F. Koch's double Jews-harp.--The Sleigh-ride.--The
Ball--and....
The reader will wish, with me, that the third Easter-holiday ended
something worse than the long 28th Dog-Post-Day.
The sleigh went tolerably, so far as could be foreseen.----I however
foresee yet something quite different: that half a million of my
reading-customers (for the other half I will answer) cannot find out
what is in my hero. It is therefore my office to tell them only so much
as this: Victor was never pusillanimous, man's subjection to the yoke
of fortune disgusted him; once every day Death took him up on the
Sublime Arm, and let him, looking down therefrom, remark how diminutive
were all mountains and hills, even graves. Every misfortune hardened
him to steel, the Medusa's head of the death's-head turned him to
stone, and the melting sun-glance of joyful emotion always vexed him in
the remembrance. His sportive humor, his ideal of female perfection,
the want of opportunity, and the shield of Minerva, had helped
him along over the wind-months of feeling, and he had hitherto
worshipped no other sun than the one which is twenty-one million miles
distant,--till Heaven or the Devil brought along the nearer one, just
in the year 1792. Still things would have gone quite tolerably, and the
misfortune would have been easy enough to get through with, if he had
been discreet or cool; I mean, if he had not said to himself: "It is
fine to weep never for one's self, but yet for another; it is fine to
worry down every loss, except that of a heart; and which will a
departed friend from his lofty place count greater, if I deliver
consolatory sermons to myself on his decease with true composure, or if
I sink, yearning, after the loved one, in voluntary, overmastering
sorrow?"
Thereby,--and from unacquaintance with the over-powering influence of
noble but untamed feelings,--and because he confounded his previous
accidental calm of the heart with a voluntary one,--and from an
overflowing love of humanity,--he had intentionally let the feelers of
his inner man up to this time grow too large,--and thus, by the whirl
of all the previous influences, the previous bereavements, the previous
emotions of these Easter-days, of this fair village of his youth, he
had been driven so far out of his course, that, notwithstanding his
considerateness, his court-life, his humor, he forfeited (at least for
Easter) somewhat of his old dissimilarity to those geniuses who, like
the sea-crab, stretch out feelers which a man can hardly span with his
arms....
That sympathetic look of Clotilda which yesterday, after his previous
heat, had been a cooling balm, was to him to-day a very burning one;
the thought of her eye full of tears for him conjured up all the days
of his love for her and her whole image in his heart. I am convinced
that not even the Regency-Counsellor, who, for the rest, might by
yesterday's funeral-sermon have lost something of his jealousy,
as well as, by the republican diversion, somewhat of his love for
Clotilda, failed to note the drunken and dreamy look of his eye. The
parsonage itself was fortunately to-day an exchange, or a spiritual
intelligence-office and recruiting-house; the Chaplain registered--not
any of your French _car tel est notre plaisir_, but--the catechumens
who were to confess at Whitsuntide.
He would not go over to the castle--his misunderstood friend Mat
had already by ten o'clock called to him out of the window a
morning-greeting and congratulation upon the snow-storm--until his
sleigh had come from the city, so that he might start off at once,
because he would not show over yonder any ridiculous emotion. Since the
great world had become for him a work-day world, to disguise his
feelings from it became harder; one conceals one's self most easily
from those whom one respects.
But the three twins and Franz Koch carried him over earlier than he
would have gone, as early as half past five o'clock in the afternoon.
The name of Franz Koch in the Dog's papers made me jump off of my feet.
If any one of my readers is a guest of the Carlsbad waters, or should
happen to be his Majesty, the King of Prussia, William the Second, or
one of his court, or the Elector of Saxony, or the Duke of Brunswick,
or any other princely person, he has heard the good Koch, who is a
modest pensioned soldier, and travels round everywhere with his
instrument and plays on it. This instrument, which he calls the double
Jews-harp, or mouth-harmonica, consists of an improved pair of
jaw-drums, or humming jaws-harps, played at once, which he shifts
according to the piece he is playing. His handling of the buzzing-irons
bears the same relation to the old Jews-harp playing as harmonica-bells
do to servants' bells. I am under obligation to induce such of my
readers as have wren's wings to their fancy, or at least, from the
heart upwards are _lithopædia_ (petrified fœtuses), or have the
ear-drum membrane for nothing but to be drummed on,--to induce, I say,
with the little oratory I have, such readers to tumble the aforesaid
Franz out of the house, if he undertakes to come and buzz before them.
