The Dream of Heaven.---Hoppedizel's Letter.
Since I have, beside my biographical business, also driven the
trade of a Ladies' Tailor, a wholly new life has grown up in me.
Nevertheless the future Shroeckh who shall offer to hang me up also in
his picture-gallery of famous men, must be advised to be moderate and
not deduce everything from my tailoring, but something from my
imagination. This latter has during the last winter and autumn so
strengthened itself by the painting of so many scenes in nature, that
the present spring finds quite other eyes and ears in me than I have
ever had before. This is what we all, I and the reader, should have
considered before now. If the attraction of certain vices becomes
through the daily growing efforts of the imagination, insuperable, why
do we not give her irresistible pencil worthy subjects? Why do we not
direct her in winter to sketch or rather to create the spring? For one
enjoys in nature not what one sees (else the Forester and the Poet
would find out of doors the same kind of enjoyment) but what one's
poetic sense imparts to the visible, and the feeling for nature is at
bottom the fancy for it.
But in no brain did more graceful shades of dream and fancy crystallize
than in Gustavus's. His health and his happiness have come back to him;
this is shown by his nights, wherein dreams like violets open again
their spring-chalices. Such an Eden-fragrance floats around the
following dream.
* * * * *
"He died," it seemed to him, "and was to play out the interval before
his new incarnation in mere dreams. He sank into a tossing sea of
blossoms, which was the conflux of the starry heavens; on the ground of
immensity all stars bloomed white and neighborly blossom-leaves tossed
against each other. But why did this flower-field growing from the
earth up even to heaven intoxicate with the exhaling spirit of a
thousand cups all souls that flew over it and sunk down in bewildering
ecstasy? Why did a juggling wind mingle souls together with souls and
flowers amidst a snow-flurry of sparks and many-colored flakes of fire?
Why did so sweet and so sportive a dream envelop deceased men?--O, for
this reason; the gnawing wounds of life were to be closed by the balmy
breath of this immeasurable spring, and man, still bleeding from the
blows of the former earth, was to be healed under the flowers for the
future heaven where the greater virtue and knowledge demand a healthy
soul. For ah! the soul suffers here indeed, quite too much! When on
every snow-field one soul embraced another, then out of love they
walked into _one_ glowing dew-drop; then it trembled downward and
alighted on a flower, which breathed it up again, rent asunder, as holy
incense. High over the blooming field stood God's paradise, out of
which the echo of its heavenly tones, in the form of a brook, flowed
down to the plain; its melody wandered through all the windings of the
lower paradise and the intoxicated souls plunged in their ecstasy from
the flowery shore into the stream of flute-music; in the resonance of
paradise all their senses expired, and the too finite soul, dissolved
into a bright tear or joy, floated on upon the running waves. This
flowery field rose and rose incessantly, to meet the uplifted paradise,
and the heavenly air, through which it flew, swept from above downward,
and its descending undulations unfolded all flowers and did not bend
them. But often, in the darkest height, God passed far away above the
waving meadows; then when the Infinite One veiled his infinity overhead
in two clouds, the one charged with lightning, or the Eternal Truth,
and the other a warm one, trickling down on everything and weeping, or
the Eternal Love; then they stood arrested, the soaring meadow, the
sinking ether, the echoing brook, the quivering leaf of the flower;
then God gave the signal that he was passing by, and an immeasurable
love constrained all souls in this lofty stillness to embrace each
other, and none sank upon one, but all on all--a blissful slumber fell
like a dew on the embrace. Then when they awoke out of each other's
arms, lightnings flashed out of the whole field of flowers, all
blossoms exhaled, all leaves sank under the drops of the warm cloud,
all windings of the melodious brook rang in unison, the whole paradise
gleamed with heat-lightning above them and nothing was mute but the
loving souls which were too blessed...."
Gustavus awoke into a nearer world, which was a beautiful counterpart
of his dreamed one; the sun was transformed into a single glowing ray,
and this ray also broke off on the earth; the cloud of twilight
gathered round, flowers and birds hung their drowsy heads in the dew
and only the evening-wind still stirred round in the leaves and stayed
up all night....
