Chapter XVI: Part 16

If a _maitre de plaisirs_ should draw up for a Prince a plan of decoration for an opera-house, to consist of a rising sun, a thousand Leipsic larks, twenty ringing bells, whole meadows and floras of silken flowers, the Prince would say, it cost too much~-but the master of pleasures should reply, costs a walk--or a crown, say I, because such an entertainment requires not the Prince, but the man.

In the church I seated myself on the organ-stool in order to fire off the clumsy organ, to the astonishment of most of the souls present. When Gustavus stepped into a pew of the nobility, there sat in the opposite one--Beata; for she was as fond of a sermon as other maidens are of a dance. Gustavus bent down with drooping eyes and rising blushes before her and was deeply touched by the pale, afflicted form, which once had glowed before him. She was equally affected by his, on which she read all the mournful recollections which had been on either his or her soul. Their four eyes turned back again from the object of love to that of the general attention, Herrn Brueger of Grossenhayn. He began--I had intended, as temporary organist, not to give heed to him at all--a chorister makes as little out of a sermon as a man of _ton_;--but Herr Brueger with his first words preached the singing-book, in which I was going to read, out of my hands. He took for his theme the forgiveness of human faults--how hard men were on one side and how frail on the other; how surely, too, and how bloodily every fault avenged itself upon man, and like a hairworm ate its way through him whom it inhabited; and how little reason, therefore, another had to exercise the judicial office of inexorableness; how little merit there was in forgiving faults of heedlessness, little or venial errors, and now very much all merit centered in the overlooking of such faults as reasonably exasperated us, etc. When at last he pointed to the blessedness of love to man, then did the burning and streaming eyes of Gustavus unconsciously rest on Beata's countenance; and when, finally, their eyes, directed toward the preacher, filled with the true solvent of joy and sorrow, and when, during the drying of them, she turned to Gustavus, then did they open upon each other mutually their eyes and their innermost being; the two disembodied souls gazed full into each other and a moment of the tenderest enthusiasm flying over chained their eyes together by a spell.... But suddenly they sought the old place again, and Beata's remained fixed upon the pulpit.

I cannot assert whether he, Herr Brueger, has yet inserted this practical discourse in his printed volume; nevertheless, this commendation shall not prevent my confessing that his sermons, however good in themselves, are perhaps wanting in the proper soporific power, a defect which one perceives in reading as well as in hearing. I will here, for the benefit of other clergymen, interpolate some extra pages upon the false style of church architecture.

_Extra lines on the false architecture of Churches_.

I have already delivered this lecture before the Consistory and the building inspector; but it had no effect. We and they all know that every church, a cathedral as well as a chapel of ease, has to care for the head or _brain_ of the diocese, _i. e_., for its _sleep_, because, according to Brinkmann, nothing strengthens the former so much as the latter. It were ridiculous if I should set to work to elaborate the point, that this disorganizing sleep can be induced in a cheaper way and for fewer pence and less opium, than it is done among the Turks; for our opium, like quicksilver, is rubbed in outwardly and applied mainly at the ears. Now, no one knows so well as I what has been already done in the whole matter. As in Constantinople (according to De Tott) there are special baths and seats for opium eaters, but only near the Mosques; so with us they are actually in them and are called church pews. Further, regular _night-lamps_ burn on the altar. The window-panes have in Catholic temples, glass paintings, which answer for shade as well as window-curtains. Sometimes the columns are so arranged or multiplied that they help toward that darkening of the church which is such a promoter of sleep. As the sleeping-chambers in France have only dull and dead colors, so in the great canonical dormitory is at least so much provision made for sleeping, that those parts of the church at least on which the eye chiefly rests: altar, preacher, chorister, and pulpit, are painted black. It will be seen that I omit no good point, and if I censure it is in no censorious spirit.

But still much is wanting to make a temple a true dormitory. I have in Italy and even in Paris, stood (I might say _lain_) in many theater boxes, which were rationally arranged and furnished; one could in them (for everything was provided for the purpose) sleep, play, eat, and--so forth.... One had his female friends with him also. Now this the great folks have been accustomed to; how shall one expect them to go to church and sleep there when their money can procure them all friends sooner than sleep? With the _tiers etat_, with poor and burghers, even with the college of burgomasters, which wears itself out through the week with voting, it is no wonder, of course, that it should be easy enough to induce them to fall asleep in any pew, in any loft; I do not deny it; but the libertine, the sleeper on eider-down, will not (even were a Consistorial Counsellor preaching) sleep on any back seat; he therefore prefers not to go to church at all. For such people of _ton_ regular church-beds must therefore be made up in the boxes, so that the thing may succeed; just as gaming-tables, eating-tables, ottomans, _female friends_, and the like, are such indispensable things in a court-chapel, that they might better be left out in any other place than there.

One may therefore without offending me and the truth, call it no flattery if I contend that nothing but the stupid church architecture and the want of all house and kitchen utensils, all beds, etc., is to blame, and not the well and philosophically or mystically elaborated sermons of clever court university--barrack--Vesper-preachers, that people of rank are able to sleep in them far less than one hopes to.

_End of the Extra Pages_.

