Hesperus or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days Volume II Part 7

"And thus then I flutter with tolerably dusted b.u.t.terfly's[59] wings in the immense temple which to our b.u.t.terfly[60] eyes breaks up into smaller ones, and the leafy ornaments of whose columns we take for the columns themselves, and whose rows of pillars become invisible from their greatness; there flutters the human b.u.t.terfly[61] up and down,--strikes against windows,--rows through dusty cobwebs,--flaps his wings at last around a hollow flower,--and the great organ-tone of the eternal harmony tosses him about with merely a _dumb_, rising and falling tempest, which is too great for a mortal ear.

"Ah, now I know life! Were not man even in his desires and wishes so _systematic_,--did he not in all things aim at roundings-off as well of his Arcadias as of the kingdom of truth,--then he might be happy and brave enough for wisdom. But a looking-gla.s.s wall of his _system_, a living hedge of his _paradise_, neither of which lets him _sally_ or _see_ into the infinite, fling him back forthwith to the opposite side, which receives him with new railings and throws in his way new limits.... Now, when I have gone through such various states, pa.s.sionate, wise, foolish, aesthetic, stoic; now that I see that the most perfect of them crooks and cripples either my earthly roots in the earth, or my twigs in the ether, and that, even if it did not do that, still it could not last over an hour, to say nothing of a life;--as, therefore, I clearly see that we are a fraction only and not a unit, and that all reckoning and reduction of the fraction is only an approximation between numerator and denominator, a change of the 1000/1001 into 10000/10001, I say: 'Well, for all me--be it so! Let wisdom, then, be for me the _finding out_ and _enduring_ of merely the _least_ gaps in our knowing, enjoying, and doing.' Accordingly, I no longer let myself be led astray, nor my neighbor either, by that most common illusion, that man regards every change in himself--every improvement at all events, but also even every deterioration--as greater than it afterward proves.

"--Enough! but since this observation--and still more since high destiny has given me joys, _in order that_ I might deserve them--new morning-light has fallen on my shady path, and I have new courage to improve myself. The clear stream of time runs over a sloping flower-bed of fair hours, on which I once stood, and upon which I can distinctly look down.--O when this Eden-lawn once comes up again, and I can take thy hand and walk upon it, and kneel down beside thee and look gratefully now to the morning-sky and now over the waving flower-fields of this life; then will I fall back upon thee speechless, and gratefully embrace thy breast, and say: 'O my Emanuel! only through thee do I indeed deserve it all.' Nay, I say it to-day, beloved teacher, and do thou stay a good long while by the side of thy scholar on the earth, even until he is worthy to accompany thee out of it."--

Long as this letter was, still Victor after all loved his teacher too much,--and hated too much the princely rudeness of making men tools,--not to have told him outright, that this letter owed--not so much its origin as--its birthday to the letter to his beloved. Here is the one to Clotilda, into which with the following words he brings his request to see her:--

"If I knew that I should even for a moment oppress or disturb by this sheet the beloved soul, which will now be enjoying itself by the side of the lofty Emanuel, in the presence of spring and amidst its fair thoughts, O most gladly would I sacrifice this blessed hour, in order, perhaps, to deserve it. But no, my friend forever! your tender heart desires not my silence! Ah, man must so often conceal coldness and bitterness, why, too, even love and joy?--Nor should I be able to do it today.

"O, if an inhabitant of earth had in a dream gone through Elysium; if great unknown flowers had waved above him; if a saint had handed him one of these flowers with the words, 'Let this remind thee when thou awakest that thou hast not dreamed!'--how would he pine for the Elysian land, as often as he looked upon the flower! Never-to-be-forgotten one!

