The Campaner Thal and Other Writings Part 25

THE NEW-YEAR'S NIGHT OF AN UNHAPPY MAN.

An old man stood in the New-Year's night at the window, and gazed with a look of restless despair upon the immutable, ever-blooming heaven, and out over the still pure white earth whereupon there was now no one so joyless and sleepless as he. For his grave stood near to him. It was covered only with the snow of age, not with the green of youth; and he brought with him thither out of his whole rich life nothing but errors and sins and sickness; a ruined body, a desolated soul, a breast full of poison, an old age full of remorse. The fair days of his youth wandered about him now like ghosts, and they bore him back again to that clear morning when his father first placed him at the cross-road of life, the right hand leading by the sunny ways of virtue into a wide, peaceful land, full of light and of harvests; the left, down into the mole-ways of vice towards a black cavern, full of down-dropping poison, full of darting serpents and dark sultry damps.

Ah! the serpents hung about his breast, and the poison-drops upon his tongue, and he knew now where he was.

Knowing not what he did, and with unspeakable grief, he cried out to Heaven: "Give me my youth once more! O father, place me again upon the cross-road, that I may choose otherwise!"

But his father and his youth were long gone. He saw wandering lights dancing on the marshes, and dying out upon _G.o.d's Acre_, and he said, "These are my sinful days!" He saw a star fly out from heaven, to glimmer in its fall, and to be extinguished on the earth. "That is I,"

said his bleeding heart; and the serpent-teeth of remorse gnawed again into his wounds.

His burning fancy showed him creeping night-wanderers upon the roofs, and the windmill threw up its arms threatening to crush him, and a mask left behind in the dead-house a.s.sumed by degrees his own feature.

Suddenly, in the midst of this tumult, music for the New Year flowed down from the tower, like distant church-song. He was deeply moved. He looked around the horizon and over the wide earth, and thought of his youthful friends, who now, happier and better than he, were teachers for the world, fathers of happy children, and favored men, and he said, "O, I also could be happy, dear parents, had I fulfilled your New-Year's wishes and instructions."

In the feverish memories of his youth, it seemed to him that the mask with his features raised itself up in the dead-house; finally, through the superst.i.tion which discerns spirits and the future on New-Year's night, it became a living youth, in the position of the beautiful boy of the Capitol, pulling out a thorn, and his formerly blooming face danced weird and bitter before him.

He could look no more: he covered his eyes: hot tears streamed down upon the snow;--again he softly sighed, hopeless and unconscious, "Come again, O youth, come again!"

And it came again; for on that New-Year's night he had only dreamed thus fearfully. He was still a youth; yet his errors had been no dream.

But he thanked G.o.d that he, still young, might turn aside from the foul ways of vice, and could follow the sunny path which leads to the fair land of harvests. Turn aside with him, O youth, if thou standest upon his wandering way. This frightful dream will in future be thy judge; but if thou shouldst one day call out, full of grief, "Come again, O beautiful youth!" so shall it never return again.

THE DEATH OF AN ANGEL.

The tenderest and kindest angel, the Angel of the _last_ hour, whom we harshly call Death, is sent to us, that he may mildly and gently pluck away the sinking heart of man from life, and bear it unhurt in his warm hands out of the cold breast into high, warming Eden. His brother is the Angel of the first hour, who twice kisses man,--once when he begins this life; and again, when he awakes on high, without wounds, and enters smiling upon the other life, as he came weeping into this.

As the Angel of the last hour saw the battle-fields stretched before him, full of blood and tears, and drew the trembling souls away, his mild eyes melted, and he said: "Ah! I will once die like man, that I may enter into his last agony, and soothe it when I dissolve the ties of life!"

The boundless circle of angels, who love each other above, pressed around the sympathetic one, and promised their beloved to surround him with heavenly rays after the instant of his death; thereby he might know that death had been; and his brother, whose kiss opens our cold lips, as the morning light does the chill flowers, gently touched his forehead, and said: "When I kiss thee again, my brother, thou shalt have died upon the earth, and will be again with us."

