Great Aloe-blooming of Love; or, the Grave.--The Dream.--The
Organ.--Together with my Apoplectic Attack, Fur-boots and
Ice-liripipium.[74]
In the soul of Gustavus the highest lights passed slowly over from the
friend's image to that of the beloved. Now, for the first time, did her
face, which at the death-bed had beamed eternal rays upon him, come
forth out of the cypress-shadow. The solitary pyramid stood sublimely,
as angel-watcher beside the buried one. He climbed the hill with still
sad, but softened feelings; he had now, indeed, the indescribably sweet
consolation of never having harmed the man lying under the ground
there, and having often forgiven him; he wished Amandus had still
oftener given occasion for his forgiveness; even _this_ wrapped his
wounded bosom in warm solace, that he at this moment so loved, so
lamented him, unseen, unrequited.
At the summit he still trod upon some thorns of anguish, which make one
cry out aloud; but soon, on the bridge of light, which ran from a lamp
out of Beata's chamber across the garden over to the mountain, his
yearning eyes flew like other butterflies toward her bright windows. He
saw nothing except now the light and now a head which eclipsed it; but
this head he dressed up within his far more beautifully than any woman
does her own. He lay and leaned, half-kneeling and half-standing, with
his eyes turned toward the long stream of light, on the pedestal of the
pyramid. Weariness and sleepless nights had filled his tear-glands with
those oppressive and yet enrapturing tears, which often without
occasion and so bitterly and so sweetly stream out shortly before
sickness or after exhaustion.--The same causes spread between him and
the outer world the semblance of a dark misty day or yellow fog; his
inner world on the contrary grew, without effort of his own, from a
pen-and-ink-sketch to a glistening oil-painting, then to a mosaic, at
last to an _alto relievo_.--Worlds and scenes moved up and down before
him--at last dream shut up the whole outer world of sight with his
eye-lids, and opened behind them a new-created paradisiacal one; like a
dead man lay his slumbering body beside a grave-mound and his spirit in
a heavenly meadow stretching over the whole abyss. I will presently
relate the dream and its end, when I have shown the reader the person
by whom the dream was at once prolonged and ended.
Namely Beata--she came. She could not know either of his return or of
his last station. The recentness of the funeral-ceremonies for Ottomar,
the withdrawal of Gustavus, whose image since that last scene had been
impressed so deeply upon and almost _through_ her heart, and the
retiring of Summer, who daily rolled up her many-colored blooming
picture some inches further,--all this had compressed itself in Beata's
bosom to an oppressive sigh, which the noisy hunting-seat with its
close atmosphere painfully confined, and with which she sought purer
spheres of ether, in order to breathe it out upon a grave, and
therefrom to breathe-in material for now ones. Enthusiastic heart! with
thy feverish throbbings thou dost, indeed, send thy blood coursing in
too torrent-like a circle and with thy gushing washest away shores,
flowers and lives; but surely thy fault is fairer than if, with
phlegmatic movement, thou shouldest, out of the stagnant water of the
blood, cast up only a residuum of fatty slime!
The night-walker was startled when she saw the fair sleeper; she had
not in all the garden, through which in these still minutes she had
been roving, anticipated or found anyone. He lay, as he had sunk softly
down, upon one knee; his pale face was irradiated by a lovely dream, by
the rising moon and by Beata's eye. It did not occur to her that he was
perhaps only feigning slumber; with trembling she therefore drew half a
step nearer, in order, in the first place, to be certain who it was,
and, secondly, to let her eye rest full upon the form, at which she had
hitherto only ventured a side glance. During the gaze she could not
properly tell just when she should end it. At last she turned her back
upon her paradise, after she had once more stepped quite up to him; but
while slowly walking backward it occurred to her (_without_ alarm). "He
surely cannot be actually dead." She therefore turned back again and
heard his increasing respirations. Near him lay two small sharp stones
about as large as my inkstand. She bent down _twice close by him_ (she
would not do it at once, or even with her foot) in order to remove
them, that he might not fall upon their points....
Really I should have filled an alphabet, or twenty-three sheets, with
this scene; fortunately it does not properly go on, until he awakes,
and the reader is to-day the happiest of men....