you have, in the glimmering night, when my heart twice succ.u.mbed, but only once from pain, given a mortal an Eden, which reaches out beyond his life; but to me it has seemed till now as if I were waking more and more out of the receding dream-night,--when, lo! I received from the paradisiacal dream a flower,[62] which you left behind for me, that I might remain inexpressibly happy, and that my longing might be as great as my bliss. Why does this c.r.a.pe draw up all the hot tears out of the depth of my heart, why do I see behind this woven lattice the eyes open, which are so far from me, and which so move my inmost being to sadness? O, nothing appeases the loving soul, but what it shares with the loved one; therefore do I gaze upon the spring with such a sweet stir of emotion; for she enjoys it, too, I say,--therefore it is that thou pleasest me so, dear moon, with thy evening star; for thou weavest the web of thy silver-threads round her shadows also and her May-flowers,--therefore it is that I so love to bury myself in every shaded dell of your Eldorado; for I think, in the magnified shadows, in the fragrance-breathing blossoms of these pictures, she is now roaming, and the moon-sickle deflects the softened lightnings of the sun upon her eye. Then when I am too full of joy, when the _evening-rain_ of memory falls upon the hot cheeks, when my rapture rocks up and down on a single long trembling tri-clang of the harpsichord, then does the trembling and the silence and the infinite love too heavily oppress with woe the tumultuous heart, then do I yearn for the least sound, wherewith I may tell the beloved of my heart how I _love her_, how I honor _her_, that for _her_ I will live, for _her_ will die!----O my dream, my dream steals now like a tear into my heart! In the night of the third Easter-holiday I dreamed: Emanuel and I stood in a dusky nocturnal region. A great scythe on the western horizon flung flying, reflected flashes at the high lawns, which forthwith dried up and turned pale. But when a flash flickered into our eyes, our hearts, sweetly fainting, drew themselves up in the breast, and our bodies grew lighter for soaring away. 'It is the scythe of Time,' said Emanuel, 'but whence does it, haply, catch the reflection?' We looked toward the east, and there hung far in the distance and high in the air a broad dark-glowing land of vapor, which occasionally lightened. 'Is not that Eternity?' said Emanuel. Then fell before us light snow-pearls, like sparks. We looked up and three gold-green birds of paradise poised themselves overhead and swept round incessantly in a little circle, one after the other, and the falling pearls came from their eyes, or were their eyes themselves. High above them stood the full moon in the blue, but on the earth there was still no light, but a blue shadow: for the blue of heaven was a great blue cloud, opened only in one place by the moon, which poured down radiance on the three birds of paradise, and down below on a bright form averted from us.--_You_ were that form, and turned your face toward the East, toward the hanging landscape, as if you would presently see something there. The birds of paradise sprinkled their pearls faster and faster into your eyes; 'They are the tears which our friend must shed,' said Emanuel; and then, too, they fell from your eyes, but more brightly, and lay glittering on the flowery ground. The blue on the earth suddenly grew brighter than the blue in the heavens, and a steep cavern, whose mouth yawned towards Eternity, sank back deeper and deeper through the earth towards the west, down even to America, where the sun shone from below into the opening,--and a stream of evening-red, broad as a grave, shot upward out of the earth, and diffused itself with its evening sheen over the far haze-land of the vapory Eternity like thin flames. Then trembled your outspread arms, then trembled your songs full of blissful longing, then could we and you see perfectly the illuminated Eternity. But it shifted with playing colors under the gaze, we could not retain even in thought what we saw; they were elusive forms and dissolving hues, they seemed near, seemed far, seemed to be in the midst of our thoughts.---Little clouds going up from the earth floated around the glowing Eternity, and each bore a human being, standing upon it and singing, up to that luminous island, which clove itself open toward the earth, with only an endless row of white trees, moulded of light and snow, and instead of blossoms putting forth purple flowers.--And we saw our three shadows lying sublimely projected on the radiant white grove; and on Clotilda's shadow the purple flowers hung down as garlands; an angel hovered round the lovely shadow and smiled upon it tenderly and touched the place of the heart upon it. Then didst thou suddenly tremble, Clotilda, and turn round towards us, fairer than the angel in Eternity; thy whole ground gleamed under the fallen tears and became transparent. And now when thy dropping pearls dissolved the ground into a rising cloud, then didst thou hastily reach thy hand to us, and say, The cloud takes me up, we shall see each other again.--Ah! my fainting heart no more retained its blood: I knelt down, but I could say nothing; I would fain have melted my soul into a single sound, but the fettered tongue could not frame one, and I stared at the ascending immortal with infinite and inconsolable love.--Ah! thought I, life is a dream; but I could perhaps say to her how I love her, were I only awake.

