THIRD DAY OF WHITSUNTIDE,
OR
BURGUNDY-CHAPTER.
The Englishman.--Meadow-Ball.--Blissful Night.--The Blooming Cave.
With men, as with misers, it never strikes anything but quarters of the
happy hour; like a bad clock, it never strikes full the Arcadian hour
of our hope. But in respect to the Whitsuntide days this is utterly
false,--they are magnificent, and as the outpouring of the Holy Spirit
was formerly represented in the old churches by the flinging down of
flowers, so do we shadow forth those of Maienthal by throwing out
flowers of speech. I have therefore actually unsealed a flask of
Burgundy, and set it beside my inkstand, in order, in the first place,
by my greater fire in this chapter, to bring over the critics of art
and nature to my side, who would rather break the staff over authors
than a lance with authors,--and secondly and simply to drink the wine,
which of itself is final object and teleology enough. A true Paradise
and kingdom of heaven we should have, if the reader also would himself
take something spirituous in such chapters. When the author alone gets
drunk, half the impression goes to the d----ogs; and it is a misfortune
that the reviewers have nothing to nibble and nothing to drink, else
they might minister to me as to a star by refracting me through their
_atmosphere_ and show me _higher_ and _broader_ than I stand.
Victor had hardly run out into the wet grass of the morning, when he
came upon the Englishman with his head under the sprinkling-pots of the
water-wheels. He gladly forgave this Cato the elder all his
singularities and the idiosyncrasy of his extravagant nature and his
comet-course; for he had himself in his eighteenth year been such a
hairy star, and so looked upon this man as a comet-medal struck for
himself. Although the Briton _affected_ singularity, Victor knew from
his own experience that it arose not from vanity, (one can, if one
will, extract vanity from all, even the most innocent, actions, as well
as _air_ from all bodies,) but it proceeded from humor, for which the
enjoyment of an eccentric part, whether we shall _read_ or _play_ it,
has full as many charms as it has for the sense of freedom and of
inward power. Vain men succumb to the ridiculous, which the whimsical
man defies; and the former hate, the latter seek their likenesses. The
only thing which Victor had against him was that he would not show
others little indulgences, for the simple reason that he never desired
any either; and this very war, inseparable from humor, with all the
little weaknesses and expectations of men, had given the humane Victor
a dislike to this eccentric path. Misfortune, therefore, more easily
makes odd men than prosperity.
His delight at the pictures which Cato drew him of Flamin's similar
heavenly ascensions and _feux de joie_ inspired him with the thought of
earning his Quatraine[115] of beautiful days in some other way than by
his foregoing gloomy ones,--namely, by making those of others like his
own. In short, he concerted with the elder Cato, to whom the idea was
most agreeable,--to employ the Prague company for some useful purpose,
namely, in giving in the cool of the evening a ball on the green
to the Maienthal children. What needed either for this purpose more
than--which they immediately did--to thrust their hands into their
pockets and their fingers into their purses and give the night watchman
_loci_ more than the hay of his great meadow might be worth on St.
John's day, which would have to be mowed to-day for a ball-room?
Besides, the man gave it with a thousand pleasures, because his
son was to-day to be--married. The twenty May-poles which Cato proposed
to plant in the hall stood already incarnate there as autochthones.
And when they had, further, gone to the parents of the neat
village,--generally, however, the poor ploughman resembles the swine,
which, according to Ælian,[116] invented his ploughing for him,--and
unitedly and with the greatest earnestness--for peasants and ladies do
not understand singularities--begged and extorted from them the young
dancing-partners: then all was right.
The trio of friends found, at the dinner-table of the Abbess, yesterday
over again. Victor was immediately at home in all points; he would not
continue a guest, so that the other might not continue the host. In
general, maidens are seldom found again as one left them, just as their
reception is always warmer or colder than their note previous; but in
Clotilda's dissolving features an infinite charm announced the memory
of yesterday, when she had, for two reasons, surrendered her heart to
all his flames consecrated on the altar of nature and of virtue. In the
first place, she was warmer yesterday, because she had previously been
colder in the little quarrel which only her face had had about the
Kussewitz watch affair: nothing makes love sweeter and tenderer than a
little previous scolding and freezing, just as the grape-clusters
acquire by a frost before vintage thinner skins and better must.