By this time she had already, as a veteran, become more familiar with
the danger, and was so sure he would not wake that she ceased to fear
it, and almost began to wish it, for it occurred to her "the night-air
might be injurious to him." It further occurred to her how sublime a
thing it was that the two friends should so rest side by side; and her
blue eye relieved itself of a dewdrop, as to which I know not whether
it fell for the heart that beat above the ground or the one that lay
motionless beneath it. At last she made serious arrangements to
withdraw, in order, upon the whole, at a distance to awaken him by a
rustling, and in order to indulge her emotions without fear of his
waking. She would merely just pass by him (for she stood four and a
half paces distant), because she _must_ go down on the other side of
the mountain (unless she _chose_ the reverse). His smiles betrayed even
increasing raptures, and she was, of course, curious to observe how the
play of his features would end, but she must needs leave the smiling
dreamer. When, therefore, she had approached two hesitating steps
nearer to him, in order to withdraw to a distance of several, all at
once the organ of the solitary church of the resting-place where
Ottomar had to-day been buried, began to sound in the middle of the
night so solemnly and sadly, as if Death were playing it; and the
countenance of Gustavus became suddenly transfigured by the reflection
of an inner Elysium, and he stood erect with closed eyes, snatched the
hand of the motionless Beata, and said to her in the intoxication of
drowsiness: "O take me wholly, blessed soul! Now I have thee, beloved
Beata; I, too, am dead!"
The dream, which expired with these words, had been this: He sank away
into an immense meadow, which extended away over fair earths placed one
after another. A rainbow of suns, which had been strung in the manner
of a pearl-necklace, encircled the earths and revolved around them. The
circle of suns, going down, sank to the horizon and on the rim of the
great round landscape stood a girdle of brilliants, composed of a
thousand red suns, and the loving heaven had opened a thousand mild
eyes.--Groves and alleys of giant flowers, as tall as trees,
intersected the meadow in transparent zig-zag; the high-stemmed rose
flung over it a gold-red shadow, the hyacinth a blue one, and the
mingling shadows of all tinged it with a silver-hue. A magic evening
glimmer hovered over the landscape like a flush of gladness between the
shores of shadow and the stems of the flowers, and Gustavus felt that
this was the evening of eternity and the rapture of eternity.--Blessed
souls, far away from him and nearer the receding suns, plunged in the
commingling evening rays, and a muffled murmur of joy hung in dying
cadence, like an evening bell, over the heavenly Arcadia;--Gustavus
alone lay forsaken in the silvery shadow of the flowers, with an
endless yearning, but none of the exulting souls came over to him. At
last two bodies in the air dissolved into a thin evening cloud and the
falling cloud revealed two spirits, Beata and Amandus--the latter would
fain lead the former into the arms of Gustavus, but could not gain an
entrance into the silver shadow--Gustavus would fain fall into her
arms, but could not extricate himself from the silver shadow--"Ah, it
is only that thou art not yet dead;" (cried the soul of Gustavus) "but
when the last sun is gone down, then will thy silver shadow float over
all and thy earth will flutter away from thee, and thou will sink on
the bosom of thy friend,"--one sun after another dissolved--Beata
spread down her arms--the last sun sank from view--an organ-peal that
might have shaken the worlds and their coffins to atoms, rang down like
a flying heaven and by its far-reaching tremor loosed from him the
fibrous wrappage and over the outspread silver-shadow floated a rapture
which bore him upward and he took--the actual hand of Beata and said to
her while he woke and still dreamed and saw not, these words: "O take
me wholly, blessed soul; I have thee now, beloved Beata; I, too, am
dead!" He held her hand as fast as the good man does virtue. Her
endeavors to tear herself away drew him at last out of his Eden and his
dream; his blessed eyes opened and exchanged heavens; before him stood
sublimely the white ground flooded with moonlight, and the park-lawn
and the thousand suns diminished to stars, and the beloved soul which
until the setting of all the suns he could not reach.--Gustavus must
needs think that the dream had passed over out of his sleep into real
life, and that he had not slept; his spirit could neither move nor
unite the great precipitous ideas before him. "What world are we in?"
