Chapter II: Part 2

I confess I am an enemy to these relative conclusions, because they take as much from truth as they give to eloquence, for contrary opinions can be proved by them. To one whose eyes are hurt by a grain of sand, I can prove that he is comparatively happy, as there are many in the world who suffer from sand-blisters and gravel; and also that he is unfortunate, as Sultanic eyes are never pressed by anything harder than Circassian eyelids--or two rosy lips. Thus I can make the world immense in comparison to bullets, grains of poison, or round puddings, or minute, if placed beside Jupiter, the sun, or the milky-way. If the ephemera on the ladder of existence would turn its back on the brilliant development of the beings above it, and only count the important ones on the steps beneath it, it would increase in its own importance. In short, our oratorical fantasy continually mistakes the distinction between more and less for that of something or nothing; but every relative conclusion must be based on something positive, which only eternal eyes, which can measure the whole range of innumerable degrees, can truly weigh. Indeed, there must be some bodily substance, and were it even the earth; for every comparison, every measurement, presupposes a fixed, unchanging standard. Therefore, the ephemeral development is a true one, and the conclusions on it are the same as on a seraphic one. The difference in the degrees can only bring forth _relative_, not _opposite_ conclusions. And here, in this letter--for in print I would not dare to do it--I will acknowledge a doubt. No one has ever _seen_ the steps of the ladder of beings above us,--no one has _counted_ those beneath us. What if the former were less, the latter greater, than we have hitherto imagined. The eternal promotion of souls from angels to archangels, in short, the nine philosophical hierarchies have only been asserted, but not proved. The common opinion, that the immense difference between man and the Eternal must be filled up by a chain of spiritual giants, is false; as no chain can shorten the distance, much less fill it, for it will ever retain the same width; and the seraph, i. e. the highest finite being according to human thoughts, must imagine just as many, if not more, beings above him, as I do beneath me. Astronomy, this sawing machine of suns, this ship's wharf and laboratory of earths, would persuade us that the _enlargement_ of worlds and beings is a sign of their improvement. But over the whole sky there hang only earth and fire-balls, and all things on them, from milk-way to milk-way, are less than the wishes and longings of our hearts. Then why should our earth alone, why not every other also, be progressing? why should they, rather than we, have the start in this inaugural eternity? In short, it may be disputed if in the whole universe there are other angels and archangels than Victor and Jean Paul. It seems scarcely credible to me. But truly the _melodious_ progression to sublime beings has hitherto been merely taken for granted. I believe in a _harmonious_ one, in an eternal ascension, but in no created culmination.

I presume Karlson intended to answer my argument, not on the seraphs, but on ephemera, when Nadine, who had borrowed the fly in order to examine it, held it too near her eyes, and thereby disturbed and extinguished our Mendelssohn-Platonic conversation. For Madame Berlier (such was the noble name of our temporary hostess) stepped up to Nadine, and said: "It is a pity for the pain. You must take the wart-locust, I have proofs," do you understand? It is this. The so-called wart-eater, a locust with light brown spots, takes away a wart in a very short time by a single bite. Dame Berlier, over whom, as over most Southrons, beauty had greater power than self-love and sex, had falsely imagined that Nadine wished to annihilate the only fault in her charming form with the fly. The Chaplain had scarcely heard the wart-eater mentioned, when he vanished among the green, and commenced a hunt for wart-locusts. I was vexed that I had known the remedy as well as Dame Berlier, and never thought of it. For a shabby simile I should have easily recollected it, but not for a useful cure. Fortune permitted him soon to return with the winged wart-operator; this excited my envy. When he gave it to Nadine, the officious Phylax had squeezed, with the letter and paper press of his hands, like in a good calendar-press, the brown spotted vegetable-eater to--death. The animal could bite no more; I immediately darted off in search of another, and soon returned, holding one by the tips of its wings, and said, I would myself hold it over the wart until he would operate on it. While performing the action I praised it. Every great deed, I said, is only accomplished in the soul, at the moment of determination; when it comes outward and is repeated by the body,--which holds the locust,--it disperses into insignificant movements and thirds; but when it is done, as now the operation, it becomes great again, and, ever increasing, flows onward through all time. Thus the Rhine rushes like a giant from its summit, disperses in the fog, falls as rain upon the plain, then it forms itself into clouds, and roams over the sands, and carries suns instead of rainbows.

It need not be concealed from you that it affected me to look into the retina of two such bright and warm, upturned eyes, without mentioning the whole warlike array of curls and lips, and forehead, and the Waterloo landscapes of the cheeks. Nadine's terror at the teeth of the brown little doctor made her more charming, and the danger of my situation greater. After holding it for some time, when I thought the operation was finished, she told me the locust had not yet touched her, as I held it two or three Parisian feet too far from the wart. It is true, I had lost myself in her net skin; but I remarked that the cure could not be accomplished, if I did not rest the ball of my right hand slightly on her cheek, in order to hold the wart-eater more firmly over the wart. Now he bit the required wound, and propelled into it as much of his corrosive fluid as he carried with him. I artfully diverted Nadine's pain, which resembled that of a pin pricking, by philosophizing. Man, I said, finds the stoic theory true and forcible for all pain, only not for the present. And when he bleeds from cut wounds, he imagines bruises heal more easily. He therefore defers his practice of the stoic-school until his own schooling is over. O, but then he stands by a running stream, waiting until the waters shall have passed. True firmness bears the bite of a locust, and rejoices at the trial!

