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."

For some time, the queen kept her face buried in her hands. Gunther
quietly withdrew.

CHAPTER XVI.

The king returned from the hunt. His courageous wanderings among the
Highlands had reinvigorated him. He, too, was in a changed frame of
mind. He had already received a full account of what had happened at
the lake. "That's over