Police-Regulations of Pleasure.--Church.--The Evening.--The
Blooming-Cavern.
Hardly had Victor waked from his sleep, though not from his dreams,
when the low talking of all his thoughts, the Elysian stillness that
pervaded his whole heart, told him that to-day his _Sabbatical weeks_
came on. Without reproach or design of a misstep, without a sigh of his
conscience, he went guilelessly to meet joy and love. The tenderer and
more delicate a flower of joy is, so much the clearer must be the hand
that plucks it, and only cattle pasture can bear filth; just as those
who pick Imperial tea deny themselves beforehand all gross fare, that
they may pluck the fragrant leaf unsoiled.--Victor had, out of doors,
hardly dawn enough to see on his broad hour-watch of Bee-father Lind's
the first hour of his Sabbath; but this watch, the step-marker on the
so beautiful road of the Bee-father's life, and the morning-service of
nature, which consists in stillness, fortified his purpose of prefixing
his present life to the second life after death as a still, cool,
starry spring-morning.
"By you I swear,"--said he, as, by degrees, more and more larks soared
up singing out of their dew into the morning-hora,[97]--"I will even in
joy remain composed for thirty whole years together, at least for
three whole Whitsuntide days,--I will be a university-friend and
house-friend, but not a Wertherish lover of enjoyment.--Does not man
act as if his path of life must be a bridge of connected honey-combs,
through which he has, moth-like, to chew his way, as if his hands were
only sugar-tongs of pleasure?--I will again apply the sportive faculty
as a bridle to my pleasures and my pains. The warm tears of melancholy,
especially those of rapture, a sort of hot vapor which propels and
decomposes more mightily than gunpowder and Papin's[98] machines, I
will indeed shed, but cool them a little beforehand.--And if I do not
get sight of Clotilda every forenoon, I will simply say, A man cannot
be always in the third heaven, he must also sometimes stay over night
in the first."--He has, perhaps, more reason than power; but, it is
true, health of heart is equally removed from hysteric spasms and from
phlegmatic torpor, and rapture borders more nearly on pain than on
tranquillity. But no tranquillity or coolness is worth aught but that
which is _attained_,--man must have at once the _capacity_ and the
_mastery_ of passion. The _freshets_ of the will resemble those of
_rivers_, which for a time muddy all the _springs_; but take away the
rivers, and the springs are gone too.--
The increasing dawn veiled one distant sun, after another; and when at
last the near one had risen, or rather nature, then could Victor see
and read and take my work (the well-known _Mumien_) out of his pocket.
A book was for him, in the midst of free, stimulative nature, a pair of
_garden-shears_ to his wantonly up-shooting dreams and joys. This
morning sparkling with a whole spring, this flashing on all brooks,
this humming out of blossoms into blossoms,--this blue hanging sea,
over which the sun sailed like a Bucentaur,[99] in order to throw on
the bottom of that sea, the earth, the marriage-ring,--such a Present
beside such a Future would even now at the third hour have deprived him
of the strength, in obedience to his new constitution, to rule over his
ecstasy, and to preserve steadily so much repose as is needed for a
_mezzotint_ between a rapturous and a dull day,--I say he would not
have had that power without his biographer, I mean, if he had not had
my book before him, in the second part of which he had still the
schoolmaster Wutz[100] to read. But this learned work--I venture
without self-conceit to flatter myself--set the proper limits to his
rapture. For thus,--as he walked along reading,--(as others, e. g.
