What cloud is that, which like the clouds of the tropics, passes from
morn to eve, and then sets? It is humanity. Is that the magnet-mountain
covered with the nails of wrecked ships? No, it is the great Earth,
strewed with the bones of fallen men.
Ah! why did I love? I had not then lost so much!
Nadine, give me thy grief, for it contains hope. Thou standest by thy
crushed sister, who dissolves even beneath the winding-sheet, and
lookest upwards to the trembling stars, and thinkest: Above, O dearest
one, thou dost reside, and on the suns we find again our hearts, and
the small tears of life will be over.
But mine remain, and burn in the dim eye. My cypress alley is not open,
and discloses no heaven. Human blood paints the fluid figure called man
on the monument, as oil on marble forms forests; Death wipes away the
man, and leaves the stone. O Gione! I would have some consolation, if
thou wert but far away from us all, on a clouded forest, in a cave of
the Earth, or on the most distant world in space. But thou art gone,
thy soul is dead, not only thy life and thy body.
See, Nadine, on the judgment-seat of Time lies the crushed angel, with
the death color of the spirit-world. Gione has lost all her virtues,
her love, her patience, her strength, her all-embracing heart, and her
rich mind: the thunderbolt of Death has destroyed the diamond, and now
the wax statue of the body slowly melts beneath the soil.
Serpent of Eternity, quickly take away the beautiful form, as the
larger serpent first poisons and then devours man. But I, Gione, stand
beside your ruins with unalleviated pain, with undestroyed soul; and
grieving, think of you until I also dissolve. And my grief is noble and
deep, for I have no hope! May thy invisible shadow-picture, like the
new moon with the sun,[27] arise to heaven in my soul! And may the
creative wheel of Time, which raises innumerable hearts, and fills them
with blood, only to pour them again into the grave, and let them die,
pour out my life slowly, for long time would I mourn for thee, thou
lost one!
I cannot tell you, dearest Victor, how horrible and fearful the eternal
snow of annihilating death seemed to me, placed beside the noble form
it should have covered; how frightful the thought: if Karlson is right,
the last day has torn this never happy, innocent soul from the prisons
upon the earth to the closer ones beneath it: man too often carries his
errors as his truths only as word arguments, not as feelings. But let
the disbeliever of immortality imagine a life of sixty minutes instead
of sixty years, and let him try if he can bear to see loved, noble, or
wise men only aimless, hour-long air-phantoms, hollow thin shadows
which fly towards the light and are consumed by it, and who, without
path, trace, or aim, after a short flight, dissolve into their former
night. No; even over him steals a supposition of immortality. Else a
black cloud would forever hang over his soul, and the earth would quake
beneath him when he trod on it, as if he were a Cain.
I continued, but all arguments were poetized into feelings. "Yes, if
all forests of this earth were pleasure grottoes, all valleys Campan,
all islands holy, all fields Elysian, and all eyes sparkling, yes,
then--no, even then the Eternal One would have given to our souls the
promise of a future life, even in the blessedness of the present one.
But now, O God! when so many houses are mourning ones, so many fields
battle-fields, so many cheeks pale, and when we pass so many sunken,
red, torn, closed eyes,--O, can death be but the last destroying
whirlwind? And when at last, after thousand, thousand years, our earth
is dried up by the sun's heat, and every living sound on its surface
silenced, will an immortal spirit look down on the silent globe, and,
gazing on the empty hearse moving slowly on, say: 'There the churchyard
of humanity flies into the crater of the sun; on that burning heap many
shadows, and dreamers, and wax-figures, have wept and bled, but now
they are all melted and consumed: Fly into the sun, which will also
dissolve thee, thou silent desert with thy swallowed tears, with thy
dried-up blood!' No, the crushed worm dares raise himself to his
Creator, and say: 'Thou canst not have made me only to suffer.'"
"And who gives the worm the right to this demand?" asked Karlson.