For it amounts to just nothing, and the wretchedest bass-viol or rebeck
screams louder in my opinion; nay, its hum is so low, that he played at
Carlsbad before not more than twelve customers at once, because one
cannot sit near enough to him, particularly as in his leading pieces he
has the light carried away, that neither eye nor ear may disturb the
fantasies. If, however, a reader is differently constituted,--a poet,
perchance,--or a lover,--or very tender,--or like Victor,--or like me;
then, indeed, let him without scruple listen with still and melting
soul to Franz Koch, or--for to-day is just the time when he is not to
be had--to _me_.
The jolly Englishman had sent this harmonist to Victor with the card:
"The bearer of this is the bearer of an echo which he carries in his
pocket." Victor preferred, therefore, to take him over to the friend of
all sweet tones, that her departure might not deprive her of this
melodious hour. It seemed to him like going through a long church, when
he entered Clotilda's Loretto-chapel; her simple chamber was like
Mary's sitting-room, enclosed with a temple. She had already completed
arranging herself in her black ornamental dress. A black costume is a
fine eclipse of the sun, wherein one absolutely cannot take one's eyes
away from it: Victor, who, with his _Chinese_ regard for this color,
brought with him to-day to this magic a defenceless soul, an enkindled
eye, grew pale and confused at the radiant face of Clotilda, over which
the trace of a trouble that had rained out, hovered like a rainbow over
the bright, blue sky. It was not the cheerfulness of light thoughts,
which every maiden takes on when she dresses herself, but the
cheerfulness of a pure soul full of patience and love. He trembled lest
he should tread on two kinds of thistles,--on the painted ones of the
floor, over which he took care to step, and upon the satirical ones of
the fine observers around him, with which he was always coming in
contact. Her stepmother was still upon the stucco-work and finishing of
her worm-bag,[45] and the Evangelist was in her toilet-chamber as
assistant-priest and collaborator in the finery department. So that
Clotilda had still time to hear the performer on the mouth-harmonica;
and the Chamberlain offered himself to his daughter and my hero for he
was a father of good breeding towards his daughter--as part of the
audience, although he could make little out of music, table- and
ball-music excepted.
Victor now saw for the first time, by Clotilda's delight in the
musician he had brought with him, that her harmonious heart loved to
tremble in unison with strings; in fact, he was often mistaken about
her, because she--like thee, dearest * * *--expressed her highest
praise as well as her highest censure by silence. She begged her
father, who had already heard the mouth-harmonica in Carlsbad, to give
her and Victor an idea of it,--he gave it: "It expressed in masterly
manner, not so much the _fortissimo_ as the _piano-dolce_, and, like
the simple harmonica, was best adapted to the _adagio_." She
answered,--leaning on the arm of Victor, who led her into a still
chamber darkened for the occasion,--"music was perhaps too good for
drinking-songs and for mirthful sensations. As sorrow ennobled man,
and, by the little cutting pangs which it gave him, unfolded him as
regularly as they do the buds of the carnation, which they slit open
with a knife that they may bloom without bursting; so music as an
artificial sorrow took the place of the true." "Is the true so rare?"
said Victor in the dark chamber which only _one_ wax-taper lighted. He
came close to Clotilda, and her father sat opposite to him.
Blissful hour! thou--that didst once, with the echo-strains of this
harmonica, pass through my soul,--glide along by me once more, and let
the resonance of that echo again murmur around thee!