Thus do our green hours creep through our unvisited vale, they glide
with an unheard, butterfly's pinion through our atmosphere, not with
the buzzing wing-sheath of a chafer--joy lights upon us softly as an
evening-dew and does not rattle down like a rushing rain. Our happy
bath-time will refresh our spirits, our powers of work and of
endurance, for a long time, forever; the green Lilienbad will remain in
our fancy a green oasis, whereon, if ever the years shall have buried
in deep snow all Elysian fields, the whole landscape of our joy, under
its warm breath all the snow will melt and which will ever look green
to us, that we may thereon, as painters do on green cloth, refresh our
old eyes.... I wish you, my readers, for your old age very many such
places left open, and every sick man his Lilienbad.
Were I not doing it to please the German public, I should hardly for
very joy succeed in describing it. And yet I will not begin a new
joy-section before Beata's birthday. This is celebrated in the little
Molucca, Teidor, whither we are all invited by the Doctor; he has his
country-seat on that island; the weather, too, will continue fine. This
much I can easily foresee without any great prophetic talent, that the
Birthday, or Teidor section, will not so much combine as fully surpass
all the fine things that were ever burnt up in the Alexandrian library
or mouldered in Imperial ones or have ever been kept in all others.
In the following letter inviting me to the Molucca Island, the Doctor
writes me a piece of news which deserves a place here, in so far as
there is use for it, and I would gladly have my section full, inasmuch
as I merely transcribe.
"Professor Hoppedizel, who, except philosophizing and flogging, loves
nothing so much as practical joking, will, so soon as the moon
by-and-by rises later, play a new one, namely play the rogue. I found
him several days ago with a long beard which he had been stiffening and
straightening for himself; moreover he had concealed crowbars and
chosen masks. I asked him into what redoubt he was going to steal? He
said into that of Maussenbach--in short, he proposes by breaking in
with a small band and instead of plundering, turning it into a joke, to
drive thy Legal Chief into a theatrical and artificial fright. It were
to be wished that this artistic and satirical robber-captain might be
taken for a real one, and be bundled into a police-wagon with his
burglar's tools and publicly marched in--not that the good Hoppedizel
might be injured in the matter, but only that this stoical corsair
might be brought to the rack and thereby place three persons at once in
full light: first, himself, since he would confess not so much a crime
as his stoical principles--secondly, the Pestilentiary or myself, since
I, on the rack (as we do in all sufferings) should prescribe regard to
his health--thirdly, the justiciary, or thyself, who couldst show that
thou hadst thy academical criminal-sheets already--in thy trunk...."
I fancy it will fare with the reader as with me, that on the flowery
shore amidst the melodies of nature this sea-fight on the great sea of
the world and the firing during it seems to create a screaming
dissonance.
FIFTY-THIRD, OR GREATEST, SECTION OF JOY,
OR BIRTHDAY OR TEIDOR-SECTION.
The Morning.--The Evening.--The Night.
To-day is Beata's festival, and is growing finer and finer--my
writing-desk is nine million square miles broad, namely the earth--the
sun is my lamp of Epictetus, and instead of the portable library the
leaves of the whole book of nature rustle before me.... But to begin at
the beginning--merely adding here that I am already ensconced on the
island of Teidor.
