Erde mag zuruck in Erde stauben;
Fliegt der Geist doch aus dem morschen Haus.
Seine Asche mag der Sturmwind treiben,
Sein Leben dauert ewig aus!
Elegie.
(Earth may crumble back into earth; the Spirit will still escape
from its frail tenement. The wind of the storm may scatter his
ashes; his being endures forever.)
To-morrow!--and it is already twilight. One after one, the gentle stars
come smiling through the heaven. The Seine, in its slow waters, yet
trembles with the last kiss of the rosy day; and still in the blue sky
gleams the spire of Notre Dame; and still in the blue sky looms the
guillotine by the Barriere du Trone. Turn to that time-worn building,
once the church and the convent of the Freres-Precheurs, known by the
then holy name of Jacobins; there the new Jacobins hold their club.
There, in that oblong hall, once the library of the peaceful monks,
assemble the idolaters of St. Robespierre. Two immense tribunes,
raised at either end, contain the lees and dregs of the atrocious
populace,--the majority of that audience consisting of the furies of
the guillotine (furies de guillotine). In the midst of the hall are
the bureau and chair of the president,--the chair long preserved by the
piety of the monks as the relic of St. Thomas Aquinas! Above this seat
scowls the harsh bust of Brutus. An iron lamp and two branches scatter
over the vast room a murky, fuliginous ray, beneath the light of which
the fierce faces of that Pandemonium seem more grim and haggard. There,
from the orator’s tribune, shrieks the shrill wrath of Robespierre!
Meanwhile all is chaos, disorder, half daring and half cowardice, in the
Committee of his foes. Rumours fly from street to street, from haunt to
haunt, from house to house. The swallows flit low, and the cattle group
together before the storm. And above this roar of the lives and things
of the little hour, alone in his chamber stood he on whose starry
youth--symbol of the imperishable bloom of the calm Ideal amidst the
mouldering Actual--the clouds of ages had rolled in vain.
All those exertions which ordinary wit and courage could suggest had
been tried in vain. All such exertions WERE in vain, where, in that
Saturnalia of death, a life was the object. Nothing but the fall of
Robespierre could have saved his victims; now, too late, that fall would
only serve to avenge.
Once more, in that last agony of excitement and despair, the seer had
plunged into solitude, to invoke again the aid or counsel of those
mysterious intermediates between earth and heaven who had renounced the
intercourse of the spirit when subjected to the common bondage of the
mortal. In the intense desire and anguish of his heart, perhaps, lay a
power not yet called forth; for who has not felt that the sharpness
of extreme grief cuts and grinds away many of those strongest bonds
of infirmity and doubt which bind down the souls of men to the cabined
darkness of the hour; and that from the cloud and thunderstorm often
swoops the Olympian eagle that can ravish us aloft!
And the invocation was heard,--the bondage of sense was rent away from
the visual mind. He looked, and saw,--no, not the being he had called,
with its limbs of light and unutterably tranquil smile--not his
familiar, Adon-Ai, the Son of Glory and the Star, but the Evil Omen, the
dark Chimera, the implacable Foe, with exultation and malice burning in
its hell-lit eyes. The Spectre, no longer cowering and retreating into
shadow, rose before him, gigantic and erect; the face, whose veil no
mortal hand had ever raised, was still concealed, but the form was more
distinct, corporeal, and cast from it, as an atmosphere, horror and rage
and awe. As an iceberg, the breath of that presence froze the air; as a
cloud, it filled the chamber and blackened the stars from heaven.
“Lo!” said its voice, “I am here once more. Thou hast robbed me of a
meaner prey. Now exorcise THYSELF from my power! Thy life has left thee,
to live in the heart of a daughter of the charnel and the worm. In that
life I come to thee with my inexorable tread. Thou art returned to the
Threshold,--thou, whose steps have trodden the verges of the Infinite!
And as the goblin of its fantasy seizes on a child in the dark,--mighty
one, who wouldst conquer Death,--I seize on thee!”
“Back to thy thraldom, slave! If thou art come to the voice that called
thee not, it is again not to command, but to obey! Thou, from whose
whisper I gained the boons of the lives lovelier and dearer than my own;
thou--I command thee, not by spell and charm, but by the force of a soul
mightier than the malice of thy being,--thou serve me yet, and speak
again the secret that can rescue the lives thou hast, by permission of
the Universal Master, permitted me to retain awhile in the temple of the
clay!”
Brighter and more devouringly burned the glare from those lurid eyes;
more visible and colossal yet rose the dilating shape; a yet fiercer and
more disdainful hate spoke in the voice that answered, “Didst thou think
that my boon would be other than thy curse? Happy for thee hadst thou
mourned over the deaths which come by the gentle hand of Nature,--hadst
thou never known how the name of mother consecrates the face of Beauty,
and never, bending over thy first-born, felt the imperishable sweetness
of a father’s love! They are saved, for what?--the mother, for the death
of violence and shame and blood, for the doomsman’s hand to put aside
that shining hair which has entangled thy bridegroom kisses; the child,
first and last of thine offspring, in whom thou didst hope to found a
race that should hear with thee the music of celestial harps, and
float, by the side of thy familiar, Adon-Ai, through the azure rivers of
joy,--the child, to live on a few days as a fungus in a burial-vault, a
thing of the loathsome dungeon, dying of cruelty and neglect and famine.
