Victor rose sadly from his dreams, in which he had seen nothing but
graves and funeral piles for his friend; but he gathered secret hopes
at the morning-greeting, as he saw him step forth into his alleged
death-morning without fever, without oppression, without change. His
only concern was about the impression which the disappointed hope of
departure would make upon the heart of the beloved friend, already half
torn from the earthly soil and laid bare from earthly environment. The
latter, on the contrary, still held fast to his dreams, to which even
his nightly ones gave nourishment; and he looked yearningly into the
starless blue, and calculated the long road to the twelfth night-hour,
when, out of heaven should peer forth the stars, and death with that
dark, immense mantle of his, in which he bears us through his cold
realm. His heart lay in a sweet siesta, which proceeded partly from
bodily exhaustion and from the beauty of the day. His inner calm, never
so great and magical as in souls in which whirlwinds and hurricanes
have swept to and fro, overspread his whole being with a bliss of
yearning which in other eyes than his would have melted in tear-drops.
O Rest! thou soft word!--autumnal bloom of Eden! Moonlight of the
spirit! Rest of the soul, when wilt thou hold our head, that it may be
still, and our heart, that it may cease beating? Ah, ere the one grows
pale and the other stiff, thou comest often and goest often, and only
down below with sleep and with death thou abidest, whereas above, men
with the greatest wings, like birds of paradise, are whirled about most
of all by the storms!
The tranquillity with which Emanuel played out the star-part of life,
even to the last catch-word,--with which he packed up everything--set
all to rights--gave all directions--took leave of all,--stirred up
tears and tempests together in his tormented friend. His heart had
been, indeed, dragged till it was sore over a stony road, but its
inflammations were now softly cooled off by the thought of death; yet
he could not--though with the greatest incredulity about Emanuel's
death--endure to hear it, when Emanuel committed to him at a distance
the blind Julius, from whom this death was concealed, with the
low-spoken words, "Hold him dear as I do, protect, provide for the poor
child, till thou canst deliver him over to Lord Horion." His trembling
hands could hardly take from him a packet to that lord, which the
friend handed to him with tender eyes and with the words, "When these
seals are opened, then my oaths have ceased and thou wilt learn all."
For his tender conscience allowed him to conceal only the _import_, not
the _existence_ of secrets.--It will not astonish us, as Victor's veins
received one wound after another, that, in order not to increase their
bleeding by agitations, he begged the flute-player not to play to-day;
music would, on this day, have had too much power over his dissolved
heart.
The morning they spent in farewell-visits to old paths, bowers, and
heights; but Emanuel performed not here the sharp, passionate
climax-part of the fifth act; he broke not forth, upon an earth where
death grazes, into any unphilosophical outcry because he should not see
the flowers plucked and the grain cut, nor the green fruit grow yellow;
but with a higher rapture, which beyond the earthy spring promised
itself still fairer ones, he took his leave of every flower, went
through every leafy winding and shadowy night-piece, drew out of every
mirroring pond his transfigured form lying as it were in the earth, and
showed a more affectionate attentiveness to nature, now that he hoped
to-night to come nearer to Him who created it. He sought and Victor
shunned every occasion to speak of all this. "Only not for the last
time!" said the latter. "Not?" said Emanuel.--"Does not everything
happen only once and for the last time?--Do not Autumn and Time, as
well as Death, separate us from all?--Does not all part from us, even
if we do not part from it?--Time is nothing but a death with softer,
thinner sickles; every minute is the autumn of the past one, and the
second world will be the spring of a _third_.----Ah, when I one day
retire again from the flowery surface of a second, and when on the
heavenly death-day I see the twilight of the memory of two lives,----O
in the future lies a groundwork for infinite bliss as well as woe, why
does man shrink with awe only before this?"--Victor disputed the
immortality of memory. "Without memory," said Emanuel, "there is no
life, only existence, no years, only seconds,--no _I_, only
representations of it.--A being breaks up into as many million beings
as it has thoughts,--memory is merely consciousness of present
existence."[150]--Even the Poet philosophizes at least for poetry and
against philosophy.--Victor thought: "Thou good man! to myself, not to
thee, I made these objections."
It was towards noon; the sky was clear, but sultry; the flowers
announced by their shutting up the gathering of the electric fires; all
meadows were altars of incense, and fragrances went forth as prophets
of the storm-clouds. With the _physical_ stormy material there
accumulated in Victor a corresponding _moral_ element;--he reflected
that often a hot day ended the life of consumptive patients;--he
confounded at times the _bitterness_ of parting with its _probability_;
for man, deceived by the _aerial perspective_ of fear, fancies a shape
of terror so much the _nearer_, the _larger_ it is; he wept at the very
thought that he might weep; but nevertheless reason would have held the
upperhand of the feelings, had not the following occurrence benumbed
both.