After church we all met in the vestry. I pass over trivialities and come at once to the point, that we all withdrew in a body and that Gustavus gave his arm to our fair Dauphiness and took hers. It was a quiet walk under the festal sun and beneath the blossoms of the bushes. The finery of the female peasantry, the wainscoted foreheads, the front locks stretched across them like the hairs of the fiddle-bow, the frocks lying one over another in layers, like the skins of an onion, all this, together with their laughing faces prefigured Sunday to us more vividly than whole parueres of city dames could. On Sunday, too, I find much more beautiful faces than on the six work days which disguise everything in smut.

The conversation must have been indifferent, I think, even at the forget-me-not. Beata, namely, found one lying in the grass, and ran up to it and--lo, it was made of silk: "Oh, it's a false one," said she. "Only a dead one," said Gustavus, "but a durable." Among persons of a certain refinement everything easily turns to allusion! Good nature is therefore indispensable to them, that they may infer no allusions but kindly ones. Nothing delighted me so much all through the little pilgrimage as the feeling that I was the back-ground and fair wind that followed them; for if I had gone ahead I should have failed to see the most beautiful gait in which the most beautiful female soul that ever was manifested itself through the body--Beata's. Nothing is more characteristic than a woman's gait, especially when it has to be accelerated.

In the vale we found, beside shade and noontide, something still finer, Doctor Fenk. He had arranged a little dinner-_concert_-_spirituel_ among the flowers, where we all, like princes and players, kept open table, but only before seated and musical spectators, the birds. We made no complaint, that occasionally a blossom fluttered down into the saucepan, or a leaf into the vinegar cruet, or that a puff of wind blew the powdered sugar sidewise out of the sugar-bowl; _per contra_, the greatest _plat de menage_, Nature, lay around our joyous table, and we were ourselves a part of the show-dish. Fenk said, as he played with a branch which he had drawn down: "Our table had at least one advantage over the tables of the great world, that the guests at ours knew each other, whereas the great ones in Scheerau and Italy, _i. e_., feasted more people than they became acquainted with; as in the fat of the animal which was so much abhorred and irritated by the Jews mice lived, without the creatures noticing it."

A physician may be ever so delicate in expression, he is so only to the mind of physicians.

During the coffee my dear Pestilentiary asserted that all pots, like coffee-pots, chocolate-pots, tea-pots, pitchers, etc., had a physiognomy which was too little studied; and if Melancthon[94] had been the missionary and cabinet preacher of pots, still they stood in need of a Lavater.

He had once known a coffee-pot in Holland, the nose of which was so faint and flat, its profile so shallow and Dutch, that he told the ship's-physician with whom he was drinking, there certainly must be just as miserable a soul in that pot, or all physiognomy was mere wind; on pouring it out, he found the stuff was not fit to drink. He said, in his own house, not a milk pitcher was bought of which he had not at first, as Pythagoras did of his pupils, made a physiognomical inspection.

"To whom have we to ascribe it," he went on in his humorous enthusiasm, "that around our faces and figures not so many lines of beauty are described as around the Greek,--unless it be to the cursed tea-pots and coffee-pots, which often have hardly human conformation, and which nevertheless our women gaze at all through the week and thereby copy in their children? The Greek women, on the other hand, were watched only by beautiful statues, nay, the Spartan women had the _likenesses_ of fair youths hung up even in their sleeping-chambers."--(I must however say in justification of many hundred dames, that they certainly do the same with the _originals_, and that something is to be done even in that way.)--

As in this family-spectacle I have respect for no Goddess but that of Truth; I cannot sacrifice her even to my sister, although her sex and her youth place her, too, among the Goddesses. It vexes me, that it will not vex her, to read herself here _printed_ and _censured_, because she makes more account of the gain to her vanity by the printing, than of the loss to her pride by the censure.

Pride is in our strategic century the most faithful patron-saint and guardian of female virtue. No one, to be sure, will require me to name publicly the ladies of my acquaintance who would certainly like Milan (according to Keissler) have been besieged forty times and taken twenty, had they not been bravely proud, nay, had not one of them, in a single evening full of dances, been proud two and a half times; but I could not name her, if I would.

Thou teachest me, dear Philippina, that the noblest feelings do not always exclude vanity, and that, except the business of loving thee, I can have no better than that of scolding thee--and thy medical adviser, Fenk, too, who indulges toward thee in too great a degree his reckless humor; fortunately she is still at an age, when maidens always love the one they have talked with longest, and when their heart, like the magnet, lets the old iron drop, when one applies to it a new one.

Beata and Gustavus touched each other's sore souls like two snow-flakes; even in the voice and in the movement was pictured a tender, forbearing, honorable, self-sacrificing reserve. O if even the denials of coquetry itself give so much, how much more must the present ones of virtue give!

The afternoon had sped away on the wings of the butterflies, which sought by our side their lower flowers; the conversation like the eyes, increased in interest, and we sauntered (or shall I write sawntered?)[95] along on the terraced alley which winds round the mountain like a girdle and in which the eye can pass over the hedges of the vale into the pastures. Toward the west a tempest strode across the heavens with its thunder-tread and hung its bier-cloth of black cloud over the sun. The country looked like the life of a great but unhappy man; one mountain glowed under the sun's fiery glance, the other darkled under the descending night of a cloud--over in the western region there pealed forth in the heavens instead of the song of birds the heavenly pedal, the thunder, and in rows of white water-columns the warm rain came down from heaven and filled again its flower-cups and summits out of which it had ascended--it was to the soul as solemn as if a throne were set up for God and all were waiting for him to come down and sit thereon.

