Translations from the German Part 34

But the patient man, quietly and slowly, and with a heart silent, though deadly cold, laid the leaves together;--looked softly and firmly over the churchyard, where, in the moonshine, the grave of his father was to be distinguished;--gazed timidly up to the sky, full of stars, which a white overarching laurel-tree half screened from his sight;--and though he longed to be in bed, to settle there and sleep it off, yet he paused at the window to pray for his wife and child, in case this night were his last.

At this moment the steeple-clock struck twelve; but from the breaking of a pin, the weights kept rolling down, and the clock-hammer struck without stopping,--and he heard with horror the chains and wheels rattling along; and he felt as if Death were hurling forth in a heap all the longer hours which he might yet have had to live,--and now to his eyes, the churchyard began to quiver and heave, the moonlight flickered on the church-windows, and in the church there were lights flitting to and fro, and in the charnel-house there was a motion and a tumult.

His heart fainted within him, and he threw himself into bed, and closed his eyes that he might not see;--but Imagination in the gloom now blew aloft the dust of the dead, and whirled it into giant shapes, and chased these hollow fever-born masks alternately into lightning and shadow.

Then at last from transparent thoughts grew coloured visions, and he dreamed this dream: He was standing at the window looking out into the churchyard; and Death, in size as a scorpion, was creeping over it, and seeking for his bones. Death found some arm-bones and thigh-bones on the graves, and said: "They are my bones;" and he took a spine and the bone-legs, and stood with them, and the two arm-bones and clutched with them, and found on the grave of Fixlein's father a skull, and put it on.

Then he lifted a scythe beside the little flower-garden, and cried: "Fixlein, where art thou? My finger is an icicle and no finger, and I will tap on thy heart with it." The skeleton, thus piled together, now looked for him who was standing at the window, and powerless to stir from it; and carried in the one hand, instead of a sandgla.s.s, the ever-striking steeple-clock, and held out the finger of ice, like a dagger, far into the air....

Then he saw his victim above at the window, and raised himself as high as the laurel-tree to stab straight into his bosom with the finger,--and stalked towards him. But as he came nearer, his pale bones grew redder, and vapours floated woolly round his haggard form. Flowers started up from the ground; and he stood transfigured and without the clam of the grave, hovering above them, and the balm-breath from the flower-cups wafted him gently on;--and as he came nearer, the scythe and cloak were gone, and in his bony breast he had a heart, and on his bony head red lips;--and nearer still, there gathered on him soft, transparent, rosebalm-dipt flesh, like the splendour of an Angel flying hither from the starry blue;--and close at hand, he was an Angel with shut snow-white eyelids....

The heart of my friend, quivering like a Harmonica-bell, now melted in bliss in his clear bosom;--and when the Angel opened its eyes, his were pressed together by the weight of celestial rapture, and his dream fled away.----

But not his life: he opened his hot eyes, and--his good wife had hold of his feverish hand, and was standing in room of the Angel.

The fever abated towards morning: but the certainty of dying still throbbed in every artery of the hapless man. He called for his fair little infant into his sick-bed, and pressed it silently, though it began to cry, too hard against his paternal heavy-laden breast. Then towards noon his soul became cool, and the sultry thunder-clouds within it drew back. And here he described to us the previous (as it were, a.r.s.enical) fantasies of his usually quiet head. But it is even those tense nerves, which have not quivered at the touch of a poetic hand striking them to melody of sorrow, that start and fly asunder more easily under the fierce hand of Fate, when with sweeping stroke it smites into discord the firm-set strings.

But towards night his ideas again began rushing in a torch-dance, like fire-pillars round his soul: every artery became a burning-rod, and the heart drove flaming naphtha-brooks into the brain. All within his soul grew b.l.o.o.d.y: the blood of his drowned brother united itself with the blood which had once flowed from Thiennette's arm, into a b.l.o.o.d.y rain;--he still thought he was in the garden in the night of betrothment, he still kept calling for bandages to stanch blood, and was for hiding his head in the ball of the steeple. Nothing afflicts one more than to see a reasonable moderate man, who has been so even in his pa.s.sions, raving in the poetic madness of fever. And yet if nothing save this mouldering corruption can soothe the hot brain; and if, while the reek and thick vapour of a boiling nervous-spirit, and the hissing water-spouts of the veins are encircling and eclipsing the stifled soul, a higher Finger presses through the cloud, and suddenly lifts the poor bewildered spirit from amid the smoke to a sun--is it more just to complain, than to reflect that Fate is like the oculist, who, when about to open to a blind eye the world of light, first bandages and darkens the other eye that sees?

