Morning.--The Abbess.--The Water-Mirror.--Dumb Action
for Libel.--The Rain and the Open Heaven.
At two o'clock the morning-wind swept in more loudly and coolly through
Victor's open chamber, and shook already dew-drops from shiny foliage,
and the near whisper of leaves murmured through his ears into his
dreams. The lark, as the overture of the day, flung herself high up
into the gray of heaven, and rang in the morning's feast of trumpets.
This alarmist became in his dreaming the hovering after-echo which
blended with the morning; amidst the soft in-fall of the neighboring
sounds he slowly opened his eyes and dreamed on, and closed them again,
and was more awake, and sleep did not pass off like a thick shroud made
of night, but floated upward like a veil of morning perfume; and his
soul, without making a single movement of the body, opened with the
still awaking of a flower-cup in the presence of the morning....
--Now I am again already at boiling and blazing point,--and yet, as
often as I dip my pen in the ink, I make up my mind to gain the good
graces of the critics, and to write with my pen as with an icicle. But
it is impossible for me,--in the first place, because I am getting into
years. With most men, it is true, as with birds, singing ceases when
love does; but with those who make their head a hot-house of their
ideas, years, i. e. the days of drill therein, give the fancy as well
as the _passions_ a higher growth. Poets resemble glass, which, when it
is old and breaks, takes on motley colors.--But secondly, though I were
just blooming in my twentieth year, still I could not now write
frostily, seeing winter is at the door. Rousseau says that in prison
he produced the best poem on Liberty,--hence the French, those
state's-prisoners, used to write better prose on the subject than the
free Britons,--hence Milton poetized in winter. I have often carried
out my writing-tablets in summer, and undertaken to press it to this
silhouette board, and then take its profile; but fantasy can lay only
Past and Future under its copying-paper, and every actual Present
limits its creative power,--just as, according to the old naturalists,
the water distilled from roses loses its virtue precisely at the time
when roses bloom. Therefore I always had to wait till I became
unfaithful, before I could go at love with my drawing instruments....
On the contrary, a man who now, towards after-summer, on a Molucca
Island, primes and sketches the spring, must, for the foregoing
reasons, and for the further one that the flying-summer is the
regretful after-echo and silver-wedding of spring, hand it over to the
Gallery-inspectors with much too bright sap-colors.--
The gayly-embroidered description of Victor's sojourn in Maienthal may
well get to be as long as that of Voltaire's in Paris, with the
publisher's compensation for which the lean wag might have cleared the
rent of his _chambres garnies_. For just at this moment the dog has
actually handed in a fourth Whitsuntide day, and expanded the trinomial
root of the given _power_ of joy into a quadrinomial. As in this
quadruplicate of joy again, there is no wailing, no murder, no
pestilence, but only good, I joyfully catch the remaining images of
this spring in my camera-obscura, nor hover in anxious suspense, lest I
should have to drag out my hero (Knef has made over to me all the
Whitsuntide-days, and is only to send a little supplementary page
afterward) somewhat as I did my Gustavus,[104] from the collapsed
rubbish of his pleasure-palace and summer-house.--
Emanuel despatched in the forenoon his day's work of writing in his
astronomical tables, in order to spend the whole afternoon with his
guest at the Abbess's; he also offered him a little collaboratorship at
his flowers, namely, to pluck out the rosemary blossoms, and spread the
sunshade over the carnation-stand. With Emanuel, even in the prosaic
repose of the day, the wings always protruded far out from under the
half-wing-shells. Victor took the requests of his teacher as gifts. As
he picked away out there at the rosemary, the rising sun opened the
valves of the wind, and then, under its breath, all the registers of
the great organ of being began to go, and the tremolo of the brooks
rolled its waves on his ear, the flute-work of the birds pealed, and
the thirty-two footed pedal-register of the woodland roared. One little
parishioner's head after another, as he carried his twelve years
together with the same number of Herculean labors of memory to the Holy
