Chapter XII: Part 12

The good Medical Counsellor shut to with a violent slam the hymn-book which lay in his hands; he heard not when the Prince, (who had been there only three minutes) rode away to get the death-certificate, but every word of the pastor he caught, for the sake of learning something of the history of his friend's last sickness; but he learned nothing except the cause of his death (burning fever). At last all was over, and he walked mutely and with staring eyes in between the funeral torches and up to the bier, shoved aside with his left hand without look or sound whatever might hinder him, and clutched at the sleeper's with his right. When at last he once held in his grasp the hand which Alps and years had torn from his, without however being any nearer to him for whom he had so long yearned, and without the joy of reunion, then did his anguish grow dense and dark, and spread heavily and formlessly over his whole soul. But when he found again on that hand two warts, which he had so often felt in grasping it, then did his sorrow assume the veiled form of the past; Milan passed before him with the bloom of its vineyards and the summits of its chestnut-trees and the lovely days spent among both, and looked mournfully on the two men, to whom nothing was left. And now he would have fallen with his two streaming eyes on the two that were dry, if the undertaker had not said: "One does not like to do that, it is not well." A lock was all the grave gave back of the whole friend of whom it had robbed him, a lock which for the eye is so little and for the touch of the finger so much. He tenderly laid down again the hand which had so sadly closed the last letter, upon the untouched one and took a last leave of his Ottomar for this world.

He had not observed that the dead man's Pomeranian dog and two tonsured strangers were there, one of whom had six fingers.--Once out of the church and on the road, one branch of which ran toward the palace of Ottomar and the other around the hermitage-mountain, Gustavus and Fenk looked upon each other with a mute, inconsolable inquiry--they answered each other by a leave-taking. The Doctor turned about and continued his journey--Gustavus went into the park and there at the foot of hermitage-mountain, reflected upon the fate--not of his friend, nor his own, but--that of all men....

And when am I writing this? On this 16th day of November, which is the baptismal day of the encoffined Ottomar.

THIRTY-THIRD, OR XXVI TRINITATIS, SECTION.

Great Aloe-blooming of Love; or, the Grave.--The Dream.--The
Organ.--Together with my Apoplectic Attack, Fur-boots and
Ice-liripipium.[74]

In the soul of Gustavus the highest lights passed slowly over from the friend's image to that of the beloved. Now, for the first time, did her face, which at the death-bed had beamed eternal rays upon him, come forth out of the cypress-shadow. The solitary pyramid stood sublimely, as angel-watcher beside the buried one. He climbed the hill with still sad, but softened feelings; he had now, indeed, the indescribably sweet consolation of never having harmed the man lying under the ground there, and having often forgiven him; he wished Amandus had still oftener given occasion for his forgiveness; even _this_ wrapped his wounded bosom in warm solace, that he at this moment so loved, so lamented him, unseen, unrequited.

At the summit he still trod upon some thorns of anguish, which make one cry out aloud; but soon, on the bridge of light, which ran from a lamp out of Beata's chamber across the garden over to the mountain, his yearning eyes flew like other butterflies toward her bright windows. He saw nothing except now the light and now a head which eclipsed it; but this head he dressed up within his far more beautifully than any woman does her own. He lay and leaned, half-kneeling and half-standing, with his eyes turned toward the long stream of light, on the pedestal of the pyramid. Weariness and sleepless nights had filled his tear-glands with those oppressive and yet enrapturing tears, which often without occasion and so bitterly and so sweetly stream out shortly before sickness or after exhaustion.--The same causes spread between him and the outer world the semblance of a dark misty day or yellow fog; his inner world on the contrary grew, without effort of his own, from a pen-and-ink-sketch to a glistening oil-painting, then to a mosaic, at last to an _alto relievo_.--Worlds and scenes moved up and down before him--at last dream shut up the whole outer world of sight with his eye-lids, and opened behind them a new-created paradisiacal one; like a dead man lay his slumbering body beside a grave-mound and his spirit in a heavenly meadow stretching over the whole abyss. I will presently relate the dream and its end, when I have shown the reader the person by whom the dream was at once prolonged and ended.

Namely Beata--she came. She could not know either of his return or of his last station. The recentness of the funeral-ceremonies for Ottomar, the withdrawal of Gustavus, whose image since that last scene had been impressed so deeply upon and almost _through_ her heart, and the retiring of Summer, who daily rolled up her many-colored blooming picture some inches further,--all this had compressed itself in Beata's bosom to an oppressive sigh, which the noisy hunting-seat with its close atmosphere painfully confined, and with which she sought purer spheres of ether, in order to breathe it out upon a grave, and therefrom to breathe-in material for now ones. Enthusiastic heart! with thy feverish throbbings thou dost, indeed, send thy blood coursing in too torrent-like a circle and with thy gushing washest away shores, flowers and lives; but surely thy fault is fairer than if, with phlegmatic movement, thou shouldest, out of the stagnant water of the blood, cast up only a residuum of fatty slime!