But the sorrow does affect me, which I read on Thiennette's pale lips, though do not hear. It is not the distortion of an excruciating agony, nor the burning of a dried-up eye, nor the loud lamenting or violent movement of a tortured frame that I see in her; but what I am forced to see in her, and what too keenly cuts the sympathising heart, is a pale, still, unmoved, undistorted face, a pale bloodless head, which Sorrow is as it were holding up after the stroke, like a head just severed by the axe of the headsman; for, O! on this form the wounds, from which the three-edged dagger had been drawn, are all fallen firmly together, and the blood is flowing from them in secret into the choking heart. O Thiennette, go away from the sick-bed, and hide that face which is saying to us: "Now do I know that I shall not have any happiness on Earth; now do I give over hoping--would this life were but soon done."

You will not comprehend my sympathy, if you know not what, some hours ago, the too loud lamenting mother told me. Thiennette, who of old had always trembled for his thirty-second year, had encountered this superst.i.tion with a n.o.bler one: she had purposely stood farther back at the marriage-altar, and in the bridal-night fallen sooner asleep than he; thereby--as is the popular belief--so to order it that she might also die sooner. Nay, she has determined if he die, to lay with his corpse a piece of her apparel, that so she may descend the sooner to keep him company in his narrow house. Thou good, thou faithful wife, but thou unhappy one!--

CHAPTER LAST.

I have left Hukelum, and my gossip his bed; and the one is as sound as the other. The cure was as foolish as the malady.

It first occurred to me, that as Boerhaave used to remedy convulsions by convulsions, one fancy might in my gossip's case be remedied by another; namely, by the fancy that he was yet no man of thirty-two, but only a man of six or nine. Deliriums are dreams not encircled by sleep; and all dreams transport us back into youth, why not deliriums too? I accordingly directed every one to leave the patient: only his mother, while the fiercest meteors were dancing and hissing before his fevered soul, was to sit down by him alone, and speak to him as if he were a child of eight years. The bed-mirror also I directed her to cover. She did so; she spoke to him as if he had the small-pox fever; and when he cried: "Death is standing with two-and-thirty pointed teeth before me, to eat my heart," she said to him: "Little dear, I will give thee thy roller-hat, and thy copybook, and thy case, and thy hussar-cloak again, and more too, if thou wilt be good." A reasonable speech he would have taken up and heeded much less than he did this foolish one.

At last she said,--for to women in the depth of sorrow, dissimulation becomes easy: "Well, I will try it this once, and give thee thy playthings: but do the like again, thou rogue, and roll thyself about in the bed so, with the small-pox on thee!" And with this, from her full ap.r.o.n she shook out on the bed the whole stock of playthings and dressing-ware, which I had found in the press of the drowned brother.

First of all his copybook, where Egidius in his eighth year had put down his name, which he necessarily recognised as his own handwriting; then the black velvet _fall-hat_ or roller-cap; then the red and white leading-strings; his knife-case, with a little pamphlet of tin-leaves; his green hussar-cloak, with its stiff facings; and a whole _orbis pictus_ or _fictus_ of Nurnberg puppets....

The sick man recognised in a moment these projecting peaks of a spring-world sunk in the stream of Time,--these half shadows, this dusk of down-gone days,--this conflagration-place and Golgotha of a heavenly time, which none of us forgets, which we love forever, and look back to even from the grave.... And when he saw all this, he slowly turned round his head, as if he were awakening from a long heavy dream; and his whole heart flowed down in warm showers of tears, and he said, fixing his full eyes on the eyes of his mother: "But are my father and brother still living, then?"--"They are dead lately," said the wounded mother; but her heart was overpowered, and she turned away her eyes, and bitter tears fell unseen from her down-bent head. And now at once that evening, when he lay confined to bed by the death of his father, and was cured by his playthings, overflowed his soul with splendour and lights, and presence of the past.

