In conversation like this, the hours glided away; till at length, from the Giant’s Tower, the Castleclock struck twelve, with a sound that seemed to come from the Middle Ages.  Like watchmen from their belfries the city clocks answered it, one by one.  Then distant and muffled sounds were heard.  Inarticulate words seemed to blot the foggy air, as if written on wet paper.  These were the bells of Handschuhsheimer, and of other villages on the broad plain of the Rhine, and among the hills of the Odenwald; mysterious sounds, that seemed not of this world.

Beneath them, in the shadow of the hills, lay the valley, like a fathomless, black gulf; and above were the cloistered stars, that, nun-like, walk the holy aisles of heaven.  The city was asleep in the valley below; all asleep and silent, save the clocks, that had just struck twelve, and the veering, golden weathercocks, that were swimming in the moonshine, like golden fishes, in a glass vase.  And again the wind of the summer night passed through the old Castle, and the trees, and the nightingales recorded under the dark, shadowy leaves, and the heart of Flemming was full.

When he had retired to his chamber, a feeling of utter loneliness came over him.  The night before one begins a journey is always a dismal night; for, as Byron says,

“In leaving even the most unpleasant people

And places, one keeps looking at the steeple!”

And how much more so when the place and people are pleasant; as was the case with those, that Flemming was now leaving.  No wonder he was sad and sleepless.  Thoughts came and went, and bright and gloomy fancies, and dreams and visions, and sweet faces looked under his closed eyelids, and vanished away, and came again, and again departed.  He heard the clock strike from hour to hour, and said, “Another hour is gone.”  At length the birds began to sing; and ever and anon the cock crew.  He arose, and looked forth into the gray dawn; and before him lay the city he was so soon to leave, all white and ghastly, like a city that had arisen from its grave.

“All things must change,” said he to the Baron, as he embraced him, and held him by the hand.  “Friends must be torn asunder, and swept along in the current of events, to see each other seldom, and perchance no more.  For ever and ever in the eddies of time and accident we whirl away.  Besides which, some of us have a perpetual motion in our wooden heads, as Wodenblock had in his wooden leg; and like him we travel on, without rest or sleep, and have hardly time to take a friend by the hand in passing; and at length are seen hurrying through some distant land, worn to a skeleton, and all unknown.”

BOOK III.

Epigraph

“Take away the lights, too;

The moon lends me too much to find my fears;

And those devotions I am now to pay,

Are written in my heart, not in thy book;