Now the operation was happily accomplished, which could easily excite an illness in me. It is true that her countenance had inflicted a deeper wound on me than the wart-eater upon it,--I should fear and examine whether mine, which was just as near to hers, had done as much damage; but Nadine is exceedingly--young. The hearts of young girls, like new waterbutts, at first let everything drop through, until in time, the vessels swell and thus retain their contents.

506th STATION.

Objections To Immortality.--The Second Childhood of the
Outer and Inner Man.

We broke up and proceeded. On high, light feathers floated through the sky, like the loose-flowing hair of the sun, which could not veil it. The day became hotter and stiller. But our path lay beneath a green roof, and each branch spread over us a parasol of broad fresh leaves.

Gione asked, "Can we not continue our conversation in walking?" O, your Clotilde should know her; she has, excepting her charms, half her soul. No discord exists between her outer and inner harmony; her earnest, generous soul resembles the palm-tree, which has neither bark nor branches, but which bears broad foliage and buds on its summit. "Gione," said Nadine, "these arguments unsettle our minds, instead of removing our doubts." "No one," she replied, "has yet given his opinion; if we even have the firmest convictions, still by their beautiful conformity with another's convictions our own become more beautiful and firm." "Just as water-plants, surrounded by their water, are yet as much refreshed by rain as land plants are," said Myrtil (I am Myrtil).

Wilhelmi said, just as we were passing through the Midsummer's-day night of a grotto cooled by oakshade and cascades: "Our conversation would better suit a total eclipse of the sun. I would that I could see one, when the moon hangs beauteously before the midday sun, when the noisy day is suddenly hushed, when the nightingales sing, the flowers fade, and when nightly mists and shuddering cold and dew fall." Phylax had now let slip his sofa-cushion into a murmuring spring; Nadine saw it, and, not to confuse him in the act of drawing it out, she, with charming zeal, drove us back to our conversation. Her intercourse with the world had given her a playful, light, ever-joyous exterior. But Gione's style, like the highest Grecian, is, artistically speaking, somewhat meagre and spare,--and the ball-rooms had made her, as mahogany presses make dresses, more agreeable. But her exterior charms did not contradict or injure her interior beauty.

I said to Karlson, "Pray, prove to us the spiritual mortality, this soul's death." "M. Karlson needs not do that," answered the stupid Phylax, vexed at the wet cushion, "only the assertor must prove."

"Very well," I said, "I call proofs objections, but I shall certainly give you only two;--firstly, the proof or objection: the simultaneous decay and destruction of the body and of the soul; secondly, the absolute impossibility of ascertaining the mode of life of a future existence, or as the Chaplain would say, to see into the spiritual world from the sensuous one. Now, M. Karlson, throw your two bombs into the greatest possible angles, which, according to Hennert, is 40 degrees, but according to Bezout, 43 degrees."

He aimed well. He showed how the spiritual Dryad flowered, burst and dispersed with the corporeal bark, how the noblest impulses are chained to the lead--earth, revolving wheel of the body; how memory, imagination, and madness only feed on the egg-yolk of the brain,--how bravery and mildness stand in as opposite degree to blood as leeches and Jews;[16] how, in age, the inner and outer man together bend towards the grave, together petrify, together, like metal compositions, _slowly_ cool, and at last together die!

He then asked why, with the continual experience that every bodily down-bending digs a spiritual wound, and with this unceasing parallel of body and soul, we give to the latter, after death, everything which we have seen annihilated in the former. He said, and I believe it, that neither Bonnet's underbody, nor the incorporated soul corsets of Plattner (the "second soul organ") can diminish the difficulty of the question, for as both soul's under-garments or night-gowns and pinafores, always share, in life, the good and bad fate of the coarse, corporeal coat and martyr-cloak, and as in us double-cased English watches, the works, and the first and second cases (Bonnet's and Plattner's) always suffered and gained together, it would be absurd to seek the Iliad of the future world in the narrow hazel-nut shell of the _revived_ little body which has first stood and fallen with the coarse outward one.

I then asked him to aim his second ball in the angle of forty degrees also. I added, that "I would have begged leave to give a long parliamentary speech on it, but that long speeches have a life and reproducing power, as, according to Reaumuer, long animals more easily re-form themselves, when cut, than short ones." Though certainly it occurs to me, that Unzer says, tall persons do not live as long as short ones. But Karlson needed little time or power to prove the uncertainty of the next world. The Sun-land behind the hillocks of the God's acre, behind the pest-cloud of Death, is covered by a complete, an impenetrable darkness of twelve inches, or of as many holy nights. He showed, and not badly, what an immense leap beyond all terrestrial analogies and experiences it is, to hope for, i. e. to create, a world, a transcendent Arcadia, a world of which we know neither copy nor original, which wants no less than a form and a name, map and globe, another Vespucius Americus, of which neither chemistry nor astronomy can give us the compounds or the quarters; a universe of air, on which, from the leaf-stripped, faded soul, a new body will bud forth, i. e. a nothing on which nothing is to embody itself.

O, my good Karlson! how could your noble soul omit a second world which is already contained in this physical first one, like bright crystals in dark earth, namely, the sun-world of _Virtue_, _Truth_, and _Beauty_,[17] glowing in our souls, whose golden vein inexplicably extends its ramification through the dark, dirty clump of the sensuous world.

