Feigned and Real Swoons of Clotilda.--Julius.--Emanuel's
Letter concerning God.
Good, beautiful sex! Sometimes, when I see a diamond heart hanging
above thy warm one, I ask: Is it for some such reason as _this_ thou
wearest a copied heart on thy bosom, in order to indicate to Love,
Fate, and Slander a common mark for their different arrows, as the poor
soldier who is shot kneeling points out to the balls of his comrades,
by a heart cut out of paper, the place of the beating one?
--When this chapter is ended, the reader will no longer ask me, why I
begin it thus....
Once Victor came back from a day's walk, when Marie ran breathless to
meet him with a letter from Matthieu. It contained the question whether
he would not accompany him and his sister to-day to Kussewitz via St.
Luna. Marie's running had arisen merely from a rich messenger's-fee and
gratuity on the part of Mat, who often treated poor people at once with
generosity and with persiflage, just as he thought his sister at once
amiable and absurd. To people who knew him, he therefore appeared comic
when he must have been serious. But Victor said "No" to the request for
his company; which was very well, for in fact the two had already
started. I cannot determine whether it was after two or after three
days that they came back, the sister with the coldest face towards him
and the brother with the warmest. This double temperature could not be
wholly explained, but only about half, on the ground of discoveries
which the couple might have made at Tostato's and Count O.'s concerning
his disguise and his shop-drama. Heretofore Joachime's anger had always
been a consequence of his: now it was the reverse; but this vexed him
exceedingly.
Some days after he was standing with the Princess and Joachime in a
window of the Ministerial _Louvre_. The conversation was lively enough;
the Princess counted over the shops in the market, Joachime was
following with her eye the swift zigzag of a swallow, Victor was
standing secretly on one leg (the other he set, only apparently and
without resting on it, on the floor), to try how long he could hold
out. All at once the Princess said, "Holy Mary! how can one carry round
a poor child shut up so in a box!" They all peered out into the street.
Victor took the liberty to remark that the poor child was "made of
wax." A woman was carrying a little glass case hanging before her,
wherein there slept a swaddled waxen angel; she begged, like the rest,
as if for this child, and the little one supported her better than if
it had been alive. The Princess called up the new apparition. The woman
came in trembling with her mummy-chest, and drew back the little
curtain. The Princess bent an artistically enchanted eye on the sweet
slumbering form, which (like its wax material) seemed to have been born
of flowers and reared in springtimes. All beauty penetrated deeply into
her heart; hence she loved Clotilda so exceedingly and many Germans so
little. Joachime was fond of only _one_ child and _one_ beauty,--and
each was _herself_. Victor said, "This waxen mimic and copy of life had
always made him sad, and that he could not even see his own wax
counterfeit in St. Luna without shuddering."
"Doesn't it stand in a frock-coat at the window of the parsonage?"
asked Joachime, becoming much more pleasant.
"Isn't it true," he asked in return, "that you thought, some days ago,
it was I myself?" He guessed from her look her former error, which
perhaps had contributed to excite her against him.
The father confessor of the Princess now came up and added,--after his
custom of being complimentary,--that, in order to save him the trouble
of a sitting, he would draw him the next time merely from his wax
image. The Pater was well known to be a good draughtsman.
I let circumstances which are less important lie unrelated, and gayly
proceed.
It was as early as March, when the higher classes, on account of their
sedentary winter sleep, are more full-blooded than cold-blooded,--any
one who does not understand the matter takes for granted that
their overflow of blood proceeds more from their sucking that of
others,--when sicknesses leave their visiting-cards in the form of
recipes with the whole court,--when the eyes of the Princess, the
_embonpoint_ of the princely ether, and the gouty hands of the court
apothecary continued the storms of winter; it was even then; I say,
that Clotilda also experienced every day more intensely the influence
of the winter, and of her double withdrawal from relaxations and of her
intercourse with her fancies.... If I must speak sincerely, I attribute
little to her seclusion, but all to the necessity which propriety
imposes on her of intercourse with the noble Mat, with the Schleuneses
and with other cold-blooded Amphibia;[1] an innocent heart must, in
moral frosty weather, like alabaster garden statues in the physical,
when the former and the latter have soft, absorbing veins, get cracks,
and break.