Ha! ha! thou who wouldst baffle Death, learn how the deathless die if
they dare to love the mortal. Now, Chaldean, behold my boons! Now I
seize and wrap thee with the pestilence of my presence; now, evermore,
till thy long race is run, mine eyes shall glow into thy brain, and mine
arms shall clasp thee, when thou wouldst take the wings of the Morning
and flee from the embrace of Night!”
“I tell thee, no! And again I compel thee, speak and answer to the lord
who can command his slave. I know, though my lore fails me, and the
reeds on which I leaned pierce my side,--I know yet that it is written
that the life of which I question can be saved from the headsman. Thou
wrappest her future in the darkness of thy shadow, but thou canst not
shape it. Thou mayest foreshow the antidote; thou canst not effect the
bane. From thee I wring the secret, though it torture thee to name it.
I approach thee,--I look dauntless into thine eyes. The soul that loves
can dare all things. Shadow, I defy thee, and compel!”
The spectre waned and recoiled. Like a vapour that lessens as the sun
pierces and pervades it, the form shrank cowering and dwarfed in the
dimmer distance, and through the casement again rushed the stars.
“Yes,” said the Voice, with a faint and hollow accent, “thou CANST save
her from the headsman; for it is written, that sacrifice can save. Ha!
ha!” And the shape again suddenly dilated into the gloom of its giant
stature, and its ghastly laugh exulted, as if the Foe, a moment baffled,
had regained its might. “Ha! ha!--thou canst save her life, if thou wilt
sacrifice thine own! Is it for this thou hast lived on through crumbling
empires and countless generations of thy race? At last shall Death
reclaim thee? Wouldst thou save her?--DIE FOR HER! Fall, O stately
column, over which stars yet unformed may gleam,--fall, that the herb at
thy base may drink a few hours longer the sunlight and the dews! Silent!
Art thou ready for the sacrifice? See, the moon moves up through
heaven. Beautiful and wise one, wilt thou bid her smile to-morrow on thy
headless clay?”
“Back! for my soul, in answering thee from depths where thou canst not
hear it, has regained its glory; and I hear the wings of Adon-Ai gliding
musical through the air.”
He spoke; and, with a low shriek of baffled rage and hate, the Thing was
gone, and through the room rushed, luminous and sudden, the Presence of
silvery light.
As the heavenly visitor stood in the atmosphere of his own lustre,
and looked upon the face of the Theurgist with an aspect of ineffable
tenderness and love, all space seemed lighted from his smile. Along the
blue air without, from that chamber in which his wings had halted, to
the farthest star in the azure distance, it seemed as if the track of
his flight were visible, by a lengthened splendour in the air, like the
column of moonlight on the sea. Like the flower that diffuses perfume as
the very breath of its life, so the emanation of that presence was joy.
Over the world, as a million times swifter than light, than electricity,
the Son of Glory had sped his way to the side of love, his wings had
scattered delight as the morning scatters dew. For that brief moment,
Poverty had ceased to mourn, Disease fled from its prey, and Hope
breathed a dream of Heaven into the darkness of Despair.
“Thou art right,” said the melodious Voice. “Thy courage has restored
thy power. Once more, in the haunts of earth, thy soul charms me to thy
side. Wiser now, in the moment when thou comprehendest Death, than when
thy unfettered spirit learned the solemn mystery of Life; the human
affections that thralled and humbled thee awhile bring to thee, in these
last hours of thy mortality, the sublimest heritage of thy race,--the
eternity that commences from the grave.”
“O Adon-Ai,” said the Chaldean, as, circumfused in the splendour of the
visitant, a glory more radiant than human beauty settled round his form,
and seemed already to belong to the eternity of which the Bright One
spoke, “as men, before they die, see and comprehend the enigmas hidden
from them before (The greatest poet, and one of the noblest thinkers, of
the last age, said, on his deathbed, “Many things obscure to me before,
now clear up, and become visible.”--See the ‘Life of Schiller.’), “so in
this hour, when the sacrifice of self to another brings the course of
ages to its goal, I see the littleness of Life, compared to the majesty
of Death; but oh, Divine Consoler, even here, even in thy presence,
the affections that inspire me, sadden. To leave behind me in this
bad world, unaided, unprotected, those for whom I die! the wife! the
child!--oh, speak comfort to me in this!”
“And what,” said the visitor, with a slight accent of reproof in the
tone of celestial pity,--“what, with all thy wisdom and thy starry
secrets, with all thy empire of the past, and thy visions of the future;
what art thou to the All-Directing and Omniscient? Canst thou yet
imagine that thy presence on earth can give to the hearts thou lovest
the shelter which the humblest take from the wings of the Presence that
lives in heaven? Fear not thou for their future. Whether thou live or
die, their future is the care of the Most High! In the dungeon and on
the scaffold looks everlasting the Eye of HIM, tenderer than thou to
love, wiser than thou to guide, mightier than thou to save!”
Zanoni bowed his head; and when he looked up again, the last shadow had
left his brow. The visitor was gone; but still the glory of his presence
seemed to shine upon the spot, still the solitary air seemed to murmur
with tremulous delight. And thus ever shall it be with those who have
once, detaching themselves utterly from life, received the visit of the
Angel FAITH. Solitude and space retain the splendour, and it settles
like a halo round their graves.