Secondly, in a high degree of emotion and love the best girls behave
just like--good ones.
I have only taken three coffee-cups of Burgundy, because I shall not
perhaps need any more for the carnation and red crayon drawing of the
afternoon--but O heavens! the night!--It is not my fault if it does not
get to the ears of posterity, that most persons in the afternoon, on
account of the heat, stayed out of the garden. But they see from the
chambers the meadow, the timber-yard of a beautiful evening, where the
children were already running round beforehand, carrying off the grass,
and opening the feast of trumpets with horn-blowers on beer-siphons. It
would be too trifling, if I should remark that several youngsters were
stretched out dead by having red caps or crowns shot at them, because
they represented hares, the cap-shooter the hunter, and the rest
greyhounds; one can, however, take it metaphorically, and then it
becomes satirical and edifying enough.
The joy of tender natures is bashful; they would sooner show their
wounds than their raptures, because they do not think to deserve
either, or they stow both behind the veil of a tear. So was it with
Victor, and in every joy he looked with a sigh to the west; I know not
whether he thought of the setting of stars and of men, or of the blacks
whose chains clank across even to our hemisphere, or on the nearer
whites whose sundered chains they resolder with blood.----But this
looking towards his _Keblah_[117] constrained him to _earn_ his
rapture. That of yesterday and of to-day was so great, that he said
with emotion to the genius of the earth: "Such greatness my feeble
virtue cannot attain."--It availed him naught, that he sought to
magnify himself to his conscience, and represented to it how many fair
moments and happy pulsations he here in this _Valley of Seifersdorf_
imparts to his friends and to her, his friend, who through him regains
her health, and to the children whom he sees already skipping about and
who at evening will do so still more,--it had some effect on his
conscience, but still not enough, when he asked it whether, then, he
should stop his ears to the sphere-music of these days; whether he had
not conquered his passions, and whether the enlargement of a man's
sphere and the increase of his activity were not simply in proportion
to the greater number of passions he had mastered; so that,
accordingly, a maid of honor, nay, even a king, possessed no smaller
circle of efficiency than the most useful citizen; and whether man,
like very small children, had not been sent into the school of earth to
learn to be _still_,--but the sacramental religious war between the old
and the new Adam was ended merely by a delight, namely, by the
determination, so soon as his father should release him from the
manacles and ankle-fetters of the court, to do more cures than the city
and country physicians and all _gratis_ and mostly among the poor.----
Only one word, reader! Virtue cannot make one _worthy_ of felicity, but
only _worthier_, because existence of itself with us as with the
non-moral creatures gives a right to joy,--because Virtue and Joy are
incommensurable qualities, and one knows not whether a happy century is
earned by a virtuous decade or the latter by the former,--because
the years of pleasure forerun the years of virtue, so that the
virtuous man, instead of the future, would have first to deserve the
past,--instead of heaven, would have first to deserve the earth.
The afternoon glided away like a bright rill, over motley trifles as
over golden sand, over little joys and over great hopes, over delicate
attentions and over the flower-dust of benevolent refinements which is
the best sticking-powder of the heart. Victor felt that a mistress who
has much intelligence imparts to love a peculiar piquant taste; she
herself felt, that the heart which one has plucked with soft, covered
hands, and not with rough clutchings, keeps better, just as Borsdorf
apples keep longer which one has picked only with gloves on. Although,
according to my tables, love stands the highest precisely on the day
after the first kiss, that is at 112° Fahrenh. or 10° De l'Isle: with
Victor's love, however, his reverence had risen at the same rate,--and
love exalts, when the favors which are shown therein make one not
bolder but shyer!--
Our friend felt how happy in joy _self-continence_ makes one, and how
much the foaming beaker of joy is cleared up and improved by throwing
in a few knife-points of sedative-powder. After an afternoon when the
whole hours were charming, without one's being able to single out into
prominence any extraordinary minutes,--as the feathers of the pheasant
shine not singly, but in whole bunches,--after such an afternoon all
went into the garden, but Emanuel first. The East Indian, like
ground-sparrows, could not endure the confinement of a room, and was
silent therein or only read, and that too merely--which does not
surprise me--the tragedies of Shakespeare....