In Maienthal there dwelt a madman whom they called by no other name
than that of the crazy skeleton. For three reasons he was called so:
first, because he was an anatomical preparation of leanness; secondly,
because he carried round the fixed idea, that Death was after him and
wanted to seize and abduct him by the left hand, which he therefore
concealed; thirdly, because he gave out that he could see when any one
was going to die soon by the look of the face, which in that case was
already overspread with the indentations and abscesses of corruption.
In Moritz's experimental psychology[151] a similar man is described,
who is also said to be able to detect the forerunners of death and its
triturating hand on faces which appear to others smooth and ruddy,
whereas he sees them seamed with the lunar caustic of corruption.--This
skeleton it was, which, on the night of the fourth Whitsuntide day,
when Clotilda was in the churchyard, cried out, Death! I am already
buried.[152]--Victor and Emanuel went home during the striking of the
twelfth hour, and on their way passed a hill, whereon the skeleton sat
agitated; the left hand, at which Death grasped, buried itself deep
into the opposite arm-pit: "Brrr!" it said, shaking its head at
Emanuel, "he has thee, but not me! Nothing but mould is hanging on
thee! The eyes are gone! Brr!"
The words of the insane are, to a man who listens at the gate of the
invisible world, more memorable than those of the wise man, just as he
listens more attentively to sleepers than to the waking, to the sick
than to the well. Victor's blood stiffened under the ice-cold clutch at
his warm life. The crazy skeleton ran off, shielding the left hand with
the right. Victor took his friend's left, looked up at the warm sun,
and sought to conceal and to warm himself and could say nothing. Down
near the margin of the deep-blue heaven little clouds smoked up, the
germs of an evening tempest; and in the sultry air nothing but vermin
flew abroad.
Emanuel was more quiet and almost troubled, but it was not the anxiety
of fear, but that uneasiness of expectation with which we always look
upon the folds and flutterings of the curtain of great scenes. The
stinging sun kept the couple at home. To Emanuel, oppressed by the
sultry atmosphere, the last afternoon was almost too long. But his
friend saw all the time hanging in this atmospheric vault a mouldering
countenance, which seemed to work its way into the beloved fresh one,
and he continually heard the crazy skeleton repeating in his ear, "His
eyes are out!"
In the sultry stillness, when the sun dug and charged the mining pits
of the thunder, and when the two friends ventured before the ears of
the blind Julius to speak only with looks of to-day's future, towards
four o'clock a fanning, evening-breeze came up, which refreshed all
drooping wings and heads. Emanuel let in these cool waves, which ran
lullingly and comfortingly over the bent flowers at the window, and
flowed down along the wavering folds of the curtains, and strayed and
plashed through the fragrant foliage of the room. Then came an infinite
stillness, a dissolving bliss, an inexpressible yearning into Emanuel's
heart. The joys of his childhood, the features of his mother, the
images of Indian fields, all beloved, mouldering forms, the whole
gliding reflection of his youth's morning, flowed along glimmeringly
before him;--a melancholy longing for his native land, for his dead
friends, distended his bosom with sweet, distressful emotions. That
evergreen palm-grove of youthful memory he laid as a cooling herb
around his own and Horion's brows, and brought over the whole first
circle of his existence out of the Indian Eden into this narrow housing
before the two latest objects of his affection. But as he thus
heaped up the ashes of the Phœnixes of joy on the altar of the
evening-sun,--as he thus at his exodus looked back over all the Elysian
fields of his life as they lay behind each other,--as the whole of
earth and life, overspread with morning dew and morning redness,
transformed themselves before him into the glimmering playground of
humanity;--then was he unable to master any longer his emotion and his
melted heart, and in a blissful agitation, in a trembling gratitude to
the Eternal, he begged the blind youth to take his flute and let the
_Song of Ecstasy_, which he always had played for himself on the
morning of the new year and of his birthday, sound after him as an echo
of his dying life.
Julius took the flute. Horion went out under a loud-rustling tree and
looked into the setting sun. Emanuel placed himself at the breezy
window opposite the purple stream of the evening light, and the song of
rapture began and flowed in streams into his heart and round the
sinking sun.
