Day After This Night.--Beata's Leaf.--Something Memorable.
I ask pardon of the critics, if I made last night too many metaphors
and too much fire and noise: a section of joy (as well as the critique
upon it) must content itself with the like, when once the author
contents himself with a like over-freight of lemon-juice, tea-blossoms,
sugar-cane and arrack, as I did.
I did not lie down again to-day; the birds had already begun to sing
again, and when my dreams had hardly reproduced the past spectacle some
forty times over before my closed eyes, I opened them again, because
the sun was blazing around me.
A night through which one has been awake and enjoying himself leaves
behind a morning when in a sweet languor one not so much feels and
fantasies, when the nightly tones and dances still sound on in our
inner ears, when the persons with whom we spent it float before our
inner eyes in a lovely twilight, which charms our hearts. In fact, we
never love a woman more than after such a night, in the morning before
one has breakfasted.
I have thought a thousand times to-day upon my Gustavus, who before
day-break began his five days' journey, and of my Ottomar who goes with
him. Would that you might never come upon any thorns but such as are
hidden under the rose, might never pass under any cloud except one that
leaves you the whole blue sky and takes away merely the blazing disc,
and that your joys might want one only, namely, that of being able to
relate it to us!
All sunlight merely encircled with a magic spell and overflowed like a
lofty moonlight before me all the shaded avenues of Lilienbad: the past
night seemed to me to reach over into the present day, and I cannot
tell how the moon, which was still sinking with its wiped-out luster,
like a snow-flake, low in the west, became so welcome and so dear to
me. O, pale friend of need and of night! I still think even now of thy
Elysian splendor, of thy cooled off rays, wherewith thou accompanyest
us by brooks and in leafy lanes, and wherewith thou transformest the
sad night into a day seen afar! Magical scene-painter of the future
world for which we mourn and weep, as a dead man becomes beautiful, so
dost thou paint the second world upon our earthly one, when with all
its flowers and people it sleeps or looks up to thee with silent gaze!
I would give up the most distinguished visit to-day in exchange for it,
if I could make one to the happy parties of yesterday, but it is not
practicable. Even Beata had one to-day from her mother; and my eyes
were not able to get a glimpse of anything about her except the five
white fingers with which she turned round a flower-pot at her window
out of the shadow of a twig. O if our old life and our walks begin
again and all live together again, what things the republic of letters
will then get to read!
To-day I deliver into its hands nothing more than Beata's safe conduct
to Gustavus, because that I have only to copy off. Then I slip out
again into the open air, steer once more by a chart I have in my head
yesterday's course and, in gathering up as after-flora the scattered
flowers our full hands let fall yesterday, I find the higher ones also.
One will pardon Beata some passages in the following composition, when
I premise that she, perhaps imposed upon by her heart, as well as by
her father, who was only a nominal renegade of Catholicism--believed
more of the angels and of their worship, than Nicolai and the Smalcald
(mercantile) articles can admit. For weak and so often helpless woman,
who dares not soar far above this earth, so loves in the hour of need
to lay down her prayers and her sighs before a Mary, a saint, an angel;
but more self-reliant man will indulgently forbear to censure a
delusion which can be so consoling.
"_Wishes for my friend_.
"It is no delusion, that angels, in the midst of their joys, watch over
threatened children of men, as the mother amidst her joys and labors
guards her children. O ye unknown immortals! does a single and separate
heaven shut you in? Do you never pity the defenceless son of earth? Can
you never have wiped away greater tears than ours? Ah, if the creator
has breathed his love into you as into us, then you certainly descend
to this earth and console the besieged heart beneath the moon, hover
around the oppressed soul, cover with your hand the parching wound and
think on poor human creatures!
"And if here below there walks a spirit who will one day be like you,
can you forget your brother?--Angel of joy! be with my friend and
thine, when the sun comes, and let fair, holy mornings bloom around
him! Be with him when the sun mounts higher--and when toil weighs him
down!--Oh take the distant sigh of a sister and friend and cool his
therewith! Be with him when the sun declines, and direct his eye to the
moon as she rises in white morning-dress and to the broad heavens
wherein the moon and thou walk!...
"Angel of tears and of patience! Thou that art oftener about men! Oh,
forget my heart and my eye and let them bleed--indeed they do so
willingly;--but tranquillize, like death, the heart and the eye of my
friend, and show them on the earth nothing but the heavens beyond it.
Ah, angel of tears and of patience! Thou knowest the eye and the heart,
which pours itself out for him, thou wilt bring his soul before them,
as one sets out flowers under the summer rain! But do it not, if it
makes him too sad! O, angel of patience! I love thee! I know thee! I
shall die in thy arms!
"Angel of friendship!--perhaps thou art the former angel?... Oh!... let
thy heavenly wing cover his heart and warm it more tenderly than a
human being can--ah, thou on another earth and I on this would weep, if
his heart should, like the warm hand pressed upon freezing iron, cleave
to a cold heart and tear itself away bleeding!... O shield him! but if
thou canst not do it, then let me not learn his misery.
"Oh ye ever blessed ones in other worlds' with you nothing dies, you
lose nothing and have all! what you love you clasp to an eternal
breast, what you have you hold in eternal hands. Can you then feel in
your shining heights above there, in your eternal bond of souls, that
human beings here below are torn asunder, that we reach our hands to
one another only out of coffins, before they sink; ah, that death is
not the only, not the most painful thing that parts human beings?--Ere
that snatches us from one another, many a colder hand breaks in and
severs soul from soul----then indeed does the eye fail and the heart
sink in anguish, just as much as if death had divided them, as in a
_total eclipse of the sun_ no less than in the longer _night_ the dew
falls, the nightingale mourns, the flower closes in death!
"May all that is good, all that is fair, all that blesses and exalts
man be with my friend; and all my wishes are summed up in my silent
prayer."
* * * * *
In all which I join, not merely for Gustavus, but for every good soul
of my acquaintance and for all others too.
Though it is already eleven o'clock at night, still I must report to
the reader something of melancholy beauty, which has just gone by. A
singing person passed through our valley, concealed, however, by leaves
and shadows, because the moon was not yet up. The voice sang more
sweetly than any I ever heard before:
---- No one, nowhere, never.
---- The tear that falls.
---- The angel that shines.
---- There is silence.
---- It suffers.
---- It hopes.
---- I and thou.
Evidently half of each line is wanting, and to every answer the
question. It has already occurred to me several times that the _Genius_
who educated our friend under the ground, left him at his departure
questions and dissonances, whose answers and solutions he took away
with him; I think, too, I have said as much to the reader. Would that
Gustavus were here. But I have not the courage to conceive what would
be our delight if the Genius himself should introduce himself into our
garland of joy at Lilienbad! I still forever hear the long drawn
flute-tones from that unknown bosom wail behind the blossoms; but they
make me sad. Here lie the ever-sleeping flowers, which I collected today
on the path of our last night's ramble, beside the unfolded, waking
ones which I have just palled up--they too sadden me. There is nothing
I and my readers need more than to begin a new section of joy, so that
we may continue our old life.
O Lilienbad! thou appearest only once in the world; and if thou still
once more becomest visible thy name is B----zka.