Under the great evening-sky, which no cloud limited, their souls opened
like night-violets. Emanuel was the cicerone and gallery-inspector of
this picturesque garden. He led his friend and the others to his little
flower-garden, which lay highest in the park. That is to say, the park
ran down the mountain with _five_ landings and stories slid out as it
were from the latter in the manner of drawers. These five plains, these
cut-in green steps, bore just so many different gardens, orchards, and
shrubbery-gardens, &c.,--hence with every new point of view, as by a
kaleidoscope, a new garden was put together out of the old one. The
sloping park was enclosed on both sides by two serpentine walks of
tall, flaunting, flaming flowers, like two balustrades flowing
downward, and behind each flowery serpentine line curled down from the
mountain above silvery veins of bright, thin water leaping up and
down,[118] which in the evening sun became a gold-snake or artery of
ichor lying there in upright sinuosities. On the last and uppermost
terrace stood the _evening_- and the _morning-arbors_, like the poles
of the garden, opposite to each other, and the _evening-fountain_
gleamed up over the former, and the _morning-fountain_ over the latter,
and the two looked across at each other like sun and moon.
And just at the evening-fountain Emanuel had his middle-garden. For he
loved, as an East Indian, physical flowers as he did poetic ones, and
to him in December a book of flowers was a gently waving flowery lawn,
and a catalogus of carnation leaves was to him the hull and chrysalid
of summer. He conducted his loved ones over the flowery region of the
mountain away through the innocent flowers, which, like good maidens,
take neither sun nor soil from another's life for their own,--along
by the gold tassel of the tulip,--by the miniature-colors of the
forget-me-not,--by the many-colored bells, which are also, like those
that _sound_, cast in the moulds of the earth,--by the ear-roses[119]
of August, namely, the roses,--by the Cato, not the jolly Englishman,
but an auricula that does not flame, (to be had of Herr Klefeker in
Hamburg,)--by the beloved Agatha, which reminded one of the other in
St. Luna, and which is a beautiful cowslip....
At last they arrived at the evening-bower and at Emanuel's flowers,
namely, at the snow-white hyacinths, in whose shadow the irradiated
evening-fountain tinged a pale red. O, how sweetly, how sweetly, there,
breathed the warmth of the evening sun and the coolness of the evening
wind!--But why droop thy eye and head, Clotilda, so sadly here toward
the flowers? Is it because the water-column is extinguished, because
the sun goes down?--No; but because the white hyacinths, in the
language of the florists, mean _Julia_,--O because the churchyard looks
over hither, whose tall, swaying wildflowers stand with their roots
over two beloved eyes, over the eyes of the pale hyacinth Giulia, who
has not lived to see to-day's festival.----But Clotilda concealed
herself, so as to disturb nothing.
The last sparkling gold of the water-columns and the evening-blaze
flung back from all the windows, turned all eyes toward the sun, who
sank behind his stage.--But a rolling fire-wheel of the allegro, with
which the harmonists on the meadow accompanied the retiring sun,
brought down the eyes to the level of the ears, and below on the veiled
meadow there rose a new theatre of joy with new players.... Two roses
were planted in heaven, the red, the sun, which unfolded its buds over
the second hemisphere, and the white, the moon, which hung low in ours;
but sun-gold and lunar silver and evening-slags were as yet absorbed by
a smoking magic-haze, and one could not separate the shadows from the
silver ground of the moonlight, and blossoms fluttering downward were
still confounded with night-butterflies.