Gustavus and Beata, swallowed up in this heaven, went forward on the terrace; the Doctor, my sister, and I at a little distance behind them. At last single rain drops pattered down on the foliage of the alley, which flew and fell over us out of the border of the broad storm-cloud; thus does a thundering, lightning-flashing calamity of a neighborhood only sprinkle the distant lands with a few tears, that steal from the eye of sympathy. We all betook ourselves to the shelter of the nearest trees. Gustavus and Beata stood, for the first time, again in many months, alone beside each other, without ear-witnesses, though with eye-witnesses not far off. They faced the west and were silent. There are situations, in which man feels himself too great to start a conversation, or to be polite or to make allusions. Both remained mute, till Gustavus in the hottest solstice of his emotions turned round from the deluged western country toward the eyes of Beata--hers raised themselves slowly and openly to his and the lips beneath them remained quiet and her soul was with no one but God and virtue.

The cloud had emptied itself and disappeared. The Doctor had to hurry home. No one could break from his blissful silence. In this perfect silence we had all come down the terrace--and everything had already gone from under its leafy umbrella--when, all at once, the low sun blazed through the black cloud canopy and rent it asunder, and flung the funereal veil of the tempest far back and gleamed over us and over the glistening thickets and every fiery bush.... All birds screamed, all human creatures were mute--the earth became a sun--the heavens trembled tearfully over the earth for joy and embraced her with hot, immeasurable rays of light.

The landscape burned around us in the heavenly rain of fire; but our eyes saw it not and hung blindly on the great sun. In the effort to set the heart free from blood and joy, Gustavus's hand sank into Beata's--he knew not what he took--she knew not what she gave--and their present feelings were exalted far above insignificant refusals. At last the thunder-beset sun laid himself down like a philosopher under the cool earth, his evening glow calmly reposed under the flashes of the retiring tempest, he seemed like a soul gone to God and a clap of thunder followed his death.

Twilight came on.... Nature was a mute prayer.... Man stood more sublime therein, like a sun; for his heart apprehended the speech of God.... But when that language comes into the heart and it grows too great for its breast and its world, then does the great genius whom it thinks and loves breathe the tranquillizing love of humanity into the stormy bosom and the infinite lets himself be tenderly loved by us in the person of the finite....

Gustavus felt the hand which pulsed in his and struggled to escape from it--he held it more faintly and looked back into the loveliest eyes--his own begged Beata in an infinitely touching manner for forgiveness of the past days and seemed to say: "O! in this blissful hour take my last sorrow away also!"--And now when, in a tone that was as much as a good deed, he asked softly: "Beata?" and when he could say no more and she turned her blushing face to the earth and ceased to draw her hand out of his, and with deep emotion looked up again and showed him the tear that said to him: "I will forgive thee;" then the two souls which were still greater than the nature around them became two angels and they felt the heaven of the angels; they stood silent, lost in endless gratitude and rapture. At length, agitated with reverent joy, he took her trembling arm and joined us.

The Sabbath closed with silent thoughts, silent raptures, silent recollections and a still rain out of _all_ discharged tempests.

FOURTH JOY SECTION.

The Dream of Heaven.---Hoppedizel's Letter.

Since I have, beside my biographical business, also driven the trade of a Ladies' Tailor, a wholly new life has grown up in me. Nevertheless the future Shroeckh who shall offer to hang me up also in his picture-gallery of famous men, must be advised to be moderate and not deduce everything from my tailoring, but something from my imagination. This latter has during the last winter and autumn so strengthened itself by the painting of so many scenes in nature, that the present spring finds quite other eyes and ears in me than I have ever had before. This is what we all, I and the reader, should have considered before now. If the attraction of certain vices becomes through the daily growing efforts of the imagination, insuperable, why do we not give her irresistible pencil worthy subjects? Why do we not direct her in winter to sketch or rather to create the spring? For one enjoys in nature not what one sees (else the Forester and the Poet would find out of doors the same kind of enjoyment) but what one's poetic sense imparts to the visible, and the feeling for nature is at bottom the fancy for it.

But in no brain did more graceful shades of dream and fancy crystallize than in Gustavus's. His health and his happiness have come back to him; this is shown by his nights, wherein dreams like violets open again their spring-chalices. Such an Eden-fragrance floats around the following dream.