Sacrament, creeping along behind its father, embroidered and stiffened
up with a wreath-knob, and generally with gold-spangles, passed by
before him. What a beautiful second Whitsuntide-day, which is generally
full of rain-clouds, have you, ye little folks, to-day!--Victor right
gladly indulged the grandees of the village, i. e. the drivers
of a full span and the schoolmaster's son, the hair-modeller and
queue-preacher Meuseler, who on the second Whitsuntide-day frizzled the
neighboring villages, and who with his holy-(powder)-sprinkler effected
the last effusion upon the little heads, which the Parson had been
moistening these six weeks. Victor's heart beat for joy, as if he had a
child, or were himself a child among them, when the motley, powdered,
animated chain, with dancing spangles, with long-stemmed nosegays, with
black-glistening spiritual _Musen-annuals_, marched in under the
commander's staff and shepherd's crook of their two consuls, singing
and besung and rung in and trumpeted in through the triumphal gate of
the church.--Ah! joy sits still more beautifully on children than on
us, just as an unhappy, a begging child, whose first child's-garden
fate has trampled down, and before whose eyes, at the first bursting
into existence, nothing hangs but black, misshapen morning cloud,
afflicts our heart more than his father beside him.--
"Pluck, like a berry, _every_ minute of your first day of triumph, ye
good children, and I wish the sermon would be right long, that you
might keep on so much longer your handsome dress!" said Victor, and
looked round toward the convent, whose windows were full of
unrecognizable spectatresses; he proposed to himself, on the return of
the juvenile procession, to seek out for himself from among the windows
with a pocket spy-glass the one with the fairest contents.--Just go,
kindly man, who lovest fair souls like fair nature, and endurest cold
ones like the winter-landscape, and who never revengest, just walk up
and down by the brooks, for there is the footpath of the fishers, and
because on thy poetic ring-races thou wouldst not harm a peasant by
trampling down so much as a forked wagon of hay, such as the children
braid out of hazel-rods! Fill the interval between the first heaven and
the third, when thou wilt sit down not with Abraham, but with thy
Clotilda at the table of the Abbess,--fill it up with a second, namely
with the embrace of all nature, which never looks more sweetly into the
soul, than when on it, not far from the soul, a beloved dwells!--
A stroll between two brooks that mingled their flashings and between
their lackered willows snowed over with foam-worms[105] overspread
the whole inner man even to every corner of a dark tear with
morning-splendor.--In addition to that Victor kept looking across the
meadow up at Emanuel's open window, and letting a smile float down from
it like a running wave full of light.--In addition to that, he did not
stop there, but went up twice and disturbed him in the midst of his
writing with a childlike embrace.--In addition to that, he put
seven-leagued boots on his eyes, and ran over the whole landscape, here
rising, there sinking, here shining, there shadowing, in order to catch
and size even here in anticipation a postal and travelling map of the
finest places for the afternoon-rambles with Clotilda, because in the
afternoon the raptures themselves will perhaps spoil the choice of
raptures!--And thus did Nature create over again in his spirit her
morning and her spring out of the earth-clod of the first spring, i. e.
out of the hot sun, out of the cool brook, out of the butterfly, whom
May shelled out of his hull, from the motley flies which the prolific
earth hatched out of the larva-seed like winged flowers.--Then he
closed his eyes amid the din of sparrows and swallows in the village,
and amidst the watch-cries of the larks, and against the dazzling waves
of the brooks, and let his soul dive down into the ringing sea and into
the chiaroscuro painted by the eyelid; but then would his heart have
been overwhelmed by creation's flood, which swept over it out of all
pipes and beds and mouths of life around him, out of the tangled
vein-work of the stream of life, which shoots at once through
flower-runnels, through tree-channels, through white flies' veins,
through red blood-canals and through human nerves, ... he would, in the
impotence of enjoyment, have been drowned in the deep, broad ocean of
life, which life-streams cross and fill, had he not, like every
drowning man, heard a peal of bells far down into the waves.
