You can imagine the change that your words have effected in me.”

“I can conceive it.”

“Let me ask a few more questions.  I believe—­nay, I am sure—­that on the height you occupy, and toward which you would fain lead me, there dwells eternal peace.  But it seems so cold and lonely up there.  I am oppressed with a sense of fear, just as if I were in a balloon ascending into a rarer atmosphere, while more and more ballast was ever being thrown out.  I don’t know how to make my meaning clear to you.  I don’t understand how to keep up affectionate relations with those about me, and yet regard them from a distance, as it were,—­looking upon their deeds as the mere action and reaction of natural forces.  It seems to me as if, at that height, every sound and every image must vanish into thin air.”

“Certainly, your Majesty.  There is a realm of thought in which hearing and sight do not exist, where there is pure thought and nothing more.”

“But are not the thoughts that there abound projected from the realm of death into that of life, and is that any better than monastic self-mortification?”

“It is just the contrary.  They praise death, or at all events extol it, because after it life is to begin.  I am not one of those who deny a future life.  I only say, in the words of my Master, ’Our knowledge is of life and not of death,’ and where my knowledge ceases my thoughts must cease.  Our labors, our love, are all of this life.  And because God is in this world and in all that exist in it, and only in those things, have we to liberate the divine essence wherever it exists.  The law of love should rule.  What the law of nature is in regard to matter, the moral law is to man.”

“I cannot reconcile myself to your dividing the divine power into millions of parts.  When a stone is crushed, every fragment still remains a stone; but when a flower is torn to pieces, the parts are no longer flowers.”

“Let us take your simile as an illustration, although in truth no example is adequate.  The world, the firmament, the creatures that live on the face of the earth, are not divided—­they are one; thought regards them as a whole.  Take for instance the flower.  The idea of divinity which it suggests to us, and the fragrance which ascends from it, are yet part and parcel of the flower; attributes without which it is impossible for us to conceive of its existence.  The works of all poets, all thinkers, all heroes, may be likened to streams of fragrance wafted through time and space.  It is in the flower that they live forever.  Although the eternal spirit dwells in the cell of every tree or flower and in every human heart, it is undivided and in its unity fills the world.  He whose thoughts dwell in the infinite regards the world as the mighty corolla from which the thought of God exhales.”