The night-walker was startled when she saw the fair sleeper; she had not in all the garden, through which in these still minutes she had been roving, anticipated or found anyone. He lay, as he had sunk softly down, upon one knee; his pale face was irradiated by a lovely dream, by the rising moon and by Beata's eye. It did not occur to her that he was perhaps only feigning slumber; with trembling she therefore drew half a step nearer, in order, in the first place, to be certain who it was, and, secondly, to let her eye rest full upon the form, at which she had hitherto only ventured a side glance. During the gaze she could not properly tell just when she should end it. At last she turned her back upon her paradise, after she had once more stepped quite up to him; but while slowly walking backward it occurred to her (_without_ alarm). "He surely cannot be actually dead." She therefore turned back again and heard his increasing respirations. Near him lay two small sharp stones about as large as my inkstand. She bent down _twice close by him_ (she would not do it at once, or even with her foot) in order to remove them, that he might not fall upon their points....

Really I should have filled an alphabet, or twenty-three sheets, with this scene; fortunately it does not properly go on, until he awakes, and the reader is to-day the happiest of men....

By this time she had already, as a veteran, become more familiar with the danger, and was so sure he would not wake that she ceased to fear it, and almost began to wish it, for it occurred to her "the night-air might be injurious to him." It further occurred to her how sublime a thing it was that the two friends should so rest side by side; and her blue eye relieved itself of a dewdrop, as to which I know not whether it fell for the heart that beat above the ground or the one that lay motionless beneath it. At last she made serious arrangements to withdraw, in order, upon the whole, at a distance to awaken him by a rustling, and in order to indulge her emotions without fear of his waking. She would merely just pass by him (for she stood four and a half paces distant), because she _must_ go down on the other side of the mountain (unless she _chose_ the reverse). His smiles betrayed even increasing raptures, and she was, of course, curious to observe how the play of his features would end, but she must needs leave the smiling dreamer. When, therefore, she had approached two hesitating steps nearer to him, in order to withdraw to a distance of several, all at once the organ of the solitary church of the resting-place where Ottomar had to-day been buried, began to sound in the middle of the night so solemnly and sadly, as if Death were playing it; and the countenance of Gustavus became suddenly transfigured by the reflection of an inner Elysium, and he stood erect with closed eyes, snatched the hand of the motionless Beata, and said to her in the intoxication of drowsiness: "O take me wholly, blessed soul! Now I have thee, beloved Beata; I, too, am dead!"

The dream, which expired with these words, had been this: He sank away into an immense meadow, which extended away over fair earths placed one after another. A rainbow of suns, which had been strung in the manner of a pearl-necklace, encircled the earths and revolved around them. The circle of suns, going down, sank to the horizon and on the rim of the great round landscape stood a girdle of brilliants, composed of a thousand red suns, and the loving heaven had opened a thousand mild eyes.--Groves and alleys of giant flowers, as tall as trees, intersected the meadow in transparent zig-zag; the high-stemmed rose flung over it a gold-red shadow, the hyacinth a blue one, and the mingling shadows of all tinged it with a silver-hue. A magic evening glimmer hovered over the landscape like a flush of gladness between the shores of shadow and the stems of the flowers, and Gustavus felt that this was the evening of eternity and the rapture of eternity.--Blessed souls, far away from him and nearer the receding suns, plunged in the commingling evening rays, and a muffled murmur of joy hung in dying cadence, like an evening bell, over the heavenly Arcadia;--Gustavus alone lay forsaken in the silvery shadow of the flowers, with an endless yearning, but none of the exulting souls came over to him. At last two bodies in the air dissolved into a thin evening cloud and the falling cloud revealed two spirits, Beata and Amandus--the latter would fain lead the former into the arms of Gustavus, but could not gain an entrance into the silver shadow--Gustavus would fain fall into her arms, but could not extricate himself from the silver shadow--"Ah, it is only that thou art not yet dead;" (cried the soul of Gustavus) "but when the last sun is gone down, then will thy silver shadow float over all and thy earth will flutter away from thee, and thou will sink on the bosom of thy friend,"--one sun after another dissolved--Beata spread down her arms--the last sun sank from view--an organ-peal that might have shaken the worlds and their coffins to atoms, rang down like a flying heaven and by its far-reaching tremor loosed from him the fibrous wrappage and over the outspread silver-shadow floated a rapture which bore him upward and he took--the actual hand of Beata and said to her while he woke and still dreamed and saw not, these words: "O take me wholly, blessed soul; I have thee now, beloved Beata; I, too, am dead!" He held her hand as fast as the good man does virtue. Her endeavors to tear herself away drew him at last out of his Eden and his dream; his blessed eyes opened and exchanged heavens; before him stood sublimely the white ground flooded with moonlight, and the park-lawn and the thousand suns diminished to stars, and the beloved soul which until the setting of all the suns he could not reach.--Gustavus must needs think that the dream had passed over out of his sleep into real life, and that he had not slept; his spirit could neither move nor unite the great precipitous ideas before him. "What world are we in?" he said to Beata, but in an exalted tone, which almost answered the question. His hand had clung so that it almost grew to her struggling one. "You are still in a dream," said she softly, and trembling. This _you_ and the voice thrust his dream at once away from the present into the background; but the dream had made the form which contended with his hand more dear and familiar to him, and the dreamed dialogue acted in him like a real one, and his spirit was a still vibrating chord into which an angel had struck his rapturous emotion--and now when, in the deserted temple over yonder, the organ by a fresh peal raised the scene above the earthly ground, on which the two souls now were; when Beata's position swayed to and fro, her lip quivered, her eye gave way--then again it seemed to him, as if the dream were true, as if the mighty tones drew him and her from the earth into the land of the embrace, his being reached on every side its limits: "Beata," he said to the lovely form dying away under conflicting emotions, "Beata, we are dying now--and when we are dead, I will tell thee my love and embrace thee--the dead man beside us has appeared to me in a dream and has again given me his hand...." She would fain have sunk down upon the grave--but he held up the falling angel in his arms--he let her head which had sunk to slumber fall under his and beneath her motionless heart glowed the throbs of his--it was a sublime moment, when, with his arm folded around a slumbering blessedness, he looked out alone upon the sleeping night of earth, was the sole listener to the organ, the only voice in the solitude, was the sole watcher in the circle of sleep....