* * * * *

"He died," it seemed to him, "and was to play out the interval before his new incarnation in mere dreams. He sank into a tossing sea of blossoms, which was the conflux of the starry heavens; on the ground of immensity all stars bloomed white and neighborly blossom-leaves tossed against each other. But why did this flower-field growing from the earth up even to heaven intoxicate with the exhaling spirit of a thousand cups all souls that flew over it and sunk down in bewildering ecstasy? Why did a juggling wind mingle souls together with souls and flowers amidst a snow-flurry of sparks and many-colored flakes of fire? Why did so sweet and so sportive a dream envelop deceased men?--O, for this reason; the gnawing wounds of life were to be closed by the balmy breath of this immeasurable spring, and man, still bleeding from the blows of the former earth, was to be healed under the flowers for the future heaven where the greater virtue and knowledge demand a healthy soul. For ah! the soul suffers here indeed, quite too much! When on every snow-field one soul embraced another, then out of love they walked into _one_ glowing dew-drop; then it trembled downward and alighted on a flower, which breathed it up again, rent asunder, as holy incense. High over the blooming field stood God's paradise, out of which the echo of its heavenly tones, in the form of a brook, flowed down to the plain; its melody wandered through all the windings of the lower paradise and the intoxicated souls plunged in their ecstasy from the flowery shore into the stream of flute-music; in the resonance of paradise all their senses expired, and the too finite soul, dissolved into a bright tear or joy, floated on upon the running waves. This flowery field rose and rose incessantly, to meet the uplifted paradise, and the heavenly air, through which it flew, swept from above downward, and its descending undulations unfolded all flowers and did not bend them. But often, in the darkest height, God passed far away above the waving meadows; then when the Infinite One veiled his infinity overhead in two clouds, the one charged with lightning, or the Eternal Truth, and the other a warm one, trickling down on everything and weeping, or the Eternal Love; then they stood arrested, the soaring meadow, the sinking ether, the echoing brook, the quivering leaf of the flower; then God gave the signal that he was passing by, and an immeasurable love constrained all souls in this lofty stillness to embrace each other, and none sank upon one, but all on all--a blissful slumber fell like a dew on the embrace. Then when they awoke out of each other's arms, lightnings flashed out of the whole field of flowers, all blossoms exhaled, all leaves sank under the drops of the warm cloud, all windings of the melodious brook rang in unison, the whole paradise gleamed with heat-lightning above them and nothing was mute but the loving souls which were too blessed...."

Gustavus awoke into a nearer world, which was a beautiful counterpart of his dreamed one; the sun was transformed into a single glowing ray, and this ray also broke off on the earth; the cloud of twilight gathered round, flowers and birds hung their drowsy heads in the dew and only the evening-wind still stirred round in the leaves and stayed up all night....

Thus do our green hours creep through our unvisited vale, they glide with an unheard, butterfly's pinion through our atmosphere, not with the buzzing wing-sheath of a chafer--joy lights upon us softly as an evening-dew and does not rattle down like a rushing rain. Our happy bath-time will refresh our spirits, our powers of work and of endurance, for a long time, forever; the green Lilienbad will remain in our fancy a green oasis, whereon, if ever the years shall have buried in deep snow all Elysian fields, the whole landscape of our joy, under its warm breath all the snow will melt and which will ever look green to us, that we may thereon, as painters do on green cloth, refresh our old eyes.... I wish you, my readers, for your old age very many such places left open, and every sick man his Lilienbad.

Were I not doing it to please the German public, I should hardly for very joy succeed in describing it. And yet I will not begin a new joy-section before Beata's birthday. This is celebrated in the little Molucca, Teidor, whither we are all invited by the Doctor; he has his country-seat on that island; the weather, too, will continue fine. This much I can easily foresee without any great prophetic talent, that the Birthday, or Teidor section, will not so much combine as fully surpass all the fine things that were ever burnt up in the Alexandrian library or mouldered in Imperial ones or have ever been kept in all others.

In the following letter inviting me to the Molucca Island, the Doctor writes me a piece of news which deserves a place here, in so far as there is use for it, and I would gladly have my section full, inasmuch as I merely transcribe.

"Professor Hoppedizel, who, except philosophizing and flogging, loves nothing so much as practical joking, will, so soon as the moon by-and-by rises later, play a new one, namely play the rogue. I found him several days ago with a long beard which he had been stiffening and straightening for himself; moreover he had concealed crowbars and chosen masks. I asked him into what redoubt he was going to steal? He said into that of Maussenbach--in short, he proposes by breaking in with a small band and instead of plundering, turning it into a joke, to drive thy Legal Chief into a theatrical and artificial fright. It were to be wished that this artistic and satirical robber-captain might be taken for a real one, and be bundled into a police-wagon with his burglar's tools and publicly marched in--not that the good Hoppedizel might be injured in the matter, but only that this stoical corsair might be brought to the rack and thereby place three persons at once in full light: first, himself, since he would confess not so much a crime as his stoical principles--secondly, the Pestilentiary or myself, since I, on the rack (as we do in all sufferings) should prescribe regard to his health--thirdly, the justiciary, or thyself, who couldst show that thou hadst thy academical criminal-sheets already--in thy trunk...."

I fancy it will fare with the reader as with me, that on the flowery shore amidst the melodies of nature this sea-fight on the great sea of the world and the firing during it seems to create a screaming dissonance.

FIFTY-THIRD, OR GREATEST, SECTION OF JOY,
OR BIRTHDAY OR TEIDOR-SECTION.

The Morning.--The Evening.--The Night.

To-day is Beata's festival, and is growing finer and finer--my writing-desk is nine million square miles broad, namely the earth--the sun is my lamp of Epictetus, and instead of the portable library the leaves of the whole book of nature rustle before me.... But to begin at the beginning--merely adding here that I am already ensconced on the island of Teidor.