And so Delirium dyed for itself rosy wings in the Aurora of life, and fanned the panting soul,--and shook down golden b.u.t.terfly-dust from its plumage on the path, on the flowerage of the suffering man;--in the far distance rose lovely tones, in the distance floated lovely clouds,--O, his heart was like to fall in pieces, but only into fluttering flower-stamina, into soft sentient nerves; his eyes were like to melt away, but only into dewdrops for the cups of joy-blossoms, into blooddrops for loving hearts; his soul was floating, palpitating, drinking and swimming in the warm relaxing rose-perfume of the brightest delusion....

The rapture bridled his feverish heart; and his mad pulse grew calm.

Next morning, his mother, when she saw that all was prospering, would have had the church-bells rung, to make him think that the second Sunday was already here. But his wife (perhaps out of shame in my presence) was averse to the lying; and said it would be all the same if we moved the month-hand of his clock (but otherwise than Hezekiah's Dial) eight days forward; especially as he was wont rather to rise and look at his clock for the day of the month, than to turn it up in the Almanac. I for my own part simply went up to the bedside, and asked him: "If he was cracked--what in the world he meant with his mad death-dreams, when he had lain so long, and pa.s.sed clean over the Cantata-Sunday, and yet, out of sheer terror, was withering to a lath?"

A glorious reinforcement joined me; the Flesher or Quartermaster. In his anxiety, he rushed into the room, without saluting the women, and I forthwith addressed him aloud: "My gossip here is giving me trouble enough, Mr. Regiments-Quartermaster: last night, he let them persuade him he was little older than his own son: here is the child's fall-hat he was for putting on." The Guardian deuced and devilled, and said: "Ward, are you a parson or a fool?--Have not I told you twenty times, there was a maggot in your head about this?"--

At last he himself perceived that he was not rightly wise, and so grew better; besides the guardian's invectives, my oaths contributed a good deal; for I swore I would hold him as no right gossip, and edit no word of his Biography, unless he rose directly and got better....

--In short, he showed so much politeness to me that he rose and got better.--He was still sickly, it is true, on Sat.u.r.day; and on Sunday could not preach a sermon (something of the sort the Schoolmaster read, instead); but yet he took Confessions on Sat.u.r.day, and at the altar next day he dispensed the Sacrament. Service ended, the feast of his recovery was celebrated, my farewell-feast included; for I was to go in the afternoon.

This last afternoon I will chalk out with all possible breadth, and then, with the pantagraph of free garrulity, fill up the outline and draw on the great scale.

During the Thanksgiving-repast, there arrived considerable personal tribute from his catechumens, and fairings by way of bonfire for his recovery; proving how much the people loved him, and how well he deserved it: for one is oftener hated without reason by the many, than without reason loved by them. But Fixlein was friendly to every child; was none of those clergy, who never pardon their enemies except in--G.o.d's stead; and he praised at once the whole world, his wife and himself.

I then attended at his afternoon's catechising; and looked down (as he did in the first Letter-Box) from the choir, under the wing of the wooden cherub. Behind this angel, I drew out my note-book, and shifted a little under the cover of the Black Board, with its white Psalm-ciphers,[64] and wrote down what I was there--thinking. I was well aware, that when I today, on the twenty-fifth of May, retired from this _Salernic_[65] spinning-school, where one is taught to spin out the thread of life, in fairer wise, and without wetting it by foreign mixtures,--I was well aware, I say, that I should carry off with me far more elementary principles of the Science of Happiness, than the whole Chamberlain piquet ever muster all their days. I noted down my first impression, in the following Rules of Life for myself and the press:

[64] Indicating to the congregation what Psalm is to be sung.--ED.

[65] Salerno was once famous for its medical science; but here, as in many other cases, we could desire the aid of Herr Reinhold with his _Lexicon-Commentary_.--ED.