The days preceding foul weather are, meteorologically also, the
fairest. As we to-day--being the most pacific quadruple alliance that
exists--went out through our tuneful valley ere yet the morning-rays
had entered it, so as to arrive comfortably at the Molucca island
before 9 o'clock--a whole crystalline day, clear as a sparkling well,
lay stretched out on the broad meadows before us--we had hitherto been
used to the beautiful, but not to the most beautiful. The earthly ball
seemed a bright lunar globe compacted out of airs and mists--the
summits of hills and woods stood bare in the deep blue, unpowdered (so
to speak) with fogs--all prospects had drawn nearer to us and the mist
was wiped away from the _glass_ through which we looked; the air was
not sultry, but it lay in motionless repose on the fragrant meadows and
the leaf nodded, but not the twig, and the hanging flower swayed a
little, but only under two fighting butterflies.... It was the Sabbath
of the Elements--the Siesta of Nature. Such a day, when the very
morning has the nature of a rapturous evening and when even it reminds
us of our hopes, our past and our longings, comes not often, comes not
to many, to the few into whose swelling hearts it does shine may not
venture to come often, because it makes the poor human beings, who open
their hearts to it like leaves of flowers, too glad, and transports
them from the financial feudal soil, where one must mow more flowers
than he smells, too suddenly and too far into the magic Arcadia. But ye
financiers and economists and leaseholders, if almost all seasons of
the year minister to the skin and the stomach, why shall not _one_
day--especially for guests of the springs--belong merely to the too
tender heart? If one forgives you for hardness, why will you not
forgive any softness? Oh, you offend enough besides, you unfeeling
souls! the fairer, finer soul is to you simply insignificant and
ridiculous; but you are to it a torment and wound it constantly.
Singular it is, that we sometimes concede to others superiority of
_talents_, but never superiority in _sentiment_, and that we admit
errors in our own judgment, but never in our own taste.
A transparent balustrade of forest-trees was now all that remained
between us and the Indian Ocean, wherein lay the green Teidor, when our
path led through the high grass which grew in over it, along by a
hermitage or an isolated house, which lay too enchantingly in this
flowery ocean for it to be possible one should walk or ride by it. We
reclined on a spot of mown grass, on the right side of the house, to
the left of a little round garden, which hid itself away in the middle
of the meadow. In this poor little garden were and supported themselves
(as in a tolerant state) on the same bed, beans and peas and lettuce
and cabbages; and yet in this dwarf-garden a child had also his little
infusorial garden. In the little red and dazzling bird-house a nimble
woman was just carrying on her fragrant field-bakery; and two
children's-shirts hung on the garden-hedge and two stood at the
house-door, in which latter couple two brown children played and
watched us--nothing gave them pleasure this morning but the sun on
their hare feet. O Nature! O Blessedness! thou, like benevolence,
lovest to seek out poverty and obscurity!
The cleverest thing I have said, or probably shall say, to-day, was
certainly the grass-discourse in the morning beside the little house.
As I stood there and observed the steadfast sky, the lull of wind and
leaves, in which the vertical wing of the butterfly and the hair of the
caterpillar remained unbent, then I said: "We and this little worm
stand in and under three almighty seas, the aerial sea, the watery sea
and the electric sea; and yet the roaring waves of these oceans, these
mile-long waves, that can tear a land to pieces, are so smoothed so
tamed, that this Sabbath-day comes forth, in which not a breath of air
moves the broad wing of the butterfly or plucks from it a particle of
feathered dust, and in which the child toys and smiles so peacefully
among the elemental leviathans. If no infinite genius had compelled
this, if we may not trust this genius with the harmonious ordering of
our future world and our future destiny ...
"O infinite genius of the earth! in thy bosom we will bury our childish
eyes, when the tempest breaks loose from its chain--on thy almighty
heart will we sink back, when iron death puts us to sleep in passing
by!"
So we sauntered on in innocent contentment, without haste or heat,
toward the waves which rippled around Fenk's country-seat. Singular it
is, there are days, when we willingly let our still, continuous
enjoyment of _outward_ objects suffice us (wherewith we rarely
repel genuine stoicism)--still more singular is it, that many a day
really does this. What I mean is, a certain gentle, water-level
contentedness--not earned by virtue, not won by reflection--is
sometimes supplied us by a day, by an hour, when all the miserable
trifles and ravelings of which our puny and petty life is sewed
together, harmonize with our pulses and do not run contrary to our
blood--_e. g_., when (as happened to-day) the sky is cloudless, the
wind asleep, the ferryman at hand to carry us over to Teidor, the
master of the country-house, Doctor Fenk, ready and waiting for us an
hour ago, the water smooth, the boat dry, the landing-haven deep and
everything just right.... Verily we are all on such a foolish footing,
that among _human pleasures_, upon which the Consistorial Counsellor of
Zerbst, _Sintenis_, has composed two volumes, may be reckoned--in
Germany (though far less in Italy and Poland)--the catching now and
then of one or another flea.... If, then, one would experience such a
day of paradise, then must there not so much as a trifle, such as one
strides over in hours of stoical energy, lie in the way; just as when
one will draw down the sun with a burning-glass, not the thinnest cloud
must intrude before his face.... I am now on fire, and assure the
reader I cannot possibly think of anything more foolish than our life,
our earth, and its inhabitants, and our remarking upon this folly....
