Chapter XII: Conclusion (8)

Opposite to this gate lay the twenty-seventh stone. Victor's father displaced it, took out a magnet, bent down, and held its _south_ pole to the gap. Suddenly machines began to gnar, and the waves to whirl, and an iron bridge rose out of the water. Victor's soul was overfilled with dreams and expectations. Shuddering, he followed his father, and set foot upon the magic island. Here his father touched a thin stone with the _north_ end of the magnet, and the iron bridge sank down again. Before they stepped up to the elevated gate a key turned itself from within, and unlocked, and the gate flew open. His Lordship was silent. On his face a higher soul had risen like a sun: one no longer knew him; he seemed to be transformed into the genius of this magic island.

What a scene! So soon as the gate was opened there ran to and fro through all twigs an harmonious murmur; breezes flew in through the gate, and absorbed the sounds into themselves, and floated on with them, trembling, and reposed only on bended blossoms.--Every step opened farther a great, sombre stage.--Round about the scene lay marble fragments, on which the blacksmiths' coals had drawn forms of Raphael's, sunken Sphinxes, map-stones, whereon dim Nature had etched little ruins and effaced cities, and deep openings in the earth, which were not so much graves as moulds for bells that had been cast therein. Thirty poisonous trees stood twined round with roses, as if they were signs of the thirty years of man's passionate madness. Three-and-twenty weeping birches had bent themselves down to form a low bush-work, and were crowded into each other; into this bush ran all the paths of the island. Behind the bushes ninefold crape-veils, in waves that mutually swallowed each other, obscured the sight of the high temple; through the veils five lightning-rods rose into the heavens, and a rainbow, formed of two shoots of water that leaped up and arched over into each other, hovered glittering over the twigs, and evermore the two streams arched themselves aloft, and evermore they shivered each other to pieces overhead by their contact.

As Horion led his son, whose heart was grasped, affrighted, oppressed, kindled, chilled, by invisible hands, into the low birch thicket, the stammering dead-man's-tongue of an organ-trill began to speak, through the lone silence, to the sigh of man, and the tremulous tone sank too deeply into a soft heart.--There stood the two on a grave darkly built over with bush-work; on the grave lay a black marble, on which were chiselled a bloodless white heart, with a veil over it, and the pale words, "_It is at rest_." "Here," said his Lordship, "my second eye became blind; _Mary's_[152] coffin lies in this grave; when that arrived at the island from England, the diseased eye was too severely inflamed, and never saw again."--Never did Victor shudder so; never did he see on a face such a chaotic, shifting world of flying, coming, conflicting, vanishing emotions; never did such an ice of brow and eyes congeal upon convulsive lips;--and so a father looked, and a son felt every sensation repeated in himself.

"I am unhappy," said his father, slowly; a more bitter, biting tear burned on the pupil of his eye; he hesitated a little, and placed his five open fingers upon his heart, as if he would grasp and pluck it out, and looked upon the pale stone one as if he would say, Why is not mine resting too? The good, dying Victor, crushed with the anguish of affection, melting into pity, longed to--fall upon the dear, desolated bosom, and to say more than the sigh, "O God, my good father!" But his Lordship gently repelled him, and the tear of gall, unshed, was stifled by the eyelids. His Lordship resumed, but more coldly: "Think not that I am specially affected; think not that I desire a joy or deprecate a sorrow: I live now without hope, and without hope I die."

His voice came cutting over ice-fields; his glance was made sharp by frost.

He continued: "When I have, perhaps, made _seven_ human beings happy, then must it be inscribed on _my_ black marble, _It rests_.... Why dost thou wonder so? Art thou even _now_ at peace?"--The father stared at the white heart, and then stared more fixedly straight before him, as if a shape had risen out of the grave,--the freezing eye laid and turned itself about on a rising tear, as if to smother it. Suddenly he drew back a veil from a mirror, and said, "Look in, but embrace me immediately after!" ... Victor gazed into the mirror, and saw, with a shudder, an eternally loved face appear therein,--the face of his teacher _Dahore_; his knees smote together, but still he did not look over, his shoulder, and embraced that father who was without hope.

"Thou tremblest far too violently," said his Lordship; "but ask me not, my dear boy, why all is so. At a certain stage of years one opens no more the old breast, full as it may be."

Ah, I pity thee! For _those_ wounds which can be disclosed are not deep; _that_ grief which a humane eye can discover, a soft hand alleviate, is but small; but the woe which a friend must not see, because he cannot take it away,--that woe which sometimes rises into the eye in the midst of blessedness in the form of a sudden trickle which the averted face smothers,--_this_ hangs in secret more and more heavily on the heart, and at last breaks it, and goes down with it under the healing sod. So are iron balls tied to man when he dies on the sea, and they sink with him more quickly into his vast grave.--

He continued: "I am going to tell thee something; but swear, here upon these precious ashes, never to divulge it. It concerns thy Flamin, and from him thou must conceal it."

Victor, so hurled from one wave to another, started at this. He remembered that Flamin had wrung from him on the watch-tower the promise, that, if ever they should have offended each other too sorely, they would die together. He hesitated to take the oath; at last he said, "But shortly before my death may I tell it to him?"

