Chapter XIII: Conclusion (9)

The breakfast of fruits and water, which, in fact, made up his whole bill of fare, called up reprovingly before our Victor the wine and coffee-grounds wherewith he had sometimes had to manure, like earthly ones, the flowers of his spirit. Flower-pots were Dahore's snuff-boxes, and glowed under the linden-green, which, with two tame, and yet free, ground-sparrows skipping through it, was the live, growing ceiling-piece of the apartment. His soul seemed also, like a Brahmin, to live on poetical flowers, and his speech was often, like his manners, Indian,--i. e. poetic. So was there throughout, as with divers magnates of men, a striking pre-established harmony between outward nature and his heart; he readily found in the corporeal the physiognomy of the spiritual, and _vice versâ_; he said matter, considered as thought, was just as noble and spiritual as any other thought, and that we represented to ourselves in it, after all, only the Divine conceptions of it. For example, during breakfast he lost himself in the glimmering dew-drop on a stock-gillyflower, and, by moving his eye to and fro, played through the gamut of its harpsichord of colors. "There must," said he, "be some harmony or other of accordant sounds between this minute particle of water and my spirit, as between virtue and me, because otherwise neither could so ravish me. And is, then, this accord which man makes with the whole creation (only in different octaves) a mere play of the Eternal, and no resonance of a nearer, greater harmony?" In the same way he would often gaze at a glimmering coal, till in his eyes it had expanded to a flaming meadow, on which, illumined by tender fancies, he roamed up and down....

Have patience, reader, with this flowery soul; we will both think that men can more easily have one religion than one philosophy, and that every system presupposes its peculiar weaving in the heart, and that the heart is the bud of the head.

The only circumstance that pained the blessed Victor this morning was, that he could not embrace the fair blind youth, and ask, "Have we not already once lived together, and is not my voice as familiar to thee as thine is to me?" For he looked upon him (as I do too), for several reasons, as the concealed son of Pastor Eymann. But as Dahore kept silent on the subject,--into whose clear, bright heaven one could otherwise look down even to the least nebulous star,--he feared before these holy ears he should be speaking too near to the verge of his oath of silence, though he should only disclose his inquiring conjectures about the blind one. This Julius seemed to have only two root-fibres in his nature, of which the one went to his flute, and the other to his teacher. On his white face, whereon the rapture of the musical genius and the abstractedness of the blind dreamer were blended with an almost womanly beauty, lay the reflection of his teacher, and its fibres had, like lute-strings, stirred only to harmonious movements. The poor blind one, who looked upon his Dahore as his father, was turned about, like down, by his lightest breath. Victor often drew the head of the dear blind one close to his face, in order to inspect the disordered eyes, and judge whether they might be restored. But though he saw with pain that the unhappy one must remain incurable on the full, radiant earth, nevertheless he kept on repeating his minute investigation, merely for the sake of having the dear, enchanting form nearer to his eye and his soul.

In the morning Emanuel, as cicerone of Nature, led his guest through the ruins and antiques of the earth: for every tree is an eternal antique. How different is a walk with a religious[165] man from one with a vulgar, worldly soul! The earth appeared to him holy, just fallen from the hands of the Creator; it was to him as if he were walking in a planet hanging over us and clothed with flowers. Emanuel showed him God and love everywhere mirrored, but everywhere transformed,--in the light, in--colors, in the scale of living creatures, in the blossom and in human beauty, in the pleasures of animals, in the thoughts of men and in the circles of worlds; for either everything or nothing is his shadow. So the sun paints its image on all creatures,--great in the ocean, many-colored in the dew-drop, small on the human retina, as mock-sun on the cloud, red on the apple, silvery on the stream, seven-colored in the falling rain, and gleaming over the whole moon and over all its other worlds.

Victor felt to-day, for the first time, the enlargement and transfiguration of his conscious being before a spirit which, _like_ his, but _excelling_ his, like a spherical concave mirror reflected all the features of his nobler part in colossal size. The whole vulgar portion of his nature crept away when the higher, painted by Dahore on a large scale, erected itself above the low impulses. A man whom the perihelion of a great man does not set on fire and beside himself is nothing worth. He was hardly willing to speak, so that he might only hear _him_ all the time, although he had it in mind to stay here a good many days. As before a higher being and before the woman of his love, in whose presence one will neither show his head nor his tongue, so had he, renouncing self, sunk into pure truth and love. All the varnish of the little relations of place and citizenly respectability had cracked so clean off, and they all stood before him there so moss-grown, that he would not so much as name the names of Göttingen, of Flachsenfingen, or empty incidents of life, or strange personalities. In fact, Victor had a slight contempt for men who care more for the directions to the bookbinder than for the book, and more for the review of an author than for his system, and to whom the earth is no deciphering chancery of the book of nature, but a parlor (a talking-room), a news-office of wretched personalities, which they care neither to profit by, nor to retain, nor to estimate, but merely to tell; and he was disgusted with the German societies, in which there is so little philosophizing.--Oh, how blest he was, for once to think a whole day in company with another, and, what is still finer, to be permitted to poetize with him!

