Hyperion to Bellarmin
Some days later they came up to visit us. We walked around together in the garden. Diotima and I strayed ahead, immersed, and tears of joy would come to my eyes over the hallowed being who walked so unassumingly beside me.
Now we stood close by the edge of the mountain’s summit and gazed out into the endless east.
Diotima’s eye opened wide and softly as a bud unfolds, her lovely little face unfolded before the breezes of heaven, became pure speech and soul, and as if about to fly into the clouds, her whole figure stood there stretching lightly up in airy majesty and her feet barely touched the earth.
Oh, I could have clasped her under the arms, like the eagle his Ganymede, and with her flown away above the sea and its islands.
Now she stepped further forward and gazed down the sheer cliff face. She took her delight in plumbing the awesome depth and losing herself in the night of the forests that stretched up their bright crowns from broken rocks and foaming rain-swollen streams below.
The rail on which she leaned was rather low. And so she let me hold her a little, the delightful creature, as she bent forward. Oh! hot trembling bliss swept through my being and sent all my senses reeling and raging, and my hands burned like coals when I touched her.
And then my heart’s joy at standing beside her in such closeness, and my gentle childish fear that she might fall, and my delight in the inspiration of the glorious maiden!
What is all that men have done and thought in whole millennia compared to a single moment of love? For is it not of all the things in nature the most consummate, the most divinely beautiful! it’s thither all steps lead on the threshold of life. Thence we come and thither we go.