In short--church was out, and he had to go behind a leafy
hunter's-screen, in order, when the Panists[106] of the Lord's Supper
should march by out of the church, whose organ-music still followed,
and under the tower that still trumpeted after them, that then he might
see with his pocket-glass _who_ looked out of the convent. Clotilda's
face floated, as if called forth by magic out of the second world,
close to the glass, and he could, without fear of being driven away,
close his butterfly-wings around this flower; he could freely sink into
her great eyes, as into two flower-cups filled with the splendor of
dew. Never did he see so pure a snow of the white around the blue
heaven's-opening, which went far into the soul, now fairer than ever;
and when she cast down her eye toward the garden, the great veiling
eyelid with its trembling lashes stood just as beautifully over it as a
lily over a fountain. _Love_, like _drawing_ and like the germ of man,
begins at the _eye_.--When the children had gone by, then Clotilda
slowly and freely turned her face toward Emanuel's cottage, and gazed
across with the far-reaching, longing look of love....
And with such a love, beating like a heart in his innermost
consciousness, Victor with his two friends arrived up at the convent.
The Abbess (her name is not reported to me at all, not even her
pseudonyme) received him with a stately air, which her station had not
imparted to her, but had attempered. Her soul was born crowned. The
Princess of ----, whose chief governess she was, loved sometimes to
play the child (children inversely reciprocate, and represent their
representatives): but although she possessed a pride of thirty years,
she checked her hobby-horse so soon as the monarchical chief governess
appeared, than whom no one in the land (the swans excepted) carried her
head back so high. A lady like her, whose looks were throne-insignia,
and her words _mandata sacræ cæsareæ majestatis propria_,[107] had from
the hands of Nature herself the allegiance-medals and the throne
scaffolding, so as to weigh her imperial apple against young maidens'
apple of beauty,--such a one could rule and mould a Clotilda. Her soul
was painted by three masters:--the back-ground by the world,--the
foreground by the church,--the middle-ground by Virtue. Her æsthetic
parts placed her in a singular manner in a certain elective-affinity
with Emanuel's East Indian ones.
I know nothing more touching and beautiful than a woman's obeisance
when it springs from that deep respect with which alone good maidens
venture to speak their love.--Happy Victor! thy Clotilda received thee
with as much reverence as her teacher. Only the coquette is made by
love more dictatorial[108] (a silicious juristic word!); but the proud
one it makes modest and gentle. Never did he take a meal more
delightedly than in this bright pleasure-villa, before whose open
windows reposed a blue horizon and nearer at hand murmuring avenues,
filled with music, than in this decorated orangery of blooming
girls,--(whereas a gymnasium is a menagerie and a house of sisters an
aviary.)--Victor, who understood how to manage women even better than
men, felt himself as well in the busy ant-hill of these lively maidens,
as in an ant-bath,[109] and he was a second Bee-father Wildau, who
constructed for himself out of the swarm of bees now a beard and now a
muff. More manly sense is required for a certain refined gallantry,
than they have who in their satires confound it with the insipid kind;
just as only mountains afford the sweetest honey. Earnest must be the
groundwork of jest; respect and kindliness, of praise. Victor could
more easily before two than before thirty-two female eyes fall into
embarrassment, which, by the way, is the grossest blunder and Germanism
in female grammar. He had long since learned to combine the volatile
salts of woman's wit with the fixed ones of man's, as well as the art,
in great circles, of setting every soul, every caterpillar, on the
right leaf for its nourishment.
