Hesperus or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days Volume II Part 14

Then he came into the presence of his beloved!--I remarked day-before-day-before-yesterday, while reading the German-French history, where, as is well known, the crowned name Clotilda also reigns, by the redoubled beatings of my heart, how I should feel then, when I came actually to see this Clotilda, whom for three quarters of a year I have praised; for that Knef, and the dog too, are no knaves, and that the whole history has not merely transpired, but is still transpiring, I see by a hundred traits which no fancy can well invent.

If the biographer should get sight of the heroine, there would arise nothing but a new volume and a new--hero, who would be--myself.

She was sick; that evening had pounced like a vulture upon her heart, and had not yet drawn out its b.l.o.o.d.y claws. Her soul seemed only the angel that guards the earthly casing of a saint, from which the soul has fled. The Chamberlain met the Court Physician, as if he knew nothing of any duelling. What mothers generally do, that the father did; he forgave every one who was in high station and who wanted his daughter. The proposal which Victor at last made to him surprised him only because he had hitherto thought the latter postponed it merely on account of uncertainty respecting Clotilda's inheritance and relations in life. His answer consisted in infinite pleasure, infinite honor, &c., and other infinities; for with him all was one; hence, too, Platner a.s.serts with justice that it is in fact only the finite of which man cannot conceive.[144] Le Baut would have handed over his daughter, even if he had not wished to; he could not refuse anything to one's face, not even a daughter. Moreover, no one could come and sue for Clotilda who would not have fitted into some one of his projects (the four chambers of his brain were full of them up to the ceiling).

Naturally, therefore, a son-in-law was what he now most wished, since his daughter might actually die without his having yet used her for a leaping-pole and lever of his body,--and because, secondly, the duel-talk preyed upon his heart; not as if he had not by healthy _vermiform_[145] motions digested the _hardest_ things, but because, like cultivated men without honor, he loved to appear on occasion of slight insults with alarm-cannon and fire-drums, in order to steal the right, in the case of complete but productive cases of dishonor, pierced with veins of silver, to lie there still as a mouse. The only thing which looked unpleasant to the Chamberlain, but which he immediately got over by the fact of giving his word (regarding his daughter) to the Court Physician, was, that he had previously given the selfsame word (secretly) to our Mat. As his Lordship, who was soon to return, could harm him and help him more than the minister could, he gladly broke his old word, for the sake of keeping his newest; for not only his _last will_, but _every_ will, man can change as he will, and if he is a man of his word, he will be fond of making entirely opposite promises, in order to oblige himself to keep one of them. If the lying conduct of the Chamberlain, after such excuses, still needs one, he has this in his favor, that he certainly hoped Clotilda, when _he_ had given his Yes, would answer No, and dare and--suffer instead of him. At least he held out this hope before his angry wife, and referred her to Clotilda's former No, which had laid upon our Victor such heavy hours, and to her unchangeableness. I wish one could have afterward petrified or cast his face in plaster in the state into which it fell upon being informed of Clotilda's Yes. What could the stepmother, the Chamberlain's lady, who was always the esquire and ally of the Evangelist, do in the matter further than to make a friendly face and the remark, that "no one was harder to manage than a spouse whom everybody managed"?

The formalities of the betrothal itself awaited the return of the Lord, and other circ.u.mstances. Let me not say anything of the love of this couple, exalted as it had been by so many sorrows. When, to love, the love of man also is actually wedded (a thing which many a one will not understand at all);--when in the breath of love all other charms of the heart become more beautiful, all fine feelings still finer, every flame for the sublime still higher, as in oxygen gas every spark becomes a lightning-flash, and every glowworm a flame;--when the eyes of the two lovers seldom meet, but their thoughts often;--when Victor almost dreads to retain a heart to which he has cost so much, so many dark days, so many anxieties and almost a brother;--and when Clotilda divines this delicate shrinking and rewards _him_ for _her_ sufferings;--then is it impossible to convey to many persons a sketch of such an ethereal flame, to say nothing of its colors; for the _few_ it is unnecessary.