The days preceding foul weather are, meteorologically also, the fairest. As we to-day--being the most pacific quadruple alliance that exists--went out through our tuneful valley ere yet the morning-rays had entered it, so as to arrive comfortably at the Molucca island before 9 o'clock--a whole crystalline day, clear as a sparkling well, lay stretched out on the broad meadows before us--we had hitherto been used to the beautiful, but not to the most beautiful. The earthly ball seemed a bright lunar globe compacted out of airs and mists--the summits of hills and woods stood bare in the deep blue, unpowdered (so to speak) with fogs--all prospects had drawn nearer to us and the mist was wiped away from the _glass_ through which we looked; the air was not sultry, but it lay in motionless repose on the fragrant meadows and the leaf nodded, but not the twig, and the hanging flower swayed a little, but only under two fighting butterflies.... It was the Sabbath of the Elements--the Siesta of Nature. Such a day, when the very morning has the nature of a rapturous evening and when even it reminds us of our hopes, our past and our longings, comes not often, comes not to many, to the few into whose swelling hearts it does shine may not venture to come often, because it makes the poor human beings, who open their hearts to it like leaves of flowers, too glad, and transports them from the financial feudal soil, where one must mow more flowers than he smells, too suddenly and too far into the magic Arcadia. But ye financiers and economists and leaseholders, if almost all seasons of the year minister to the skin and the stomach, why shall not _one_ day--especially for guests of the springs--belong merely to the too tender heart? If one forgives you for hardness, why will you not forgive any softness? Oh, you offend enough besides, you unfeeling souls! the fairer, finer soul is to you simply insignificant and ridiculous; but you are to it a torment and wound it constantly. Singular it is, that we sometimes concede to others superiority of _talents_, but never superiority in _sentiment_, and that we admit errors in our own judgment, but never in our own taste.

A transparent balustrade of forest-trees was now all that remained between us and the Indian Ocean, wherein lay the green Teidor, when our path led through the high grass which grew in over it, along by a hermitage or an isolated house, which lay too enchantingly in this flowery ocean for it to be possible one should walk or ride by it. We reclined on a spot of mown grass, on the right side of the house, to the left of a little round garden, which hid itself away in the middle of the meadow. In this poor little garden were and supported themselves (as in a tolerant state) on the same bed, beans and peas and lettuce and cabbages; and yet in this dwarf-garden a child had also his little infusorial garden. In the little red and dazzling bird-house a nimble woman was just carrying on her fragrant field-bakery; and two children's-shirts hung on the garden-hedge and two stood at the house-door, in which latter couple two brown children played and watched us--nothing gave them pleasure this morning but the sun on their hare feet. O Nature! O Blessedness! thou, like benevolence, lovest to seek out poverty and obscurity!

The cleverest thing I have said, or probably shall say, to-day, was certainly the grass-discourse in the morning beside the little house. As I stood there and observed the steadfast sky, the lull of wind and leaves, in which the vertical wing of the butterfly and the hair of the caterpillar remained unbent, then I said: "We and this little worm stand in and under three almighty seas, the aerial sea, the watery sea and the electric sea; and yet the roaring waves of these oceans, these mile-long waves, that can tear a land to pieces, are so smoothed so tamed, that this Sabbath-day comes forth, in which not a breath of air moves the broad wing of the butterfly or plucks from it a particle of feathered dust, and in which the child toys and smiles so peacefully among the elemental leviathans. If no infinite genius had compelled this, if we may not trust this genius with the harmonious ordering of our future world and our future destiny ...

"O infinite genius of the earth! in thy bosom we will bury our childish eyes, when the tempest breaks loose from its chain--on thy almighty heart will we sink back, when iron death puts us to sleep in passing by!"

So we sauntered on in innocent contentment, without haste or heat, toward the waves which rippled around Fenk's country-seat. Singular it is, there are days, when we willingly let our still, continuous enjoyment of _outward_ objects suffice us (wherewith we rarely repel genuine stoicism)--still more singular is it, that many a day really does this. What I mean is, a certain gentle, water-level contentedness--not earned by virtue, not won by reflection--is sometimes supplied us by a day, by an hour, when all the miserable trifles and ravelings of which our puny and petty life is sewed together, harmonize with our pulses and do not run contrary to our blood--_e. g_., when (as happened to-day) the sky is cloudless, the wind asleep, the ferryman at hand to carry us over to Teidor, the master of the country-house, Doctor Fenk, ready and waiting for us an hour ago, the water smooth, the boat dry, the landing-haven deep and everything just right.... Verily we are all on such a foolish footing, that among _human pleasures_, upon which the Consistorial Counsellor of Zerbst, _Sintenis_, has composed two volumes, may be reckoned--in Germany (though far less in Italy and Poland)--the catching now and then of one or another flea.... If, then, one would experience such a day of paradise, then must there not so much as a trifle, such as one strides over in hours of stoical energy, lie in the way; just as when one will draw down the sun with a burning-glass, not the thinnest cloud must intrude before his face.... I am now on fire, and assure the reader I cannot possibly think of anything more foolish than our life, our earth, and its inhabitants, and our remarking upon this folly....