"Then I woke. O Clotilda, can man say how much he loves?

"H."

His character and the contents of this dream shut out the suspicion of invention.--For the rest, even if Clotilda refuses his veiled wish to see her in Maienthal, still she must do it with a leaf of paper and three lines, which he can then read a thousand times over, and with which the cabinet of pictures and seals, wherein already are contained the hat and the views, will be considerably enriched. Meanwhile he stood in his fair Alpine valley between two high mountains, on each of which was mustering material for an avalanche,--one is perhaps already started up there in its crushing course, and he is not yet able to see it. The first avalanche, which the least sound of his may topple down upon him, is his crazy relation with his court acquaintance. He can boast of having angered them in a body: the Princess, Joachime, Matthieu. But, even independently of that, some conductor or other--merely because he stands not with the rest on the social isolating stool of the throne--must soon dart a diminished flash at his fingers or his eyes; at boards and at courts no one can stand upright without connections; it is there as in galleys, where all the slaves must move their oars together, if no one is to feel the cutting of the chain. But Victor said to himself, "Be not a child! be not the reversed fox who p.r.o.nounces _sour_ grapes, because he cannot reach them by leaping, to be _sweet_! I flatter myself, thou canst dispense with courtly hearts, which like their viands must first be warmed over a chafing-dish full of flickering spirits of wine.--By heaven! a man will surely be able to eat, even though that which he puts on the spit is not fetched by a guard from the kitchen, then handed to a page, then served up by a chamberlain or some other regulation-cavalier.--Only my father,--if it makes no difference to him!" That was just it: in the son there was nothing to be felled, but there was in the father,[63]

for whom they will probably let the uplifted woodman's and sacrificial axe hover, till he stands under it with his head, which without his return is not to be had.

But deuse a bit does a Pastor-fido care for the first avalanche. On the harmonica-bells of his fancy the external dissonances of fate, as the rolling of carriage-wheels over the pavement does on the strings of a musical instrument, die away in softly ascending murmur. With him, as with the astrologers, April, like my book, was dedicated to the evening-star, i. e. to Venus.

On the contrary, the other avalanche lay already beforehand on his breast,--the possibility of a breach with Clotilda's brother. A jealous man the twelve Apostles and the twelve minor Prophets cannot convert;--if he is cured on Sunday, then on Monday he is sick again, on Tuesday he is raving mad, and on Wednesday you can loose him again; he is weak and cunning and----only lies in wait. The cancer of jealousy on the breast can never wholly be cut out, if I am to believe great masters of the healing art. This time, furthermore, there was something true at the bottom; and then too the jealous man insures it in good season; jealousy enforces infidelity, and the provoked woman will not, so far as in her lies, leave the man in _error_. I cannot give myself the trouble (but the reader may) to enumerate in my biography all the little crannies and wood-holes through which he has. .h.i.therto let his Flamin see and _hear_ into his love-smitten heart: these knot-holes are so much the larger, as he was _before_ the _third_ Easter-holiday more improvident, for the very reason that he was more innocent, or, rather, more unhappy.

To this add, that Flamin--who every day thought the dear Evangelist Mattheus more honest and _open_ (like a burnt-out _touchhole_)--every day looked upon his faithful Bastian as more artful and impenetrable. I could wish the Regency-Councillor were more discerning; but crowded souls like Victor's, that have more powers, and for that very reason more sides, than common, seem, of course, to be less _porous_, just as authors full of meaning seem less clear. A man who exposes to you with frankness all the colors of his heart playing into each other, loses thereby the glory of frankness;--one who like Victor, from humor, collects and shows up other people's tricks, seems to imitate them;--a changeable, an ironical, a fine man is in the eyes of narrow ones a thorough-going false thief. Then, too, Victor, when it could be done without noise, jumped out of the way of any long mentionings of Clotilda, i. e. long dissemblings; and this very flight from artifice, even his present increased human-kindliness toward Flamin, precisely overshadowed his n.o.ble form; and nothing consoled him for the distortions of suspicion, but the sweet reflection that to please the brother of his beloved and of his heart he had turned his back upon the fairest days in Maienthal.