The Indian Ocean was a noisy market-place, resembling a Chinese river;
on every side it was crowded with joy, life and splendor, from its
upper surface to its bottom, where the second hemisphere of the heavens
with its sun was tremulously reflected. In the country-house the walls
were white, because (said Fenk) for a man who comes in from a nature
that stands in a blaze of fire and light into a narrow cell, no
coloring of this cell can be bright enough to counteract a mournful and
confined impression.
Then we rested, changing our position from one shaded grassy bank of
the island to another, fanned by birch-leaves and Indian waves--then we
made music--then dined; first, at the table of a host who knows how to
be refined and delicate, in a jovial manner; secondly, at the windows
which opened to all four points of the compass, and drew us more than
ever into all the vortices of joyous nature, and thirdly, each of us by
himself, with a hand that knew how to pluck the soft berry of enjoyment
without crushing it. At evening comes Ottomar--the two maidens have
lost themselves among flowers and Gustavus among shadows--the
biographer lies here, like the jurist Bartolus, on the tossing grass
depicting it all--Fenk is arranging for the evening. Not till evening
does our to-day's joy come out into full light; and I thank heaven that
I have now overtaken, with my biographical pen, the actual course of
things, and that no one knows more than I report; whereas heretofore I
always knew more, and embittered for myself the biographical enjoyment
of the happiest scenes by the knowledge of the most mournful. But now,
though in the next quarter of an hour the sea might swallow us all up,
in the present one we looked out on it with a smile.
As I am so quiet and care not to go to walk, I will talk about taking
walks--a thing which so often occurs in my work--and not without
keenness. A man of understanding and logic would, in my opinion,
distribute all walkers, like the East Indians, into four castes.
In the first caste trot along the most miserable ones, who do it from
vanity or fashion, and want to show either their feeling or their
clothes or their gait.
In the second caste run the fat and the scholarly, who do it for the
sake of getting a _motion_, and not so much to enjoy as to digest what
they have enjoyed already; into this innocent, passive department they
are also to be thrown, who do it without reason and without enjoyment,
or as companions, or from an animal satisfaction with fine weather.
The third caste comprise those in whose heads are the eyes of the
landscape-painter, whose hearts are penetrated by the grand outlines of
the universe, and whose eyes trace the immeasurable line of beauty
which flows with ivy-tendrils around all created things--which rounds
the sun and the drop of blood and the pea, and cuts out all leaves and
fruits into circles. Oh, how few such eyes rest on the mountains and on
the setting sun and the closing flower!
A fourth and better caste, one would think, could hardly be produced
after the third; but there are persons who look upon creation not
merely with an artistic but with a holy eye--who transplant into this
blooming world the world to come, among the creatures find the
Creator--who kneel down amidst the rustling and roaring of the
thousand-twigged, thickly-leaved tree of life, and are fain to speak
with the genius whose presence pervades it, they themselves being only
leaves that tremble thereon--who use the profound temple of Nature--not
as a villa full of pictures and statues, but as a holy place of
worship--in snort, who go to walk not merely with the eye, but with the
heart....