Loving and moved, the Angel descended to the battlefield, where only one beautiful, ardent Youth still panted, and heaved his shattered breast. Near the hero stood his Betrothed alone. He could no longer feel her hot tears, and her sorrow pa.s.sed him unrecognized, like a distant battle-cry.--Then the Angel quickly clothed himself in her dear form, rested by him, drew the wounded soul with one hot kiss out of the cloven breast, and gave it to his brother on high, who kissed it for the second time, when suddenly it smiled.

The Angel of the last hour pa.s.sed like a lightning-flash into the deserted frame, shone through the body, and stirred the warm life-stream again with the strengthened heart. But how was he affected by this new clothing of the body! His clear eye became confused in the whirl of unwonted, nervous life;--his once flying thought waded now slowly through the atmosphere of his brain,--the moist, faint-hued vapor dried away from all objects which formerly hung, autumnal-like, floating over them; now they pierced him out of the hot air with burning, painful spots of color,--all sensations became more gloomy, yet stormier and more nearly allied to _self_; and they seemed to him to be like instinct, as those of the beasts appear to us. Hunger tore him, thirst consumed him, pain stabbed him. Alas! his breast, torn and bleeding, heaved upward, and his first breath drawn was his first sigh after the heaven he had left! "Is this the death of man?" he thought; but as he did not see the promised token of death, neither angel nor the surrounding heavenly flame, therefore he perceived this to be only the life of man.

In the evening, the earthly strength of the Angel declined, and a crushing globe seemed to revolve about his head. Then Sleep sent his messengers. Images of the mind shifted out of the sunshine into a misty fire; the shadows of the day were thrown upon his brain; they came confused, and colossal, one upon another, and the world of sense reared itself uncontrolled and poured in upon him. Then Dream sent his messengers. Finally the funereal veil of Sleep wrapped itself thickly about him, and, sunk in the vault of night, he lay there lonely and motionless, like us poor mortals. But then, thou, heavenly Dream! didst descend, with thy thousand reflecting-gla.s.ses before his soul, and didst show in all of them a circle of angels and a radiant heaven; and the earthly body seemed to fall away from him with all its thorns.

"Ah!" said he, in vain rapture, "my sleep was also my death." Yet when he awoke again, with his compressed heart full of heavy human blood, and looked out upon the earth and upon the night, he cried, "I saw the angels and the starry heavens; but it was only the image of Death, and not his presence."

The Betrothed of the translated hero did not mark that an angel only dwelt in the breast of her beloved; yet she loved the purified aspect of the wounded soul, and still gladly held the hand of him who had past so far away. But the Angel loved her deceived heart with the love of a man's soul in return; jealous of his own nature, he wished that he might not die before her, but love her so long that she might forgive him, when they met again in heaven, for having clasped together upon her breast an angel and a lover. Yet she died sooner; the late sorrow had bowed the head of this flower too low, and it lay broken upon the grave. She sank before the weeping Angel, not like the sun, who before all-beholding Nature casts himself so gorgeous into the sea that its red waves strike the very heaven, but like the tranquil moon, who, in the midnight, silvers the vaporous air, and sinks down unseen behind its dim veil. Death sent his gentler sister Unconsciousness before; she touched the heart of the Betrothed, and chilled the warm countenance; the flowers of her cheek withered; the pale snow of winter, under which the spring of eternity grows green, clothed her forehead and her hands.

Then a burning tear broke from the swelling eye of the Angel, and, while he thought his heart loosed itself in the form of a tear as a pearl from the brittle sh.e.l.l, his Betrothed, awaked to the last delirium, moved her eyes once again, drew him close to her heart, and died as she kissed him, and said, "Now I am with thee, my brother!"

Then the Angel believed his heavenly brother had given him the sign of the kiss and death. Yet no radiant heaven surrounded him, nor aught but funereal darkness, and he sighed because this was not his death, only the anguish of man over the death of another.