The sublime moment passed, the most blissful began; Beata raised her head and showed to Gustavus and to heaven upon her backward bent face the wandering and wept-out eye, the exhausted soul, the transfigured features and all that Love and Virtue and Beauty can compress into one heaven on this earth.... Then came on the supernal moment, descending through thousand heavens upon the earth, in which the human heart lifts itself to the highest love and beats for two souls and two worlds--that moment united forever the lips on which all earthly words were extinguished, the hearts which wrestled with the oppressive rapture, the kindred souls which like two lofty flames pulsated into each other....

--Ask not of me any landscape picture of the blooming worlds they passed over, at a moment which hardly our feelings, not to say words, can grasp. I could as well give a silhouette of the sun.--After that moment Beata, whose body already collapsed under a great tear as a flowret under a rain-drop, sought to seat herself upon the grave; she softly waved him off from her with one hand, while she resigned to him the other. In this situation he opened to her his large soul, and told her all, his history and his dream and his conflicts. Never was a man more sincere in the hour of his fortune than he; never was love more coy after the moment of embrace than here with Beata, the oil of joy floated, as ever, thinly upon the water of tears; a coming sorrow stood before her and looked upon her with steady, dry eyes, but no remembered one nor any coming joy. She had now hardly the courage to speak, hardly the courage to recollect herself, hardly the courage to be enraptured. To him she only lifted up her shy glance, when the moon, that climbed up over a broken stairway of clouds stood overshadowed behind a little white cloudlet. But when a thicker cloud buried the lunar torch, then the two ended the loveliest day of their life, and in their parting they felt that there was for them no more parting forever.

Alone in her chamber, Beata could not think, nor feel, nor remember; she experienced what are tears of joy; she let them stream down, and when at length she would fain stay them, she could not, and when sleep came to close her eyes, they still lay glistening under heavenly drops....

Ye innocent souls, to you I can better say than to the dead one: sleep softly! We generally, that is I and the reader, take very little pleasure in the bravura and stilted parts of lovers in romances, because either the one party is not worthy to enjoy such rain-torrents of the light of joy, or the other to occasion them; but here we have neither of us anything to object.... If heaven would only, grant, ye loving ones, that your lame biographer could make his pen a Blanchard's wing and transport you thereby out of the mine-chambers and mine-damps of the court to some free poplar-island or other, whether in the Mediterranean or the Southern Seas!--As, however, I cannot do it, I nevertheless imagine it, and as often as I go to Auenthal or Scheerau, I picture it out to myself how much I should bestow upon you, if in that poplar or rose-vale, which I had set in water, you could, far from the German winter, amidst eternal blossoms, far from the cutting faces of the moral manufacturers, without any more dangerous murmur than that of the brooks, without any higher complications than those of intertangled flower bushes, or any influence of harder stars than the peaceful ones in heaven,--that you might draw breath in guiltless joy and peace--not, indeed, forever, but at least through the one or two flower-months of your first love.

