Hyacinth.--The Voice of Emanuel's Father.--Letter from the
Angel.--Flute on the Grave.--Second Nightingale.--Farewell.--
Pistols.--Ghostly Apparition.
The appendix to the fourth day of joy has just come in.--Pausing only
to breathe the sigh wherewith one usually says, on the day after festal
days, that he is burying them, I come back again before the blooming
bed of my friend, and open the living-green curtain; not till toward
nine o'clock did a ground-sparrow twittering close to his hands draw
him with difficulty out of a deep sea of dream. But the shadowy shapes,
which the concave mirror of dream had erected in the air, were all
forgotten; only the tears, which they had wrung from them, still stood
in his eyes, and he could no longer remember why he had shed them.
To-day was Ember-day, which, like other changes of moon and weather,
makes the echo of our dreams louder and more polysyllabic.--In a
singular lassitude he opened his eyes before the white twilight of the
canopy of apple-blossoms, before the maze of the green web,--his hand
chased the ground-sparrow through the bushes,--it was sultry around
this shade, the tree-tops were mute and all the flowers erect,--bees
bent down from grains of sand into the springs around him and
sipped water,--white flocks dropped from the willows, and all the
smelling-bottles of the blossoms and the censers of the flowers
diffused over his place of slumber a sweet, sultry steam....
He raises his right hand to his moist eye and sees therein, to his
astonishment, a white hyacinth, which some one must have placed
there.... He suspected Clotilda; and she it had really been. Half an
hour before she had stepped up to this bed of flowers,--had gently let
the bushes immediately close again,--but then, however, drawn them
apart again, because she saw the tears of the forgotten dream run down
the face of the glowing sleeper,--her whole soul became now a tender
look and blessing of love, and she could not refrain from laying the
memorial of her morning-visit, the flower, on his hand,--and then
hastened softly back to her chamber.
He stepped hastily into the beaming day, to overtake the giver, whose
morning-offering he unhappily, for fear of destroying it, could no more
press to his heart than he could herself. O how it saddened him, when
he stood in the open air before the Moravian churchyard of the heavenly
night which had _gone home_, before the reposing garden, and when he
looked upon the bald, close-shaven, trodden-down dancing-floor, and on
the silent nightingale's-bush, and on the hills where the children were
tending sheep, disrobed of yesterday's finery! Then the forgotten dream
again appeared and said: Weep once more, for the rose-feast of thy life
concludes to-day, and the last of the _four_ rivers of Paradise in a
few hours will utterly dry up!--"O ye fair days," said Victor, "ye
deserve that I should leave you with a tenderness that knows no measure
and with unnumbered tears!"--He fled from the too harsh daylight into
the cell of crape, that it might recolor the brilliant foreground of
the day into a dim back-ground, overspread with the moonshine of
yesterday; and under this pall of the pale dead night he proposed to
himself to indulge his heart, so soon to be impoverished, with its last
joy, namely, its yearning, in utter overmeasure. He stepped out of the
tent, but the nocturnal moonshine faded not from the lawn; he looked up
into the blue heaven, which touches us with _one_ long flame, but the
veiled stars of the wintry night sent little outwelling rays to the
eclipsed soul; he said to himself, indeed, "The ice-mountain on which
hitherto my reason has delivered half sermons-on-the-mount, has shrunk
up under the glow of joy to a mole-hill," but he added, "To-day I care
for nothing."
He came to Emanuel with wet eyes. The latter told him that the first
link of yesterday's chain of flowers, namely the Briton with his
people, had already loosed itself in the night. But the longer he
looked on Emanuel and thought of the morrow,--for to-morrow before day
he too would softly close the garden gate of this Paradise behind, and
this afternoon he is to take leave of the Abbess and this evening of
his beloved, in order not to hinder her in the reading out of the
well-known angel's-epistle,--so much the more painful was the straining
of his eyes, and he preferred to go out, with a heart bleeding itself
full, into the open air, and led the blind one with him, who suspected
nothing, saw nothing, and before whom, besides, one loved to lay bare
his innermost heart as before a child.
But this time Julius was in the same softened state, because he had all
the morning seen the angel playing and hovering in his darkling soul.