Gione answered, gently, "The Eternal One himself, who gives us charity
and who speaks in all our souls to calm us, and who alone has created
in us our demands to Him and our hope in Him."
This good sweet word could still not calm all the waves of my excited
soul. From a distant house, turtle-doves sent after us trembling,
soul-felt plaints. About my tear-filled inward eye assembled all those
forms whose hearts were without guilt and without joy,[28] who attained
no single wish here below, and who, sinking under the frost and
snow-storm of fate, only longed, like persons freezing to death, to
sleep; and all those forms who have loved too deeply, and lost too
much, and whose wounds were never cured until death had widened them,
like a cracked bell which retains its hollow sound until the crevice is
made larger, and the beings nearest me, and many other female ones,
whose exquisitely tender souls fate most consecrates to torture, as
Narcissus is consecrated to the God of Hell. I also remembered your
true remark, that you had never pronounced the words _pain_ and _the
past_ before a woman, without hearing an almost inaudible sigh at the
union of the two words, from the suffering heart; for woman on the
narrower stage of her plans, with idealized wishes and desires built on
others' worth, rather than on her own, has a thousand times more
disappointments to suffer than we men.
The sun sank deeper behind the mountains, and giant shadows, like
mighty birds of prey, came coldly down upon us from the eternal snow. I
took Karlson's hand in mine, and looked with tearful eyes into his
manly, beautiful countenance, and said, "O Karlson! on what a blooming,
grand world you throw an immeasurable gravestone, which no time can
lift! Are two difficulties,[29] based too on the _necessary ignorance_
of man, sufficient to overthrow a belief, which explains thousand
greater difficulties, without which our existence is without aim, our
sufferings without explanation, and the holy Trinity in our breast
three furies, and three terrible contradictions? A tending God's hand,
leading and feeding the inner man (the child of the outer one),
teaching him to go and to speak, educating, refining him, is shown in
all things, from the shapeless earthworm to the brilliant human face,
from the chaotic nations of the primitive ages to the present century,
from the first faint pulsation of the invisible heart to its full,
bold, throbbing pulse in manhood,--and why? That when man stands
upright and exalted, a beautiful demi-god, even amid the ruins of his
old body temple, the club of Death may annihilate the demi-god forever?
And on the eternal sea, on which the least drop throws immeasurable
rings, on this sea a life-long rising and a life-long falling of the
soul should have the same termination, namely, the end of all
things,--annihilation?[30] And as, from the same cause, the souls of
all other worlds must fall and die with ours, and of this shroud and
crape-veiled immeasurability nothing remain but the ever-sowing and
never-reaping solitary world-spirit, who sees one eternity mourn for
another, there can be no aim and no object in the whole spiritual
universum, for the purpose of the development of succeeding or
successive ephemera is no progress for the vanished ephemera, scarcely
even for the last one which can never exist.[31] And you take for
granted all these enigmas and contradictions by which all the strings
of creation, not only its harmony, are torn, because two difficulties
present themselves to you, which _cannot any better_ explain mortality
... Dearest Karlson, you would bring your eternally jarring discord
into this harmony of the spheres! See how calmly the day goes, how
grandly the night sets in; did you not think that our spirit will rise
one day from its grave of ashes, when you saw the mild pale moon rise
grandly from the crater of Vesuvius?" ... The sun stood on the
mountains, about to plunge into the sea and swim to the new world.
Nadine embraced her sister with emotion, and said, "O, we love each
other forever and immortally, dearest sister." Karlson accidentally
touched the chords of the lyre which he carried: Gione took it from him
with one hand, gave him the other, and said, "You are the only one
among us who is tormented by this melancholy belief,--and you deserve
to have one so beautiful!"
This word of concealed love overpowered his long-filled heart, and two
burning drops fell from the blinded eyes, and the sun gilded the holy
tears, and he said, looking towards the mountains: "I can bear no
annihilation but my own,--my whole heart is of your opinion, and my
head must slowly follow."