CAMPANER THAL.

501st STATION.

The Diversities of Life.--The Dirge as Billet-Doux.--The

Cavern.--The Surprise.

_Campan, 23d July_.

Here have I been since the day before yesterday. After descent into

hell and purgatory, and passage through _limbos infantum et patrum_,

man must at last reach heaven. But I owe you yet our exit from our inn

on the 20th. Never can the head have a harder couch than when we hold

it in our hands. The reason that this happened to Karlson and myself

was, that in the rooms adjoining ours a wedding-dance was taking place,

and that below, the youngest daughter of our _maitre d'hotel_, who had

not only the name, but also the charms of _Corday_, with two white

roses on her cheeks, and two red ones in her hair, was being interred,

and that human beings with pale faces and heavy hearts waited on happy

and blooming ones. When fate harnesses to Psyche's car, the merry and

the mourning steed together, the mourning one ever takes the lead;

i. e. if the muses of Mirth and Sorrow play on the same stage in the

same hour, man does not, like Garrick,[3] follow the former; he does

not even remain neuter, but takes the side of the mourning one. Thus we

always paint, like Milton, our lost Paradise more glowing than the

regained one,--like Dante, hell better than purgatory. In short, the

silent corpse made us cold to the warm, joyful influence of the

dancers. But is it not absurd, my dear Victor, that a man who, like

myself, knows nothing better than that every hour unfolds at once

morning bloom and evening clouds; that here an Ash Wednesday and there

a black Monday commence; that such a man, who grieves little that

dancing music and funeral marches should sound at the same time on the

broad national theatre of humanity, should yet hang his head and grow

pale, when, in a side scene, this double music sounds in his ears? Is

not this as absurd as all his other doings?

Into Karlson's eyes something of this cloud had fallen. It was to him

the restirred ashes of a funeral urn. He can withstand all sorrows, but

not their recollection. He has replaced his years by lands, and the

space he has travelled over must be called his time. But the firm youth

changed color when he came to tell that the lover of the pale Corday

had torn her folded taper hands asunder, and, on his knees, had dragged

them to his burning lips.

He perceived his paleness in the glass; and to explain it, he imparted

the last and most secret leaf of his life's Robinsonade to me. You see

what an opaque gem this youth is, who follows his friends through all

France, without opening to his communicative friend and travelling

companion, even a fold or a loophole in his relation to them. Now only

from emotion on entering the Campan Vale, he draws the key from the

keyhole, which shall become a prompter's hole for you.

That he had accompanied the Baron Wilhelmi and his betrothed Gione,

with her sister Nadine, to Lausanne, in order to celebrate their

Arcadian marriage in the Campan Vale, you know already; that he had

left them suddenly at Lausanne, and returned to the Rhine fall at

Shaffhausen, you know also, but not the reason, which will now be

related to you by me and by him.

By daily contact Karlson had at last penetrated the thickly-woven veil,

magically colored by betrothed love, thrown over the strong, firm, and

kindred mind of Gione. Probably others discovered him ere he had

discovered himself. His heart became like the so-called world's eye[4]

in water, first bright, then varying its colors, then dull and misty,

and at last transparent. Not to cloud their beautiful intimacy, he

addressed the suspicious part of his attentions to Nadine. He did not

explain to me clearly whether he had led her into a beautiful error,

without taking a beautiful truth from Gione.

The sword of death seemed likely to separate all these stage knots.

Gione, the healthy and calm Gione, was suddenly attacked by a nervous

disorder. One evening, Wilhelmi, with his usual poetic ardor, entered

Karlson's chamber weeping, and, embracing him, could only sob forth the

words, "She is no more."

Karlson said not a word, but in the tumult of his own and others'

griefs, departed that night for Shaffhausen, and probably fled at the

same time from a beloved and a loving one,--from Gione and from Nadine.

By this eternal waterspout of the Rhine, this onward pressing, molten

avalanche, this gleaming perpendicular milky-way, his soul was slowly

healed; but he was long imprisoned in the dark, cold, serpent's-nest of

envenomed pains; they entwined and crawled over him, even to his

heart. For he believed, as most world-men among whom he had grown up

do,--perhaps, also, too much accustomed to analyzed ideas and opinions

by his favorite study, chemistry,--that our last sleep is annihilation,

as in the epopee the first man imagined the first sleep to be the first

death.

To Wilhelmi he only sent the name of his retreat and a poem, entitled,

"Grief-without Hope," which declared his disbelief, for he had never

broken the Ambrosia, whose delights a trust in immortality affords. But

just that strengthened his enfeebled heart, that the muses led him to

Hippocrene's spring of health.

Wilhelmi answered, that he had read his beautiful requiem to the

deceased, or the immortal one. A long swoon had occasioned the painful

mistake. Gione and he entreated him to follow speedily. Karlson

replied: "Fate had separated him from their beautiful feast by the

Alpine Wall, but as it would, like the Campan Vale, ever renew its

springs, he hoped to lose nothing but time by his delay."

Now that the next world had cast its supernatural light on Gione's

countenance, Karlson loved her too much to be capable of assisting at

the ceremony of losing her forever. I will give you the opinion I

formed of her by listening to his description.

Even by a love and a praise in a person's absence we may be won; how

much more, then, if both are thrown to us as farewell kisses after the

ascent to Heaven! Therefore the idea of the future funeral procession

behind my gay, richly decorated dust, onion and relic box is only

another incentive, not only to drug, but also to absolve myself, for

when older we are less missed. And even you, who so seldom hang us, or

drive us all to the Devil, I mean, how seldom soever the tempest of

anger sours the beer-barrel of your breast! Even you have no more

efficacious morsel of white chalk, no better _oleum tartari per

deliquium_,[5] with which you can sweeten your internal fluids, than

the thought how we shall all turn pale round your death-bed, and be

dumb at your grave-mound, and how none will forget you! I cannot

possibly believe that there exists one being who, when death draws him

into the diving-bell of the grave, will not leave _one_ weeping eye,

_one_ bending head behind, and therefore each one can love the soul

which will some time weep for him.

When I think now of the convalescent Gione, with her wounded heart,

which had received a new sensitiveness in the hot electric atmosphere

of the sinking thunderbolt of Death, I need not measure her emotion at

Karlson's poem, by the dew and hygrometer, nor with the loadstone of

her love. But not Wilhelmi's brilliant riches, nor his still more

brilliant conduct, her first choice, her first promise, forbade her

even to touch the diamond scales.

When Karlson told me all this, he turned Gione's ring-portrait upwards

on his finger, and pressed the hard edge of the ring-finger with his

tearful eyes, till the adorned hand was unconsciously touched by the

lip's kiss. The bashfulness of his grief moved me so much, that I

offered to take another route into the Vale, under the pretence that

the dreams of it had lessened the desire for the reality, and that we

should disturb the newly-affianced in their first rose-honey days, as

they had probably waited for the mild late spring. He divined my

intention; but his promise to come to-morrow dragged him by chains.

Right gladly would I have missed the new spring-filled Eden, and drawn

from my friend's feet the Jacob's ladder from which he might gaze on

his former glad heaven, but could not ascend to it. On the other hand,

I rejoiced at his firm, promise-keeping character, which opposed its

strong nature to the thorns and boring-worms of sorrow; as with the

increase of moonlight, tempests decrease. Unperceived, I now added

Gione, not only Karlson, to the list of rare beings, who, like

Raphael's and Plato's works, uncloud themselves only on earnest

contemplation, and who, as both, resemble the Pleiades, which to the

naked eye seems only to have seven suns, but with a telescope discloses

more than forty.

On the 20th, we started towards the Vale. On the way, I looked too

often into Karlson's faithful, heavenly, deep-blue eyes. I descended

into his heart, and sought the scene of the day on which the holy

church tie would tear the noble Gione forever from out his pure muse

and goddess-warmed heart. I confess I can imagine no day on which I

regard my friend with deeper emotion that on that never-to-be-forgotten

one, on which Fate gives him the brother kiss, the hand-pressure, the

land of love and Philadelphia and Vaucluse's spring, united in one

female heart.