"Canst thou know when that will be?" said his father.

"But in case--?"

"Then!" said his father, coldly and curtly.--

Victor swore, and trembled at the future import of the oath.

He also had to promise not to visit this dark island before his Lordship's return.

They passed out of the leafy mausoleum, and sat down on an overturned stalactite. At times, during the conversation, a strange harmonica-tone fell from leaf to leaf, and, at a great distance, the four rivers of Paradise seemed to go sounding away under a zephyr that trembled with it.

The father began: "Flamin is Clotilda's brother, and the Prince's son."--

Only such a lightning-flash of thought could now have penetrated into Victor's already dazzled soul; a new world now started up within him, and snatched him away from the great one before his senses.--

"Furthermore," continued Horion, "January's three other children still live in England,--only the fourth, on the Seven Islands, is invisible." Victor comprehended nothing; his Lordship rent away all veils from the past, and introduced him to a new outlook into the life immediately before him, and into that which had flown away. I shall, in the sequel, communicate all his Lordship's disclosures and secrets to the reader; at present I will first relate the leave-taking of father and son.

While his Lordship accompanied his son into the dusky, subterranean passages of former times, and told him all that he concealed from the world, tears started from Victor's eyes at many a trifle which could not deserve any; but the stream of these soft eyes,--it was not the narrative, but the returning contemplation of his unhappy father and the neighborhood of the buried and mouldering fair form and of the funereal marble, that wrung it out of the incessantly weeping heart.--At last all tones on the island ceased,--the black gate seemed to shut to,--all was still,--his Lordship came to an end with his revelations, and said, "Fulfil thy purpose of going to-day to Maienthal, and be cautious and happy!"--But although he took his leave with that refined reserve which in his rank guides and governs the hands and arms of even parents and children, still Victor pressed his childish bosom, so big with sighs and emotions, to his father's, with such an intensity as if he would fain crush in two his impoverished heart for the sake of the tears which he was compelled to let rise to sight ever hotter and larger. Ah, the forsaken one! When the bridge which clove asunder the father's and the son's days had risen up, Victor went over it alone, staggering and speechless; and when it had sunk into the water again, and the father had disappeared into the island, pity weighed him down to the ground; and when he had drawn all his tears, like arrows, out of his suffering heart, slowly and dreamily he quitted the still region of riddles and sorrows, and the dark funeral garden of a dead mother and a gloomy father, and his whole agitated soul cried incessantly, "Ah, good father! hope at least, and come back again, and forsake me not!"--

And now all that in the foregoing part of the story has created obscurities, all that his Lordship exposed to his son, we will explain to ourselves also. It will still be remembered that, at the time when he set out for France to fetch away the Prince's children,--the so-called Welshman, Brazilian, and Asturian, and the _Monsieur_,--the dark intelligence of their abduction came to hand. This abduction, however, he had (as he now confessed) himself arranged,--only the disappearance of the _Monsieur_ on the Seven Islands had occurred without his knowledge, and he could therefore with his untruth mix some truth, as mouth-glue. These three children he caused secretly to be taken to England, and educated at Eton for scholars, and in London for civilians,[153] in order to give them back to their father as blood-related assistants of his tottering administration. Hence he had helped the so-called Infante (Flamin) become an administrative councillor. So soon as he once gets the whole infant colony together, he means to surprise and bless the father with the delightful apparition. The (at present) invisible son of the Chaplain, who before the embarkation took the small-pox and blindness, he therefore keeps in the dark, because otherwise it would be too easily guessed to whom Flamin properly belonged.

Victor asked him how he would convince the Prince of a relationship to four or five strangers. "By my word," was Horion's first reply; then he subjoined the remaining evidences,--in Flamin's case, the testimony of his mother (the niece), who would come with him; in the case of the others; their resemblance to their pictures, which he still possessed, and finally the maternal mark of a Stettin apple.

Victor had already often heard from the Parson's wife that all January's sons had a certain mother's or father's mark on the left shoulder-blade, which looked like nothing, except in autumn, when the Stettins ripen; then it also grew red, and resembled the original. The reader himself must remember, in the annals of the curious and learned societies, whole fruit-basketfuls of cherries, whose red pencilling was only faint on children, and heightened in redness not until the ripening of the prototypes on the twigs. If I could believe a fellow-bather of mine, I myself should have such a Stettin fruit-piece hanging on my shoulder; the thing is not probable nor important; meanwhile next autumn,--for I have proposed it to myself several autumns, but now Knef, through his dog, reminds me of it,--so soon as the Stettins mature, I might, to be sure, take a looking-glass and examine myself behind.--And on the same ground this Stettin festoon puts off the return of his Lordship, at least the transfer and recognition of the children, till the autumnal season of its reddening.--

I make no scruple of communicating here a satirical note from my correspondent. "Make believe," he writes, "in regard to this intelligence, as if you did it at my behest, and, when you have once related his Lordship's _exposé_ and revelation, very quietly relate it over to your reader a second time; so that he may not forget, or get it confused. One cannot cheat readers enough, and a clever author will be fond of leading them into marten-traps, wolf-pits, and deer-nets." I confess, for such tricks I always had a poor talent; and, in fact, will it not be more creditable, both to me and to the reader, if he fixes it at once in his mind, at first hearing, that Flamin is January's natural and Le Baut's assumed son,--that the Parson's is blind, and not yet apparent,--that three or four other children of January's, from the Gallic seaboard towns, are still to follow;--more creditable, I say, than if I should now have to chew it over for him a second time, (in fact, it would be a third time,) that Flamin is January's natural and Le Baut's assumed son,--that the Parson's is blind, and not yet apparent,--and that three or four other children of January's, from the Gallic seaboard towns, are still to follow?