"Little joys refresh us constantly like house-bread, and never bring disgust; and great ones, like sugar-bread, briefly, and then bring it.--Trifles we should let, not plague us only, but also gratify us; we should seize not their poison-bags only, but their honey-bags also: and if flies often buz about our room, we should, like Domitian, amuse ourselves with flies, or, like a certain still living Elector,[66] feed them.--For _civic_ life and its micrologies, for which the Parson has a natural taste, we must acquire an artificial one; must learn to love without esteeming it; learn, far as it ranks beneath _human_ life, to enjoy it like another twig of this human life, as poetically as we do the pictures of it in romances. The loftiest mortal loves and seeks the _same sort_ of things with the meanest; only from higher grounds and by higher paths. Be every minute, Man, a full life to thee!--Despise anxiety and wishing, the Future and the Past!--If the _Second-pointer_ can be no road-pointer into an Eden for thy soul, the _Month-pointer_ will still less be so, for thou livest not from month to month, but from second to second! Enjoy thy Existence more than thy Manner of Existence, and let the dearest object of thy Consciousness be this Consciousness itself!--Make not the Present a means of thy Future; for this Future is nothing but a coming Present; and the Present, which thou despisest, was once a Future which thou desiredst!--Stake in no lotteries,--keep at home,--give and accept no pompous entertainments,--travel not abroad every year!--Conceal not from thyself, by long plans, thy household goods, thy chamber, thy acquaintance!--Despise Life, that thou mayst enjoy it!--Inspect the neighbourhood of thy life; every shelf, every nook of thy abode; and nestling in, quarter thyself in the farthest and most domestic winding of thy snail-house!--Look upon a capital but as a collection of villages, a village as some blind-alley of a capital; fame as the talk of neighbours at the street-door; a library as a learned conversation, joy as a second, sorrow as a minute, life as a day; and three things as all in all: G.o.d, Creation, Virtue!"----

[66] This hospitable Potentate is as unknown to me as to any of my readers.--ED.

And if I would follow myself and these rules, it will behove me not to make so much of this Biography; but once for all, like a moderate man, to let it sound out.

After the Catechising, I stept down to my wide-gowned and black-gowned gossip. The congregation gone, we clambered up to all high places, perused the plates on the pews,--I took a lesson on the altar on its inscription incrusted with the _sediment of Time_ (I speak not metaphorically); I organed, my gossip managing the bellows; I mounted the pulpit, and was happy enough there to alight on one other rose-shoot, which, in the farewell minute, I could still plant in the rose-garden of my Fixlein. For I descried aloft, on the back of a wooden Apostle, the name _Lavater_, which the Zurich Physiognomist had been pleased to leave on this sacred Torso in the course of his wayfaring.

Fixlein did not know the hand, but I did, for I had seen it frequently in Flachsenfingen, not only on the tapestry of a Court Lady there, but also in his _Hand-Library_;[67] and met with it besides in many country churches, forming, as it were, the Directory and Address-Calendar of this wandering name, for Lavater likes to inscribe in pulpits, as a shepherd does in trees, the name of his beloved. I could now advise my gossip prudently to cut away the name, with the chip of wood containing it, from the back of the Apostle, and to preserve it carefully among his _curiosa_.

[67] A little work printed in ma.n.u.script types; and seldom given by him to any but Princes. This piece of print-writing he intentionally pa.s.ses off to the great as a piece of hand-writing; these persons being both more habituated and inclined to the reading of ma.n.u.script than of print.

On returning to the parsonage, I made for my hat and stick; but the design, as it were the projection and contour of a supper in the acacia-grove, had already been sketched by Thiennette. I declared that I would stay till evening, in case the young mother went out with us to the proposed meal ... and truly the Biographer at length got his way, all doctors' regulations notwithstanding.

I then constrained the Parson to put on his Krautermutze,[68] or Herb-cap, which he had st.i.tched together out of simples for the strengthening of his memory; "Would to Heaven," said I, "that Princes instead of their Princely Hats, Doctors and Cardinals instead of theirs, and Saints instead of martyr-crowns, would clap such memory-bonnets on their heads!"--Thereupon, till the roasting and cooking within doors were over, we marched out alone over the parsonage meadows, and talked of learned matters, we packed ourselves into the ruined Robber-Castle, on which my gossip, as already mentioned, has a literary work in hand. I deeply approved, the rather as this Kidnapper-tower had once belonged to an Aufhammer, his intention of dedicating the description to the Rittmeister: that n.o.bleman, I think, will sooner give his name to the Book than to the Shock. For the rest, I exhorted my fellow-craftsman to pluck up literary heart, and said to him: "A fearless pen, good gossip!