The day before yesterday, at ten in the evening, we arrived at

Wilhelmi's Arcadian dwelling, which pressed its straw roof against a

green marble wall. Karlson found it easily from its proximity to the

famed Campan Cave, from which he had often broken stalactites. The sky

was clouded with colored shadows, and on the green cradle of slumbering

children night threw her star-embroidered cradle-cover, fastened to the

summits of the Pyrenees. From out Wilhelmi's hermitage advanced some

men in _black_ attire, with torches in their hands, who seemed to be

waiting for us, and told us the baron was in the Cave. By heaven, under

such circumstances, it is easier to imagine the most circumscribed,

than the _largest_ and most _beautiful_ Cave! The sable attendants

carried the flame before them, and drew the flying smoke-picture from

oak-top to oak-top, and led us, stooping, through the catacomb

entrance. But how splendidly was arched the high and wide grotto,[6]

with its crystal sides, shining like an illumined ice Louvre, a

gleaming sub-terrestrial heaven vault. Wilhelmi threw away a handful of

gathered spars, and joyfully hastened into his friend's arms. Gione,

with her sister, advanced from behind a connected stalactite and

stalagmite. The gleaming of the torches gave her an undecided outline,

but at length Wilhelmi advanced to her, and said, "Here is our friend."

Bending low, Karlson kissed the warm living hand, and was dumb with

emotion. But the firm features of Gione's earnest face, which wanted

but Nadine's juvenile bloom, changed into a shining joy, greater than

he dared to return or reward. "We have long expected and missed you in

this paradise," she said, with unshaken voice; and her clear, calm eye

opened a view into a richly-gifted, steadfast soul. "Welcome to the

infernal regions," said Nadine; "you believe in reunion and Elysium

now?" Though she received him with an assemblage or Flora of wit, or

was it grace? for they were difficult to distinguish, this cheerfulness

of character and acquirement seemed not to be the cheerfulness of a

contented or reposeful mind.

My friend introduced me properly, that no supermember or _hors

d'[oe]uvre_ should remain in this corporation of friendship.

To all of us--even to me--for around me never before seen beings

floated in silver reflections--it seemed as if the world had ceased,

Elysium had opened, and the separated, covered, sub-terrestrial regions

cradled only tranquil, but happy souls.

There was a certain heartfulness in the joyous interest which this

affectionate trinity took in Karlson's appearance, which generally

accompanies the last step before the disclosure of some hidden plan,

but this plan was concealed. To speak something also to me, Nadine

said, that there was a critical philosopher and arguer with them, who

would rejoice to hear any one _for_ or _against_ his opinions,--namely,

the house-chaplain. When we stepped from the illumined diamond and

magic cave into the dark night, we saw the cloak of Erebus hang in

thick cloudy folds over the earth, and pale lightning shot from the

nightly mist, the flowers breathed from covered calysses, and under the

fast approaching storm the nightingales raised their melodious voices

behind their blooming hedges.

Suddenly Gione walked more slowly by Karlson's side, and said, with

much warmth, but without hesitation: "I heartily love truth, even at

the expense of stage-like effect: I must, in the name of the Baron,

discover to you that he and I will to-morrow be forever united. You

must forgive _your_ friend that he would not celebrate this ceremony

without _his_."

I think that now, in Karlson's heart, the cooled lava immediately

became fluid and glowing. Suddenly lightning flashed from a cloud

around the rising moon, and illumined the rain-drops, intended for

darkness, in Gione's and in Karlson's eyes. Wilhelmi asked, "Can you

not forgive me?" Karlson pressed him warmly and lovingly to his

grateful heart: this lofty confidence of friendship, and this

affectionate proof of it, raised his strengthened soul above all

desires, and another's virtue spread in his breast the calm

tranquillity of his own. We took shelter for the night in three Thabor

huts,--the ladies in the first, Wilhelmi with the critical philosopher

in the second, Karlson and myself in the third,--which the Baron had

hired for us. The fatigue of the journey, and even of our feelings,

deferred our joys and confidences for another night. But I cannot tell

you how nobly sorrow changed into exaltation in my friend's

countenance, how grief fell like a cloud from his heaven, and

discovered the serene blue beneath. The sacrifices and virtues of our

beloved ones belong to the inexpressible joys which the soul at least

can count and appreciate; which it can imitate.

His and my eyes overflowed with holy gladness from a singularly elysian

mood of harmony in anticipation of the coming day. Ah, my Victor!

nations and men are only the _best_ when they are the gladdest, and

deserve Heaven when they enjoy it. The tear of grief is but a diamond

of the second water, but the tear of joy of the first. And therefore

fatherly fate, thou spreadest the flowers of joy, as nurses do lilies

in the nursery of life, that the awakening children may sleep the

sounder! O, let philosophy, which grudges our _pleasures_, and blots

them out from the plans of Providence, say by what right did torturing

_pain_ enter into our frail life? Have we not already an eternal right

to a warm down bed? I think not now of the deepest mattress in the

earth, because we are so pierced with stigmas of the past, so covered

with its wounds.

You once said to me: "In your early years, you have been drawn and

driven from the stoic philosophy by Sorites; for if the sensation of

pleasure be as little as the stoics pretend, it were wiser to convert

than to benefit your neighbor,--wiser to preach morality from pulpit

and desk than to practise it in the work-rooms,--wiser to turn towards

your neighbor the dirt-balls and _soap-pills_ of moral philosophy, than

the enlarged marble _soap-bubbles_ of joy. Further, that it is a

mistake to assert that virtue makes more worthy of happiness, if

happiness possessed not an eternal, independent value in itself; for

else it might be maintained that virtue would make the possessor of a

straw, &c. worthy--"

You said this once. Do you believe it yet?--I do.

502d STATION.

The Thundering Morning.--The Short Trip after the

Long One.--The Sofa-cushions.

Through the whole night, a half-lost thundering was heard, as though it

murmured in its sleep. In the morning, before sunrise, Karlson and

myself stepped out into the wide cloud-tapestried bridal-chamber of

nature. The moon approached the double moment of its waning and its

fulness. The sun, standing on America as on a burning altar, drove the

cloudy incense of its _feu de joie_ high and red into the air; but a

morning tempest boiled angrily above it, and darted its fierce

lightnings to meet his ascending rays. The oppressive heat of nature

drew longer and louder plaints from the nightingales, and evanescent

aroma from the long flower-meads. Heavy warm drops were pressed from

the clouds, and beat loudly on the stream and on the foliage. Only the

Mittagshorn, the pinnacle of the Pyrenees, stood brightly and clearly

in the heavenly blue. Now a gust of wind from the waning moon dispersed

the raging storm, and the sun stood victoriously under a triumphal arch

of lightnings. The wind restored the heaven's blue, and dashed the rain

behind the earth, and around the dazzling sun-diamond there lay only

the silvered fringes of the once threatening clouds.

O my Victor, what a new-born day was now on earth, encamped in the

glorious valley. The nightingales and the larks loudly sung its

welcome, the rosechafers rustled round its lily garlands, and the

eagle, riding on the highest cloud, surveyed it from mountain

to mountain. How rurally all things surrounded the serpentine

field-embracing Adour. The marble walls, not raised by human skill,

surround its flower-beds like large vases, and the Pyrenees, with their

high tops, watch over and protect the lowly scattered shepherd huts.

Tranquil Tempe! May a storm never disturb thy gardens and thy murmuring

Adour. May a stronger one never visit thee, than would gently rock the

cradle of nature, or dash a bee from the honey-dew of the wheat-sheaf,

or force but a single drop from the waterfall upon the flowers of thy

shores.

You must not think that I am placing my paintbrushes at my side to copy

the heavenly rounded valley by the measure of art for you; I will let

you peep into this picture-book of nature as chance shall turn each

succeeding page. My stations will lead you through its different

chambers, in which the rich dowry of Spring, like that of a king's

daughter, is placed for show. But truly it is a more glorious thing to

see the whole dowry disposed over the person of the royal bride

herself.

A servant seeking the chaplain, roused us both from our reverie. We saw

him advance towards a gentleman standing on the banks of the Adour, who

slowly turned down his rolled-up shirt-sleeves. It was the chaplain,

who had been catching crabs during the storm, and had subsequently

fished. As I knew that his hairy hand had worked for the food of the

critical, as well as his own philosophy, with trowel and mortar, with

pen and ink, I boldly advanced towards him, and told him what I was

writing. But the coarse, obstinate, yet timid free-mason, coldly

welcomed me in a language as broad as his own frosty visage.

He despises biographers; for the windows of a philosophical audience

are too high,--perhaps, as in ancient temples, in the roof,--so that

they cannot see into the streets of real life, as, according to

Winkelmann, the Roman windows were architecturally as high. Lord

Rochester is said to have been continually drunk during a whole

quintennium; but such a chaplain is capable of being _sober_ for an

entire decennium. A man like this bites the buds of all powerful

truths, experiences, and fictions, as ants bite the buds from

corn-seeds, that they may not fructify, but wither and die and form

building materials.

When the Chaplain left me to join the Baron, as consecrator of the

marriage sacrament, I found Karlson in the dustrain of a near cascade.