But this is hard for mortals, and least of all am I the man for that. Such a bliss is hard to attain and for that very reason hard to keep. Rather let it be permitted here to bring forward a word upon the happiness of an authorial invalid, who, to be sure, would fain have one of his own also and who is the very describer of the foregoing felicity, I mean namely, a word about my own sick personality. From the cow barn I have come out again and of my lung complaint am happily cured; only symptoms of apoplexy have since set in, and it threatens to slay me like a mole, just when, as the latter does his hill, so I too am upheaving the Babel-tower of my literary fame. Fortunately I dabble a little just now in Haller's greater and lesser Physiology and in Nicolai's Materia Medica and in all the medical works of which I can get the loan, and can therefore keep up against the apoplexy a brisk fire of musketry (or _cartridge_-fire). The fire I make at my feet, by putting my long leg into a fur-boot as a purgatory and the shrunken one into a little laced boot. I have the oldest moon-doctors and Pestilentiaries on my side, in the idea, that I can like a Democrat, by these boots--and a broad mustard-plaster, wherewith, like sundry literati, I sole my feet--drive down the _materia peccans_ out of the upper parts into the lower. Nevertheless I go farther, if I freeze. Namely: I scrape out and notch for myself a cap of ice[75] and think under the frozen night-cap; accordingly it can be no wonder if the apoplexy and its half-sister, the hemiplexy--attacking me throughout from above and below, at one pole through the hot sock of the foot, at the other through the icy knob or frozen martyr's-crown--should go back to where it came from, and give me to the earth, of which the one pole in like manner below has summer, while the other above has winter.... But let the reader for once turn from good books a philanthropic eye upon us, their authors. We authors make great exertions and produce catechisms, primers, funeral sermons upon murderers, periodicals or menstrua, extracts, and other confounded enlightening stuff; but in doing it we worry and wear away our worm-bags terribly--and yet no poor devil has a decent word for us. Thus I and the whole scribbling fraternity stand erect there and shoot off with gusto long rays across a whole hemisphere (for more than that, of worlds and other globes, cannot be illuminated at once,) and all America is lost to our keels (or quills) and all the while, nevertheless, we resemble the early Christians, by whom the _light_, wherewith they, shrouded in tarred linen, as living pitch-pine torches, shone over Nero's gardens, was given out at the same time with their very fat and life....

"And here"--(romance manufacturers say)--"here ensued a scene, which the reader may imagine, but which I cannot describe." This appears to me too stupid. Nor can I describe it, nevertheless. Have then authors so little honesty, that, when it comes to a scene for which the readers have been long turning over the leaves ahead, _e. g_., a death, for which all, parents and children, have been waiting and watching as for a feudal vacancy or a hanging-day, they should then jump up from their chairs and say: do that yourselves? It is just as if Schikaneder's[76] troop, before the most heart-rending scenes of Lear, should come to the foot-lights and beseech the audience to imagine Lear's countenance, for they on their part could not imitate it. Surely what the reader can imagine, the author can also--in the full pulse of all his powers--and still more easily imagine and consequently depict; moreover the reader's fancy, into whose spokes the previous scenes have once caught and set them in motion, will easily be impelled to the swiftest by my description of the last scene--only not by the miserable one, that it is not to be described.

As to myself, on the contrary, one may be assured that I make myself equal to all emergencies. I have therefore negotiated already with my publisher at the Easter fair, to have ready several pounds extra of dashes, a pound of interrogation and exclamation points, for the setting up of the most intense scenes, because I should not in the least worry myself in this case about my apoplectic head.

THIRTY-FOURTH, OR FIRST ADVENT, SECTION.

Ottomar.--Church.--Organ.

The next morning there was an alarm in the palace about a matter which Dr. Fenk learned a week later in a letter from--Ottomar.

Never have I begun a section or a Sunday so sadly as to-day; my declining body and the following letter to Fenk hang on me like a mourning hat-band. I could wish I did not understand the letter.--Ah in that case never would there have entered into my life a never-to-be-forgotten November hour, which, after so many others have passed away from me, still stands before me and gazes upon me forevermore. Gloomy hour! thou stretchest out thy shadow over whole years! Thou so picturest thyself before me, that I cannot see the phosphorescing nimbus of the earth glimmer and smoke behind thee! The eighty years of man look in thy shadow like the movement of the second-hand--ah take not so much away from me!... Ottomar had this same hour _after_ his burial and describes it to the Doctor thus:

"I have since that been buried alive. I have talked with death and he has assured me, there is nothing else than he. When I was out of my coffin, he laid in the whole earth in my place and my little mite of joy on the top of it.... Ah, good Fenk! how am I altered! since that moment all hours have stretched on before me like empty graves, that are to catch me or my friends! I heard who it was that pressed my hand once more in the coffin.... Come right soon, dear man!

"Hast thou forgotten how I always dreaded a living burial? In the midst of going to sleep I often started up, because it occurred to me I might sink into a swoon and so be buried and then the lid of the coffin would hold down my upward-struggling arms. On journeys I always threatened, when I fell sick, that if they laid me away within eight days I would appear to them and haunt them as a ghost. This fear was my fortune; else had my coffin killed me.