The Indian Ocean was a noisy market-place, resembling a Chinese river; on every side it was crowded with joy, life and splendor, from its upper surface to its bottom, where the second hemisphere of the heavens with its sun was tremulously reflected. In the country-house the walls were white, because (said Fenk) for a man who comes in from a nature that stands in a blaze of fire and light into a narrow cell, no coloring of this cell can be bright enough to counteract a mournful and confined impression.

Then we rested, changing our position from one shaded grassy bank of the island to another, fanned by birch-leaves and Indian waves--then we made music--then dined; first, at the table of a host who knows how to be refined and delicate, in a jovial manner; secondly, at the windows which opened to all four points of the compass, and drew us more than ever into all the vortices of joyous nature, and thirdly, each of us by himself, with a hand that knew how to pluck the soft berry of enjoyment without crushing it. At evening comes Ottomar--the two maidens have lost themselves among flowers and Gustavus among shadows--the biographer lies here, like the jurist Bartolus, on the tossing grass depicting it all--Fenk is arranging for the evening. Not till evening does our to-day's joy come out into full light; and I thank heaven that I have now overtaken, with my biographical pen, the actual course of things, and that no one knows more than I report; whereas heretofore I always knew more, and embittered for myself the biographical enjoyment of the happiest scenes by the knowledge of the most mournful. But now, though in the next quarter of an hour the sea might swallow us all up, in the present one we looked out on it with a smile.

As I am so quiet and care not to go to walk, I will talk about taking walks--a thing which so often occurs in my work--and not without keenness. A man of understanding and logic would, in my opinion, distribute all walkers, like the East Indians, into four castes.

In the first caste trot along the most miserable ones, who do it from vanity or fashion, and want to show either their feeling or their clothes or their gait.

In the second caste run the fat and the scholarly, who do it for the sake of getting a _motion_, and not so much to enjoy as to digest what they have enjoyed already; into this innocent, passive department they are also to be thrown, who do it without reason and without enjoyment, or as companions, or from an animal satisfaction with fine weather.

The third caste comprise those in whose heads are the eyes of the landscape-painter, whose hearts are penetrated by the grand outlines of the universe, and whose eyes trace the immeasurable line of beauty which flows with ivy-tendrils around all created things--which rounds the sun and the drop of blood and the pea, and cuts out all leaves and fruits into circles. Oh, how few such eyes rest on the mountains and on the setting sun and the closing flower!

A fourth and better caste, one would think, could hardly be produced after the third; but there are persons who look upon creation not merely with an artistic but with a holy eye--who transplant into this blooming world the world to come, among the creatures find the Creator--who kneel down amidst the rustling and roaring of the thousand-twigged, thickly-leaved tree of life, and are fain to speak with the genius whose presence pervades it, they themselves being only leaves that tremble thereon--who use the profound temple of Nature--not as a villa full of pictures and statues, but as a holy place of worship--in snort, who go to walk not merely with the eye, but with the heart....

I know no greater praise than being able to glide over easily from such persons to our loving couple--their love is such a walk; the life of high-minded persons is also such a walk. I will only add, before rising from the crushed grass, the single remark, that Gustavus's love quite fits the practical definition of it which is to be made in a rapturous summer-midnight. The noblest love (as one may define it) is simply the tenderest, deepest, most substantial respect, revealed less by what is done than by what is left undone, which is divined by both parties mutually, which stretches across both souls (in an astonishing degree) the same chords, which exalts the noblest feelings with a new glow, which will always sacrifice, never gain, which takes away nothing from love for the whole sex, but gives all through the individual; this love is a respect, in which the pressure of hand and lips are not indispensable constituents and good actions are quite essential; in short, a respect which must be laughed to scorn by the majority of men and profoundly honored by the smallest part. Such a heart-exalting respect was the love of Gustavus, which not only endured, but even gladdened and warmed noble eye-witnesses, because it was without that innocently-sensuous toying with lips and hands, in which the spectator can take no more interest than in the artificial, theatrical viands of the players. A sign of virtuous esteem or love is this, when the spectator takes the more interest in it, the greater it is. Gustavus's love had--since his Peter's-fall, and still more since the forgiveness of this fall (for many faults one feels most deeply, only when they are pardoned)--gained such an access of tenderness, of reserve, and sense of another's worth, that he won more hearts than the tenderest one, and ruled other eyes than the fairest, those of Beata, before which his glances fell, like snow-flakes in the blue under the cloudless sun, pure, sparkling, trembling and melting away.

All have just arrived, Ottomar and the rest.

My clock strikes two in the morning, and still the birthday festival of Beata and of paradise is not yet closed; for I am just come over to this position to describe it; that is to say, if I remain in my chair and do not sally forth again into the blue vault, which throws over the so great multitude of to-day's joys its starry rays.

Towards evening Ottomar flew hither over the water. He always looks like a man who is thinking of something distant, who is just now only resting, who plucks the flower of joy that hangs over his path, because his flying gondola hurries him along by it, not because he is thinking of it at all. He still retains his sublimely-low voice and that eye of his which has seen death. He is still as much of a Zahouri[96] as ever, who sees through all flower-beds and grass-plots of the earth and down to the motionless dead, who sleep beneath it. So soft and stormy, so humorous and melancholy, so obliging and unconstrained and free! He asserted that most vices were owing to the flying from vices--for fear of acting badly we did nothing and had no longer courage for anything great--we all had so much love for man that we had no longer any honor--out of humane tolerance and love we had no sincerity, no uprightness, we could not hurl down a traitor, a tyrant or the like.

