Chapter VIII: Part 8

Emanuel despatched in the forenoon his day's work of writing in his astronomical tables, in order to spend the whole afternoon with his guest at the Abbess's; he also offered him a little collaboratorship at his flowers, namely, to pluck out the rosemary blossoms, and spread the sunshade over the carnation-stand. With Emanuel, even in the prosaic repose of the day, the wings always protruded far out from under the half-wing-shells. Victor took the requests of his teacher as gifts. As he picked away out there at the rosemary, the rising sun opened the valves of the wind, and then, under its breath, all the registers of the great organ of being began to go, and the tremolo of the brooks rolled its waves on his ear, the flute-work of the birds pealed, and the thirty-two footed pedal-register of the woodland roared. One little parishioner's head after another, as he carried his twelve years together with the same number of Herculean labors of memory to the Holy Sacrament, creeping along behind its father, embroidered and stiffened up with a wreath-knob, and generally with gold-spangles, passed by before him. What a beautiful second Whitsuntide-day, which is generally full of rain-clouds, have you, ye little folks, to-day!--Victor right gladly indulged the grandees of the village, i. e. the drivers of a full span and the schoolmaster's son, the hair-modeller and queue-preacher Meuseler, who on the second Whitsuntide-day frizzled the neighboring villages, and who with his holy-(powder)-sprinkler effected the last effusion upon the little heads, which the Parson had been moistening these six weeks. Victor's heart beat for joy, as if he had a child, or were himself a child among them, when the motley, powdered, animated chain, with dancing spangles, with long-stemmed nosegays, with black-glistening spiritual _Musen-annuals_, marched in under the commander's staff and shepherd's crook of their two consuls, singing and besung and rung in and trumpeted in through the triumphal gate of the church.--Ah! joy sits still more beautifully on children than on us, just as an unhappy, a begging child, whose first child's-garden fate has trampled down, and before whose eyes, at the first bursting into existence, nothing hangs but black, misshapen morning cloud, afflicts our heart more than his father beside him.--

"Pluck, like a berry, _every_ minute of your first day of triumph, ye good children, and I wish the sermon would be right long, that you might keep on so much longer your handsome dress!" said Victor, and looked round toward the convent, whose windows were full of unrecognizable spectatresses; he proposed to himself, on the return of the juvenile procession, to seek out for himself from among the windows with a pocket spy-glass the one with the fairest contents.--Just go, kindly man, who lovest fair souls like fair nature, and endurest cold ones like the winter-landscape, and who never revengest, just walk up and down by the brooks, for there is the footpath of the fishers, and because on thy poetic ring-races thou wouldst not harm a peasant by trampling down so much as a forked wagon of hay, such as the children braid out of hazel-rods! Fill the interval between the first heaven and the third, when thou wilt sit down not with Abraham, but with thy Clotilda at the table of the Abbess,--fill it up with a second, namely with the embrace of all nature, which never looks more sweetly into the soul, than when on it, not far from the soul, a beloved dwells!--

A stroll between two brooks that mingled their flashings and between their lackered willows snowed over with foam-worms[105] overspread the whole inner man even to every corner of a dark tear with morning-splendor.--In addition to that Victor kept looking across the meadow up at Emanuel's open window, and letting a smile float down from it like a running wave full of light.--In addition to that, he did not stop there, but went up twice and disturbed him in the midst of his writing with a childlike embrace.--In addition to that, he put seven-leagued boots on his eyes, and ran over the whole landscape, here rising, there sinking, here shining, there shadowing, in order to catch and size even here in anticipation a postal and travelling map of the finest places for the afternoon-rambles with Clotilda, because in the afternoon the raptures themselves will perhaps spoil the choice of raptures!--And thus did Nature create over again in his spirit her morning and her spring out of the earth-clod of the first spring, i. e. out of the hot sun, out of the cool brook, out of the butterfly, whom May shelled out of his hull, from the motley flies which the prolific earth hatched out of the larva-seed like winged flowers.--Then he closed his eyes amid the din of sparrows and swallows in the village, and amidst the watch-cries of the larks, and against the dazzling waves of the brooks, and let his soul dive down into the ringing sea and into the chiaroscuro painted by the eyelid; but then would his heart have been overwhelmed by creation's flood, which swept over it out of all pipes and beds and mouths of life around him, out of the tangled vein-work of the stream of life, which shoots at once through flower-runnels, through tree-channels, through white flies' veins, through red blood-canals and through human nerves, ... he would, in the impotence of enjoyment, have been drowned in the deep, broad ocean of life, which life-streams cross and fill, had he not, like every drowning man, heard a peal of bells far down into the waves.

In short--church was out, and he had to go behind a leafy hunter's-screen, in order, when the Panists[106] of the Lord's Supper should march by out of the church, whose organ-music still followed, and under the tower that still trumpeted after them, that then he might see with his pocket-glass _who_ looked out of the convent. Clotilda's face floated, as if called forth by magic out of the second world, close to the glass, and he could, without fear of being driven away, close his butterfly-wings around this flower; he could freely sink into her great eyes, as into two flower-cups filled with the splendor of dew. Never did he see so pure a snow of the white around the blue heaven's-opening, which went far into the soul, now fairer than ever; and when she cast down her eye toward the garden, the great veiling eyelid with its trembling lashes stood just as beautifully over it as a lily over a fountain. _Love_, like _drawing_ and like the germ of man, begins at the _eye_.--When the children had gone by, then Clotilda slowly and freely turned her face toward Emanuel's cottage, and gazed across with the far-reaching, longing look of love....