31. DOG-POST DAY.

Clotilda's Letter.--The Night-Express.--Rents and Gashes in the Band of Friendship.

I was going to have inserted in the Magazine of Literature, that I needed _Herrnschmidt's osculologia_[64] for my (learned) labors,--that is for this Chapter. I wanted to find out from it, how in Herrnschmidt's times they managed with women. In Jean Paul's times, they treat them miserably, that is to say in romances. Only an Englishman can portray excellent women. In the hands of most German romance-founders, the women turn out men, the coquettes w----, the statues lumps, the flower-pieces kitchen-pieces. That the fault lies more with the artists than with the models, not only the models themselves know, but also the Mining-Superintendent, even from the fact, that the female readers of romances are all even more romantic than the heroines of them,--more refined and reserved. The Mining-Superintendent will here--without any design of having eight distinguished women in Mayence bear him to the grave, as they did the women's minstrel and meister-singer, Henry Frauenlob--swear a printed oath (or simply _swear_ in print) that he has found most of his contemporaries better than the good, open, but empty and rough head of the author of the Alcibiades and Nordenschild[65] can draw them. In fact, if women did not forgive men everything, even authors, (and in truth they do it seventy times a day, and offer the other cheek, when one has been offended by a kiss,) then no circulating-library keeper could explain how it is that human beings, whose head nevertheless is heavier, whose pineal gland is smaller, and who have six more annular cartilages to the windpipe,--that is, in all, twenty, probably for the sake of their more speaking,--whose breast-bone is shorter, and whose breast-bones are softer than men's,--how such human beings of the female s.e.x can still send their maid or footman to a circulating library with the commission: "A romance of chivalry for my mademoiselle!" My colleagues of the quill--in reference to women I am, according to miners' language, one of the _feather_,[66] not of _fire_ nor of _leather_--are elected for the education of female readers, as, according to Lessing, the Jews were for the education of the nations, for the simple reason that they are ruder than their pupils.

Every woman is finer than her station. She gains more by culture than the man. The female angels (but so also the female devils) are kept only in the highest and finest human drawers; they are b.u.t.terflies, on whom the velvet-wing between two rough man's-fingers becomes a naked, skinny flap; they are tulips, whose colored leaves a single grasp of fate rubs down into a s.m.u.tty leather.----

I bring forward all this, in order that Herr Kotzebue and the shameless Poets'-corner in Jena[67] and the whole romantic crew may not take it ill of my Clotilda that she imitates more her own s.e.x than the aforesaid tribe, and so much the more, as she can allege in her defence, that she has not yet read this.

Through Agatha came very soon an answer from Clotilda, superscribed by Emanuel, which was inwardly sealed in the style of amba.s.sadors, geometrically cut, and calligraphically written, because ladies execute all things that require the attention of the senses better than we, and because they--for hardly four of my acquaintance need I except--are exactly the opposite of men, in that the better they think, the finer they write. Lavater says the handsomest painter produces the handsomest pictures; and I say, fair hands write a fair hand.

Clotilda's letter sets itself with an ornamental belt and a live hedge full of blossoms across our Doctor's path and shuts him off from Maienthal. For it runs thus:--

"MOST WORTHY FRIEND,--

"Perhaps no maiden is so happy as a poetess; and I think, here in this charming valley one at last becomes both. You are happy everywhere, for you can be a poet even at a court, as your beautiful poetic epistle shows me. But fancy loves to paint from paint-boxes,--the true Maienthal cannot give yours so much as you know how to put into the three landscape-pictures of it. As often as you and I are obliged to make good the absence of the same things by imagination: only with you is the compensation greater than the sacrifice.

"If I could by persuasion have procured you the pleasure of seeing Herr Emanuel, gladly would I have done it; but I was at last, from conscientious scruples, not eloquent enough to induce him to make the journey, which would expose his weak breast to the danger of bleeding to death. Regard him as a Spring, for which every year one must wait nine months.