I know no greater praise than being able to glide over easily from such
persons to our loving couple--their love is such a walk; the life of
high-minded persons is also such a walk. I will only add, before rising
from the crushed grass, the single remark, that Gustavus's love quite
fits the practical definition of it which is to be made in a rapturous
summer-midnight. The noblest love (as one may define it) is simply the
tenderest, deepest, most substantial respect, revealed less by what is
done than by what is left undone, which is divined by both parties
mutually, which stretches across both souls (in an astonishing degree)
the same chords, which exalts the noblest feelings with a new glow,
which will always sacrifice, never gain, which takes away nothing from
love for the whole sex, but gives all through the individual; this love
is a respect, in which the pressure of hand and lips are not
indispensable constituents and good actions are quite essential; in
short, a respect which must be laughed to scorn by the majority of men
and profoundly honored by the smallest part. Such a heart-exalting
respect was the love of Gustavus, which not only endured, but even
gladdened and warmed noble eye-witnesses, because it was without that
innocently-sensuous toying with lips and hands, in which the spectator
can take no more interest than in the artificial, theatrical viands of
the players. A sign of virtuous esteem or love is this, when the
spectator takes the more interest in it, the greater it is. Gustavus's
love had--since his Peter's-fall, and still more since the forgiveness
of this fall (for many faults one feels most deeply, only when they are
pardoned)--gained such an access of tenderness, of reserve, and sense
of another's worth, that he won more hearts than the tenderest one, and
ruled other eyes than the fairest, those of Beata, before which his
glances fell, like snow-flakes in the blue under the cloudless sun,
pure, sparkling, trembling and melting away.
All have just arrived, Ottomar and the rest.
My clock strikes two in the morning, and still the birthday festival of
Beata and of paradise is not yet closed; for I am just come over to
this position to describe it; that is to say, if I remain in my chair
and do not sally forth again into the blue vault, which throws over the
so great multitude of to-day's joys its starry rays.
Towards evening Ottomar flew hither over the water. He always looks
like a man who is thinking of something distant, who is just now only
resting, who plucks the flower of joy that hangs over his path, because
his flying gondola hurries him along by it, not because he is thinking
of it at all. He still retains his sublimely-low voice and that eye of
his which has seen death. He is still as much of a Zahouri[96] as ever,
who sees through all flower-beds and grass-plots of the earth and down
to the motionless dead, who sleep beneath it. So soft and stormy, so
humorous and melancholy, so obliging and unconstrained and free! He
asserted that most vices were owing to the flying from vices--for fear
of acting badly we did nothing and had no longer courage for anything
great--we all had so much love for man that we had no longer any
honor--out of humane tolerance and love we had no sincerity, no
uprightness, we could not hurl down a traitor, a tyrant or the like.
He wondered at Beata, who took not the customary constrained, but a
heightening interest in our talk: for he has a notion that one may talk
with a woman about heaven and hell, God and the Fatherland, and yet she
will be thinking of nothing all the while she listens, but her figure,
her attitude, her dress. "I except," said Fenk, "in the first place,
everything, and secondly, physiognomy also; to this they all listen,
because they can all immediately apply it."
The magic evening drove more and more shadows before it; at last it
took up all creatures into its rocking lap and clasped them to its
bosom, in order to make them tranquil, tender and glad. We five
islanders became so, too. We went out in a body up to a little
artificial eminence that we might escort the sun even to the last
stairway, before he sailed across the ocean to America. Suddenly, over
in another island, five Alpine horns pealed forth, and went on rising
and falling with their simple strains. One's condition has more
influence on music, than music on one's condition. In our situation and
where one's ear places him already at the Alpine fountain, and his eye
on the evening-gilded glacier-peak, and around the hut of the herdsman,
lie Arcadia and Tempe and youth's pastures, and when we let these
fancies fly before the sinking sun and after the fairest day--in such a
case the heart follows an Alp-horn with intenser throbs than a concert
hall full of gaily bedizened hearers. Oh the admission ticket to joy is
a good, and then a tranquil heart! The dark, cloudy, dimly gleaming
_ideas_, which the universal philosopher demands of all sensations,
must glide slowly over the soul or stand perfectly still, if it is to
enjoy itself; just as clouds that move slowly betoken fair weather,
while flying ones indicate foul. "There are," said Beata, "virtuous
days when one pardons everything and has all power over one's self,
when joy seems to kneel down in the heart and pray that it may remain
there longer, and when all is cleared up and illumined within us;--then
when one weeps over it for joy this grows so great that all is gone by
again."