Let Subrector Hans von Fuchslein be, if he like, the Dragon of the Apocalypse, lying in wait for the delivery of the fugitive Woman, to swallow the offspring; I am there too, and have my friend the Editor of the _Litteraturzeitung_ at my side, who will gladly permit me to give an _anticritique_, on paying the insertion-dues!"--I especially excited him to new fillings and return-freights of his Letter-Boxes. I have not taken oath that into this biographical chest-of-drawers, I will not in the course of time introduce another Box. "Neither to my G.o.dson, worthy gossip, will it do any harm that he is presented, poor child, even now to the reading public, when he does not count more months than, as Horace will have it, a literary child should count years, namely, _nine_."

[68] Thus defined by Adelung in his Lexicon: "_Krautermutze_, in Medicine, a cap with various dried herbs sewed into it, and which is worn for all manner of troubles in the head."--ED.

In walking homewards, I praised his wife. "If marriage," said I to him, "is the madder, which in maids, as in cotton, makes the colours visible, then I contend, that Thiennette, when a maid, could scarcely be so good as she is now when a wife. By Heaven! in such a marriage, I should write Books of quite another sort, divine ones; in a marriage, I mean, where beside the writing-table (as beside the great voting-table at the Regensburg Diets, there are little tables of confectionery); where in like manner, I say, a little jar of marmalade were standing by me, namely, a sweetened, dainty, lovely face, and out of measure fond of the Letter-Box-writer, gossip! Your marriage will resemble the Acacia-grove we are now going to, the leaves of which grow thicker with the heat of summer, while other shrubs are yielding only shrunk and porous shade."

As we entered through the upper garden-door into this same bower, the supper and the good mistress were already there. Nothing is more pure and tender than the respect with which a wife treats the benefactor or comrade of her husband: and happily the Biographer himself was this comrade, and the object of this respect. Our talk was cheerful, but my spirit was oppressed. The fetters, which bind the mere reader to my heroes, were in my case of triple force; as I was at once their guest and their portrait-painter. I told the Parson that he would live to a greater age than I, for that his temperate temperament was balanced as if by a doctor so equally between the nervousness of refinement, and the hot thick-bloodedness of the rustic. Fixlein said that if he lived but as long as he had done, namely, two-and-thirty years, it would amount, exclusive of the leap-year-days, to 280,320 seconds, which in itself was something considerable; and that he often reckoned up with satisfaction the many thousand persons of his own age that would have a life equally long.

At last I tried to get in motion; for the red lights of the falling sun were mounting up over the grove, and dipping us still deeper in the shadows of night: the young mother had grown chill in the evening dew.

In confused mood, I invited the Parson to visit me soon in the city, where I would show him not only all the chambers of the Palace, but the Prince himself. Gladder there was nothing this day on our old world than the face to which I said so; and than the other one which was the mild reflexion of the former.--For the Biographer it would have been too hard, if now in that minute, when his fancy, like mirror-telescopes, was representing every object in a _tremulous_ form, he had been obliged to cut and run; if, I will say, it had not occurred to him that to the young mother it could do little harm (but much good), were she to take a short walk, and a.s.sist in escorting the Author and architect of the present Letter-Box out of the garden to his road.

In short, I took this couple one in each hand, instead of under each arm, and moved with them through the garden to the Flachsenfingen highway. I often abruptly turned round my head between them, as if I had heard some one coming after us; but in reality I only meant once more, though mournfully, to look back into the happy hamlet, whose houses were all dwellings of contented still Sabbath-joy, and which is happy enough, though over its wide-parted pavement-stones there pa.s.ses every week but one barber, every holiday but one dresser of hair, and every year but one hawker of parasols. Then truly I had again to turn round my head, and look at the happy pair beside me. My otherwise affectionate gossip could not rightly suit himself to these tokens of sorrow: but in thy heart, thou good, so oft afflicted s.e.x, every mourning-bell soon finds its unison; and Thiennette, enn.o.bled with the thin trembling _resonance_ of a reverberating soul, gave me back all my tones with the beauties of an echo.----At last we reached the boundary, over which Thiennette could not be allowed to walk; and now must I part from my gossip, with whom I had talked so gaily every morning (each of us from his bed), and from the still circuit of modest hope where he dwelt, and return once more to the rioting, fermenting Court-sphere, where men in bull-beggar tone demand from Fate a root of Life-Licorice, thick as the arm, like the botanical one on the Wolga, not so much that they may chew the sweet beam themselves, as fell others to earth with it.