he said to Beata, but in an exalted tone, which almost answered the
question. His hand had clung so that it almost grew to her struggling
one. "You are still in a dream," said she softly, and trembling. This
_you_ and the voice thrust his dream at once away from the present into
the background; but the dream had made the form which contended with
his hand more dear and familiar to him, and the dreamed dialogue acted
in him like a real one, and his spirit was a still vibrating chord into
which an angel had struck his rapturous emotion--and now when, in the
deserted temple over yonder, the organ by a fresh peal raised the scene
above the earthly ground, on which the two souls now were; when Beata's
position swayed to and fro, her lip quivered, her eye gave way--then
again it seemed to him, as if the dream were true, as if the mighty
tones drew him and her from the earth into the land of the embrace, his
being reached on every side its limits: "Beata," he said to the lovely
form dying away under conflicting emotions, "Beata, we are dying
now--and when we are dead, I will tell thee my love and embrace
thee--the dead man beside us has appeared to me in a dream and has
again given me his hand...." She would fain have sunk down upon the
grave--but he held up the falling angel in his arms--he let her head
which had sunk to slumber fall under his and beneath her motionless
heart glowed the throbs of his--it was a sublime moment, when, with his
arm folded around a slumbering blessedness, he looked out alone upon
the sleeping night of earth, was the sole listener to the organ, the
only voice in the solitude, was the sole watcher in the circle of
sleep....
The sublime moment passed, the most blissful began; Beata raised her
head and showed to Gustavus and to heaven upon her backward bent face
the wandering and wept-out eye, the exhausted soul, the transfigured
features and all that Love and Virtue and Beauty can compress into one
heaven on this earth.... Then came on the supernal moment, descending
through thousand heavens upon the earth, in which the human heart lifts
itself to the highest love and beats for two souls and two worlds--that
moment united forever the lips on which all earthly words were
extinguished, the hearts which wrestled with the oppressive rapture,
the kindred souls which like two lofty flames pulsated into each
other....
--Ask not of me any landscape picture of the blooming worlds they
passed over, at a moment which hardly our feelings, not to say words,
can grasp. I could as well give a silhouette of the sun.--After that
moment Beata, whose body already collapsed under a great tear as a
flowret under a rain-drop, sought to seat herself upon the grave; she
softly waved him off from her with one hand, while she resigned to him
the other. In this situation he opened to her his large soul, and told
her all, his history and his dream and his conflicts. Never was a man
more sincere in the hour of his fortune than he; never was love more
coy after the moment of embrace than here with Beata, the oil of joy
floated, as ever, thinly upon the water of tears; a coming sorrow stood
before her and looked upon her with steady, dry eyes, but no remembered
one nor any coming joy. She had now hardly the courage to speak, hardly
the courage to recollect herself, hardly the courage to be enraptured.
To him she only lifted up her shy glance, when the moon, that climbed
up over a broken stairway of clouds stood overshadowed behind a little
white cloudlet. But when a thicker cloud buried the lunar torch, then
the two ended the loveliest day of their life, and in their parting
they felt that there was for them no more parting forever.
Alone in her chamber, Beata could not think, nor feel, nor remember;
she experienced what are tears of joy; she let them stream down, and
when at length she would fain stay them, she could not, and when sleep
came to close her eyes, they still lay glistening under heavenly
drops....
Ye innocent souls, to you I can better say than to the dead one: sleep
softly! We generally, that is I and the reader, take very little
pleasure in the bravura and stilted parts of lovers in romances,
because either the one party is not worthy to enjoy such rain-torrents
of the light of joy, or the other to occasion them; but here we have
neither of us anything to object.... If heaven would only, grant, ye
loving ones, that your lame biographer could make his pen a Blanchard's
wing and transport you thereby out of the mine-chambers and mine-damps
of the court to some free poplar-island or other, whether in the
Mediterranean or the Southern Seas!--As, however, I cannot do it, I
nevertheless imagine it, and as often as I go to Auenthal or Scheerau,
I picture it out to myself how much I should bestow upon you, if in
that poplar or rose-vale, which I had set in water, you could, far from
the German winter, amidst eternal blossoms, far from the cutting faces
of the moral manufacturers, without any more dangerous murmur than that
of the brooks, without any higher complications than those of
intertangled flower bushes, or any influence of harder stars than the
peaceful ones in heaven,--that you might draw breath in guiltless joy
and peace--not, indeed, forever, but at least through the one or two
flower-months of your first love.