It was now my turn to answer: "I will lessen your two difficulties, and then I will give my innumerable proofs. You are no materialist,[18] you therefore take for granted that bodily and mental activity only accompany and mutually excite each other. Yes, the body represents the keys of the inner Harmonica through all its scales. Hitherto only the corporeal outward signs have been called feelings, as the swelling heart and the slowly-beating pulse--longing; the outpouring of gall, anger, and so on. But the net-like texture, the anastomy between the inner and outer man, is so life-full, so warm, that to every _picture_, every _thought_,--a nerve, a fibre must move. We should also observe, and put into the notes of speech all the bodily after sounds of poetic, algebraic, artistic, numismatic, and anatomic ideas. But the sounding-board of the body is neither the soul's scale nor its harmony. Grief has no resemblance to a tear,--shame, none to the cheek-imprisoned blood,--wit, none to champagne,--the idea of this valley, none to its portrait on the retina. The inner man, this God, hidden in the statue, is not of marble as it is, but in the stony limbs, the living ones grow and ripen in an unknown life. We do not sufficiently mark how the inner man even tames and forms the outer one; how, for example, the passionate body which, according to physiology, should ever increase in heat, is gradually cooled and extinguished by principles,--how terror, anger, holds the dividing texture of the body in a spiritual grasp. When the whole brain is paralyzed, every nerve rusty and exhausted, and the soul carrying leaden weights, man needs but to _will_ (which he can do every moment), he needs only a letter, a striking idea, and the fibre-work of the soul's mechanism proceeds again without help from the body."

Wilhelmi said, "Then the soul is but a watch which winds itself." "There must always be some _perpetuum mobile_," I said, "for all things have moved for an eternity already. The question is, either the soul never winds off, or it is its own watchmaker. I return to the subject. If a ruptured life-vein in the fourth brain-chamber of a Socrates place the whole land of his ideas and moral tendencies in a blood-bath, these ideas and moral tendencies will surely be covered with blood-water, but not spoilt by it; because not the drowned brains were virtuous and wise, but his _self_ was, and because the dependence of a watch on its case for protection from dust, &c. does not prove the identity of the two, or that the watch consists only of cases. As spiritual exertions are not bodily ones, but only _precede_ or _follow_ them; and as every spiritual activity leaves traces, not only in the soul, but also in the body; must, then, if apoplexy or age destroy corporeal activity,--must the soul's fire be therefore quenched? Is there no difference between the soul of a _childish_ old man, and that of a _child_? Must the soul of Socrates, imprisoned in Borgia's body as in a mud-bath, lose its moral powers, and does it suddenly change its virtuous qualities for vicious ones? Or shall in left-handed wedlock (which has no common property of body and soul) the one conjugal half only share the gains, not also the losses of the other? Shall the ablactated soul feel only the blooming, not also the faded body? And if it does, the earth surrounding it must, as our earth does to the superior planets, give it the reflection of our advancing and retrograding. If we shall ever be disembodied, the slow hand of time, that is, ever encroaching age, must do it. If our course is not to be concluded in one world, the gulf between it and the second must always appear to us a grave. The _short_ interruption to our progress by age, and the _longer_ one by death, destroy this progress as little as the _shortest_ interruption by sleep. We anxiously suppose--as the first man did--the _total_ sun-eclipse of sleep to be the _night_ of death, and this again the _doomsday_ of the world."

"That must yet be proved, although I believe it," replied Phylax.

New beauties prevented my answering, and closed the 506th Station.

(P. S.--I have been told the Chaplain has declared that he had purposely not replied to several of my arguments, but he hoped he could see them in print, and then he would publish his opinions. But he will scarcely live until this letter is printed, and he will answer it.)

507th STATION.

The Theft of the Souvenir.--Answers to Previous Stations.--On the
Emigration of the Dead to the Planets.--The Threefold World in
Man.--Grief without Hope.--The Seal of Immortality.--The
Country-seat.--The Balloons.--Ecstasy.

When it is three o'clock, and a wandering Arcadian council is very well but somewhat warm, when the narrowing Adour, which has its source at the end of the Valley, flows round a projecting tongue of land, and draws its silver gauze cover over the pale moon reposing on its breast,[19] when round this slip of earth, this flowery anchoring place, half water scene, half bowling green, a broadleaved oak arcade grows, beneath which trembles a sun-gilt shadow, gliding from between the branches of the trees, on to the grass, embroidered by the restless, roving, gay-colored sand, on the book of nature--its insects, when the hammering in the shining marble blocks, the living Alp-horns, the bleating pasture-sheep, and the murmuring of waves fill the heart to its topmost branches and up to the brim with life-balsam, and the head with life-spirit; and when so many beauties are heard and seen,--living beauties who walk are inclined to sit down on the slip of earth, after the cushion-carriers have placed their burdens as resting-places for their arms.

My dear Victor! all this came to pass.

While sitting, long speeches were not as practicable as while walking. Even before, when we, from some distance, were choosing this spot for a resting-place, they had suffered considerably. I remained on the shore near Nadine, whose cheeks, reflected in the shadow-painted waves, appeared a charming pale red, as though a cochineal had bled to death on them. The walk and her red parasol had been too great colorists.

My dear brother, I am preparing to fall in love. The operation on the wart was unimportant as a corner-piece of vexation, as negative electricity; but warts have their good points.

