Pictor's Metamorphoses by Hermann Hesse

I love your poor soul, and I beg of you, deliver it from evil, and give it into God’s keeping, so that it can again be beautiful and pure.”
    An invisible hand touched the youth’s heart. His eyes brimmed with tears, and he cried: “Oh, must I renounce you forever? But give me a command, I will do naught but what you bid me.”
    She smiled like an angel and said to him: “You need not renounce me forever. There will come a day when we will stand before God’s throne. Let us prepare ourselves for that day so that we can look Him in the face and endure His judgment. Then I will be your friend. It is but for a short time that we must remain apart.”
    Gently he let go her hand, and smiling she walked away. For a while he stood like one under a spell, then he too walked on, locked up his house, and went into the wilderness to serve God. His beauty left him; he grew thin and brown and shared his dwelling with the beasts of the field. And when he grew weary and suffered doubt and could find no other consolation, he would endlessly repeat her words: “It is but for a short time…”
    And probably the time seemed long to him; he grew gray and white and stayed on the earth even into his eighty-first year. What are a mere eighty years? The ages flee and are gone, as if on the wings of a bird. Since the days of that youth, one thousand and several hundred years have gone by, and how soon, too, will our names and deeds be forgotten, and no more trace of our life remain than perhaps a short, uncertain legend …

Three Lindens
    M ORE THAN a hundred years ago, in the green cemetery of the Hospital of the Holy Ghost in Berlin, there stood three splendid old linden trees. They were so big that the branches and boughs of their gigantic crowns had grown tangled into one another, and they arched over the entire cemetery like one enormous roof. The origin of these beautiful lindens, however, lies several centuries further back and is the subject of this story.
    In Berlin there lived three brothers, among whom there was such hearty friendship and intimacy as is seldom seen. It so happened one day that the youngest of them went out alone in the evening, saying nothing to his brothers, because he was to meet a young woman in another part of town and go walking with her. But before he came to the appointed place, as he made his way thither immersed in pleasant reveries, out of a dark and lonely spot between two houses he heard a gentle, plaintive cry and something that sounded like a death rattle, which he immediately walked toward; for he thought an animal, or perhaps a child, had met with misfortune and lay there waiting for help. Stepping into the darkness of the secluded place, he saw, with horror, that a man lay there in a pool of his own blood. He bent over the man and asked compassionately what had happened, but there was no reply except for weak moaning and sobbing. The injured man had a knife wound in his heart, and a few moments later passed away in the arms of the one who had come to his aid.
    The young man did not know what to do next, and since the slain man showed no further sign of life, the youth, dismayed and disconcerted, proceeded with uncertain footsteps to return to the alley. At that very moment, along came two sentries on duty, and while he was considering whether to call out to them for help or walk away in silence, the sentries, observing his terror-stricken condition, approached him. Seeing the blood on his shoes and coat sleeves, they seized him by force, scarcely listening to what he now was beseechingly trying to tell them. They found the dead man close by, the body already cold; and without delay they took the alleged murderer to prison, where he was put in irons and closely guarded.
    The next morning, the judge heard his case. The corpse was brought out; and now, in broad daylight, the youth recognized him as a journeyman blacksmith whose companionship he had occasionally