But scarcely had the modest, quiet virtuoso put the instrument of
enchantment to his lips, when Victor felt that now (before the light
was removed) he should not dare to do as at other times, when he
pictured to himself at every adagio appropriate scenes, and underlaid
every piece with peculiar fantasyings for its texts. For it is an
unfailing method of giving tones their omnipotence, when one makes them
the accompanying voices of our inner mood, and so out of instrumental
music makes as it were vocal music, out of inarticulate tones
articulate ones, whereas the fairest series of tones, which no definite
subject arranges into alphabet and speech, glides off from bathed, but
not softened hearts. When, therefore, the sweetest sounds that ever
flowed over human lips as consonants of the soul began to well forth
from the trembling mouth-harmonica,--when he felt that these little
steel-rings, as if they were the setting and touch-board[46] of his
heart, would make their agitations his own,--then did he constrain his
feverish heart, on which, besides, all wounds came out to-day, to
shrink up against the tones, and not picture to itself any scenes,
merely that he might not burst into tears before the light was gone.
Higher and higher swept the drag-net of uplifting tones with his heart
in its grasp. One melancholy remembrance after another said to him in
this short ghostly hour of the past, "Crush me not out, but give me my
tear." All his imprisoned tears were clustered around his heart, and in
them his whole inner being, lifted from the ground, softly swam. But he
collected himself: "Canst thou not yet deny thyself," he said to
himself, "not even a moist eye? No, with a dry eye receive this sad,
stifled echo of thy whole breast, receive this resonance from Arcadia,
and all these weeping sounds, into a broken heart."--Amidst such a
secret melting away, which he often took for composure, it always
seemed within him as if a breaking voice from a far region addressed
him, whose words had the cadence of verses; the breaking voice again
addressed him: "Are not these tones composed of vanished hopes? Do not
these sounds, Horion, run into one another like human days? O, look not
on thy heart; on the dust-cloud of the crumbling heart, as on a mist,
the gleaming forms of former days cast their image."--Nevertheless he
still answered calmly, "Life is truly too short for two tears,--the
tear of woe, and the other." ... But now, as the white dove, which
Emanuel saw fall in the churchyard, flew through his imaginings,--as he
thought to himself, "This dove, truly, once fluttered in my dream of
Clotilda, and clung to the ice-mountains; ah! it is the image of the
fading angel beside me,"--and as the tones fluttered more and more
faintly, and at last ran round in the whispering leaves of a
death-garland,--and as the breaking voice returned again and said:
"Knowest thou not the old tones? Lo! they sounded in thy dream before
her birthday festival, and there made the sick soul beside thee sink up
to her heart in the grave, and she left nothing behind for thee but an
eye full of tears, and a soul full of grief"----"No, that was all she
left me," said in broken tones his weary heart, and all his suppressed
tears gushed in torrents from his eyes....
But the light was just then carried from the chamber, and the first
stream fell unseen into the lap of night.
The harmonica began the melody of the dead: "How softly they slumber."
Ah, in such tones do the far-wandering waves of the sea of eternity
beat against the hearts of darkling mortals who stand on the shore and
yearn to put forth! Now art thou, Horion, wafted by a wave of harmony
out of the mist-rain of life over into the light of eternity! Hear,
what tones murmur round the broad fields of Eden! Do not the strains,
dissipated into breaths, reverberate from distant flowers, and float,
swollen by echo, round the swan-bosom, which, blissfully dissolving,
swims on pinions, and draw it on from flood to flood of melody, and
sink with it in the distant flowers, which a cloud of fragrances fills,
and does not in the fragrant dusk the soul glow again like a ruddy
evening, ere it sets in bliss?
O Horion, does the earth still abide under us, drawing its circle of
death-hills round the breadth of life? Do these tones tremble in an
earthly air? O Music! thou that bringest the Past and the Future with
their flying flames so near to our wounds, art thou the evening-breath
of this life, or the morning air of the life to come? Ay, thy sounds
are echoes, which angels snatch from the second world's tones of
gladness, to convey down into our mute hearts, into our dreary night
the faint spring-melodies of heavens flying far above us! And thou,
dying harmonica-tone! verily thou comest to us out of an peal of
exultation, which, driven from heaven to heaven, dies at last in the
remotest mute heaven, which consists of nothing but a deep, broad,
tranquil, and eternal bliss....