His doubts upon the greatest matters which can weigh down our minds and lift up our hearts grew to-day to questions; the questions, to hopes; the hopes, to presentiments. There are truths of which one hopes that great men will be more strongly convinced than one can be one's self; and one will therefore by their conviction confirm and complete his own. Dahore held the two great truths (God and immortality) which, like two pillars, bear up the universe, firmly to his heart; but, like the rarer men to whom the truth is not merely the _shew-bread_ of vanity and the dessert of the head, but a _holy supper_ and _love-feast_ full of the _spirit of life_ for their weary heart, he cared little, if he could make no proselytes. Victor felt that _he_ understood handling the artillery-train and the electric pistols and batteries of the art of disputation better than Emanuel; he would have abhorred his own tongue if he had directed its readiness against this fair soul. He was silent for two reasons. "Undertake," said he, "to give a molten image, an altar-piece, of a great, shining truth that embraces thy whole being,--to do this on the flying second-hand whereon one stands in transient conversation, with the few dry paints wherewith human ideas are to be colored, and with the clumsy human tongue wherewith you must daub on these grains of color,--I tell you, a _silhouette_, a transparent asterism, will be all you can produce." The light heaven of certain simple-hearted men of deep feeling veils, like the outer one, all its suns, except the warmest, under the sheen of a void blue; but the unclean heaven of others full of wit and logic is bedizened with _mock-suns_, bows, northern lights, clouds, and redness.

The second, better reason why he scorned the honor of opposition was his heart, which contained in itself more than the head could throw light upon. Certain views cannot be detached so easily as wall-pictures in Italy, and transferred from one head into another. The _light_ which another can give thee _shows_, but _constructs_ not, the house-furniture of thy interior, and what the light really _creates_ with some is meteorological appearance, optical illusion, but no substance.[166]--Hence all turns not upon the showing and seeing of a truth, i. e. of an object, but upon the effects which it works through thy whole inner being. For how is it that there are men who, as Socrates did Aristides, make us better merely by our being with them?--How do great authors bring it about, that their invisible spirit in their works seizes and holds us fast, without our being able to quote the words and passages whereby they do it, as a thickly leaved forest always murmurs, though not a single branch stirs?--Why did Emanuel overmaster his beloved Horion--more than by broad thesis-formulas, _rationes decidendi_ and _sententiæ magistrales_--merely by the transfiguration in his countenance, by the low echo-tone of his voice, by the radiance of his look, and by the devotion in his breast, when he spoke solemnly truths which were old to speech and new to the heart, like the following?--

Man goes, like the earth, from _west_ to _east_; but it seems to him as if he went, with it, from east to west, from life to the grave.

What is highest and noblest in man conceals itself, and is without use for the practical world, (as the highest mountains bear no herbage,) and out of the chain of fine _thoughts_ only some members can be detached as actions.[167]

Our aimless activity, our clutchings at the air, must appear to higher beings like the clutching of dying men at the bed-clothes.

The spirit awakes and will awake when the light of the senses goes out, just as sleepers awake when the night-light is extinguished.

* * * * *

Why did these thoughts linger like things of awe in the soul?--Because Horion felt something higher than language, which is invented only for every-day sensations, can ever represent; because, even in his childhood, he hated systems which thrust out of sight all that is inexplicable; and because the human spirit feels itself as much oppressed in the explicable and finite as it is in a mine, or in the thought of the heavenly space overhead being somewhere or other boarded up.

How should he have had the heart or the occasion on such a day to ask Emanuel about his dying-day, or about Clotilda? Victor had that poetry of fellow-feeling which easily puts itself into the place of the most unlike persons, of women and philosophers. In the evening Dahore went to the abbey to teach astronomy, his most beloved science. During the astronomical school-hour the open face of Julius became an open heaven; he told his Victor everything, as if he were a second father. Now he related to him frankly that the year before an angel had again and again come to him, who grasped his hand, gave him flowers, spoke to him kindly, and at last vanished from him into heaven, but had left him a letter, which he was permitted to have read to him a year after, at Whitsuntide, by Clotilda,--yes, and that this good angel had yesterday flown by him with a kiss. Victor smiled with delight, but concealed his conjecture that _he_ looked upon the angel to be a shy, loving maiden from the boarding-school.--"But yesterday," said Victor, "I only was the angel that kissed thee _thus_!" and repeated it. Julius knew no fairer gift to make to those he loved than the picture of his father,--the portraiture of his exalted love, which forgot no human being, because it was based, not upon the superiorities, but upon the necessities, of men,--further, of his indulgence, of his disinterestedness, since a long virtue spared him the battle against his heart, and now he did nothing but what he wished to, and since the next world, hanging low down before him, preached a peculiar independence upon necessities. Five hundred thousand fixed stars of the first magnitude, according to Lambert, hardly give a light equal to that of the nearer full moon,--and so the present always outshines our inner world; but soar nearer to the fixed star of the next world, then does it grow to a sun, which transforms the moon of time and of the present into a petty nebula.--As to this Emanuel, all Maienthalers loved him (even the Parson, although he was a non-Catholic, non-Lutheran, and non-Calvinist); and he loved to be dependent on something, on others' love.[168]--During this description Victor yearned for him again with as much emotion as if they had been separated a year; accordingly, in the flush of evening he laid himself down under the birch-leaves opposite the school, in order immediately, with ardent arms, to take him prisoner.