"Ah, my anxiety for my unforgettable and irreplaceable teacher casts a shadow over the whole present Spring, as a monument does over a flower-garden. I have never looked upon a Spring so gladly and joyfully as on this.--I can often, even by moonlight, go out along the brooks, and look for a flower which trembles beside the liquid mirror, and around which a moon above and another below fling their l.u.s.tre, and I represent to myself the floral festival in the East, at which (as they say) a mirror and two lights are placed by night around every garden-flower. And yet I cannot look over to the flower-beds of my teacher, without being too much affected by the thought, Who knows whether his tulips will not stand longer than his crippled form? Has then the whole medical art no remedy that shall frustrate his hope of death?--It seems to me he is gradually attuning me to his melancholy tone, whereby I should make myself ridiculous before any other than the friend of Emanuel; but a still, hidden joy loves to break out even into melancholy. 'Only in the cold, not in the fair season of our destiny,'

you once said, 'do the warm drops pain us, which fall from the eyes upon the soul, just as only in winter one must not sprinkle flowers with warm water.' And why should I not disclose to your open heart all the weaknesses of mine? This chamber, wherein my Giulia ended her beautiful life, even this looking-gla.s.s which, when I turned away for pain from her dying, showed me once more my pale and fading sister, the windows, from which my eye so many times a must fall upon a mournful, thornful rose-bush, and on an eternally closed mound, all these may, indeed, cause my heart some sighs more than a happy one should otherwise have. I know not whether you or Emanuel said, 'The thought of death must be only our means of improvement, not our end and aim; if the earth of the grave falls into the heart, just as when it falls into the heart-leaves of a flower, it destroys instead of fructifying it';--but on my leaves fate and Giulia have already thrown some earth.--And I gladly bear it, as I can now, since gaining your friendship, flee for refuge to a heart, before which I may dare to open mine, in order to show it therein all the woes, all the sighs, all the doubts, all the questions of an oppressed soul. O, I thank the All-Gracious, that as much as he threatens to s.n.a.t.c.h from me in the person of my _teacher_, so much he gives me again already in advance in the person of his _friend_.--My friendship will reach after our Emanuel even into the next world, and will accompany his darling through this; and if one day the double stroke of his death should fall on us both, then would we shed more patiently our united tears, and I should perhaps say, Ah! his friend Sebastian has lost more than his friend CLOTILDA!"

The beating of my own heart, a stranger's, is to me a measure of the beating of the happier one. But before I relate what at the outset disturbed, and then doubled Victor's joy over this letter, let me be allowed to make two good observations. The first is: the enhanced sensibility, in a proud bosom (such as Clotilda's), which otherwise would call back sighs and send out only female satires at us lords of the creation, is the fairest token that her heart is melting in the sunshine of love. For this sentiment reverses women; it makes out of a Columbine a female Young, out of an orderly a disorderly one, out of a fine woman a frank one, out of a maker and wearer of finery a female philosopher, and so _vice versa_. And do thou, dear Philippina, prove the second remark, for thou answerest here as well as thy own brother: Is not the concealment of love the sweetest confession of it? Does not a veil--a moral one, I mean--show the whole face, and is it not permeable to everything except the wind,--the moral wind, I mean?--Does not the gla.s.s case of a lady's watch reveal the whole varnished watch-portrait at the bottom, and exclude merely _soiling_, not _seeing_? And what observations wilt thou make, when I rehea.r.s.e to thee these two!

The letter strengthened at once Victor's wish to be about Clotilda, and his power to give it up,--until, the next day at supper-time, an accident changed all. Matthieu, who paid almost more visits to enemies than to friends, came up from the Apothecary's. He saw the views of Maienthal and the c.r.a.pe hat; and as he knew that his sister Joachime had both, he said jokingly, "I fancy, you are going to dress yourself up in borrowed robes, or somebody has been disrobing." Victor fluttered away over the subject with a gay, vacant "Both." He was unwilling to take upon his lips the name of love or of a woman before a man who had no faith in virtue, least of all in woman's, who, to be sure, as other spiders do on other music, let himself down by his threads upon love, but who, as mice do, from love for the tones, crept over the strings and snapped them. Victor never loved (before his court-life) to be with such philosophical defamers among blameless maidens, because it pained him even to be reminded of their point of view. "They must not," said he, "learn so much as the existence of a daughter of mine, because they insult a father in the very act of imagining her to themselves."