But this is hard for mortals, and least of all am I the man for that.
Such a bliss is hard to attain and for that very reason hard to keep.
Rather let it be permitted here to bring forward a word upon the
happiness of an authorial invalid, who, to be sure, would fain have one
of his own also and who is the very describer of the foregoing
felicity, I mean namely, a word about my own sick personality. From the
cow barn I have come out again and of my lung complaint am happily
cured; only symptoms of apoplexy have since set in, and it threatens to
slay me like a mole, just when, as the latter does his hill, so I too
am upheaving the Babel-tower of my literary fame. Fortunately I dabble
a little just now in Haller's greater and lesser Physiology and in
Nicolai's Materia Medica and in all the medical works of which I can
get the loan, and can therefore keep up against the apoplexy a brisk
fire of musketry (or _cartridge_-fire). The fire I make at my feet, by
putting my long leg into a fur-boot as a purgatory and the shrunken one
into a little laced boot. I have the oldest moon-doctors and
Pestilentiaries on my side, in the idea, that I can like a Democrat, by
these boots--and a broad mustard-plaster, wherewith, like sundry
literati, I sole my feet--drive down the _materia peccans_ out of the
upper parts into the lower. Nevertheless I go farther, if I freeze.
Namely: I scrape out and notch for myself a cap of ice[75] and think
under the frozen night-cap; accordingly it can be no wonder if the
apoplexy and its half-sister, the hemiplexy--attacking me throughout
from above and below, at one pole through the hot sock of the foot, at
the other through the icy knob or frozen martyr's-crown--should go back
to where it came from, and give me to the earth, of which the one pole
in like manner below has summer, while the other above has winter....
But let the reader for once turn from good books a philanthropic eye
upon us, their authors. We authors make great exertions and produce
catechisms, primers, funeral sermons upon murderers, periodicals or
menstrua, extracts, and other confounded enlightening stuff; but in
doing it we worry and wear away our worm-bags terribly--and yet no poor
devil has a decent word for us. Thus I and the whole scribbling
fraternity stand erect there and shoot off with gusto long rays across
a whole hemisphere (for more than that, of worlds and other globes,
cannot be illuminated at once,) and all America is lost to our keels
(or quills) and all the while, nevertheless, we resemble the early
Christians, by whom the _light_, wherewith they, shrouded in tarred
linen, as living pitch-pine torches, shone over Nero's gardens, was
given out at the same time with their very fat and life....
"And here"--(romance manufacturers say)--"here ensued a scene, which
the reader may imagine, but which I cannot describe." This appears to
me too stupid. Nor can I describe it, nevertheless. Have then authors
so little honesty, that, when it comes to a scene for which the readers
have been long turning over the leaves ahead, _e. g_., a death, for
which all, parents and children, have been waiting and watching as for
a feudal vacancy or a hanging-day, they should then jump up from their
chairs and say: do that yourselves? It is just as if Schikaneder's[76]
troop, before the most heart-rending scenes of Lear, should come to the
foot-lights and beseech the audience to imagine Lear's countenance, for
they on their part could not imitate it. Surely what the reader can
imagine, the author can also--in the full pulse of all his powers--and
still more easily imagine and consequently depict; moreover the
reader's fancy, into whose spokes the previous scenes have once caught
and set them in motion, will easily be impelled to the swiftest by my
description of the last scene--only not by the miserable one, that it
is not to be described.
As to myself, on the contrary, one may be assured that I make myself
equal to all emergencies. I have therefore negotiated already with my
publisher at the Easter fair, to have ready several pounds extra of
dashes, a pound of interrogation and exclamation points, for the
setting up of the most intense scenes, because I should not in the
least worry myself in this case about my apoplectic head.