And as Victor lifted his soul on the tall, white columns of the park planned by his Lordship, on the sublime sculpture which wrote out a great thought that looked like a tempest, and just as he had carried a bee that had dropped down, his wings being glued up with honey, to the beehive sill,--just then Dahore, with a friendly manner, came up. The latter entered, himself,--for Victor would have held the covert starting of a subject as a sin,--on that of Clotilda, and said this used to be her favorite spot, and the resting-bench of her quiet soul. The place was not grand, but, what is more, it was opposite to something grand (even physical greatness, e. g. a mountain, needs distance as a pedestal); it lay in the deepest part of the dell, encircled with Emanuel's flower-chains, which he often laid out without enclosure, because all Maienthalers respected his little joys,--breathed upon by great clover-fields,--overspread by the moon, which in spring, only after reaching the mountain-top, beamed down this deep valley with a mournful medley of birch-shadows, water-glistenings, and bright spots,--and, finally, adorned with a grassy bench, which I should not have mentioned had it not been planted at both ends with great, drooping flowers, which, with a tender feeling, no one crushed who sat down between them. How was Victor surprised or enraptured when Emanuel asked about this Clotilda! Like jewels of dew, like tears of joy, all the words of his teacher fell into his languishing heart, because they were eulogies upon her tender soul, which leads its own tears only into those of _others_, and hides them before dry hearts; upon her fine ambition, which men's criticism misconstrues into _coldness_ and women's into _pride_; and on her warmth of love, which one would not have looked for in a heart like hers, fast closed as a bud, which now confounds inanimate with animated nature, in order by the former to learn to love the latter. It touched Victor even to tears when Emanuel so warmly praised his pupil, now withdrawn from this Eden; and when he actually went on to beg, in all simplicity, that he would be the friend of _his_ friend, and now especially because he was going to die, and because she would never come back again,--for she had been here the last time merely for the purpose--on Whitsuntide, where her parents could not smile at it--of publicly taking the sacrament with the boarding-school girls,--that he would now take _his_ place towards this starward-soaring eye, this heart aspiring to eternity,--then could he have fallen at the feet of his friend and _his_ maiden friend for emotion and love.... From such lips praise bestowed upon its object always gives to love an extraordinary growth, because that sentiment always seems a pretext,[169] and ripens at once, so soon as it has found it.

If thy heart, my friend, does not beat quickly and intensely enough for another's,--although, in my opinion, it already pulsates at the fever-point, namely, a hundred and eleven times in a minute,--then just go, in order to transform thy cold fever into a warm one, thy quartan ague into a quotidian, to other particularly respected people, and let them praise her, the good soul, or only name her often before thee,--mortally sick, and provided with thy good hundred and forty pulsations to the minute, thou wilt go thy way, and have the desired fever.

The innocent Emanuel, who did not guess Victor's warmth, thought he must do still more by way of giving him the sevenfold consecration as priest of friendship for Clotilda, and gave him a--letter from her. _Thou_ couldst do it, East Indian, since thou art here a child that has been made into an angel in the _limbus infantum_ (the children's heaven), since thou hast no mysteries, excepting the mystery of the three children (hence his Lordship did not make thee the reader of his letters), and since thou dost not at all dream that the giving away of another's letter is anything wrong. Still thy scholar should not have read it.

But he did read it. He cannot defend himself by anything except by my reader, who here holds in his hand this very same letter of another who never wrote it for him, and nevertheless reads it through word for word in his chair. I, for my part, read nothing, but only copy off what the dog brings me.--It is a beautiful coincidence that this letter should have been written by her on that very same raining, melodious night of the garden-feast when he wrote his first to Emanuel.

"St. Luna, May 4, 179*.

"You will not, perhaps, expect any excuse from me, revered teacher, that, when I have hardly left Maienthal, I come back in the form of a letter. In fact, I meant to write it even while on the road, then the second day, and finally yesterday. This Maienthal will spoil for me many other valleys; all music will sound to me like an Alpine horn, making me sad, and bringing to my heart the remembrance of the Alpine life under the weeping-birch tree.

"In this mood I should not have been able to deny my heart the pleasure of opening itself and pouring itself out before yours in the warmest thanks for the most beautiful and instructive days of my life, had I not formed the resolve after some days to be in Maienthal again; after my second return home, my heart must have its will, and way.

"In our house I found nothing changed,[170] nor anything in our neighbor's; and I found in all souls the same old love with which we had parted from each other,--only my Agatha, to be sure, is merry, but yet less so than she used to be. The only change in Herr Eymann's house is a guest whom every one calls by a different name,--Victor, Horion, Sebastian, young Lord, Doctor. This last name he fully deserves by his first action and first joy in St. Luna, which was the healing of the blind Lord Horion. What a piece of happiness for the saved and for his saviour!--May this youth one day only pass through your Eden, and meet with your good Julius, so as to repeat upon him the beautiful art--Oh! as often as I think upon it, that the male sex is blest with the means of the greatest, godlike benefactions,--that they, like a god, can distribute eyes, life, justice, science,--whereas my sex must confine its heart, so yearning to do good, to lesser services,--to the drying away of a tear for another, to the concealing of its own, to the exercise of a secret patience with happy and unhappy;--then the wish rises, O that that sex which has the highest benefits in its hands would vouchsafe to us the greatest,--that of imitating itself, and getting into our hands good things which should bless us by our distribution of them!---At present, a woman can have nothing in her soul to make her great, except only wishes.

