Chapter VII: Part 7

The much in little which, with my previous haste, I have still to throw out, is, according to the gourd-documents, this: Victor set his heart full as much as I do on the Whitsuntide-gospels. His conscience placed not the thinnest pasture-bars, not the lowest boundary-stone, in the way of his enjoyment, and he could go like an innocent pleasure to the beloved Clotilda, and say to her, Accept me. He paid now his farewell and professional visits regularly at court, and cared nothing for any word full of human caustic, or any eye full of basilisk's poison. He redoubled his fairer visits to Flamin, in order to reward his noble reconciliation with a warmer friendship, and he stamped upon the past history and on the subject of jealousy the privy-seal of forbearing silence. His dreams did not, to be sure, on their stage full of shadow-plays and airy apparitions, present Clotilda's form (the most loved faces are just those dream denies), but by conducting him into the old, dark, rainy months, when he was again unhappy and without love and without the dearest soul, they gave him by means of the rained-out night a brighter day, and redoubled melancholy became redoubled love.--And when in the morning after such dreams of the past dream he walked out through the May-frost, and by the swollen joy-drops of the vine-leaves, and under the morning wind, which rather wafted than cooled him, in order to touch with his yearning eyes as precious relics the fixed western woods, which hung a green curtain before the opera-stage of his hope,----a reviewer, who shall put himself in my place, cannot possibly expect me with this shortness of time, and in my extra post-coach to the carriage of Phœbus (now in the shorter days), to give this long antecedent member of the period its conclusion.

Even the perpendicular climax of the barometer, and the horizontal streams of the east wind, swelled the sails of his hope, and wafted him into the silent sea of the Whitsuntide-future, and into the Almanach of 1793, to see whether the moon fulled on Whitsuntide.--By Heaven, it will at least be half full, which is much better still, because one will have it at hand in the middle of heaven when one is about to begin his evening....

I have, after all, by extraordinary racing, brought matters so far, that I have done with the 32d dog-post-day before Spitz with his goblet of joy on his neck has made his way across the Indian Ocean.--And as, besides, according to the _capitulatio perpetua_ with the reader, (at which, notoriously, the benches of princes and cities bite the dust,) I must now make an Intercalary Day: I will spend the Dog's vacation in that way; but I earnestly beg all my day-electors, those of my subscribers who have hitherto skipped across the Intercalary Days on the leaping-pole of the index-finger, not to do it in this case, first, because I agree to be shot, if in this Intercalary Day I in the least exercise my intercalary-day privilege, though confirmed under several governments, of delivering the wittiest and weightiest matters,--and, secondly, because the dog even on the Intercalary day may run into port, and bring me facts which I may serve up not in the 33d Dog-post-day, but already in the----VIIIth _Intercalary day_, or in the VIIIth _Sansculottide_.--The contents of this, like the present, are a rambling overture to the Future.--

I must say, if, in the first place, as Bellarmin (the Catholic champion and contradictor) asserts, every man is his own Redeemer,--whence follows, in my judgment, that he is also his own Eve and serpent for his old Adam,--if, secondly, the pen of an extraordinarily good author is the snuffers of truth, just as, inversely, to Herr von Moser in prison the snuffers were a pen,--if, thirdly, Despotism may at last, instead of the living tree-stems (for it saws right into the world as if blind,) saw into the throne-saw-horse itself,--further, I must say, if, fourthly, every action (even the worst) has, like Christ, two unlike genealogies,--if in fact, fifthly, one and another reviewer carries his critical eye, wherewith he surveys everything, not on the apex of his skull (as Mahomet's saints are said to, in order not to see _beauties_), nor, like Argus, before and behind, but actually in front, under the stomach, over the gut, in the midst of the navel; if this man, in addition thereto, possesses no other heart than the linen one which the seamstress has stitched in the corner of the shirt-frill, and which lies over the pit of the heart, which one would call more sensibly the pit of the stomach,--finally I must say (at least I can do so), if, in the sixth place, true coherence, strict _concatenation_ of paragraphs, is perhaps the greatest ornament and soul of the so-called _unbound discourse_, or prose, which, however, is like a _bound_ harpsichord, and if, therefore, the sense, like an epic action, must begin at the end of the (rhetorical and temporal) period, because otherwise there would not be any at all....

--But neither will there be any to come.--These four points, however, look like the _hare's tracks_ in the snow.--In short: the Pomeranian dog, my biographical hod-bearer and forwarder, is already lying under the table, and has discharged some Elysian fields and heavenly kingdoms.--As, besides, I did not wholly know in the above paragraph what I was after (I hope not to sit a well man before the public, if I knew)--accordingly the dog did me a true labor of love in actually biting off, so to speak, the tail, or second member. It was, besides, my plan merely to make caprioles in a period of an ell's length until the dog should have removed my anxiety about the doubtfulness of the Whitsuntide journey.--In fact, I never wanted to lay out words and thoughts together, but to save the _latter_, while I spent the _former_; Peutzer wrote long ago to the men of Ratisbon and Wetzlar, Many thoughts need a small stream of words, but the greater the brook is, so much the smaller can be the mill-wheel.--An honest reviewer is offended also by a laconic book if only for this reason, (not merely that the public does not understand it but) because a German has in the jurists and theologians the very best models before him for writing prolixly, and indeed with a diffuseness which perhaps--for the thought is the soul, the word the body--establishes among _words_ that higher friendship of men, which, according to Aristotle, consists in this, that _one_ soul (one thought) inhabits several bodies (words) at once.----