The yearning for the angel brooded over his reposing heart and warmed
it even to beating, and he said with an unaccustomed sorrow, "If I
could only see, only something, only my father, or thee!" The
dust-covered remembrances of his childhood were shaken up; and out of
this cloud-enveloped period emerged before him into special prominence
one day, bright with morning, blue and full of song, and bore three
forms on its cloud-floor, Julius's own and those of the two children,
from whom before their embarkation for Germany he had parted,--drops
escaped from him without his perceiving it, when he described to this
Victor, the very one who had done what he described, how he had been
kissed and hugged and cried after by the one child, that loved him
most, and always carried him. "And I think," he continued, "that every
one whose voice I love to hear has the face of that good child, and
that _thou_ hast too. Often when I contemplate this form alone in my
darkness, and feel warm drops on my lips, and fall into a languishing,
slumbering rapture, I fancy it is blood trickles from my lips and my
heart is boiling,--but my father says if then my eyes were suddenly
opened, and I should look upon my angel, or the good child, or a
beautiful human being, I should have to die for love."----"O Julius,
Julius," cried his Victor, "how noble is thy heart! The good child whom
thou lovest so my father will soon lay in thy arms, and he will kiss
thee and love thee and clasp thee just as I do now."--
He led him back to dinner; but he himself remained till afternoon under
the open heaven, and his heart put on silent mourning under trees full
of bees, near thickets full of feeding birds, on all the former walks
and ecliptics of this dying festival,--and all the hours of childhood
rose out of the winter-sleep of memory and stirred his heart, but it
dissolved.--O when far distant moments sound on our ears with their
chime, then great drops fall from the softened soul, as the increasing
nearness of far-off bells sounding across betokens rain. I blame thee
not, Victor,--thou art, after all, only _feminine_, but not
_effeminate_,--if thy biographer can describe thy emotion and thy
reader can feel it, without relaxing the firm muscles of the heart,
thou canst do it quite as well, and only a man who can wring bitter
tears from others will scorn sweet ones and shed none himself.
At length Victor went to take his last pleasure, to the garden of
termination, in order to take leave with tender tears of all his female
friends at the Abbey. A singular incident delayed it a little: for as
he left Emanuel, he encountered Julius coming from the garden, who told
him, "if he wanted to find Emanuel, he was in the garden."--This raised
a friendly dispute, because each of them insisted on having just talked
with him. Victor went back with him to Emanuel, and Julius related to
his teacher every word of the alleged garden-talk with him: "e. g.
about Victor, about Clotilda, about the farewell he was to-day taking,
about his previous happy days."
During the narration Emanuel's face grew radiant, as if moonlight
flowed down from it,--and instead of representing to the beloved child
the impossibility of his appearance in the garden, he humored his
notion of the apparition, and said with delight: "I shall die,
then!--It was my departed father,--his voice sounds like mine,--he
promised me when he died to come back from the next world to this
before I should go hence.--Ah, ye beloved ones beyond the graves over
yonder, ye still then think of me.--O thou good father! break through
even now into my presence with thy fatal radiance, and release my
spirit in thy lips!"--
He was still more confirmed in his conclusion, because, Julius added
that the shape had demanded of him the angel's letter, but given it
back again after a short whisper. The seal was uninjured. Emanuel's
joyful enthusiasm at these telegraphs of death implied that he had
drawn dissatisfying inferences from his previous health. Victor never
set himself in opposition to the exalted errors of his teacher; thus,
e. g., he never arrayed the reasons he had, and which I will show in
the next Intercalary day, against the innocent delusion, that "from
dreams, and from the independence of the personal consciousness on the
body, one could infer its future independence after death,"--that "in
dream the inner diamond dusted itself and drank in light from a fairer
sun."--Victor was alarmed about the matter,--but for other reasons,
Julius took them both along with him to the place of the interview,
which was in the darkened avenue near the blossoming hollow. No one was
there, nothing appeared; leaves whispered, but no spirits; it was the
place of bliss, but of earthly bliss.--
Victor went into the other place of bliss, the Abbey. Clotilda was not
over there, but in the intricate labyrinth of the Park, probably for
the purpose of facilitating for its possessor, Julius, the opportunity
of hearing read the angel's letter. Just as the sun blazed over against
the window-panes, he took leave of the good Abbess with that refined,
feeling courtesy to which in her position the highest enthusiasm was
limited. The refined Abbess said to him: "The visit was so short, that
it would be inexcusable, if Victor did not make it good by persuading
her second spring guest (Clotilda) to lengthen hers; for she too was
going soon to leave them."--He took his leave of her with a heart-felt
respect: for his tender heart knew, quite as well behind the lace mask
of refinement and knowledge of the world as behind the leather-crust of
roughness, how to feel the tender heart of another.