"I have just come in out of the open air from a little garden-feast at my Agatha's; and never is any fair bit of deep-blue sky exactly right to me, if it does not stand over your weeping-birch, where your eye counts up all its treasures and suns, and shows my heart all the tokens of Infinite Power and Love. To-day, in the garden, I thought with almost too sad a longing on your Maienthal; Herr Sebastian reminded me of it still oftener, because he seems to have had a teacher who resembled mine.[171] He talked very well to-day, and seemed to be made up of two halves,--a British and a French. Some of his fine observations have not gone from me,--e. g., 'Sorrows are like thunder-clouds: in the distance they look black, over our heads hardly gray.--As sad dreams betoken a glad future, so may it be with the so-often-tormenting dream of life when it is over.--All our strong feelings, like ghosts, hold sway only up to a certain hour; and if a man would always say to himself, This passion, this grief, this rapture, will in three days certainly be gone from this soul,--then would he become more and more tranquil and composed.' I report all this to you so exactly, in order, as it were, to punish myself for a too hasty judgment which I passed some days since (though within myself) on his propensity to satire.--Satire, also, seems to be merely for the stronger sex; I have never yet found one of my own who had found in the works of Swift or Cervantes or Tristram anything to her taste.--

"_Two days later_.--I and my letter are still here; but to-day it starts four days in advance of me. I cannot help thinking, This last time every flower in Maienthal, and every word my best teacher says to me, will give me still greater and deeper joy than ever, because I journey thither right from the turmoil of visiting, and with such a melancholy heart. The morning after that lovely night of the church-going festival I sat alone in an arbor near the great pond, and made myself sadder with all that I saw and thought; for during that whole morning, by reason of a dream I had had, my faded friend[172] stood before my soul,--her grave lay transparent above her, and I looked down through it, and saw that lily of heaven lying within there pale and still,--I reflected, indeed, as the gardener buried flowers with their pots in the earth, that the body in which we are planted must, in like manner, go down into the earth for future blooming, but, nevertheless, I could no longer control my tears.--In vain did I look upon the sparkling spring, which draws every day new colors, new insects, new flowers out of the earth,--I only grew sadder, since it rejuvenates everything, but not man.[173]--And when I saw Herr von Schleunes with a frog-bow approaching the pond, I was obliged, as he could see my eyes at a great distance as he passed by, to make believe asleep, in order not to betray them.... But before my dearest teacher I would have opened them as now, because he forgives me my weaknesses.

"CLOTILDA v. L. B."

Victor had kept his left hand, with which he held the letter, too near to his heart, and his arm and letter began to tremble with the thumping heart, and he could hardly read and comprehend it for emotion. "Such a teacher! such a pupil!"--beyond that his looks could say nothing more.

There was a struggle within him whether he should tell his friend his love for Clotilda. In _favor_ of the confession was Emanuel's request to seek her society,--that eye of his beholding, as if out of fixed stars, all trifles of earth,--Victor's grateful desire to repay one secret with another, and, most of all, oh! this love for his teacher, this love of his teacher for him.... And this, too, conquered, however much there was otherwise to be said _per contra_. For if Victor's whole nature glowed in the fire of friendship, so did his heart mount higher and higher, and burn to lay itself open,--he still wrestled with it, and still it was silent,--it loved boundlessly,--it lifted itself up as if by an invisible power,--at last it burst asunder,--his bosom opened wide as before God,--and now, beloved, look in, but forgive him all!

He was still in this inward conflict, when the moon, which had gone up behind their backs, projected their two shadowy knee-pieces before them.--He was reminded, by Emanuel's outstretched shadow, of a passage in his letter,[174] and of his sickly life and early passing away.... This clove open his inner being; he gently turned his Emanuel round toward the moon, now pouring down its radiance, and told him and showed him everything,--not merely his love, however, but his whole history, his whole soul, all his faults, all his follies,--everything; he was, at this moment, as eloquent as an angel, and full as great; his heart undulated in the melting glow of love; and the more he said, the more he wanted to have to say.

No sublimer and more blessed hour strikes on this earth than that in which a man erects himself, exalted by virtue, softened by love, and despises all dangers, and shows a friend how it is with his heart. This trembling, this dissolving, this exaltation, is more precious than the itching of vanity to disguise itself in idle refinings. But perfect sincerity comports only with virtue. Let the man in whom suspicion and darkness dwell by all means apply to his bosom night-screws and night-bolts,--let the bad man spare us his opening of coffins,--and whoso has no heaven's door about him to open, let him keep the hell-gate shut!

Emanuel felt the divine or motherly joy which a friend experiences at the virtue and improvement of a friend, and forgot in his joy the different occasions of it.

Reluctantly do I tear myself away for a night from this virtuous pair. May I get many more days of Maienthal to paint, and may Victor spend there many days more!

15. DOG-POST-DAY.

The Parting.

Ah, he goes this very day! The emotions and conversations which we have described had shattered too severely the tender casing which enclosed, as a tulip does the bee, Emanuel's fair spirit; he rose pale and languid; and the blind one was the happiest, who saw neither this paleness nor the white handkerchief which he, during the night, instead of staining with tears, had stained with blood. He himself had still the pale evening red of yesterday's joy on his face; but this very indifference to the gradual extinguishing of his days, this growing feebleness and faintness of tone in his conversation, caused Victor to turn away his eyes from him whenever they had for some time rested upon him. Emanuel looked down calm as an eternal sun on the autumn of his bodily life; nay, the more the sand fell from his life's hourglass, so much the more clearly did he look through the empty glass. And yet the earth was to him a beloved place, a fair meadow for our earliest plays of childhood; and he still hung upon this mother of our first life with the love wherewith the bride spends the evening full of childish remembrances on the bosom of her beloved mother, before on the morrow she goes to meet the bridegroom of her heart.