The happy party went down through the chestnut avenue to the younger
happy ones, the children, who, made more bold by the presence of their
mothers, encircled and girdled twenty liberty-trees in changeable
groups, and waited only for deeper shadows to dance more briskly. The
Englishman was welcomed by Clotilda as a friend of her two friends. The
bridal pair, to whom the meadow belonged as an inheritance, had
exchanged their own music for this, and their feast of the covenant in
its solemnity brought nearer to our hero the joyous day when he too
should be able to call his Clotilda a bride; but he had not the courage
to turn his blushing face towards her, because he thought she was
thinking the same thing, and was red also. Only a lover can sympathize
with the inspiration of a bridal pair; and never did fairer wishes go
up for one than ascended for this one in two souls full of love. A
four-years-old sister of the bride attached herself to Clotilda,--the
former was the little Luna of this Venus in her walks,--and the latter
gladly discharged her love into the little hand which gave hers the
preference over a dancing partner.
And now the moon, by the reflection of the sun wherewith it silvered
this children's paradise, gave joy brighter colors, and under the
deepened shadows of the May-trees the children's courage grew. All was
happy,--all unfettered,--all peaceful,--no poisonous eye flashed
lightnings,--not a single roughness disturbed the metrical life,--in
melodious march the minutes went sounding onward with silver tone, and
sang themselves away, and lingered in the bursting rose-thicket of the
evening red.--The bland, fluttering ether of Spring drank its fill of
perfume from the blossoms, and bore it like honey into the breast of
man.--And as pulses beat fuller, dumb, cooling lightnings played round
the clouds of the horizon, and the moon drew vital air[120] from the
leaves, in order to convey more healthily thereupon the abstracted
spirit of their cups.
Victor and the Englishman and Emanuel and Clotilda, together with some
of her female friends, stood below as patron gods of joy beside the
children, and were intoxicated by the enjoyment of the young people's
delight. Our friend had too holy a love to show (especially to so many
strangers and to the Englishman), and laid a bridle on his
unmanageable, dancing heart. In noble love the sacrifice--and though it
were that love itself--is as agreeable as the enjoyment; but still
easier is it near an Emanuel, who--that is the gleaming order-cross of
the higher men--precisely in the hour of joy lifts his eyes to the
higher life and to the truth. This time, moreover, the feeling of his
improving health redoubled his pining after the predicted departure.
His glorified countenance, his super-earthly wishes, and his still
resignation, constituted, as it were, the second and higher moonlight
which fell into the more dim; and he disturbed not in the least the
growing elysium, when he said, for example: "Mortal man regards himself
as eternal here, because the human race is eternal; but the propelled
drop is confounded with the inexhaustible stream; and were it not that
new human creatures always spring up after us, each one would feel more
deeply the fleetingness of his second[121] of life";--or when he said:
"If man is not immortal, then no higher being is either, and the
conclusions are the same; in that case the abiding God would burn
solitary out of the struggling and expiring sense, like the sun which,
if there were no atmosphere, would blaze out of a black heaven, and
pierce, but not illuminate, the vaulted night";--or when he said: "The
gait of mankind toward the holy city of God is like the gait of certain
pilgrims, who, wayfaring toward Jerusalem, always after three steps
forward take one backward";--or, finally, when, upon his Victor's
remarking, that amendment only removed the great faults, not the fine
stings of remorse, and that a saint got as many reproaches from his
conscience as the bad man, when he said to this: "Our _distance_ from
virtue, like that from the sun, by exact reckonings we always find only
_greater_; but still, notwithstanding all our changeable calculations,
the sun always pours into our faces the _same_ warmth."