To him who had once said, "I wish I had to converse at least four times
a year with ladies, with whom one should have to apply so much
_tournture_,[110] that one actually would not know what he wanted, and
who were fine even to nonsense,"--to him a high lady like the Abbess,
whom, since the laying down of her high governess-ship, one could
confound a very, very little with a _précieuse_,[111] was a true
refreshment; for he could sketch her at least the physiognomical
fragments of the court with a thousand turns, i. e. a full face with
_five_ dots. But he had in this the still nobler design to draw off his
adoring attention, his heart that sometimes started in the shape of a
tear to his eye, from his beloved Clotilda, in order to spare her a
wholly different attention from his own. In a singular manner his
satirical feeling, precisely, always drew off the Moses' veil from his
serious feelings, from his softened soul,--that is to say, he was not
ashamed of a tear, simply because he knew that his humor could protect
him against the suspicion of exaggeration and against the mocker; just
as, on the other hand and inversely, his playing and flashing of wit
under tears, like phosphorus under water, conserved and nourished its
light.--
Fortunately, at this point, Emanuel, who in the midst of dinner had
gone out into the garden, came back and proposed taking a walk. For in
his soul great ideas were all that remained standing of life, as of old
Egypt only temples were left behind, no houses; and his ignorance in
little things must be ridiculous to _little things_.[112]--The Abbess
had taken Clotilda beside her on the throne as under-queen of
the fiery nuns. Victor represented in his single person the board of
wards of the Electorate of Brandenburg among these fluttering graces.
Clotilda gave over the blind one just to a whole dove-flock of the
liveliest way-guides, because they all sued for the boatman's and
forefinger's-office with the blind youth; they all loved him on account
of his heavenly beauty, but (as he could not see theirs) only in the
same way as they would caress a beautiful boy of five years.... At
another time Victor would certainly have looked round and made the fine
allusion that _beauty_ was leading _blindness_; but to-day he only
looked round for other reasons.
--At last the Island of the Blest, which had already gleamed far, far
out through the mist of his childhood's dreams, was now the ground
under his feet, and he made the voyages of discovery through his
heaven;--he and Clotilda were silent for some minutes, because their
hearts began to be softly agitated with joy, that they were at last
alone together and stood before the great esplanade of spring. Amidst
the blissful smiles, the dumb alphabet of rapture, and amidst trembling
respirations, that holy sanscrit of love, they had already arrived at
the first pond, over whose crystal mirror a bridge winds like gilded
foliage-work.--They stopped dazzled in the midst of this moon-disk and
looking-glass, because the parasol could not screen from two suns at
once, reckoning the one in the water; they turned half round, and
sought with their eyes in the picturing water the deeper heaven's-blue,
and two still, blissful forms, that looked at each other with their
moist eyes. O, his eye rested warmly in her reflected one, like the sun
upon the subterranean sun, and his trembling look was the long tremolo
and continuance of a single tone; for the goddess dwelling in the water
sank with her eyes to meet his soul, because she would fain avail
herself of the doubled distance of his form, which amounted to ten
feet.--To conclude at last the overmastering rapture, he withdrew his
eyes from this glass-painting and directed them (i. e. he merely
redoubled it) to the archetype itself; and the mutual inflowing of
glances, the trembling together of souls, threw into the short moment
the fields of a long heaven.--And they saw that they had found each
other, and that they had loved each other, and that they deserved each
other. As they went on, Victor could only say, "O that you might be
to-day as inexpressibly happy as I am."--And she answered softly,
softly as a zephyr exhaled from among tender, leafless blossoms, "I am
so indeed." ... Ah, I have often pictured to myself, if we all loved
one another as two lovers do, if the emotions of all souls, as these
are, were _tied_ notes, if Nature drew from us all at once, the
resonance of her strings stretching even beyond the stars, instead of
moving only a loving couple as a double harpsichord,--then should we
see that a human heart full of love contains an immeasurable Eden, and
that Deity itself created a world in order to love one.
But I will write again, as Clotilda spoke, who manifested the poetic
spirit only by actions, not by words, like players who know how in
speaking to evade the rhyme and metre of their poet.