He wondered at Beata, who took not the customary constrained, but a heightening interest in our talk: for he has a notion that one may talk with a woman about heaven and hell, God and the Fatherland, and yet she will be thinking of nothing all the while she listens, but her figure, her attitude, her dress. "I except," said Fenk, "in the first place, everything, and secondly, physiognomy also; to this they all listen, because they can all immediately apply it."

The magic evening drove more and more shadows before it; at last it took up all creatures into its rocking lap and clasped them to its bosom, in order to make them tranquil, tender and glad. We five islanders became so, too. We went out in a body up to a little artificial eminence that we might escort the sun even to the last stairway, before he sailed across the ocean to America. Suddenly, over in another island, five Alpine horns pealed forth, and went on rising and falling with their simple strains. One's condition has more influence on music, than music on one's condition. In our situation and where one's ear places him already at the Alpine fountain, and his eye on the evening-gilded glacier-peak, and around the hut of the herdsman, lie Arcadia and Tempe and youth's pastures, and when we let these fancies fly before the sinking sun and after the fairest day--in such a case the heart follows an Alp-horn with intenser throbs than a concert hall full of gaily bedizened hearers. Oh the admission ticket to joy is a good, and then a tranquil heart! The dark, cloudy, dimly gleaming _ideas_, which the universal philosopher demands of all sensations, must glide slowly over the soul or stand perfectly still, if it is to enjoy itself; just as clouds that move slowly betoken fair weather, while flying ones indicate foul. "There are," said Beata, "virtuous days when one pardons everything and has all power over one's self, when joy seems to kneel down in the heart and pray that it may remain there longer, and when all is cleared up and illumined within us;--then when one weeps over it for joy this grows so great that all is gone by again."

"I," said Ottomar, "love better to throw myself into the rocking arms of the tempest. We enjoy only glancing, glowing moments; this coal must be violently whirled round, that the burning circle of rapture may appear."

"And yet," said he, "I am to-day so glad in thy presence, setting sun!... The gladder I have been in any hour, or week, so much the stormier was the next. Like flowers is man: the more violent the tempest is going to be, so much the more perfume do they exhale." "You must not invite us any more, Herr Doctor," said Beata smiling, but her eye swam, however, in something more than joy.

Amidst the deepening red of the heavens the sun stepped upon his last stair, environed with tinted clouds. He and the Alpine horns vanished in the same instant. One cloud paled after another and the highest still hung transfused with the evening-glow. Beata and my sister talked playfully, after the manner of maidens, about what these illuminated clouds might be--the one resolved them into Christmas lambs with rosy-red ribbons, or a red heavenly scarf--the other into fiery eyes or cheeks under a veil--red and white cloud-roses--a red sun-hat, etc....

Punch, I think, was brought at last for the gentlemen, one of whom took it in such moderation that he can even now, at 21/2 o'clock, compose this section. Then we sauntered round under the rustling and refreshing tree of night, whose blossoms are suns and its fruits worlds. Our enjoyment now led us apart, now brought us together again, and each was equally capable of enjoying himself greatly, with or without company. Beata and Gustavus forgot their own peculiar love and joy out of respect and sympathy for that of others, and where all were friends became simply friends to each other. O, preach out of the world, I pray, the sadness which makes the heart as thick as blood, but not the joy, which in its dance of ecstasy, stretches out its arms not merely after a partner, but also after a tottering unfortunate, and which, as it flies by, takes the tear from the eye of the weeping spectator! To-day we would fain pardon each other everything, although we found nothing to pardon. There was nothing there to forgive, I say; for as one star after another welled out from the depth of shadow, and when Ottomar and I had turned about before a warbling nightingale in order to hear her wails, softened by distance, and when we stood alone together, encompassed by nothing but tones and shapes of love, and when I could no longer contain myself, but, under the great present and future heavens, opened my heart to him, whose own I had long ago seen and loved; then was such a frame of spirit no forgiveness and reconciliation, but.... of that, day after to-morrow....

In alternating groups--now the two maidens alone, now with a third person, now all together--we walked over the grass-embosomed flowers and passed along between two rival nightingales, the one of which sang the praises and inspired the air of the one island, aim the other of the neighboring one. In this musical _pot-pourri_ the leaves of the flowers had covered the fragrant _pot-pourris_, but all the birch-leaves had put on their own and we separated from one another on purpose, so as not to be able to embark hurriedly from an enchanting Otaheite.

