The tenderest and kindest angel, the Angel of the _last_ hour, whom we
harshly call Death, is sent to us, that he may mildly and gently pluck
away the sinking heart of man from life, and bear it unhurt in his warm
hands out of the cold breast into high, warming Eden. His brother is
the Angel of the first hour, who twice kisses man,--once when he begins
this life; and again, when he awakes on high, without wounds, and
enters smiling upon the other life, as he came weeping into this.
As the Angel of the last hour saw the battle-fields stretched before
him, full of blood and tears, and drew the trembling souls away, his
mild eyes melted, and he said: "Ah! I will once die like man, that I
may enter into his last agony, and soothe it when I dissolve the ties
of life!"
The boundless circle of angels, who love each other above, pressed
around the sympathetic one, and promised their beloved to surround him
with heavenly rays after the instant of his death; thereby he might
know that death had been; and his brother, whose kiss opens our cold
lips, as the morning light does the chill flowers, gently touched his
forehead, and said: "When I kiss thee again, my brother, thou shalt
have died upon the earth, and will be again with us."
Loving and moved, the Angel descended to the battlefield, where only
one beautiful, ardent Youth still panted, and heaved his shattered
breast. Near the hero stood his Betrothed alone. He could no longer
feel her hot tears, and her sorrow passed him unrecognized, like a
distant battle-cry.--Then the Angel quickly clothed himself in her dear
form, rested by him, drew the wounded soul with one hot kiss out of the
cloven breast, and gave it to his brother on high, who kissed it for
the second time, when suddenly it smiled.
The Angel of the last hour passed like a lightning-flash into
the deserted frame, shone through the body, and stirred the warm
life-stream again with the strengthened heart. But how was he affected
by this new clothing of the body! His clear eye became confused in the
whirl of unwonted, nervous life;--his once flying thought waded now
slowly through the atmosphere of his brain,--the moist, faint-hued
vapor dried away from all objects which formerly hung, autumnal-like,
floating over them; now they pierced him out of the hot air with
burning, painful spots of color,--all sensations became more gloomy,
yet stormier and more nearly allied to _self_; and they seemed to him
to be like instinct, as those of the beasts appear to us. Hunger tore
him, thirst consumed him, pain stabbed him. Alas! his breast, torn and
bleeding, heaved upward, and his first breath drawn was his first sigh
after the heaven he had left! "Is this the death of man?" he thought;
but as he did not see the promised token of death, neither angel nor
the surrounding heavenly flame, therefore he perceived this to be only
the life of man.
In the evening, the earthly strength of the Angel declined, and a
crushing globe seemed to revolve about his head. Then Sleep sent his
messengers. Images of the mind shifted out of the sunshine into a misty
fire; the shadows of the day were thrown upon his brain; they came
confused, and colossal, one upon another, and the world of sense reared
itself uncontrolled and poured in upon him. Then Dream sent his
messengers. Finally the funereal veil of Sleep wrapped itself thickly
about him, and, sunk in the vault of night, he lay there lonely and
motionless, like us poor mortals. But then, thou, heavenly Dream! didst
descend, with thy thousand reflecting-glasses before his soul, and
didst show in all of them a circle of angels and a radiant heaven; and
the earthly body seemed to fall away from him with all its thorns.
"Ah!" said he, in vain rapture, "my sleep was also my death." Yet when
he awoke again, with his compressed heart full of heavy human blood,
and looked out upon the earth and upon the night, he cried, "I saw the
angels and the starry heavens; but it was only the image of Death, and
not his presence."
The Betrothed of the translated hero did not mark that an angel only
dwelt in the breast of her beloved; yet she loved the purified aspect
of the wounded soul, and still gladly held the hand of him who had past
so far away. But the Angel loved her deceived heart with the love of a
man's soul in return; jealous of his own nature, he wished that he
might not die before her, but love her so long that she might forgive
him, when they met again in heaven, for having clasped together upon
her breast an angel and a lover. Yet she died sooner; the late sorrow
had bowed the head of this flower too low, and it lay broken upon the
grave. She sank before the weeping Angel, not like the sun, who before
all-beholding Nature casts himself so gorgeous into the sea that its
red waves strike the very heaven, but like the tranquil moon, who, in
the midnight, silvers the vaporous air, and sinks down unseen behind
its dim veil. Death sent his gentler sister Unconsciousness before; she
touched the heart of the Betrothed, and chilled the warm countenance;
the flowers of her cheek withered; the pale snow of winter, under which
the spring of eternity grows green, clothed her forehead and her hands.