Thus matters stood with her on a weighty day, when he found with her
little Julia. This beloved name she affixed to the child of the Senior,
Flamin's landlord, in order to keep alive her sad yearning after her
dead Giulia by a similarity of sound, by the relic of an echo. "This
funereal tone," said Victor to himself, "is indeed to her the welcome
distant roll of the hearse which shall come to take her to the friend
of her youth; and her expectation of a like fate is truly the most
mournful evidence of a like grief." If anything further was needed to
purify his friendship from all love, it was this swift falling-off of
the leaves of so fair a passion-flower;--towards the suffering, one is
ashamed of the least selfishness. During the conversation, from which
the jealous Julia was excluded by not understanding it, the child in a
pet twitched at the servants' bell; for girls make claims to attention
eight years earlier than boys. Clotilda forbade this ringing by a too
late interdict; the little one, delighted that she had set in motion
the chambermaid, who came hastening up, tried again to twitch at the
cord. Clotilda said in French to the Doctor, "One must not give her any
command too monarchically; now she will not rest till I have tried my
extremest method." "Julia!" said she once more, her large eye
overflowing with love; but in vain. "Well, now I am going to die!" said
she, already dying away, and leaned her fair head, inhabited by a
departing genius, back against the chair, and closed her pure eyes,
which deserved to open again only in a heaven.--While Victor stood in
silent emotion before the still tranced one, and thought to himself:
"If now she should never wake again, and thou shouldst vainly snatch
her stiff hand, and her last word on this dreary earth should have
been, 'Now I am going to die,'--O God! would there be any other remedy
for the inconsolableness of her friend than a sword and the last wound?
And I should clasp with a cold hand her hand, and say, I go with thee!"
As he thought thus, and as the little one, weeping, lifted the sinking
right hand, her countenance really grew paler, and the left hand glided
down from her lap;--here was that sword's sharp edge drawn across his
heart;--but soon she opened her wandering eyes again, coming out of the
drowsiness of the death-sleep to herself and to a sense of shame. She
excused the transient swoon with the remark, "I have done as that
player[2] did with the urn of his child: I imagined myself in the place
of my Giulia in her last moments, but a little too successfully."
He was just on the point of drawing up medical pastoral letters against
this consuming enthusiasm,--so much does an unhappy love translate
every female heart from the _major_ tone into the _minor_, even that of
a Clotilda, whose forehead had a manly elevation, and whose chin
expressed almost more courage than beauty,--when quite other pastoral
letters arrived. The bearer of them was Victor's _happier_ friend
Agatha. Send back with thy laugh, thou untroubled one, life into two
hearts on which death has flung his flying cloud-shadows! She fell
confidingly into two friendly arms; but towards her doctor brother, who
so long, instead of his whole person, had let only his hand, i. e. his
handwriting, go to St. Luna, she was still shy. But this fault of his,
when he had avoided a house one quarter of a year _for_ reasons, of
absenting himself from it another quarter of a year _without_
reason,--this fault I cannot wholly condemn, because I--have it myself.
She could not satisfy her eyes with looking at him; her blooming
country face showed him, instead of his present passion-week of grief,
a red chalk drawing of his and her vanished days of joy in the
parsonage-garden. He solemnly promised her to be her Easter guest with
her brother, and, instead of heads and windows, to break nothing but
eggs; he rested not till he was the same old Sebastian and she the same
old Agatha again. As she delivered to the two court-people, smiling
only from love, the long duodecimo history of the village and her
father, not at all as a compiler or epitomist, or in a mutilated
edition, but in volumes as long as her heel-ligaments; then did
Clotilda and Victor feel how soothing to them was this descent from the
glittering, sharp court-glaciers into the soft vales of the middling
stations of life, and they both yearned to exchange polished hearts for
warm ones. Among men and Borsdorf apples the best are not the smooth
ones, but the rough ones that have some warts. This longing for sincere
souls, too, it may well have been which wrung from Clotilda the
assertion, that there were mismatches only between souls, not between
ranks. Hence came her growing love for this Agatha, who bloomed
outside of the forcing-box of a genealogical tree only in the common
pasture,--a love which the reader and I in the first volume, from
sharp-sightedness, explained as the hiding-cloak of another love toward
Flamin, and which ought to wean us both from bringing a reproach upon a
heroine, who in the sequel continually refutes it.