"O ye afflicted mortals!" he cried, "how can ye weary ones survive this! How can ye become old when the circle of youthful forms breaks and lies at length altogether scattered around,--when the graves of your friends lead down like steps to your own,--and when age becomes like the silent, blank evening hour of a cold battle-field! O ye poor mortals! how can your hearts endure it?"

The body of the translated hero-soul placed the gentle Angel among hard men, their injustice, and the distortions of Vice and of Pa.s.sion; about his figure, also, was laid the th.o.r.n.y girdle of sceptres bound together, which compresses the hemispheres with its stings, and which is always laced more tightly by the great; he saw the claws of crowned and emblazoned beasts fasten themselves on their displumed prey, and heard it panting with enfeebled beating of the wings; he saw the whole terrestrial globe encircled in the winding swarthy folds of the giant-serpent, Vice, plunging and concealing its poisonous head deep in the breast of man. Then the hot sting of enmity was made to shoot through that tender heart, which, during a long eternity, had lain in the warmth of angelic love, and the holy love-fed spirit was forced to shudder over an inward dissolution. "Ah!" said he, "the death of man is full of woe!" Yet this was not death; for no angel appeared.

Thus in a few days he became weary of this life which we bear for half a hundred years, and he longed to go back. The evening sun attracted his kindred spirit. The wounds of his shattered breast exhausted him with pain. He went out with the evening glow upon his pale cheeks to "G.o.d's Acre," that green background of our life, where the forms which he had once stripped of all their beautiful souls were now crumbling away. He placed himself with sorrowful longing upon the bare grave of his unspeakably beloved and departed bride, and looked towards the fading evening sun. Seated on this dear knoll, he regarded his suffering body, and thought: Thou also, tender breast, wouldst be lying here in decay, and wouldst give no more pain, did I not support thee.

Then he reflected upon the grievous life of man, and the throbs of the wounded breast showed him the pangs with which mortals purchase their virtue and their death, and which he had joyfully spared the n.o.ble soul of this body. Deeply touched by human virtue, he wept out of his boundless love for men, who, amid the craving of their own needs, under low-hung clouds, behind mists which stream over the sharp-cutting paths of life, never turn away from the lofty star of duty, but in their darkness stretch out loving arms towards every suffering breast they encounter, while around them nothing glimmers but the hope of setting like the sun in the old world, in order to arise in the new.

Just then the ecstasy opened his wounds, and blood, the tear of the soul, flowed from his heart upon the cherished knoll,--the dissolving body sank quietly towards his beloved,--tears of rapture broke the sunset light into, a rosy, swimming sea,--distant echoing tones, as of the earth pa.s.sing wide through ringing ether, played in the vaporous l.u.s.tre. Then a dark cloud or short night shot by the Angel, and was full of sleep; and now a radiant heaven opened and overspread him, and a thousand angels shone around. "Art thou again here, thou deceiving dream?" he said. But the Angel of the first hour stepped through the rays to him, and gave the sign of the kiss, and said: "That was death, thou immortal brother and heavenly friend!"

And the Youth and his beloved softly repeated the words.

A DREAM AND THE TRUTH.

WRITTEN ON THE DEATH OF A MOTHER FOLLOWING THAT OF HER HUSBAND.

Sleep buries the first world, its nights and sorrows, and brings to us a second world, with the forms we have loved and lost, and scenes too vast for this little earth.

I was in the Isle of the Blest, in the second world. This I dreamed.

The stars were nearer; the heaven-blue lay on the flowers; all the breezes were melodious tones; and repose and ravishment, which with us are sundered, there dwelt conjoined. And the dead, from around whom had fallen that mist of life which veiled the higher heaven before, rested like mild evening suns in the azure ether.

Then, behold, the earth rose out of the deep beneath, on her course, and the Spring had covered her with his blossoms and buds. As she drew nearer to the Isle of the Blest, a voice full of love cried, "Look down, ye dead, on your old home, and see the beloved who have lost, but not forgotten you."