Rousseau and I, read while eating, and take a bite now from the plate
and now from the book,)--as he contemplated the life of the
schoolmaster till a new valley or a new wood opened,--as he listened
now to this printed chorister, and now to a living one before whose
Whitsuntide songs he passed by: in this way he could keep his
ideas, with all their rondos and knights'-jumps, in such a fine
ball-room-order and church-discipline, that he was as happy as the Wutz
he was reading of. Besides, I was still crying to him on the stretch
out of my _Mumien_, to be discreet, and to give heed to my little
schoolmaster as a file-leader in the arts of happiness, and to _get the
kernel_ out of every day, every hour. "Besides, I am a reprobate," said
he, "if I do not do it; good God, is not then the very sense of
existence,[101] and the first sweet breakfast after every waking, a
_standing_ enjoyment?"--He reflected, to be sure, that culture gives us
spectacles, and takes away in return the papillæ of the tongue, and
compensates to us for our pleasures by the better definitions of them
(just as the silk-worm, as caterpillar, has _taste_, but no _eyes_,
and, as butterfly, has eyes without taste), he confessed to himself,
indeed, that he had too much understanding to have so much contentment
as the Auenthal schoolman Wutz, and that he philosophized too deeply
besides; but he also insisted upon this: that "a higher wisdom must
nevertheless (because otherwise the all-wise would be necessarily the
_all-unhappy_) find a way again out of the sweltry parterre of the
lecture-room into a parterre of flowers. Lofty men produce, like
mountains, the sweetest honey." ...
Although, even while he was in the last village, the suburbs as it were
of Maienthal, he heard the last tolling, still he was not provoked at
the belated arrival. Nay, to show himself that he was the philosopher
Socrates, he passed on with a diligent increase of slowness, and did
not, like the Athenian, make a libation of the cup of joy, but did not,
in fact, yet fill it up. "Float on," he said to a little cloud formed
of collected lily-pollen, "and be wafted before me in advance over the
_good hearts_, thou pillar of cloud at the entrance of the promised
land!--And may thy little shadow silhouette for them the more fixed
one, which follows more lazily, and which is absorbed later by the blue
of heaven!"--And ere the winding footpath placed him before the
flower-curtained gate of the valley, wherein stood the beloved cradle
and nursery-garden of his fair three-days future, he was arrested by a
closed thistle, around whose sealed honey-cups a white butterfly was
drawing his third parallel,--and the mosaic thistles on Le Baut's floor
started into life before him, and showed him the stings of the past;
then he felt it incomprehensible how he had been able to endure his
sorrows, and easier to bear the heaven of joy....
He took out Lind's watch, in order to know the birth-hour of his
honeymoon or honey-week,--precisely at 11 o'clock he came out before
the neat village, before the green-house of his heaven, before the
colony of his hope, before Eden.... Ah, the murmuring little village
buried in foliage seemed to throw all its blooming twigs, like arms,
around, and knit himself to itself; it was green and white and
red,--not painted, but overspread with leaves and blossoms. And when,
as the ringing died away,--in order avariciously to hoard up for
himself the embrace of his Emanuel, and in order to come upon the
Maienthal church music with a heart opened by Nature,--he stole into
the long, clean village, and ran Friendship's toll for a few minutes at
Emanuel's house, it seemed to him as if his peacefully glad heart in
the still lanes rocked with the birds on the cherry-twigs that latticed
the window-panes, and hovered with the bees in the cherry blossoms.
"Come right in," all seemed to say, "thou good man, we are all happy,
and thou shalt be so too."--He approached the shining church, whose
dazzling stucco flung by contrast upon the blue of the sky a sublime
darkness, and his beating heart trembled blissfully with the waves of
the organ within, and with the rustling birch-tree fixed in the ground
before the church-door, and with the dry May-pole, in the middle of the
village, bowed by the morning-wind....