"Tranquil and eternal bliss," repeats Horion's dissolving soul, whose
rapture I have hitherto made my own, "ay, _there_ will lie the region
where I shall lift up my eyes toward the All-gracious, and spread out
my arms toward _her_, toward this weary soul, toward this great heart.
Then shall I fall upon thy heart, Clotilda, then shall I clasp thee
forever, and the flood of tranquil and eternal bliss will close around
us. Breathe again toward life, earthly tones, between my breast and
hers, and then let a little night, an undulating shadowy outline, swim
along on your light waves, and I will look toward it and say, That was
my life;--then shall I say more softly, and weep more intensely, Ay,
man is unhappy, but only on the earth."
O, if there is a human being over whom, at these last words, memory
draws great rain-clouds, to him, to her, I say, Beloved brother,
sister, I am, to-day, as much moved as thou; I respect the sorrow which
thou hidest,--ah! thou excusest me, and I thee....
The tune stopped and died away. What stillness now in the dark! Every
sigh took the form of a long-drawn breathing. Only the nebulous stars
of sensibility sparkled brightly in the darkness. No one saw whose eye
had been wet. Victor looked into the still, black air before him, which
a few minutes ago had been filled with hanging-gardens of tones, with
dissolving air-castles of the human ear, with diminished heavens, and
which now remained a naked, black firework-scaffold.
But the harmonica soon filled this darkness again with meteorological
apparitions of worlds. Ah, why, then, must it needs strike precisely
that melody which woke such restless yearnings in my Victor, the
"Forget-me-not," which sounded out to him the verses, as if he repeated
them to Clotilda. "Forget me not, now that fate sternly calls thee away
from me. Forget me not, when the cool earth one day rests lightly upon
this heart, that fondly beat for thee. Think it is I, when some soft
voice shall whisper to thy thought, Forget me not." ... And O, when
these tones intertwine themselves with waving flowers, when they flow
backward from one past to another, when they ripple more and more
faintly through the past years that repose back of man's memory,--at
last only murmur under the dawn of life,--only well up inaudibly under
the cradle of man,--and stiffen in our cold twilight and dry up in the
midnight, when each of us was not,--then does man, deeply moved, cease
any longer to conceal his sighs and his infinite pangs.
The still angel at Victor's side could no longer veil them, and Victor
heard Clotilda's first sigh.
Ay, then he took her hand as if he would sustain her, hovering over an
open grave.
She gave up her hand to him, and her pulse throbbed trembling in unison
with his.
Finally only the last lingering tone of the song still flung out its
melodious circles in the ether, and its wake undulated away over a
whole past,--then a distant echo wrapped it up in a fluttering breath
of air, and wafted it away through deeper echoes, and finally over to
the last which lay round about heaven,--then the tone expired and flew
as a soul into one of Clotilda's sighs.
Then the first tear escaped from her, and fell like a hot heart on
Victor's hand.
Her friend was overpowered,--she was carried away,--he pressed the soft
hand,--she drew it out of his,--and went slowly out of the chamber, in
order to come again to the help of the too tender heart, over whose
sweet signs night hung her veil....
The light which was brought in took away these dream-worlds. Matthieu
and the Chamberlain's lady appeared also. We will not, however, in this
soft mood, when one is precisely the severest against evil natures, say
or think anything about the new couple which cannot help its contrast
to our tenderness. Victor said this to himself, too, but more than
once; because the Apothecary's lyingly alleged engagement of Clotilda
to Matthieu impressed itself upon him in the liveliest colors, as
resembling that platonic union, in which the pure spirit, driven out of
its ether and with crooked-up wings, is immured in an unclean body.