The reason why his Lordship required of his son the oath of silence towards Flamin was, that the latter, by his native honesty, kept all secrets, but in a heat of passion betrayed all; because in such a case he would make his birth tell, merely for the sake of backing himself in a quarrel with an adversary; because he might the very next day, on account of this revelation, become, instead of a fencing-master with the sword of Themis, a fencing-scholar with the war-blade; and because, in fact, a secret, like love, fares still better between two partners than among three. His Lordship thought, too, that out of a man to whom you gave money in order that he might become something, more would be made than out of one who should be something because he had money, and who looked upon the coins as his hereditary arms, and not as the prize-medals laid out for his future redemption of them.

After all these developments, his Lordship made to our Victor still one more, and a weighty one, upon which he was always to look back on the icy career of his future court-life as to a warning-tablet.

When his Lordship was struck blind before the house that held the ashes of his beloved, his whole correspondence with England, with the niece and with the tutors of the princely children, was embarrassed, or at least changed. He was obliged to have the letters received by him read to him by a friend whom he could trust: but he could trust no one. Only one female friend he found out who deserved the distinguished preference of his confidence, and that was none else than Clotilda. He who did not, like a youth, squander his secrets, could nevertheless venture to put Clotilda in possession of his greatest, and to make her book-keeper and reader to him of the letters of her mother, the so-called niece. In fact, he held women's power of keeping a secret to be greater than ours,--at least in weighty matters and in the concerns of men whom they love.--But just hear what the Devil did last winter: to me it is memorable.

His Lordship received a letter from Flamin's mother, in which she renewed her old entreaties for a speedier promotion of the beloved child, and her inquiries after his fortunes at the Parsonage. Luckily just then Clotilda was making a visit at St. Luna, and saved him the journey to Maienthal. He visited the Chamberlain, to hear the letter from the mouth of his reader. He had great difficulty in securing in Clotilda's chamber an hour free from eavesdroppers. When he at last got it, and Clotilda began to read to him the letter, the latter was called away from the reading by her step-mother. He hears her immediately come back again, read the letter over in a sort of darkly murmuring tone, and say softly that she was going away again, but would come back in a moment. After some minutes Clotilda appears, and when his Lordship asks why she went out the second time, she denies a second leaving,--his Lordship insists,--she likewise persists,--finally Clotilda falls upon the bitter conjecture whether Matthieu may not have been there, and with his theatrical art and throat, which contained all human voices, himself have mocked and travestied her, in order under her credentials to read the important letter. Ah, there was too much in favor of the conjecture and too little against it! To be sure Matthieu could not now undertake upon Flamin, whose academic career had just expired, the October-test of the shoulder-device; but he stuck (so it afterward seemed to Clotilda and his Lordship) with his green-frog-feet to that good soul, and, under the cloak of love for Agatha and for his friend, hung out his threads, let the wind swing and stretch them across between the princely palace and the Parsonage-house,--kept on spinning one after another, until at last his father, the minister Schleunes, should have woven the right web for the entangling of the prey.... I confess, this conjecture throws light for me on a thousand things.--

Victor was even more astounded than we are, and proposed to his Lordship whether he might not, without injury to his oath, reveal to Clotilda his induction into these mysteries, as he had two reasons for it: first, her delicacy would be spared embarrassment at the appearance which her sisterly love must otherwise, in her opinion, have in his eyes;[154] secondly, one keeps a secret better, if only _one_ more person helps him hold his tongue about it, as is well known from the case of Midas's barber and the reeds; the third reason was, that he had several reasons. His Lordship naturally did not refuse.

For the rest, he introduced his Victor with no pedantic rules of march to the ice-course and tilt-yard of the court. He merely advised him neither intentionally to seek nor to shun any one, particularly the house of Schleunes,--to unbridle his friend Flamin, who was in Matthieu's leading-strings, and to guide him, instead of by the bit, rather with a friendly hand,--and himself to covet the rank of a doctor, and nothing more. He said, rules before experience were like geometry before the operation for the cataract. Even after the harvest of experience Gratian's _homme de cour_ and Rochefoucauld's Maxims were not so good as the memoirs and history of courts, i. e. the experiences of others. Finally he appealed to his own example, and said, it was only within a few years that he had understood the following rules of _his_ father's.