Nadine plucked roses and other flowers. I drew an empty jewel-box from my pocket,--it was empty, like the 9th Kurstuhl, the Elias chair,[20] or the _limbus patrum_,--and held it under them, begging her to shake the flowers, that I might catch the millipeds,[21] which, like tallow candles, are more suitable for the eye than the nose. I caught a whole germanic diet of these creatures from the fragrant flower-cups, and imprisoned them in the box.

During the flower-toying, which brought us nearer to each other, a small cockchafer fell on my skin. I looked round for the flowers and could find nothing till I saw, protruding from Nadine's left pocket, a souvenir, filled with sweet-smelling herbs. To steal from a beautiful woman is often nothing else than to give to her. I thought it fit, secretly to take the scented pocket-book in order to make a scent-bottle, and a joke of it in future. I so arranged the theft, that the Baron perceived my hand, holding the book, retreating from the pocket.

The souvenir, thought I, may occasion some scene; meanwhile I can smell at it. I indemnified her for the loss of the scent-bag by the millipeds, whose prison I immediately insinuated into her pocket. The Baron was witness.

Wilhelmi said, when we rose: "In the evening we shall be separated and deafened by the carriages. If something has yet to be decided--"

"Something?" replied Phylax,--"everything has to be decided. M. Jean Paul, you have yet to raise M. Karlson's second difficulty." "Raise?" I asked, "I am to raise the cover of the whole future world? I am but going _towards_ it, not coming _from_ it. But this dissimilarity between the present and the future world, its inconceivable magnitude, has made many apostates. Not the bursting of our bodily doll-skin in death, but the wide disparity between the present autumn and the future spring, raises such overwhelming doubts in our poor, timid breasts. This is shown by the savages, who consider the future life merely as the second volume, the new testament of the first, and make no greater distinction between the first and second life than between youth and age: they easily believe in all their hopes; your _first_ difficulty, the bursting and fading of the bodily polish, does not deprive the savage of the hope to bud anew in another flower-vase. But your second difficulty daily increases itself, and its advocates, for by the increasing proofs and apparatus of chemistry and physiology, the future world is daily more effectually annihilated and dispersed, as it cannot be brought within play of a sun-microscope or of a chemical furnace. In fact, not only the reality, but also the theory of the body, not only the practised measurement of its longings, but also the pure moral philosophy of its spirit-world, must darken and make difficult the prospect on the inner world from the outer one. Only the moralist, the physiologist, the poet, and the artist more readily comprehend our inner world; but the chemist, the physician, and the mathematician want both seeing and hearing faculties for it, and in time, even eyes and ears.

"On the whole, I find fewer men than one would imagine who decidedly believe in, or deny, the existence of a future world. Few dare to deny it, as for them this life would then lose all unity, form, peace, and hope;--few dare to believe it, for they are startled at their own purification and at the destruction of the lessened earth. The majority, according to the promptness of alternating feelings, waver poetically between both beliefs.

"As we paint Devils more easily than Gods, Furies than Venus Urania, Hell than Heaven, we can more easily believe in the former than in the latter,--in the greatest misfortune than in the greatest happiness. Must not our spirit, used to misgivings and earth chains, be startled at a Utopia against which earth will be shipwrecked, that the lilies of it, like the Guernsey lilies,[22] may find the shore to bloom on, which saves and satisfies, elevates and makes blessed, our much tormented humanity.

"I now come to your difficulty. I imagine, if even we were to take the grave to be merely the moat of communication between allied globes, our ignorance concerning the second world should not terrify us, and we need not take for granted that the mountain ridge of humanity does not continue under the Dead Sea, merely because we cannot see through its waters, for do not all mountain ridges continue on the bottom of the ocean? What! man will guess at _worlds_, when he cannot even guess _world-quarters_! Would the Greenlander paint a Negro, a Dane, a Greek, in his mind's eye, without ever having seen one? Can the political genius divine the inner versifications of the poetic one, without experience? Can the Abderite imagine the architecture of the sage? Would we have guessed the existence of but one of the animal creations of Anthropomorphism which copy the human figure in all animals, and yet change it? Or could a bodiless self, placed in a vacuum, with all existing logic and metaphysic, ever have conceived but a single vein of its present embodification and humanification?"

"But what are you asserting or denying?" asked Wilhelmi.

"I only assert that a second life on another planet cannot be denied, merely because we are unable to map out the planet, and portray its inhabitants. But we need no other planet."

The Baron said: "O, I have often dreamed delicious dreams of this '_grande tour_' through the stars! It seemed the progression of a student from one class to another,--the classes being worlds."

"But," replied Karlson, "to all these worlds, as upon our own, you will be refused admittance if you arrive without a body. By what miracle will you obtain one?"

"_By a repeated one_," I answered. "For by a miracle we have our present body. But we can say in favor of this planet wandering, that our eyes too widely separate the worlds of which each one is but an _element_ of the infinite _integral whole_. The different worlds and their satellites above and around us, are only far removed world-quarters. The moon is but a smaller, more distant America, and space is the ocean."

Nadine said: "One day I so pictured the inhabitants of a lemon-tree to myself. The worm on the leaf may think it is on the green earth, the second worm on the white bud is on the moon, and the one on the lemon believes itself to be upon the sun."