Round him, almost close to our windows, the hermitages of the farmers

waded in green foliage, with the fresh harvest wreath roofed by faded

ones; and inside, there bloomed families, outside, elms. He showed me

Gione's card, which, he said, she had given him before her marriage.

But it was not so; he had found it on the moss near the cascade. It

represented a Roman landscape, and beside the living fountain was the

pictured one of Tivoli, and on a stone in the foreground Gione's name

was written. Such a printed trifle, a beloved name shortly before its

sublunar annihilation, moves the whole heart with a succession of

pleasing reflections.

Karlson went to the ceremony. I remained alone under the splendid blue

heaven, and rejoiced that all the inhabitants of Campan wore its

livery, the blue, which we had yesterday mistaken for black.

I will not hide from you that during the coupling, softened by the many

beauties of spring, I lost myself in Nadine's equally charming ones,

which were an undiscovered Central Africa for me, while I wished she

were as warm. After eight or ten dreams, I saw the beautiful couples

cross my path. How earnestly glad and serene we all stood under the

spring music of flutes and pipes, and harps and warbling, which were

living around us, with and without wings. Gione and Karlson concealed

an equal emotion, as at an almost equal fate. Wilhelmi, who is, as a

comet, sometimes in the burning, sometimes in the freezing point of a

sun, requires no joys than those of others to make him happy. But a

tear stood in Nadine's bright eye, which could not be smiled or looked

away. Her heart seemed to me to resemble the earth, whose exterior is

cold, but which carries in its centre a latent heat. And yesterday her

whole being seemed so mirthful and so gay!

We never make more erroneous conclusions in our opinions on any subject

than on woman's cheerfulness. Oh! how many of these charming beings

there are, who decay unvalued, who, while jesting, despair, and while

joking, bleed to death; who hide their merry laughing eyes behind a

wall, as behind a fan, to give glad vent to their long-restrained

tears; who pay for a merry day by a tearful night, just as an unusually

clear, transparent, and fogless air betokens rain. Remember the

beautiful N. N., and also her youngest sister. In the mean time, the

charming, sun-variegated dew-drop under Nadine's eye was balanced by a

wart of half the size, the solitaire among her personal charms.

Wilhelmi's lyric and dithyrambic head was filled with projects for

pleasure, and with the eagerness of delight, he demanded a hasty

determination concerning the proper use and enjoyment of the day. "O

yes," said I, quickly and impertinently, "life flies to-day on a

minute-hand, like an alarum it winds off; but how shall we form a plan,

a good plan?" Nadine, who had arranged everything beforehand with the

bridegroom, replied: "I think we need none for such a delightful day,

and such a charming valley. We will pilgrimize carelessly along the

banks of the Adour, the length of the Vale, and rest at every new

flower, and at every bud, and in the evening we will sail back by

moonlight! That would be quite Arcadian and shepherd-like in this

Arcadia. Will you all? You certainly will, dearest sister?" "O yes,"

said Gione, "for I think we are as yet all strangers to the charms of

this paradise." The Baron seemed to hesitate before giving his consent,

and said: "It depends whether the ladies can walk two and a quarter

miles in one day."[7] I was mad with joy, and cried, "Charming!" Such a

long horizontal heaven-journey, such a melodious Arpeggio through the

chords of delight was an old innate wish of my youth. I imparted my

delight to the Chaplain, to whose feelings this _voyage pitturesque_

was as repugnant as a Good Friday procession, and to whom, instead of

this heaven-way, that of Hoefer[8] would have been more acceptable,

because he would rather have remained at home to read, and because he

did not enjoy the Epopee of nature as a man, nor scan it as a

naturalist, but like an usher, separated and divided it, for practice

in building up again. I said to him: "If we two will be shepherds,

representing the old Myrtil and Phylax, it would be interesting. You

know best that whims should be ten times less bold before ladies and

refined ears than on print, and that for such people it has to be

filtered through so many filtering-papers and strainers, that I would

not give a proof-sheet for it after the process."

A hired country-house, at the end of the valley, was the architectural

Eden with which Wilhelmi intended to surprise and delight his bride in

this botanic one. But Nadine alone knew it.

In as many moments as a swan would take to spread his wings and rise,

we were all ready. I do not blame man for making preparations for the

examination for death, but for no (shorter) journey. The long _hunt_

destroys the game of enjoyment. I, for my part, never think of starting

until I am on the road.

Wilhelmi loaded himself with his bride's guitar; Karlson carried a

portable ice-cellar. The ladies had their parasols; the Chaplain and I

had nothing. I whispered to the shallow Phylax,--so I can now call him,

and myself the old Myrtil,--"Sir Chaplain, we rebel against all good

manners if we follow empty-handed." He immediately offered himself to

Gione, as pack-horse, wagon, and carrier for her--parasol. But clever

genius prompted me to return to Karlson's chamber, and bring two

cushions from the sofa, and I returned with these twins in my arms;

nothing could have been more appropriate, as the ladies sat down a

thousand times on the way, and could not have dipped their silken

elbows in the juicy paint of the flowers. To his vexation, Phylax was

obliged to carry the soft block in his arms; I hung the other one, like

a stick, to my thumb. At last we started.

We advanced towards the Pyrenees. Corn-fields, waterfalls, shepherd

huts, marble blocks, woods and grottoes, animated by the vascular

system of the many-branched Adour, passed beautifully before our eyes,

and we were forced to leave them behind, like the bright years of youth

changed into dreams by the stern hand of Time.

Ah, Victor, travelling alone is life, as life, on the contrary, is only

a journey. And if, like certain shell-fish, I could only push myself on

with one foot, or, like sea-nettles and women, I could only progress

six lines in a quarter of an hour, or if I lived under Fritz II. or

Fritz I. (Lycurgus), who both forbade a long journey, I would make a

short one, that I might not perish like the loach, which languishes in

every vessel, if not shaken.

How spirited, how poetical, how inventive can we not be while we run

onwards. As Montaigne, Rousseau, and the sea-nettle only shine when

they move on. By Heaven! it is no wonder that man rises and will go on;

for does not the sun follow the pedestrian from tree to tree? does not

its reflected likeness swim after him in the water? do not landscapes,

mountains, hills, men, rapidly changing, come and go? and does not

Freedom's breath blow on the ever-varying Eden, when, released from the

neck and heart-breaking chains of narrow circumstances, we fly freely

and gladly, as in dreams, over ever-new scenes.

For unfortunately the bell-glass over men and melons, which at first is

covered by a broken bottle, must always be raised higher and higher,

and at last removed entirely. At first, a man will go into the next

town, then to the university, then to an important residency, then--if

he has only written twenty lines--to Weimar, and finally, to Italy or

to heaven. And if the planets were stringed together on a cord, and

near each other, or if the rays of light were roads, and the atoms of

light bridges, then surely would post-houses be erected in Uranus, and

the insatiable inner man--for the outer one is so very satiable--would

go longing and roaming from planet to planet.----

Therefore, my Victor, nothing is confined in so many prison-walls as is

this our human self. And our cages are enclosed, onion-like, one in the

other. Tour and my _self_ are imprisoned not only on this earth, but in

this King's Bench are the town walls; in these our four walls surround

us; in the four walls, the arm-chair or the bed; in this again, the

shirt or the coat, or both; and lastly, the body. And, to be minute

(according to Soemmering), in the brain crevices, the duck's

pond.---- Start at the fatal many-sided suite of houses of correction

which surround thy_self_?----

503d STATION.

Lampoon on the Chaplain.--Praise of Him.--The Diamond.--Opinions

against Immortality.--Eden Jokes.

We two fellow-carriers formed the rear-guard. I wished to enter into

discourse, but Phylax had a very poor opinion of me; at most he thought

me a fickle sentimentalist who only portrays feelings. Yet feelings are

the sponge of atmospheric air, which the poet, on his high Parnassus,

as well as the philosophical diver in his depths, _must_ hold in his

mouth, and yet poetry has cast an earlier light on many obscure works

of nature than philosophy, as the dark _new moon_ borrows light from

_Venus_.

But the philosopher sins against poets more than you sin against the

followers of Kant, from whom you seem to expect that they shall write

pleasingly. Your arguments are ideas, not reasonings, when you say that

philosophy's attendants are like those of Turkish ladies, mute, black,

and deformed; that the philosophical market-place is a _forium

morionum_,[9] and that beauty is forbidden to philosophers, as it was

to the Helots, who were killed for possessing it. Is it not evident

that a certain barbarous, un-German, far-fetched language is more an

ornament than a detriment to it. Oracles despise grace, _vox dei

sol[oe]cismus_, i. e. a Kantist cannot be read,--he must be studied.