And with such a love, beating like a heart in his innermost consciousness, Victor with his two friends arrived up at the convent. The Abbess (her name is not reported to me at all, not even her pseudonyme) received him with a stately air, which her station had not imparted to her, but had attempered. Her soul was born crowned. The Princess of ----, whose chief governess she was, loved sometimes to play the child (children inversely reciprocate, and represent their representatives): but although she possessed a pride of thirty years, she checked her hobby-horse so soon as the monarchical chief governess appeared, than whom no one in the land (the swans excepted) carried her head back so high. A lady like her, whose looks were throne-insignia, and her words _mandata sacræ cæsareæ majestatis propria_,[107] had from the hands of Nature herself the allegiance-medals and the throne scaffolding, so as to weigh her imperial apple against young maidens' apple of beauty,--such a one could rule and mould a Clotilda. Her soul was painted by three masters:--the back-ground by the world,--the foreground by the church,--the middle-ground by Virtue. Her æsthetic parts placed her in a singular manner in a certain elective-affinity with Emanuel's East Indian ones.

I know nothing more touching and beautiful than a woman's obeisance when it springs from that deep respect with which alone good maidens venture to speak their love.--Happy Victor! thy Clotilda received thee with as much reverence as her teacher. Only the coquette is made by love more dictatorial[108] (a silicious juristic word!); but the proud one it makes modest and gentle. Never did he take a meal more delightedly than in this bright pleasure-villa, before whose open windows reposed a blue horizon and nearer at hand murmuring avenues, filled with music, than in this decorated orangery of blooming girls,--(whereas a gymnasium is a menagerie and a house of sisters an aviary.)--Victor, who understood how to manage women even better than men, felt himself as well in the busy ant-hill of these lively maidens, as in an ant-bath,[109] and he was a second Bee-father Wildau, who constructed for himself out of the swarm of bees now a beard and now a muff. More manly sense is required for a certain refined gallantry, than they have who in their satires confound it with the insipid kind; just as only mountains afford the sweetest honey. Earnest must be the groundwork of jest; respect and kindliness, of praise. Victor could more easily before two than before thirty-two female eyes fall into embarrassment, which, by the way, is the grossest blunder and Germanism in female grammar. He had long since learned to combine the volatile salts of woman's wit with the fixed ones of man's, as well as the art, in great circles, of setting every soul, every caterpillar, on the right leaf for its nourishment.

To him who had once said, "I wish I had to converse at least four times a year with ladies, with whom one should have to apply so much _tournture_,[110] that one actually would not know what he wanted, and who were fine even to nonsense,"--to him a high lady like the Abbess, whom, since the laying down of her high governess-ship, one could confound a very, very little with a _précieuse_,[111] was a true refreshment; for he could sketch her at least the physiognomical fragments of the court with a thousand turns, i. e. a full face with _five_ dots. But he had in this the still nobler design to draw off his adoring attention, his heart that sometimes started in the shape of a tear to his eye, from his beloved Clotilda, in order to spare her a wholly different attention from his own. In a singular manner his satirical feeling, precisely, always drew off the Moses' veil from his serious feelings, from his softened soul,--that is to say, he was not ashamed of a tear, simply because he knew that his humor could protect him against the suspicion of exaggeration and against the mocker; just as, on the other hand and inversely, his playing and flashing of wit under tears, like phosphorus under water, conserved and nourished its light.--

Fortunately, at this point, Emanuel, who in the midst of dinner had gone out into the garden, came back and proposed taking a walk. For in his soul great ideas were all that remained standing of life, as of old Egypt only temples were left behind, no houses; and his ignorance in little things must be ridiculous to _little things_.[112]--The Abbess had taken Clotilda beside her on the throne as under-queen of the fiery nuns. Victor represented in his single person the board of wards of the Electorate of Brandenburg among these fluttering graces. Clotilda gave over the blind one just to a whole dove-flock of the liveliest way-guides, because they all sued for the boatman's and forefinger's-office with the blind youth; they all loved him on account of his heavenly beauty, but (as he could not see theirs) only in the same way as they would caress a beautiful boy of five years.... At another time Victor would certainly have looked round and made the fine allusion that _beauty_ was leading _blindness_; but to-day he only looked round for other reasons.

