Gunther rose and was about to withdraw. He feared lest excessive thought
might over-agitate the Queen, who, however, motioned him to remain. He
sat down again.

"You cannot imagine--" said the Queen after a long pause, "--but that is
one of the cant phrases that we have learned by heart. I mean just the
reverse of what I have said. You can imagine the change that your words
have effected in me."

"I can conceive it."

"Let me ask a few more questions. I believe--nay, I am sure--that on the
height you occupy, and toward which you would fain lead me, there dwells
eternal peace. But it seems so cold and lonely up there. I am oppressed
with a sense of fear, just as if I were in a balloon ascending into a
rarer atmosphere, while more and more ballast was ever being thrown out.
I don't know how to make my meaning clear to you. I don't understand how
to keep up affectionate relations with those about me, and yet regard
them from a distance, as it were,--looking upon their deeds as the mere
action and reaction of natural forces. It seems to me as if, 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
the