The superscription of the thick letter-packet which Agatha brought was
in the handwriting of Emanuel, whom Clotilda got to superscribe
everything to the parson's wife, in order to save her stepmother the
trouble of--closing her letters. Madame Le Baut had learned this
_insight_ into documents, this Socratic art of midwifery, in the
ministry, which possesses the right of search into the letters of all
subjects, because it can hold them either as infected or arrested, if
it please. While the step-daughter, in the adjoining chamber, broke
open the outer packet, because from its thickness she prophesied an
enclosed communication for the Doctor: the latter breathed, by
chance--or design, for he had, this long time, established everywhere
his deciphering offices of women, in the narrowest corner, in every
fold of a dress, in the marks of books which had been read,--he
breathed, I said, accidentally on the window-panes, on which one can
then at once read what a warm finger has written thereon. There came
out, after the involuntary breathing, nothing but French initial S's,
sketched with the finger-nail. "S!" thought he, "that is singular; that
is the beginning of my own name."
His conjectures were interrupted by Clotilda's returning with a face
blissfully cleared of all its clouds, and, handing to the thoughtful
Medicus a great letter from Emanuel. Upon the heels of this second
pleasure followed, in the place of the third, a piece of news; she now
disclosed to him, "that Emanuel had at last enabled her to be an
obedient, though not believing patient." She had, namely, hitherto
suppressed the purpose of her obedience and her spring cure, until
her friend in Maienthal had secured her for some spring months a
sick-chamber at the Abbess's,--the very one Giulia had had,--that the
fanning of spring might there lift her drooping pinions, the incense of
flowers heal her torn heart, and the great friend enable _his_ great
friend to stand upright.
Victor slipped away hastily, not only from hunger and thirst after what
he held in his hand, but because a new flood of thought broke through
his old trains of ideas. "Bastian!" said Bastian to himself on the way,
"I have often held thee to be stupid, but so stupid as that--no, never.
It is sinful that a man, a court-medicus, a thinker, should ruminate
for months, often half-evenings together, and yet not bring the matter
out, till he hears it, now for the first time. Verily, even the 'S' on
the window fits!" The reader and I will take out of his hands the thing
with which he is stoning himself before our faces; for he throws at
both of us as well, because we failed to guess at anything just as much
as he did. In short, the unknown happy one who makes the fair Clotilda
unhappy, and for whom she sighs out her dumb, shy soul, and who for
most of her charms has no eye at all, is the blind--Julius in
Maienthal. Hence her desire to go thither.
I should like to fill a folio volume with the proofs of this: Victor
counted them off on his five fingers. On his thumb he said, "For
Julius's sake she seeks little Julia; so, too, is it with Giulia." At
the forefinger he said, "The French initial _I_ looks like an _S_
without the cross-stroke." At the middle finger, "Minerva has furnished
him, indeed, not merely the flute, but also Minerva's fair face, and in
this blind Cupid's-face Clotilda could lose herself without blushing;
even from love for his friend Emanuel, she might have loved him." At
the ring-finger, "Hence her justification of mis-matches, since his
citizenly ring-finger is to be joined to her noble one." At the little
finger, "By Heaven! all this proves not the least."