--I now begin Victor's vigils, the holy eve of Whitsuntide. It was already Saturday,--the wind (like the sciences) came from the east,--the quicksilver in the barometer-tube (as it does to-day in my nervous-tubes) almost leaped out at the top.--Flamin had parted in peace with his friend on Friday, and was not to return for five days.--Victor will to-morrow, on the first day of Whitsuntide, sally forth before the sun, in order to come back again on the third, when he alights in America.--(I wish he would stay longer.)--It is a fine _blue-Monday_[93] in the soul (every blue day is one), and a fine dispensation from the mourning of life, when one (like my hero) has the good fortune on a holy even-tide, during the tolling for prayers, and when the moon is already up above the houses, to sit tranquil and innocent in Zeusel's balcony in the presence of the prospects of the fairest Whitsuntide-days and the fairest Whitsuntide-faces, to take a first cut of all the preparatory dishes of hope, to gather all the bosom-roses and signs of the fairest morning, and, amidst the noisy booth-preludes to the Festival, to read the second part of the _Mumien_[94] precisely in the Sectors of joy in which I sketch my own and Gustavus's entrance into the heavenly Jerusalem at Lilienbad.----All this, as was said, my hero had....

But when he who found out so much affinity between his Whitsuntide-journey and that journey to the watering-place in the book, came at last with his agitated soul to the destruction of that Jerusalem; then, with the first sad sigh of to-day, he said: "O thou good Destiny, never lay such a sacrificial knife on the heart of my Clotilda; ah, I should die, if she became so unhappy as Beata."--And he further reflected how the ruddy morning clouds of hope are only high, hovering rain, and how often sorrow is the bitter kernel of rapture, like the golden Imperial Apple of the German Emperor, which, to be sure, weighs three marks and three ounces, but inwardly is filled up with earth....

By Heaven! we are here needlessly embittering with night-thoughts the holy evening, and none of us knows why he sighs so.--I assure the reader I have the whole Whitsuntide-festival before me in copy, and there is not a single misfortune there, unless Victor joins on a fourth Whitsuntide-day as after-summer, and in that there should something be developed. I confess I like to be an æsthetic _frère terrible_, and to point the sword at the breast of the world, which is reading deep into my Invisible (mother) Lodge, and play other like tricks,--but that comes from the fact that in youth one reads and owns the Sorrows of Werther, of which, like a mass-priest, one prepares a bloodless victim before one enters the Academy. Nay, if I this very day were composing a romance, I should--as the blue-coated Werther has in every young Amoroso and author a quasi-Christ who on Good-Friday puts on a similar crown of thorns, and ascends a cross--myself also do the same over again....

But it is time I opened my Maienthal, and let every one in. Only I will no longer make a mystery of it that I am minded to present outright this whole Paphos and knightly seat to the reader, as Louis XI. cast the Duchy of Boulogne at the feet of the Holy Mary. I think thereby to tower, perhaps, above other writers, who bestow only their quills upon their readers, full as much as the king does above old Lipsius, who made over to Mary only his silver-pen. In the beginning I meant to retain for myself this Elysium with thrice-mowed meadows and pine-groves, because I am in fact a poor devil, and really have no more income than a Prince of Wurtemberg formerly, namely ninety florins Rhenish of appanage-money, and ten florins for a coat of state, and because, as to the two square miles of land set off to me by God and equity,--for so much does the whole earth at an equal division, according to a good plan, lay off to each man,--verily I make so small account of that, that I would gladly give up my two miles to any one for a miserable sheepfold.--And what most kept me back from making this presentation of my Maienthal to living men, was the fear that I should turn over a _feudum_ to people, readers, provincial deputies, who are possessed of a thousand times greater palatinates and patrimonial estates, and whom one would provoke, if one should make them resemble the holy Mary, who from a Queen of Heaven became a Duchess of Boulogne, or the Roman Emperor who must on the day of his coronation become at the same time a member of the Order of Mary at Aachen.

But what then can all their _majorats_,--their Teutonic-knights' estates,--their mesne-tenures,--and their _patrimonia Petri_ (an allusion to _my patrimonium_ PAULI),--and their grandfathers' estates and all their cargoes stowed into the ship of earth,--in short, their European possessions on the earth,--what, I say, can all these Dutch farms yield, in the way of products, that could stand even at a distance before those of Maienthal? And do there grow on their crown-estates heavenly blue days, evenings full of blissful tears, nights full of great thoughts? No, Maienthal bears loftier flowers than those which cattle pluck off, fairer apples of the Hesperides than are laid up in fruit-cellars, super-terrestrial treasures on subterranean rival-pieces to Eden, like Clotilda and Emanuel, and all that our dreams paint and our tears of joy bedew.--

And this is just my excuse, if I deny the Maienthal domain of joy to a thousand rival claimants, if I as its fee-provost cannot invest with this Swabian reversionary fief such people as are not fit for a proper _feudum_, morally blind, lame, minors, eunuchs, &c.--And here I must make myself many enemies, when, from among the vassals and joint subjects of investiture to whom Maienthal, with all its poetic privileges, is given in fee, I expressly exclude old gabblers who can no longer make the _knight's leap_ of fancy,--forty-seven inhabitants of Scheerau and one hundred of Flachsenfingen, whose hearts are as cold as their knee-pans, or as dogs' noses,--the greatest ministers and other grandees, in whom, as in _great_ roasted lumps of meat, only the middle is still raw, namely the heart,--one half billion economists, jurists, exchequer and finance-counsellors, and plus- i. e. minus-makers,[95] in whom the soul, as in Adam's case the body, was kneaded out of a clod of earth, who have a pericardium [or heart-bag], but no heart, cerebral-membranes without brain, shrewdness without philosophy, who, instead of the book of nature, read only their papers for law-cases and their tax-books,--finally, those who have not fire enough to kindle at the fire of love, poetry, religion, who for _weep_ say _blubber_, for _poetry_, _rhyme_, for _sentiment_, _craziness_....