The village, or rather the inn, gave their Jacob's ladder a _fourth_
round, the fourth Whitsuntide-day.--The Englishman, Cato the elder, who
had run away from Kussewitz and from his club with a travelling
orchestra of virtuosos from Prague, came out to see Maienthal also. He
could never in his life wait for anything. He told Victor he was coming
to see him to-morrow, to-day he should survey the cultivated prospects
and he was waiting with the overture of the Prague musicians only for
the close of the vesper-sermon. At last he told him that Flamin and
Matthieu were going a journey day after to-morrow, and were going back
again to Kussewitz, and consequently would stay there longer than they
had intended. This presence of the Englishman and the delayed return of
the jealous one settled all at once in Victor his last will, to
stretch the fourth Whitsuntide-day also as the fourth string on this
tetrachord of joy. And as on this fourth day the riddle about the angel
running through all the parts of this book is brought into the
deciphering-office of time, because Julius delivers the letter of the
said angel to Clotilda to read, he could make believe to himself he
stayed merely for that reason, and say to himself: "For the novelty's
sake surely one should tarry, to see what the state of the case is
about the angel."--Good hero! thou confoundest every angel with thine,
nor do I know why thou shouldst not!...
Now a shadow of a cloud flitted over them, a sort of forerunner of a
darker one which was seeking their souls. For Victor, who before a fair
heart could never shut up his own, who in the consecration of love
scorned all dissimulation, related to Clotilda, with that heartiness
which so easily marries itself to refinement, the reasons of Matthieu's
journey, namely, his own little folly in Kussewitz, when he played into
the Princess's hands the little billet-doux. He would at any rate have
been obliged, too, to make this disclosure, by way of obviating the
extraneous one of an accuser. But he presupposed too hastily on the
part of Clotilda a calculation of the chronology of his little annual
registers, and did not remark that he had written the billet before he
knew that Clotilda was not Flamin's _sweetheart_, but only his
_sister_.[113] She was silent for some time. He feared this pantomime
of anger, and did not dare to convince himself of it by looking into
her face. At length, on her favorite green spot, where in the greatest
depth the vale's green shadow rocks its painted twigs in the sheen of
sun and water, there she begged him with a voice neither cold nor
proud, but almost a voice of emotion, to let her rest a little on her
favorite grass-bench, whose arms were great flowers. As he stood before
her, he saw with alarm in her animated face--not a resentment wrestling
with courtesy, but--the touching struggle against the destiny which
darkened for her the darling of her soul, the unselfish grief at the
closed scar, which she wished away from his virtue. She felt, he felt,
as if the former year lifted itself up again from its death-pillow of
flowers of joy, which it had trampled on for both; they were right
sad,--Clotilda had hardly the mastery of her eyes or Victor of his
tongue,--till at last upon the latter the misunderstanding dawned. He
therefore said softly to her and in English: "Had his father made all
his disclosures to him earlier, he would have spared him more than one
conflict, more than one dark hour, and first of all the foregoing
folly."
In the higher love anger is only sorrow over the object. Clotilda
continued, however, the solar-eclipse of her fair features; but it
proceeded not from the continuance of the previous sigh, nor from the
usual inability to carry over at once a reconciled soul into an angry
face, but her discontent with her own hastiness always looked like that
which has another's for its object. She rose up therefore to give him
back her arm, and, as it were, the heart which lay near it. Victor did
not allow himself to break the doubled-voiced silence.--Emanuel came
after, and then Clotilda said with emotion, as if she were just
answering what had been said before: "Ah, I am only too closely
related to my brother on the side of my faults."--Did she mean
Flamin's jealousy, or suspecting nature, or more probably his
temperament?--Victor turned to her, as if to beg her pardon for what
she had said,--and her eyes said, "O, I ought not to have misunderstood
thee,"--and his said, "I ought not, even though unknown, to have denied
thee,"--and their hearts made peace, and the olive-branch twining among
the old flowers of joy bound their souls to each other.