But as he hastened to the garden, the tears of his heart gushed up
higher and warmer,--and he felt as if he must here in the face of the
sun embrace the rising moon, as he thought: "Ah, when thy pale fleece
hangs this evening brighter overhead there, when thou lookest down
alone, I shall have departed or be in the act of departing from my
pastoral world."--And below near the nightingale's hedge reposed his
Julius, shedding bright streams of tears,--for this whole evening
swarmed with greater and greater wonders[123] of chance,--he hastens
down to him, the letter of the so-called angel is opened in his hand,
Victor says softly, "Julius, why weepest thou so?"--"O God," said the
latter in broken tones, "guide me under a bower!"--He conducted him to
the crape one. Julius said, when they were under cover: "Good! here the
sun does not burn!" and flung his right arm around Victor, and gave him
the letter, and folded his arm round even to his heart and said: "Thou
good soul! tell me when the sun is down, and read me once more the
letter of the angel!"
Victor began: "Clotilda!"--"To whom is it?" said he.--"To me!" said
Julius, "and Clotilda has already read it to me; but I could not
understand her on account of her weeping, and besides I also was too
much distressed.--I shall die for sorrow, thou good Giulia, why didst
thou not tell me of it before thy death.--The dead one wrote it, read
on!"--He read:
"CLOTILDA!
"I cover my blushing cheeks with the funeral veil. My secret lies
hidden in my heart, and will be laid with it under the grave-stone.
But after a year it will force its way out of the mouldered heart. O,
then let it rest forever in thine, Clotilda!--and forever in thine,
Julius!--Julius, was not a silent form often about thee that called
itself thy angel? Did it not once, as the death-bell tolled for the
burial of a blooming maiden, lay a white hyacinth in thy hand, and say,
Angels pluck such _white_ flowers? Did not a mute form once take thy
hand and wipe away its tears therewith, and it could not tell why it
wept? Did not a low voice once say, Farewell, I shall no more appear to
thee, I go back to heaven? That form was I, O Julius; for I have loved
thee and even unto death. Lo! here I stand on the shore of the second
world, but I look not over into its infinite fields, but I turn my
face, while I am still sinking, back to thee, to thee, and my eye grows
dim over thy image.--Now I have told thee all.--Now come, quieting
death, crush slowly the white hyacinth, and rend the heart asunder
speedily, that Julius may see the love enclosed therein.--Ah, wilt thou
then take a dead one into thy soul? Wilt thou weep, when thou hearest
this read? Ah, when my covered, sunken dust can no more touch thee,
will my remote spirit be loved by thine?--But I conjure thee, O
ever-remembered one, go, on the day when this tearful leaf is read to
thee, then go, at sundown, up to my grave and offer to the pale face
below, which the old mound is already crushing asunder, and to the
dissolved heart that can beat for nothing more, then present to the
poor heart that has loved thee so much, and on thy account has hid
itself under the earth, thy funeral offering,--bring to it on thy flute
the tones of my loved song, 'The grave is deep and silent.'--Sing it
softly to the accompaniment, Clotilda, and thou too visit me.--Ah, poor
Giulia, lift up thy soul, and sink not now, as thou imaginest thy
Julius on thy grave!--When thou bringest thy offering to the dead, my
spirit will, it is true, already have gone up higher; I shall have
lived a year beyond the earth, I shall already have forgotten the
earth,--but nevertheless, but, O God, if Thou shouldst let the tones
above my grave penetrate into Elysium, then should I sink down and shed
hot tears and stretch out my arms and cry: Yes! here in eternity I love
him still,--may it fare well with him on the earth, may his soft heart
repose softly and long on life below there!--No, not long! Come up
hither, mortal, to the Immortals, that thine eye may be healed, and see
the friend who died for thee!
"GIULIA."