Matthieu spoke of the next Patriotic Club (on the 4th of May, the birth-day of the Parson) and asked whether he would be there. Agatha, however, had already reminded him of it yesterday (the last day but one of April). At last Mat proposed his question, "Whether he would not also be of the party at Whitsuntide. He had planned a little excursion with the Regency-Councillor (Flamin), who always needed holidays for that purpose, to Grosskussewitz to the Count of O.'s. He had business there, to pay for some lodgings of the court to the Kussewitzers, and put the Count of O. in tune for an amicable adjustment of the recent misunderstanding; therefore he must have the lawyer with him. Perhaps the Englishmen would be at this Congress,--the travelling corps might then have as great entertainment as a _corps diplomatique_, after having first had just such occupation as theirs. The Count of O., in fact, loved Englishmen very much, though he did not like to ride English horses,--for he had been very sorry that he had lately talked with the distinguished Court-Physician at the Princess's without knowing you." Sebastian had concluded his long, dumb attention with a cold "No!" because the perspiration of this false, flying cat[68]

overspread his unprotected heart with an eating poison. "What have I done to this man," thought he during that invitation, "that he pursues me eternally,--that with a knife, of which one side is poisoned, or both, he cuts away, amidst the double pangs of both of us, my youth's friend from my soul,--that he runs out his mines even to strange places, in order in all situations to have me over his powder?" Victor had, namely, after all, reason to fear that the Whitsuntide journey was a voyage of discovery, upon which Joachime might propound to her brother, as Chevalier Michaelis[69] did to the Oriental travellers, questions about the case of the watch-letter, about Tostato, &c., in order, perhaps, to form out of it all an impeachment before the Prince.

He held the lower side of his card, i. e. of his _virtuous pain_, in such a way that Matthieu could not quite see it, so as to deprive him of a _malicious pleasure_. The latter, who wore not a lace mask, but an iron one, and besides one with a neck, showed often such coldness, that one did not comprehend his furious wrath and _vice versa_,--but the one (the coldness) he had in camp, the other (the wrath) in the fight against the foe. If any one immediately enraged him, it was a good sign, and meant that he had no design against him.

After the evacuation of the Evangelist,--when he had done scolding at himself for letting him find the c.r.a.pe hat, which, in fact, he would have kept more concealed if Flamin had came oftener,--he looked round for Clotilda's profile, that the charming shadow might cool his wrath.

It was not to be found: his first hypothesis was that Mat had quietly stolen it, which was the more likely, as he had cut it. If he has really pocketed the profile, then must the Evangelist--for, as is well known, the silhouette was made over _to me_ at the very beginning of this story--be actually my corresponding fellow-member Knef, and it is he who sent me the advice-boat,--namely, the Pomeranian dog.--Odd enough it is that my correspondent himself by such intelligence sets me upon the suspicion.

While Victor took the dear c.r.a.pe hat into his hand as a compensation for the likeness, and dreamily contemplated it, there sprang forth on the hat wholly new, fresh flowers for his soul. "What!" he said to himself, "must I then have only the profile to look at? Can I not choose the--original itself for that purpose?" In short, the hat became an urn of fortune, from which he drew a joyous hour, that is the determination to travel on Whitsuntide, but to--Maienthal. He seriously reflected, that for him and Clotilda this excessive indulgence of a jealous brother, whose mistaken hopes no sister indeed was obliged to strengthen, was besides aggravated and frustrated by the misanthropic suggestions of Matthieu,--that, therefore, their separation was as little of an alleviation as their meeting was a crime,--that, meanwhile, it would be a fine thing to spare the brother and to take merely the time of his absence for a suspicious excursion, till one day the drawing down of the bandage should disclose in the unfaithful one the sister, and in the rival the forbearing friend,--and that it was at all events better to talk with her in Maienthal than, at his return, when he was near,--and that a brother enlightened in regard to his origin would certainly one day have nothing to reproach him with, except that he had taken from him no other illusions than, at most, disagreeable ones.--O, Love and Virtue have a naked conscience, and apologize for their heavenly pleasures longer and more than other qualities do for their infernal ones!