--At last the Island of the Blest, which had already gleamed far, far out through the mist of his childhood's dreams, was now the ground under his feet, and he made the voyages of discovery through his heaven;--he and Clotilda were silent for some minutes, because their hearts began to be softly agitated with joy, that they were at last alone together and stood before the great esplanade of spring. Amidst the blissful smiles, the dumb alphabet of rapture, and amidst trembling respirations, that holy sanscrit of love, they had already arrived at the first pond, over whose crystal mirror a bridge winds like gilded foliage-work.--They stopped dazzled in the midst of this moon-disk and looking-glass, because the parasol could not screen from two suns at once, reckoning the one in the water; they turned half round, and sought with their eyes in the picturing water the deeper heaven's-blue, and two still, blissful forms, that looked at each other with their moist eyes. O, his eye rested warmly in her reflected one, like the sun upon the subterranean sun, and his trembling look was the long tremolo and continuance of a single tone; for the goddess dwelling in the water sank with her eyes to meet his soul, because she would fain avail herself of the doubled distance of his form, which amounted to ten feet.--To conclude at last the overmastering rapture, he withdrew his eyes from this glass-painting and directed them (i. e. he merely redoubled it) to the archetype itself; and the mutual inflowing of glances, the trembling together of souls, threw into the short moment the fields of a long heaven.--And they saw that they had found each other, and that they had loved each other, and that they deserved each other. As they went on, Victor could only say, "O that you might be to-day as inexpressibly happy as I am."--And she answered softly, softly as a zephyr exhaled from among tender, leafless blossoms, "I am so indeed." ... Ah, I have often pictured to myself, if we all loved one another as two lovers do, if the emotions of all souls, as these are, were _tied_ notes, if Nature drew from us all at once, the resonance of her strings stretching even beyond the stars, instead of moving only a loving couple as a double harpsichord,--then should we see that a human heart full of love contains an immeasurable Eden, and that Deity itself created a world in order to love one.

But I will write again, as Clotilda spoke, who manifested the poetic spirit only by actions, not by words, like players who know how in speaking to evade the rhyme and metre of their poet.

The village, or rather the inn, gave their Jacob's ladder a _fourth_ round, the fourth Whitsuntide-day.--The Englishman, Cato the elder, who had run away from Kussewitz and from his club with a travelling orchestra of virtuosos from Prague, came out to see Maienthal also. He could never in his life wait for anything. He told Victor he was coming to see him to-morrow, to-day he should survey the cultivated prospects and he was waiting with the overture of the Prague musicians only for the close of the vesper-sermon. At last he told him that Flamin and Matthieu were going a journey day after to-morrow, and were going back again to Kussewitz, and consequently would stay there longer than they had intended. This presence of the Englishman and the delayed return of the jealous one settled all at once in Victor his last will, to stretch the fourth Whitsuntide-day also as the fourth string on this tetrachord of joy. And as on this fourth day the riddle about the angel running through all the parts of this book is brought into the deciphering-office of time, because Julius delivers the letter of the said angel to Clotilda to read, he could make believe to himself he stayed merely for that reason, and say to himself: "For the novelty's sake surely one should tarry, to see what the state of the case is about the angel."--Good hero! thou confoundest every angel with thine, nor do I know why thou shouldst not!...

Now a shadow of a cloud flitted over them, a sort of forerunner of a darker one which was seeking their souls. For Victor, who before a fair heart could never shut up his own, who in the consecration of love scorned all dissimulation, related to Clotilda, with that heartiness which so easily marries itself to refinement, the reasons of Matthieu's journey, namely, his own little folly in Kussewitz, when he played into the Princess's hands the little billet-doux. He would at any rate have been obliged, too, to make this disclosure, by way of obviating the extraneous one of an accuser. But he presupposed too hastily on the part of Clotilda a calculation of the chronology of his little annual registers, and did not remark that he had written the billet before he knew that Clotilda was not Flamin's _sweetheart_, but only his _sister_.[113] She was silent for some time. He feared this pantomime of anger, and did not dare to convince himself of it by looking into her face. At length, on her favorite green spot, where in the greatest depth the vale's green shadow rocks its painted twigs in the sheen of sun and water, there she begged him with a voice neither cold nor proud, but almost a voice of emotion, to let her rest a little on her favorite grass-bench, whose arms were great flowers. As he stood before her, he saw with alarm in her animated face--not a resentment wrestling with courtesy, but--the touching struggle against the destiny which darkened for her the darling of her soul, the unselfish grief at the closed scar, which she wished away from his virtue. She felt, he felt, as if the former year lifted itself up again from its death-pillow of flowers of joy, which it had trampled on for both; they were right sad,--Clotilda had hardly the mastery of her eyes or Victor of his tongue,--till at last upon the latter the misunderstanding dawned. He therefore said softly to her and in English: "Had his father made all his disclosures to him earlier, he would have spared him more than one conflict, more than one dark hour, and first of all the foregoing folly."

In the higher love anger is only sorrow over the object. Clotilda continued, however, the solar-eclipse of her fair features; but it proceeded not from the continuance of the previous sigh, nor from the usual inability to carry over at once a reconciled soul into an angry face, but her discontent with her own hastiness always looked like that which has another's for its object. She rose up therefore to give him back her arm, and, as it were, the heart which lay near it. Victor did not allow himself to break the doubled-voiced silence.--Emanuel came after, and then Clotilda said with emotion, as if she were just answering what had been said before: "Ah, I am only too closely related to my brother on the side of my faults."--Did she mean Flamin's jealousy, or suspecting nature, or more probably his temperament?--Victor turned to her, as if to beg her pardon for what she had said,--and her eyes said, "O, I ought not to have misunderstood thee,"--and his said, "I ought not, even though unknown, to have denied thee,"--and their hearts made peace, and the olive-branch twining among the old flowers of joy bound their souls to each other.

