Madame! I have deceived you. I am not the Count of the Ganges. Never in
my life have I seen the holy stream, nor the lotus flowers which are
mirrored in its sacred waves. Never did I lie dreaming under Indian
palms, nor in prayer before the Diamond Deity Juggernaut, who with his
diamonds might have easily aided me out of my difficulties. I have no
more been in Calcutta than the turkey, of which I ate yesterday at
dinner, had ever been in the realms of the Grand Turk. Yet my ancestors
came from Hindostan, and therefore I feel so much at my ease in the
great forest of song of Valmiki. The heroic sorrows of the divine Ramo
move my heart like familiar griefs; from the flower lays of Kalidasa the
sweetest memories bloom; and when a few years ago a gentle lady in
Berlin showed me the beautiful pictures which her father, who had been
Governor in India, had brought from thence, the delicately-painted,
holy, calm faces seemed as familiar to me as though I were gazing at my
own family gallery.
Franz Bopp--Madame, you have of course read his _Nalus_ and his System
of Sanscrit Conjugations--gave me much information relative to my
ancestry, and I now know with certainty that I am descended from
Brahma's head, and not from his corns. I have also good reason to
believe that the entire _Mahabarata_, with its two hundred thousand
verses, is merely an allegorical love-letter which my first fore-father
wrote to my first fore-mother. Oh! they loved dearly, their souls
kissed, they kissed with their eyes, they were both but one single kiss.
An enchanted nightingale sits on a red coral bough in the silent sea,
and sings a song of the love of my ancestors; the pearls gaze eagerly
from their shells, the wonderful water-flowers tremble with sorrow, the
cunning sea-snails, bearing on their backs many-coloured porcelain
towers, come creeping onwards, the ocean-roses blush with shame, the
yellow, sharp-pointed starfish, and the thousand-hued glassy jelly-fish
quiver and stretch, and all swarm and listen.
Unfortunately, Madame, this nightingale song is far too long to be set
down here; it is as long as the world itself, even its dedication to
Anangas, the God of Love, is as long as all Scott's novels, and there is
a passage referring to it in Aristophanes, which in German[5] reads
thus:--
"Tiotio, tiotio, tiotinx,
Totototo totototo tototinx."
(Voss's _Translation._)
No, I was not born in India. I first beheld the light of the world on
the shores of that beautiful stream, in whose green hills folly grows
and is plucked in Autumn, laid away in cellars, poured into barrels, and
exported to foreign lands. In fact, only yesterday I heard some one
speaking a piece of folly which, in the year 1811, was imprisoned in a
bunch of grapes, which I myself then saw growing on the Johannisburg.
But much folly is also consumed at home, and men are the same there as
everywhere: they are born, eat, drink, sleep, laugh, cry, slander each
other, are greatly troubled about the propagation of their race, try to
seem what they are not and to do what they cannot, never shave until
they have a beard, and often have beards before they get discretion, and
when they at last have discretion, they drink it away in white and red
folly.
_Mon dieu!_ if I had faith, so that I could remove mountains--the
Johannisburg would be just the mountain which I would carry with me
everywhere. But as my faith is not strong enough, imagination must aid
me, and she quickly sets me by the beautiful Rhine.
Oh, that is a fair land, full of loveliness and sunshine. In the blue
stream are mirrored the mountain shores, with their ruined towers, and
woods, and ancient towns. There, before the house-door, sit the good
townspeople, of a summer evening, and drink out of great cans, and
gossip confidentially about how the wine--the Lord be praised!--thrives,
and how justice should be free from all secrecy, and how Marie
Antoinette's being guillotined is none of our business, and how dear the
tobacco tax makes tobacco, and how all mankind are equal, and what a
glorious fellow Goerres is.
I have never troubled myself about such conversation, and sat rather
with the maidens in the arched window, and laughed at their laughter,
and let them throw flowers in my face, and pretended to be ill-natured
until they told me their secrets, or some other important stories. Fair
Gertrude was half wild with delight when I sat by her. She was a girl
like a flaming rose, and once, as she fell on my neck, I thought that
she would burn away into perfume in my arms. Fair Katharine flamed into
sweet music when she talked with me, and her eyes were of a pure,
internal blue, which I have never seen in men or animals, and very
seldom in flowers--one gazed so gladly into them, and could then think
such sweet things. But the beautiful Hedwig loved me, for when I came to
her she bowed her head till her black curls fell down over her blushing
face, and her bright eyes shone like stars from the dark heaven. Her
bashful lips spoke not a word, and I too could say nothing to her. I
coughed and she trembled. She often begged me, through her sisters, not
to climb the rocks so rashly, or to bathe in the Rhine when I was hot
with running or drinking wine. Once I overheard her pious prayer before
the Virgin Mary, which she had adorned with gold leaf and illuminated
with a lamp, and which stood in a corner at the entrance. I plainly
heard her pray to the Mother of God to keep him from climbing, drinking,
and bathing. I should certainly have been desperately in love with her
if she had been indifferent to me, and I was indifferent to her because
I knew that she loved me.--Madame, to win my love, I must be treated _en
canaille_.
Johanna was the cousin of the three sisters, and I was glad to be with
her. She knew the most beautiful old legends, and when she pointed with
her white hand through the window out to the mountains where all had
happened which she narrated, I became enchanted; the old knights rose
visibly from the ruined castles and hewed away at each other's iron
clothes, the Lorely sat again on the mountain summit, singing a-down her
sweet, seductive song, and the Rhine rippled so reasonably soothing--and
yet so mockingly horrible--and the fair Johanna looked at me so
strangely, with such enigmatic tenderness, that she seemed herself one
with the legend that she told. She was a slender, pale girl, sickly and
musing, her eyes were clear as truth itself, her lips piously arched,
in her face lay a great story--was it a love legend? I know not, and I
never had the courage to ask. When I looked at her long, I grew calm and
cheerful--it seemed to me as though it was Sunday in my heart and the
angels held service there.
In such happy hours I told her tales of my childhood, and she listened
earnestly, and, strangely, when I could not think of the names she
remembered them. When I then asked her with wonder how she knew the
names, she would answer with a smile that she had learned it of the
birds that had built a nest on the sill of her window--and she tried to
make me believe that these were the same birds which I once bought with
my pocket-money from a hard-hearted peasant boy, and then let fly away.
But I believed that she knew everything because she was so pale, and
really soon died. She knew, too, when she would die, and wished that I
would leave Andernach the day before. When I bade her farewell she gave
me both her hands--they were white, sweet hands, and pure as the
Host--and she said, You are very good, and when you are not, think of
the little dead Veronica.
Did the chattering birds also tell her this name? Often in hours of
remembrance I had wearied my brain in trying to think of that dear name,
but could not.
And now that I have it again, my earliest infancy shall bloom into
memory again--and I am again a child, and play with other children in
the Castle Court at Düsseldorf on the Rhine.