* * * * *
"I will go,"--said Julius hesitatingly, but with quiverings in his
face,--"although the sun is not down. My father shall console me till
sundown, that my heart may not beat so violently against my breast,
when I stand at the grave and make the offering to the dead."----Let me
say nothing, reader, of the choking heart with which I proceed,--nor of
this too sensitive Giulia, who like a morning sun-dial was ere noon in
shade and coolness, who, like a dove, unfolded her wings to the rain
and to tears,--nor of her soul's-sisters, who in the second decade of
life hang, the skeleton of death all over with flowers, that they may
not be able to see its limbs, and who rest their white arm merely on a
myrtle-twig of love as upon a bleeding-support, and watch calmly the
bleeding to death of its severed veins!--
I could not have said even this, if Victor had not thought it, whose
heart was mortally distraught by an infinite grief and an infinite
love; for ah! how far on the way was not his irreplaceable Clotilda
already, to follow her friend and hide her unloved heart in the earth,
as they lay down carnations in the frost?
The sun sank lower, the moon mounted higher,--Victor saw Clotilda, like
an ethereally embodied angel, reclining in a niche that opened towards
the west,--the little girl mentioned yesterday played, in her lap, with
a new doll,--it seemed to him as if he saw her soaring toward heaven,
and when she lifted her great eyelids, weighed down with tears for the
departed friend, whose secret she had long since guessed and concealed,
towards him, who to-day increased them by his departure; and when she
saw his face also melted in emotion; then did like sorrowful thoughts
drown in both even the first sounds of welcome, and both turned away
their faces, because they wept for the parting.----"Have you,"
said Clotilda, at least with a composed voice, "just spoken with
Julius?"--Victor did not answer, but his eyes said yes, in the simple
fact that they streamed more passionately and looked on her fixedly.
She cast hers down with a slight blush for Giulia. The little child
took the falling of the eyelids over the great drops for a sign of
sleepiness, and drew the little hay-stuffed pillow away from the doll,
spread it out for Clotilda, and said innocently, "There, lie down on it
and go to sleep!" A shudder thrilled through her friend, as she
answered, "Not to-day, dear; on pillows of hay only the dead sleep." He
shuddered, as he saw a snow-white pink, in the centre of which there
was a great dark-red point, like a bloody drop, trembling on her
agitated bosom. The fearful pink seemed to him to be the lily which
superstition formerly found in the choir-seat of the priest, whose
death was said thereby to be predicted.
She fixed her gaze painfully on, the low sun and the churchyard, behind
which in the May days it sank like a mortal. "Leave this prospect,
dearest," he said, though without a hope of obedience,--"a tender
integument is most easily destroyed by a tender soul,--your tears make
you too sad." But she replied: "Only in earlier years--but long ago it
ceased to be so--did they make my eye-sockets burn and benumb my
brain."--Suddenly, as the thought of the beclouded perspective of her
eyes exhausted with weeping wrung his heart out of his bosom, the
sunlight died upon her cheeks,--streams of tears broke violently
from her eyes,--he turned round,--over on the churchyard the veiled
youth had prostrated himself on the grave-mound of the veiled one
beneath,--the sun was already below the earth, but the flute had as yet
no voice, sorrow has only sighs,--no tones.... At last the beautiful
blind one raised himself erect, amidst convulsive sorrows, for the
funeral-offering, and the wailings of the flute went up from the closed
grave into the evening-redness,--three hearts melted away like the
tones, like the fourth heart that was buried below. But Clotilda lifted
herself up by force out of her dumb woe, and sang low as an offering to
the dead the heavenly song, for which the departed one had entreated
her and which I give with inexpressible emotion:--
The grave is deep and dismal,--
How solemn there to stand!
Below, in gloom abysmal,
There lies an unknown land.
There sounds, when daylight closes,
No nightingale's sweet tone;
And Friendship strews with roses
The mossy mound alone.
In vain the bride, forsaken,
May wring her hands and weep:
Nor orphans' wail may waken
The dead one from his sleep.
_Yet_ nowhere else can mortals
Attain the wished repose,
And through these gloomy portals,
Alone, man homeward goes.
O Salis! in that _yet_ are all our expired sighs, all our dried-up
tears, and they lift the aspiring heart from its roots and veins, and
it fain would die!
The voice of the noble singer gave way to sadness, but still she sang
the last of the strophes of this song of the spheres, though lower
under the--weight of overmastering sorrow:--
The weary heart, storm-driven,
There, where all tempests cease,
Finds home at length and heaven,
And everlasting peace.[124]
Her voice broke, as an eye breaks into tears or a heart in death....
