Lilies--Mountain Bugles--and an Outlook--are Signs of Death.
In all the fibres of my memory (those reminder-threads and
leaf-skeletons of so much miserable stuff), there rests no lovelier
legend than this from the cloister of Corbey--that when the Angel of
Death had to take away therefrom a spiritual brother, he laid, as a
sign of his coming, a white lily in his pew. Would that I had this
superstition! Our gentle Genius imitated the Death-angel and said to
the little one: "When we find a lily we shall die soon after." How,
after that, did the heaven-longing child, who had never seen a lily,
seek everywhere to find one! Once, when his Genius had pictured
to him the Genius of the Universe, not as a metaphysical Robinet's
puzzle-image, but as the greatest and best man on earth; a fragrance
never before present floated around it. The little child feels, but
does not see; he stepped out into the cloister and--there lay three
lilies. He does not know them, these white June-children; but the
Genius, enraptured, takes them from him and says: "Those are lilies,
they come from heaven; now we shall soon die." Long years after, the
sight of a lily always revived the old thrill of emotion in Gustavus's
heart, and surely one day in his actual death hour a lily will hover
before him as the last gleaming quarter of the waning moon-earth.
The Genius proposed to himself to let him, on the first of June, his
birthday, come up out of the earth. But by way of stimulating his soul
to a higher (perhaps too high a) degree, he let him in the last week
experience still two holy vigils of death. That is to say, as he had
already pictured to him beforehand the blisses of heaven, _i. e_., of
the earth, with voice and face, especially the glories of the heavenly
and spheral music, so now he ended with the intelligence, that often
even to dying men, who were not yet gone up, this echo of the human
heart sounded down, and that they then died the sooner because those
tones dissolved the tender heart. Into the ear of the little one,
music, that poesy of the air, had never yet entered. His teacher had
long since made a so-called death-song; in this Gustavus naturally
referred everything it said of the second life to the first, and they
read it often without singing it. But in the last week all at once for
the first time the Genius began to transfigure his mild didactic voice
into the still softer singing-voice of the Moravian choral music,
and to deliver the yearning death-song to the accompaniment of a
mountain-bugle--that flute of longing--which he had arranged to have
blown overhead; and the long-drawn adagio wails penetrated to their
ears and hearts through the muffling earth like a warm rain....
In Gustavus's eye stood the first tear of joy--his heart turned
over--he believed, even now he was dying of the tones.
O music! Lingering echo from a remote world of harmony! Sigh of the
angel within us! When the word is speechless, and the embrace and the
eye, even the weeping one, and when our dumb hearts lie solitary behind
the grating of the breast; O, then it is through thee alone they cry to
each other in their prisons, and their distant sighs meet and mingle
and cheer them in their wilderness!
As at a real death, so in this mimetic one, the Genius led his pupil's
approach toward heaven on the step-ladder of the five senses. He
invested the semblance of death, to the advantage of the reality, with
all possible charms, and Gustavus will certainly die one day more
rapturously than one of us. While others bring us to see hell open, he
promised him, that, like a Stephen, on his dying day he should see
heaven open already, even before he ascended into it. And this actually
occurred. Their subterranean valley of Jehoshaphat had beside the
afore-mentioned cellar stairs a long, horizontal cross-passage, opening
at the foot of the mountain out into the valley and the village which
lay therein, and barred up at certain intervals by two doors. In the
night before the first of June, when only the white sickle of the moon
hung in the horizon, and like an old visage gray with age, turned in
the blue night toward the hidden sun, he had arranged that in the midst
of a prayer these doors should imperceptibly be thrown open--and now,
Gustavus, for the first time in thy life, and on thy knees, thou
lookest out into the broad theatre, nine million square miles broad, of
human doings and sufferings; but only just as we in the nightly years
of childhood and under the veil wherewith a mother guarded us from the
flies, so dost thou glance out into the sea of night which spreads out
before thee into immensity with swinging blossoms and shooting
fire-flies, that seem to move among the stars, and with the whole
multitudinous movement of creation! O, thou happy Gustavus! this
night-piece shall remain long years after in thy soul, as a green
island that has gone down in the sea, it shall lie encamped behind deep
shadows and look yearningly at thee as a long past joyous eternity....
But after a few minutes the Genius folded him in his arms and veiled
the eager eyes in his bosom; imperceptibly the heavenly gates swung to
again and snatched his spring-time away.
In twelve hours he will be standing in the midst of it; but I am
already oppressed with suspense as I draw nearer and nearer to this
mild resurrection. It moves me, not merely because only one single time
in my life can I have such a birthday, worthy of heaven, as Gustavus's,
rise and set in my soul, a day whose fire I feel in my pulse, and of
which only a faint reflection falls upon this paper--nor yet merely for
the reason that presently the Genius withdraws, unknown both to author
and to reader; but chiefly on this account, that I am to cast my
Gustavus out of the still diamond mine, where the diamond of his heart
formed itself so transparent and so brilliant, and so without spot or
flaw, into the hot world which will soon hold up to it its concave
mirror and crumble it to pieces; from his dead calm of the passions out
into the so-called heaven, where by the side of the saints walk fully
as many of the reprobate. But as he will then be at liberty also to
gaze upon the face of great nature, it is not, after all, his fate
alone that makes me anxious, but mine and that of others, for I reflect
through how much rubbish our teachers drag our inner man as a
malefactor before he is permitted to stand upright! Ah, had a
Pythagoras, instead of the Latin one and the Syrian History, let our
heart become a softly trembling _AEolian Harp_, on which Nature should
play and express her feelings, and not an alarming _fire-drum_ of all
passions--how far--since Genius, but never Virtue, has limits, and
everything pure and good can grow still purer--might we not have risen!
Just as Gustavus waits over a night, so will I postpone my picture one
night that I may give it to-morrow with full rapture of soul.