"But," says my reader, "could then his eye so long deny itself the
fairer prospects, and his heart the more beloved beauty, and, instead
of the Abbey, seek out only the church?"--Oh, he looked after that the
very first thing of all, and his eye ran trembling around all the
windows of his sun-temple; but as he found all of them open and empty,
and all the curtains drawn up, he guessed that its fair conclave of
sisters, and among them the conclave-sister of his heart, were there
where he sought--and found them,--in the temple. He went up unheard,
during the tramping down of the church-goers, into the front-stall of
the nobility, which from without appeared empty, that flower-stand of
the convent-nuns. There was nothing there but dropped birch-leaves; for
the body of nuns and the Abbess and Clotilda stood--below in the
Church, and encircled the altar with a choir of singing angels, and
took the sacrament there.--With a thrill of joy he beheld the queen of
his heaven, the so dearly loved and undeserved, the shining angel,
melting her vestment of earthly snow with heavenly warmth to tears, in
order soon to become invisible.----His spirit bowed itself as she
knelt: "Drink heaven's peace," he said, "out of the sacred chalice of
the great man, among whose thoughts was never a cloud nor a sigh,--and
may the thought which thou now contemplatest with such steadfast
devotion be destined to become more and more luminous and immovable,
like a sun, and always to throw a warm evening-light over the weary
soul!"--This angel in mourning-attire called forth in his inner being
by an awakening of the dead all the virtues of his life and all its
faults, and gave those a heaven and these a hell; he was, therefore,
now too holy to disturb a saint by making his appearance, even
supposing her tranquil eye, absorbed in pious emotions, which did not
so much as fall on the nearer devout beauties to the height of the
waist, had been able to lift itself to him. The birch at the first
window of the loft he kept before him as a leafy fan;--this green veil
playing on his cheeks covered his attentiveness and his tears of joy
from the whole church. The place where he was so happy seemed, to judge
from an inscription on the glass, to have been once the usual stand of
Clotilda; for Giulia's was near by, as I know for certain, because on
the stall-window a G and C, enclosed by a wreath, had been cut in with
the words by Giulia: "Thus are we united by the flowers of life and the
circle of eternity." ...
Victor slipped away unseen and early out of this niche of removed
goddesses, and bore his heart filled with love to the open breast of
friendship,--to Emanuel. He saw already the latter's tabernacle of the
covenant in the temple of Nature,--when his rapture was delayed by one
of earlier date. Julius lay in the blooming grass with its waves
rippling over him, and holding a cherry-twig full of open honey-cups in
his hand, in order to draw the bees to him, and to delight himself with
their murmurous hovering over the blossoms. Victor embraced him, and
forgot in the ecstasy to name his name,--"Art thou my angel?" said
he.--"I am only thy Victor!"--"O come! O come!" said the blind youth,
trembling like a melody, and drew his friend to Emanuel's house; but he
led him, behind the cloud of his blindness, the longer way, and,
besides, he turned round at every fourth step for a renewed embrace.
When they came to the water-wheel, which loudly emptied its
sprinkling-cans on the flower-beds, and whose shivered lightnings
flitted against Emanuel's windows and ceiling, then the blind one said,
"Embrace me once more right heartily."--But amidst the din of the
rain-shower, and amidst the stupefaction of love, they were pressed
together by other arms than their own, and the two young hearts were
linked to a third, and the East Indian gazed like a god of love from
one to the other, and said: "O ye good youths, remain ever thus, and
weep on in your blissful love!--Blessings on thee, my Horion, and a
welcome in the great spring round about us!"--And when Emanuel and
Victor sank on each other's necks, then was it as if all the
flower-beds bowed down for rapture, as if all the waves flamed more
radiantly under super-earthly lightnings flying over them, as if the
zephyrs swelled with sighs of love, as if higher beings must needs
whisper in the over-measure of joy: O ye good human beings, verily ye
love like us!--
An arm out of a river of Paradise lifted and bore this loving trinity
into the leafy rooms, and here, for the first time, Victor saw that the
spring was on Dahore's cheeks and the summer in his eyes, as well as
twelve May months in his heart. The white mourning-roses on his cheeks,
which always seemed to bloom like _mural crowns_ of death against St.
John's-day, had given place to the red ones,--in short, Emanuel's face
gave the hope that he had been, in regard to his death, a false
prophet.--
In this waving apartment, whose golden wall borders were linden-boughs,
and whose splendid tapestries were linden blossoms, and over whose
door, as door-paintings, flickered the reflection and the mock-suns of
the flashing water-wheel, in this four-walled island, surrounded by
Nature's roaring sea of joy, through whose open windows the zephyrs
flung bees and butterflies over the window-flowers among the lindens,
my hero, to whom, besides, the noonday hum of bells appeared like a
ringing call to a peace-festival of the earth, felt himself wading
through flowers of joy up to his heart.--Emanuel's poesy sounded to
him, in this epic intoxication, like prose; he was, as it were, sunk in
a thicket of flowers, and, lifting his eyes, saw overhead a healed
immortal who bent apart the blooming envelopment,--and still higher up
an eternal Whitsuntide sun in the infinite blue,--and nearer above him
the sprouting of the flower-leaves, and above this the swarming of
bees,--and a golden morning-red, wound as a living frame round about
the whole variegated incense-breathing woodland....