The greatest hatred, like the greatest virtue and the worst dogs, is quiet.--Women have more _flow_, and fewer _overflows_, of emotion than we.--There is nothing one hates so much in another as a _new_ fault, which he does not show till after some years.--One commits the most follies among people who are of no account.--It is the most common and pernicious delusion, that one always takes one's self to be the only one who remarks certain things.--Women and soft-hearted people are timid only in their own dangers, and courageous in those of others, where they have to save them.--Trust no one (and though it were a saint) who in the smallest trifle leaves his honor in the lurch; and a woman of that kind still less.--Most persons confound their vanity with their sense of honor, and allege wounds inflicted on the one as wounds inflicted on the other, and the reverse.--What we undertake from humanity, we should always accomplish, if we mixed in no selfishness with our motive.--The warmth of a man is by nothing more easily misunderstood than by the warmth of a young man.

The last observation, which perhaps had a nearer reference, he had made while he was already on the shore of the island in the attitude of leave-taking, which he did with that considerate courtesy which in his rank guides the hands and arms of even parents and children.[155]

THIRD INTERCALARY DAY.

Meteorological Observations upon Man.

When, in the former chapter, I wrote down his Lordship's pithy sayings, I found that some came into my own head, which might be serviceable for the Intercalary Day. I have never made one observation alone, but always twenty, thirty, in succession, and this very first one is a proof of it!

*

When any one remains modest, not after praise, but after censure, then he is really so.

*

The talk of the people, and still more the letters of maidens, have a peculiar euphony, arising from a constant interchange of long and short syllables (Trochees or Iambuses).

*

The two things which a maiden most easily forgets are, first, how she looks (hence mirrors were invented); and, secondly, wherein the pronoun _that_ differs from the conjunction _that_. I fear, however, that they will from to-day forward observe the distinction, merely for the sake of upsetting my assertion. And _then_ one of my two touchstones is lost[156] with which I have hitherto tested learned ladies; the second, which I retain, is the left thumb-nail, which the penknife has sometimes notched full of red marks, but seldom, however, because they drive the quill more easily than they make the pen.

*

One who has received many benefits ceases to _count_, and begins to _weigh_ them, as if they were votes.

*

The transporting one's self into good characters does more harm to a poet or player, who retains his own, than entering into bad ones. A clergyman who, besides, is free to take only the first of these steps, is more exposed to moral _atony_[157] than the maker of verses and parts, who is able to make up again for a holy part by an unholy one.

*

Passion makes the best observations and the wretchedest conclusions. It is a telescope whose field is so much the brighter, as it is narrower.

*

Men require of a new Prince, Bishop, Domestic Tutor, Nursery Tutor, Capon-Stuffer, Town-Musician, or Town-Recorder _only in the first week_ very special merits which were wanting in his predecessor; for in the second they have forgotten what they required and what they missed.

*

Such sentences please women most and stay by them longest.

*

Therefore, by way of reward, I will manufacture more than one upon themselves.--They regard others only as younger, not as fairer, than themselves.

*

They are even ten times more artful and false towards each other than towards us; but we are almost more honest to each other than to them.

*

They look to it only that one _does_ justify himself with them, no matter _how_.

*

They forgive a loved man more stains than we do a loved woman. Hence the romance-writers let the heroes of their quill guzzle, storm, duel, and stay overnight anywhere and everywhere, without the least prejudice to the hero.--The heroine, on the contrary, must sit at home by her mother and be a little angel.

*

On the whole, they are so delicate, so mild, so sympathetic, so refined, so loving and love-thirsty, that I cannot get it into my head why it is that they cannot really like each other, unless it is for some such reason as this, that they are too courteous to each other to be formally reconciled or formally at variance with each other. You dear ones! you sometimes love a man because he has a friend and is one. O how beautifully would a friend of your own sex _fit_[158] you!

*

One learns taciturnity best among people who have none, and loquacity among the taciturn.

*

If self-knowledge is the road to virtue, so is virtue still more the road to self-knowledge. An amended and purified soul is darkened by the least moral poison, as certain precious stones are by every other, and now after the amendment one observes for the first time how many impurities still lurk in all corners.

*

I will close with some rules for improvement. Never, when the bosom has to fear that thorn in the side, anger, eloquently represent to any one his faults; for in the very act of convincing him of his guilt thou persuadest thyself of it, and so becomest exasperated. Picture to thyself every morning the possible situations and passions into which during the day thou mayst fall; then thou wilt deport thyself better, for one seldom behaves badly, in a repeated case, the second time.--Is thy friend angry with thee, then provide him an opportunity of showing thee a great favor. Over that his heart must needs melt, and he will love thee again.--No resolves are great save those which one has more than once to execute. Hence _forbearing_ is harder than _undertaking_; for the former has to be kept up longer, and the latter is also linked with the sense of a double expression of power, a psychological and a moral.--Only despair not at a single failing; and let thy whole repentance be--a nobler action.--Only make thyself (by stoicism, or in ally way thou canst) _tranquil_, then wilt thou have little trouble in making thyself _virtuous_ also.--Begin the culture of thy heart, not with the rearing of noble motives, but with the extirpation of bad ones. When the weeds are once withered or uprooted, then will the nobler flowerage spontaneously and vigorously spring up.--The virtuous heart, like the body, grows sound and strong more by _work_ than by good _food_.

Therefore I can stop.

13. DOG-POST-DAY.

Concerning his Lordship's Character.--An Evening of
Eden.--Maienthal.--The Mountain and Emanuel.

In regard to his Lordship I have three words to say, that is, three opinions to state.