Am I then crazy that I work myself up here into such a rage, as if I had not before me on the other side the finest college of readers, which I am promoting to the _primus adquirens_ of the freehold and apron-string-hold of Maienthal; a mystical, moral person, who discerns that utility is only an inferior beauty, and beauty a higher utility?--It is peculiar to all emotions (but not to opinions) that one thinks he alone has them. Thus every youth holds his love to be an extraordinary celestial phenomenon which has been only once in the world, as the star of love, the evening star, often looks like a comet. But the world is not all Flachsenfingenites and Dutchmen, who climb the Alps less to have great thoughts and elevations than to get _sedes_,[96] or go to sea, not to throw a poet's glance over the sublime ocean, but to escape consumption.... but there are everywhere to be found, in every market-town, on every island, fair souls who rest in the bosom of nature,--who reverence the dreams of love, though they themselves have awaked from their own,--who are encased with rough men, before whom they have to veil their idyllic fantasies about the second life, and their tears over the first,--who give fairer days than they receive,--to this whole fair society I finally make a present of the _Feudum_ of Maienthal, of which there has been already so much talk, and go in at the head with some friends of both sexes and my sister as investing fief-provost.

_Postscript_ or autograph bull of dispensation:--The Mining Superintendent cannot deny that the S. T. author of this biography, by the fact that the dog is lazy, and that these post-days are more than commonly voluminous, and that in this chapter he has actually melted two into one, is sufficiently excused with those who have the right to ask him why he has not ended the 32d Post-day till the middle of September or Fructidor. He still sits with his description four months distant from the history, 1793.

J. P.

33. DOG-POST-DAY.

FIRST WHITSUNTIDE-DAY.

Police-Regulations of Pleasure.--Church.--The Evening.--The
Blooming-Cavern.

Hardly had Victor waked from his sleep, though not from his dreams, when the low talking of all his thoughts, the Elysian stillness that pervaded his whole heart, told him that to-day his _Sabbatical weeks_ came on. Without reproach or design of a misstep, without a sigh of his conscience, he went guilelessly to meet joy and love. The tenderer and more delicate a flower of joy is, so much the clearer must be the hand that plucks it, and only cattle pasture can bear filth; just as those who pick Imperial tea deny themselves beforehand all gross fare, that they may pluck the fragrant leaf unsoiled.--Victor had, out of doors, hardly dawn enough to see on his broad hour-watch of Bee-father Lind's the first hour of his Sabbath; but this watch, the step-marker on the so beautiful road of the Bee-father's life, and the morning-service of nature, which consists in stillness, fortified his purpose of prefixing his present life to the second life after death as a still, cool, starry spring-morning.

"By you I swear,"--said he, as, by degrees, more and more larks soared up singing out of their dew into the morning-hora,[97]--"I will even in joy remain composed for thirty whole years together, at least for three whole Whitsuntide days,--I will be a university-friend and house-friend, but not a Wertherish lover of enjoyment.--Does not man act as if his path of life must be a bridge of connected honey-combs, through which he has, moth-like, to chew his way, as if his hands were only sugar-tongs of pleasure?--I will again apply the sportive faculty as a bridle to my pleasures and my pains. The warm tears of melancholy, especially those of rapture, a sort of hot vapor which propels and decomposes more mightily than gunpowder and Papin's[98] machines, I will indeed shed, but cool them a little beforehand.--And if I do not get sight of Clotilda every forenoon, I will simply say, A man cannot be always in the third heaven, he must also sometimes stay over night in the first."--He has, perhaps, more reason than power; but, it is true, health of heart is equally removed from hysteric spasms and from phlegmatic torpor, and rapture borders more nearly on pain than on tranquillity. But no tranquillity or coolness is worth aught but that which is _attained_,--man must have at once the _capacity_ and the _mastery_ of passion. The _freshets_ of the will resemble those of _rivers_, which for a time muddy all the _springs_; but take away the rivers, and the springs are gone too.--