--By Heaven! only to lie in a _literal_ flower-wood of this kind were
of itself something,--to say nothing of lying actually in a
_metaphorical_ one!--Victor was devout with joy, still from
overfulness, contented from gratitude. The aspect of their common
teacher gave, it is true, to Clotilda's image warmer colors, and to his
soul higher flames, but imparted to his wishes no insatiableness and no
impatience.
Emanuel immediately began speaking of that beloved pupil of his;
not at all as if Clotilda had clearly described to him the third
Easter-holiday, or as if Emanuel had guessed it, but this guileless man
simply knew not the difference between love and friendship, and he
would have said of himself as well as of Victor, that he loved her. And
just this childlike _naïveté_, which, through the open chamber of a
woman's heart, watched for no right of transit nor for any breaches,
but laid bare his own, and which fished for no confessions, found fault
with none, took advantage of none,--this quality must have been just
what would bind with the Gordian ganglion of sympathy the shyest female
soul to so open a manly one. Nay, I believe Clotilda could more easily
have made known her love to her teacher than to her beloved.--As this
Emanuel now told him how he had pictured to her all the scenes of his
former sojourn here,--and all his raptures,--and his confession of
friendship for her,--how he had read to her his letters, and how the
second (that disconsolate one on the night of the Stamitz concert) had
forced so many tears into her eyes,--and as Victor saw how very much
his friend had by his breathing on it drawn her love open like a
closing tulip-cup,--all this kindled his love for her, his friendship
for him even to devotion, and in a blissful embarrassment he kissed the
blind one. By this double love he now explained to himself Clotilda's
easy consent to his Whitsuntide journey.
He would have held it all Angel's- and a Peter's-fall from friendship,
not to propose directly the question to Emanuel, when he might see this
beloved--of Virtue.--"Now!" said the latter, who, despite his
respectful East-Indian gentleness toward women, knew not the
nose-rings, binding-keys, and dampers of our Harem-decency. But Victor
acted otherwise and yet thought just so. He had already asked when
abroad: "Why do they suffer the wretched police-regulation to stand for
maidens, that they, e. g., must never walk out singly, but always, like
Nuremberg Jews, under the escort of an old crone, or like the monks, in
pairs?" Not as if this would in any manner embarrass me, if I acted a
romance, but that it would, if I wrote one, where I should have to keep
to the female rules-of-march at the expense of the critical, and trail
round with me a convoy of auxiliary-women through the whole book as an
abattis to my heroine. Should I not be obliged, if I would so much as
get her out beyond the house door-steps, to march along beside her
with a crown-guard of female keepers of the seal? Should I not be
obliged by this confounded co-investiture and trading in company with
Virtue--there would be no such thing as doing business on one's own
account--to foist female friends on my heroine contrary to all
probability? I should think hard, to be sure, of a Spanish maiden if
she showed me her foot, and of a Turkish, if she showed me her face,
and of a German, if she went _alone_ to see the best young man; but
just because the most fanatical _blue laws_, which surely are blue
vapor on blue Mondays, become a real moral law for them, therefore am I
vexed at this deplorable pusillanimity, and wish to see nothing
forbidden but--waltzing and falling!... He has here, perhaps,
satire _in petto_; for, to speak seriously of the matter, this
sanitary-ordinance, that maidens must with us, as petitions with
princes, always present themselves in duplicates, has manifestly the
design of accustoming them all to one another, because they must have
each other's friendship for visits;--secondly, brothers and sisters
must be out of each other's hair, because they do not know whether they
shall need each other as collateral securities of their virtue and
second exchange-bills of love;--thirdly, these human ordinances give to
female virtue by the _minor_ moral-service (because great temptations
are too rare) daily exercise in religion, and higher importance, and
bear the same relation as the articles of the Talmud do to the Bible,
although a right Jew would sooner transgress the Bible than the
Talmud;--fourthly, we owe to these symbolic books of propriety the
earlier culture of that female acuteness for which we unhappily furnish
no other opportunities of attention than the oath they swear on those
books affords.