Her friend veiled his head with the leaves of the bower,--the whole of
earthly life passed before him like a dirge.--Clotilda's sad past,
Clotilda's dark future, drew together before his vision, and cast, in
the darkness, the funeral veil over this angel, and bore her shrouded
into the grave of her sister.... He had even forgotten his farewell....
He had not the heart to look upon the great scene around him and the
bowed form beside him....
He heard the little one go and say, "I will fetch thee a larger pillow
to put under thy head."
Clotilda stood up and clasped his hand,--he turned round again toward
the earth,--and she looked on him with eyes worn with weeping, yet
tender, whose drops were too pure for this unclean world, but in those
large eyes stood something like the terrible question, "Do we not love
each other in vain for this world?" And her beating heart shook the
bloody pink. The moon and the evening star gleamed solitary, like a
past, in heaven.--Julius lay mute and prostrate, with outspread arms,
on the low mound which had been rolled upon the dust of his shattered
paradise.
The tones of the nightingale throbbed now like high waves on the
night,--then he gathered up his courage to bid her farewell....
Reader! raise not thy spirit to any pitch of rapture, for it will soon
stiffen in a spasm,--but I raise my soul thereto, because even the
fatal stumble at the gate of paradise is not unlovely when one is going
out of it!
The first call of the confiding nightingale was suddenly answered
still-higher by a new nightingale that had fluttered along and whose
voice was muffled by thick blossoms, who kept flying as she sang, and
now made her languishing melody flow out of the blossoming hollow. The
two lovers, who delayed and dreaded parting, wandered confusedly after
the receding nightingale, and were on the way to the blessed blooming
hollow; they knew not that they were alone; for in their hearts was
God; before their sight shone the whole second world full of risen
souls. At last Clotilda recovered herself, turned round before the
nightingale, and gave the mournful sign of separation.--Victor stood on
the shore of his late blissful island,--all, all was now over,--he
lingered, took both her hands, could not yet look upon her for anguish,
bowed down with tears, raised himself up again, when he was able to say
softly: "Farewell,--my heavy heart can say no more,--fare thee right
well, far better than I,--weep not so often as thou usedst to do, that
thou mayest not perchance have to leave me utterly.--For then I too
should go."--Louder and more solemnly he continued: "For we can no more
be separated,--here under Eternity I deliver to thee my heart,--and
when it forgets thee, then--may a sorrow crush it which shall reach
over the two worlds." ... In a lower and tenderer tone, "Weep not
to-morrow, angel,--and Providence give thee rest." Like a transfigured
one to a transfigured he inclined himself modestly to her holy lip, and
in a gentle, devout kiss, in which the hovering souls only glide
tremulously from afar to meet each other with fluttering wings, with a
light touch he took from the yielding, dissolving lips the seal of her
pure love, the repetition of his late Eden, and her heart and his
all----
--But here let the gentler soul, which the thunderbolts of fate too
sorely agitate, turn its eye away from the great yellow flash which
suddenly darts through the still Eden!
* * * * *
"Scoundrel!" cried Flamin, rushing out with sparkling looks, with
snow-white cheeks, with locks hanging down like a mane, with two
pocket-pistols in his hands,--"there take, take; blood I want," and
thrust the deadly weapon towards him; Victor forced Clotilda aside,
saying, "Innocent one! do not aggravate thy sorrows!"--Flamin cried in
a new kindling of fury, "Blood!--Faithless one, take, fire!"--Matthieu
fell upon his right arm, but the left, trembling, forced the weapon
upon Victor.--Victor snatched it towards him, because the muzzle was
swaying about Clotilda.--"Thou art in truth my brother," cried the
tortured girl, whose deathly agony alone kept her by its rack from the
death of a swoon.--Flamin with both arms flung all from him and said
with a horribly low and long-drawn voice in his raving exhaustion,
"Blood!--Death!"--Clotilda sank to the ground. Victor looked at her and
said, turning to him, "Only fire, here is my life!"--Flamin cried
aloud, "Thou first!"--Victor shot, lifting his arm high up, so as to
shoot into the air, and the splintered top of a branch was brought down
by his ball.--Clotilda came to.--Emanuel flew to the spot,--threw
himself on his pupil's heart,--from his breast for the first time in
years rent with passion the sickly blood gushed out. Flamin proudly
hurled away his pistol and said to Matthieu, "Come!--it isn't worth the
trouble," and went off with him.