Clotilda came back. She was in a state of embarrassment towards Victor,
merely because he was in one, or was to be still more so by her side in
the sleigh,--the swollen ball of her eye she withdrew from the light.
As condensation of tears, like inspissation of milk, oppresses and
destroys; his sadness, repressed and drawn back into his innermost
being, sought an outlet through the voice, which was vehement and
abrupt; through the motions of the body, which were quick; even through
vivacity of expression;--in short, it was well that they started.
He thought the opposite again, when he stood behind her on the sleigh.
The night seemed to have withdrawn behind the clouds, whose wide arch
occupied the heavens. He could not hunt up any subject of conversation,
let him think as much as he would,--he ran through Clotilda's,
Victor's, all his acquaintances' lives,--nothing occurred to him. The
reason was, that his thoughts, which he sent out on this errand,
returned every minute without his knowledge, and hung like bees on
Clotilda's noble profile, or on her soft eye, or buried themselves in
that tear of hers which had fallen on his hand, and in the whole
ethereal sea of to-day's tones. The dark heaven above him finally put
into his head Emanuel's last communication, and he could relate to her
out of that the blind youth's initiation into the highest thought of
man. Clotilda listened to him with delight, and at last said: "No one
is more fortunate than a pupil of such a teacher: but he must never go
into the world,--there he will be so no longer. His teacher has given
him too soft a heart; and a soft heart, as you yourself say, hangs,
like soft, fruit, so low down, that every one can reach and wound it;
the hard fruits hang higher."
They had arrived now at the hard fruits of the capital, and her
remark was her own history. But the new scenes,--the rattling
carriages and rustling dresses,--the much ado about little or
nothing,--the hall-lights like systems of fixed stars,--the double
mouth-_un_harmonicas,--the masculine court-fauna,--the feminine
court-flora,--the whole mobilized pleasure camp,--this din of a fair
drowned the muffled echo which passed to and fro between two harmonious
souls.
Our hero was received by the Princess in a more friendly manner than
even by the Prince. Joachime, Clotilda's lieutenant in office, had, in
addition to her cold angry friendliness, a _montre à régulateur_ rich
in jewels. In a public place it costs less than in a cabinet to cover
the inner man with the outer as with a theatrical mask. Victor, on
whom, besides, every _sorrow_ produced the witty effect of
_intoxication_, betrayed the former at most by the exuberance of his
vivacity.
A woman betrays herself by the opposite,--Clotilda by nothing. He
expressed to her in the singular stunned state into which outer tones
of joy and inner fantasies put one, when they come together like two
streams meeting, the following ideas: "Were I the Goddess of delight
(if there is one), I would have it strike three; round the chandeliers
I would draw prismatic colors, or in fact would hang them up in the
cabinets and diffuse through the dancing-hall with incense a magic
twilight,--then I should have to set back the tones of the orchestra
through so many apartments, that nothing of the music should find its
way hither but a soft echo,--and then if in the glimmering maze,
breathing throughout with melodies, the people did not, after some
silent movements, feel like sinking away with ecstasy, I greatly
mistake." ... "Add further," said she, "in order that we too may have
one, that we stay here and observe the dissolving."
But his composure hardly ever at any ball survived the minuet. After
the first din was over, at least about the witching hour, his whole
soul was always dissolved into a poetic melancholy which hardly left
him the mastery of his eyes. Besides the tones, I can further adduce
the _motion_ as an explanation of this phenomenon: all motion, in the
first place, is sublime,--that is to say, of great masses; or rather
every quick motion imparts to the object the greatness of the space
hurried through: hence, in contrast with the end in view, objects in
motion are more comic than those at rest. Secondly, the movement of men
imaged to him their fluttering by, their fleeing into graves; often at
night he would stop in sad musing under the windows of houses, where
they were dancing in the second story, and look up, and the gliding by
of heads in their movement was to him the mad dance of _ignes fatui_ in
the churchyard.