Victor at once blamed and followed, like a good girl, the female rules
of the order; court life had made him more courageous, but also more
refined, and, like the court itself, he was, among women, reconciled
to the writing-lines of the ceremonial. Therefore he purposed not until
the second day of Whitsuntide to make his regular diplomatic appearance
at the Abbess's, since to-day it was too late for anything, and besides
that he would not fly into the sweet, holy emotions over yonder like a
comet. And then too, his contentment told him, indeed, how little the
_neighborhood_ of a loved heart differs from its _presence_, which,
besides, is nothing but a nearer neighborhood.
Meanwhile he mastered himself at least so far as to go out with his
twin-brothers of the heart into the Colosseum of Nature, although he
did not conceal from himself that he should be in dread out there of
meeting Clotilda. And Emanuel lessened this fear but poorly, when he
confessed to him that she had hitherto with her wounded life gone every
day round the ponds as around magnetic healing-tubs, and through the
lawn as through field-apothecaries'-shops.--Hasten forth at last, ye
three good souls, into the Jubilee of Spring, which the Earth
celebrates yearly in memory of Creation. Haste, ere the minutes of your
life, like the broad waves on the two brooks, now still fleeting, and
flashing, and sounding, fly to pieces and extinguish themselves on a
weeping-willow,--haste, ere the flowers of your days and the flowers of
the meadow are veiled by evening, when instead of the vital oxygen they
shall exhale only poisonous air,--and enjoy the first day of
Whitsuntide ere it trickles away!
--And it has trickled away, and a summer already lies upon it to-night
as a grave; but the three dear hearts have hastened and enjoyed it,
before it faded.... They sauntered on among the zephyrs, those
sowing-machines of the flowers, as they came fluttering out of all the
bushes,--they came before the five pocket-mirrors of the sun, the
ponds, (the rivers being pier-mirrors and the gay shores the
pier-tables,)--they saw how Nature, like Christ, conceals her miracles,
but they saw also the bridal torch of the marriage-making May, the sun,
and a bridal chamber in every singing tree-top, and a bridal bed in
every flower-cup,--they, the wedding guests of the earth, turned not
away the bee, who drunk with honey revelled around them, nor did they
scare up the food-bringing mother, before whom the young bird with
trembling wings melted into invisibleness,--and when they had climbed
all the earthly steps of the eternal temple, whose columns are
milky-ways, the sun sank, like the thoughts of men, to meet another
world....
The fountain in the _garden of termination_,[102] which rears itself
half-way down the declivity of the southern mountain and gleams away
high over the mountain, already bore on its thin crystal column
a shaft recast by the evening sun into a ruby, and this glittering,
full-blowing rose contracted itself, like other flowers that had gone
to sleep, to a red point,--and the hanging columns of gnats in the last
beam seemed to say: To-morrow it will be fair again; go back; ah, you
play longer in the sun than we.--
They went back; but when Victor saw the five high white columns at the
western end of the beloved garden blink in the light of evening, his
exalted heart felt a yearning and a burden, and he restrained it not
from sighing: "Good Clotilda! ah, I should be glad indeed to see thee
even to-day; my heart is full of tears of joy over this holy day, and I
would fain pour it out before thee."--And when the whole park of the
Abbey reared itself proudly beside the evening-heaven, and took
possession of their hearts, then all at once said Emanuel,--who was
always like himself even in his raptures,--"I will tell the Abbess this
very day, so that Clotilda may lay up joy for to-morrow," and he
separated from them.... Noble man! thou that in four weeks hopest to
leave this flowery spring and mount to the stars above thee,--thou
thinkest more of immortality than of death,--no threatening Orthodoxy,
but the Indian love of flowers, hath trained thee, hence art thou so
blessed; thou art free from wrath, like every dying man, free from
greed and from anxiety; in thy soul, as at the Pole when every morning
the sultry sun stays away, the _moon_ of the _second_ world never sets
day nor night!--
Victor, alone, led the blind youth home, and both were silent and
embraced each other with brotherly tears behind every screen, and asked
each other neither for the reasons of the embrace nor of the tears.