Emanuel led them, as their guiding star, to his dear mountains, those front boxes of the earth,--only from his mountain with the weeping birch he kindly turned them aside for unknown reasons,--and his easy climbing gave them joy over the restoration of his breathing. At last they came out upon the throne of the region, on the mountain where Victor, on the morning after the night spent in travelling, had looked down upon Maienthal. O how the living plain of God, the foreground of a sun and of an Eden, stretched far away in such untamable, blooming, breathing, undulating masses! How did heaven hang full of mountains of incense, full of ice-fields of light! And a gentle morning-wind stole out from the eastern gate overhung with cloud-bloom and played with heaven and earth, with the yellow floweret and with the broad cloud above them, with the eyelash under a tear and with the cornfields it searched through!--How the eye dilates, when chased night-pieces of cloud-shadows cut through the bright sunshine of the earth! how the heart enlarges, when the morning-wind hurls the winged shadows now over mountains, now into ponds of splendor, now into bowed grain-fields!--But round upon the woods still ice-mountains of clouds had settled themselves.--Ah, this field flecked with day and night, this wall of nebulous glaciers, put Victor's heart into the old dream again, in which he saw Clotilda on an ice-mountain with outspread arms!--Ah, on this rocky peak rising above the southern mountain he could see the _Isle of Union_, lying darkly with its tree-tops and its white temple, and the thirsty heart staggered full of the mingled draught of yearning and melancholy and love.--

Then he was glad to tell her that he had seen her that morning when he gave the blind youth the note to Emanuel, and yet that he had denied himself a visit to her,--only give him, Clotilda, a great, warm, thankful look for his sparing of thy brother, for the nobleness of his loving, and for his hiding of that love with a veil! She looked on him, and when her eye grew warm with a tear, heaven bowed itself and came down to them on a sunny cloud and touched the kindred beings with hot, fluttering drops.--O thou good earth! thou good Nature! thou sympathizest oftener (and always) with good men, than good men do themselves!--Before him the dream passed in which Clotilda's tears resolved the ground into an uplifting cloudlet....

But the approach of evening and the little shattered pearl-strings of rain-drops rattling down called the fair group back to the cottage. The girls; who with the blind one had not even quite climbed the mountain, went no farther, but turned about and took the advance. Emanuel withdrew himself to his hill of mourning, in order there to uncover his flowers to the rain. When our loving couple reached the smoking vale below, how heavenly was the evening and the earth!--In the great evening-heaven above them waved tulip-beds of red clouds, between which ran blue strips like dark brooks.--Behind them stood under the sun mountains like Vesuviuses in flames, and the woodland like a burning bush, and the prairie-fire running over the flowers caught the cloud-shadows.--And all the larks hung with their [114]_ripieno_-voices of Nature near the red ceiling-piece of evening, and every deeper sunbeam held a humming chain-of-being made of happy insects.--And in the sheepfold on the mountain a hundred mothers at once called lovingly to a hundred children, and every sheep hastened bleating to its thirsty kneeling lamb.----

Great evening! only in the Vale of Tempe thou still bloomest and dost not fade; but in a few minutes, reader, all its blossoms for the first time will open magnificently!--

Clotilda and Victor went along more closely and warmly, linked together under the small sun-shade, which walled _both_ in from the transient shower. And with hearts which beat more and more strongly, and, instead of blood, sent round as it were devout tears of joy, they reached the park; the warm tones of the nightingale came to meet them, the tones wafted away from the musical retinue wherewith the Englishman was just passing across the mountains floated after them like perfumes exhaled from flowers.----But lo! while the earth still wore its gilding in the fire of the sun, while the evening-fountain still blazed up like a torch, when in a great oak-tree of the garden, in which motley glass globes had been grafted instead of fruit, twenty red suns sparkled out of the leaves,--then a warmed cloud melted asunder and came all down in drops into the fire of evening and on the gleaming water-column....

The nuns who were nearer to the trees flew under the foliage; but Clotilda, who deemed a slow gait more beautiful and becoming for a female soul, went without haste to the neighboring "Evening-bower," which, raised above the garden, nowhere opens its thick leaf-work except to the setting sun.--No, it was an angel, it was Clotilda's sister, Giulia, who reposed on the tender cloud and let fall through it her tears of joy, in order to compel her friend, whose arm rested on her lover's as in a bandage, to the glimmering bower, where two blessed hearts were to be most blest. Clotilda still lingered under the rain of pearls and golden sand, and resembled the still doves around her, who on all the roofs flung open their pure wings like variegated umbrellas and held them under the bath,--and before entering Victor drew her back, who said, oppressed with bliss, "Thou all-gracious one!" and looked over to Emanuel's bower, on which the gate of Paradise built up of mosaic stones, the rainbow, abutted itself and arched across through heaven over the evening-bower and enclosed in its heavenly magic circle the three loving souls.

And when they stepped into the dark bower which had only a small opening toward the sun that blazed in through the rain, there lay before the opening the evening-field, with the swaying fiery columns, between which dashed the golden flood of the molten sun, and with the lawns which stood even to the flowers in a sea of luminous globules.--And fallen rainbows lay with their ruins on the blossoming trees.--And little airs fanned the running-fire in the meadow flowers and threw sparks out of the blossoms.--And the heart of man was swept onward by the stream of rapture and swam burning in its own tears.

Like a transfigured saint Clotilda looked into the sun, and her countenance was exalted at once by the sun and by her soul. And her friend disturbed not the fair soul; but he took the white handkerchief out of her hand and softly wiped away the colored particles dropping from the foliage, encircled with flower-dust, and she gave him voluntarily her hand. When she turned her eyes full of tears upon him, he let the tears stand; but she herself removed them, and looked upon him with a love over which soon the old ones glided, and said with a smile that flowed forth blissfully: "My whole heart is inexpressibly moved; pardon it, dearest friend, to-day everything in which it has hitherto not been like yours!" ...

