The Campaner Thal and Other Writings Part 22

ON THE DEATH OF YOUNG CHILDREN.

Ephemera die all at sunset, and no insect of this cla.s.s has ever sported in the beams of the morning sun. Happier are ye, little human ephemera! Ye played only in the ascending beams, and in the early dawn, and in the eastern light; ye drank only of the prelibations of life; hovered for a little s.p.a.ce over a world of freshness and of blossoms; and fell asleep in innocence before yet the morning dew was exhaled!

THE PROPHETIC DEW-DROPS.

A delicate child, pale and prematurely wise, was complaining on a hot morning that the poor dewdrops had been too hastily s.n.a.t.c.hed away and not allowed to glitter on the flowers like other happier dewdrops that live the whole night through and sparkle in the moonlight, and through the morning onwards to noonday: "The sun," said the child, "has chased them away with his heat--or swallowed them in his wrath." Soon after came rain and a rainbow; whereupon his father pointed upwards: "See,"

said he, "there stand thy dew-drops gloriously re-set--a glittering jewelry--in the heavens; and the clownish foot tramples on them no more. By this, my child, thou art taught that what withers upon earth blooms again in heaven." Thus the father spoke, and knew not that he spoke prefiguring words: for soon after the delicate child, with the morning brightness of his early wisdom, was exhaled, like a dewdrop, into heaven.

ON DEATH.

We should all think of death as a less hideous object, if it simply untenanted our bodies of a spirit, without corrupting them; secondly, if the grief which we experience at the spectacle of our friends'

graves were not by some confusion of the mind blended with the image of our own; thirdly, if we had not in this life seated ourselves in a warm domestic nest, which we are unwilling to quit for the cold blue regions of the unfathomable heavens; finally,--if death were denied to us. Once in dreams I saw a human being of heavenly intellectual faculties, and his aspirations were heavenly; but he was chained (methought) eternally to the earth. The immortal old man had five great wounds in his happiness--five worms that gnawed forever at his heart: he was unhappy in springtime, because _that_ is a season of hope--and rich with phantoms of far happier days than any which this aceldama of earth can realize. He was unhappy at the sound of music, which dilates the heart of man into its whole capacity for the infinite, and he cried aloud,--"Away, away! Thou speakest of things which throughout my endless life I have found not, and shall not find!" He was unhappy at the remembrance of earthly affections and dissevered hearts: for love is a plant which may bud in this life, but it must flourish in another.

He was unhappy under the glorious spectacle of the starry host, and e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed forever in his heart,--"So then I am parted from you to all eternity by an impa.s.sable abyss: the great universe of suns is above, below, and round about me: but I am chained to a little ball of dust and ashes." He was unhappy before the great ideas of Virtue--of Truth--and of G.o.d; because he knew how feeble are the approximations to them which a son of earth can make. But this was a dream: G.o.d be thanked, that in reality there is no such craving and asking eye directed upwards to heaven--to which death will not one day bring an answer!

IMAGINATION UNTAMED BY THE COa.r.s.eR REALITIES OF LIFE.

Happy is every actor in the guilty drama of life, to whom the higher illusion within supplies or conceals the external illusion; to whom, in the tumult of his part and its intellectual interest, the bungling landscapes of the stage have the bloom and reality of nature, and whom the loud parting and shocking of the scenes disturb not in his dream!

SATIRICAL NOTICE OF REVIEWERS.

In Swabia, in Saxony, in Pomerania, are towns in which are stationed a strange sort of officers,--valuers of author's flesh, something like our old market-lookers in this town. They are commonly called tasters (or _Praegustatores_) because they eat a mouthful of every book beforehand, and tell the people whether its flavor be good. We authors, in spite, call them _reviewers_: but I believe an action of defamation would lie against us for such bad words. The tasters write no books themselves; consequently they have the more time to look over and tax those of other people. Or, if they do sometimes write books, they are bad ones: which again is very advantageous to them: for who can understand the theory of badness in other people's books so well as those who have learned it by practice in their own? They are reputed the guardians of literature and the literati for the same reason that St. Nepomuk is the patron saint of bridges and of all who pa.s.s over them,--namely, because he himself once lost his life from a bridge.