When they had passed through the still village, and as they came along
by the park of the Abbey, Victor saw his Emanuel pass out of the last
bower into the dazzling convent. It seemed to him as if every one
therein already recognized him, as if he must hide himself. The garden
of inspiration was to be in the valley only the flower-bed in a meadow,
and not violently contrast itself with nature by sharp limits, but hang
over into it softly as a dream into waking hours with blooming,
embowered borders, and flow over into it with hop-gardens, with green
thick-set hedges around corn-fields, and with sowed-over children's
gardens. A large wide colonnade of chestnuts, set in silver by two
brooks, opened broad and free toward the five ponds with their pierced
work of blossoms. The northern mountain lifted itself up over against
the park like a terrace, and seemingly continued the Eden over unseen
valleys.
Victor avoided every opening window of the convent by means of the
chestnut-trees under which he led his blind one, and behind which he
could, unobserved, observe more nearly. On the shed-roof of the avenue
woven of green roof-laths the evening lay like an autumn gleaming
through with red streaks of splendor. He went, despite the danger of
detection, to the very middle, where the avenue divides into two arms;
but here he chose the right arm of the leafy hall, which bent away with
him from the convent, as well as from a nightingale which, in the midst
of the garden, sent out from a consecrated thorn-hedge her young and
her tones. The arbor rendered to him by its softening distances from
the bravura-airs of the feathered Prima Donna the services of a pedal
and lute-stop;--gently was he led on by the windings which the gradual
darkening and narrowing of the alley concealed, through the tones of
the nightingale that floated after him, through the thinner trickling
of the evening rays among the leaves between the two brooks, which now
glided away _inside_ of the chestnut-lane.--The brooks came closer
together and left room only for love.--The portico closed in more
coseyly.--The scattered flowers of the two banks crowded together and
passed over into bushes.--The bushes grew up into a garden wall and
touched each other at first in summits hanging towards each other,
loose and transparent, and at last darkly knit together.--And the
avenue and the arbor which had grown up under it blended their green
together, so as to make with their coinciding blossom-veils only a
single night.--Then in the green twilight was the arbor stopped up by a
web of honeysuckle and nest of blossoms, but five ascending steps
invited to the tearing asunder of the blooming curtain. And when one
parted it, one sank into a blossom-cleft, into a narrow, tangled vault,
as it were into a magnified flower-cup. In this Delphic cave of dreams
the cushion was made of high grass, and the arms of the seat of
blossoming-twigs, and the back of flowers massed together, and the air
of the breath of dusting dwarf-fruit-trees. This flowery Holy of Holies
was peopled only with bees and dreams, illuminated only with white
blossoms; it had for evening-red only the purple of night-violets, for
heaven's blue only the azure of elder-blossoms, and the blest one
therein was lulled only by bees' wings and by the five mouths of the
brooks meeting around him into the slumber in which the distant
nightingale struck the harmonica- and evening-bells of dream....
--And as Victor to-day, beside the blind one, trod the five steps, and
opened the blossom-woven tapestry door of the heaven: lo!--there--O man
beatified this side of death!--reposed a female saint with weeping
eyes, absorbed in Philomela's expiring plaints.... It was thou,
Clotilda, and thou thoughtest of _him_ with softened soul and
heightened love,--and he on thee with reciprocal love! O when two
loving ones meet each other in the _selfsame_ emotion, then and not
till then do they respect the human heart and its love and its
bliss!--Hide not, Clotilda, with any blossoms the tears under which thy
cheeks blush, because they should fall only before solitude! Tremble,
but only for joy, as the sun trembles, when he comes out of a cloud on
the horizon! Cast not down yet thy eye curtained with flowers, which
for the first time falls so calmly opened and with such a stream of
love on the man who deserves thy fair heart, and who rewards all thy
virtues with his own!... Victor was struck with the lightning of joy
and must needs remain immovable in the sweet smile of rapture, when the
beloved rose behind the flower-clouds like the moon behind an Eden
standing in full bloom, and in the womanly transfiguration of love
resembled an angel dissolved into a prayer.