Emanuel led them, as their guiding star, to his dear mountains, those
front boxes of the earth,--only from his mountain with the weeping
birch he kindly turned them aside for unknown reasons,--and his easy
climbing gave them joy over the restoration of his breathing. At last
they came out upon the throne of the region, on the mountain where
Victor, on the morning after the night spent in travelling, had looked
down upon Maienthal. O how the living plain of God, the foreground of a
sun and of an Eden, stretched far away in such untamable, blooming,
breathing, undulating masses! How did heaven hang full of mountains of
incense, full of ice-fields of light! And a gentle morning-wind stole
out from the eastern gate overhung with cloud-bloom and played with
heaven and earth, with the yellow floweret and with the broad cloud
above them, with the eyelash under a tear and with the cornfields it
searched through!--How the eye dilates, when chased night-pieces of
cloud-shadows cut through the bright sunshine of the earth! how the
heart enlarges, when the morning-wind hurls the winged shadows
now over mountains, now into ponds of splendor, now into bowed
grain-fields!--But round upon the woods still ice-mountains of clouds
had settled themselves.--Ah, this field flecked with day and night,
this wall of nebulous glaciers, put Victor's heart into the old dream
again, in which he saw Clotilda on an ice-mountain with outspread
arms!--Ah, on this rocky peak rising above the southern mountain he
could see the _Isle of Union_, lying darkly with its tree-tops and its
white temple, and the thirsty heart staggered full of the mingled
draught of yearning and melancholy and love.--
Then he was glad to tell her that he had seen her that morning when he
gave the blind youth the note to Emanuel, and yet that he had denied
himself a visit to her,--only give him, Clotilda, a great, warm,
thankful look for his sparing of thy brother, for the nobleness of his
loving, and for his hiding of that love with a veil! She looked on him,
and when her eye grew warm with a tear, heaven bowed itself and came
down to them on a sunny cloud and touched the kindred beings with hot,
fluttering drops.--O thou good earth! thou good Nature! thou
sympathizest oftener (and always) with good men, than good men do
themselves!--Before him the dream passed in which Clotilda's tears
resolved the ground into an uplifting cloudlet....
But the approach of evening and the little shattered pearl-strings of
rain-drops rattling down called the fair group back to the cottage. The
girls; who with the blind one had not even quite climbed the mountain,
went no farther, but turned about and took the advance. Emanuel
withdrew himself to his hill of mourning, in order there to uncover his
flowers to the rain. When our loving couple reached the smoking vale
below, how heavenly was the evening and the earth!--In the great
evening-heaven above them waved tulip-beds of red clouds, between which
ran blue strips like dark brooks.--Behind them stood under the sun
mountains like Vesuviuses in flames, and the woodland like a burning
bush, and the prairie-fire running over the flowers caught the
cloud-shadows.--And all the larks hung with their [114]_ripieno_-voices
of Nature near the red ceiling-piece of evening, and every deeper
sunbeam held a humming chain-of-being made of happy insects.--And in
the sheepfold on the mountain a hundred mothers at once called lovingly
to a hundred children, and every sheep hastened bleating to its thirsty
kneeling lamb.----
Great evening! only in the Vale of Tempe thou still bloomest and dost
not fade; but in a few minutes, reader, all its blossoms for the first
time will open magnificently!--
Clotilda and Victor went along more closely and warmly, linked together
under the small sun-shade, which walled _both_ in from the transient
shower. And with hearts which beat more and more strongly, and, instead
of blood, sent round as it were devout tears of joy, they reached the
park; the warm tones of the nightingale came to meet them, the tones
wafted away from the musical retinue wherewith the Englishman was just
passing across the mountains floated after them like perfumes exhaled
from flowers.----But lo! while the earth still wore its gilding in the
fire of the sun, while the evening-fountain still blazed up like a
torch, when in a great oak-tree of the garden, in which motley glass
globes had been grafted instead of fruit, twenty red suns sparkled out
of the leaves,--then a warmed cloud melted asunder and came all down in
drops into the fire of evening and on the gleaming water-column....
The nuns who were nearer to the trees flew under the foliage; but
Clotilda, who deemed a slow gait more beautiful and becoming for a
female soul, went without haste to the neighboring "Evening-bower,"
which, raised above the garden, nowhere opens its thick leaf-work
except to the setting sun.--No, it was an angel, it was Clotilda's
sister, Giulia, who reposed on the tender cloud and let fall through it
her tears of joy, in order to compel her friend, whose arm rested on
her lover's as in a bandage, to the glimmering bower, where two blessed
hearts were to be most blest. Clotilda still lingered under the rain of
pearls and golden sand, and resembled the still doves around her, who
on all the roofs flung open their pure wings like variegated umbrellas
and held them under the bath,--and before entering Victor drew her
back, who said, oppressed with bliss, "Thou all-gracious one!" and
looked over to Emanuel's bower, on which the gate of Paradise built up
of mosaic stones, the rainbow, abutted itself and arched across through
heaven over the evening-bower and enclosed in its heavenly magic circle
the three loving souls.