Victor reproached himself with every drop of blood shed by Emanuel, and resolved to go to-day, because this Psyche, with her great wings, could no longer stir herself in her web without tearing it. In Emanuel's eyes there shone an inexpressible love for his sympathizing scholar. He began of himself to speak of his dying-day, in order to comfort him, and represented to him that he could not go hence till after a year. He based his enthusiastic prediction on two grounds;--first, that most of his male relatives had died on the selfsame day and in the selfsame climacteric[175] of life; secondly, that several consumptive patients before him had read in their diseased breast, as in a magic mirror, their last day. Victor disputed him; he showed that the foretelling of one's last appearance, as if the hectic man could easily feel beforehand, from the regular and gradual failing of the vital energy, the last step or freezing-point, was false, because feelings of the future in the present were contradictions (_in adjecto_), and because in the midst of life we could as little have a presentiment of the arrival of death as in our waking hours we can (notwithstanding a parallel gradation of steps in this case also) that of sleep. Victor represented all this to him; and yet he did not fairly believe it himself; he was overmastered by the lofty man who could announce his entrance into the shadow of death as calmly and confidently as an entrance of the moon into the shadow of the earth.... We will forgive the sick man, and not hold ourselves wiser than he is, because he is more enthusiastic than we.--Victor was most consoled by Emanuel's notion that his deceased father would appear to him for the first time just before his death.

Victor lingered, and tried not to linger; forbade, as physician, Emanuel's talking, in order to make the excuse to himself of a harmless postponement, and became more and more troubled, for the very reason that he cared little to speak himself.--How canst thou, good Victor, this very day hurry away from him, from this angel, who will perhaps disappear over the next grave?--It must be a sore thing for thee, since it is already so hard to quit a Maienthal full of blossoms, a blind one full of soft tones; painful is here the last pressure of hands, Victor, and sweet every delay!

He resolved to take leave at night, because a parting in the morning begets too long a sadness, and the place in the heart from which the beloved object was torn away continues bleeding all day long. Emanuel would of course, at evening, have betaken himself to the seminary, as he did yesterday; then would Victor, before the blind one, whom he would beg for the saddest melody in the world, be able to let his full eyelids, with which he always had to go out in order to relieve the anguish, stream down to his heart's content.

When at evening he had eaten his last meal, and the evening-bell began, his heart felt as if the breast had been lifted away from it, and needle-points of ice were blown upon it.[176] Full of love, he clasped the blind youth, whom he was not permitted to recognize as the playmate of his childhood, and who with his tones had given more raptures than he had in this night of his blindness received in return; and he let tears have their way, whose twofold, perhaps threefold, source Emanuel did not guess; for the sight of these eyes, which were nevermore to be opened, awoke in him now, since Clotilda's wish for their healing, much more sorrow. Emanuel he still begged, with a voice that hurried away over the incidental meaning, to accompany him a short distance, till Maienthal should be out of sight.

Out in the darkling and still country, all his sorrows lingered in his breast beside their sighs. "When the moon glimmers in upon this valley of blossoms," thought he, "I shall have left it for a long time." Only the altar-lights, the stars, burned in the great temple. He proposed to himself to part with his teacher on the mountain where their union had taken place; but he went up by circuitous ways,--Emanuel gladly following whithersoever he led,--in order during the circuit to overmaster his taciturnity and his tears.

But they arrived at the foot of the weeping-birch, and grief still held possession of his eye and his voice. "Ah!" thought he, "how great and glad was the first night here, and how painful is this!" They reclined on the earth beside each other on the grassy bank, solitary, silent, sad, before the darkly glimmering universe. Victor could hear the labored breathing of the diseased breast, and the future grave on this mountain seemed to open at his side. Oh! if it is bitter to stand by the bed wherein a loved and fading countenance lies with the hues of death, far more bitter is it, in the midst of the scenes of health, behind the erect form of the dear one, to hear the grave-digger Death softly at his work, and to think, as often as the loved face looks joyful, "Ah, be still more joyful! in a short time he will have gnawed round the roots of thy life, and thou wilt have passed away with thy joys and with mine!"--But ah! there is indeed no friend, man or woman, with whom we should not be obliged to think the same!--

He knew not why Dahore was so long silent.--He foresaw not that the moon would illumine the mountain sooner than the valley. The moon, that Pharos on the coast of the second world, now encircled men with pale fields, taken from dreams, with wan, gleaming meadows born of a super-terrestrial perspective, and the Alps and woods it resolved into immovable mists; _above_ the hemisphere of earth stood deep the Lethe-flood of slumber, _below_ the green crust stood the dead sea, and two loving men lived between the wide domains of sleep and death.... At this moment Victor thought to himself, indeed, still more keenly, "Here, beside this birch-tree, under this cold sod, will _his_ crumbling breast be forever hidden, and his heart will bleed no more; but ah! it will beat no more." He thought, indeed, upon gloomy resemblances, as the _immovable_ stars appeared to go _up_ and _down_, merely because the playing _earth_ turned itself about them, now _showing_ and now _hiding_ them; he turned, indeed, his melancholy glance away from the _ignes fatui_, that, gliding over valleys, danced only on the solemn darkness and on the graves, and which described round a solitary powder-house their deceptive circles.----

But still he was silent, and thought, "Ah, well! we have each other yet."