In every new relation into which a beloved object enters, love begins again at the beginning and with new flames; e. g. when we meet her in a strange house,--or among new persons,--or as a traveller,--or as a hostess,--or as a flower-gardener,--or as a dancer,--or (which has the greatest effect) as a betrothed. This was Victor's case; for from the hour when the wish of inclination is exalted into the command of duty, and when the dear soul delivers herself and all her hopes, and the reins of her whole future, into the beloved hands, there must in every good man's heart be a voice calling: "Now she has no longer any one on earth but thee,--now let her be holy to thee; O, now spare and guard and reward the dear soul who believes in thee!"--Victor was inexpressibly moved by this relation through the incidental circ.u.mstance that this very Clotilda, this firm, proud ball-queen and queen of heaven, who with so many energies and so much independence went her way over the snares of men and under their laurel-wreaths, was now by the betrothal giving her Declaration of Independence with a gentle smile into Victor's hands, and wished now nothing more than to love and to be loved; for this sweet condescension of so lofty a form Victor knew no sacrifice, no wound, no gift, which would have seemed to him great enough to repay her.--Thus should one love; and every new right and sacrifice which chills the common man, makes the good one warmer and more tender.

Although Victor by the rights of his new relationship found a more domestic and comfortable life with his parents-in-law; nevertheless it pained him that he was daily obliged to see the ever-memorable parsonage-people in their garden, and yet that the iron fence of the previous duel and the present betrothal shut him off from their hearts.

For the same reason must he also renounce the Britons and their standing club. Le Baut however thought it an act of prudence: "for it was known on good authority, that they were Jacobins, and Frenchmen in disguise."--

But Clotilda's soul could no longer bear the deep sorrow which she felt to be weighing on her friend, the Parson's wife; she invited her by a note to a friendly walk. They met on the observatory; and Victor saw, with the deepest emotion, how Clotilda immediately took the hand of her oldest friend, and never, for the whole way, let it go from hers.

Clotilda came back with a countenance illumined with joy, and with eyes which had wept much, and with heavenly features in which shone an unnamable, not so much more ardent as more tender, love. Not for some time could she sufficiently command her emotions to communicate to Victor _something_ of the interview: for I think I can detect that it was not _all_. The Parson's wife--Clotilda related--received her with a look full of crushing sorrows, but neither with coldness nor suspicion.

At first neither could do anything but weep, and they spoke not a word; Clotilda was still more overcome, and her tears still continued to flow, when she began to relate her betrothal. She laid the hand of her friend upon her heart, and said: "Now is our friendship severely tried.

I still believe in yours,--believe in mine!--O only this once, dear friend, stand firm! Heavy secrets, over which I have no right and to which I have only in a small degree the key, bring us all so near to these dreadful misunderstandings. Only this time rely upon it firmly, that you and I are changing _our relation_ to each other as little as our characters."--Here the Parson's wife beheld her with a great look in which the old love for Victor still gleamed on, and then embraced her all at once with dry eyes and said: "Yes, I rely upon you, do you what you will, and though I should at last be the only soul left."--The last addition would at another time have offended Clotilda; ah, it could not do so now; O, she was glad to have something to forgive!

After the narration she told her friend, that, in case the invisibleness and the silence of his Lordship lasted much longer, she should perhaps, rather than wait, undertake the toilsome journey to London to her and Flamin's mother, in order to persuade the latter, as the solution of all these dangerous riddles, to come to Germany.--Ah, could Victor's self-sacrificing heart make an objection to the sacrifices of others?--No! his woe was redoubled, but also his respect and love.

In this situation of things there came to Clotilda a short letter from Emanuel.

Last evening my Julius came to me with a basket full of garden-earth and begged me for flower-pots and for hyacinths, because, he said, he was bringing earth for both. He had fetched the soil for his flowers from the hill of thy Giulia.----I drew his white- and red-blooming face, which resembles the pink with the red point, to my breast and said, 'Ah, who tends the flowers of man, when he has pa.s.sed away?' And I meant _him_ too with his tender bloom, into which may sorrow never fling its heavy rain-drops!--O Victor and Clotilda, when the lilies of the earth benumb me and put me into the last slumber, then adopt ye my blind Julius, and let this soul full of love be guarded by your loving souls!