And when they stepped into the dark bower which had only a small
opening toward the sun that blazed in through the rain, there lay
before the opening the evening-field, with the swaying fiery columns,
between which dashed the golden flood of the molten sun, and with
the lawns which stood even to the flowers in a sea of luminous
globules.--And fallen rainbows lay with their ruins on the blossoming
trees.--And little airs fanned the running-fire in the meadow flowers
and threw sparks out of the blossoms.--And the heart of man was swept
onward by the stream of rapture and swam burning in its own tears.
Like a transfigured saint Clotilda looked into the sun, and her
countenance was exalted at once by the sun and by her soul. And her
friend disturbed not the fair soul; but he took the white handkerchief
out of her hand and softly wiped away the colored particles dropping
from the foliage, encircled with flower-dust, and she gave him
voluntarily her hand. When she turned her eyes full of tears upon him,
he let the tears stand; but she herself removed them, and looked upon
him with a love over which soon the old ones glided, and said with a
smile that flowed forth blissfully: "My whole heart is inexpressibly
moved; pardon it, dearest friend, to-day everything in which it has
hitherto not been like yours!" ...
--Lo, then was the warm cloud emptied into the garden as if it were a
whole river of Paradise and on the streams angels playfully floated
down, ... and when bliss could no more weep and love could no more
stammer, and when the birds screamed for joy, and the nightingale
warbled through the rain, and when the heavens, weeping for joy, fell
with cloud-arms on the earth, aye, then two inspired souls met
trembling and rushed breathless on each other with quivering lips and
cheek pressed to cheek in glowing, trembling ecstasy,--then at last
gushed forth, like life-blood out of the swollen heart, great tears of
bliss out of the loving eyes over into the loved ones.--The heart
measured the eternity of its heaven with great throbs heavy with
bliss,--the whole visible universe, the sun itself had sunk away, and
only two souls throbbed against each other alone in the emptied,
glimmering immensity, dazzled with the glistening of tears and the
splendor of sunshine, stunned with the roar of the heavens and the echo
of Philomel, and sustained by God in dying of rapture.
Clotilda bent her head aside, to dry her eyes; and her mute darling
sank down and knelt before her, and pressed his face upon her hand, and
stammered: "O thou heart out of my heart, O thou for ever and ever
beloved one,--ah, that I could bleed, could die for thee!"--Suddenly he
rose, as if lifted by an immeasurable inspiration, and said in a lower
tone, looking upon her: "Clotilda, I love thee, God, and virtue
forever."
She pressed his hand and said softly: "Oh, how could man and fate wound
such a heart? But mine, Victor," she said still more softly, "will never
more do it wrong."----They came out from the bower,--heaven, like
their hearts had exhausted itself in tears of joy, and was merely
serene,--the sun had gone down simultaneously with the great moment.
Victor went _slowly_, as if he were passing along before a wide
Elysium, bearing in his heart the received Eden, home to Dahore's quiet
dwelling. Dahore, who had sunk to sleep in a sitting posture, swayed
softly to and fro, and Victor, although he would gladly have let his
heart cease its beatings on a second, congenial bosom, nevertheless
denied himself,--and slowly leaned against his swaying teacher. He held
for a long time the slumbering head on his tumultuous breast. His
tempest of joy cooled itself off into serene sky, and the refreshed
flowers of joy opened the incense-cups of memory. Dahore flung his arms
around his darling, and then, and not till then, woke up: for he had
dreamed he was embracing him, and when he woke, he was delighted that
it had not been merely a dream.
Enough!--And you, O ye human beings whom I love, take your rest on the
lap of memory or of hope, when, as I do, ye lay down these little
leaves!