The increasing dawn veiled one distant sun, after another; and when at last the near one had risen, or rather nature, then could Victor see and read and take my work (the well-known _Mumien_) out of his pocket. A book was for him, in the midst of free, stimulative nature, a pair of _garden-shears_ to his wantonly up-shooting dreams and joys. This morning sparkling with a whole spring, this flashing on all brooks, this humming out of blossoms into blossoms,--this blue hanging sea, over which the sun sailed like a Bucentaur,[99] in order to throw on the bottom of that sea, the earth, the marriage-ring,--such a Present beside such a Future would even now at the third hour have deprived him of the strength, in obedience to his new constitution, to rule over his ecstasy, and to preserve steadily so much repose as is needed for a _mezzotint_ between a rapturous and a dull day,--I say he would not have had that power without his biographer, I mean, if he had not had my book before him, in the second part of which he had still the schoolmaster Wutz[100] to read. But this learned work--I venture without self-conceit to flatter myself--set the proper limits to his rapture. For thus,--as he walked along reading,--(as others, e. g. Rousseau and I, read while eating, and take a bite now from the plate and now from the book,)--as he contemplated the life of the schoolmaster till a new valley or a new wood opened,--as he listened now to this printed chorister, and now to a living one before whose Whitsuntide songs he passed by: in this way he could keep his ideas, with all their rondos and knights'-jumps, in such a fine ball-room-order and church-discipline, that he was as happy as the Wutz he was reading of. Besides, I was still crying to him on the stretch out of my _Mumien_, to be discreet, and to give heed to my little schoolmaster as a file-leader in the arts of happiness, and to _get the kernel_ out of every day, every hour. "Besides, I am a reprobate," said he, "if I do not do it; good God, is not then the very sense of existence,[101] and the first sweet breakfast after every waking, a _standing_ enjoyment?"--He reflected, to be sure, that culture gives us spectacles, and takes away in return the papillæ of the tongue, and compensates to us for our pleasures by the better definitions of them (just as the silk-worm, as caterpillar, has _taste_, but no _eyes_, and, as butterfly, has eyes without taste), he confessed to himself, indeed, that he had too much understanding to have so much contentment as the Auenthal schoolman Wutz, and that he philosophized too deeply besides; but he also insisted upon this: that "a higher wisdom must nevertheless (because otherwise the all-wise would be necessarily the _all-unhappy_) find a way again out of the sweltry parterre of the lecture-room into a parterre of flowers. Lofty men produce, like mountains, the sweetest honey." ...

Although, even while he was in the last village, the suburbs as it were of Maienthal, he heard the last tolling, still he was not provoked at the belated arrival. Nay, to show himself that he was the philosopher Socrates, he passed on with a diligent increase of slowness, and did not, like the Athenian, make a libation of the cup of joy, but did not, in fact, yet fill it up. "Float on," he said to a little cloud formed of collected lily-pollen, "and be wafted before me in advance over the _good hearts_, thou pillar of cloud at the entrance of the promised land!--And may thy little shadow silhouette for them the more fixed one, which follows more lazily, and which is absorbed later by the blue of heaven!"--And ere the winding footpath placed him before the flower-curtained gate of the valley, wherein stood the beloved cradle and nursery-garden of his fair three-days future, he was arrested by a closed thistle, around whose sealed honey-cups a white butterfly was drawing his third parallel,--and the mosaic thistles on Le Baut's floor started into life before him, and showed him the stings of the past; then he felt it incomprehensible how he had been able to endure his sorrows, and easier to bear the heaven of joy....

He took out Lind's watch, in order to know the birth-hour of his honeymoon or honey-week,--precisely at 11 o'clock he came out before the neat village, before the green-house of his heaven, before the colony of his hope, before Eden.... Ah, the murmuring little village buried in foliage seemed to throw all its blooming twigs, like arms, around, and knit himself to itself; it was green and white and red,--not painted, but overspread with leaves and blossoms. And when, as the ringing died away,--in order avariciously to hoard up for himself the embrace of his Emanuel, and in order to come upon the Maienthal church music with a heart opened by Nature,--he stole into the long, clean village, and ran Friendship's toll for a few minutes at Emanuel's house, it seemed to him as if his peacefully glad heart in the still lanes rocked with the birds on the cherry-twigs that latticed the window-panes, and hovered with the bees in the cherry blossoms. "Come right in," all seemed to say, "thou good man, we are all happy, and thou shalt be so too."--He approached the shining church, whose dazzling stucco flung by contrast upon the blue of the sky a sublime darkness, and his beating heart trembled blissfully with the waves of the organ within, and with the rustling birch-tree fixed in the ground before the church-door, and with the dry May-pole, in the middle of the village, bowed by the morning-wind....

"But," says my reader, "could then his eye so long deny itself the fairer prospects, and his heart the more beloved beauty, and, instead of the Abbey, seek out only the church?"--Oh, he looked after that the very first thing of all, and his eye ran trembling around all the windows of his sun-temple; but as he found all of them open and empty, and all the curtains drawn up, he guessed that its fair conclave of sisters, and among them the conclave-sister of his heart, were there where he sought--and found them,--in the temple. He went up unheard, during the tramping down of the church-goers, into the front-stall of the nobility, which from without appeared empty, that flower-stand of the convent-nuns. There was nothing there but dropped birch-leaves; for the body of nuns and the Abbess and Clotilda stood--below in the Church, and encircled the altar with a choir of singing angels, and took the sacrament there.--With a thrill of joy he beheld the queen of his heaven, the so dearly loved and undeserved, the shining angel, melting her vestment of earthly snow with heavenly warmth to tears, in order soon to become invisible.----His spirit bowed itself as she knelt: "Drink heaven's peace," he said, "out of the sacred chalice of the great man, among whose thoughts was never a cloud nor a sigh,--and may the thought which thou now contemplatest with such steadfast devotion be destined to become more and more luminous and immovable, like a sun, and always to throw a warm evening-light over the weary soul!"--This angel in mourning-attire called forth in his inner being by an awakening of the dead all the virtues of his life and all its faults, and gave those a heaven and these a hell; he was, therefore, now too holy to disturb a saint by making his appearance, even supposing her tranquil eye, absorbed in pious emotions, which did not so much as fall on the nearer devout beauties to the height of the waist, had been able to lift itself to him. The birch at the first window of the loft he kept before him as a leafy fan;--this green veil playing on his cheeks covered his attentiveness and his tears of joy from the whole church. The place where he was so happy seemed, to judge from an inscription on the glass, to have been once the usual stand of Clotilda; for Giulia's was near by, as I know for certain, because on the stall-window a G and C, enclosed by a wreath, had been cut in with the words by Giulia: "Thus are we united by the flowers of life and the circle of eternity." ...