For now, for the first time, all the proofs came upon him in a flood:
in the first volume of this book there came often an unknown angel to
Julius and said: "Be good, I will hover round thee, I will guard thy
veiled soul,--I go back into heaven."--
Secondly, this angel once gave Julius a paper, and said, "Conceal it,
and after a year, when the birches grow green in the temple, let
Clotilda read it to thee; I take my flight, and thou wilt not hear me
sooner than a year hence."----
All this fitted Clotilda as if it were moulded on her: she could never
unfold to the blind one her dying heart,--she was going just now to
Maienthal (how long is it still to Whitsuntide?) to read to him herself
the leaf which she had handed to him in the character and mask of an
angel,--finally, she was going off precisely then to St. Luna;----in
short, everything hits to a hair.
If the Biographer might venture to put in a word, it would be this: The
Mining-Superintendent, the Biographer, for his part, believes it all
with great pleasure; but as to Clotilda, who hitherto has come forth
whitely radiant from every pitchy cloud, and on whom, as on the sun,
one has so often confounded _clouds_ with _sun-spots_, he cannot blame
her, until she herself sets the example. Victor, as I myself did in the
first edition, has even forgotten many proofs of Clotilda's love for
Julius: e. g. her warm interest in his blindness, and her desire of his
recovery (in her letter to Emanuel), Flamin's obsolete jealousy in
Maienthal, even the rapture with which, in the playhouse, she calls the
vale an Eden, and rejects the Lethe.
Victor tore open the packet, and two leaves fell out of a large sheet.
One of the notes and the large sheet were from Emanuel, the other from
his Lordship. He studied the last, written in double cipher, first; it
was as follows:--
"I come in autumn, when the _apples_ ripen,--the Trinity [his Lordship
means the Prince's three sons] is found; but the fourth Person [the
fourth, merry son] is wanting.--Flee from the Palace of the Empress of
all the Russias [with this cipher the two had concerted to designate
the Minister Schleunes], but the grand duchess [Joachime] avoid still
more: she wants no heart, but a princely hat.--In Rome [he means
Agnola] beware of the crucifix, out of which a stiletto springs! Think
of the _Island_, ere thou makest a misstep."
Victor was astonished at first at the accidental appropriateness of
these prohibitions; but when he bethought himself that he would have
given them to him even on the Island, if they had not referred to his
more recent circumstances, then he was still more astonished at the
channels through which the espionage-despatches of his present
relations might have reached his father,--(as if my correspondent and
spy might not have been the father's also!)--and most of all at the
warning against Joachime. "Oh! if she were false to me!" he said,
sighing, and would not complete the dark picture nor the sigh.----But
he drove both away by the little leaf from Emanuel, which read thus:--
"My Son:--
"The dawn of the new year shone on my face across the snow, as I placed
before me the paper [Emanuel's second immediately following letter],
upon which I sought to impress for the last time my soul with all its
images reaching out beyond this globe. But the flames of my soul dart
even to the body, and singe the frail thread of life; I was obliged
often to turn away my too easily bleeding breast from the paper and
from my rapture.
"I have, my son, written to thee with my blood.--Julius has now the
thought of God.--The spring glows under the snow, and will soon lift
itself up out of the green, and bloom even to the clouds.--My daughter
[Clotilda] takes spring by the hand and comes to me,--let her take my
son with the other hand, and lay him on my breast, wherein is a failing
breath and an everlasting heart.... O how melodiously sound around me
the evening bells of life!--Ay, when thou and thy Clotilda and our
Julius, when we all, we who love each other, stand together, when I
hear your voices, then shall I look to Heaven and say, The evening
bells of life sound around me too mournfully; I shall for ecstasy die
still earlier than the eve of the longest day, and ere my sainted
father has appeared to me.
"EMANUEL."
