Resurrection.
Four Priests stand in the broad cathedral of nature and pray at God's
altars: the mountains:--the ice-gray Winter with his snow-white
surplice--the in-gathering Autumn with sheaves under his arm, which he
lays on God's altar that men may take them--the fiery youth, Summer,
who toils till night in bringing his offerings--and, finally, the
child-like Spring, with his white church decoration of lilies and
blossoms, who, like a child, strews flowers and blossom-cups around the
lofty spirit, and in whose prayer all that hear it join. And for the
_children_ of men Spring is surely the fairest priest.
This flower-priest was the first the little Gustavus beheld at the
altar. Before sunrise on the first of June (down below it was evening)
the Genius knelt down in silence and offered up with his eyes and mute,
trembling lips a prayer for Gustavus, which spread out its wings over
his whole untried life. A flute breathed out overhead a tender, loving
call, and the Genius said: "It is calling us up out of the earth toward
heaven; come with me, my Gustavus." The little one trembled for joy and
fear. The flute sounds on. They go up the nocturnal passage of the
Jacob's-ladder. Two anxious hearts almost crush with their beatings the
breasts that hold them. The Genius pushes open the doors, behind which
stands the world, and lifts his child out on to the earth and under the
heavens.... And now the high waves of the living sea clap their hands
together above Gustavus. With choking breath, with compressed eyelids,
with overwhelmed soul, he stands before the illimitable face of nature,
and clings trembling more and more closely to his Genius.... But when,
after the first shock of amazement, he had flung open, torn open his
soul to these streams; when he felt the thousand arms with which the
lofty Soul of the Universe clasped him to itself; when he was able to
see the green, tumultuous flowery life round about him, and the nodding
lilies, which seemed to him more living than his, and when he feared he
should tread the trembling flower to death; when his eye, cast upward
again, sank in the depth of heaven, the opening of infinity; and when
he shrank with apprehension of the breaking down of the dark red
mountain piles moving along through the heavens and the lands floating
over head; when he saw the mountains resting like new earths on ours;
and when he witnessed the endless life stirring around him, the
feathered life flying along with the cloud, the humming life at his
feet, the golden, crawling life on all leaves, the live arms and heads
of the giant trees all beckoning to him; and when the morning wind
seemed to him the great breath of a coming Genius, and when the
fluttering foliage whispered, and the apple tree threw upon his cheek a
cold leaf; when, finally, his eye, moving heavily under its burden, let
itself be borne on the white wings of a butterfly, which, soundless and
solitary, balanced above gay flowers and hung like a silvery
auricula[12] to the broad green leaf.... then did the heavens begin to
burn, the trailing edge of her mantle blazed off from the fleeing
night, and on the rim of the earth, like a crown of God fallen from the
divine throne, lay the _Sun_. "There stands God!" cried Gustavus; and
with dazzled eye and mind, and with the greatest prayer which the bosom
of a ten-year-old child ever conceived, he flung himself headlong upon
the flowers....
Only open thy eyes again, thou darling! Thou art no longer gazing into
the glowing globe of lava; thou art lying on the overshadowing breast
of thy mother, and her loving heart in that bosom is thy Sun and thy
God--for the first time thou seest the ineffably gracious, womanly and
maternal smile, for the first time hearest the parental voice; for the
first two blessed ones who came to meet thee in heaven are thy parents.
O heavenly home! The sun beams, all dew-drops sparkle beneath it, eight
tears of joy descend with the milder image of the sun, and four human
beings stand blissful and touched with emotion on an earth which lies
so far from heaven! Veiled Destiny! will our death be like that of
Gustavus? Veiled destiny! that sittest behind our earth and behind a
mask and lea vest us time _to be_--ah! when death dissolves us and a
great Genius has lifted us out of the vault into heaven, then when its
suns and joys overpower our soul, wilt thou give us also there a
familiar human breast, on which we may open our feeble eyes? O Destiny!
dost thou give us again, what here we can never forget? No eye will be
directed to this page, which has nothing there to weep over and nothing
there it yearns to meet again: ah, will it, after this life, full of
dead ones, meet no well-known form, to which we can say: Welcome? ...
Fate stands dumb behind the mask; the human tear lies dark upon the
grave; the sun shines not into the tear.--But in Immortality and before
the face of God our loving heart dies not.