"Weeks ago my old malady returned upon me: the burning fever. I hastened with it to my chamber and my first word to my housekeeper--as I could not have thee--was, _so soon_ as I was lifeless to inter me, because the air of the vault more easily awakens one, but not to fasten either coffin or tomb--besides, the solitary church in the park stands always open. I also told him in any case to let my dog who never leaves me, go with me. That very night the fever came to its crisis; but my memory breaks off at the blood-letting. All I further remember is that I shuddered a little as I saw the blood curl round my arm and that I thought: 'That is the human blood, which we hold so sacred, which cements the card-house and frame-work of our personality, and in which the invisible wheels of life and our impulses move.' This blood sprinkled after that over all the fancies of my feverish nights; the immersed universe came up out of it blood-red and all human beings together seemed to me to shed a stream of blood upon a long shore, which leaped out over the earth down into a roaring deep--thoughts, odious thoughts passed along grinning before me, such as no healthy man knows, none can represent, none can endure and which bark only at souls prostrate with sickness. Were there no Creator, I must needs have quaked before the hidden chords of agony which are stretched in man and at which a malignant being might storm. But no! thou all gracious Being! Thou holdest thy hand upon our capacity for anguish and dissolvest the earthly heart over which these chords are stretched, when they tremble too violently!...

"The conflict of my nature passed over at last into a trance, out of which so many awake only to die under the ground. In that state I was carried to the solitary church. The Prince and my dog were with me there; but the former, only, went away again. I lay, it may have been half the night, before life thrilled through me. My first thought almost rent my soul asunder. By chance the dog stepped on my face; suddenly there came in upon me a sense of suffocation as if a giant hand bent my breast, and a coffin lid seemed to stand like an upheaved wheel above me.... The very description is painful, because the possibility of recovery distresses me.... I rose out of the hexagonal brooding-cell of the next life; death lay stretched far out before me with his thousand limbs, heads and bones. I seemed to myself to be standing in a chaotic abyss and far above me the earth moved on with its living men. Life and death alike disgusted me. Upon what lay near me, even on my mother, I looked coldly and rigidly as the eye of death, when he looks a life to atoms. A round iron grating in the church wall cut out of the whole heaven nothing but the glimmering, broken disk of the moon, which hung down like a heavenly coffin-lamp upon the coffin which is called the earth. The deserted church, that former market-place of a buzzing throng, stood there, dead and undermined with dead men--the tall church windows stretched their long shadows, projected by the moon, over the latticed pews--in the sacristy stood erect the black funeral crucifix, the cross of the order of death--the swords and spears of the knights reminded one of the crumbled limbs which no longer nerved them or themselves, and the death dance of the suckling with false flowers had accompanied hither the poor suckling, whose hand death had broken off, ere it could pluck any more--stone monks and knights imitated the long silenced prayer on the wall with their weatherwasted hands--no living thing spoke in the church save the iron movement of the pendulum of the clock in the tower, and it seemed to me as if I heard how Time with heavy step strode over the world and left graves as his foot-prints.... I sat down on a step of the altar; around me lay the moonlight with fleeting, saddening cloud-shadows; my spirit stood on high: I addressed the personality which I still was: 'What art thou? what is it that sits here and recollects itself and suffers torment?--Thou, I, something--whither, then, is it gone, the colored cloud, which for thirty years has swept by over this _I_ and which I called childhood, youth, life?' Myself drifted along through this painted mist--but I could not overtake it,--at a distance from me it seemed something solid; close upon me drizzling mist-drops or so called moments--to live them, means to drop from one moment (that mist-globule of time) into another.... If, now, I had remained dead, then would all that which I now am have been the object on account of which I was created for this luminous earth and it for me? That were the end of the scenes?--and beyond the end----? Joy is perhaps yonder--here is none, because a past joy is none, and our moments thin out that present into thousand past ones--virtue, rather, is here; it is above _time_. Below me all sleeps; but I shall, also; and if I still make believe thirty years longer that I am living, still they will lay me here again--this night will return again, but I shall remain in my coffin: and then?... If now I had three minutes, one for birth, one for life, one for death, for what purpose then would I have them--this is what I would say?--But all that stands between the past and the future, is a moment--we, none of us, have but three.... Great Being of beings--I began and was about to pray--Thou hast eternity.... but before the thought of Him who is nothing but present, no human soul can stand erect, but bows itself down to the earth again. 'Oh ye departed loves,' I thought, 'you could not be too great for me; appear to me! lift oft the sense of nothingness from my heart, and show me the eternal breast which I can love, which can warm me.' Just then I happened to see my poor dog who was gazing at me; and this creature so moved me with his still briefer, still duller life, that I was softened even to tears and yearned for something with which I might increase and allay them.

"That something I found in the organ over my head. I went up to it as to a thirst-quenching fountain. And when with its mighty tones I shook the nightly church and the deaf and dumb dead, and when the dust flew around me which had hitherto lain upon their mute lips then did all the transitory beings that I had loved, with their transitory scenes, pass along before me; thou camest, and Milan, and the Still Land; I related to them in organ tones what had become a bare narration, I loved them all once more in their fleeting life, and would fain for love have died upon their bosoms and pressed my soul into their hands--but my hand pressed only wooden keys. I struck out fewer and fewer tones, which circled around me like a magnetic whirlpool--at last I laid the choral book upon a low tone and continued to press the bellows in order not to have to endure the mute interval between the tones--there streamed forth a humming sound, as if it were pursuing the wings of time--it bore all my memories and hopes, on its waves floated my throbbing heart.... As far back as I can remember a continued tremulous tone has always made me sad.