"I," said Ottomar, "love better to throw myself into the rocking arms
of the tempest. We enjoy only glancing, glowing moments; this coal must
be violently whirled round, that the burning circle of rapture may
appear."
"And yet," said he, "I am to-day so glad in thy presence, setting
sun!... The gladder I have been in any hour, or week, so much the
stormier was the next. Like flowers is man: the more violent the
tempest is going to be, so much the more perfume do they exhale." "You
must not invite us any more, Herr Doctor," said Beata smiling, but her
eye swam, however, in something more than joy.
Amidst the deepening red of the heavens the sun stepped upon his last
stair, environed with tinted clouds. He and the Alpine horns vanished
in the same instant. One cloud paled after another and the highest
still hung transfused with the evening-glow. Beata and my sister talked
playfully, after the manner of maidens, about what these illuminated
clouds might be--the one resolved them into Christmas lambs with
rosy-red ribbons, or a red heavenly scarf--the other into fiery eyes or
cheeks under a veil--red and white cloud-roses--a red sun-hat, etc....
Punch, I think, was brought at last for the gentlemen, one of whom took
it in such moderation that he can even now, at 21/2 o'clock, compose this
section. Then we sauntered round under the rustling and refreshing tree
of night, whose blossoms are suns and its fruits worlds. Our enjoyment
now led us apart, now brought us together again, and each was equally
capable of enjoying himself greatly, with or without company. Beata and
Gustavus forgot their own peculiar love and joy out of respect and
sympathy for that of others, and where all were friends became simply
friends to each other. O, preach out of the world, I pray, the sadness
which makes the heart as thick as blood, but not the joy, which in its
dance of ecstasy, stretches out its arms not merely after a partner,
but also after a tottering unfortunate, and which, as it flies by,
takes the tear from the eye of the weeping spectator! To-day we would
fain pardon each other everything, although we found nothing to pardon.
There was nothing there to forgive, I say; for as one star after
another welled out from the depth of shadow, and when Ottomar and I had
turned about before a warbling nightingale in order to hear her wails,
softened by distance, and when we stood alone together, encompassed by
nothing but tones and shapes of love, and when I could no longer
contain myself, but, under the great present and future heavens, opened
my heart to him, whose own I had long ago seen and loved; then was such
a frame of spirit no forgiveness and reconciliation, but.... of that,
day after to-morrow....
In alternating groups--now the two maidens alone, now with a third
person, now all together--we walked over the grass-embosomed flowers
and passed along between two rival nightingales, the one of which sang
the praises and inspired the air of the one island, aim the other of
the neighboring one. In this musical _pot-pourri_ the leaves of
the flowers had covered the fragrant _pot-pourris_, but all the
birch-leaves had put on their own and we separated from one another on
purpose, so as not to be able to embark hurriedly from an enchanting
Otaheite.
At last we met by chance under a silver-poplar, whose snow-white leaves
had by their gleam through the dark gathered us around it. "It is high
time we took our leave!" said Beata. Only just as we were, or should
have been, on the eve of doing it, the moon came up; behind a latticed
fan of flowers she opened so modestly her cloudy eyelids, as she
silently floated across the blind night, and her eye streamed, and she
looked upon us like sincerity itself, and sincerity looked upon her
too. "If we would only tarry," said Ottomar, in whose hot hand of
friendship we would willingly dispense with every female hand--"till
it grows lighter on the water and the moon can shine in upon the
vales--who knows when we can have things so again?" At length he added:
"Besides, Gustavus and I start on our journey early to-morrow morning,
and this weather cannot last long." He referred to the unknown
seven-weeks' journey, in regard to which I here gladly take back all
those conjectures which have hitherto represented it as so weighty and
mysterious.