Further, it is not beneath a philosopher to enrich the language instead

of the science. For some other may seek the ideas for the terms, and

find them, as animals were found for the Ammonites. Therefore the

Greeks have the same term for _word_ and _knowledge_, which combination

was at last deified. The philosopher should always write over his door

_pour l'oudalgie_,[10] instead of "here lives a dentist." This is the

best reason, except a second one, why the philosopher, especially the

Kantist, as I saw in Phylax, needs not books, nor men, nor experience,

nor chemistry, botany, the fine arts, nor natural history. He can and

must decipher the positive, the material, the given number, the unknown

X. He creates the term, and sucks, as children often do,--it may

suffocate them,--his own blistered tongue.

I must return to the company! As the Chaplain carried his

walking-stick, or rather walking-tree of a cushion, with the greatest

indifference towards me, I wished to prejudice him for me by a

panegyric at the expense of Kant. I said to him: "It surprised me that

the philosophers should have suffered Kant to have made so great a

distinction between them and artists, and only allowed the merit of

genius to the latter. He says, in Sec. 47 of his 'Kritik der

Urtheilkraft,' 'In sciences, the greatest inventor is only

distinguished from the most labored imitator and apprentice by

gradation; but from, those whom nature has gifted for beautiful nature,

he is specifically distinguished.' This is derogatory, Sir Chaplain,

and besides, not true. Why can Kant, then, only make Kantists, but no

Kants?[11] Are new systems discovered by syllogisms, yet they are

proved and tried by them? Can, then, the connection of a new

philosophical idea with the old one better explain or facilitate its

comprehension than the same connection which each new poetic one must

have with old ones, which are the means of its creation. Sir Chaplain,

I know not whom Kant has most sinned against, Truth, himself, or his

school. Leibnitz's 'Monadology,' _harmonia praestabilita_, &c., are as

much pure, brilliant emanations of genius, as any beaming form in

Shakespeare or Homer. Besides, Leibnitz is a genial almighty Demiurg in

the philosophical world, its greatest and first circumnavigator, and

who, happier than Archimedes, found in his genius the standing-point

from which he might move the philosophical _universa_, and play with

worlds. He was an extraordinary spirit, he threw new chains on the

earth, but he himself bore none: I think you agree with me, Sir

Chaplain!" He replied, He did not, that the critical philosophy knew

what to make of Leibnitz's experiments, his immaterial world, the

asserted approximation of the definite to the indefinite line, and how

to honor genius. In short, I had rather angered than conquered him.

Karlson, whom even Amor's torch could not blind to the philosophical

one, took as much interest in our war as could be taken with the ears.

Fortunately we all stood still. A small diamond had fallen from

Nadine's necklace, and she sought for the silver petrified spark in the

grass. Strange that a man always hopes to find a thing on the spot

where he perceives his loss. Nadine looked for her hardened dew-drop on

the sparkling, spangled mead. As a bright diamond of the first water,

it was so easily mistaken for a dew-drop, that I remarked, seeing one

in Nadine's breast-rose, "Everything is covered with soft diamonds, and

who will find the hard one? The dew in your rose sparkles as brightly

as the lost stone." She looked down, and in the rose-cup lay the

sought-for gem! It was thought I had been clever, and I was angry with

myself for having been so stupid. But Nadine liked me no less for it,

and that was reward enough.

As the Adour bent, not an arm, but a finger, around this gay moss-bank

and bees' sugar-field, the whole company sat among the bees and the

flowers, and the cushion-bearers laid down their burdens. Nadine said,

playfully, "If flowers have souls, the bees, whose nurses they are,

must seem to them like dear sucking children." "They have," said

Karlson, "souls like frozen window flowers, or like the tree of

Petit,[12] which I once showed to you, or like pyramids of alum." "O,

you always destroy, sir," said Gione. "Nadine and I once painted to

ourselves an elysium for the souls of faded flowers." "I believe in a

middle path for flowers after their death," said Wilhelmi, seriously;

"the souls of lilies probably go into woman's forehead; hyacinth and

forget-me-not souls into woman's eyes, and rose souls into lips and

cheeks." I added, "It is a fortunate coincidence for this hypothesis,

that a girl has perceptibly more color from the departing soul at the

moment when she breaks or kills a rose."

Joyfully and affectionately we continued our journey. Only into my

carrier-companion the souls of thistles and sloes seemed to have

entered. This play of ideas and this politeness in argument provoked

him. Only Karlson pleased him.

At last the Chaplain said to me: "No immortality but that of moral

beings can be discussed, and with them it is a postulate or

apprenticeship of practical sense. For as a full conformity of the

human will to the moral law, with which the just Creator never can

dispense, is quite unattainable by a finite being, an eternally

continuing progress, i. e. an unceasing duration, must contain and

prove this conformity in God's eyes, who overlooks the everlasting

course. Therefore our immortality is necessary."

Karlson stood still at Gione's side, that we might approach, and said:

"Dear philosopher, pray take from this proof the boldness or the

indistinctness which it has for laymen. How can we imagine the

supervision, i. e. the termination, of an infinite, a never-ending

course? or how will you make the eternity of time harmonize with the

eternity of the moral requirements. How can a righteousness, scattered

and dispersed over an interminable period of time, satisfy Divine

Justice, which must require this righteousness in each portion of the

period. And has the constant approximation of man towards this state of

purity been proved? And will not the number, if not the grossness of

faults, in this infinite space, increase with the number of virtues?

And what comparison will the list of faults bear to that of the virtues

at the examination? But let us leave that also. Will, in the sight of

the Divine eye, the moral purity of two different beings--for instance,

a seraph and a man, or of two different men, as Robespierre and

Socrates--be equally contained in two equally long, i. e. eternal,

courses of time? If on comparing the two, a difference appear, then one

of them cannot have attained the so-called perfection, and must still

be mortal."

The Chaplain answered: "But Kant does not intend to demonstrate

immortality by this argument. He says even, that it has been left so

uncertain in order that free, pure will, and no selfish views, shall

prompt our aspirations to immortality." "Strange," said Karlson. "But

as we have now discovered this intention, its object would be defeated.

Philosophers ought then to imitate me, and attack immortality to the

advantage of virtue. It is a strange axiom to presuppose the truth of

an opinion from its indemonstrability. Either immortality can be

proved, then one half of your argument is right, or it cannot, then the

whole of it is wrong. Besides, if the belief in immortality makes

virtue selfish, the experience of it in the next world would make it

more so. Does the belief in it deter the common man from doing what his

confessor forbids, and forgives him? As little as the first stroke of

apoplexy deters the drunkard from rushing to the second."

504th STATION.

Flower Toying.

Karlson joined the others in conversation, and Phylax was enraged that

he could not triumph,--not even dispute. I said to him, that my

opinions agreed with his, though not on the same grounds, and that,

uniting, we would subsequently together issue forth and attack Karlson.

I then went with my silken club to Nadine, and on a rose-bush showed

her the flying light-magnets, the shining will-o'-the-wisps of night,

the brown glowworms which she had never seen by day. I colonized a box

with them for a living firework in the evening. Chance had romantically

bent a bright rose-bush between graceful bluebells, on a green marble

boundary stone; its foliage had the appearance of being seamed with

black glowworms;[13] the lily-chafer hung like gold embroidery on the

pale, ripe roses; long-legged, shining gnats ran glittering over the

thorns; the flower-divers and nectary treasure-diggers, the bees,

covered the rose-cups with new thorns; the butterflies, like moving

tints, like Epicurean colors, gently floated round the branch's gay

world. I cannot tell you how this glance, turned from the vast whole on

to a beautiful small portion, gave a warmer glow to our hearts and to

nature. Instead of the hand, we could only hold, like children, the

fingers of the great mother of life, and reverently kiss them. By the

creation, God became human for men, as therefore for angels an

angel,--like the sun whose bright immensity the painter gently divides

into the beauties of a human face.

Wilhelmi said, that, to rise into Eden or Arcadia, he would need no

larger wings than the four of a butterfly. What a poetical,

paradisaical existence, like the papilio, to roam without stomach or

hunger, among buds and flowers, to suffer no long night, no winter, and

no storm, to toy away one's life in a delightful chase for another

papilio, or to nestle, like the flower-colored bird of paradise, among

lemon-blossoms, to float round blooming honey-cups, and to be rocked in

silken cradles!

Blissfully we proceeded on our way, and each new step drove an exciting

blood-drop to our warmed hearts. I said to the Chaplain, that the

temple of nature had been changed into a concert-hall for me, and every

vocal into instrumental music. Victor! should not philosophy and the

philosophers imitate electric bodies, which not only enlighten, but

also attract? The soul's wine will indeed ever taste of the bodily

barrel-hoops, but the soul is scarcely spirit-like enough only to serve

as a body to another soul.

