there would be able to find it again; an irresistible home sickness overpowered and united us.
Though only a few days parted us from that time, and we sat together just as happy as we had been then, and though we looked forward to a happy union,—in spite of all this it seemed to both of us that we saw a lost paradise revealing itself out there in the glow of the setting sun, with tiny rosy clouds like Cupid-feathers floating above in the light colourless sky, little by little to glide away under the shadow of the soft wings of the night, which found us still sitting on the same spot with our arms around each other.
This constant, tender sadness in looking back on things, is it but the reaction from an idealising power which the memory itself possesses, or does it perhaps rather proceed from man's never-ceasing fear—the feeling of everlasting uncertainty with regard to the unknown fate, that by a mere mood is able to rob one of everything, except what one has experienced—an uncertainty that not only threatens from without, but also seems to warn from within, and against which perhaps only our Ego's hidden kernel in rare moments of expansion can place an equal force?