When Victor further thought on _this_, how soon leaf and blossom drop off from the days of love, and that Emanuel, and even Clotilda, were two flowers moved close to the brink of the grave, whose loose, naked roots already hung down dead, then was his resolution fixed, and he wrote to Emanuel the intelligence of his intended arrival at Whitsuntide, in order not to anger Clotilda by a surprise, and in order, besides, to allow her the opportunity of a countermand. The way in which he put it was this: "If his Socratic genius would allow it (i. e. Clotilda), who always told him what he must _not_ do, then he was coming on Whitsuntide, as, besides, the town would then be deserted, as Flamin was to be gone for four or five days to Kussewitz, &c."

When he had finished the letter, it occurred to him that this very day a year ago; on the 29th of April, he had travelled all night, in order with the first of May in the morning to enter through the mist into the parsonage. "I can, verily, again spend the sultry zephyr-night, not under the coverlet, but under the stars. I can take one steady gaze into the evening-red towards Maienthal's mountains. I can, indeed, better still, go half the way over them,--or in fact the whole. I can post myself on a hill and look down into the hamlet. Truly I can then deliver my billet here incognito to some Maienthaler, and take flight again before it is yet day."

At seven o'clock in the evening he went, like the sea, from east to west. Orion, Castor, and Andromeda glisten in the west, not far from the evening-red, over the fields of the loved one, and, like her, will soon sink from one heaven into another. His heart agitated by nothing but hopes, the _heated_ chambers of his brain, on whose walls Maienthal sketched with _sympathetic_ ink came forth in ever clearer outlines and brighter colors, this inner and almost painful din of joy deprived him at first of the power of taking in the temple of Spring, built up in Grecian beauty, with a still, luminous soul. Nature and Art are best enjoyed only with a clean eye, from which both kinds of tears have been wiped away.

But at last the outspread _night-piece_ covered over his hot _fever-images_, and heaven with its lights, and earth with its shadows, made their way into his expanded heart. The night was without moonlight, but without clouds. The temple of nature, like a Christian temple, was sublimely dimmed. Victor could not make his way up out of the trenches of long valleys, out of the glooms of woods, and out of the mists of meadows with their play of colors, till the midnight hour, when he climbed a mountain like a throne, and there lay down on his back in order to plunge his eyes into the heavens, and cool off from his dreaming and racing. The low-hanging blue of heaven seemed to him to be a thin blue cloud, a sea dashed into blue mists, and one sun after another with its long rays slightly parted this blue flood.

Arcturus, who stood over against the reclining man, was already descending from the battlements of heaven, and three great.

constellations, the Lynx, the Bull, and the Great Bear, marched far in the van under the western gate.--These nearer suns were encircled by remote milky-ways with a swimming halo, and thousands of vast heavens flung into eternity stood in our heaven as white vapors a span in length, as faintly luminous snow-flakes out of immensity, as silver circles of h.o.a.r-frost.--And the strata of suns crowded together, which only before the thousand-eyed eye of Art let fall their misty veil, played like streaks of _our_ little particles of sun-dust in the glowing sunbeam of the Eternal that burned through the immeasurable s.p.a.ce. And the reflection of his throne, glowing through and through, lay bright on all the suns.----

--Suddenly, nearer at hand, molten cloudlets of light, nearer mists, which had flown upward out of dew, take their stations, during their silvering, low down before the suns, and the silvery gleam of heaven comes on apace with scattered dark fleeces.----Victor cannot comprehend the supernatural kindling, and starts up, enchanted, to his feet....

and lo, our good neighbor and kinsman, the moon, the sixth grand division of our little earth, had silently, and without the morning's cry of joy, entered _beside_ the triumphal gate of the sun into the night of her mother earth with her _half-day_.

And now, when the shadows ran off from all the mountains, and glided through the discovered landscapes only in brooks between trees, and when the moon gave the whole dark spring a little morning in the midnight,--then did Victor, not with nightly melancholy, but with morning rejuvenescence take the great round play-room of the annual creation into his awakened eyes, into his awakened soul; and he surveyed the spring with an internal cry of joy in the midst of the wide realm of profound silence, with the feeling of immortality in the circle of sleep.----

Earth also, and not Heaven only, makes man great!