Then a burning tear broke from the swelling eye of the Angel, and,
while he thought his heart loosed itself in the form of a tear as a
pearl from the brittle shell, his Betrothed, awaked to the last
delirium, moved her eyes once again, drew him close to her heart, and
died as she kissed him, and said, "Now I am with thee, my brother!"
Then the Angel believed his heavenly brother had given him the sign of
the kiss and death. Yet no radiant heaven surrounded him, nor aught but
funereal darkness, and he sighed because this was not his death, only
the anguish of man over the death of another.
"O ye afflicted mortals!" he cried, "how can ye weary ones survive
this! How can ye become old when the circle of youthful forms breaks
and lies at length altogether scattered around,--when the graves of
your friends lead down like steps to your own,--and when age becomes
like the silent, blank evening hour of a cold battle-field! O ye poor
mortals! how can your hearts endure it?"
The body of the translated hero-soul placed the gentle Angel among hard
men, their injustice, and the distortions of Vice and of Passion; about
his figure, also, was laid the thorny girdle of sceptres bound
together, which compresses the hemispheres with its stings, and
which is always laced more tightly by the great; he saw the claws of
crowned and emblazoned beasts fasten themselves on their displumed
prey, and heard it panting with enfeebled beating of the wings; he saw
the whole terrestrial globe encircled in the winding swarthy folds of
the giant-serpent, Vice, plunging and concealing its poisonous head
deep in the breast of man. Then the hot sting of enmity was made to
shoot through that tender heart, which, during a long eternity, had
lain in the warmth of angelic love, and the holy love-fed spirit was
forced to shudder over an inward dissolution. "Ah!" said he, "the death
of man is full of woe!" Yet this was not death; for no angel appeared.
Thus in a few days he became weary of this life which we bear for half
a hundred years, and he longed to go back. The evening sun attracted
his kindred spirit. The wounds of his shattered breast exhausted him
with pain. He went out with the evening glow upon his pale cheeks to
"God's Acre," that green background of our life, where the forms which
he had once stripped of all their beautiful souls were now crumbling
away. He placed himself with sorrowful longing upon the bare grave of
his unspeakably beloved and departed bride, and looked towards the
fading evening sun. Seated on this dear knoll, he regarded his
suffering body, and thought: Thou also, tender breast, wouldst be lying
here in decay, and wouldst give no more pain, did I not support thee.
Then he reflected upon the grievous life of man, and the throbs of the
wounded breast showed him the pangs with which mortals purchase their
virtue and their death, and which he had joyfully spared the noble soul
of this body. Deeply touched by human virtue, he wept out of his
boundless love for men, who, amid the craving of their own needs, under
low-hung clouds, behind mists which stream over the sharp-cutting paths
of life, never turn away from the lofty star of duty, but in their
darkness stretch out loving arms towards every suffering breast they
encounter, while around them nothing glimmers but the hope of setting
like the sun in the old world, in order to arise in the new.
Just then the ecstasy opened his wounds, and blood, the tear of the
soul, flowed from his heart upon the cherished knoll,--the dissolving
body sank quietly towards his beloved,--tears of rapture broke the
sunset light into, a rosy, swimming sea,--distant echoing tones, as of
the earth passing wide through ringing ether, played in the vaporous
lustre. Then a dark cloud or short night shot by the Angel, and was
full of sleep; and now a radiant heaven opened and overspread him, and
a thousand angels shone around. "Art thou again here, thou deceiving
dream?" he said. But the Angel of the first hour stepped through the
rays to him, and gave the sign of the kiss, and said: "That was death,
thou immortal brother and heavenly friend!"
And the Youth and his beloved softly repeated the words.