So the phantasm of the dead drew near and wooed, as the living
had never dared.--What if there were any good in loving? What if men and
women did not die all out, but some dim shade of each, like that pale,
mind-ghost of Wolkenlicht, floated through the eternal vapours of chaos?
And what if they might sometimes cross each other's path, meet, know that
they met, love on? Would not that revive the withered memory, fix the
fleeting ghost, give a new habitation, a body even, to the poor, unhoused
wanderers, frozen by the eternal frosts, no longer thinking beings, but
thoughts wandering through the brain of the 'Melancholy Mass?' Back with
the thought came the face of the dead Karl, and the maiden threw herself
on her bed in a flood of bitter tears. She could have loved him if he had
only lived: she did love him, for he was dead. But even in the midst of
the remorse that followed--for had she not killed him?--life seemed a less
hard and hopeless thing than before. For it is love itself and not its
responses or results that is the soul of life and its pleasures.
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