Enter into my soul and into my words, ye May-feelings that throbbed in the bosom of my Victor, as he looked over the budding, swelling earth, covered with suns above his head, enclosed in a net of green life that reached from roots to tree-tops, from mountains to furrows, and borne up by a second spring under his feet, as he imagined to himself behind the transpierced earth-crust the sun standing with a day of splendor under America.--Climb higher, moon, that he may see more easily the gushing, swollen, dark-green spring, which with little pale spears crowds upward out of the earth, till it has lifted itself out, full of glowing flowers, full of waving trees,--that he may descry the plains which lie under rich leaves, and on whose green track the eye ascends from the upright flowers on which the cloven charms of light grow and fix themselves to the bushes bursting into blossoms, and to the slow trees whose glistening buds sway up and down in the spring-winds.----Victor had sunk into dreams, when all at once the cold fanning of the spring-air, which could now play more with little clouds than with flowers, and the murmur of the spring brooks, which darted away beside him from all the hills and over every patch of darker green, woke and bestirred him.--There was the moon that had gone up unseen, and all the fountains glistened, and the lilies of the valley came out in white bloom from the green, and round the lively water-plants danced silver-points. Then did his bliss-burdened look lift itself in order to rise to G.o.d from the earth and from the green borders of the brooks, and climb up the curved woods, out of which the iron-sparks and smoke columns[70] leaped above the summits, and far up the white mountains where winter sleeps in clouds;----but when his holy sight was in the starry heaven, and was about to look up to G.o.d, who has created night and spring and the soul,--then, weeping and reverent and lowly and blissful, he fell back with drooping wing.... His heavy soul could only say, He is!--

But his heart drank its fill of life from the endless, welling, breathing world around him, above him, under him, wherein force reaches to force, blossom to blossom, and whose fountains of life shoot from one earth to another, and whose void s.p.a.ces are only the paths of the finer powers and the residence of the lesser ones,--the whole immeasurable world stood before him, whose distended cataract, spraying into fragrances and streams, into milky-ways and hearts, between the _two_ thunders of the summit and the abyss, rapid, starry, flaming, descends out of a past eternity, and leaps down into a future one,--and when G.o.d looks upon the cataract, then the circle of eternity paints itself thereon as a rainbow, and the stream does not discompose the hovering circle....

The blessed mortal rose up and journeyed on in the feeling of immortality through the spring-life pulsating around him; and he thought that man, in the midst of so many examples of immutability, erroneously translated the distinction between his sleep and waking into the distinction between existence and non-existence. Now his vigorous, exuberant feelings welcomed every noise, the stroke of the trip-hammer in the woods, the rush of spring-waters and spring-winds, and the whir of the partridge.--

At three o'clock in the morning he looked down on Maienthal. He came upon the mountain relieved by five solitary fir-trees, on which one can see through the whole village, and again over to the other mountain, where the weeping birch shades his Emanuel. The embowered cell of the latter he could not discern, but all the windows of the convent where his loved one dreamed glistened in the sparkling moonlight. The rapture of night was still in his breast, and the burning glow of dreams on his countenance;--but the valley drew him out to the earth, and only gave his flowers of joy a _firmer_ soil; and the morning-wind cooled his breath, and the dew his cheeks. The tears rose into his eyes, when they fell upon the white-curtained windows, behind which a lovely, a wise, a loved and loving soul was completing its guileless morning-dreams. Ah!

dream, Clotilda, of thy friend, that he is near thee, that he is turning his overflowing eyes toward thy cell, and that he will vanish, if thou appearest, and that, nevertheless, he is growing more blessed from moment to moment,--ah! he too, indeed, is dreaming, and when the sun rises, the beloved vale will have sunk like thy dream with the starry heaven.--O, the mountains, the woods, behind which dwells a beloved soul, the walls which enclose her, look upon man with a touching magic, and hang before him like sweet curtains of the future and the past.