rs of blind delusion and
the bonds of selfishness, his memory will help us to free ourselves
also and to become more worthy of the joy of having been loved by him.
For yes, he has loved you too, my friends who never saw his face or
heard his voice. His great heart beat for all his brothers, for all who
were poor and miserable, for all the children of this world, who come
they know not whence and go they know not whither, and yet are too
honest to console themselves with fantastic tales and be lulled to rest
by idle dreams. What can be called sacred, if his grave is not? For do
you know _whom_ we are burying here? A laborer, my friends, who was
ever sharing his last shilling with some poor man; a poet who never
desecrated his genius for fame or gold; a hero, whose last act was a
deed of sacrifice for those he loved. And is this life to be swallowed
up in gloom? Should this grave be called a 'sad' one over which
penitent sighs and pharasaical petitions for mercy must resound? Oh! my
Balder, I know you would submit to even this error of a gloomy,
intolerant formalist, with the quiet smile which was your only weapon
against all assaults. But we, your friends, are not yet at peace, but
in the midst of warfare. We must struggle for the weak who allow
themselves to be intimidated by formulas preferring to leave their free
souls in imprisonment than to shake themselves free from the hands of
their tyrants, to learn to know and love this earth instead of
despising its beauty in view of an imaginary world to come. Despise an
earth, which has contained you, my Balder, a sky to which your noble
eyes have been raised? no, a thousand times no! such a world is no vale
of tears, and even in the bitterest woe beside your grave, we still
have a feeling of triumph--we have possessed you, and all the
calamities of life are richly compensated for, by the certainty that
your great heart lives on in ours--Balder--my friend--my brother--"

His voice suddenly failed, he pressed his clenched hand to his eyes and
turned away, but the next instant regained his composure and motioned
to the singers, who stood in a dense mass behind him. Instantly a
quartette choir, whose voices at first low and unsteady from agitation,
became gradually clearer and more powerful, began a song, which Mohr
had composed to the air of _Integer vitae_:

Brother, ere in the dust thy form we lay,
We'll to thy worth a loving tribute pay;