The first is wholly improbable; it is, that, like all men of the world and of business, he regards mankind as an apparatus for experiments, as so much hunting-gear, war-material, knitting-work: such men look upon heaven only as the key-board to earth, and the soul as orderly-sergeant of the body; they carry on wars, not for the sake of winning crowns of oak-leaves, but to secure the oak soil and acorns; they prefer the successful man to the deserving one; they break oaths and hearts to serve the state; they respect poetry, philosophy, and religion, but as means; they respect riches, statistics of national prosperity, and health, as objects; all they honor about pure Mathesis[159] and pure female virtue is the transmutation of each into impure for manufactures and armies; in the higher astronomy all they care for is the transformation of suns into odometers[160] and way-marks for pepper-fleets, and in the most exalted _magister legens_[161] they seek only an alluring tavern-sign for poor universities.

The second opinion is at least the opposite of the first, and an improvement upon it: it is, that to his Lordship, as to other great men, the race-course is the goal and the steps taken the garlands.--Fortune and misfortune differ, with him, not in _worth_, but in _manner_; both are, in his view, two converging race-tracks toward the eternity's ring of inner promotion; all accidents of this life are to him mere arithmetical examples in _unknown_ terms, which he solves, not however as a merchant, but as an indifferentialist[162] and algebraist, to whom products and multiplicands are of equal interest, and to whom it is all one whether he reckons by letters or by hundredweights.

Verily, a man has almost as much to reproach himself with, if he is discontented, as if he had committed a crime; and inasmuch as it depends upon his ocean of thoughts, whether he will raise out of it as an island an Otaheite-Arcadia or the lowest hell, he deserves all that he creates....

Nevertheless, the third opinion is the true one, and at the same time it is mine: his Lordship, how much soever he may seem to be an indeclinable man, who has no object, but is a verb in _mi_, has nevertheless the following paradigm (and so inversely we find in the most ordinary man a short plan for the most singular one): he is one of the unhappy great ones who have too much genius, too much wealth, and too little repose and knowledge, to be habitually happy; they hunt pleasure instead of virtue, and miss both, and cry out at last over every bitter drop which is given them in a sugar-loaf; like silver-plate, precisely at the point of melting in the fire of pleasure are they the most inclined to overspread themselves with a dark skin; their ambition; which otherwise hides with plans the emptiness of high life, is not strong enough for their heart, which in this emptiness withers; they do good from pride, but without the love of doing it; they play with the empty shell of life as with a ringlet, and deem it not even worth the while to shorten it; and yet they do deem it worth the while, when they, who stand through this night-frost of the soul, outwardly smiling and cold, inwardly all in a fever, without hope, fear, or faith, renouncing all, making light of everything, and shut up in themselves,--when they feel a stroke of death, a great sorrow clutch at their unhappy hearts.----Ah the poor lord! can thy heart then find no rest till it finds it under the lid of black marble?

"Ah the poor lord!" his son incessantly repeated, as with oppressed soul he went toward Maienthal. The outward heaven around him was still; a great cloud completely overspread it, but rested on a blue rim along the whole circle of the horizon. In Victor's breast, on the contrary, streams of air rushed against each other and whirled together into a hurricane, drinking up brooks and tearing up trees. His father's image hung pale in this tempest. Victor's future days were hurled to and fro.--His future life was compressed into a narrow, veiled image, and it distressed him just as much to think that he _must_ live it as _how_ he must.

What saddened him most was the mere external and trifling circumstance that his father had remained alone and concealed in the depths of the island. Once the conjecture came over him, whether the greater part of what he had witnessed had not been mere dramatic machinery which his father (who in his youth had been a tragic poet) had employed to give more firmness to his vow of silence; but he was immediately disgusted at his own heart. Why are the purest souls tormented with a multitude of disgusting, poisonous thoughts, which like spiders crawl up on the shining walls, and which they only have the trouble of crushing to death? Ah, our _victories_ are not wholly distinguishable from our _defeats_!

It is singular that the _perspective_ thought of Clotilda's blood-relationship to Flamin was the one which he followed out least of all.

When man can obtain from reason no balsamic relief, he begs it at the hands of Hope and Illusion; and they two then willingly share his sorrow. Just as the blue sky of to-day by little and little peered through light seams in the clouds, and the sea of mist collected into hanging lakes, so also did the dark thoughts break asunder in Victor's soul.--And when the swollen masses of cloud in the broad blue passed into fleece, till at last the blue sea swallowed up all banks of vapor, and bore nothing on its infinite expanse but the blazing sun, then did Victor's soul also cleanse itself from vapors, and the sun-image of Emanuel, whom he was to-day to reach, shone soft and warm and cloudless into all his wounds.... The form of his loved Dahore, the form of his loved father, the form of his hidden mother, and all beloved images, reposed like moons in a mournful group over his head; and this sadness, and the sacred oath to keep himself virtuous and obey all his father's wishes, breathed upon his inflamed bosom some solace in regard to his father's fate.

He could even to-day see the sun go down behind the church-tower of Maienthal.