Victor slipped away unseen and early out of this niche of removed goddesses, and bore his heart filled with love to the open breast of friendship,--to Emanuel. He saw already the latter's tabernacle of the covenant in the temple of Nature,--when his rapture was delayed by one of earlier date. Julius lay in the blooming grass with its waves rippling over him, and holding a cherry-twig full of open honey-cups in his hand, in order to draw the bees to him, and to delight himself with their murmurous hovering over the blossoms. Victor embraced him, and forgot in the ecstasy to name his name,--"Art thou my angel?" said he.--"I am only thy Victor!"--"O come! O come!" said the blind youth, trembling like a melody, and drew his friend to Emanuel's house; but he led him, behind the cloud of his blindness, the longer way, and, besides, he turned round at every fourth step for a renewed embrace.

When they came to the water-wheel, which loudly emptied its sprinkling-cans on the flower-beds, and whose shivered lightnings flitted against Emanuel's windows and ceiling, then the blind one said, "Embrace me once more right heartily."--But amidst the din of the rain-shower, and amidst the stupefaction of love, they were pressed together by other arms than their own, and the two young hearts were linked to a third, and the East Indian gazed like a god of love from one to the other, and said: "O ye good youths, remain ever thus, and weep on in your blissful love!--Blessings on thee, my Horion, and a welcome in the great spring round about us!"--And when Emanuel and Victor sank on each other's necks, then was it as if all the flower-beds bowed down for rapture, as if all the waves flamed more radiantly under super-earthly lightnings flying over them, as if the zephyrs swelled with sighs of love, as if higher beings must needs whisper in the over-measure of joy: O ye good human beings, verily ye love like us!--

An arm out of a river of Paradise lifted and bore this loving trinity into the leafy rooms, and here, for the first time, Victor saw that the spring was on Dahore's cheeks and the summer in his eyes, as well as twelve May months in his heart. The white mourning-roses on his cheeks, which always seemed to bloom like _mural crowns_ of death against St. John's-day, had given place to the red ones,--in short, Emanuel's face gave the hope that he had been, in regard to his death, a false prophet.--

In this waving apartment, whose golden wall borders were linden-boughs, and whose splendid tapestries were linden blossoms, and over whose door, as door-paintings, flickered the reflection and the mock-suns of the flashing water-wheel, in this four-walled island, surrounded by Nature's roaring sea of joy, through whose open windows the zephyrs flung bees and butterflies over the window-flowers among the lindens, my hero, to whom, besides, the noonday hum of bells appeared like a ringing call to a peace-festival of the earth, felt himself wading through flowers of joy up to his heart.--Emanuel's poesy sounded to him, in this epic intoxication, like prose; he was, as it were, sunk in a thicket of flowers, and, lifting his eyes, saw overhead a healed immortal who bent apart the blooming envelopment,--and still higher up an eternal Whitsuntide sun in the infinite blue,--and nearer above him the sprouting of the flower-leaves, and above this the swarming of bees,--and a golden morning-red, wound as a living frame round about the whole variegated incense-breathing woodland....

--By Heaven! only to lie in a _literal_ flower-wood of this kind were of itself something,--to say nothing of lying actually in a _metaphorical_ one!--Victor was devout with joy, still from overfulness, contented from gratitude. The aspect of their common teacher gave, it is true, to Clotilda's image warmer colors, and to his soul higher flames, but imparted to his wishes no insatiableness and no impatience.

Emanuel immediately began speaking of that beloved pupil of his; not at all as if Clotilda had clearly described to him the third Easter-holiday, or as if Emanuel had guessed it, but this guileless man simply knew not the difference between love and friendship, and he would have said of himself as well as of Victor, that he loved her. And just this childlike _naïveté_, which, through the open chamber of a woman's heart, watched for no right of transit nor for any breaches, but laid bare his own, and which fished for no confessions, found fault with none, took advantage of none,--this quality must have been just what would bind with the Gordian ganglion of sympathy the shyest female soul to so open a manly one. Nay, I believe Clotilda could more easily have made known her love to her teacher than to her beloved.--As this Emanuel now told him how he had pictured to her all the scenes of his former sojourn here,--and all his raptures,--and his confession of friendship for her,--how he had read to her his letters, and how the second (that disconsolate one on the night of the Stamitz concert) had forced so many tears into her eyes,--and as Victor saw how very much his friend had by his breathing on it drawn her love open like a closing tulip-cup,--all this kindled his love for her, his friendship for him even to devotion, and in a blissful embarrassment he kissed the blind one. By this double love he now explained to himself Clotilda's easy consent to his Whitsuntide journey.