"I left my place of resurrection and looked toward the white pyramid of the hermitage-mountain, where nothing rose again and where life more soundly slept; the pyramid stood steeped in the moon-light and a long cloud-shadow traveled on with me.

"Leaves and trees were bent by the touch of autumn; over the prickly stubbles of the pastures the flowers danced no longer, it had perished in the mouths of the cattle; the snail encoffined itself in its house and bed with spittle; and when in the morning the earth turned round with full-blooded flecked clouds, toward the faint sun, I felt that I had no longer my former glad earth, but that I had left it forever in the sepulchre, and the people whom I found again seemed to me corpses, which Death had lent the upper world, and which Life set up and shoved along, in order to act with these figures in Europe, Asia, Africa and America....

"So I still think. And so long as I live, I shall carry round with me the mournful impression of this certainty, that I must die. For I have only known this within eight days; although I formerly gave myself very great credit for my sensibility at death-beds, theatres and funeral sermons. The child has no conception of death; every minute of his sportive existence interposes its dazzling light between him and his little grave. Busy men and pleasurelings comprehend it quite as little, and it is incomprehensible with what coldness thousands of people can say, life is short. It is incomprehensible, that one should not be able to get the benumbed multitude, whose talk is an articulate snoring, to lift up their heavy eyelids when one demands of them. Pray look through thy two or three years of life to the bed wherein thou art to lie--see thyself with the heavy hanging dead hand, with the mountainous sick face, with the white marble eye, let thy ear draw over into the present hour the jangling fancies of the last night--that great night which is ever stalking on to meet thee, and which every hour comes an hour nearer, and beneath which thou, the ephemeron, whether thou now hoverest round in the gleam of the evening sun or in the glow of the evening twilight, wilt certainly be crushed. But the two eternities tower up on both sides of our earth, and we creep and grub on in our deep narrow pass, stupid, blind, deaf, chewing, wriggling, without seeing any greater path than that which we plough with our chafer-heads into one ball of dirt.

"But since that there is also an end of my plans; one can complete nothing here below. Life is so small a thing to me, that it is almost the least thing I can sacrifice for a fatherland; I am merely moving on with a greater or lesser retinue of years toward the grave-yard. But with joy it is all over, as well; my rigid hand, which death has once touched like an electric eel, too easily rubs the butterfly dust from its four wings, and I merely let it flutter round me without seizing it. Only misfortune and occupation are opaque enough to shut out the future; and you shall be welcome to my house, especially if you come out from another, where the landlord would rather take in joy.--Oh! ye poor pale images made out of earthly colors, ye human creatures, I have now a redoubled love and toleration for ye; for what power but love raises us up again through the feeling of immortality out of the ashes of death? Who would make your two December days, which you call eighty years, still colder and shorter? Ah! we are only trembling shadows! and yet will one shadow tear another to pieces?

"Now I understand why a man, a king, in his latter days, goes into a cloister; what would he do at a court or on 'change, when the world of sense recedes from him and all looks like a great outstretched veil, while only the upper world, the world to come, hangs with its rays down into this blackness. Thus does the sky when one beholds from high mountains, lay aside its blue and become black, because the former is not its own color, but that of our atmosphere; but the sun is then stamped upon this night like a burning seal and keeps on blazing.

"I have just looked up to the starry heaven; but it no longer illumines my soul as once; its suns and planets wither just as this one does into which I crumble. Whether a minute insert its mite's tooth, or a millenium its shark's-tooth into a world, is all one, it is crushed in either case. Not merely the earth is vanity, but all which flies beside it through the heavens and is distinguished from it only in size. And thou thyself, fair sun, thou that like a mother, when her child says good-night, regardest us so tenderly, when the earth carries us away and draws the curtain of night around our beds, thou too shalt sink at last into thy night, into thy bed, and shalt need a sun to give thee rays!

"It is singular, therefore, that one should make higher stars or indeed planets and their daughter-lands to be the flower-pots, into which Death is to plant us, somewhat as the American hopes after death to go to Europe.[77] The European would reciprocate his delusion and hold America to be the Walhalla of the departed, if our second hemisphere, instead of being only one thousand miles[78] off, hung at a distance of sixty thousand, as that of the moon notoriously does. Oh my spirit craves something different from a warmed-over, newly laid-out earth, a different satisfaction from what grows on any dung-heap or fire-mound of the heavens, a longer life than a crumbling planet bears upon it; but I have no conception of it at all....

"Only come right down to my head from which thou hast taken the lock; so long as I live shall _that_ side, on which thou hast committed the Rape of the Lock, in memory of what I was and am to be, remain undressed, etc."