The broad cleared-up sky made him more tender, the thought of falling to-day upon the heart of a noble man, whose soul dwelt above this blue atmosphere, made him more exalted, the hope of being consoled by this man for his whole life made him more tranquil.--

He hastened, and, his haste drew out the saddest lute-stop of his soul. For he seemed not to be going over the summer fields, but they seemed rather to be hurrying along before him; landscape after landscape, theatres of woods, theatres of grain-fields, flew by; new hills rose with other lights, and lifted up their woods, and others with theirs dropped down; long, shadowy steppes ran backward before the flood of yellow sunlight; now valleys full of flowers billowed around him, now bare, hot hill-shores carried him upward; the stream murmured close to his ear, and suddenly its windings glistened from far away across poppy-fields; white roads and green paths met him, and fled from him, and led round the broad earth; full villages, with gleaming windows, swept by, and gardens with undressed children; the declining sun was now lifted up, now lost again, and now withdrawn to the summits of the hills.--

This fleeting of Nature's dissolving views bedimmed his moistened eye, and brightened the inner world; but the steady abiding of an incessant music, the constant choir of larks above him, whose contending cries melted to one in his soul, this distant hum from air and woods and bushes, this harmonica of Nature, moved him to say to himself: "Why do I in this solitude hold back every drop that would fall? No; besides, I am too sensitive to-day, and I will exhaust myself before I see the beloved man."

At last he ascended the broad mountain that stations itself with its scattered columns of trees and gray cubes of rock before Maienthal, which lies in greenness at its foot.... Then the earth, tuned by the Creator, rang with a thousand strings; the same harmony stirred the stream, divided into gold and gloom, the humming flower-cup, the peopled air, and the waving bush; the reddened east and the reddened west stood stretched out like the two rose-taffeta wings of a harpsichord, and a tremulous sea gushed from the open heavens and the open earth....

He burst into a mingling flood of tears at once of joy and sorrow, and the past and the future simultaneously stirred his heart. The sun with ever-increasing swiftness dropped down the heavens, and the more swiftly did he climb the mountain, the quicker to follow its flight with his eye. And there he looked down into the village of Maienthal, that glimmered among moist shadows....

At his feet, and on this mountain, lay, stretched like a crowned giant, like a transplanted spring-island, an English park. This mountain toward the south and one toward the north met and formed a cradle in which the peaceful village rested, and over which the morning and the evening sun spun and spread out their golden veil. In five gleaming ponds trembled five duskier evening heavens, and every wave that leaped up painted itself to a ruby in the hovering fire of the sun. Two brooks waded, in shifting distances, darkened by roses and willows, over the long meadow-land, and a watering fire-wheel,[163] like a pulsating heart, forced the sunset-reddened water through all the green flower-vases. Everywhere nodded flowers, those butterflies of the vegetable world, on every moss-grown brook-stone, from every tender stalk, round every window, a flower rocked in its fragrance, and scarlet lupines traced their blue and red veins over a garden without a hedge. A transparent wood of gold-green birches climbed, in the high grass over there, the sides of the northern mountain, on whose summit five tall fir-trees, as ruins of a prostrated forest, held their eyrie.

Emanuel's small house stood at the end of the village, in a tangled growth of honeysuckle, and in the embrace of a linden-tree which grew through it.--His heart gushed up within him: "Blessings on thee, quiet haven! hallowed by a soul which here looks up to heaven, and waits to launch into the sea of eternity!"--Suddenly the windows of the abbey where Clotilda had been educated flung upon him the flames of the evening-redness,--and the sun went, softly as a Penn, toward America,--and the thin night spread itself over nature,--and the green hermitage of Emanuel wrapped itself in obscurity.... Then he knelt there alone on the mountain, on that throne-step, and looked into the glowing west, and over the whole still earth, and into the heavens, and expanded his spirit to think on God.... As he knelt, all was so sublime and so mild,--worlds and suns came up from the east, and the little insect, with his play of colors, nestled down into his mealy flower-cup,--the evening-wind flapped its immeasurable wing, and the little naked lark rested warmly under the soft-feathered breast of the mother,--a man stood on the mountain-ridge, and a golden-chafer on the stamens; ... and the Eternal loved his whole world.

His spirit was now made up to take in a great man, and he yearned for the voice of a brother.

He staggered, without following any path, down into the village, with the pewit in its great circles, and the may-chafer in its little ones, sweeping around him. At the foot of the mountain the hybrid day grew darker,--in the starry heaven the curtain rose,--the vapor of evening, which had gone up hot, fell cold, as men do, back to the earth: one more loud lark went circling upward, as the last echo of day, over the mountain.

At last he neared Emanuel's linden. He would rather have embraced him under the great heavens than under the close ceiling of a room. Through the window he saw an uncommonly beautiful youth standing and playing on a flute. The player drew out of its heavenly gates a fugitive and floating elysium. Victor listened to him for a long time, in order to still his beating heart; at last, with tearful eyes, he went round the house, and would fain have fallen speechlessly and blindly on the necks of the youth and of Emanuel. As he passed along before the window, the youth did not return his greeting; as he opened the house-door, a soft chime of bells began to make music. Then the youth came out immediately, and asked him, in a friendly tone, who was there; for he was blind. Victor stepped into a Holy of Holies when he entered the apartment lined with linden-leaves, which was the nest of the winged man, who at this moment was out of it, under the great night of God. Emanuel was to return toward midnight. The room was open and clean; some leaves of fruits which had been eaten lay on the table; flowers glowed around all the windows; a telescope leaned against the wall; remains of an Oriental wardrobe bespoke the East Indian....