To-night with his melted, overflowing soul, he felt this sooner than
ever. The Anglaise, in which one couple after another disappears from
the column, was the very image of our shadowy life, into which we all
march out with drums, and encircled with thousands of playmates, and in
which we grow poorer and poorer every year as we move onward, every
hour more solitary, and in which we hurry to the end forsaken by all
except a hired man, who buries us behind the goal. But death spreads
out, as it were, our arms, and folds them around our beloved brothers
and sisters; a human being feels for the first time on the brink of the
tomb, when he comes upon the realm of unknown beings, how much he loves
the known ones who love him, who suffer like him, and like him die.
As a woman in no way discloses to us more touchingly the whole blessed
past, than when she lifts her eyelids and shows us her beaming eyes,
accordingly he could not well help, during the dance, at least,
looking into an eye, which pictured to him nothing but heavens that had
set,--and to-night all was to set for him, even the eye itself. And as
Clotilda usually grew pale with dancing, he entered through her eyes
into her innermost being, and counted there the tear-drops that hung
undisturbed on the still soul,--the many incisions made by the
grafting-knife of fate for new virtues,--the clipped roots which fate
shortens in this flower as we do in lowlier plants, before
transplanting into another soil,--and the thousand honey-vessels of
sweet thoughts. And as he thought on all her hidden virtues at once, on
the supremacy of her womanly reason over her sensibility, on her easy
consent in regard to the ball which the Prince now imposed upon her, as
well as in regard to the rouging on which the Princess had before
insisted, and on her ready compliance, whenever she had to sacrifice
nothing but herself;--and as he held the thought before his mind how
she, not like the women of court and city, who, like shrubs at the
window of the greenhouse, spread themselves out after the light, but
like spring flowers, loved to bloom in the shade, and yet made as
little show of her fondness for country life as of her modesty;--he had
to turn away his eye from the delicate, upright flower, on which death
threw down the gravestone; from that loveliest soul who never yet saw
her worth in the glass of an equal; from the dying heart, which
nevertheless was not happy.
And then, to be sure, the thought before which he shrank into himself
sprang up like a storm: "I will tell her to-day how good she is,--O, I
shall certainly never see her again, and she will die, otherwise
unknown to herself! I will fall at her feet and confess my
inexpressible love. She cannot be angry; God knows I crave not her holy
heart, which no man deserves; I will only say, Mine shall never forget
thee, but it desires not thine, only it will break more gently when it
has trembled and bled and wept and spoken before thee." ...
Close behind this thought came to him Clotilda herself, hand in hand
with her step-mother, and, the face robbed of its color by the warmth
as roses are by the sun, the tired and more sick-looking features put
forth the silent prayer to come out into the fresh air and go home.
She went; her step-mother followed her at a distance. What a change of
scene! Under the eastern gate of heaven stood the moon, who had taken
off the funeral veil of cloud from the milky-way and the whole blue
abyss. She gradually laid out a ground of silver, and sketched upon it
with gleams and shadows a growing night-piece. The frost seemed to
condense her light into body, into white meadows, into tumbling
streams, into floating flakes; it hung glistering as white blossoming
foliage on the bushes, it glimmered up the eastern mountains, which the
sun had cast into ice-mirrors. And all above man and around man was
sublimely still,--sleep played with death,--every heart rested in its
own night.
And here, at this entrance, as it were, out of the turmoil of earth
into the still twilight-shrouded underworld, cold thrills and after
them glowing thrills ran over Victor's nerves. This happens when the
soul of man is too full and too sorely agitated, and all the threads of
the trembling web of the fleshly organism sway with it. His sleigh
became now a flying gondola. The night-air blowing against him kindled
all his flames. O the stream full of ice-points, if it had only swept
over him! the cool coverlet of snow, if it were only laid upon him! A
voice was continually crying within him: "Thou art bearing the still,
the patient one with her black veil to death; it is her hearse: the
noble pearl-diver has given heaven her sign that she has collected here
below enough sorrows and virtues, that it may draw her up again to
itself." The procession of mountains gliding by, the trees that whirled
past, the fields that fled away, this flight of nature seemed to form
together one great cataract that carried all before it, and man first
of all, and left nothing behind it but time. And as he rolled down into
the valley, where the city disappears, as did a year ago his female
escort, and the moon behind the trees began seemingly to scud through
the heavens, then he lifted his eyes toward the stars, and, bent
backward in a rigid gaze, spoke aloud as out of a shattered heart to
the heavens: "Deep blue grave over men, thou hidest thy broad nights
behind crowded suns! Thou drawest us and our tears upward like vapors.