* * * * *
Dear Emanuel, that, alas! thou wilt do! The heaven of joy presses
downward to thy lips, and amidst breezes, amidst tones, amidst kisses,
it drinks up thy flickering breath; for the earthly body which will
only _graze_, not _pluck_, digests only _lowly_ joys, and chills under
the beam of a higher sun!--
With emotion I draw aside from Victor's distracted, irrecognizable face
the veil which covers his sorrows. Let us look upon thee, disconsolate
man, who art going to meet a spring where thy heart is to lose
everything: Emanuel by death, Clotilda by love, Flamin by jealousy,
even Joachime by suspicion! Let us look upon thee, impoverished one; I
know why thy eye is still dry, and why thou sayst brokenly and with a
shake of the head, "No, my dear Emanuel, I shall not come, for indeed I
cannot."--What ate most deeply into thy heart was, that thy true
Emanuel should be the very one who still believed thou wert loved by
his friend.--An undeveloped sorrow is without tears or signs; but when
man through fancy draws out of his own bosom a heart full of confluent
wounds, and counts the gashes, and then forgets that it is his own,
then does he weep sympathetically at that which beats so painfully in
his hands, and then he bethinks himself and weeps still more. Victor
would fain release as it were by warming his stiff soul from frozen
tears, and went to the balcony window and pictured to himself, while
the suppressed evening-glow of March burned out of the clouds over the
hills of Maienthal, Clotilda's marriage to Julius.--O, in order to make
himself right sad, he drew a spring day over the vale, the genius
of love flung open, above the nuptial altar, the blue heaven, and bore
the sun as bridal torch without cloud-smoke through the pure
immensity.--There walked, on that day, Emanuel transfigured, Julius
blind, but blissful, Clotilda blushing and long since well again, and
every one was happy. Only one unhappy one he saw there standing among
the flowers, namely, himself; he saw there, how this afflicted one,
chary of words for sorrow, joyous from virtue, more familiar and
confidential with the bride from coldness, went round among the rest,
so unknown, properly so superfluous; how the guiltless pair, with every
sign of love, reckoned up before him all that he had lost, or indeed
concealed those signs from forbearance, because they guessed his
grief;--this thought darted at him like a blaze;--and how at last, as
the heavy-laden past brought all his slain hopes and his withered
wishes before him, he turned round, when the beloved pair went from him
to the altar and to the eternal covenant, how he turned round
inconsolably toward the still, empty fields, to weep infinitely, and
how he then remained so alone and dark in the fair region, and said to
himself: "In thee, no human being takes an interest to-day,--none
presses thy hand, and says, 'Victor, why weepest thou so?'--Oh! this
heart is as full of unspeakable love as any other, but it fades unloved
and unknown, and its dying and its weeping disturb no one.
Nevertheless, nevertheless, O Julius! O Clotilda! I wish you eternal
happiness, and only contented days." ... Then he could do no more; he
pressed his eyes to his hands and to the window-frame, and gave free
play to them, and thought of nothing more; the sorrow, which, like a
rattlesnake, had watched with distended jaws him and his charmed and
writhing approaches, now seized and swallowed him and crushed him to
pieces....
Soft hearts, ye torment yourselves as much on this flinty earth as hard
ones do _others_,--the spark which only makes a burn, ye swing round
till it becomes a wheel of fire, and under the blossoms a sharp leaf
becomes to you a thorn!... But why, I say to myself, dost thou show
that of thy friend and open afresh remote similar wounds in men who
have been healed?--O, answer for me, ye who resemble him, could you do
without a single tear? And since the woes of fantasy are to be reckoned
among the joys of fantasy,--a moist eye and a heavily drawn breath are
the least with which we buy a fair hour....
--Pride--the best counterpoise to effeminate tears--wiped away my
hero's, and said to him: "Thou art worth as much as they who are more
fortunate; and if unhappy love has hitherto made thee bad, how good
might not a happy love make thee!" There was stillness in and around
him; night stood in heaven; he read Emanuel's letter.
"My Horion!
"Within a few hours Time has reversed its hour-glass, and now the sands
of a new year are trickling down.--Uranus strikes for our little earth
the centuries, the sun strikes the years, the moon the months; and on
this concert clock, constructed out of worlds, human beings come forth
as images, that utter cries and tones of joy, when it strikes.