The voice of the beautiful youth had in his ear something inexpressibly touching, because it seemed like one he knew; it went deep into his heart, like the melody of a song that sounds up from childhood. He could rest freely with the steady gaze of love upon that face, that looked out into an eternal night; he wanted to kiss those childish lips full of melodies, and still he hesitated. But as he went out of the house again in quest of Emanuel, and when the bells began to chime again,--for they sounded whenever the door opened, to announce to the blind one every arrival,--then he could no longer restrain himself amidst the lovely music, but he touched the mouth of the blind one, as he leaned at the open window, with a kiss as soft as a breath. "Ah, angel! art thou, then, come down again from heaven?" said the blind one, confounding him with some well-known being or other.

How good was it to be out of doors! The evening-bell of the village sounded its call over the slumbering fields, and a distant soul was inclining its ear, perhaps, to catch the dying echoes of its broken tones. The evening wind, rustling through twigs full of green fruits, joined in. The evening star--the moon of our twilight--rested kindly on the road of the sun and of the moon, and sent its solace in the interval during the absence of both.--"Where mayst thou be at this moment, my Emanuel? Art thou resting, perhaps, in the sight of the evening-red,--or gazing into the starry sea?--art thou in the ecstasy we call a prayer,--or ..."

At this moment, all at once the thought flashed up in him, that, as to-night St. John's day began, his Emanuel might have expired in the enjoyment of the evening.... The more eagerly did he seek after him with his eyes under every tree, in every deeper shadow; he looked up to the hills, as if he might see him there, and to the stars, as if even there he might venture to seek him.--He went round the village, whose circular wall was a festoon of cherry-trees which silvered the green circumference with a milky-way of blossoms long since fallen, and hurried over the ruins of the houses which the children had built during the day, towards the fading windows of the abbey, which rose on the southern mountain down whose slope he had entered the village; for the blind one had told him that this mountain was Emanuel's observatory, and that he went thither every night. The green stairway, which made its successive landings of terraces and moss-banks, and on which a balustrade of bush-work ran upward, led him to a mountain which terminated sublimely in the ether with a tall weeping-birch. With every grass-plot, as from a bath, new limbs of dark Nature lifted themselves; he went on, as if from one planet to another. Across the ascending, darkling fields streamed the night-wind, and lonesomely swept on from wood to wood, and its ruffling fingers played with the plumage of the sleeping bird and the down of the whirring night-butterfly. Victor looked over toward the evening-red which Night had taken as a rose to wear on the bosom whereon suns repose. The sea of eternity lay in the form of night on the silver-sand of worlds and suns, and from the bottom of that sea the grains of sand glistened far up through the deep.

Around the weeping-birch swelled an unaccountable melodious murmur, which he had this very day heard on the island. At length he stood up there under the birch, and the music, like that of an harmonica which has just stolen over paradises and through hedges of flowers, was loud around him; but he saw nothing further, save a high grassy altar (the birthplace of Emanuel's letter) and a low grassy bench. From what invisible hand, he thought with awe, can these tones issue, which seem to glide off from angels, as they fly over the next world, from mingling souls, when a too great bliss breathes itself out into a sigh, and the sigh dissipates itself into distant dying sound? It must be forgiven him, if on such a day, which threw his soul into growing agitations, in this awful hour of night, under this melodious mourning-tree, on this Holy of Holies of the invisible Emanuel, he at last came to believe that _he_ had this evening taken his flight from life, and that his soul, full of love, was still floating around him in these echoes and yearnings for the first and last embrace. He lost himself more and more in the tones and in the silence round about them,--his soul grew to a dream within him, and the whole nocturnal landscape grew to a cloud made of the sleep in which this light dream hung,--the fountain of endless life, flung up by the Eternal, flew far above the earth in the immeasurable arch with the spraying silver-sparks of suns over immensity; gleaming it encircled the whole vault of night, and the reflection of the Infinite overspread the dark eternity.

O Eternal One, if we saw not thy starry heaven, how much would our heart, sunk into the mire of earth, know of thee and of immortality?--

Suddenly in the east the night grew lighter, because the floating glimmer of the moon darted up on the Alpine ridges that hid the orb, and all at once the unaccountable tones and the leaves and the night-wind grew louder. Then Victor awoke as out of a dream and out of life, and clasped the harmonious, fleeting airs to his languishing bosom, and, amidst the gushing tears which, like a rain-cloud, veiled from him the whole landscape, he cried out, beside himself: "Ah, Emanuel, come!--Ah, I thirst for thee--Float no more in sound, thou blessed one; take thy deposed human face, and appear to me, and slay me by a shudder, and keep me in thy arms!" ...

Lo! while the dim tear-drop still stood in his eye, and the moon still lingered behind the Alps, there came up the mountain a white form with closed eyes,--smiling, transfigured, blissful,--turning toward Sirius....