Suddenly the Englishman ran to the players and demanded of them--in
order to see the pranks and cranks of his ideas set to music--the best
adagio, and hastened up to the "Crape-Tent," which Lord Horion had had
built of iron arches, over which was stretched black double crape, in
order to convert, for his eyes, which were at that time ailing, the
sunshine into moonshine. As every heart at the first touch of the
adagio must needs dissolve in tears of bliss, the consequence was that
the rapture which sought to veil itself broke up the tranquil circle,
and all glided away from each other, in order (each under his own
arbor) to smile unseen and sigh unheard,--like patients visiting a
medicinal spring they parted, met, avoided each other in accidental
directions.
The beautiful blind youth was reclining above not far from the
nightingale, as it were at the fountain-head of the streams of harmony,
and Clotilda looked upon him pityingly, as often as she passed by him,
and thought: "Poor overshadowed soul, the sighs of music distend thy
yearning heart, and thou never seest whom thou lovest and who loves
thee."--Emanuel went up slowly the long way to his mountain with the
weeping birch and back.--Victor roamed about the whole garden; he
passed along before veiled obelisks, columns and cubes which better
filled the place of stone Fauns; he stepped into the dark evening-bower
shaded only by the evening-red, where he was yesterday too happy for a
mortal, and too susceptible for an immortal; he pushed through a ring
of bushes, out of which and above which towered a gleaming fountain,
and closed his eyes to the dazzling light, when he saw therein in
artificially embowered pier mirrors a water-bow saturated with lunar
silver, arched over a million times in receding and paling curves,
and reduced from white rainbows to moon-sickles, and at last to
shadows.----
Oh, how often in the dreams of his childhood, in his landscape-pictures
which he sketched to himself of the days of Paradise, had he not seen
this night and hardly wished for it, because he never hoped to live to
see it on the rough earth; and now did this Eden-night, with all
blossoms and stars hanging round it, stand out created before him?--And
who of us has not in some magically illumined spot or other of his
fancy and his hope set up just so grand a night-piece of a future
vernal night, when, as in this one, he is made happy _with all friends_
at once (not always alone),--when, as in this one, the night is only
thrown as a transparent veil over the day, when the red girdle which
the sun laid down on stepping into the sea remains lying till morning
glowing on the margin of the earth,--when the long, soul-like tones of
the nightingale float aloud through the adagio that melts asunder, and
start up out of the echo,--when we meet none but friendly souls, and
look on them with rapture, and ask by our smiles, "O thou too art
surely as happy as I?" and when the other's smile answers in the
affirmative,--a night, O God, when thou hast made our hearts full and
yet tranquil, when we neither _doubt_ nor _hate_ nor _fear_, when all
thy children repose on thy bosom in thy arms, and hold each other's
hands as brothers and sisters, and slumber only with half-closed eyes,
in order to smile on each other?----Ah, inasmuch as the sigh wherewith
I write and you read this reminds us how seldom such spring nights fall
upon our earth, take it not ill of me that I only slowly execute the
voluptuous picture of _this_ night that so I may some time in my old
days refresh myself by the painted hour of the present inspiration,[122]
and may haply be able to say: Ah, thou knewest then, perhaps, that thou
shouldst never live to experience such a night, and for that reason
wast thou so copious. And what else than petrified blossoms of a clime
which is not on our earth, do we dig up out of our fantasy, just as in
our North they exhume fossil palms?...
Victor went to the still Julius at the hedge of the nightingale and
laid night violets in his hand, and kissed him on the curtained eye,
which could not see, yet could weep for joy,--and neighbor nightingale
paused not during the kiss. He came up the garden, as Emanuel came
down; they looked on each other near the morning fountain, and
Emanuel's face gleamed in the reflection of the waves, as if he were
standing before the angel of death and dissolving, to die, and he
said: "The Infinite One clasps us to-day to himself,--why can I not
weep as I am so happy?"--and when they had separated again, he called
back to his Victor and said: "See, how blooming-red the evening goes
forth toward the morning like a dying man, as if the tones moved it
onward,--see, the stars, like blossoms, hang down out of eternity into
our earth,--behold the great deep, how many springs bloom to-night on
so many thousand earths wheeling therein!"--
The maidens, after short walks, had soon seated themselves on the
grassy banks of the terraces in pairs or in the number of the Graces.