--Lo, then was the warm cloud emptied into the garden as if it were a whole river of Paradise and on the streams angels playfully floated down, ... and when bliss could no more weep and love could no more stammer, and when the birds screamed for joy, and the nightingale warbled through the rain, and when the heavens, weeping for joy, fell with cloud-arms on the earth, aye, then two inspired souls met trembling and rushed breathless on each other with quivering lips and cheek pressed to cheek in glowing, trembling ecstasy,--then at last gushed forth, like life-blood out of the swollen heart, great tears of bliss out of the loving eyes over into the loved ones.--The heart measured the eternity of its heaven with great throbs heavy with bliss,--the whole visible universe, the sun itself had sunk away, and only two souls throbbed against each other alone in the emptied, glimmering immensity, dazzled with the glistening of tears and the splendor of sunshine, stunned with the roar of the heavens and the echo of Philomel, and sustained by God in dying of rapture.

Clotilda bent her head aside, to dry her eyes; and her mute darling sank down and knelt before her, and pressed his face upon her hand, and stammered: "O thou heart out of my heart, O thou for ever and ever beloved one,--ah, that I could bleed, could die for thee!"--Suddenly he rose, as if lifted by an immeasurable inspiration, and said in a lower tone, looking upon her: "Clotilda, I love thee, God, and virtue forever."

She pressed his hand and said softly: "Oh, how could man and fate wound such a heart? But mine, Victor," she said still more softly, "will never more do it wrong."----They came out from the bower,--heaven, like their hearts had exhausted itself in tears of joy, and was merely serene,--the sun had gone down simultaneously with the great moment. Victor went _slowly_, as if he were passing along before a wide Elysium, bearing in his heart the received Eden, home to Dahore's quiet dwelling. Dahore, who had sunk to sleep in a sitting posture, swayed softly to and fro, and Victor, although he would gladly have let his heart cease its beatings on a second, congenial bosom, nevertheless denied himself,--and slowly leaned against his swaying teacher. He held for a long time the slumbering head on his tumultuous breast. His tempest of joy cooled itself off into serene sky, and the refreshed flowers of joy opened the incense-cups of memory. Dahore flung his arms around his darling, and then, and not till then, woke up: for he had dreamed he was embracing him, and when he woke, he was delighted that it had not been merely a dream.

Enough!--And you, O ye human beings whom I love, take your rest on the lap of memory or of hope, when, as I do, ye lay down these little leaves!

35. DOG-POST-DAY.

THIRD DAY OF WHITSUNTIDE,
OR
BURGUNDY-CHAPTER.

The Englishman.--Meadow-Ball.--Blissful Night.--The Blooming Cave.

With men, as with misers, it never strikes anything but quarters of the happy hour; like a bad clock, it never strikes full the Arcadian hour of our hope. But in respect to the Whitsuntide days this is utterly false,--they are magnificent, and as the outpouring of the Holy Spirit was formerly represented in the old churches by the flinging down of flowers, so do we shadow forth those of Maienthal by throwing out flowers of speech. I have therefore actually unsealed a flask of Burgundy, and set it beside my inkstand, in order, in the first place, by my greater fire in this chapter, to bring over the critics of art and nature to my side, who would rather break the staff over authors than a lance with authors,--and secondly and simply to drink the wine, which of itself is final object and teleology enough. A true Paradise and kingdom of heaven we should have, if the reader also would himself take something spirituous in such chapters. When the author alone gets drunk, half the impression goes to the d----ogs; and it is a misfortune that the reviewers have nothing to nibble and nothing to drink, else they might minister to me as to a star by refracting me through their _atmosphere_ and show me _higher_ and _broader_ than I stand.

Victor had hardly run out into the wet grass of the morning, when he came upon the Englishman with his head under the sprinkling-pots of the water-wheels. He gladly forgave this Cato the elder all his singularities and the idiosyncrasy of his extravagant nature and his comet-course; for he had himself in his eighteenth year been such a hairy star, and so looked upon this man as a comet-medal struck for himself. Although the Briton _affected_ singularity, Victor knew from his own experience that it arose not from vanity, (one can, if one will, extract vanity from all, even the most innocent, actions, as well as _air_ from all bodies,) but it proceeded from humor, for which the enjoyment of an eccentric part, whether we shall _read_ or _play_ it, has full as many charms as it has for the sense of freedom and of inward power. Vain men succumb to the ridiculous, which the whimsical man defies; and the former hate, the latter seek their likenesses. The only thing which Victor had against him was that he would not show others little indulgences, for the simple reason that he never desired any either; and this very war, inseparable from humor, with all the little weaknesses and expectations of men, had given the humane Victor a dislike to this eccentric path. Misfortune, therefore, more easily makes odd men than prosperity.