505th STATION.

The Ephemera.--Relative Conclusions.--Doubts of the Length of the

Chain of Living Beings.--The Wart-Eaters.--The Cure.

The sun and the valley surrounded us with their burning-glasses, and it

was pleasant to sit down in a shady spot, and eat; and as just opposite

to us was a marble-quarry, and close to the iron rock-wall a sap-green

meadow, and beside us a group of elms and a little shining solitary

white house, we asked at it for as much food as a roaming, contented

quintet requires. The mistress of the house was alone, the husband was

at work (as most Campanians are, in Spain), four children waited on us;

our ice-cellar was opened, and with its contents the soul was warmed

and the body cooled. The white glowing keystone of the heaven arch

awoke with its flames the noonday wind, which slept on the cold summit

of the Pyrenees.

Little or nothing would taste well to poor Phylax, to whom it was more

important to prove that he would be eternal. Fortunately, the French

wine armed him more with French customs, and he asked the Baron

politely: "I believe I owe M. Karlson some proofs of our immortality.

Might I be allowed to give them?" Wilhelmi sent him to Gione, saying,

"Ask there." Gione willingly granted his request, and said, "Why should

not recollections of immortality ornament our joys as much as monuments

do English gardens?" Nadine threw in the question, "But if men quarrel

about the hopes of humanity, what remains for women?" "Her heart and

its hopes, Nadine," said Gione. Wilhelmi said, smiling: "The owl of

Minerva, as all other owls, is said to forebode destruction to a

household, by settling on its roof. But I hope it is not so." I added,

"The lives of all our beloved ones are tied to the obelisk of

immortality, as to that of Rameses,[14] that the danger may double our

strength; for they will be destroyed if it rebound."

In the mean time, Karlson had taken an ephemeral fly from a neighboring

elm, to which it had clung, in order to cast off its super body before

death. The ephemera should not be an embodiment of our immortality,[15]

but of our unfolding; for, unlike other insects, after all its

transformations, and when already furnished with wings, it changes its

shape once more before death. He held it before us, and said: "In my

opinion, a philosophical ephemera would argue thus. What! I should have

uselessly accomplished all my various changes, and the Creator had no

other intention in calling me from the egg to the grub, then to a

chrysalis, and at last to a flying being, whose wings must burst

another covering before death, with this long range of spiritual and

corporeal developments, he should have had no other aim than a six

hours' existence, and the grave must be the only goal of so long a long

a course?" The Chaplain opportunely answered, "Your argument proves

against yourself, for it is _petitio principii_ to presuppose mortality

amongst ephemera."

I confess I am an enemy to these relative conclusions, because they

take as much from truth as they give to eloquence, for contrary

opinions can be proved by them. To one whose eyes are hurt by a grain

of sand, I can prove that he is comparatively happy, as there are many

in the world who suffer from sand-blisters and gravel; and also that he

is unfortunate, as Sultanic eyes are never pressed by anything harder

than Circassian eyelids--or two rosy lips. Thus I can make the world

immense in comparison to bullets, grains of poison, or round puddings,

or minute, if placed beside Jupiter, the sun, or the milky-way. If the

ephemera on the ladder of existence would turn its back on the

brilliant development of the beings above it, and only count the

important ones on the steps beneath it, it would increase in its own

importance. In short, our oratorical fantasy continually mistakes the

distinction between more and less for that of something or nothing; but

every relative conclusion must be based on something positive, which

only eternal eyes, which can measure the whole range of innumerable

degrees, can truly weigh. Indeed, there must be some bodily substance,

and were it even the earth; for every comparison, every measurement,

presupposes a fixed, unchanging standard. Therefore, the ephemeral

development is a true one, and the conclusions on it are the same as on

a seraphic one. The difference in the degrees can only bring forth

_relative_, not _opposite_ conclusions. And here, in this letter--for

in print I would not dare to do it--I will acknowledge a doubt. No one

has ever _seen_ the steps of the ladder of beings above us,--no one has

_counted_ those beneath us. What if the former were less, the latter

greater, than we have hitherto imagined. The eternal promotion of souls

from angels to archangels, in short, the nine philosophical hierarchies

have only been asserted, but not proved. The common opinion, that the

immense difference between man and the Eternal must be filled up by a

chain of spiritual giants, is false; as no chain can shorten the

distance, much less fill it, for it will ever retain the same width;

and the seraph, i. e. the highest finite being according to human

thoughts, must imagine just as many, if not more, beings above him, as

I do beneath me. Astronomy, this sawing machine of suns, this ship's

wharf and laboratory of earths, would persuade us that the

_enlargement_ of worlds and beings is a sign of their improvement. But

over the whole sky there hang only earth and fire-balls, and all things

on them, from milk-way to milk-way, are less than the wishes and

longings of our hearts. Then why should our earth alone, why not every

other also, be progressing? why should they, rather than we, have the

start in this inaugural eternity? In short, it may be disputed if in

the whole universe there are other angels and archangels than Victor

and Jean Paul. It seems scarcely credible to me. But truly the

_melodious_ progression to sublime beings has hitherto been merely

taken for granted. I believe in a _harmonious_ one, in an eternal

ascension, but in no created culmination.

I presume Karlson intended to answer my argument, not on the seraphs,

but on ephemera, when Nadine, who had borrowed the fly in order to

examine it, held it too near her eyes, and thereby disturbed and

extinguished our Mendelssohn-Platonic conversation. For Madame Berlier

(such was the noble name of our temporary hostess) stepped up to

Nadine, and said: "It is a pity for the pain. You must take the

wart-locust, I have proofs," do you understand? It is this. The

so-called wart-eater, a locust with light brown spots, takes away a

wart in a very short time by a single bite. Dame Berlier, over whom, as

over most Southrons, beauty had greater power than self-love and sex,

had falsely imagined that Nadine wished to annihilate the only fault in

her charming form with the fly. The Chaplain had scarcely heard the

wart-eater mentioned, when he vanished among the green, and commenced a

hunt for wart-locusts. I was vexed that I had known the remedy as well

as Dame Berlier, and never thought of it. For a shabby simile I should

have easily recollected it, but not for a useful cure. Fortune

permitted him soon to return with the winged wart-operator; this

excited my envy. When he gave it to Nadine, the officious Phylax had

squeezed, with the letter and paper press of his hands, like in a good

calendar-press, the brown spotted vegetable-eater to--death. The animal

could bite no more; I immediately darted off in search of another, and

soon returned, holding one by the tips of its wings, and said, I would

myself hold it over the wart until he would operate on it. While

performing the action I praised it. Every great deed, I said, is only

accomplished in the soul, at the moment of determination; when it comes

outward and is repeated by the body,--which holds the locust,--it

disperses into insignificant movements and thirds; but when it is done,

as now the operation, it becomes great again, and, ever increasing,

flows onward through all time. Thus the Rhine rushes like a giant from

its summit, disperses in the fog, falls as rain upon the plain, then it

forms itself into clouds, and roams over the sands, and carries suns

instead of rainbows.

It need not be concealed from you that it affected me to look into the

retina of two such bright and warm, upturned eyes, without mentioning

the whole warlike array of curls and lips, and forehead, and the

Waterloo landscapes of the cheeks. Nadine's terror at the teeth of the

brown little doctor made her more charming, and the danger of my

situation greater. After holding it for some time, when I thought the

operation was finished, she told me the locust had not yet touched her,

as I held it two or three Parisian feet too far from the wart. It is

true, I had lost myself in her net skin; but I remarked that the cure

could not be accomplished, if I did not rest the ball of my right hand

slightly on her cheek, in order to hold the wart-eater more firmly over

the wart. Now he bit the required wound, and propelled into it as much

of his corrosive fluid as he carried with him. I artfully diverted

Nadine's pain, which resembled that of a pin pricking, by

philosophizing. Man, I said, finds the stoic theory true and forcible

for all pain, only not for the present. And when he bleeds from cut

wounds, he imagines bruises heal more easily. He therefore defers his

practice of the stoic-school until his own schooling is over. O, but

then he stands by a running stream, waiting until the waters shall have

passed. True firmness bears the bite of a locust, and rejoices at the

trial!

Now the operation was happily accomplished, which could easily excite

an illness in me. It is true that her countenance had inflicted a

deeper wound on me than the wart-eater upon it,--I should fear and

examine whether mine, which was just as near to hers, had done as much

damage; but Nadine is exceedingly--young. The hearts of young girls,

like new waterbutts, at first let everything drop through, until in

time, the vessels swell and thus retain their contents.

506th STATION.

Objections To Immortality.--The Second Childhood of the

Outer and Inner Man.

We broke up and proceeded. On high, light feathers floated through the

sky, like the loose-flowing hair of the sun, which could not veil it.