"I too come out gladly under the fair new-year's dawn, which gleams
through all the clouds, and flames up the high hemisphere of heaven. In
a year I shall look into the sin from another world: O how my heart,
for this last time, under the earthly cloud, overflows with love toward
the Father of this fair earth, toward his children and my brothers and
sisters, toward this flowery cradle, wherein we only once awake, and
amidst its rocking in the sun only once fall asleep!
"I shall never live to see another summer-day, therefore will I
describe the fairest one, on which, with thy Julius[3] I for the first
time tremblingly penetrated through luminous clouds, and through
harmonies, and fell down with him before a thundering throne, and said
to him, 'Overhead, in the immeasurable cloud which they call eternity,
He dwells, who has made us and loves us.' This day will I to-day repeat
in my soul; and never, too, may it be extinguished in my Julius or my
Horion!
"I have often said to my Julius, 'I have not yet given thee the
greatest thought of man, which bows down his soul and yet erects it
again forever; but I will name it to thee on the day when thy spirit
and mine are the purest, or when I die.' Hence he often begged me, when
_his angel_ had been with him, or when the flute and the awe-inspiring
night or a tempest had exalted him, 'Name to me, Emanuel, the greatest
thought of man!'
"It was a sweet July evening, when my beloved one lay on my bosom,
weeping, under the birch-tree on the mountain, and said: 'Tell me why I
weep so very much this evening? Dost thou, then, never do it, Emanuel?
But there fall also warm drops from the clouds on my cheeks.' I
answered: 'There are little warm clouds that float round in heaven, and
shake out a few dew-drops; but does not the angel walk up and down in
thy soul? For thou stretchest out thy hand to touch him.' Julius said:
'Yes, he stands before my thoughts; but it was only thou that I wanted
to touch: for the angel indeed is gone from the earth, and I long right
earnestly for his voice. Dreamy shapes undulate into each other within
me, but they have no such bright colors as in sleep,--gracious, smiling
faces look upon me, and come up to me with outspread, shadowy arms, and
beckon to my soul, and melt away, ere I can press them to my heart.[4]
My Emanuel, is not thy face, then, one among my shadowy forms?' Here he
pressed his wet face glowingly to mine, which seemed to hover before
him in shadowy outline; a cloud sprinkled the consecrating water of
heaven upon our embrace, and I said: 'We are softened so to-day only by
that which encircles us, and which I now see.'--He answered: 'O, tell
me what thou seest, and leave not off till the sun is gone down.'
"My heart swam in love and trembled in rapture at my words: 'Beloved,
the earth is to-day so beautiful! that indeed makes man more tender:
heaven rests with a caress and kiss of love on the earth, as a father
on a mother and her children,--the flowers and beating hearts fall into
the embrace and nestle around the mother. The twig gently rocks its
singer up and down, the flower cradles its bee, the leaf its fly and
its drop of honey: in the open flower-cups hang the warm tears, into
which the clouds dissolve themselves, as if in eyes, and my flower-beds
bear the rainbow, which is built up on them, without sinking. The woods
lie nursing themselves at the breast of heaven, and having drunken
deeply of the clouds, all summits stand fixed in silent bliss. A
zephyr, not stronger than a warm sigh of love, breathes along by our
cheeks among the steaming corn-blossoms, and lifts clouds of seed-dust,
and one little breeze after another plays its antics with the flying
harvests of the lands; but it lays them at our feet when it has done
playing. O beloved, when all is love, all harmony, all loves and is
loved, all meadows _one_ intoxicating blossom-chalice, then indeed in
man also does the lofty spirit stretch out its arms, and long to
embrace with them a spirit, and then, when it folds its arms only
around shadows, then it grows very sad for infinite, inexpressible
longing after love.'
"'Emanuel, I am sad too,' said my Julius.