The blind youth knew nothing as yet of the third blessed one. She moved
her hand, in sweet confusion, towards a too thin twig to raise herself
from the deep grass-bench; it seemed to her lover, as if this hand
reached to him out of the clouds of the second life a second heart, and
he drew the hand to himself and sank with his mute, overflowing face
down through the blossom on her throbbing veins. But hardly had
Clotilda bade _both_ a stammered welcome during the coming out from the
green closet, when there appeared to them the angel--Emanuel, who had
hastened from the convent to seek his friend. He said nothing, but
looked on both with a nameless rapture, to find out whether they were
right joyful, and as if to ask, "Are you not, then, now right happy, ye
good souls? do you not, then, love each other inexpressibly?"----Oh,
only a mortal is needed for sympathy in sorrow, but an angel for
sympathy in joy; there is nothing more beautiful than the radiant
Christ's head, on which the laying aside of the Moses' veil shows the
still, glad interest in another's blameless joys, in another's pure
love; and it is quite as godlike (or still more so) to contemplate the
love of others with a mutely congratulating heart, as to have it one's
self.... Emanuel, thy greater praise is kept in kindred souls, but not
on paper!--
On the cross-way of the alley the fair society parted, and the left
branch of the same led Clotilda along by the nightingale back to the
abode of gentle hearts. Victor, dissolved by his heightened love for
three human beings at once, arrived at the dusky apartments of Emanuel,
lighted only by setting stars, and found there a spread table which the
refined Abbess had sent to the guest or to the host, for Emanuel at
evening ate only fruit. One wishes to share everything with one's love,
even the kitchen. Emanuel after Easter never lighted a light. In the
clar-obscure, made of the fusion of lunar silver and linden green, the
blissful trefoil[103] bloomed under the evening star. Victor, by his
professional pictures of the night-cold, put his invalid friend out of
conceit with night-walks, and went alone with the blind one at this
late hour out to the dormitory of hushed Nature.... Blessed is the
evening which is the fore-court of a blessed day. The May-frost had
cleansed the stars from the warm breath of the vapor, and deepened the
blue of the celestial hemisphere, to make a beautiful night the earnest
of a beautiful day. All was silent around the village, except the
nightingale in the garden and the rustling May-chafers, those heralds
of a bright day.--And when Victor went home with an upward sigh of
thanks for these Whitsuntide hours, of which each handed the next the
box of powdered sugar to sweeten the short moments of a still mortal;
as he passed along before the muffled confession-hymns, which here a
twelve-years-old little man who to-morrow was to take the sacrament,
and there one by the side of his mother, sang; and when, finally, a
vesper-hymn breathed out from the Abbey, and, swimming forth as it were
on a single lute-tone, brought the fair day with a swan-song to its
close, and when nothing more was left of the soft day except its
resonance in the heart of the happy one and in the evening song of the
convent, and its reflection in the fleeting evening-red of heaven, and
in the contented and still smiling face of the sleeping Emanuel;--then
did the mute joys in Victor's face look like prayers, the undisturbed
tears like overrunning drops from the cup of gladness, his stillness
like a good deed, and his whole heart like the warm tear of joy shed by
a higher genius.
Victor led the beloved blind one softly to his place of slumber, where
dream restored his disordered eyes and arrayed the little landscapes,
of his childhood, with morning hues, more brightly around him.--He
then laid himself down without undressing himself, opposite to the
moon which hung low above the horizon, and sank to sleep on the
building-ground of our fairer air-castles, on the sounding-board of
childhood, where morning-dreams lead consecrated man out of the
wilderness of day to the mount of Moses, and let him look over into
the dark, promised land of Eternity....
The first Whitsuntide day, dear reader, in this tri-clang of rapture,
has died away; but in these three high festivals of joy, as with those
in the almanac, the second is still fairer, and the third the fairest
of all. I shall not at all hurry with the movement of my pen through
these three heavens,--nay, if I could certainly know that the acting
persons in this history would never get to see my work, I should shift
the boundaries of this Eden, by adding much that, on nearer inspection,
would not prove historically true.--