The day became hotter and stiller. But our path lay beneath a green

roof, and each branch spread over us a parasol of broad fresh leaves.

Gione asked, "Can we not continue our conversation in walking?" O, your

Clotilde should know her; she has, excepting her charms, half her soul.

No discord exists between her outer and inner harmony; her earnest,

generous soul resembles the palm-tree, which has neither bark nor

branches, but which bears broad foliage and buds on its summit.

"Gione," said Nadine, "these arguments unsettle our minds, instead of

removing our doubts." "No one," she replied, "has yet given his

opinion; if we even have the firmest convictions, still by their

beautiful conformity with another's convictions our own become more

beautiful and firm." "Just as water-plants, surrounded by their water,

are yet as much refreshed by rain as land plants are," said Myrtil (I

am Myrtil).

Wilhelmi said, just as we were passing through the Midsummer's-day

night of a grotto cooled by oakshade and cascades: "Our conversation

would better suit a total eclipse of the sun. I would that I could see

one, when the moon hangs beauteously before the midday sun, when the

noisy day is suddenly hushed, when the nightingales sing, the flowers

fade, and when nightly mists and shuddering cold and dew fall." Phylax

had now let slip his sofa-cushion into a murmuring spring; Nadine saw

it, and, not to confuse him in the act of drawing it out, she, with

charming zeal, drove us back to our conversation. Her intercourse with

the world had given her a playful, light, ever-joyous exterior. But

Gione's style, like the highest Grecian, is, artistically speaking,

somewhat meagre and spare,--and the ball-rooms had made her, as

mahogany presses make dresses, more agreeable. But her exterior charms

did not contradict or injure her interior beauty.

I said to Karlson, "Pray, prove to us the spiritual mortality, this

soul's death." "M. Karlson needs not do that," answered the stupid

Phylax, vexed at the wet cushion, "only the assertor must prove."

"Very well," I said, "I call proofs objections, but I shall certainly

give you only two;--firstly, the proof or objection: the simultaneous

decay and destruction of the body and of the soul; secondly, the

absolute impossibility of ascertaining the mode of life of a future

existence, or as the Chaplain would say, to see into the spiritual

world from the sensuous one. Now, M. Karlson, throw your two bombs into

the greatest possible angles, which, according to Hennert, is 40

degrees, but according to Bezout, 43 degrees."

He aimed well. He showed how the spiritual Dryad flowered, burst and

dispersed with the corporeal bark, how the noblest impulses are chained

to the lead--earth, revolving wheel of the body; how memory,

imagination, and madness only feed on the egg-yolk of the brain,--how

bravery and mildness stand in as opposite degree to blood as leeches

and Jews;[16] how, in age, the inner and outer man together bend

towards the grave, together petrify, together, like metal compositions,

_slowly_ cool, and at last together die!

He then asked why, with the continual experience that every bodily

down-bending digs a spiritual wound, and with this unceasing parallel

of body and soul, we give to the latter, after death, everything which

we have seen annihilated in the former. He said, and I believe it, that

neither Bonnet's underbody, nor the incorporated soul corsets of

Plattner (the "second soul organ") can diminish the difficulty of the

question, for as both soul's under-garments or night-gowns and

pinafores, always share, in life, the good and bad fate of the coarse,

corporeal coat and martyr-cloak, and as in us double-cased English

watches, the works, and the first and second cases (Bonnet's and

Plattner's) always suffered and gained together, it would be absurd to

seek the Iliad of the future world in the narrow hazel-nut shell of the

_revived_ little body which has first stood and fallen with the coarse

outward one.

I then asked him to aim his second ball in the angle of forty degrees

also. I added, that "I would have begged leave to give a long

parliamentary speech on it, but that long speeches have a life and

reproducing power, as, according to Reaumuer, long animals more easily

re-form themselves, when cut, than short ones." Though certainly it

occurs to me, that Unzer says, tall persons do not live as long as

short ones. But Karlson needed little time or power to prove the

uncertainty of the next world. The Sun-land behind the hillocks of the

God's acre, behind the pest-cloud of Death, is covered by a complete,

an impenetrable darkness of twelve inches, or of as many holy nights.

He showed, and not badly, what an immense leap beyond all terrestrial

analogies and experiences it is, to hope for, i. e. to create, a world,

a transcendent Arcadia, a world of which we know neither copy nor

original, which wants no less than a form and a name, map and globe,

another Vespucius Americus, of which neither chemistry nor astronomy

can give us the compounds or the quarters; a universe of air, on which,

from the leaf-stripped, faded soul, a new body will bud forth, i. e. a

nothing on which nothing is to embody itself.

O, my good Karlson! how could your noble soul omit a second world which

is already contained in this physical first one, like bright crystals

in dark earth, namely, the sun-world of _Virtue_, _Truth_, and

_Beauty_,[17] glowing in our souls, whose golden vein inexplicably

extends its ramification through the dark, dirty clump of the sensuous

world.

It was now my turn to answer: "I will lessen your two difficulties, and

then I will give my innumerable proofs. You are no materialist,[18] you

therefore take for granted that bodily and mental activity only

accompany and mutually excite each other. Yes, the body represents the

keys of the inner Harmonica through all its scales. Hitherto only the

corporeal outward signs have been called feelings, as the swelling

heart and the slowly-beating pulse--longing; the outpouring of gall,

anger, and so on. But the net-like texture, the anastomy between the

inner and outer man, is so life-full, so warm, that to every _picture_,

every _thought_,--a nerve, a fibre must move. We should also observe,

and put into the notes of speech all the bodily after sounds of

poetic, algebraic, artistic, numismatic, and anatomic ideas. But the

sounding-board of the body is neither the soul's scale nor its

harmony. Grief has no resemblance to a tear,--shame, none to the

cheek-imprisoned blood,--wit, none to champagne,--the idea of this

valley, none to its portrait on the retina. The inner man, this God,

hidden in the statue, is not of marble as it is, but in the stony

limbs, the living ones grow and ripen in an unknown life. We do not

sufficiently mark how the inner man even tames and forms the outer one;

how, for example, the passionate body which, according to physiology,

should ever increase in heat, is gradually cooled and extinguished by

principles,--how terror, anger, holds the dividing texture of the body

in a spiritual grasp. When the whole brain is paralyzed, every nerve

rusty and exhausted, and the soul carrying leaden weights, man needs

but to _will_ (which he can do every moment), he needs only a letter, a

striking idea, and the fibre-work of the soul's mechanism proceeds

again without help from the body."

Wilhelmi said, "Then the soul is but a watch which winds itself."

"There must always be some _perpetuum mobile_," I said, "for all things

have moved for an eternity already. The question is, either the soul

never winds off, or it is its own watchmaker. I return to the subject.

If a ruptured life-vein in the fourth brain-chamber of a Socrates place

the whole land of his ideas and moral tendencies in a blood-bath, these

ideas and moral tendencies will surely be covered with blood-water, but

not spoilt by it; because not the drowned brains were virtuous and

wise, but his _self_ was, and because the dependence of a watch on its

case for protection from dust, &c. does not prove the identity of the

two, or that the watch consists only of cases. As spiritual exertions

are not bodily ones, but only _precede_ or _follow_ them; and as every

spiritual activity leaves traces, not only in the soul, but also in the

body; must, then, if apoplexy or age destroy corporeal activity,--must

the soul's fire be therefore quenched? Is there no difference between

the soul of a _childish_ old man, and that of a _child_? Must the soul

of Socrates, imprisoned in Borgia's body as in a mud-bath, lose its

moral powers, and does it suddenly change its virtuous qualities for

vicious ones? Or shall in left-handed wedlock (which has no common

property of body and soul) the one conjugal half only share the gains,

not also the losses of the other? Shall the ablactated soul feel only

the blooming, not also the faded body? And if it does, the earth

surrounding it must, as our earth does to the superior planets, give it

the reflection of our advancing and retrograding. If we shall ever be

disembodied, the slow hand of time, that is, ever encroaching age, must

do it. If our course is not to be concluded in one world, the gulf

between it and the second must always appear to us a grave. The _short_

interruption to our progress by age, and the _longer_ one by death,

destroy this progress as little as the _shortest_ interruption by

sleep. We anxiously suppose--as the first man did--the _total_

sun-eclipse of sleep to be the _night_ of death, and this again the

_doomsday_ of the world."

"That must yet be proved, although I believe it," replied Phylax.

New beauties prevented my answering, and closed the 506th Station.

(P. S.--I have been told the Chaplain has declared that he had

purposely not replied to several of my arguments, but he hoped he could

see them in print, and then he would publish his opinions. But he will

scarcely live until this letter is printed, and he will answer it.)