We again postponed our departure; the conversation grew monosyllabic,
our thoughts polysyllabic, and our hearts too full, just as the waning
moon on the threshold of its rising appeared to us _full_ also. When a
company that has once had its hand on the door-latch, draws it away
again, this delay excites the expectation of greater enjoyments, and
this expectation excites embarrassment; but we were merely more silent
about each other, and concealed our sighs over the falcon-flight of
joyous hours, and perhaps many an averted eye presented to the moon the
offering which the saddest or the gladdest soul finds it so hard to
refuse.
Just at this moment I made my way out into its rays and came back again
to my writing table, and thank the veil of night, which stretches
double around the Universe, that it also folds itself over the greatest
sorrows and joys of men.... We were, therefore, on our island as sadly
silent as at the gate of a joyous eternity; the land-embracing spring,
with its majesty--with its warm, sunken moon--with its twinkling star
of Venus--with its sublime midnight-red--with its heavenly
nightingales--swept by before five human beings; it flung and heaped up
in these five too happy ones, its buds and its blossoms, and its dimly
gleaming outlooks and hopes, and its thousand heavens, and took nothing
away from them for it, but their _speech_. O spring! O thou earth of
God! O thou boundless sky! O that to-day, in all dwellers upon thee,
the heart heaved in joyous throbbings, till we all fell down beside
each other beneath the stars, and poured out our hot breath in one
jubilant voice and all our joys in prayers, and lifted our aspiring
hearts to the lofty blue of heaven, and in our ecstasy sent up sighs,
not of sorrow, but of bliss, whose way to heaven was as long as ours to
the grave!... O bitter thought! of being often the one happy among none
but the unhappy! sweeter thought, of being among only happy ones the
sole afflicted!
At last the dark slags floated away from before the silvery glance of
the rising moon; she stood like an ineffable rapture higher in the
night of the heavens, painted out of the background into the
foreground. The frogs pierced the night like a mill, and their
continuous, many-voiced din had the effect of a silence. O what man
whom death had changed into an angel flying over the earth, would not
have fallen down upon it, and under the earthly foliage and on the
earthly ground, silvered over by the moon (as by the sun it is gilded
over), and thought upon the heaven he had left behind and upon his old
human pastures, his old spring-times down below here, and of his former
hopes among the blossoms?
Ye reviewers! forgive me this once and let me go on! At last we stepped
into a gondola as into a Charon's bark, and rapturously and reluctantly
cleared the bushy shore and the reflection streaming from the water
upon its leaves. The greatest enjoyment, the highest gratitude, send,
not _horizontally_ but _vertically_, their hidden and grasping roots
into the heart; we could not therefore say much to Fenk, who was not to
go away to-night from the scene of joy. Thou friend! dearer to me than
all others, perhaps when all is more quiet and the moon is higher and
purer, and the night more eternal, toward morning, thou wilt begin to
weep over both--what the earth has given thee and what it has taken
away. Beloved! if thou doest it now, at this moment--then I shall
surely do so too!...
With our first step into the boat the Alp-horns (probably under Fenk's
direction) again pierced the night; every tone rang through it like a
past, every chord like a sigh for a spring-time of the other world; the
night-mist played and smoked over woods and mountains and drew itself
out, like the boundary lines of men, like morning-clouds of the future
world, around our spring-awakened earth. The Alp-horns died away, like
the voice of first love, in our ears and grew louder in our souls; the
rudder and boat cut the water in two into a gleaming milky way; every
wave was a trembling star; the fluctuating water reflected tremulously
the moon, which we would rather have multiplied a thousand-fold than
doubled, and whose soft lily-face bloomed still paler and more sweetly
under the waves. Encircled with four heavens--the one in the blue
above, on the earth, in the water and within us--we sailed on through
the swimming blossoms. Beata sat at one end of the boat, facing the
other, the moon, and the friend of her tender soul--her glance glided
easily up and down between the moon and him--he was thinking of his
morrow's journey and of his longer tour as ambassador, and begged us
all for written souvenirs, that he might always have a good abiding
among us as now, and reminded Beata of her promise to give him one
also. She had already written it and gave it to him to-day at their
parting. The happy day, the happy evening, the heavenly night filled
her eyes with a thousand souls and with two tears that lingered there.