His delight at the pictures which Cato drew him of Flamin's similar heavenly ascensions and _feux de joie_ inspired him with the thought of earning his Quatraine[115] of beautiful days in some other way than by his foregoing gloomy ones,--namely, by making those of others like his own. In short, he concerted with the elder Cato, to whom the idea was most agreeable,--to employ the Prague company for some useful purpose, namely, in giving in the cool of the evening a ball on the green to the Maienthal children. What needed either for this purpose more than--which they immediately did--to thrust their hands into their pockets and their fingers into their purses and give the night watchman _loci_ more than the hay of his great meadow might be worth on St. John's day, which would have to be mowed to-day for a ball-room? Besides, the man gave it with a thousand pleasures, because his son was to-day to be--married. The twenty May-poles which Cato proposed to plant in the hall stood already incarnate there as autochthones. And when they had, further, gone to the parents of the neat village,--generally, however, the poor ploughman resembles the swine, which, according to Ælian,[116] invented his ploughing for him,--and unitedly and with the greatest earnestness--for peasants and ladies do not understand singularities--begged and extorted from them the young dancing-partners: then all was right.

The trio of friends found, at the dinner-table of the Abbess, yesterday over again. Victor was immediately at home in all points; he would not continue a guest, so that the other might not continue the host. In general, maidens are seldom found again as one left them, just as their reception is always warmer or colder than their note previous; but in Clotilda's dissolving features an infinite charm announced the memory of yesterday, when she had, for two reasons, surrendered her heart to all his flames consecrated on the altar of nature and of virtue. In the first place, she was warmer yesterday, because she had previously been colder in the little quarrel which only her face had had about the Kussewitz watch affair: nothing makes love sweeter and tenderer than a little previous scolding and freezing, just as the grape-clusters acquire by a frost before vintage thinner skins and better must. Secondly, in a high degree of emotion and love the best girls behave just like--good ones.

I have only taken three coffee-cups of Burgundy, because I shall not perhaps need any more for the carnation and red crayon drawing of the afternoon--but O heavens! the night!--It is not my fault if it does not get to the ears of posterity, that most persons in the afternoon, on account of the heat, stayed out of the garden. But they see from the chambers the meadow, the timber-yard of a beautiful evening, where the children were already running round beforehand, carrying off the grass, and opening the feast of trumpets with horn-blowers on beer-siphons. It would be too trifling, if I should remark that several youngsters were stretched out dead by having red caps or crowns shot at them, because they represented hares, the cap-shooter the hunter, and the rest greyhounds; one can, however, take it metaphorically, and then it becomes satirical and edifying enough.

The joy of tender natures is bashful; they would sooner show their wounds than their raptures, because they do not think to deserve either, or they stow both behind the veil of a tear. So was it with Victor, and in every joy he looked with a sigh to the west; I know not whether he thought of the setting of stars and of men, or of the blacks whose chains clank across even to our hemisphere, or on the nearer whites whose sundered chains they resolder with blood.----But this looking towards his _Keblah_[117] constrained him to _earn_ his rapture. That of yesterday and of to-day was so great, that he said with emotion to the genius of the earth: "Such greatness my feeble virtue cannot attain."--It availed him naught, that he sought to magnify himself to his conscience, and represented to it how many fair moments and happy pulsations he here in this _Valley of Seifersdorf_ imparts to his friends and to her, his friend, who through him regains her health, and to the children whom he sees already skipping about and who at evening will do so still more,--it had some effect on his conscience, but still not enough, when he asked it whether, then, he should stop his ears to the sphere-music of these days; whether he had not conquered his passions, and whether the enlargement of a man's sphere and the increase of his activity were not simply in proportion to the greater number of passions he had mastered; so that, accordingly, a maid of honor, nay, even a king, possessed no smaller circle of efficiency than the most useful citizen; and whether man, like very small children, had not been sent into the school of earth to learn to be _still_,--but the sacramental religious war between the old and the new Adam was ended merely by a delight, namely, by the determination, so soon as his father should release him from the manacles and ankle-fetters of the court, to do more cures than the city and country physicians and all _gratis_ and mostly among the poor.----

Only one word, reader! Virtue cannot make one _worthy_ of felicity, but only _worthier_, because existence of itself with us as with the non-moral creatures gives a right to joy,--because Virtue and Joy are incommensurable qualities, and one knows not whether a happy century is earned by a virtuous decade or the latter by the former,--because the years of pleasure forerun the years of virtue, so that the virtuous man, instead of the future, would have first to deserve the past,--instead of heaven, would have first to deserve the earth.

The afternoon glided away like a bright rill, over motley trifles as over golden sand, over little joys and over great hopes, over delicate attentions and over the flower-dust of benevolent refinements which is the best sticking-powder of the heart. Victor felt that a mistress who has much intelligence imparts to love a peculiar piquant taste; she herself felt, that the heart which one has plucked with soft, covered hands, and not with rough clutchings, keeps better, just as Borsdorf apples keep longer which one has picked only with gloves on. Although, according to my tables, love stands the highest precisely on the day after the first kiss, that is at 112° Fahrenh. or 10° De l'Isle: with Victor's love, however, his reverence had risen at the same rate,--and love exalts, when the favors which are shown therein make one not bolder but shyer!--

Our friend felt how happy in joy _self-continence_ makes one, and how much the foaming beaker of joy is cleared up and improved by throwing in a few knife-points of sedative-powder. After an afternoon when the whole hours were charming, without one's being able to single out into prominence any extraordinary minutes,--as the feathers of the pheasant shine not singly, but in whole bunches,--after such an afternoon all went into the garden, but Emanuel first. The East Indian, like ground-sparrows, could not endure the confinement of a room, and was silent therein or only read, and that too merely--which does not surprise me--the tragedies of Shakespeare....