"'Lo, the sun goes down, the earth veils itself: let me still see all
and tell it to thee. Now a white dove flies dazzling, like a great
snow-flake, across the deep blue.... Now she sails round the gold-spark
of the lightning-rod, as if around a glistening star hung out in the
day-sky. O, how she floats and floats, and sinks and vanishes in the
tall flowers of the churchyard!... Julius, didst thou feel nothing,
while I spoke? Ah, the white dove was perhaps thy angel, and therefore
thy heart melted when he was so near thee to-day. The dove does not fly
up, but clouds of dew, with a silver border, like fragments torn from
summer-nights, glide across the church-yard, and overspread the
blooming graves with colored shadows.... Now, one such shadow falling
from heaven swims towards us and bathes our mountain. Melt, melt,
fleeting night, emblem of life, and hide not long from me the sinking
sun!... Our little cloud moves on into the flames of the sun.... O thou
gracious sun, looking back so softly from behind the shore of earth,
thou maternal eye of the world, truly thou sheddest thy evening light
from thee as warmly and slowly as trickling blood, and palest as thou
sinkest, but the earth, hung up and laid upon thee in fruit-festoons
and flower-chains, reddens as if new-created, and with swelling
energy.... Hark! Julius, now the gardens resound,--the air hums,--the
birds with their calls wheel across each other's tracks,--the
storm-wind lifts its mighty wing, and flaps against the woods; hark!
they give the sign that our good sun is departed.
"'O Julius, Julius!' said I, and embraced his breast, 'the earth is
great; but the heart which rests upon it is still greater than the
earth, and greater than the sun.... For it alone thinks the _greatest
thought_!'
"Suddenly there came forth a coolness from the deathbed of the sun, as
from a grave. The high sea of the air undulated, and a broad stream, in
whose bed woods lay prostrate, came roaring back through the heaven
along the path by which the sun had departed. The altars of Nature, the
mountains, were veiled in black as at a great mourning. Man was
fastened down to the earth by the mist-cloud and separated from heaven.
Transparent lightnings licked at the foot of the cloud, and the thunder
smote three times at the black arch. But the storm upreared itself and
rent it asunder; it drove the flying ruins of the shattered prison
through the blue, and flung the dismembered masses of vapor down below
the sky,--and for a long time it still continued to roar alone over the
open earth, through the bright and cleansed plain.... But above it,
behind the curtain which it had torn aside, glistened the all-holiest,
the starry night.--
"Like a sun, the greatest thought of man rose in heaven,--my soul was
borne down when I looked toward heaven, it was lifted up when I looked
upon the earth.--
"For the Infinite has sowed his name in the heavens in burning stars,
but on the earth He has sowed his name in tender flowers.
"'O Julius,' said I, 'hast thou been good to-day?' He answered: 'I have
done nothing but weep.'
"'Julius, kneel down and put away every evil thought,--hear my voice
quiver, feel my hand tremble;--I kneel beside thee.
"'We kneel here on this little earth before immensity, before the
immeasurable world floating over us, before the radiant circumference
of space. Raise thy spirit and conceive what I see. Thou hearest the
storm-wind which drives the clouds around the earth,--but thou hearest
not the storm-wind which drives the earth around the sun, nor yet the
greatest, which blows beyond the suns and carries them around a veiled
All which lies with sun-flames in the abyss.--Step from the earth into
the void ether, here float and see it dwindle to a flying mountain, and
with six other particles of sun-dust play around the sun,--moving
_mountains_, after which _hills_[5] flutter, whirl along before thee,
and go up and down before the sunshine,--then gaze about thee in the
round, flashing, high vault, built up of crystallized suns, through
whose chinks looks the immeasurable night in which hangs the sparkling
arch.--Thou fliest for thousands of years, but thou wilt never set foot
on the last sun, nor step out into the great night.--Thou shuttest
thine eyes and throwest thyself with a thought over the abyss and over
the visible universe, and when thou openest them again, lo! there sweep
around thee, as thoughts do around souls, new streams, surging up and