"Clotilda! I now beg or wish something of you, which you perhaps can hardly grant. Ah, come on the _longest day_ to Maienthal, thou fair soul! Cannot thy heart bear it? Didst thou not accompany thy Giulia even to the _blind gate_ of the grave and there see her soul soar up and her body fall to the earth? O, if thou and thy friend, in the last hour, when life folds up its flashing peac.o.c.k-mirrors and lets them sink heavy and colorless into the grave, could stay by me, as the two first angels of the future world!--For at the moment when the whole earth like a sh.e.l.l breaks off from the heart, the naked heart clings faster to hearts and would fain warm itself against death, and when all bonds of earth tear away, the flower-chains of love bloom on. O Clotilda! how heavenly to close my life in the presence of thy Elysian form! I should already be hovering around thee unfettered on the wings of eternity, to look upon thee, and if I could not wipe away thy tears with the ethereal hand, I would console thy heavy heart with a strange rapture! Ay, if man were blinded in the forecourt of the second world, still thy form would remain as an after-shining sun-image before my closed eyes!--O Clotilda, if thou shouldst come! Ah, probably thou wilt not come; and only the Eternal, who numbers the hours of the second life, knows when I shall see thee again, on the second earth, and how great are there the pains of longing. And so then farewell, and move on, lofty soul, in thy path beneath the clouds,--when I behold thy friend, thou wilt touchingly stand before me,--and when I die on his heart, I shall pray for thee, and say to G.o.d: Give her to me again, when on her head the flower-wreath of earth is great enough--or the crown of thorns too great!--Clotilda, never change, and then I shall not ask Destiny: How long will she smile down below there, how long will she weep there? Never change!

"EMANUEL."

The two fell softly on each other's hearts and were silent over their thoughts; Emanuel's love glorified theirs, and Victor had too great a respect for his friend and his beloved to console the latter. He did not once ask her, how she answered Emanuel's prayer; he knew that she must refuse it, because otherwise her heart would break beside the loved one.

When at last he parted from her and from St. Luna, and she was compelled to reflect that in a few days he would go to Maienthal,--and when in his eyes and hers tears stood which indicated more than _one_ sorrow, and which not, man dries away but death or G.o.d,--then Victor during the farewell looked upon her with the mute question, "Shall I say nothing to our beloved?"--Clotilda's soul remained most erect under burdens, and she never appeared greater than through tears, as the stars in a heaven full of rain come out brighter and larger; she looked up to heaven as if asking, "Couldst thou, all-gracious One, crush us so deeply?" then she weighed with oppressed heart the heavy grief,--then she found it too great for utterance--and too great for endurance,--and she no longer believed it, and said ambiguously, with wet eyes and with ambiguous smile, "No, Victor, we shall surely all meet again!"

Victor went off not long before the two crowned bathing-guests arrived with a considerable retinue.--I remark it with quite as little resentment as Victor felt on the occasion, that Agatha, notwithstanding the maternal example, broke off entirely, first with Victor, i. e. with the Antipode and Anti-Christ of her beloved brother; secondly and still more with Clotilda.

It may be stated, that I suppressed the foregoing letter of Emanuel in the first edition, for the simple reason--for I had it in my hands early enough, as well as many other doc.u.ments of this history, which nevertheless (for reasons) will never be published--that I feared it would be affecting; a susceptible soul finds, as it is, too many sorrows in this volume!--But for that very reason we will not leave out what there was, in the first edition, of the comic, and accordingly I proceed.