Clotilda, who had strolled alone, at last did the same, and seated
herself beside a solitary friend on the fourth terrace, near the gay
solar rainbow of flowers, behind which the lunar rainbow of water
glistened. This friend appealed to Victor, approaching, as umpire of a
virtuous quarrel: "We have been disputing," said the friend, "which is
sweeter to good souls, to forgive or to be forgiven. I absolutely
assert, forgiving is the sweeter."--"And to me it appears," said
Clotilda with a touched voice, which betrayed all the affectionate
thoughts of her indulgent heart, all her grateful remembrances of their
last variance and of his beautiful forgiveness, "that it is more
beautiful to receive forgiveness, because love toward the forgiving
soul is made by its own lowliness _purer_, and by the other's goodness
_greater_." Never, perhaps, was anything lovelier said to our Victor.
His emotion and his gratitude made the decision hard for him; but
Clotilda prompted or corrected his dreams by this turn: "I have
reminded my good Charlotte already of _day before yesterday_, but she
sticks to her opinion." She meant the day of confession and communion,
when the fair hearts all asked and received forgiveness of each other.
Victor finally answered at once truly, significantly, and delicately:
"You both, I think, suppose impossible cases; no human being is either
all right or all wrong; and whoever forgives is at the same time
forgiven, and the reverse;--thus two beings who are reconciled always
share the joy of forgiveness and the joy of _purified and increased_
love with each other."--
Victor went off, in order to conceal an emotion through which he too
much heightened another's. But on his far and near ways among tones and
blossoms, feelings clung to him which doubled and glorified his love;
he felt that the _strongest_ expression of love takes not so firm and
deep a hold of the soul as the _finest_. But as he passed along by the
sun-dial, which with its measuring-rod of shadow counted out for us
other shadows our narrow fortunate islands, and as the moon weighed out
on the scale with her shadowy beam in equipoise the last minutes of
this glad hour, because she pointed toward midnight, as if she wrote,
It will presently be over,--just then the Englishman passed out alone
slowly and with downcast eyes from the crape-tent, and went in among
the tones, to lead them away with, the whole heaven around them.
Victor, who in the still sea of the deepest joy no longer steered for
countries, but contentedly tossed or rested upon it, and desired
nothing in the future but the present, only paced now to and fro
on the long terraces, instead of ascending and descending the
garden,--he stood just on the uppermost, on the flower-terrace, at the
morning-fountain, and looked along the glimmering way over to the
evening-fountain, and the fallen snow of the moon lay deeper and whiter
down along the blissful slope, and this blooming sugar-field appeared
to his dreaming heart like a point of land with which the island of the
blest stretched over into this earth, and he saw on all this enchanted
field nothing but blessed ones walking, reposing, dancing, here alone,
there in pairs, yonder in groups, and innocent men, quiet children,
gentle, virtuous maidens, and he looked up to the starry heaven and his
tearful eye said to the All-gracious, O give my good father and my good
Flamin also such a sight!----when all on a sudden he perceived that the
tones were wafted away, and saw the Briton moving on with the children,
and the swan-song of a Maëstoso was borne along before the fleeing
youth....