"And yet this," said I, "is but a tree of immeasurable life. As around the earth-kernel cling wider and finer covers,--the earth, the seas, the air and space,--so the giant of one world is surrounded by increasingly large ones, with ever larger arms. The longest shell is the finest one, as light and the attractive power. The beauteous covering elongates and rarefies itself from iron bands to pearl ties, from flower-chains to rainbows and milky-ways."

"Will we not now descend from the milky-way," said Karlson, "for we cannot ascend it. It is precisely this uniformity of the universe which forbids the rambling of emigrants from the earth. Every planet already has its own crew; more dense ones, as for instance Mercury, may be peopled with real sailors."

"Precisely as Kant supposes!" said Phylax.

"Finer, less solid ones, as e. g. Uranus, only with the most tender beings, perhaps only with women and nuns who love not the sun. He who intends to rectify the so-called soul or spirit by distilling it from one planet to the other, may with as much justice assert, that the spirits of the slacked Mercury receive their dephlegmation in a distilling process through our earth,--in short, that the earth is the second world for Mercury and Venus. The dead of the arctic zones could even pass into the temperate ones (it would be _distillatio per latus_), for on all planets there can be no other than coarser or finer _human beings_[23] like ourselves."

Karlson waited for an answer and a contradiction, but I said his opinion was also mine. "I have still a stronger reason," I continued, "against emigration to, and voyage picturesque through, the planets, because we carry and lock up a heaven of starry light in our own breasts, for which no dirty earth-ball is clean or large enough. But on this subject I must have permission to speak uninterruptedly, at least until we have passed all these cornfields."

Our pleasure-trip now was an alley of magic gardens, our passage through a golden sea of corn-blades, was accompanied and surrounded on all sides by a promised land, in which solitary houses reposed beneath picturesquely grouped leaf groves, as in Italy sleepers take their siestas on shaded meads. I was permitted to speak.

"There is an inner, heart-contained spirit-world, which breaks through the dark clouds of the body-world as a warm sun. I mean the inner universe of _virtue_, _beauty_, and _truth_; three soul-worlds and heavens, which are neither parts, nor shoots, nor cuttings, nor copies of the outer one. We are less astonished at the inexplicable existence of these three transcendent heavens, because they are ever floating before us, and because we foolishly imagine we _create_ them, while we merely _recognize_ them. After which copy, with what plastic material, and of what, could we create and insert in ourselves[24] this same spirit-world? Let the atheist ask himself how he conceived the giant ideal of a God, which he either denies or embodies? An idea which has not been built upon comparative greatness and degrees, for it is the contrary of every measure and of every created greatness. In short, the atheist denies the great _original_ of the _copy_.[25]

"As there are idealists of the outer world who believe that perception makes objects, instead of that objects cause perception, so there are idealists of the inner world, who deduct the _being_ from the _seeming_, the _sound_ from the _echo_, the _fact_ from its _appearance_; instead of, on the contrary, the seeming from the being, our consciousness from the objects of it. We mistake our power of analyzing our inner world, for its preformation, i. e. the genealogist thinks himself both originator and founder.

"This inner universe, which is still more glorious and admirable than the outer one, needs another heaven than the one above us, and a higher world than one a sun now shines upon. Therefore we rightly say, not a second earth or globe, but a second _world_,--another beyond the universe."

Gione already interrupted me: "And every virtuous and wise being is in himself a proof of immortality." "And every one," added Nadine, quickly, "who suffers innocently."

"Yes, it is that," said I, with emotion, "which extends our line of life through countless ages. The chord of _Virtue_, _Truth_, and _Beauty_, taken from the music of the spheres, calls us from this dark oppressive earth, and announces to us the nearness of a more melodious existence. _Why_, and _from whence_ were these _super-earthly_ wants and longings created in us, if only, like swallowed diamonds, slowly to cut through our earthy shell. Why was a being endowed with wings of light chained to this dirty clump of earth, if it were to rot in its birth-clod, without ever being freed from it by means of its ethereal wings?"

Wilhelmi said, "I also like to dream the dream of a second life in the sleep of this first one. But may not our beautiful spiritual powers have been given to us for the _enjoyment_ and _preservation_ of the present life?"

"For its preservation?" I said. "Then an angel has been locked in the body to be the mute servant and fire-lighter, butler, cook, and porter of the stomach? Would not brutish souls have sufficed to drive man-bodies to the fruit-tree and the spring? Shall the pure ethereal flame only dry and bake the bodily patent stove with life-warmth, while it now slakes and dissolves it? For every tree of knowledge is the poison-tree of the body, and every mental refinement a slow-poison chalice. But, on the contrary, want is the iron key of freedom, the stomach is the manure-filled hot-house or manufactory of human blood, and the various animal instincts are but the earthy, soiled steps to the Grecian temple of our spiritual elevation.

"For _enjoyment_ you said also. That means, we received the palate and appetite of a god, with the food for an animal. That portion of us which is of earth, and creeps on worm-folds, may and can, like the earthworm, be fed and fattened on earth. Exertion, bodily pain, the burning hunger of necessity, and the tumult of our senses exclude and choke the spiritual autumn bloom of humanity in nations and classes. All these conditions of terrestrial existence must be fulfilled ere the soul may claim its due. To the unhappy, therefore, who must be the business men and carriers of their bodily wants, the whole inner world seems but as an imaginary gilt cobweb, like the man who, breathing only the electrical _atmosphere_, instead of feeling the spark, thinks to grasp an invisible web. But when our necessary _animal servitude_ is over, when the barking inner dog-kennel is fed, and the dog-fight finished, then the inner man demands his nectar and ambrosia, and if he is turned off with earth-food only, he changes to an angel of Death, and a Hellfiend, driving himself to suicide, or makes of him a poison-mixer who destroys all joy.[26] The eternal hunger _in_ man, the insatiability of his heart, wants not a _richer_, but a _different_ food, fruit, not grass. If our wants referred but to the degree, not to the quality, then the imagination, at least, might paint a _degree of satiety_. But imagination cannot make us happy, by showing us innumerable heaps of treasures, if they be other than _Virtue_, _Truth_, and _Beauty_."