We readers will, with Victor, take leave of the Chamberlain, who, with his half upright eyebrows,--they incline to each other at the bridge of the nose in the form of the mathematical sign of the root,[146]--parts from us with true, obliging courteousness. I know, when we are gone, he will let us find justice, and will make too much out of us; for he never calumniates either from malice or from levity, and whom he calumniates, him he has a serious intention to destroy, because he would rather make one unhappy than paint him black.--When I saw him bend down so to us, I executed in thought a half-satire upon him, whereof the true and serious purport may be this: that men are actually created for the purpose of making themselves as crooked as the _spiritus asper_[147] is. I do not exactly build much upon this, that geometers have written: If the G.o.ds a.s.sumed a form, it must be the most perfect, that of a circle; I might, to be sure, draw this conclusion from that, that a crooked back is at least an approximation to the divine form, because it is an arc of a circle,--but I do not care to; for the physical is child's play on this subject, and only of consequence in so far as it partly indicates the crooking and creeping of the soul, and partly (e. g. by the narrowing of the chest) promotes it. Even at court they would dispense with the external bending, if they could be sure that the inner and n.o.bler crook of the disposition were there, without the sign; for as, according to Kant, the subjection and casting down of our self-conceit is a requirement of the purer and the Christian morality: accordingly one who has absolutely no moral excellences must with his self-consciousness thereof stoop still lower than to lowliness, which even the virtuous has; he must sink to that which I call a n.o.ble crawling. I confess I do not despise the practice which the little rules of breeding insure herein, and which besides undertakes to be nothing but virtue in trifles, the rules, namely, that one shall bow when one contradicts,--when one praises,--when one receives an insult,--when one offers one,--when one bows another down,--when one would just precisely play the Devil. But it is well that such a virtue of crooking has its own places of exercise, and does not depend on chance. At court a man with straight body and spirit would be cast out as dead, in the court sense, like a crab with a straight tail, which only a dead one carries. If formerly hermits chose lowly cells, in order not to stand upright, a man of the world does not need this; lofty banquet-halls, temples of pleasure, dancing-halls, press him down so much the lower, the higher they are themselves.--It were bad, if this so important virtue of bending downward presupposed a special strength of mind or body, which no one, indeed, can bestow on himself; but exactly the reverse is the case; it will have only weakness, which with horses is not so, for they can no longer let down the tail when its sinews are cut. If the Pharisees carried lead in their caps in order to make it easier for them to stoop,[148] the lead which one brings into the world with him, and which lies in the head, renders perhaps still greater services. Hence it is a fine arrangement, that great souls, for which, as for tall statures, stooping is disagreeable, fortunately (but for their punishment) never come to anything, whereas mediocre ones, who make nothing of it, flourish and put forth a goodly crown: thus have I often seen in the baking of bread, that every moderate loaf in the oven rose and arched beautifully, but the big one remained sitting there flat and miserable.--But we should be subjects for pity, if a virtue which const.i.tutes the worth of the civilian, the virtue of becoming not merely like children, but like f[oe]tuses, which double themselves up in the mother's body,--if this could only prosper in the highest place, as one must almost suppose, since the courtier _after_ the fall goes upright again on his estate,--whereas the serpent _before_ the fall and during the temptation did not creep.--But in all civil relations educational inst.i.tutions for _crooklings_ are provided; everywhere there stretches out in the air now a spiritual and now a secular arm, which gives us the regular crook, and still higher are the longest of all set, which reach over whole nations. The scholar himself bends over his writing-desk under the birth of introductions and courtly dedications and opinions. By the mere h.o.a.riness of old age the body as well as the spirit ripens to a bony humpback, and the lower clergy, because they are always looking downward into the grave, work themselves into the crooked posture.--I conclude with the consolation that bending does not _exclude_ inflation, but _includes_ it; just as the circle, of which one is a section, runs innumerable times around the swollen surface of the sphere....

I would truly have written over this "Extra-leaf" that t.i.tle as a heading,--so that the reader might have skipped it,--had I not wished that he should read it, by way of diverting himself, and of sharing more easily with my Victor his dismal hours. For every stroke of the clock is a death-bell sounding out a dead march for the wreck of his fairer hours.

The very evening he entered into Flachsenfingen, stories quite as ugly as probable came to his ears; Mat had told the Apothecary a good deal; but this time I give in to his reports.

That is to say, the Parson, so soon as he heard of the betrothal, had set out for the city in order to frustrate murderous deeds and duels on the part of his son. As during his dressing the whole of his travelling uniform did not lie at the very instant before his eyes, he threw off to his family light red-crayon-drawings of the b.l.o.o.d.y scenes and b.l.o.o.d.y scaffolds, upon which, he said, he reckoned, as he probably, on account of the detention in dressing, should arrive too late. The shrunk boot which Appel had dried a little at the fire could not be got on to the foot,--Eymann gasped,--pulled, "It is possible," said he, "that they are at this very moment letting fly at each other";--at last he let his arms fall back powerless, and sat calmly and firmly bolt upright, and waited silently for them to fire at him and question him. When nothing came, he said with fury: "Whatever Satan it may be that has got into my house, and has made my boots shrink up so, (I would undertake to get my foot into a leather queue, through a needle's eye, but not into one of them,) he has the murder of my child upon his soul.--Is there then no child of misery about here, that will just polish my heel for me with a little soft soap?"--While they were forcing in his foot, he saw Appel still busily ironing away at his shirt-bosom: "Enough, Appel! very good!"--said he,--"I really shall not unb.u.t.ton myself." She glided away lightly on the flat, which was, as it were, the skate under her hand.

"Daughter, thy father wants his shirt. The life of thy own brother is put in jeopardy by thee,--it is just as if thou wert giving him the finishing stroke!" She glided nimbly only once more on her hand-skate over the whole, and then handed it to him with pleasure.

