with faded flag. The son
noticed his father's grave, on which the wind was opening and
shutting, with harsh noise, the little door of the metal cross, to let
the year of his death be read on the brass plate within. As an
overpowering sadness seized his heart with violent streams of tears,
and drove him to the sunk hillock, he led his bride to the grave, and
said: "Here sleeps he, my good father; in his thirty-second year he
was carried hither to his long rest. O thou good, dear father, couldst
thou today but see the happiness of thy son, like my mother! But thy
eyes are empty, and thy breast is full of ashes, and thou seest us
not." He was silent. The bride wept aloud; she saw the moldering
coffins of her parents open, and the two dead arise and look round for
their daughter, who had stayed so long behind them, forsaken on the
earth. She fell upon his heart, and faltered: "O beloved, I have
neither father nor mother. Do not forsake me!"

O thou who hast still a father and a mother, thank God for it, on the
day when thy soul is full of joyful tears and needs a bosom whereon to
shed them.

And with this embracing at a father's grave, let this day of joy be
holily concluded.

ROME[2]

From _Titan_ (1800)

By JEAN PAUL

TRANSLATED BY C. T. BROOKS

Half an hour after the earthquake the heavens swathed themselves in
seas, and dashed them down in masses and in torrents. The naked
_Campagna_ and heath were covered with the mantle of rain. Gaspard was
silent, the heavens black; the great thought stood alone in Albano
that he was hastening on toward the bloody scaffold and the
throne-scaffolding of humanity, the heart of a cold, dead
heathen-world, the eternal Rome; and when he heard, on the _Ponte
Molle_, that he was now going across the Tiber, then was it to him as
if the past had risen from the dead, as if the stream of time ran
backward and bore him with it; under the streams of heaven he heard
the seven old mountain-streams, rushing and roaring, which once came
down from Rome's hills, and, with seven arms, uphove the world from
its foundations. At length the constellation of the mountain city of
God, that stood so broad before him, opened out into distant nights;
cities, with scattered lights, lay up and down, and the bells (which
to his ear were alarm-bells) sounded out the fourth hour; [3] when the
carriage rolled through the triumphal gate of the city, the _Porta del
Popolo_, then the moon rent her black