"But the more beautiful soul?" asked Nadine. I answered, "This discrepancy between our wishes and our circumstances, the heart and the earth, will remain, an _enigma_, if we are immortal, and would be a blasphemy if we decay. Ah! how could the beautiful soul be happy? Strangers, born on mountains and living in lowland places, pine in an incurable homesickness. We belong to a higher place, and therefore an eternal longing consumes us, and every music is our soul's Swiss _ranz des vaches_. In the morning of life, the joys which hearken to the anxious wishes of our hearts are seen blooming for us in later years. When we have attained these years, we turn on the deceitful spot, and see behind us, pleasure blooming in the strong hopeful youth, and we enjoy instead of our _hopes_, the _recollections of our hopes_. Joy in this also resembles the rainbow, which in the morning shines over evening, and in the evening arches over the east. The _eye_ may reach the _light_, but the arm is short, and holds but the fruit of the soil."

"And this proves?" asked the Chaplain.

"Not that we are unhappy, but that we are immortal, and that the second world in us demands, and proves a second world beyond us. O, how much might not be said of this second life whose commencement is so clearly shown in the first one, and which so strangely doubles us! Why is Virtue too exalted to make us, and, what is more, others (sensually) happy? Why does the incapability of being useful on earth (as the expression is) increase with a certain higher purity of character, as, according to Herschel, there are suns which have no earth? Why is our heart tortured, dried, consumed, and at last broken by a slow burning fever of ceaseless love for an unattainable object, only alleviated by the hope that this _consumption_, like a physical one, must one day be sheltered and raised by the _ice cover_ of death?"

"No," said Gione, with more emotion in her eye than in her voice, "it is not ice, but lightning. When our heart lies a sacrifice on the altar, fire from heaven consumes it as a proof that the offering is accepted."

I know not why her calm voice so painfully disturbed my whole soul (not only my argument). Even Nadine's eyes, which triumphed over her own sorrows, were suffused with tears by her sister's, and, although she is generally more timid and fastidious than Gione, in passing a little garden, she raised from a projecting hairy potato-stalk, a large moth, and showed it to us with a firm mouth, which should have been softened by a smile.

It was the so-called Death's-head. I stroked the flat, drooping wings, and said, "It come? from Egypt, the land of mummies and graves; it bears a _memento mori_ on its back, and a _miserere_ in its plaintive voice." "In the mean time it is a butterfly, and visits the nectaries, which we day-birds will do also," appropriately observed Wilhelmi; but he took the words out of my mouth.

Gione's countenance again expressed thoughtful calmness, and to me she became immeasurably beautiful and grand by the stillness of her grief. You once said that the female soul, though it be pierced with burning shafts, must never beat its wings convulsively together, else, like other butterflies, it would destroy their beauty. How true is this!

Nadine's eyes seldom shone without at last overflowing, and every sorrowful emotion remained long in her heart, because she tried to guard against it. She resembled those springs which take a temperature opposed to the time of day, and which are warmest in the cool evening. She turned to me and said, putting her hand in her left pocket, "I will show you some poetry which will prove your prose." While she was seeking it, she stood still with her companion Wilhelmi. He guessed before I did, that she intended to give me something from the Souvenir, and when, in its stead, she took the milliped's prison from her pocket, he obligingly said, "If not with my hands yet with my eyes I assisted at the theft, and as accomplice I beg for mercy." The serious apology for this foolishness scarcely suited our earnest tone of mind. I said, "I wished to cause a more useless, than pardonable joke, but I--" She did not allow me to conclude, but mildly and unchanged (except by a reproving and a forgiving smile) she showed me in the aromatic book the noble Karlson's requiem on the death of the exalted Gione. I willingly give you the prosaic echo of it, from my prosaic memory.

GRIEF WITHOUT HOPE.

What cloud is that, which like the clouds of the tropics, passes from morn to eve, and then sets? It is humanity. Is that the magnet-mountain covered with the nails of wrecked ships? No, it is the great Earth, strewed with the bones of fallen men.

Ah! why did I love? I had not then lost so much!

Nadine, give me thy grief, for it contains hope. Thou standest by thy crushed sister, who dissolves even beneath the winding-sheet, and lookest upwards to the trembling stars, and thinkest: Above, O dearest one, thou dost reside, and on the suns we find again our hearts, and the small tears of life will be over.

But mine remain, and burn in the dim eye. My cypress alley is not open, and discloses no heaven. Human blood paints the fluid figure called man on the monument, as oil on marble forms forests; Death wipes away the man, and leaves the stone. O Gione! I would have some consolation, if thou wert but far away from us all, on a clouded forest, in a cave of the Earth, or on the most distant world in space. But thou art gone, thy soul is dead, not only thy life and thy body.