On the way the chaplain sketched to himself a safe and sound plan of proceeding in the business. He would in the beginning make no disclosure of the engagement to Flamin,--then he was going to read to him only the penitential text upon the Maienthal duel,--then to extort from him the _Urphede_ or solemn oath to keep quiet,--and only at the very last to come out with the report. While he was thinking over the plan and the danger, he ran himself into a hotter and hotter sweat of anxiety. Just as he had once, by a long drawing out of consequences, driven himself and a patient who had a slight buzzing in the ears to such a pitch, that they both expected the next minute apoplexy and paralysis of half one side: so, in the present instance, by a picturesque treatment of the details of an _imaginary_ duel he at last removed from himself so thoroughly all doubts about one's having already _transpired_ that he pa.s.sed in through the city gate with the firm conviction that the Regency-Councillor was lying either in chains or on the bier. "Thank G.o.d that I see thee without wounds and without chains," was the expression that escaped from him on his entrance; and he had almost spoiled his whole business plan, or at least reversed it.

Flamin understood him to refer to the first duel. Eymann could so much the more easily follow out the management of the case and phlebotomical table of rules which he had laid down, and, so to speak, fight a duel with the duel. The silent son had nothing to oppose to him--but light beer. While he was getting it, the Parson had pulled at the k.n.o.bs of all the canes to see whether there were no sword-canes. A pistol-like tinder-box at a distance was a suspicious object to him. A double-barrelled gun on the wall near by, with its--stock aimed at him, took away much of his courage. Flamin excused his taciturnity on the ground of legal _plethora_ and over-freighting of the brain, and pointed to the pile of criminal doc.u.ments before him. When he was called upon to give him an extemporaneous abstract of them, and when of course the war-cries _prison_, _blood-guiltiness_, _avenging sword_, whizzed like a hissing rain of bullets round Eymann's ears; then did the agony which he aggravated by the more rapid _douche_ of the pale ale expand itself so mightily within him that the double-barrelled gun had to be hung up in the chamber: "I get nothing by it," said he, "if it goes off and bursts, and the lock flies into my face, or if the stock actually kills me." Now he began in a compound fit of emotion and intoxication to weep and to exhort: that a man ought to think on the fifth pet.i.tion in the Lord's prayer,--that a country clergyman could with ill-grace preach to his spiritual fold reconciliation, if he had a son in the city, who during the sermon was fighting a duel,--and that Flamin must never say he was his son, if he either got or gave the fatal shot in a duel. Nothing so easily drew the storm-wind of Flamin's anger out of its cavern, as a doleful voice and long religious edicts.

"For G.o.d's sake," cried Flamin, "let that be enough now,--G.o.d shall punish me, I will be lost to all eternity, I swear to you, if I ever touch _him_ even." This oath which escaped him was magnificent marshmallow-paste and soft ice-cream for the heated court-chaplain, who from forgetfulness of his order of business now adopted the opinion that the betrothal was already full well known to the Regency-Councillor. "Thinkest thou not, son," said he joyfully, "that such an oath refreshes and comforts an anxious father like the latter rain, especially as, since _her_ betrothal to him, I have had absolutely nothing better to look for than murder and a.s.sa.s.sination? Am I right or not?"--Flamin flung up by a single question the cover from this murderous armed spectre of his heart,--and now he heard his father no more; pale, full of convulsions, he sat there in silence,--the back of the chair cracked under his pressure,--he twisted and tied his watch-chain round his fingers, and tore it off and mashed the remnant again round the bruised finger and crushed it to pieces,--in his gla.s.sy eyes stood two heavy, rigid, cold drops,--his heart shrank up empty and spiritless before an approaching and frightful _death-chill_, which, when a friendship is murdered in a bosom, always precedes the burning wrath thereby excited.--Ah, who of us does not pity the unhappy, forsaken soul?--Eymann went away deceived, and took this calm for mere calm, and the broken and choked voice for emotion.

And in this b.l.o.o.d.y state he was found by Matthieu, who had just come to announce to the Regency-Councillor, as if with twenty-four blowing postilions (from a note of the wife of the Chamberlain), Victor's victory over the whole of them. This fellow now first transformed the iceberg into a volcano, and made Flamin in his pent-up fury feel as if he could shatter to pieces one quarter of the world against another.

Victor heard nothing now for some days. Flamin locked himself up.

Matthieu visited him often, but not the house of the Apothecary. The crowned pair arrived at last at the baths of St. Luna.