She covered and dried one eye with her white handkerchief and looked
upon Gustavus with the other, with a glance as pure and calm as an
image in a mirror.... Thou fanciedst, thou good soul, that thou wast
also hiding thy open eye!
At last--O thou everlasting, unceasing At Last!--our silvery course
through the waves broke also upon its shore. The opposite one lay there
deserted and overshadowed. Ottomar tore himself away in the most
melancholy inspiration and amidst the dying echoes of the Swiss tones
my renewed friend said: "It is all over again--all tones die away--all
waves sink to rest--the fairest hours strike their last and the sands
of life run out. There is surely and absolutely nothing, thou vast
heaven above us, that can fill or bless us! Farewell! I shall take
leave of you all along my way."
The Alpine echoes sounded back far into the night and sank to a
murmuring breath, which resembled a memory, not out of youth, but out
of the depths of childhood. We reeled, filled full of enjoyment,
through dew-dripping bushes and through drooping, drowsy and
dew-drunken meadows, from which we plucked slumbering flowers, in order
to see on the morrow their folded form in sleep. We thought upon the
sunless paths of this day's morning; we passed along without a sound
before the little Lilliputian house and garden, and the children and
the bread-baking housewife were clasped and entwined in the deathlike
arms of slumber. The hours had rolled the moon, like a stone of
Sysiphus, up the steep of heaven, and let it roll down again.[97] In
the east stars rose, in the west stars set, in mid-heaven little
starlets sent off from the earth exploded into fragments--but eternity
stood dumb and great beside God, and all passed away before it and all
arose before its face. The field of life and of infinity hung down near
and low above us, like _one_ flash, and all that is great, all that is
immortal, all the dead and all angels lifted the human spirits into
their blue circle and sank to meet it....
At last, I taking the hand of my sister and Gustavus that of Beata, we
entered our little Lilienbad stiller, fuller, holier, than we had left
it in the morning. Gustavus took leave of me first, saying: "In five
days we meet again." He led Beata to her cottage, which blazed in
Luna's silver flames. The white summit of the pyramid on the hermitage
mount glimmered across out of the depth of its seclusion over the long
green avenue to the vale and through the darkness of the night. Beside
this pyramid the two happy ones had first given each other their
hearts, beside it a friend rested from the toil of life, and its white
peak pointed to the place where blooms a fairer spring. They heard the
leaves of the terrace whisper, and the Tree of Life under which after
set of sun, they had for the second time given their souls to each
other.... O ye two good and over-happy beings! at this moment a good
seraph is drawing up for you a silvery minute out of the sea of joy
which lies in a fairer earth--on this fleeting drop glances the whole
perspective of the Eden wherein the angel is; the minute will run down
to you, but ah! so soon will it pass by!
Beata gave Gustavus, as a hint for departure, the desired leaf--he
pressed the hand from which it came to his mute lips--he could not
speak either thanks or farewell--he took her other hand and all within
him cried and repeated: "She is truly once more thine and remains so
forever," and he must needs weep over his bliss. Beata looked into his
overflowing heart, and hers ran over into a tear and yet she knew it
not: but when the tear of the holiest eye trickled down the rosy cheek
and hung on that rose-leaf with trembling glimmer--when his locking and
her locked hands could not wipe it away--when with his flaming face,
with his too blissful, bursting heart, he was about to wipe the tear,
and bent toward the fairest object on earth like a rapture bending
toward virtue, and touched her face with his--then did the angel who
loves the earth draw the two purest lips together into an
inextinguishable kiss--then did all trees sink out of sight, all suns
passed away, all heavens fled, and Gustavus held heaven and earth in a
single heart clasped to his breast;--then didst thou, seraph, pass into
the beating hearts and gavest them the flames of the immortal love--and
thou heardst the breathed sounds fly from the hot lips of Gustavus: "O
thou dear! thou undeserved one! and so good! so good!"
Enough--the lofty moment has flown by--the earthly day sends up already
its morning-redness into the heavens--let my heart return to its rest
and every other heart likewise!