507th STATION.

The Theft of the Souvenir.--Answers to Previous Stations.--On the

Emigration of the Dead to the Planets.--The Threefold World in

Man.--Grief without Hope.--The Seal of Immortality.--The

Country-seat.--The Balloons.--Ecstasy.

When it is three o'clock, and a wandering Arcadian council is very well

but somewhat warm, when the narrowing Adour, which has its source at

the end of the Valley, flows round a projecting tongue of land, and

draws its silver gauze cover over the pale moon reposing on its

breast,[19] when round this slip of earth, this flowery anchoring

place, half water scene, half bowling green, a broadleaved oak arcade

grows, beneath which trembles a sun-gilt shadow, gliding from between

the branches of the trees, on to the grass, embroidered by the

restless, roving, gay-colored sand, on the book of nature--its insects,

when the hammering in the shining marble blocks, the living Alp-horns,

the bleating pasture-sheep, and the murmuring of waves fill the heart

to its topmost branches and up to the brim with life-balsam, and the

head with life-spirit; and when so many beauties are heard and

seen,--living beauties who walk are inclined to sit down on the slip of

earth, after the cushion-carriers have placed their burdens as

resting-places for their arms.

My dear Victor! all this came to pass.

While sitting, long speeches were not as practicable as while walking.

Even before, when we, from some distance, were choosing this spot for a

resting-place, they had suffered considerably. I remained on the shore

near Nadine, whose cheeks, reflected in the shadow-painted waves,

appeared a charming pale red, as though a cochineal had bled to death

on them. The walk and her red parasol had been too great colorists.

My dear brother, I am preparing to fall in love. The operation on the

wart was unimportant as a corner-piece of vexation, as negative

electricity; but warts have their good points.

Nadine plucked roses and other flowers. I drew an empty jewel-box from

my pocket,--it was empty, like the 9th Kurstuhl, the Elias chair,[20]

or the _limbus patrum_,--and held it under them, begging her to shake

the flowers, that I might catch the millipeds,[21] which, like tallow

candles, are more suitable for the eye than the nose. I caught a whole

germanic diet of these creatures from the fragrant flower-cups, and

imprisoned them in the box.

During the flower-toying, which brought us nearer to each other, a

small cockchafer fell on my skin. I looked round for the flowers and

could find nothing till I saw, protruding from Nadine's left pocket, a

souvenir, filled with sweet-smelling herbs. To steal from a beautiful

woman is often nothing else than to give to her. I thought it

fit, secretly to take the scented pocket-book in order to make a

scent-bottle, and a joke of it in future. I so arranged the theft, that

the Baron perceived my hand, holding the book, retreating from the

pocket.

The souvenir, thought I, may occasion some scene; meanwhile I can smell

at it. I indemnified her for the loss of the scent-bag by the

millipeds, whose prison I immediately insinuated into her pocket. The

Baron was witness.

Wilhelmi said, when we rose: "In the evening we shall be separated and

deafened by the carriages. If something has yet to be decided--"

"Something?" replied Phylax,--"everything has to be decided. M. Jean

Paul, you have yet to raise M. Karlson's second difficulty." "Raise?" I

asked, "I am to raise the cover of the whole future world? I am but

going _towards_ it, not coming _from_ it. But this dissimilarity

between the present and the future world, its inconceivable magnitude,

has made many apostates. Not the bursting of our bodily doll-skin in

death, but the wide disparity between the present autumn and the future

spring, raises such overwhelming doubts in our poor, timid breasts.

This is shown by the savages, who consider the future life merely as

the second volume, the new testament of the first, and make no greater

distinction between the first and second life than between youth and

age: they easily believe in all their hopes; your _first_ difficulty,

the bursting and fading of the bodily polish, does not deprive the

savage of the hope to bud anew in another flower-vase. But your second

difficulty daily increases itself, and its advocates, for by the

increasing proofs and apparatus of chemistry and physiology, the future

world is daily more effectually annihilated and dispersed, as it cannot

be brought within play of a sun-microscope or of a chemical furnace. In

fact, not only the reality, but also the theory of the body, not only

the practised measurement of its longings, but also the pure moral

philosophy of its spirit-world, must darken and make difficult the

prospect on the inner world from the outer one. Only the moralist, the

physiologist, the poet, and the artist more readily comprehend our

inner world; but the chemist, the physician, and the mathematician want

both seeing and hearing faculties for it, and in time, even eyes and

ears.

"On the whole, I find fewer men than one would imagine who decidedly

believe in, or deny, the existence of a future world. Few dare to deny

it, as for them this life would then lose all unity, form, peace, and

hope;--few dare to believe it, for they are startled at their own

purification and at the destruction of the lessened earth. The

majority, according to the promptness of alternating feelings, waver

poetically between both beliefs.

"As we paint Devils more easily than Gods, Furies than Venus Urania,

Hell than Heaven, we can more easily believe in the former than in the

latter,--in the greatest misfortune than in the greatest happiness.

Must not our spirit, used to misgivings and earth chains, be startled

at a Utopia against which earth will be shipwrecked, that the lilies of

it, like the Guernsey lilies,[22] may find the shore to bloom on, which

saves and satisfies, elevates and makes blessed, our much tormented

humanity.

"I now come to your difficulty. I imagine, if even we were to take the

grave to be merely the moat of communication between allied globes, our

ignorance concerning the second world should not terrify us, and we

need not take for granted that the mountain ridge of humanity does not

continue under the Dead Sea, merely because we cannot see through its

waters, for do not all mountain ridges continue on the bottom of the

ocean? What! man will guess at _worlds_, when he cannot even guess

_world-quarters_! Would the Greenlander paint a Negro, a Dane, a Greek,

in his mind's eye, without ever having seen one? Can the political

genius divine the inner versifications of the poetic one, without

experience? Can the Abderite imagine the architecture of the sage?

Would we have guessed the existence of but one of the animal creations

of Anthropomorphism which copy the human figure in all animals, and yet

change it? Or could a bodiless self, placed in a vacuum, with all

existing logic and metaphysic, ever have conceived but a single vein of

its present embodification and humanification?"

"But what are you asserting or denying?" asked Wilhelmi.

"I only assert that a second life on another planet cannot be denied,

merely because we are unable to map out the planet, and portray its

inhabitants. But we need no other planet."

The Baron said: "O, I have often dreamed delicious dreams of this

'_grande tour_' through the stars! It seemed the progression of a

student from one class to another,--the classes being worlds."

"But," replied Karlson, "to all these worlds, as upon our own, you will

be refused admittance if you arrive without a body. By what miracle

will you obtain one?"

"_By a repeated one_," I answered. "For by a miracle we have our

present body. But we can say in favor of this planet wandering, that

our eyes too widely separate the worlds of which each one is but an

_element_ of the infinite _integral whole_. The different worlds

and their satellites above and around us, are only far removed

world-quarters. The moon is but a smaller, more distant America, and

space is the ocean."

Nadine said: "One day I so pictured the inhabitants of a lemon-tree to

myself. The worm on the leaf may think it is on the green earth, the

second worm on the white bud is on the moon, and the one on the lemon

believes itself to be upon the sun."

"And yet this," said I, "is but a tree of immeasurable life. As around

the earth-kernel cling wider and finer covers,--the earth, the seas,

the air and space,--so the giant of one world is surrounded by

increasingly large ones, with ever larger arms. The longest shell is

the finest one, as light and the attractive power. The beauteous

covering elongates and rarefies itself from iron bands to pearl ties,

from flower-chains to rainbows and milky-ways."

"Will we not now descend from the milky-way," said Karlson, "for we

cannot ascend it. It is precisely this uniformity of the universe which

forbids the rambling of emigrants from the earth. Every planet already

has its own crew; more dense ones, as for instance Mercury, may be

peopled with real sailors."

"Precisely as Kant supposes!" said Phylax.

"Finer, less solid ones, as e. g. Uranus, only with the most tender

beings, perhaps only with women and nuns who love not the sun. He who

intends to rectify the so-called soul or spirit by distilling it from

one planet to the other, may with as much justice assert, that the

spirits of the slacked Mercury receive their dephlegmation in a

distilling process through our earth,--in short, that the earth is the

second world for Mercury and Venus. The dead of the arctic zones could

even pass into the temperate ones (it would be _distillatio per

latus_), for on all planets there can be no other than coarser or finer

_human beings_[23] like ourselves."

Karlson waited for an answer and a contradiction, but I said his

opinion was also mine. "I have still a stronger reason," I continued,

"against emigration to, and voyage picturesque through, the planets,

because we carry and lock up a heaven of starry light in our own

breasts, for which no dirty earth-ball is clean or large enough. But on

this subject I must have permission to speak uninterruptedly, at least

until we have passed all these cornfields."