"Ottomar."

Poetizing geniuses are in youth renegades and persecutors of taste, but afterward its proselytes and apostles, and age grinds down the distorting microscopic and macroscopic concave mirror to a flat one which merely duplicates nature, while painting it. Thus will the _practical_ and _passive_ geniuses from being enemies of principles and stormers of virtue, become greater friends of both than faultless people can ever be. Ottomar will one day surpass those who now may censure him. For the rest, I shall not in the sequel of this multo-biography treat him knavishly, but honorably, although he does not expect it; for before his journey, when I sometimes found myself in the hot focus of his faults, we fell out a little with each other. Since then he thinks I heartily hate him; but I think I heartily love him, only, like a hundred others, I take a peculiar pleasure in cherishing a secret and suffering love.

THIRTY-FIFTH, OR ST. ANDREW'S, SECTION.

Days of Love.--Oefel's Love.--Ottomar's Palace and
the Wax-figures.

I hasten to dip my pen again to-day into my biographic inkstand, because I shall now soon come up against the present moment with my building operations--by Christmas I hope to reach it;--furthermore because to-day is St. Andrew's and because my landlord has, amidst the screams and shouts of his children, installed a birch-tree in the sitting-room and in an old pot, that it may bear on Christmas eve the silver fruit which will be tied to it. In the presence of such things I forget court-days and law-terms.

Gustavus awoke, on the morning after the declaration of love, not from his sleep--for into that, after such a _royal-shot_ in human life, only a human badger or badgeress could fall--but from the ring and roar of joy in his ears. Raptures danced a reel around his inner eye, and his consciousness was hardly equal to his enjoyment. What a morning! Never did the earth come before him in such bridal finery. Everything pleased him, even Oefel, even Oefel's bragging about Beata's love. Fate had to-day--except the loss of his love--no poisonous dart, no festering splinter, which he would not indifferently have received into his utterly blissful and tightly strung breast. Thus, oftentimes, is the extreme of warmth replaced by the extreme of coldness or apathy; and under the diving-bell of an intense idea--be it a fixed idea or a passionate or a scientific one--we stand panoplied against the whole outer ocean.

With Beata it fared just so. This soft still-vibrating joy was a second heart, which filled her veins, animated her nerves and colored her cheeks. For love--unlike other passions which assail us like earthquakes, like lightnings--stands in the soul like a still, transparent after-summer day with its whole heaven undisturbed. It gives us a foretaste of the blessedness of the poet, whose bosom a perennial, ever-blooming, singing, sparkling Paradise encircles, into which he can ascend at any moment, while his external body bears itself and the Eden over Polish filth, Dutch morasses and Siberian steppes.

Oh, ye voluptuaries in capital cities! When does the _Present_ offer you so much as one minute of what the _Past_ here presents my couple, whole days; you, whose hard hearts the highest fire of love, as the concave mirror does the diamond, only _volatilizes_, but cannot _melt_?

But as the red of evening twilight so floats round in the sky that it tinges the clouds of morning-redness, so on Beata's cheeks by the side of the red flush of joy stood that of shame--although no longer than until the form of the beloved, like an angel, flew through her heaven. Both longed to see each other; both dreaded to be seen by the Resident Lady; the discovery and still more the criticism of their emotions, they would gladly have avoided. There is a certain stinging glance, which dissolves and destroys soft sensibilities (as that of the sun does the little Alpine creature, the Sure;) the fairest love shuts the leaves of its flowers together before its very object, how should it stand the singeing look of a court?

The biographer, with insight, seizes this opportunity to praise in two words the marriages of great folk; for he can liken them to the innocent flowers. Like Flora's variegated children, great folk have no covering to their love--like them they marry without knowing or loving each other--like flowers they care not for their offspring--but hatch their posterity with the same sympathy with which a hatching-oven does it in Egypt. Their love is even as a flower frozen to the window which melts away in the heat. Among all chemical and physiological combinations therefore only the union of two persons in the upper classes has the advantage, that the parties who fly into a passionate fondness for each other and exchange rings diffuse a terrible chilliness; with this exception one finds the same singularity and coldness only in the union of mineral alkalies with nitric acid and M. de Morveau says with simplicity: "It is remarkable."

As Beata longed so much to see her hero and mine, accordingly, by way of _disappointing_ her wish, she went for some days to her mother at Maussenbach. I will be her vindicator and speak for her. She did it because she wanted never to come upon him except accidentally; but at the Resident Lady's it would in any case have been designedly. She did it, because she loved to afflict herself, and like Socrates emptied the cup of joy before she put it to her lips. She did it, for a reason that would seldom have actuated another of her sex--in order to fall upon her mother's neck and tell her all. Finally she also did it, in order to hunt up at home the portrait of Gustavus, which the old man had sold at auction.