He would have held it all Angel's- and a Peter's-fall from friendship, not to propose directly the question to Emanuel, when he might see this beloved--of Virtue.--"Now!" said the latter, who, despite his respectful East-Indian gentleness toward women, knew not the nose-rings, binding-keys, and dampers of our Harem-decency. But Victor acted otherwise and yet thought just so. He had already asked when abroad: "Why do they suffer the wretched police-regulation to stand for maidens, that they, e. g., must never walk out singly, but always, like Nuremberg Jews, under the escort of an old crone, or like the monks, in pairs?" Not as if this would in any manner embarrass me, if I acted a romance, but that it would, if I wrote one, where I should have to keep to the female rules-of-march at the expense of the critical, and trail round with me a convoy of auxiliary-women through the whole book as an abattis to my heroine. Should I not be obliged, if I would so much as get her out beyond the house door-steps, to march along beside her with a crown-guard of female keepers of the seal? Should I not be obliged by this confounded co-investiture and trading in company with Virtue--there would be no such thing as doing business on one's own account--to foist female friends on my heroine contrary to all probability? I should think hard, to be sure, of a Spanish maiden if she showed me her foot, and of a Turkish, if she showed me her face, and of a German, if she went _alone_ to see the best young man; but just because the most fanatical _blue laws_, which surely are blue vapor on blue Mondays, become a real moral law for them, therefore am I vexed at this deplorable pusillanimity, and wish to see nothing forbidden but--waltzing and falling!... He has here, perhaps, satire _in petto_; for, to speak seriously of the matter, this sanitary-ordinance, that maidens must with us, as petitions with princes, always present themselves in duplicates, has manifestly the design of accustoming them all to one another, because they must have each other's friendship for visits;--secondly, brothers and sisters must be out of each other's hair, because they do not know whether they shall need each other as collateral securities of their virtue and second exchange-bills of love;--thirdly, these human ordinances give to female virtue by the _minor_ moral-service (because great temptations are too rare) daily exercise in religion, and higher importance, and bear the same relation as the articles of the Talmud do to the Bible, although a right Jew would sooner transgress the Bible than the Talmud;--fourthly, we owe to these symbolic books of propriety the earlier culture of that female acuteness for which we unhappily furnish no other opportunities of attention than the oath they swear on those books affords.

Victor at once blamed and followed, like a good girl, the female rules of the order; court life had made him more courageous, but also more refined, and, like the court itself, he was, among women, reconciled to the writing-lines of the ceremonial. Therefore he purposed not until the second day of Whitsuntide to make his regular diplomatic appearance at the Abbess's, since to-day it was too late for anything, and besides that he would not fly into the sweet, holy emotions over yonder like a comet. And then too, his contentment told him, indeed, how little the _neighborhood_ of a loved heart differs from its _presence_, which, besides, is nothing but a nearer neighborhood.

Meanwhile he mastered himself at least so far as to go out with his twin-brothers of the heart into the Colosseum of Nature, although he did not conceal from himself that he should be in dread out there of meeting Clotilda. And Emanuel lessened this fear but poorly, when he confessed to him that she had hitherto with her wounded life gone every day round the ponds as around magnetic healing-tubs, and through the lawn as through field-apothecaries'-shops.--Hasten forth at last, ye three good souls, into the Jubilee of Spring, which the Earth celebrates yearly in memory of Creation. Haste, ere the minutes of your life, like the broad waves on the two brooks, now still fleeting, and flashing, and sounding, fly to pieces and extinguish themselves on a weeping-willow,--haste, ere the flowers of your days and the flowers of the meadow are veiled by evening, when instead of the vital oxygen they shall exhale only poisonous air,--and enjoy the first day of Whitsuntide ere it trickles away!

--And it has trickled away, and a summer already lies upon it to-night as a grave; but the three dear hearts have hastened and enjoyed it, before it faded.... They sauntered on among the zephyrs, those sowing-machines of the flowers, as they came fluttering out of all the bushes,--they came before the five pocket-mirrors of the sun, the ponds, (the rivers being pier-mirrors and the gay shores the pier-tables,)--they saw how Nature, like Christ, conceals her miracles, but they saw also the bridal torch of the marriage-making May, the sun, and a bridal chamber in every singing tree-top, and a bridal bed in every flower-cup,--they, the wedding guests of the earth, turned not away the bee, who drunk with honey revelled around them, nor did they scare up the food-bringing mother, before whom the young bird with trembling wings melted into invisibleness,--and when they had climbed all the earthly steps of the eternal temple, whose columns are milky-ways, the sun sank, like the thoughts of men, to meet another world....

The fountain in the _garden of termination_,[102] which rears itself half-way down the declivity of the southern mountain and gleams away high over the mountain, already bore on its thin crystal column a shaft recast by the evening sun into a ruby, and this glittering, full-blowing rose contracted itself, like other flowers that had gone to sleep, to a red point,--and the hanging columns of gnats in the last beam seemed to say: To-morrow it will be fair again; go back; ah, you play longer in the sun than we.--

They went back; but when Victor saw the five high white columns at the western end of the beloved garden blink in the light of evening, his exalted heart felt a yearning and a burden, and he restrained it not from sighing: "Good Clotilda! ah, I should be glad indeed to see thee even to-day; my heart is full of tears of joy over this holy day, and I would fain pour it out before thee."--And when the whole park of the Abbey reared itself proudly beside the evening-heaven, and took possession of their hearts, then all at once said Emanuel,--who was always like himself even in his raptures,--"I will tell the Abbess this very day, so that Clotilda may lay up joy for to-morrow," and he separated from them.... Noble man! thou that in four weeks hopest to leave this flowery spring and mount to the stars above thee,--thou thinkest more of immortality than of death,--no threatening Orthodoxy, but the Indian love of flowers, hath trained thee, hence art thou so blessed; thou art free from wrath, like every dying man, free from greed and from anxiety; in thy soul, as at the Pole when every morning the sultry sun stays away, the _moon_ of the _second_ world never sets day nor night!--