Under the great evening-sky, which no cloud limited, their souls opened like night-violets. Emanuel was the cicerone and gallery-inspector of this picturesque garden. He led his friend and the others to his little flower-garden, which lay highest in the park. That is to say, the park ran down the mountain with _five_ landings and stories slid out as it were from the latter in the manner of drawers. These five plains, these cut-in green steps, bore just so many different gardens, orchards, and shrubbery-gardens, &c.,--hence with every new point of view, as by a kaleidoscope, a new garden was put together out of the old one. The sloping park was enclosed on both sides by two serpentine walks of tall, flaunting, flaming flowers, like two balustrades flowing downward, and behind each flowery serpentine line curled down from the mountain above silvery veins of bright, thin water leaping up and down,[118] which in the evening sun became a gold-snake or artery of ichor lying there in upright sinuosities. On the last and uppermost terrace stood the _evening_- and the _morning-arbors_, like the poles of the garden, opposite to each other, and the _evening-fountain_ gleamed up over the former, and the _morning-fountain_ over the latter, and the two looked across at each other like sun and moon.

And just at the evening-fountain Emanuel had his middle-garden. For he loved, as an East Indian, physical flowers as he did poetic ones, and to him in December a book of flowers was a gently waving flowery lawn, and a catalogus of carnation leaves was to him the hull and chrysalid of summer. He conducted his loved ones over the flowery region of the mountain away through the innocent flowers, which, like good maidens, take neither sun nor soil from another's life for their own,--along by the gold tassel of the tulip,--by the miniature-colors of the forget-me-not,--by the many-colored bells, which are also, like those that _sound_, cast in the moulds of the earth,--by the ear-roses[119] of August, namely, the roses,--by the Cato, not the jolly Englishman, but an auricula that does not flame, (to be had of Herr Klefeker in Hamburg,)--by the beloved Agatha, which reminded one of the other in St. Luna, and which is a beautiful cowslip....

At last they arrived at the evening-bower and at Emanuel's flowers, namely, at the snow-white hyacinths, in whose shadow the irradiated evening-fountain tinged a pale red. O, how sweetly, how sweetly, there, breathed the warmth of the evening sun and the coolness of the evening wind!--But why droop thy eye and head, Clotilda, so sadly here toward the flowers? Is it because the water-column is extinguished, because the sun goes down?--No; but because the white hyacinths, in the language of the florists, mean _Julia_,--O because the churchyard looks over hither, whose tall, swaying wildflowers stand with their roots over two beloved eyes, over the eyes of the pale hyacinth Giulia, who has not lived to see to-day's festival.----But Clotilda concealed herself, so as to disturb nothing.

The last sparkling gold of the water-columns and the evening-blaze flung back from all the windows, turned all eyes toward the sun, who sank behind his stage.--But a rolling fire-wheel of the allegro, with which the harmonists on the meadow accompanied the retiring sun, brought down the eyes to the level of the ears, and below on the veiled meadow there rose a new theatre of joy with new players.... Two roses were planted in heaven, the red, the sun, which unfolded its buds over the second hemisphere, and the white, the moon, which hung low in ours; but sun-gold and lunar silver and evening-slags were as yet absorbed by a smoking magic-haze, and one could not separate the shadows from the silver ground of the moonlight, and blossoms fluttering downward were still confounded with night-butterflies.

The happy party went down through the chestnut avenue to the younger happy ones, the children, who, made more bold by the presence of their mothers, encircled and girdled twenty liberty-trees in changeable groups, and waited only for deeper shadows to dance more briskly. The Englishman was welcomed by Clotilda as a friend of her two friends. The bridal pair, to whom the meadow belonged as an inheritance, had exchanged their own music for this, and their feast of the covenant in its solemnity brought nearer to our hero the joyous day when he too should be able to call his Clotilda a bride; but he had not the courage to turn his blushing face towards her, because he thought she was thinking the same thing, and was red also. Only a lover can sympathize with the inspiration of a bridal pair; and never did fairer wishes go up for one than ascended for this one in two souls full of love. A four-years-old sister of the bride attached herself to Clotilda,--the former was the little Luna of this Venus in her walks,--and the latter gladly discharged her love into the little hand which gave hers the preference over a dancing partner.

And now the moon, by the reflection of the sun wherewith it silvered this children's paradise, gave joy brighter colors, and under the deepened shadows of the May-trees the children's courage grew. All was happy,--all unfettered,--all peaceful,--no poisonous eye flashed lightnings,--not a single roughness disturbed the metrical life,--in melodious march the minutes went sounding onward with silver tone, and sang themselves away, and lingered in the bursting rose-thicket of the evening red.--The bland, fluttering ether of Spring drank its fill of perfume from the blossoms, and bore it like honey into the breast of man.--And as pulses beat fuller, dumb, cooling lightnings played round the clouds of the horizon, and the moon drew vital air[120] from the leaves, in order to convey more healthily thereupon the abstracted spirit of their cups.