I learned all on the very day of her return, when I arrived at Maussenbach as an entire noble Rota (or juridical circle) not so much to punish as to examine a poor hostess, who--as in the Parisian opera they keep two or three sets of players in readiness for important parts--had taken the precaution to fill the prominent part of her spouse not with a _double_ merely, but with twelve persons from the neighborhood, so that it might continue to be played as often as he himself was absent. And here was a case by which I could infer how little my manor lord was inclined to matrimonial infidelity, and how much more to virtue; he was really glad that the whole float of adulterous parishioners happened to come right by his shore and that he was made the instrument whereby justice could visit and thrash this _secret society_. Here he sought out with zest from the hostess, as in Joecher's Literary Lexicon, the names of important _authors_ and she was, to his virtuous ear, a Homer singing off the whole body of wounded heroes by name; he therefore out of sympathy, as she had absolutely nothing, remitted her entire fine; but the adulterous union and troop was brought to the tread-mill and the winepress, or pump-chambers and suction-works were applied to them.

So in Maussenbach at this pressing-out of this adulterous company the Lady of the Manor related to me what her daughter had related to her--in order to beg me, as former mentor of the lover, to draw the couple asunder, because her husband could not bear love. I could not tell her that I was engaged upon the biography of the couple and her own, and that love was the sticking-plaster and joiner's glue that held together the whole biography as well as the pair, and without which my whole book would fall to pieces, and that I should therefore offend the Jena reviewers if I should try to take his love away from him.--But so much I could well say to her: that it was impossible, for the love of such a couple was fire-proof and water-tight. I seemed to her, with my feeling, a little simple; for she thought of her own experience. I added cunningly: that the house of Falkenberg had for some years been rising and laying in fine capitals. To this she merely answered: "Fortunately her husband had never known it," (for a multitude of secrets she told everybody except her husband); "for he had already meditated for her Beata a different match." More than this I could not find out.

--But a fine broth is cooked here not merely for the hero, but also for his biographer; for the latter must certainly at last smart the worse for it on account of the portrayal of such intense scenes, and must often over such stormy sections cough away whole weeks. I will just confess to the reader candidly beforehand: such a steamy heat and tempest had already, last Friday, roared over the new palace and on Saturday swept through Auenthal and into my chamber, when Gustavus entered, all in a turmoil, and instituted the inquiry with me whither Mrs. Captain von Falkenberg, who with her mezzotinto cat occupies my first section and who is well known to be Gustavus's mother, whether she--was really such.... Meanwhile we must drive on briskly; for I know, too, that when I have built up my biographical Escurial and Louvre and sit at last on the roof with my dedicatory oration, I shall have put something into the book-shelves, the like of which the world does not often become possessed of, and which of course must charm reviewers as they pass by and make them say: "Day and night, summer and winter, even on work-days such a _man_ must write; but who can tell whether it may not be a lady?"

Now, then, on all coming pages the barometer falls from one degree to another, ere the threatened tempest breaks forth. How Gustavus loved the absent Beata, everyone can guess, who has known by experience how love is never more tender, never more disinterested than during the absence of its object. Daily he went to the grave of his friend as to the holy sepulchre; to the birth-place of his happiness with a blissful trembling of every fibre; daily he did it half an hour later, because the moon, the only open eye at his soul's nuptials, rose half an hour later every day. The moon was and will forever be the sun of lovers, that soft decoration-painter of their scenes: she swells their emotions as she does the seas, and raises in their eyes also a flood-tide.--Herr von Oefel cast the look of an observer on Gustavus and said: "The Resident Lady has made of you what I made of Fraulein von Roeper." Hereupon he reckoned up to my hero the whole pathognomy of love, the sighing, the silence, the distraction, which he had noticed in Beata and from which he deduced that her heart was no longer vacant--he himself was lodged there, he perceived. Oefel was a man whom a woman might treat as she would, in any case he concluded she was mortally in love with him.--Did she behave playfully, indulgently, familiarly with him, he would, say: "Nothing is more certain, but she ought to be a little more reserved;"--if she went to the opposite extreme, if she disdained to give him a look, a command, anything at most beyond her contempt and denied him even trifles; then he would swear, "Among one hundred men he could undertake to pick out the one she loved; it would be the only one she wouldn't look at."--If a woman struck into the middle way of indifference, then he observed: "Women understood so well the art of dissembling, that only Satan or love could find them out." It was impossible for him to provide room for all the women that wanted to get into the _rotunda_ of his heart; hence he thrust the surplus (so to speak) into the pericardium, or _heart's purse_, wherein the heart also hangs, as into a partition--in other words, he transferred the scene of love from the heart to paper, and invented an _epistolary_ and _paper-love_ corresponding to the letter and paper-nobility. I have had many such chiromantic temperament-leaves of his in my hands, wherein he drives love, like butterflies, merely to poetic flowers;--whole volumes of such madrigals and Anacreontic poems to ladies, as have both the _sweetness_ and the _coldness_ of jellies. Such is Herr von Oefel and almost the whole belle-lettristic company.