Victor, alone, led the blind youth home, and both were silent and embraced each other with brotherly tears behind every screen, and asked each other neither for the reasons of the embrace nor of the tears. When they had passed through the still village, and as they came along by the park of the Abbey, Victor saw his Emanuel pass out of the last bower into the dazzling convent. It seemed to him as if every one therein already recognized him, as if he must hide himself. The garden of inspiration was to be in the valley only the flower-bed in a meadow, and not violently contrast itself with nature by sharp limits, but hang over into it softly as a dream into waking hours with blooming, embowered borders, and flow over into it with hop-gardens, with green thick-set hedges around corn-fields, and with sowed-over children's gardens. A large wide colonnade of chestnuts, set in silver by two brooks, opened broad and free toward the five ponds with their pierced work of blossoms. The northern mountain lifted itself up over against the park like a terrace, and seemingly continued the Eden over unseen valleys.

Victor avoided every opening window of the convent by means of the chestnut-trees under which he led his blind one, and behind which he could, unobserved, observe more nearly. On the shed-roof of the avenue woven of green roof-laths the evening lay like an autumn gleaming through with red streaks of splendor. He went, despite the danger of detection, to the very middle, where the avenue divides into two arms; but here he chose the right arm of the leafy hall, which bent away with him from the convent, as well as from a nightingale which, in the midst of the garden, sent out from a consecrated thorn-hedge her young and her tones. The arbor rendered to him by its softening distances from the bravura-airs of the feathered Prima Donna the services of a pedal and lute-stop;--gently was he led on by the windings which the gradual darkening and narrowing of the alley concealed, through the tones of the nightingale that floated after him, through the thinner trickling of the evening rays among the leaves between the two brooks, which now glided away _inside_ of the chestnut-lane.--The brooks came closer together and left room only for love.--The portico closed in more coseyly.--The scattered flowers of the two banks crowded together and passed over into bushes.--The bushes grew up into a garden wall and touched each other at first in summits hanging towards each other, loose and transparent, and at last darkly knit together.--And the avenue and the arbor which had grown up under it blended their green together, so as to make with their coinciding blossom-veils only a single night.--Then in the green twilight was the arbor stopped up by a web of honeysuckle and nest of blossoms, but five ascending steps invited to the tearing asunder of the blooming curtain. And when one parted it, one sank into a blossom-cleft, into a narrow, tangled vault, as it were into a magnified flower-cup. In this Delphic cave of dreams the cushion was made of high grass, and the arms of the seat of blossoming-twigs, and the back of flowers massed together, and the air of the breath of dusting dwarf-fruit-trees. This flowery Holy of Holies was peopled only with bees and dreams, illuminated only with white blossoms; it had for evening-red only the purple of night-violets, for heaven's blue only the azure of elder-blossoms, and the blest one therein was lulled only by bees' wings and by the five mouths of the brooks meeting around him into the slumber in which the distant nightingale struck the harmonica- and evening-bells of dream....

--And as Victor to-day, beside the blind one, trod the five steps, and opened the blossom-woven tapestry door of the heaven: lo!--there--O man beatified this side of death!--reposed a female saint with weeping eyes, absorbed in Philomela's expiring plaints.... It was thou, Clotilda, and thou thoughtest of _him_ with softened soul and heightened love,--and he on thee with reciprocal love! O when two loving ones meet each other in the _selfsame_ emotion, then and not till then do they respect the human heart and its love and its bliss!--Hide not, Clotilda, with any blossoms the tears under which thy cheeks blush, because they should fall only before solitude! Tremble, but only for joy, as the sun trembles, when he comes out of a cloud on the horizon! Cast not down yet thy eye curtained with flowers, which for the first time falls so calmly opened and with such a stream of love on the man who deserves thy fair heart, and who rewards all thy virtues with his own!... Victor was struck with the lightning of joy and must needs remain immovable in the sweet smile of rapture, when the beloved rose behind the flower-clouds like the moon behind an Eden standing in full bloom, and in the womanly transfiguration of love resembled an angel dissolved into a prayer.

The blind youth knew nothing as yet of the third blessed one. She moved her hand, in sweet confusion, towards a too thin twig to raise herself from the deep grass-bench; it seemed to her lover, as if this hand reached to him out of the clouds of the second life a second heart, and he drew the hand to himself and sank with his mute, overflowing face down through the blossom on her throbbing veins. But hardly had Clotilda bade _both_ a stammered welcome during the coming out from the green closet, when there appeared to them the angel--Emanuel, who had hastened from the convent to seek his friend. He said nothing, but looked on both with a nameless rapture, to find out whether they were right joyful, and as if to ask, "Are you not, then, now right happy, ye good souls? do you not, then, love each other inexpressibly?"----Oh, only a mortal is needed for sympathy in sorrow, but an angel for sympathy in joy; there is nothing more beautiful than the radiant Christ's head, on which the laying aside of the Moses' veil shows the still, glad interest in another's blameless joys, in another's pure love; and it is quite as godlike (or still more so) to contemplate the love of others with a mutely congratulating heart, as to have it one's self.... Emanuel, thy greater praise is kept in kindred souls, but not on paper!--