See, Nadine, on the judgment-seat of Time lies the crushed angel, with the death color of the spirit-world. Gione has lost all her virtues, her love, her patience, her strength, her all-embracing heart, and her rich mind: the thunderbolt of Death has destroyed the diamond, and now the wax statue of the body slowly melts beneath the soil.

Serpent of Eternity, quickly take away the beautiful form, as the larger serpent first poisons and then devours man. But I, Gione, stand beside your ruins with unalleviated pain, with undestroyed soul; and grieving, think of you until I also dissolve. And my grief is noble and deep, for I have no hope! May thy invisible shadow-picture, like the new moon with the sun,[27] arise to heaven in my soul! And may the creative wheel of Time, which raises innumerable hearts, and fills them with blood, only to pour them again into the grave, and let them die, pour out my life slowly, for long time would I mourn for thee, thou lost one!

I cannot tell you, dearest Victor, how horrible and fearful the eternal snow of annihilating death seemed to me, placed beside the noble form it should have covered; how frightful the thought: if Karlson is right, the last day has torn this never happy, innocent soul from the prisons upon the earth to the closer ones beneath it: man too often carries his errors as his truths only as word arguments, not as feelings. But let the disbeliever of immortality imagine a life of sixty minutes instead of sixty years, and let him try if he can bear to see loved, noble, or wise men only aimless, hour-long air-phantoms, hollow thin shadows which fly towards the light and are consumed by it, and who, without path, trace, or aim, after a short flight, dissolve into their former night. No; even over him steals a supposition of immortality. Else a black cloud would forever hang over his soul, and the earth would quake beneath him when he trod on it, as if he were a Cain.

I continued, but all arguments were poetized into feelings. "Yes, if all forests of this earth were pleasure grottoes, all valleys Campan, all islands holy, all fields Elysian, and all eyes sparkling, yes, then--no, even then the Eternal One would have given to our souls the promise of a future life, even in the blessedness of the present one. But now, O God! when so many houses are mourning ones, so many fields battle-fields, so many cheeks pale, and when we pass so many sunken, red, torn, closed eyes,--O, can death be but the last destroying whirlwind? And when at last, after thousand, thousand years, our earth is dried up by the sun's heat, and every living sound on its surface silenced, will an immortal spirit look down on the silent globe, and, gazing on the empty hearse moving slowly on, say: 'There the churchyard of humanity flies into the crater of the sun; on that burning heap many shadows, and dreamers, and wax-figures, have wept and bled, but now they are all melted and consumed: Fly into the sun, which will also dissolve thee, thou silent desert with thy swallowed tears, with thy dried-up blood!' No, the crushed worm dares raise himself to his Creator, and say: 'Thou canst not have made me only to suffer.'"

"And who gives the worm the right to this demand?" asked Karlson.

Gione answered, gently, "The Eternal One himself, who gives us charity and who speaks in all our souls to calm us, and who alone has created in us our demands to Him and our hope in Him."

This good sweet word could still not calm all the waves of my excited soul. From a distant house, turtle-doves sent after us trembling, soul-felt plaints. About my tear-filled inward eye assembled all those forms whose hearts were without guilt and without joy,[28] who attained no single wish here below, and who, sinking under the frost and snow-storm of fate, only longed, like persons freezing to death, to sleep; and all those forms who have loved too deeply, and lost too much, and whose wounds were never cured until death had widened them, like a cracked bell which retains its hollow sound until the crevice is made larger, and the beings nearest me, and many other female ones, whose exquisitely tender souls fate most consecrates to torture, as Narcissus is consecrated to the God of Hell. I also remembered your true remark, that you had never pronounced the words _pain_ and _the past_ before a woman, without hearing an almost inaudible sigh at the union of the two words, from the suffering heart; for woman on the narrower stage of her plans, with idealized wishes and desires built on others' worth, rather than on her own, has a thousand times more disappointments to suffer than we men.

The sun sank deeper behind the mountains, and giant shadows, like mighty birds of prey, came coldly down upon us from the eternal snow. I took Karlson's hand in mine, and looked with tearful eyes into his manly, beautiful countenance, and said, "O Karlson! on what a blooming, grand world you throw an immeasurable gravestone, which no time can lift! Are two difficulties,[29] based too on the _necessary ignorance_ of man, sufficient to overthrow a belief, which explains thousand greater difficulties, without which our existence is without aim, our sufferings without explanation, and the holy Trinity in our breast three furies, and three terrible contradictions? A tending God's hand, leading and feeding the inner man (the child of the outer one), teaching him to go and to speak, educating, refining him, is shown in all things, from the shapeless earthworm to the brilliant human face, from the chaotic nations of the primitive ages to the present century, from the first faint pulsation of the invisible heart to its full, bold, throbbing pulse in manhood,--and why? That when man stands upright and exalted, a beautiful demi-god, even amid the ruins of his old body temple, the club of Death may annihilate the demi-god forever? And on the eternal sea, on which the least drop throws immeasurable rings, on this sea a life-long rising and a life-long falling of the soul should have the same termination, namely, the end of all things,--annihilation?[30] And as, from the same cause, the souls of all other worlds must fall and die with ours, and of this shroud and crape-veiled immeasurability nothing remain but the ever-sowing and never-reaping solitary world-spirit, who sees one eternity mourn for another, there can be no aim and no object in the whole spiritual universum, for the purpose of the development of succeeding or successive ephemera is no progress for the vanished ephemera, scarcely even for the last one which can never exist.[31] And you take for granted all these enigmas and contradictions by which all the strings of creation, not only its harmony, are torn, because two difficulties present themselves to you, which _cannot any better_ explain mortality ... Dearest Karlson, you would bring your eternally jarring discord into this harmony of the spheres! See how calmly the day goes, how grandly the night sets in; did you not think that our spirit will rise one day from its grave of ashes, when you saw the mild pale moon rise grandly from the crater of Vesuvius?" ... The sun stood on the mountains, about to plunge into the sea and swim to the new world. Nadine embraced her sister with emotion, and said, "O, we love each other forever and immortally, dearest sister." Karlson accidentally touched the chords of the lyre which he carried: Gione took it from him with one hand, gave him the other, and said, "You are the only one among us who is tormented by this melancholy belief,--and you deserve to have one so beautiful!"