down, composed of light waves of suns, of dark drops of earths, and new
successions of suns stand over against each other in the east and in
the west,--and the fire-wheel of a new Milky-Way revolves in the stream
of time.--Ay, let an infinite hand remove me out of the whole heaven;
thou lookest back and fixest thine eye on the paling, shrivelling sea
of suns; at last the remote creation hovers now as nothing more than a
pale, still cloudlet in the depths of night; thou imaginest thyself
alone and lookest round thee and----just as many suns and milky-ways
flame up and down, and the pale cloudlet hangs still paler between
them, and out around the whole dazzling abyss move nothing but pale,
still cloudlets.----
"'O Julius! O Julius! amidst the onward moving fire-mountains, amidst
the milky-ways hurled from one abyss to another, there flutters a
particle of blossom-dust made of six thousands of years and the human
race,--Julius, who beholds and who cares for the fluttering particle of
dust which consists of all our hearts?--
"'A star was just now cast down. Fall willingly, O star caught in the
atmosphere of the earth; the stars above the earth also, as well as
thyself, fall headlong into their distant graves,--the sea of worlds
without shore or bottom wells up here, dries up there; the great moth,
the earth, flies round the sunlight and sinks into the light and is
consumed;--O Julius, who sees and sustains the fluttering particle of
dust on the moth, in the midst of the fermenting, blooming, dissolving
chaos? O Julius, if every moment witnesses the dissolution of a man and
a world,--if time passes over the comets and treads them out like
sparks, and grinds to powder the carbonized suns,--if the milky-ways
dart only like returning flashes of lightning out of the great
gloom,--if one procession of worlds after another is drawn down into
the abyss,--if the eternal grave is never full and the eternal starry
firmament is never empty: O my beloved, who then sees and sustains us
little mortals made of dust?--Thou, all-gracious One, sustainest us,
thou Infinite One, thou, O God, thou formest us, thou seest us, thou
lovest us.--O Julius! raise thy spirit and grasp the greatest thought
of man! There where Eternity is, there where Immensity is, and where
night begins, there an Infinite Spirit spreads out its arms and folds
them around the great falling universe of worlds and bears it and warms
it. I and thou and all men, and all angels and all worms, rest on His
bosom, and the roaring, beating sea of worlds and suns is an only child
in his arms. He sees away through the ocean, wherein coral-trees full
of earths sway to and fro, and sees the little worm that cleaves to the
smallest coral, which is I, and He gives the worm the nearest drop,
and a blissful heart, and a future, and an eye to look up even to
Himself--yea, O God, even up to thee, even to thy heart.'--
"Inexpressibly moved, Julius said, weeping: 'Thou seest, then, O Spirit
of Love, poor blind me also!--O, come into my soul, when it is alone,
and it rains warm and still on my cheeks, and I weep at it and feel an
inexpressible love: ah, thou good, great Spirit, it is surely Thou whom
I have hitherto meant and loved! Emanuel, tell me yet more, tell me his
thoughts and his beginning.'
"'God is eternity, God is truth, God is holiness,--He has nothing, He
is all, the _whole heart_ conceives Him, but no _thought_; and _we are
only His thought, when He is ours_.[6]----All that is infinite and
incomprehensible in man is his reflection; but beyond this let not thy
awestricken thought go. Creation hangs as a veil, woven out of suns and
spirits, over the infinite, and the eternities pass by before the veil,
and draw it not away from the splendor which it hides.'
"Silently we went hand in hand down the mountain, we perceived not the
storm-wind for the voice of our thoughts, and when we entered our
cottage, Julius said: 'I shall always think the greatest thought of
man, amidst the music of my flute, amidst the roar of the storm, and
amidst the falling of the warm rain, and when I weep and when I embrace
thee, and when I am dying!'--And thou, my beloved Horion, do so too.
"Emanuel."
* * * * *
The petty woe of earth, the petty thoughts of earth, had now flown
away from Horion's soul, and, after a devout look into the open
starry heaven, he went, led by the hand of sleep, into the realm of
dreams.--Let us imitate him, and come upon nothing further to-day.[7]