Thus all remained till the morning when Victor took leave of the Apothecary to go to Maienthal before the curtain of a heavy scene. Here the Apothecary could not deny himself the pleasure of depriving the Court-Physician of his, by imparting to him the (probably false) intelligence, that the Page had challenged the Chamberlain on account of his breach of promise with regard to Clotilda. Little or no importance is to be attached to the report, for the reason, if for no other, that the Apothecary wanted only to cough out his own praise and disguise it in the shape of a commendation of Victor, that the latter had known how, with such infinite finesse, to carry out _his_ recent hints of undermining the Evangelist. The hints were, as will be recollected, the two propositions of becoming the lover of the Princess and the husband of Clotilda, in order to gain the Prince, and thus, as a swine does a rattlesnake, to swallow Mat with impunity. One must forgive the soul of Victor, gnawed by a worm's-nest of afflictions, for blazing up and attacking Zeusel with an eye full of the profoundest contempt, "I know not who would deserve to listen to such propositions,--unless it is he who can make them."

My correspondent leaves off abruptly and sadly with the words: "Late in the evening, Victor arrived with swollen eyes at Maienthal, to see whether on the next day his n.o.blest teacher and greatest friend would wither away."----We can all conceive what must be the embrace of a loved one a few paces from his grave. The friend who threatens us with his death takes a painful hold of our soul, even if we doubt it. We can all imagine the wet eye which Victor must have cast on the still blooming scene of his withered rose-feast.--What consoles him is the improbability of the predicted death, since Emanuel is as well as usual, and since suicide is still more impossible with this pious spirit, who long since compared the suicide to the lobster, who cannot draw out the claw which he himself in his stupidity has jammed and crushed with its mate, but snaps it off.--May the reader bring with him to the description of the longest day,[149] which I am to make all alone under the exalting stillness of night, a heart like that of the East Indian, which like old temples is dumb and dark, but vast and full of holy images!

38. DOG-POST DAY.

The Sublime Hour before Midnight.--The Blissful After-Midnight.--The Soft Evening.

To-day I present Emanuel's last day (which now lies cooled off and extinguished among the days of eternity) with pale outlines to the fantasies of men. My hand trembles and my eye burns before the scenes which in funeral veils glide around me and lift their veils so near to me.----I shut myself up to-night,--I hear nothing but my thoughts,--I see nothing but the night-suns which move across the heavens,--I forget the weaknesses and the stains of my heart, that I may get the courage to lift up my head as if I were good, as if I dwelt on the height where around the great man like constellations lie only G.o.d, Eternity, and Virtue. But I say to them who are better,--to the silent great heart, which _increases_ its obligations in _fulfilling_ them, and which satisfies itself _as its conscience grows_ only with daily increasing merits,--to the lofty men who have warmly pressed the hand of death, who can calmly ask him, when he walks round on morning-meadows, "Seekest thou me to-day?"--to the panting soul which cools itself under the _cypress-tree_,--to the men with tears, with dreams, with wings,--to all these I say, "Kinsmen of my Emanuel, your brother stretches out his hand after you through the shortest night; grasp it, he would fain bid you farewell!"

THE SUBLIME HOUR BEFORE MIDNIGHT.

Victor rose sadly from his dreams, in which he had seen nothing but graves and funeral piles for his friend; but he gathered secret hopes at the morning-greeting, as he saw him step forth into his alleged death-morning without fever, without oppression, without change. His only concern was about the impression which the disappointed hope of departure would make upon the heart of the beloved friend, already half torn from the earthly soil and laid bare from earthly environment. The latter, on the contrary, still held fast to his dreams, to which even his nightly ones gave nourishment; and he looked yearningly into the starless blue, and calculated the long road to the twelfth night-hour, when, out of heaven should peer forth the stars, and death with that dark, immense mantle of his, in which he bears us through his cold realm. His heart lay in a sweet siesta, which proceeded partly from bodily exhaustion and from the beauty of the day. His inner calm, never so great and magical as in souls in which whirlwinds and hurricanes have swept to and fro, overspread his whole being with a bliss of yearning which in other eyes than his would have melted in tear-drops.

O Rest! thou soft word!--autumnal bloom of Eden! Moonlight of the spirit! Rest of the soul, when wilt thou hold our head, that it may be still, and our heart, that it may cease beating? Ah, ere the one grows pale and the other stiff, thou comest often and goest often, and only down below with sleep and with death thou abidest, whereas above, men with the greatest wings, like birds of paradise, are whirled about most of all by the storms!