Victor went up with the tones that swam away, and the stars seemed
to swim with them, and the whole region to go with them;--all
at once he stopped at the end of the terrace of flowers, before the
emblems of Giulia, the white hyacinths, before the friend of Giulia,
before--Clotilda ... O moment! repeated only in eternity, wear not too
strong a lustre, that I may be able to endure it! move not my heart too
intensely, so that I may be able to describe thee!--Ah, move it only as
thou dost the two hearts to which thou appearedst; thou wilt meet none
of us any more ... And Clotilda and Victor stood innocent before God,
and God said, Weep and love as in the second world with me!--And they
looked on each other speechless in the transfiguration of night, in the
transfiguration of love, in the transfiguration of emotion, and tears
of bliss closed their eyes, and behind the illuminated tears
transfigured worlds rose around them out of the dark earth, and the
evening-fountain spread itself gleaming like a milky-way above them,
and the starry heaven closed sparkling over them, and the receding and
dying sounds washed their uplifted souls away from the shore of
earth.... Lo! then a little breath of air brought the escaping sounds
more warmly and closely to their hearts, and they wiped the tears from
their eyes; and as they looked round in the actual scene, the melodious
waving agitated all the blossoms in the garden, and the great night,
which with giant limbs slept in the moonshine on the earth, stirred for
rapture its wreaths of shadowed tree-tops, and the two beings smiled
trembling in unison, and simultaneously cast down their eyes and
simultaneously raised them without knowing it. And Victor at last was
able to say: "O may the noblest heart that I know be as unspeakably
blessed as I, and still more blessed! I have not deserved so
much!"--And Clotilda said in a soft tone: "I have remained the whole
evening mostly alone, merely for the sake of weeping for joy, but it is
too beautiful for me and for the future...."--Her companions turning
round came up the garden, and the two had to part; and when Victor
added with stifled sounds, "Rest well, thou noble soul,--may such tears
of joy have always to stand in thy eyes, may such melodious tones be
destined always to float around thy days!--Rest well, thou heavenly
soul!"--and when a look full of new love and an eye full of fresh tears
thanked him; and when he bowed himself low, low before the saintly,
still, modest one, and from reverence did not so much as kiss her
hand;--then in the invisibleness did her genius embrace his genius for
delight, that their two children were so happy and so virtuous.
O what comfort did his overwhelmed soul now find in his beloved Dahore,
whom he followed under the loud chestnut-trees, and on whose neck he
could fall with all his tears of ecstasy, with all his caresses of a
raptured heart: "My Emanuel, rest softly! I stay to-night under this
good, warm sky round about us."--"Aye, stay, good heart," said Emanuel,
"such a night will never pass through any spring again.... Hear'st
thou," he continued, as the tones receding into immensity, like evening
stars, as it were, of the sunken glory, like autumnal voices of the
departing summer-song, sent their call into the yearning soul, "hear'st
thou the sweet dying away of the strains? Lo, even thus may my soul die
away on the longest day, even so may thy heart lie on mine and say as
now, Rest well!" ...
Sinking from the arms of his last remaining loved friend, Victor went
reeling back in the confused twilight of inspired sadness through the
avenue pierced by moonlight, as it were dropping with rays, in order to
recline, in the blossom-cave, where he had here first found Clotilda,
his dreaming head on a pillow of blossom-cups.... And as he slowly and
alone and with Elysian remembrances and hopes staggered along through
the arbor which had grown into the avenue, between the lulling
rivulets, low waves of the departed melody still swam more into his
fancy than into his ears, and only the nightingale reigned aloud
over the inspired night. Then, unspeakably blest and burdened with
ecstasy, the last man of this night glided from the five steps of his
heavenly bed through the lattice of twigs into the dark thicket of
blossoms.----Bedewed leaves fell, cooling, on his fevered brow, he laid
his two outstretched arms on two supports of dwarf-trees, and closed in
rapture his burning eyelids, and the continuing tones of the
nightingale and of the five fountains around him wafted him some spaces
onward into the glimmering illusion of dreams,--but the nightingale,
screaming out in the jubilee of joy, warbled through his dream, and
when he opened his eyes, drifted away into half-dreams, the glimpses of
the moon shot through the white shrubbery,----nevertheless, satisfied
with the previous scenes, he only smiled half beside himself, and
closed his eyes again and sank completely into the harmonious slumber
... only a few broken tones he still sang to himself,--only a few times
more he stirred his prostrate arms for embraces ... and in the
euthanasia of slumber and rapture only obscurely stammered once more,
Beloved!...
And so sweetly, great All-gracious One, let the rest of us mortals sink
to sleep in the last night as Victor does in this, and let our last
word also be, Beloved!--