Our pleasure-trip now was an alley of magic gardens, our passage

through a golden sea of corn-blades, was accompanied and surrounded on

all sides by a promised land, in which solitary houses reposed beneath

picturesquely grouped leaf groves, as in Italy sleepers take their

siestas on shaded meads. I was permitted to speak.

"There is an inner, heart-contained spirit-world, which breaks through

the dark clouds of the body-world as a warm sun. I mean the inner

universe of _virtue_, _beauty_, and _truth_; three soul-worlds and

heavens, which are neither parts, nor shoots, nor cuttings, nor copies

of the outer one. We are less astonished at the inexplicable existence

of these three transcendent heavens, because they are ever floating

before us, and because we foolishly imagine we _create_ them, while we

merely _recognize_ them. After which copy, with what plastic material,

and of what, could we create and insert in ourselves[24] this same

spirit-world? Let the atheist ask himself how he conceived the giant

ideal of a God, which he either denies or embodies? An idea which has

not been built upon comparative greatness and degrees, for it is the

contrary of every measure and of every created greatness. In short, the

atheist denies the great _original_ of the _copy_.[25]

"As there are idealists of the outer world who believe that perception

makes objects, instead of that objects cause perception, so there are

idealists of the inner world, who deduct the _being_ from the

_seeming_, the _sound_ from the _echo_, the _fact_ from its

_appearance_; instead of, on the contrary, the seeming from the being,

our consciousness from the objects of it. We mistake our power of

analyzing our inner world, for its preformation, i. e. the genealogist

thinks himself both originator and founder.

"This inner universe, which is still more glorious and admirable than

the outer one, needs another heaven than the one above us, and a higher

world than one a sun now shines upon. Therefore we rightly say, not a

second earth or globe, but a second _world_,--another beyond the

universe."

Gione already interrupted me: "And every virtuous and wise being is in

himself a proof of immortality." "And every one," added Nadine,

quickly, "who suffers innocently."

"Yes, it is that," said I, with emotion, "which extends our line of

life through countless ages. The chord of _Virtue_, _Truth_, and

_Beauty_, taken from the music of the spheres, calls us from this dark

oppressive earth, and announces to us the nearness of a more melodious

existence. _Why_, and _from whence_ were these _super-earthly_ wants

and longings created in us, if only, like swallowed diamonds, slowly to

cut through our earthy shell. Why was a being endowed with wings of

light chained to this dirty clump of earth, if it were to rot in its

birth-clod, without ever being freed from it by means of its ethereal

wings?"

Wilhelmi said, "I also like to dream the dream of a second life in the

sleep of this first one. But may not our beautiful spiritual powers

have been given to us for the _enjoyment_ and _preservation_ of the

present life?"

"For its preservation?" I said. "Then an angel has been locked in the

body to be the mute servant and fire-lighter, butler, cook, and porter

of the stomach? Would not brutish souls have sufficed to drive

man-bodies to the fruit-tree and the spring? Shall the pure ethereal

flame only dry and bake the bodily patent stove with life-warmth, while

it now slakes and dissolves it? For every tree of knowledge is the

poison-tree of the body, and every mental refinement a slow-poison

chalice. But, on the contrary, want is the iron key of freedom, the

stomach is the manure-filled hot-house or manufactory of human blood,

and the various animal instincts are but the earthy, soiled steps to

the Grecian temple of our spiritual elevation.

"For _enjoyment_ you said also. That means, we received the palate and

appetite of a god, with the food for an animal. That portion of us

which is of earth, and creeps on worm-folds, may and can, like the

earthworm, be fed and fattened on earth. Exertion, bodily pain, the

burning hunger of necessity, and the tumult of our senses exclude and

choke the spiritual autumn bloom of humanity in nations and classes.

All these conditions of terrestrial existence must be fulfilled ere the

soul may claim its due. To the unhappy, therefore, who must be the

business men and carriers of their bodily wants, the whole inner world

seems but as an imaginary gilt cobweb, like the man who, breathing only

the electrical _atmosphere_, instead of feeling the spark, thinks to

grasp an invisible web. But when our necessary _animal servitude_ is

over, when the barking inner dog-kennel is fed, and the dog-fight

finished, then the inner man demands his nectar and ambrosia, and if he

is turned off with earth-food only, he changes to an angel of Death,

and a Hellfiend, driving himself to suicide, or makes of him a

poison-mixer who destroys all joy.[26] The eternal hunger _in_ man, the

insatiability of his heart, wants not a _richer_, but a _different_

food, fruit, not grass. If our wants referred but to the degree, not to

the quality, then the imagination, at least, might paint a _degree of

satiety_. But imagination cannot make us happy, by showing us

innumerable heaps of treasures, if they be other than _Virtue_,

_Truth_, and _Beauty_."

"But the more beautiful soul?" asked Nadine. I answered, "This

discrepancy between our wishes and our circumstances, the heart and the

earth, will remain, an _enigma_, if we are immortal, and would be a

blasphemy if we decay. Ah! how could the beautiful soul be happy?

Strangers, born on mountains and living in lowland places, pine in an

incurable homesickness. We belong to a higher place, and therefore an

eternal longing consumes us, and every music is our soul's Swiss _ranz

des vaches_. In the morning of life, the joys which hearken to the

anxious wishes of our hearts are seen blooming for us in later years.

When we have attained these years, we turn on the deceitful spot, and

see behind us, pleasure blooming in the strong hopeful youth, and we

enjoy instead of our _hopes_, the _recollections of our hopes_. Joy in

this also resembles the rainbow, which in the morning shines over

evening, and in the evening arches over the east. The _eye_ may reach

the _light_, but the arm is short, and holds but the fruit of the

soil."

"And this proves?" asked the Chaplain.

"Not that we are unhappy, but that we are immortal, and that the second

world in us demands, and proves a second world beyond us. O, how much

might not be said of this second life whose commencement is so clearly

shown in the first one, and which so strangely doubles us! Why is

Virtue too exalted to make us, and, what is more, others (sensually)

happy? Why does the incapability of being useful on earth (as the

expression is) increase with a certain higher purity of character, as,

according to Herschel, there are suns which have no earth? Why is our

heart tortured, dried, consumed, and at last broken by a slow burning

fever of ceaseless love for an unattainable object, only alleviated by

the hope that this _consumption_, like a physical one, must one day be

sheltered and raised by the _ice cover_ of death?"

"No," said Gione, with more emotion in her eye than in her voice, "it

is not ice, but lightning. When our heart lies a sacrifice on the

altar, fire from heaven consumes it as a proof that the offering is

accepted."

I know not why her calm voice so painfully disturbed my whole soul (not

only my argument). Even Nadine's eyes, which triumphed over her own

sorrows, were suffused with tears by her sister's, and, although she is

generally more timid and fastidious than Gione, in passing a little

garden, she raised from a projecting hairy potato-stalk, a large moth,

and showed it to us with a firm mouth, which should have been softened

by a smile.

It was the so-called Death's-head. I stroked the flat, drooping wings,

and said, "It come? from Egypt, the land of mummies and graves; it

bears a _memento mori_ on its back, and a _miserere_ in its plaintive

voice." "In the mean time it is a butterfly, and visits the nectaries,

which we day-birds will do also," appropriately observed Wilhelmi; but

he took the words out of my mouth.

Gione's countenance again expressed thoughtful calmness, and to me she

became immeasurably beautiful and grand by the stillness of her grief.

You once said that the female soul, though it be pierced with burning

shafts, must never beat its wings convulsively together, else, like

other butterflies, it would destroy their beauty. How true is this!

Nadine's eyes seldom shone without at last overflowing, and every

sorrowful emotion remained long in her heart, because she tried to

guard against it. She resembled those springs which take a temperature

opposed to the time of day, and which are warmest in the cool evening.

She turned to me and said, putting her hand in her left pocket, "I will

show you some poetry which will prove your prose." While she was

seeking it, she stood still with her companion Wilhelmi. He guessed

before I did, that she intended to give me something from the Souvenir,

and when, in its stead, she took the milliped's prison from her pocket,

he obligingly said, "If not with my hands yet with my eyes I assisted

at the theft, and as accomplice I beg for mercy." The serious apology

for this foolishness scarcely suited our earnest tone of mind. I said,

"I wished to cause a more useless, than pardonable joke, but I--" She

did not allow me to conclude, but mildly and unchanged (except by a

reproving and a forgiving smile) she showed me in the aromatic book the

noble Karlson's requiem on the death of the exalted Gione. I willingly

give you the prosaic echo of it, from my prosaic memory.