But then it was too much for his bleeding heart when the flute-wails of the blind one stole out from the solitary house into the night, and passed over the mountain and over the future grave.--Then were voices given to the sighs and death-bells to the future, and his sadness grew too oppressive, as he thought, amidst the flute-murmurs, how this unique, this irreplaceable man, who cherished so much love for him in his great heart, was going hence never to reappear.--Ah! and when, besides, just at this moment, Emanuel, who had been lying beside him silently lost in gazing on the heavens and like a departed one, changed his position on account of his painful and oppressed breathing, but with a countenance whose serenity was undisturbed by the pains in his breast, then a cold hand glided into Victor's swollen heart and turned itself about therein, and his blood curdled on it, and he said, without the power of looking upon him, in faint, supplicating, broken accents, "Do not die in a year, my dear Emanuel,--do not wish to die!"

The genius of night had stood till now, invisibly, before Emanuel, and poured high raptures into his bosom, but no passions; and he said: "We are not alone,--my soul feels the passing by of its kindred, and lifts itself up,--_under_ the earth is sleep, _above_ the earth is dream, but between sleep and dream I see luminous eyes move along like stars,--a cool breath comes from the sea of eternity over the glowing earth,--my heart mounts up, and will break away from life,--all around me is as great as if God passed through the night.--Spirits! grasp my spirit,--it climbs to your embrace,--and bear it up yonder...."

Victor turned round and looked imploringly into the beautiful, joyous, tearless countenance: "Thou _wilt_ die?"

Emanuel's ecstasy soared above life: "The dark streak in the next world is only a meadow of flowers,[177]--suns shine to light us onward,--flying heavens come to meet us with spring-breezes. With only empty graves the earth flies round the sun; for her dead stand remote on brighter suns."--

"Emanuel?" said Victor, in a questioning tone, weeping aloud, and with a voice of the most fervent yearning,--and the flute-notes sank sorrowfully into the broad night,--"Emanuel?"

Emanuel, returning to himself, looked on him, and said, calmly: "Yes, my beloved!--I can no more accustom myself to the earth; the water-drop of life has become flat and shallow,--I can no longer move round therein,--and my heart yearns to be among the great men who have left this drop behind them.--O beloved, listen, I pray,"--and here he pressed to soreness the heart of his Victor,--"and hear this heavy breath going. See, I pray, this shattered body, this thick casing,--how it wraps round my spirit, and obstructs its passage.--

"See, here my spirit and thine cleave frozen to the ice-cake, and yonder the night opens all her heavens, reposing one behind the other; yonder in the blue, glimmering abyss dwells all the greatness which has disrobed itself on the earth, all the truth that we guess, all the goodness that we love.--

"See, how still is all up there in immensity,--how softly the worlds move, how silently the suns glow! The great Eternal reposes as a fountain, with his overflowing, infinite love, in the midst of them, refreshing and tranquillizing all; and around God lies no grave."

Here Emanuel, as if raised by an infinite blessedness, stood up and looked lovingly toward Arcturus, who still hung under the zenith of heaven, and said, directing his words toward the broad deep of brilliancy: "Ah, how inexpressibly do I yearn to come up to you! Ah, break in pieces, old heart, and hold me not so long in these bonds!"

"Die, then, great soul," said Victor, "and take thy way up yonder; but break with thy death my little heart also, and keep by thee the poor one who cannot forsake thee nor do without thee."

The flute had ceased; the two friends had sunk into each other's arms to end their farewell. "Dear, beloved, never-to-be-forgotten one," said Emanuel, "thou movest me too deeply; but when, a year hence, I go up from this mountain, then shalt thou stand by me, and see how man is released from his bonds. Thy tears will be my last earthly pangs; but I shall say, what I say now, We part by night, but we meet again by day." And so he went.

Victor had gently disengaged himself from the childlike lips,--he sought not to follow him on his night-track,--slowly he went along by one vast sleep.--Often he turned round and followed with eyes full of falling tears the falling stars over Maienthal; and at four of the morning he arrived with a heavenly soul at St. Luna, and entered the garden full of old scenes, and laid down in the familiar arbor his glowing head and his subdued heart in the dew of the morning for a cooling repose.

O rest thou, rest thou!--ah! sleep only, either on the earth or under the earth, can still the ever-agitated bosom of man....[178]

16. DOG-POST-DAY.

The Potato-form-Cutter.--Drag-chains in St. Luna.--Wax
Embossments.--Chess according to the _Regula Falsi_.--The Thistle
of Hope.--Escort to Flachsenfingen.

One would certainly want to sleep in one's clothes, like old Fritz, so soon as ever one came to understand that in his shirt he is beset and attacked, as Victor and I sometimes are, by the vampires of midnight melancholy. They stay away when one sits up and has all his clothes on; especially do boots and hat retain for us the feeling of day in the greatest degree.--

A warm hand lifted up Victor's bedewed head from the sleeping-board,[179] and directed it towards the whole surging flood of morning-light. His eyes opened (as always) with indescribable mildness, and without night-clouds, before Agatha, and beamed on her with full radiance. But she hurried him away with his radiance out of the leafy bedchamber; for he must look himself up a dressing-comb and a morning-blessing, and, secondly, the table-couch was to be a tea-table for Clotilda, who liked to take _warm_ drinks in _cool_ places.