This word of concealed love overpowered his long-filled heart, and two burning drops fell from the blinded eyes, and the sun gilded the holy tears, and he said, looking towards the mountains: "I can bear no annihilation but my own,--my whole heart is of your opinion, and my head must slowly follow."

I will not again mention a man whom I have blamed so often.

We now stood before a mansion, the windows of which were silvered, and, when it was darker, gilt by girandoles. Aloft over its Italian balcony hung two balloons, one at its eastern, the other at its western extremity. Without those beautiful globes, the counterpart, as it were, of the two glorious ones in heaven, the sun and the moon, I should have scarcely paid heed to the scene on earth, in the splendor of the one on high.

Dearest friend, how beautiful was the place and the time. Around us, in their majesty, reposed the Pyrenees, half robed in night and half in day, not stooping, like man, beneath the load of years, but erect--forever; and I felt why the great ancients had thought the mountains were a breed of giants. On the mountain heads hung wreaths of roses cloud-woven; but each time that a star appeared upon the clear, deep sea of ether and sparkled on its azure waves, a rose from the mountain's chaplet faded and dropped away. The Mittaghorn, alone, like a higher spirit, gazed long after the sinking lonely sun, and glowed with ecstasy. Down beneath us an amphitheatre of lemon-trees, by its perfumes, brought us back to the veiled earth, and made a dusky paradise of it. And Gione, in calm rapture, struck the chords of her guitar, and softly did Nadine's voice accompany the gliding tones. The nightingale in the rose-hedges by the lake awoke, and the plaintive tones from its tiny heart pierced deep into the great heart of man; and shining glowworms flew from rose-bush to rose-bush, but in the mirror of the lake they were but as golden sparks, floating over pale yellow flowers. But when we looked again towards the heavens, lo! all its stars were gleaming, and in place of rose-woven wreaths, the mountains were clad in extinguished rainbows, and the giant of the Pyrenees was crowned with stars instead of roses. O my beloved Victor! in this moment it was with each of our enraptured souls as if from its oppressed heart earth's load had dropped away; as if from her mother's arms, the earth were giving us, matured in the Father arms of the infinite Creator; as if our little life were over! To ourselves, we seemed the immortal, the exalted. We fancied that our speech of man's immortality had been the prophecy of our own, as with two great and noble men.[32] But though we entered the brilliant rooms, the storm of new joys could not destroy the old ones. We were not yet able to be without the great night around us, and we ascended the platform, that from this little throne we might better contemplate the higher throne of creation beneath the eternal canopy; although kneeling would have been a higher ascension for the moved soul.

There were night-violets in a glass box, which traced Gione's name in blooming colors. I remembered the glowworms and millipeds. I let the former fly down upon the rose-bushes in confused star-pictures; with the latter I fired Gione's beautiful flower namesake.

Gione looked longingly towards the eastern Mongolfiere. Wilhelmi understood her. Her soul was as bold as it was calm, she had already visited many of the magic caves of earth, and had ascended to the summits of the highest Alps; she wished now to rise in the air, and to float in the heavens above this beautiful country, and on this beauteous night; but the enjoyment of the prospect was not her only motive. Wilhelmi asked who should be her companion. Solitude was her chief desire. The breadth and depth of the boat under the globe, a chair in it, and the cords by which she would be raised and lowered, secured the trip from all danger.

Like a celestial being she rose beneath the stars,--the night and the height threw a mist over her rising form. A slight zephyr rocked the blooming Aurora, and crowned the moving goddess with alternate constellations. Now her countenance appeared surrounded by pale supernatural rays. It seemed bright as an angel rising towards its kindred stars through the rich dark blue space. An unusual tremor seized on Wilhelmi and Karlson; it was as if they saw their beloved one again carried from them on the wings of the angel of Death.

When she returned to us her eyes were red with weeping; she had ascended, that she might in an unseen moment, shed her old heavy tears near the stars. O the Celestial one! She smiled strangely in the slumber of this life at higher joys than earthly ones, as sleeping children smile when they see Angels.

It was now impossible to repress my longing for the stars, and my petition to be allowed to ascend. Permission to use the western Mongolfiere was willingly bestowed. Nadine, emboldened by the safe return of her sister, and by the companion in the danger, skipped into the boat, with her usual impulsive warmth, to refresh her thirsting soul with the majestic immeasurability of night.

And now the suns raised us. The heavy earth sank down as the past; wings such as man has in happy dreams bore us upwards.