Here, honored young lady, is a page of _Theodor Körner’s_ manuscript,
which I have been endeavoring to get for you and which I succeeded in
obtaining for you day before yesterday. A goodly ornament for your
album, and I hasten to dispatch it to you, to afford you this pleasure
while it is still _November_. I would gladly have sent it to you on
the tenth,[11] but on that dear and sacred day it was not yet in my
hands.
Begging that you too, as hitherto, will hold me in a friendly
remembrance which shall bring us warmly together on every Schiller
Day, I am with the deepest regard
Yours sincerely
Emilie von Gleichen-Russwurm
born von Schiller
Beside it, with the note “Original manuscript of Theodor Körner.
Unpublished poem!” a much-yellowed sheet of coarse deckle-edged paper on
which stand several stanzas with deletions and corrections:
_Begeist’rung fasset mich mit heil’gem Glühn_
A holy ardor seizes me and fills me
As the soft harmony of thy accent thrills me;
A ravishment that all my soul entrances
Is in thy glances.
Upon thy breast would I, the world forgetting,
My happy fortunes with the gods’ be setting.
The goal of all my eagerness, love-drunken,
In thee is sunken.
Love brings Leander to a sweet undoing;
It plunges [_illegible_[12]] into ruin.
The fairest lot that heart has ever treasured
To me is measured.
With the hot turmoil of love’s rapturous madness
Life’s sun ascends for me in cloudless gladness;
The Horae’s endless light, the radiant morn,
To me was born.
For boldly in thy glances I might sun me;
Thy image pours all ecstasies upon me;
Grandest and most divine of women, thee,
Thee I might see.
Enamored youth! The poem did not receive its final polish nor its last
stanzas, and was left unprinted; apparently it did not seem to him good
enough to print. It was just dashed off in an hour of intoxicating
happiness. He saw life ascending as a cloudless sun, in the radiance of
youth, in the light of the Horae—and how soon an enemy’s bullet was to
destroy this life! Can it be calculated how much of the beautiful and
valuable that stupid bullet shot away from posterity?
I turn more pages. There follows, from A. Anderssen, the great
chess-player, a twenty-two-move game of chess; from G. Meyerbeer, the
beginning of the overture to the tragedy _Struensee_.
Then once more a verse with an illustrious signature:
_Reines Herz gibt reinen Sinn_
Clean heart gives the man clean sight;
In the pure eye clear and bright
Mirrored lies the world.
Clouded heart gives clouded eye,
World and life and destiny
All in darkness curled.
Friedrich Rückert
And another great poet writes for the album,
_Und musst du denn, trotz Kraft und Mut_
If, spite of strength and courage good,
The thorns your skin will tear,
See to it only that your blood
Does not the rose besmear.
Friedrich Hebbel
A historian too has his say:
Priests place themselves between men and the Deity only as shadows: as
when the eye takes to its help a smoked glass, to see the sun through
this dull medium.