"Emanuel, dost thou appear to me?" cried Horion, trembling, and melted into a new flood of tears. The form opened its eyes,--it spread out its arms. Victor saw not,--heard not; he glowed and trembled. The form flew to meet him, and he gave himself up, saying, "Take me!" They touched each other,--they embraced each other,--the night-wind swept through them,--the strange music sounded nearer,--a star shot down,--the moon flew up over the Alps....

And when with its Eden-light it suffused the cheeks of the unknown apparition, Victor recognized that it was his dear teacher, _Dahore_, who had to-day cast his image into the mirror on the island. And Dahore said: "Beloved son, dost thou still know thy teacher? I am Emanuel and Dahore." Then the embrace grew closer. Horion would fain have compressed his gratitude for a whole childhood into one kiss, and lay dissolved in the arms of the teacher and in the arms of loving ecstasy.

Twine around each other tightly, ye blessed ones; press your full hearts to each other even till you press tears out of them; forget heaven and earth, and prolong the sublime embrace!--Ah! so soon as it is dissolved, then has this frail life henceforward nothing firmer wherewith to knit you together than the beginning of the--second....

At last Emanuel drew himself out of the attitude of love, and, bending aside, gazed like a sun, with large and open look, into Horion's face, and confronted with rapture the ennobled spirit and countenance of his blooming favorite. The latter sank before the look of love involuntarily on his knee, and said, with uplifted face: "O my teacher, my father! O thou angel! dost thou, then, still love me so exceedingly?"--But he wept too much for utterance, and his words were unintelligible, and died in his heart....

Without answering, Emanuel laid his hand on the head of the kneeling pupil, and turned his glorified eye toward the glittering heavens, and said, with solemn voice: "This head, thou Eternal One, dedicates itself now to thee in this great night. Let only thy second world fill this head and this heart, and may the little, dark earth never satisfy them!--O my Horion! here on this mountain, on which, after a year, I go up from the earth, I conjure thee, by the great second world above us, by all the great thoughts wherewith the Eternal at this moment appears in thee,--I conjure thee to be still good, even when I shall have long been dead."

Emanuel knelt down to him, held up the exhausted youth, and bent towards his paling face, and said, in a low and prayerful tone, "My beloved! my beloved! when we both are dead, in the second world may God never part us,--never part me and thee!"--He wept not, and yet could say no more; their two hearts, knit together, rested on each other, and night veiled silently their mute love and their great thoughts.

14. DOG-POST-DAY.

The Philosophical Arcadia.--Clotilda's Letter.--Victor's
Confessions.

I have only two things to explain before going further,--the mysterious music and the shutting of the eyes. The former proceeded from an Æolian harp laid on the weeping-birch. As often as Emanuel came hither by night he let these breathed-out tones intermingle like blossoms with the whispering leaves, in order to exalt himself when he looked alone upon the exalted night. His eyes he often closed before the sun and the moon, whenever his inner man, winged like a cherub, had leave to bury itself in soft fantasies; into the streaming, many-colored waves of light which crowd through the eyelids he would then plunge, as into a zephyr, for a delicious swim, and in this light-bath the higher light-magnet within him drew heavenly light out of earthly light. As there are but few souls that know how far the harmony of outward nature with our own reaches, and in how very great a degree the whole creation is but an Æolian harp, with longer and shorter strings, with slower and swifter vibrations, passive before a divine breath,[164]--I demand not that every one should forgive this Emanuel.--

After this finding of each other again, which threw a far gleam over a whole life, the two came home to the blind youth; and his flute carried the heart softly over in dream from the tossings of fevered blood into the tranquil ether of heaven.

As I love so to be about Emanuel, the reader will not begrudge me the pleasure of turning over the leaves of all the hours which we are permitted to spend in his house, and to go along regularly, step by step.

The morning for the first time disclosed to the pupil of Emanuel, as it does to children, what a Christmas present the night had provided for his heart. What a form came before him in the morning-radiance, when the still, childlike, composed face of the teacher, over which storms had once passed, as on the soft, white moon volcanoes have flamed, smiled upon him in such wise that his inner being melted into mute bliss! Especially when beheld in _profile_ did this lofty form appear to stand on the brink of earth, and to look down into the _second_ hemisphere of the heavens, which is hid from us by the gravestone and the rich pasture-ground of this life. His countenance was transfigured when he lifted it to heaven, when he named God or Eternity, when he spoke of the longest day; in its light the leaf-gold of the present paled to the dead-gold of the past, and his spirit hung hovering over the body, as genii bloom out of flowers in arabesques. Never did Victor so easily attune himself, when coming out of a dream, to the new day, as he did this morning with Emanuel's voice, which was, so to speak, the music of the spheres to the blue heaven of his eyes, from which, as from that of Egypt, never a drop fell; from incapacity of the tear-glands, he could never weep; nor did this life any longer agitate his soul.

The pure morning-apartment seemed to make the soul pure and still. He was the greatest bodily Purist; he washed his body quite as often as his clothes; and the uncleanness of medical language, even to the very words,--as, e. g. toothpicks, &c.,--was avoided by his stainless tongue. Even so did his heart remain unsoiled by so much as the images of great sins, and this unconscious innocence, as well as an unacquaintedness with our artful manners, made him, in the eyes of three different classes, either a child--or a maiden--or an angel.