--And so he stands out there between parsonage and palace in mid-morning. All seemed to him to have been just built and painted during his journey; for all that dwelt therein seemed to have changed and made him melancholy. "The parents in there," he said to himself, "have no son, my friend has no sweetheart, and I--no tranquil heart." And now, when at last he entered the house, and became once more a bright triumphal arch of the loving family-circle,--when he was compelled to contemplate with sympathetic and yet enlightened eyes the tender illusions of the parents, the groundless hopes of his friend, and the coming up of stormy days,--then stood one fixed tear for the future in his eye; and it grew not less when his adoptive mother would justify it by tender glances.... Partly, however, this veil was wafted over his soul merely from the preceding night, whose glimmering scenes were separated from him only by a short interval of sleep; for a night spent in the watches of emotion always ends with a melancholy forenoon.

The Chaplain was just making butter-vignettes; I mean, he was cutting, with no other etching-tool than a penknife, and into no other copperplate except potatoes, printers' tail-pieces and quadrats, which were to be stamped on the July butter by way of ornament. One might have supposed that Victor would have helped himself out greatly by having wit enough to remark that the _old printed things_ were, to be sure, quite worthy of long books upon them, and long universal German literary reviews of the books, but of no human thought, and were ten times more unenjoyable than these _newest_ butter-_incunabula_;[180] for, if there could be anything wretcheder than the world's history (i. e. the history of rulers), whose contents consisted of wars, as the theatre-journal of _other_ puppets does of cudgellings, it could only be the history of _littérateurs_ and printers.[181] This, too, must have stood him in stead,--that he was, finally, philosophical, and demanded that man should be called neither a _laughing_ nor a _reasoning_, but a _prinking_ animal; to which remark the Chaplain's lady added nothing, except the application of it to her daughters.

But in men of his sort, sadness, satire, and philosophy have place beside each other. To the potato-medal-coiner and the Chaplainess, who reckoned all women on earth among her daughters, and pronounced similar castigatory sermons against them all, he described his journey with as many satires and rasures as were needful for both parties; but when he heard the wishes of the family expressed that his Lordship might have a happy journey back with the beloved son of the Prince, and the intelligence that the Regency-Counsellor had already everything packed up to start for the city any hour that he might choose, then had Victor nothing to do but to take the secretive tear-ducts in his eye-sockets out of the way.

But whither? Into the garden! That was not well-considered. Flamin followed, and they arrived together at the embowered closet in the presence of the tea-drinkers. Never did its branches overshadow a more embarrassed face, softer eyes, fuller looks, and livelier or lovelier dreams than Victor carried with him beneath them. He thought of Clotilda as now a wholly new being, and thought, therefore,--as he knew not whether she loved him,--very stupidly. Man, when he has climbed over the mountain, always regards the coming hill as nothing; Flamin had been his mountain, and Clotilda was his hill.--In all the shallows of conversation, where one is already half stranding or sinking, there is no grander ship's-pump than a story which one has to tell. Give me embarrassment, and the largest circle, and only _one_ disaster,--that is, the anecdote of it, which no one knows but myself,--and I will soon save myself. Victor therefore brought out his, life-preserver,--that is, his log-book,--from which he made for the bower a practical extract. I confess, a newspaper-writer might have falsified more, might have been guilty of more sins of _commission_, but hardly of more sins of _omission_.

He gave himself, I fancy, a lift again with the Chaplainess, and injured himself unquestionably with Clotilda,--however much, out of good-will towards his hearers, and too strong a hatred of the court, he offended against Clotilda's satire-embargo in her letter,--when, without reflecting, too, that maidens love only the jest, not the jesters, he represented the benefit-drama of the Princess, not on the sublime side, as I did, but on the comic side. Clotilda smiled, and Agatha laughed.

But when he named the name of Emanuel, and his house, and his mountain, then did friendship and memory diffuse over the fairest eye above which an eyebrow-arch, drawn by a line of beauty, ever yet flowed, a soft glimmer which wanted, every moment, to grow to a tear of joy. But it had to become one of another nature, when, in answer to the question about his health which Clotilda hopefully put to him as an adept in science, Victor was compelled to give the (faintly paraphrased) history of his nocturnal bleeding. He could not conceal the pang of sympathy, nor could Clotilda conquer it. O ye two good souls! what sore wounds will your hearts yet receive from your great friend!

Whither could she now turn her loving and sorrowing eye, but to her good brother Flamin, towards whom her demeanor, in consequence of the double constraint which her silence and his interpretations imposed upon her, had been hitherto so indescribably mild?--As, now, Victor saw all this with such wholly different eyes,--as he stood before his poor friend, who with his present happiness was perhaps accumulating the poisonous nourishment of his future jealousy, and gazed openly and fixedly into the firm countenance which some time bitter days might rend with agony,--and as, generally, _past_ or _future_ sorrows of another took a stronger hold of him than _present_ ones, because fancy had him more in its power than the senses,--in this state of things, he could not for a moment assert the mastery over his eyes, but they bent their look, encircled with compassionate tears, tenderly on his friend. Clotilda was embarrassed about the resting-place of his look; so was he too, because man is less ashamed of the most vehement signs of hatred than of the smallest signs of love. Clotilda understood not the coquettish double art of throwing others into embarrassment or drawing them out of it; and the good Agatha always confounded the latter with the former.... "Ask him what ails him, brother!" said Agatha to Flamin....