As I thought to myself that I would say, Farewell! to them, all the coming plagues, all the corpses, and all the marred wishes of this good pair, arose before my heart; and I remembered that little save the falling asleep of joy-flowers would mark the current of their Life-day, as it does of mine and of every one's.--And yet is it fairer, if they measure their years not by the _Water-clock_ of falling tears, but by the _Flower-clock_[69] of asleep-going flowers, whose bells in our short-lived garden are sinking together before us from hour to hour.--

[69] Linne formed in Upsal a flower-clock, the flowers of which, by their different times of falling asleep, indicated the hours of the day.

I would even now--for I still recollect how I hung with streaming eyes over these two loved ones, as over their corpses--address myself, and say: Far too soft, _Jean Paul_, whose chalk still sketches the models of Nature on a ground of Melancholy; harden thy heart like thy frame, and waste not thyself and others by such thoughts. Yet why should I do it, why should I not confess directly what, in the softest emotion, I said to these two beings? "May all go right with you, ye mild beings," I said, for I no longer thought of courtesies, "may the arm of Providence bear gently your lacerated hearts, and the good Father, above all these suns which are now looking down on us, keep you ever united, and exalt you still undivided to his bosom and his lips!"--"Be you too right happy and glad!" said Thiennette.--"And to you, Thiennette," continued I, "Ah!

to your pale cheeks, to your oppressed heart, to your long cold maltreated youth, I can never, never wish enough. No! But all that can soothe a wounded soul, that can please a pure one, that can still the hidden sigh--O, all that you deserve--may this be given you; and when you see me again, then say to me, 'I am now much happier!'"

We were all of us too deeply moved. We at last tore ourselves asunder from repeated embraces; my friend retired with the soul whom he loves;--I remained alone behind him with the Night.

And I walked without aim through woods, through valleys, and over brooks, and through sleeping villages, to enjoy the great Night like a Day. I walked, and still looked like the magnet, to the region of midnight, to strengthen my heart at the gleaming twilight, at this upstretching Aurora of a morning beneath our feet. White night-b.u.t.terflies flitted, white blossoms fluttered, white stars fell, and the white snow-powder hung silvery in the high Shadow of the Earth, which reaches beyond the Moon, and which is our Night. Then began the Eolian Harp of the Creation to tremble and to sound, blown on from above, and my immortal soul was a string in this Harp.--The heart of a brother everlasting Man swelled under the everlasting Heaven, as the seas swell under the Sun and under the Moon.--The distant village-clocks struck midnight, mingling, as it were, with the ever-pealing tone of ancient Eternity.--The limbs of my buried ones touched cold on my soul, and drove away its blots, as dead hands heal eruptions of the skin.--I walked silently through little hamlets, and close by their outer churchyards, where crumbled upcast coffin-boards were glimmering, while the once bright eyes that had laid in them were mouldered into gray ashes.--Cold thought! clutch not like a cold spectre at my heart: I look up to the starry sky, and an everlasting chain stretches thither, and over and below; and all is Life, and Warmth, and Light, and all is G.o.dlike or G.o.d....

Towards morning I descried thy late lights, little city of my dwelling, which I belong to on this side the grave; I returned to the Earth; and in thy steeples, behind the by-advanced great Midnight, it struck half-past two; about this hour, in 1794, Mars went down in the west, and the Moon rose in the east; and my soul desired, in grief for the n.o.ble warlike blood which is still streaming on the blossoms of Spring: "Ah retire, b.l.o.o.d.y War, like red Mars; and thou, still Peace, come forth like the mild divided Moon!"--

THE END.