Victor and the Englishman and Emanuel and Clotilda, together with some of her female friends, stood below as patron gods of joy beside the children, and were intoxicated by the enjoyment of the young people's delight. Our friend had too holy a love to show (especially to so many strangers and to the Englishman), and laid a bridle on his unmanageable, dancing heart. In noble love the sacrifice--and though it were that love itself--is as agreeable as the enjoyment; but still easier is it near an Emanuel, who--that is the gleaming order-cross of the higher men--precisely in the hour of joy lifts his eyes to the higher life and to the truth. This time, moreover, the feeling of his improving health redoubled his pining after the predicted departure. His glorified countenance, his super-earthly wishes, and his still resignation, constituted, as it were, the second and higher moonlight which fell into the more dim; and he disturbed not in the least the growing elysium, when he said, for example: "Mortal man regards himself as eternal here, because the human race is eternal; but the propelled drop is confounded with the inexhaustible stream; and were it not that new human creatures always spring up after us, each one would feel more deeply the fleetingness of his second[121] of life";--or when he said: "If man is not immortal, then no higher being is either, and the conclusions are the same; in that case the abiding God would burn solitary out of the struggling and expiring sense, like the sun which, if there were no atmosphere, would blaze out of a black heaven, and pierce, but not illuminate, the vaulted night";--or when he said: "The gait of mankind toward the holy city of God is like the gait of certain pilgrims, who, wayfaring toward Jerusalem, always after three steps forward take one backward";--or, finally, when, upon his Victor's remarking, that amendment only removed the great faults, not the fine stings of remorse, and that a saint got as many reproaches from his conscience as the bad man, when he said to this: "Our _distance_ from virtue, like that from the sun, by exact reckonings we always find only _greater_; but still, notwithstanding all our changeable calculations, the sun always pours into our faces the _same_ warmth."

Suddenly the Englishman ran to the players and demanded of them--in order to see the pranks and cranks of his ideas set to music--the best adagio, and hastened up to the "Crape-Tent," which Lord Horion had had built of iron arches, over which was stretched black double crape, in order to convert, for his eyes, which were at that time ailing, the sunshine into moonshine. As every heart at the first touch of the adagio must needs dissolve in tears of bliss, the consequence was that the rapture which sought to veil itself broke up the tranquil circle, and all glided away from each other, in order (each under his own arbor) to smile unseen and sigh unheard,--like patients visiting a medicinal spring they parted, met, avoided each other in accidental directions.

The beautiful blind youth was reclining above not far from the nightingale, as it were at the fountain-head of the streams of harmony, and Clotilda looked upon him pityingly, as often as she passed by him, and thought: "Poor overshadowed soul, the sighs of music distend thy yearning heart, and thou never seest whom thou lovest and who loves thee."--Emanuel went up slowly the long way to his mountain with the weeping birch and back.--Victor roamed about the whole garden; he passed along before veiled obelisks, columns and cubes which better filled the place of stone Fauns; he stepped into the dark evening-bower shaded only by the evening-red, where he was yesterday too happy for a mortal, and too susceptible for an immortal; he pushed through a ring of bushes, out of which and above which towered a gleaming fountain, and closed his eyes to the dazzling light, when he saw therein in artificially embowered pier mirrors a water-bow saturated with lunar silver, arched over a million times in receding and paling curves, and reduced from white rainbows to moon-sickles, and at last to shadows.----

Oh, how often in the dreams of his childhood, in his landscape-pictures which he sketched to himself of the days of Paradise, had he not seen this night and hardly wished for it, because he never hoped to live to see it on the rough earth; and now did this Eden-night, with all blossoms and stars hanging round it, stand out created before him?--And who of us has not in some magically illumined spot or other of his fancy and his hope set up just so grand a night-piece of a future vernal night, when, as in this one, he is made happy _with all friends_ at once (not always alone),--when, as in this one, the night is only thrown as a transparent veil over the day, when the red girdle which the sun laid down on stepping into the sea remains lying till morning glowing on the margin of the earth,--when the long, soul-like tones of the nightingale float aloud through the adagio that melts asunder, and start up out of the echo,--when we meet none but friendly souls, and look on them with rapture, and ask by our smiles, "O thou too art surely as happy as I?" and when the other's smile answers in the affirmative,--a night, O God, when thou hast made our hearts full and yet tranquil, when we neither _doubt_ nor _hate_ nor _fear_, when all thy children repose on thy bosom in thy arms, and hold each other's hands as brothers and sisters, and slumber only with half-closed eyes, in order to smile on each other?----Ah, inasmuch as the sigh wherewith I write and you read this reminds us how seldom such spring nights fall upon our earth, take it not ill of me that I only slowly execute the voluptuous picture of _this_ night that so I may some time in my old days refresh myself by the painted hour of the present inspiration,[122] and may haply be able to say: Ah, thou knewest then, perhaps, that thou shouldst never live to experience such a night, and for that reason wast thou so copious. And what else than petrified blossoms of a clime which is not on our earth, do we dig up out of our fantasy, just as in our North they exhume fossil palms?...

Victor went to the still Julius at the hedge of the nightingale and laid night violets in his hand, and kissed him on the curtained eye, which could not see, yet could weep for joy,--and neighbor nightingale paused not during the kiss. He came up the garden, as Emanuel came down; they looked on each other near the morning fountain, and Emanuel's face gleamed in the reflection of the waves, as if he were standing before the angel of death and dissolving, to die, and he said: "The Infinite One clasps us to-day to himself,--why can I not weep as I am so happy?"--and when they had separated again, he called back to his Victor and said: "See, how blooming-red the evening goes forth toward the morning like a dying man, as if the tones moved it onward,--see, the stars, like blossoms, hang down out of eternity into our earth,--behold the great deep, how many springs bloom to-night on so many thousand earths wheeling therein!"--