The tranquillity with which Emanuel played out the star-part of life, even to the last catch-word,--with which he packed up everything--set all to rights--gave all directions--took leave of all,--stirred up tears and tempests together in his tormented friend. His heart had been, indeed, dragged till it was sore over a stony road, but its inflammations were now softly cooled off by the thought of death; yet he could not--though with the greatest incredulity about Emanuel's death--endure to hear it, when Emanuel committed to him at a distance the blind Julius, from whom this death was concealed, with the low-spoken words, "Hold him dear as I do, protect, provide for the poor child, till thou canst deliver him over to Lord Horion." His trembling hands could hardly take from him a packet to that lord, which the friend handed to him with tender eyes and with the words, "When these seals are opened, then my oaths have ceased and thou wilt learn all."

For his tender conscience allowed him to conceal only the _import_, not the _existence_ of secrets.--It will not astonish us, as Victor's veins received one wound after another, that, in order not to increase their bleeding by agitations, he begged the flute-player not to play to-day; music would, on this day, have had too much power over his dissolved heart.

The morning they spent in farewell-visits to old paths, bowers, and heights; but Emanuel performed not here the sharp, pa.s.sionate climax-part of the fifth act; he broke not forth, upon an earth where death grazes, into any unphilosophical outcry because he should not see the flowers plucked and the grain cut, nor the green fruit grow yellow; but with a higher rapture, which beyond the earthy spring promised itself still fairer ones, he took his leave of every flower, went through every leafy winding and shadowy night-piece, drew out of every mirroring pond his transfigured form lying as it were in the earth, and showed a more affectionate attentiveness to nature, now that he hoped to-night to come nearer to Him who created it. He sought and Victor shunned every occasion to speak of all this. "Only not for the last time!" said the latter. "Not?" said Emanuel.--"Does not everything happen only once and for the last time?--Do not Autumn and Time, as well as Death, separate us from all?--Does not all part from us, even if we do not part from it?--Time is nothing but a death with softer, thinner sickles; every minute is the autumn of the past one, and the second world will be the spring of a _third_.----Ah, when I one day retire again from the flowery surface of a second, and when on the heavenly death-day I see the twilight of the memory of two lives,----O in the future lies a groundwork for infinite bliss as well as woe, why does man shrink with awe only before this?"--Victor disputed the immortality of memory. "Without memory," said Emanuel, "there is no life, only existence, no years, only seconds,--no _I_, only representations of it.--A being breaks up into as many million beings as it has thoughts,--memory is merely consciousness of present existence."[150]--Even the Poet philosophizes at least for poetry and against philosophy.--Victor thought: "Thou good man! to myself, not to thee, I made these objections."

It was towards noon; the sky was clear, but sultry; the flowers announced by their shutting up the gathering of the electric fires; all meadows were altars of incense, and fragrances went forth as prophets of the storm-clouds. With the _physical_ stormy material there acc.u.mulated in Victor a corresponding _moral_ element;--he reflected that often a hot day ended the life of consumptive patients;--he confounded at times the _bitterness_ of parting with its _probability_; for man, deceived by the _aerial perspective_ of fear, fancies a shape of terror so much the _nearer_, the _larger_ it is; he wept at the very thought that he might weep; but nevertheless reason would have held the upperhand of the feelings, had not the following occurrence benumbed both.

In Maienthal there dwelt a madman whom they called by no other name than that of the crazy skeleton. For three reasons he was called so: first, because he was an anatomical preparation of leanness; secondly, because he carried round the fixed idea, that Death was after him and wanted to seize and abduct him by the left hand, which he therefore concealed; thirdly, because he gave out that he could see when any one was going to die soon by the look of the face, which in that case was already overspread with the indentations and abscesses of corruption.

In Moritz's experimental psychology[151] a similar man is described, who is also said to be able to detect the forerunners of death and its triturating hand on faces which appear to others smooth and ruddy, whereas he sees them seamed with the lunar caustic of corruption.--This skeleton it was, which, on the night of the fourth Whitsuntide day, when Clotilda was in the churchyard, cried out, Death! I am already buried.[152]--Victor and Emanuel went home during the striking of the twelfth hour, and on their way pa.s.sed a hill, whereon the skeleton sat agitated; the left hand, at which Death grasped, buried itself deep into the opposite arm-pit: "Brrr!" it said, shaking its head at Emanuel, "he has thee, but not me! Nothing but mould is hanging on thee! The eyes are gone! Brr!"

The words of the insane are, to a man who listens at the gate of the invisible world, more memorable than those of the wise man, just as he listens more attentively to sleepers than to the waking, to the sick than to the well. Victor's blood stiffened under the ice-cold clutch at his warm life. The crazy skeleton ran off, shielding the left hand with the right. Victor took his friend's left, looked up at the warm sun, and sought to conceal and to warm himself and could say nothing. Down near the margin of the deep-blue heaven little clouds smoked up, the germs of an evening tempest; and in the sultry air nothing but vermin flew abroad.