FEMALE TONGUES.

Hippel, the author of the book "Upon Marriage," says, "A woman, that does not talk, must be a stupid woman." But Hippel is an author whose opinions it is more safe to admire than to adopt. The most intelligent women are often silent amongst women; and again the most stupid and the most silent are often neither one nor the other except amongst men. In general the current remark upon men is valid also with respect to women,--that those for the most part are the greatest thinkers who are the least talkers; as frogs cease to croak when _light_ is brought to the water edge. However, in fact, the disproportionate talking of women arises out of the sedentariness of their labors: sedentary artisans,--as tailors, shoemakers, weavers,--have this habit as well as hypochondriacal tendencies in common with women. Apes do not talk, as savages say, that they may not be set to work: but women often talk double their share--even _because_ they work.

FORGIVENESS.

Nothing is more moving to man than the spectacle of reconciliation: our weaknesses are thus indemnified, and are not too costly--being the price we pay for the hour of forgiveness: and the archangel, who has never felt anger, has reason to envy the man who subdues it. When thou forgivest,--the man, who has pierced thy heart, stands to thee in the relation of the sea-worm that perforates the sh.e.l.l of the muscle, which straightway closes the wound with a pearl.

The graves of the best of men, of the n.o.blest martyrs, are like the graves of the Herrnhuters (the Moravian brethren)--level, and undistinguishable from the universal earth: and, if the earth could give up her secrets, our whole globe would appear a Westminster Abbey laid flat. Ah! what a mult.i.tude of tears, what myriads of b.l.o.o.d.y drops have been shed in secrecy about the three corner-trees of earth,--the tree of life, the tree of knowledge, and the tree of freedom,--shed, but never reckoned! It is only great periods of calamity that reveal to us our great men, as comets are revealed by total eclipses of the sun.

Not merely upon the field of battle, but also upon the consecrated soil of virtue--and upon the cla.s.sic ground of truth, thousands of _nameless_ heroes must fall and struggle to build up the footstool from which history surveys the _one_ hero, whose name is embalmed, bleeding--conquering--and resplendent. The grandest of heroic deeds are those which are performed within four walls and in domestic privacy.

And, because history records only the self-sacrifices of the male s.e.x, and because she dips her pen only in blood,--therefore is it that in the eyes of the unseen spirit of the world our annals appear doubtless far more beautiful and n.o.ble than in our own.

THE GRANDEUR OF MAN IN HIS LITTLENESS.

Man upon this earth would be vanity and hollowness, dust and ashes, vapor and a bubble,--were it not that he felt himself to be so. That it is possible for him to harbor such a feeling,--_this_, by implying a comparison of himself with something higher in himself, _this_ is it which makes him the immortal creature that he is.

NIGHT.

The earth is every day overspread with the veil of night for the same reason as the cages of birds are darkened,--namely, that we may the more readily apprehend the higher harmonies of thought in the hush and quiet of darkness. Thoughts, which day turns into smoke and mist, stand about us in the night as lights and flames: even as the column which fluctuates above the crater of Vesuvius, in the daytime appears a pillar of cloud, but by night a pillar of fire.

THE STARS.

Look up, and behold the eternal fields of light that lie round about the throne of G.o.d. Had no star ever appeared in the heavens, to man there would have been no heavens; and he would have laid himself down to his last sleep, in a spirit of anguish, as upon a gloomy earth vaulted over by a material arch--solid and impervious.

MARTYRDOM.

To die for the truth--is not to die for one's country, but to die for the world. Truth, like the _Venus del Medici_, will pa.s.s down in thirty fragments to posterity: but posterity will collect and recompose them into a G.o.ddess. Then also thy temple, O eternal Truth! that now stands half below the earth--made hollow by the sepulchres of its witnesses, will raise itself in the total majesty of its proportions; and will stand in monumental granite; and every pillar on which it rests will be fixed in the grave of a martyr.