At last we met by chance under a silver-poplar, whose snow-white leaves had by their gleam through the dark gathered us around it. "It is high time we took our leave!" said Beata. Only just as we were, or should have been, on the eve of doing it, the moon came up; behind a latticed fan of flowers she opened so modestly her cloudy eyelids, as she silently floated across the blind night, and her eye streamed, and she looked upon us like sincerity itself, and sincerity looked upon her too. "If we would only tarry," said Ottomar, in whose hot hand of friendship we would willingly dispense with every female hand--"till it grows lighter on the water and the moon can shine in upon the vales--who knows when we can have things so again?" At length he added: "Besides, Gustavus and I start on our journey early to-morrow morning, and this weather cannot last long." He referred to the unknown seven-weeks' journey, in regard to which I here gladly take back all those conjectures which have hitherto represented it as so weighty and mysterious.

We again postponed our departure; the conversation grew monosyllabic, our thoughts polysyllabic, and our hearts too full, just as the waning moon on the threshold of its rising appeared to us _full_ also. When a company that has once had its hand on the door-latch, draws it away again, this delay excites the expectation of greater enjoyments, and this expectation excites embarrassment; but we were merely more silent about each other, and concealed our sighs over the falcon-flight of joyous hours, and perhaps many an averted eye presented to the moon the offering which the saddest or the gladdest soul finds it so hard to refuse.

Just at this moment I made my way out into its rays and came back again to my writing table, and thank the veil of night, which stretches double around the Universe, that it also folds itself over the greatest sorrows and joys of men.... We were, therefore, on our island as sadly silent as at the gate of a joyous eternity; the land-embracing spring, with its majesty--with its warm, sunken moon--with its twinkling star of Venus--with its sublime midnight-red--with its heavenly nightingales--swept by before five human beings; it flung and heaped up in these five too happy ones, its buds and its blossoms, and its dimly gleaming outlooks and hopes, and its thousand heavens, and took nothing away from them for it, but their _speech_. O spring! O thou earth of God! O thou boundless sky! O that to-day, in all dwellers upon thee, the heart heaved in joyous throbbings, till we all fell down beside each other beneath the stars, and poured out our hot breath in one jubilant voice and all our joys in prayers, and lifted our aspiring hearts to the lofty blue of heaven, and in our ecstasy sent up sighs, not of sorrow, but of bliss, whose way to heaven was as long as ours to the grave!... O bitter thought! of being often the one happy among none but the unhappy! sweeter thought, of being among only happy ones the sole afflicted!

At last the dark slags floated away from before the silvery glance of the rising moon; she stood like an ineffable rapture higher in the night of the heavens, painted out of the background into the foreground. The frogs pierced the night like a mill, and their continuous, many-voiced din had the effect of a silence. O what man whom death had changed into an angel flying over the earth, would not have fallen down upon it, and under the earthly foliage and on the earthly ground, silvered over by the moon (as by the sun it is gilded over), and thought upon the heaven he had left behind and upon his old human pastures, his old spring-times down below here, and of his former hopes among the blossoms?

Ye reviewers! forgive me this once and let me go on! At last we stepped into a gondola as into a Charon's bark, and rapturously and reluctantly cleared the bushy shore and the reflection streaming from the water upon its leaves. The greatest enjoyment, the highest gratitude, send, not _horizontally_ but _vertically_, their hidden and grasping roots into the heart; we could not therefore say much to Fenk, who was not to go away to-night from the scene of joy. Thou friend! dearer to me than all others, perhaps when all is more quiet and the moon is higher and purer, and the night more eternal, toward morning, thou wilt begin to weep over both--what the earth has given thee and what it has taken away. Beloved! if thou doest it now, at this moment--then I shall surely do so too!...

With our first step into the boat the Alp-horns (probably under Fenk's direction) again pierced the night; every tone rang through it like a past, every chord like a sigh for a spring-time of the other world; the night-mist played and smoked over woods and mountains and drew itself out, like the boundary lines of men, like morning-clouds of the future world, around our spring-awakened earth. The Alp-horns died away, like the voice of first love, in our ears and grew louder in our souls; the rudder and boat cut the water in two into a gleaming milky way; every wave was a trembling star; the fluctuating water reflected tremulously the moon, which we would rather have multiplied a thousand-fold than doubled, and whose soft lily-face bloomed still paler and more sweetly under the waves. Encircled with four heavens--the one in the blue above, on the earth, in the water and within us--we sailed on through the swimming blossoms. Beata sat at one end of the boat, facing the other, the moon, and the friend of her tender soul--her glance glided easily up and down between the moon and him--he was thinking of his morrow's journey and of his longer tour as ambassador, and begged us all for written souvenirs, that he might always have a good abiding among us as now, and reminded Beata of her promise to give him one also. She had already written it and gave it to him to-day at their parting. The happy day, the happy evening, the heavenly night filled her eyes with a thousand souls and with two tears that lingered there. She covered and dried one eye with her white handkerchief and looked upon Gustavus with the other, with a glance as pure and calm as an image in a mirror.... Thou fanciedst, thou good soul, that thou wast also hiding thy open eye!

At last--O thou everlasting, unceasing At Last!--our silvery course through the waves broke also upon its shore. The opposite one lay there deserted and overshadowed. Ottomar tore himself away in the most melancholy inspiration and amidst the dying echoes of the Swiss tones my renewed friend said: "It is all over again--all tones die away--all waves sink to rest--the fairest hours strike their last and the sands of life run out. There is surely and absolutely nothing, thou vast heaven above us, that can fill or bless us! Farewell! I shall take leave of you all along my way."