On the cross-way of the alley the fair society parted, and the left branch of the same led Clotilda along by the nightingale back to the abode of gentle hearts. Victor, dissolved by his heightened love for three human beings at once, arrived at the dusky apartments of Emanuel, lighted only by setting stars, and found there a spread table which the refined Abbess had sent to the guest or to the host, for Emanuel at evening ate only fruit. One wishes to share everything with one's love, even the kitchen. Emanuel after Easter never lighted a light. In the clar-obscure, made of the fusion of lunar silver and linden green, the blissful trefoil[103] bloomed under the evening star. Victor, by his professional pictures of the night-cold, put his invalid friend out of conceit with night-walks, and went alone with the blind one at this late hour out to the dormitory of hushed Nature.... Blessed is the evening which is the fore-court of a blessed day. The May-frost had cleansed the stars from the warm breath of the vapor, and deepened the blue of the celestial hemisphere, to make a beautiful night the earnest of a beautiful day. All was silent around the village, except the nightingale in the garden and the rustling May-chafers, those heralds of a bright day.--And when Victor went home with an upward sigh of thanks for these Whitsuntide hours, of which each handed the next the box of powdered sugar to sweeten the short moments of a still mortal; as he passed along before the muffled confession-hymns, which here a twelve-years-old little man who to-morrow was to take the sacrament, and there one by the side of his mother, sang; and when, finally, a vesper-hymn breathed out from the Abbey, and, swimming forth as it were on a single lute-tone, brought the fair day with a swan-song to its close, and when nothing more was left of the soft day except its resonance in the heart of the happy one and in the evening song of the convent, and its reflection in the fleeting evening-red of heaven, and in the contented and still smiling face of the sleeping Emanuel;--then did the mute joys in Victor's face look like prayers, the undisturbed tears like overrunning drops from the cup of gladness, his stillness like a good deed, and his whole heart like the warm tear of joy shed by a higher genius.

Victor led the beloved blind one softly to his place of slumber, where dream restored his disordered eyes and arrayed the little landscapes, of his childhood, with morning hues, more brightly around him.--He then laid himself down without undressing himself, opposite to the moon which hung low above the horizon, and sank to sleep on the building-ground of our fairer air-castles, on the sounding-board of childhood, where morning-dreams lead consecrated man out of the wilderness of day to the mount of Moses, and let him look over into the dark, promised land of Eternity....

The first Whitsuntide day, dear reader, in this tri-clang of rapture, has died away; but in these three high festivals of joy, as with those in the almanac, the second is still fairer, and the third the fairest of all. I shall not at all hurry with the movement of my pen through these three heavens,--nay, if I could certainly know that the acting persons in this history would never get to see my work, I should shift the boundaries of this Eden, by adding much that, on nearer inspection, would not prove historically true.--

34. DOG-POST-DAY.

SECOND DAY OF WHITSUNTIDE.

Morning.--The Abbess.--The Water-Mirror.--Dumb Action
for Libel.--The Rain and the Open Heaven.

At two o'clock the morning-wind swept in more loudly and coolly through Victor's open chamber, and shook already dew-drops from shiny foliage, and the near whisper of leaves murmured through his ears into his dreams. The lark, as the overture of the day, flung herself high up into the gray of heaven, and rang in the morning's feast of trumpets. This alarmist became in his dreaming the hovering after-echo which blended with the morning; amidst the soft in-fall of the neighboring sounds he slowly opened his eyes and dreamed on, and closed them again, and was more awake, and sleep did not pass off like a thick shroud made of night, but floated upward like a veil of morning perfume; and his soul, without making a single movement of the body, opened with the still awaking of a flower-cup in the presence of the morning....

--Now I am again already at boiling and blazing point,--and yet, as often as I dip my pen in the ink, I make up my mind to gain the good graces of the critics, and to write with my pen as with an icicle. But it is impossible for me,--in the first place, because I am getting into years. With most men, it is true, as with birds, singing ceases when love does; but with those who make their head a hot-house of their ideas, years, i. e. the days of drill therein, give the fancy as well as the _passions_ a higher growth. Poets resemble glass, which, when it is old and breaks, takes on motley colors.--But secondly, though I were just blooming in my twentieth year, still I could not now write frostily, seeing winter is at the door. Rousseau says that in prison he produced the best poem on Liberty,--hence the French, those state's-prisoners, used to write better prose on the subject than the free Britons,--hence Milton poetized in winter. I have often carried out my writing-tablets in summer, and undertaken to press it to this silhouette board, and then take its profile; but fantasy can lay only Past and Future under its copying-paper, and every actual Present limits its creative power,--just as, according to the old naturalists, the water distilled from roses loses its virtue precisely at the time when roses bloom. Therefore I always had to wait till I became unfaithful, before I could go at love with my drawing instruments.... On the contrary, a man who now, towards after-summer, on a Molucca Island, primes and sketches the spring, must, for the foregoing reasons, and for the further one that the flying-summer is the regretful after-echo and silver-wedding of spring, hand it over to the Gallery-inspectors with much too bright sap-colors.--

The gayly-embroidered description of Victor's sojourn in Maienthal may well get to be as long as that of Voltaire's in Paris, with the publisher's compensation for which the lean wag might have cleared the rent of his _chambres garnies_. For just at this moment the dog has actually handed in a fourth Whitsuntide day, and expanded the trinomial root of the given _power_ of joy into a quadrinomial. As in this quadruplicate of joy again, there is no wailing, no murder, no pestilence, but only good, I joyfully catch the remaining images of this spring in my camera-obscura, nor hover in anxious suspense, lest I should have to drag out my hero (Knef has made over to me all the Whitsuntide-days, and is only to send a little supplementary page afterward) somewhat as I did my Gustavus,[104] from the collapsed rubbish of his pleasure-palace and summer-house.--