When Clotilda saw Emanuel's blood on her lover's clothes, she supposed
him to have been hit, and laid her handkerchief on the blood and said,
"Ah, you have not deserved this of me!"--Emanuel breathed again
through his blood, no one could speak any more, no one could think,
every one feared to give consolation, the mortally crushed hearts
parted with suppressed woe; only Victor, whom the horrible word
"scoundrel" at every recollection of it pierced through like a dagger,
said to the sister: "I love him no more, but he is unhappier than we;
ah! he has lost all and kept nothing but a devil."
Namely, Matthieu. It was he who had to-day imitated the voice of
Emanuel, which had seemed to speak with Julius, and whose voice Dahore
had taken for his father's, and afterward the voice of the nightingale,
which Victor had followed, in order to convince the Regency Counsellor
through his own ears and eyes of Victor's love for Clotilda.
Victor led his weak teacher to the Indian cottage. He felt his nerves
now after so many relaxing days cooled and steeled by this tempest; his
anguish of soul and sacrifice had made his blood, as the confinement of
narrowing channels does streams, more swift and impetuous, and his love
for Clotilda had been made manlier and bolder by the thought that he
now entirely deserved it. There is nothing more beautiful than
magnanimity and gentleness, except the union of the two.
Emanuel was nothing more than faint, and, as the evening brooded with a
sweltering influence over all, he seated himself with Victor on the
grassy bench of his house in order to keep his palpitating breast in an
erect posture, and a tender joy gleamed in his features at every fallen
drop of blood, because each was a red seal upon his hope of dying. But
when Victor took the good man's weary head to his bosom and let him go
to sleep thereon, then in the still evening sadness came over him
again, and for the first time his heart pained him. He thought to
himself all alone there, how over at the Abbey hot swords would pass
hissing through the innocent bleeding soul,--he felt how now the
two-syllabled, two-edged word of Flamin's wrath had cut through the
whole bond of their friendship,--he represented to himself the blooming
theatre of beautiful days beside him deserted and desolate, and the
sweeping by of joys, which only play round us like butterflies in wide
circles, while the hairworm[125] of grief bites deeply into our nerves.
At last he leaned weeping on the slumbering father, and pressed him
softly, and said, "Ah! without friendship and love I could not bear the
earth."--And at length his distracted and exhausted soul also was
weighed and dragged down by the heavy body into the thick atmosphere of
sleep.
* * * * *
Reader! the last moment in Maienthal is the greatest,--raise thy soul
through awe and mount up on graves as on high mountains, in order to
look over into the other world!
At midnight when fancy draws the buried dead from their coffins and
sets them upright in the night round about her, and unknown shapes
drift to us from the second world,--just as indistinguishable corpses
driven from America to the coasts of the Old World announced to it the
New,--in the ghostly hour Victor opened his eyes, but with
inexpressible serenity. A forgotten dream had sunk far away to-day's
past with all its din and cloud;--the bright moon stood overhead in the
blue dark like the silvery fissure and sparkling fountain-like mouth,
from which the stream of light out of the other world breaks into ours
and comes down in ethereal vapor.--"How still and radiant is all!" said
Victor. "Is not this glimmering region a relic of my dream? is not this
the magic suburbs of the supernal city of God?"--A voice hurrying over
said, Death! I am already buried.
Emanuel opened his eyes at that, sent them through the foliage over to
the churchyard that overlooked the village and said, with a convulsion
of his being, "Horion, wake up; Giulia has left eternity and is
standing on her grave."--Victor cast a feverish glance up thither; and
all the warm thoughts and nerves of life grew hard and stiff in a
cutting ice-cold shudder, as he saw up there a white, veiled form
resting on the grave. Emanuel snatched himself up, and his pupil, and
said: "We will go up to the theatre of the spirits; perhaps the dead
one will lay hold on my soul and take me with her." ... Fearful was the
silence of the regions around their way.... Men start up out of the
ground like dumb-waiters, like serving-machines, and drop down again
when they are emptied.... The human race darts like a flying summer
through the sunshine, and the bedewed web hangs fluttering on two
worlds and in the night it passes away.... So thought both on their
pilgrimage to the dead one; they wondered at their own heavy
incarnation and at the noise of their steps. Emanuel fastened his gaze
on the veiled form that now knelt down; he thought she heard his
thoughts and would fly over to his heart through the moonlight....