The latter led him out with like good intention behind the nearest gooseberry-bushes, and asked him in his firm way, which always held an assertion as a question,--

"Something has happened to thee?"

"Just come this way!" said Victor, and pulled him along behind some higher Spanish walls[182] of foliage.

"Nothing has happened to me," he began, at last, with brimming eye-sockets and smiling features,--"nothing more than that I have been a fool for some twenty-six years" (that was his age). "I know thou art unfortunately a jurist, and perhaps a worse oculist than I myself am, and hast, perhaps, read very little in Herr Janin.[183]--Am I right?"

Flamin's shaking of his head meant something more than No.

"Very naturally; but if thou hadst, thou couldst have it from himself, or from the translation by Selle, very finely shown, that not merely the lachrymal gland secretes our tear-drops, but also the crystalline body,[184] the Meibomian[185] glands, the lachrymal caruncle,[186] and--our afflicted heart, I add to the rest.--Nevertheless, of these aqueous globules, which are made for the sorrows of poor, poor mortals, not more than (if things go rightly) four ounces are filtered in twenty-four hours.... But, my dear one, the fact is just this,--that things do not go rightly, especially with me; and it vexes me to-day, not that thou hast never peeped into Herr Janin, but that thou dost not observe my confounded, cursed, stupid way."

"What one?"

"Yes, indeed,--what one? but I mean this of to-day,--namely, that my eyes--thou mayst boldly ascribe it merely to a too feeble _tear-siphon_, under which head Petit comprehends all absorbing tear-ducts--run over, when, e. g., any one does me an injustice, or when I merely desire anything too strongly, or imagine to myself an approaching pleasure, or only, in fact, a strong sensation, or human life, or the mere weeping itself." ...

His good-natured eye stood full of water as he said it, and justified all.

"Dear Flamin, I wish I had been a lady, or a Moravian, or a player;--truly, if I wanted to make the spectators believe I was going about it (namely, weeping), it would be actually a fact, too, on the spot."--

And here he fell softly and fondly, with tears which had an excuse for flowing, upon the beloved breast.... But for the viper-cure and iron-cure of his manliness he needed nothing but a "Hm!" and a shrug of the whole body; thereupon the youths went back as men to the arbor.

There was nothing left there: the girls had stolen away to the meadows, where nothing was to be avoided, except high grass and bedewed shadows. The empty arbor was the best absorbing tear-siphon for his eyes; nay, I gather from reports of the epistolary Spitz that he was vexed. As the sister came back by-and-by alone, his companion was vexed too. In fact, if somehow or other my hero--which would be a misfortune for me and him--should in time fall in love with Clotilda, then will the heroine make us both warm enough,--him in acting, me in copying,--for the very reason that she herself will _not_ be warm, because she has neither superfluous warmth nor superfluous coldness, but always the alternating temperature which changes with the subject of conversation, but not with the speaker; because she takes away from a tenderly disposed fellow-man all pleasure in praising her, as she pays out no tithe thereof, or at least in offending her, as she issues no letters of indulgence; and because one really, in his agony, assumes at last that one can commit no other sins against her except such as are sins against the Holy Ghost. Jean Paul, who has been in such cases, and has often stood for whole years in one spot before such mountain-fortresses with his storming-ladders and labarums and trumpeters, and, instead of the garrisons, taken _himself_ off by an honorable retreat,--this Paul, I say, can form a conception of what an amount of parchment, time, and printer's ink may have to be used up in the case of Sebastian _contra_ Clotilda, before we get things even to a _war-footing_. In fact, with a perfectly _rational_ woman a man never feels himself quite well; and only with a merely fine, fanciful, ardent, capricious one is he truly at home. One like Clotilda can make the best man, from mere distress and respect, frosty, stupid, and enraptured; and in most cases there comes in the additional misfortune, that the poor, worn-out, fond fool, by whom such an earthly angel absolutely will not let herself be worshipped, as the Apocalyptic one would not by the disciple John, can still seldom muster courage to say to the angel,--somewhat as one might to an angel of an opposite nature with the kingdoms of the world, demanding to be worshipped,--"Take thyself out of my sight!" Paul always in such cases takes himself away.----

Victor did not do this; he absolutely now could not get away from the house, i. e. from the village. The summer days seemed to him to rest in St. Luna, softly breathing, fragrant, blissful; and he was going to be cast out of this softly straying gondola into the slave-ship of the Court,--out of the milk-house of the Parsonage into the princely arsenic-house,--out of the _kindergarten_ of household love into the ice-field of court love. That was a sore thing to him here in the arbor,--and so sweet a thing in Tostato's shop!--When man's wishes and situations exchange places, he accuses the situations, not the wishes. He could laugh at himself for it, he said, but he had a hundred reasons for lingering in St. Luna from one day to another: he was so much disgusted now with his intention of pleasing a man (the Prince) from any other motive than love; it was still more improbable that he should himself please than that he should be pleased; he would rather humor his own whims than those of crownéd heads, and he knew for certain that in the first month he should tell the Minister von Schleunes satirical things to his very face, and in the second even the Prince; and, in fact, now in midsummer he should just be fit to act the complete court-knave, whereas in winter, &c.