For in the spring the earth always pa.s.ses by the eternal World of the Blest, whose off-cast husk sinks into its clods; and therefore it is, that in the spring poor mortals experience such a profound longing, so powerful a presentiment, and so many haunting recollections of their lost beloved.

After the voice, all the Blest stepped forward on the sh.o.r.e of the Supernal Isle, and each one sought on the wan earth the heart which had remembered him. One n.o.ble being gazed down, seeking after his spouse and after his children, around whom the glad spring-tide of earth was flowing; but _they_ had no spring.

Alas! the father now saw his wife racked with anguish, and his children dissolved in tears. He discerned, in the strangling hand of Pain, the pallid form whose convulsed heart now reposes, and whose moistened eyes are now shut and cold; and beside it he recognized the loving companion of his former life fatally bleeding on the thorns of earthly martyrdom.

And as sorrow, with glowing iron stylus, graved in the crumbling image life's farewell letter, and as she lost hope, but not yet patience, and as her fading eye desired no further happiness save that of her children, and as these could only share, but not remove, the sleepless nights of their mother, the affectionate father sank down, weeping, and prayed: "Eternal One, suffer her to die! Break the agonized bosom, and give me my friend again, and heal the wounded form at last under the earth. Eternal One, suffer her to die!"

And as he prayed, the weary heart here in its martyr-life heard him, and his faithful wife returned forever to his heart. Why weep ye, tender children, that your parents, after the same sufferings, should now have the same joys? that now, after their winter of life, an everlasting May has dawned on their souls? Does the painted spring-house under the earth trouble you, or the black boundary-hill on the earth, or the dread hand of decay, which extinguishes earthly scars and wounds and the whole body?

No, let the Spring scatter his flowers on their cold faces, and dry the tears on yours; and when you think painfully of them, comfort yourselves with saying, "We tenderly loved them, and no one has wounded, save He who now heals them."

THE BEAUTY OF DEATH IN THE BLOOM OF YOUTH.

In the lives both of men and of women, the period of the deepest happiness will be found to be, not that of childhood, but of youth. The joys of childhood are like the spring flowers,--beautiful, but small; like the tinted forget-me-not,--pretty, but without fragrance. The higher and more brilliant joys of knowledge and the affections are as yet undeveloped; the world of the ideal lies wrapped, as it were, in a dark-green bud.

With what other and what brighter radiance is the period of youth encircled!--that heavenly time of our first friendship and our first love,--of our first poem and our first philosophy,--of our first full enjoyment of nature and music and the drama,--of our first castles in the air, and our first vigorous training for active life. And this period is not simply irrecoverable,--that is the case with all past time,--but for the very reason that in its perfect bloom its only office is to minister to the fruits it so beautifully enfolds, it is the highest and the culminating period; for there is necessarily a greater productive force present in the process than in the results of development, in the flower of youth than in the ripeness of manhood. In his more advanced years, one is seldom led to enter upon a new path of knowledge or a higher moral life; but in his youth, one gives himself up, with inextinguishable fire, to some system of philosophy, or some total change in his moral life. It calls for more strength in a man to be converted than to stand still.

As the highest bodily strength and the most perfect health, the probability of the longest life and the greatest beauty,--in short, the best bodily attributes,--belong to the period of youth, so, and for that very reason, the intellectual wealth which comes not by acquisition, but by inheritance, is the largest. Great attainments, experience, and skill are certainly the fruits of age and of labor; but what are these things, compared with the ideal enjoyments which come of the first sciences we study, when the tree of knowledge, grafted upon the tree of life, puts forth its branches,--compared with the delight with which the new truths of geometry, or of philosophy, or of any favorite science new-born to us, fill the soul? For even in science, however far its limits may be pushed, one is ever descending from the height of the ideal to the vulgar level of reality.

Youth is the full moon, illumined by the magic light of the sun. Age is the new moon, upon which the day-earth (life) throws a meagre light.