The hearts of the two men rose and fell as if under two gravestones, as
they climbed the long, grass-grown steps to the churchyard, and touched
and opened the heavy gate which was painted with forms of risen saints,
half effaced by the weather. The warm earthly blood congeals and the
soft brain runs to a single image of terror, when the great cloud rolls
away from eternity and from the gate of the spiritual world; on the
stage of the dead Emanuel called as if beside himself: "Awful spirit, I
am a spirit like thee, thou too standest below God,--wilt thou kill me,
then kill me not by a stroke of horror, not by a crushing form, but
smile like men and quietly wring off my heart."--Then the veiled form
rose up and came,--Emanuel wildly grasped his friend, buried himself
in his face, and said clinging to him: "On thee I die, on thy warm
heart,--O live happy, unless thou wilt grow cold with me, ah! go with
me!" ...
"Ah, Clotilda!" said Victor; for she was the form. She was dumb as the
realm of spirits, for the dead one whom she had visited still clung
around her heart; but she was great as a spirit from that realm: for
the ethereal luminous nebula of the moon, the standing over the dead,
the look into eternity, the lofty night, and the mourning exalted her
soul, and one almost forgot that she wept.--Emanuel still held his
wings spread out over the scene, and looked sublimely over the graves:
"How all sleeps and rests here on this great green death-bed! I would
lie down there and die.--Did not something just speak?--The thoughts of
mortals are words of spirits.--We are night birds stealing through the
dubious atmosphere, we are dumb night-walkers who fall into these pits,
when they awake.--Ye dead! crumble not so mutely into dust; ye spirits,
ye that come forth out of your buried hearts, flutter not so
transparent around us!--O, man were vanity and ashes and a plaything
and vapor on the earth, did he not feel that he were so[126]----O God,
this feeling is our immortality"[127]----
Clotilda, by way of drawing him down from this desolating inspiration,
took him by the hand and said: "Farewell, O worthy of veneration! I bid
farewell this very day, because to-morrow I leave Maienthal. Live
happily,--happily till we see each other again; my heart will never
forget your greatness, but I shall see you again soon." ... Her
melancholy at the thought of his predicted death, her fear of an
eternal parting, stifled her remaining words, for she wanted to say
more and thank him more warmly. Emanuel said: "We shall never see each
other again, Clotilda; for I die in four weeks."--"O God! no!" said
Clotilda with the most heart-felt and impassioned tone.--"My good
Emanuel," said Victor, "torment not this tormented one.--Cheer thyself,
O tortured one, our friend will certainly stay with us."--Here Emanuel
raised his eyes to heaven and said with a look in which a world lay,
"Eternal One! Couldst thou hitherto have so deceived me?--No, no, on
the longest day thy stars will draw me upward, and thy earth will cool
my heart.--And thee, thou good Clotilda, thou soul from heaven, thee,
then, I certainly see to-day, God knows! for the last time with thy
lovely cheeks and in thy earthly form,--I bless thee and bid thee
farewell, but heavily and sadly, because I must still live so many days
without thee. Go through life with soft influences breathing around
thee, keep thy heart high above the many-colored mist of earth and
above its storm-clouds,--indeed, thou hearest me not, thou bitterly
weeping face; God pour solace into thy soul, let thy parting be more
glad!--Thy friend will be with me when I go hence."--Here Victor
grasped the hands of the trembling form, exhausted with weeping, who
vainly wiped away her tears to see her teacher once more and press his
image on her soul; and when Victor cried wildly, "Giulia! sainted one!
mitigate the woe of thy friend in this hour, hold this breaking heart,"
then said Emanuel, looking on both with indescribable tenderness: "I
bless you, like a father, holy pair of souls! never forsake, never
forget each other!--O ye blessed spirits here above the glimmering
mould of the crumbling coffins, give these two hearts peace and,
happiness, and when I am dead, I will float around your souls and quiet
them. And Thou, Eternal One, make these two mortals beneath thy stars
as happy as I,--O take nothing from them, nothing on the earth, but
life.--Good-night, Clotilda!" ...
--The Whitsuntide days are over!--
And I thank thee, kind Destiny, that Thou hast given me health for the
joy of sketching such a fleeting golden age, since my weak, unequally
beating heart deserves not to paint such raptures.--And for thee, my
dear reader, may the Whitsuntide feast have sweetened some ash-Sunday
or passion-week of thy life![128]--