Emanuel was more quiet and almost troubled, but it was not the anxiety of fear, but that uneasiness of expectation with which we always look upon the folds and flutterings of the curtain of great scenes. The stinging sun kept the couple at home. To Emanuel, oppressed by the sultry atmosphere, the last afternoon was almost too long. But his friend saw all the time hanging in this atmospheric vault a mouldering countenance, which seemed to work its way into the beloved fresh one, and he continually heard the crazy skeleton repeating in his ear, "His eyes are out!"

In the sultry stillness, when the sun dug and charged the mining pits of the thunder, and when the two friends ventured before the ears of the blind Julius to speak only with looks of to-day's future, towards four o'clock a fanning, evening-breeze came up, which refreshed all drooping wings and heads. Emanuel let in these cool waves, which ran lullingly and comfortingly over the bent flowers at the window, and flowed down along the wavering folds of the curtains, and strayed and plashed through the fragrant foliage of the room. Then came an infinite stillness, a dissolving bliss, an inexpressible yearning into Emanuel's heart. The joys of his childhood, the features of his mother, the images of Indian fields, all beloved, mouldering forms, the whole gliding reflection of his youth's morning, flowed along glimmeringly before him;--a melancholy longing for his native land, for his dead friends, distended his bosom with sweet, distressful emotions. That evergreen palm-grove of youthful memory he laid as a cooling herb around his own and Horion's brows, and brought over the whole first circle of his existence out of the Indian Eden into this narrow housing before the two latest objects of his affection. But as he thus heaped up the ashes of the Ph[oe]nixes of joy on the altar of the evening-sun,--as he thus at his exodus looked back over all the Elysian fields of his life as they lay behind each other,--as the whole of earth and life, overspread with morning dew and morning redness, transformed themselves before him into the glimmering playground of humanity;--then was he unable to master any longer his emotion and his melted heart, and in a blissful agitation, in a trembling grat.i.tude to the Eternal, he begged the blind youth to take his flute and let the _Song of Ecstasy_, which he always had played for himself on the morning of the new year and of his birthday, sound after him as an echo of his dying life.

Julius took the flute. Horion went out under a loud-rustling tree and looked into the setting sun. Emanuel placed himself at the breezy window opposite the purple stream of the evening light, and the song of rapture began and flowed in streams into his heart and round the sinking sun.

And as the tones of the spheres seemed to well out from the sun, which in the evening redness, like a swan dissolved in melodies, died of rapture before G.o.d in gold-haze and dew of joy,--and as all the flowers wherewith the Eternal goodness covers our heart, and all the blissful fields through which its gentle hand conducts uncertain man, flew by before Emanuel like angels,--and as he saw the future heavens, into which the way of life leads, drawing nearer,--and as he saw these infinite arms cover all wounded hearts, stretch over all millenniums, bear all worlds and yet even him too, him, puny son of earth;--O then was it impossible for him longer to restrain his full heart; it burst with grat.i.tude, and from his eyes again fell the first tear-drops after long, long years. These holy drops he wiped not away; in them the evening-red ran to a blazing sea; the flute died away; Victor found his eyes still glistening; Emanuel said, "O see, I weep for joy at the thought of my Maker!"----Then were there between these exalted men, on this holy spot, no more words,--death had lost his form,--a sublime sorrow deadened the pangs of separation,--the sun, over which the earth had rolled, touched with his erect beams the heavens and the night and the bottom of the clouds,--the earth glimmered magically like a dream-landscape, and yet it was easy to quit it, for the other dream-landscapes covered the sky.

The earths of night (the planets) had already come out, the suns of night (the fixed stars) had already come forth after them, the moon had already enveloped itself in the southeast storm: when Emanuel saw that it was time to end the scenes of the valley and go up to his Tabor, to give Death the wing-casing of his soul. Hesitating, he begged Victor to go forward a little, that he might not see his parting with the blind one, and haply betray himself by sympathy; for Victor had represented: to the blind one the journey into the other world as only one upon this earth. He stationed himself unhappily out before the hushed sultry fields through which once had pa.s.sed the rivers of paradise of his love, on which he had once at Clotilda's side seen fairer evenings; on the earth was the stillness of death, as in a church by night, only a leaden cloud, bent down toward the earth, bl.u.s.tered round the heavens, and Death seemed to go from cloud to cloud and array them for battle.