Ah, cast not poor short-sighted mortals so far asunder, so infinitely
far! And why cannot man look up to thee without thinking: who knows
what loved heart I may not a year hence have to seek up yonder!"
His darkened eyes fell painfully from heaven--upon Clotilda's, which
were lifted over against his. The tear which had just fallen from her
eye down to her cheek she could neither conceal through the veil, nor
make believe to be a snow-flake which had melted on her face, since the
veil kept off the flakes; but such a tear needed no veil. Clotilda had
thought lie meant merely Emanuel, and therefore she was touched and
softened.... Like two parting angels, the two now beheld each other
with tearful eyes. But Clotilda withdrew hers, and her sinking head
bent. Nevertheless, she turned round again, and with her heavenly face
and heavenly voice presented to him the sweet prayer: "Bestow this warm
friendship upon my brother also; and forgive his sister today this
prayer, as I may not for a long time have an opportunity to renew it."
He bowed himself down low, and could not answer.
But when now her place of residence and her castle, from which the
silver rain of the moon ran down, gleamed before their eyes,--as the
moment came on, darker and darker, in which the parting (perhaps the
mask of death) was to take this still angel from his side,--as every
indifferent formula of leave-taking which he could imagine to himself
lacerated his sick heart,--as he saw how she leaned her head on her
hand and on the veil, in order, unobserved, to remove or check the
first signs of her farewell,--then did the whole cloud which had so
long been letting fall single drops into his eyes, rent asunder, rush
down upon him and flood his heart.... Suddenly he stopped.... He looked
with still gushing eyes toward St. Luna.... Clotilda turned round, and
beheld a colorless face, a brow full of sorrows, and a quivering lip,
and said bashfully, "Your soul is too good and too tender." Ay, then
his over-full heart burst in twain. Then gushed up all the depths of
his soul in which old tears had been so long accumulating, and lifted
up from the roots his swimming heart, and he sank down before Clotilda,
radiant with heavenly love and streaming sorrow,--mantled with the
flame of virtue,--transfigured by the moonlight,--with his true,
helpless breast, with his veiled eyes,--and the dissolving voice could
only utter the words: "Angel of heaven! the heart breaks at last which
loves thee inexpressibly. O, long indeed have I been silent. No, thou
noble form, never canst thou pass out of my soul.--O soul from heaven,
why have thy sufferings and thy goodness, and all that thou art,
inspired me with an eternal love, and with no hope, but with an eternal
sorrow?" Her agitated face lay bent aside from him in her right hand,
and the left covered only her eyes, but not her tears. A dying sound
implored him to rise. They heard the second sleigh far off.
"Never-to-be-forgotten one! I torment thee, but I will remain where I
am till thou hast granted me a token of forgiveness." She extended to
him her left hand, and the gesture disclosed a holy countenance full of
emotion. He pressed the warm hand to his flaming face, into his hot
streams of tears. Trembling, he again asked: "O, my fault grows greater
every moment! Will you, then, wholly forgive it?" ...
Then did the blushing face bury itself in the folded veil, and, turning
away, stammered: "Ah, then I must share it, noble friend of my
teacher."
Blessed, blessed man! After this word, the whole of earthly life has no
greater heaven to offer thee! Rest now in silent rapture with thy
overpowered face upon the angelic hand, into which the noblest of
hearts pours the blood that kindles for virtue! Shed all thy tears of
joy upon the dear hand which has given them to thee! And then,--if thou
canst for rapture or for reverence,--then lift up thy pure, glistening
eye, and show her therein the look of sublime love, the look of the
love which is eternal and speechless and blissful and unspeakable!
Ah! he, who had ever been loved by a Clotilda, could now read no
farther,--write no farther,--for ecstasy ... or else for pain!
Silent and sanctified he now sped along the fair road; the moon hung
down from heaven like a dewy morning overlaid with white blossoms;
spring stirred its meadows and its flowers under the veil of snow;
rapture throbbed in Victor's heart, swelled in his breast, shone in his
eye; but speechless reverence controlled his rapture.... They arrived.
And when, in the harmonica-chamber, where in the evening he had grasped
her hand for anguish, they now stood alone face to face, so changed, so
blest for the first time, two such hearts,--she like an angel who had
descended from heaven, he like a mortal who had risen from the earth,
to fill on the heart of the timid angel, and, speechless, to go back
with her to heaven.... What an hour! O, only for you, ye fair souls,
who have never experienced such an hour, and yet have deserved it, do I
go on picturing this one!... Like two risen ones before God, they look
into each other's eyes and souls,--like a zephyr, which two swaying
roses prolong, breathes between the trembling lips the speechless sigh
of bliss, drunk in by the bosom in quick inspirations, and issuing with
a tremulous thrill of glad awe in long expirations,--they continue
silent, to look at each other, they lift their eyes, to see through the
drop of joy, and cast them down again to dry it away with the
eyelid.... No, it is enough: O, there is another tear that now lies
heavily on the fair heart, which is silent and would say, I was never
happy, nor ever shall be!
Victor had so much to say to her, and had so few minutes more left for
it; and yet not so much joy as reverence made him dumb,--for sacred to
the loving heart is the form that has said to it, I am thine. But think
not he would make any such rude request to her, as that she would stay
here on his account; only the _question_ whether he might visit her in
_Maienthal_, only the _prayer_ that she would take thought of her
recovery, can he venture upon. Clotilda had only one to make to him,
which she could not sufficiently veil over, namely, that, for the sake
of her jealous brother, he would not see her in Maienthal.
During the lingerings of rapture, they hear the bells of the second
sleigh. Haste necessitated courage. Victor transformed his _prayer_
into the _wish_ that spring might favor the design of her journey
(restoration to health), and the _question_ into the _joyful thought_
how happy she would be in Maienthal by the side of Dahore, how blest he
had once been there, and how little he had once dreamed that one could
ever be still more so there. Clotilda answered (probably to his wish of
following her thither): "I leave behind quite as much to you,--my
_brother_ and your _friend_; forget not my former prayer."
Not until the approaching parents reminded Clotilda to throw back her
veil, and admonished her beloved to take his first leave of the heart
which he had won,--not till then did they both look far into the great
Eden which had opened around their life,--and the bright moment which
now darted by in the stream of time projected into eternity the images
of two heavenly forms,--one unveiled, pale-red, transfigured with
tears, and one glorified by love, radiant with the reflection of hope.
And now let no longer the hand sketch souls, which not even the great,
glowing eye of love can portray....
When the parents came, he felt, but he forgave, all possible contrasts.
He soon took his leave, that he might at home, in the silence of night,
throw the first prayerful glance over the stream of his future life,
which now glided on toward the grave in lines of beauty, and in which
gay minutes played like goldfishes.
In the stillness of night, not far from his wax-mummy, the happy one
thought to fall down before the Infinite Genius and thank him, with new
tears, for this night, for this friend, of whom he is the first love.
But the thought of doing it is the deed, and O, how could our touched
heart, which even before men is dumb, find any other words before the
Infinite than tears and thoughts?
And in this resigned frame, full of deep tranquillity, wherein I lay
down the pen, mayst thou, dear reader, lay aside this book, and say
with me, There may well be more sad days that will conclude like the
Twenty-eighth Dog-Post-Day.
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