And as the tones of the spheres seemed to well out from the sun, which
in the evening redness, like a swan dissolved in melodies, died of
rapture before God in gold-haze and dew of joy,--and as all the flowers
wherewith the Eternal goodness covers our heart, and all the blissful
fields through which its gentle hand conducts uncertain man, flew by
before Emanuel like angels,--and as he saw the future heavens, into
which the way of life leads, drawing nearer,--and as he saw these
infinite arms cover all wounded hearts, stretch over all millenniums,
bear all worlds and yet even him too, him, puny son of earth;--O then
was it impossible for him longer to restrain his full heart; it burst
with gratitude, and from his eyes again fell the first tear-drops after
long, long years. These holy drops he wiped not away; in them the
evening-red ran to a blazing sea; the flute died away; Victor found his
eyes still glistening; Emanuel said, "O see, I weep for joy at the
thought of my Maker!"----Then were there between these exalted men, on
this holy spot, no more words,--death had lost his form,--a sublime
sorrow deadened the pangs of separation,--the sun, over which the earth
had rolled, touched with his erect beams the heavens and the night and
the bottom of the clouds,--the earth glimmered magically like a
dream-landscape, and yet it was easy to quit it, for the other
dream-landscapes covered the sky.
The earths of night (the planets) had already come out, the suns of
night (the fixed stars) had already come forth after them, the moon had
already enveloped itself in the southeast storm: when Emanuel saw that
it was time to end the scenes of the valley and go up to his Tabor, to
give Death the wing-casing of his soul. Hesitating, he begged Victor to
go forward a little, that he might not see his parting with the blind
one, and haply betray himself by sympathy; for Victor had represented:
to the blind one the journey into the other world as only one upon this
earth. He stationed himself unhappily out before the hushed sultry
fields through which once had passed the rivers of paradise of his
love, on which he had once at Clotilda's side seen fairer evenings; on
the earth was the stillness of death, as in a church by night, only a
leaden cloud, bent down toward the earth, blustered round the heavens,
and Death seemed to go from cloud to cloud and array them for battle.
At last he heard Julius weeping. Emanuel came flying out, but in his
eyes stood heavier drops than his former ones. And as the forsaken
blind one turned away his dark head from his friends in the
house-door-way, either because he knew not which way they had gone or
would listen to know, then was Victor barely able, for inward sadness,
to call back to the bowed form, which dwelt in a double night, that he
would return after twelve o'clock.
In the bald evening greeting, "Good night, a pleasant sleep," which
Emanuel gave and received, there was more stuff for tears than in whole
elegies and farewell-speeches; so true it is that words are only the
inscriptions upon our hour,[153] and the ripieno[154]-voices of the
scoring of our keynotes.
So soon as Emanuel came out before the night heavens, before the
hurricane chained thereto and before his death-mountain, angels lifted
up again his softened soul,--he saw death descend from heaven and set
up the liberty-tree on his grave,--he saw the friendly stars draw
nearer, and they were the heavenly eyes of his friends and of all
blessed beings. Victor dared not disturb his poetic hopes by any
reasons; much rather was he himself from hour to hour drawn deeper into
the belief of his death; at least he feared that to-day's storm of
rapture might rend asunder the frail dwelling of this fair heart and of
its sighs, and that death would creep about the noble soul till by its
very wings, as it rose in its ecstasy, he could pluck it away from
life, as children go round and round the butterfly till at last it
lifts its wings folded on one another into their predatory fingers.
Emanuel delayed by circuitous paths the ascent of the mountain, in
order to raise his broken friend, whose eyes were no longer dry, from
one sun to the other, so that in that high position he might look down
from the midst of lights upon this shadowy earth and hardly notice the
corpse of his friend on account of its littleness. "Yes, this is the
reason," said he, "why the earth is every day darkened, like the cages
of birds, that we may in the dark more easily catch the higher
melodies.--Thoughts which the day makes a dark smoke and vapor stand
round about us in the night as flames and lights, as the column which
floats over Vesuvius appears a pillar of cloud by day and is a pillar
of fire by night." Victor perceived the design, namely, of consoling
him, and became the more disconsolate and continued silent.
They did not go up on the side of the mountain to the weeping-birch,
but over its slowly ascending ridge. They overlooked the theatre of
night, over which the moon and the storm were coming up under a veil;
Emanuel stopped and said: "O look up and see the eternally sparkling
morning-meadows which lie around the throne of the Eternal! Had never a
star shone out of heaven, only then would man lay himself down with
anguish in his last sleep, on a dark earth built over like a burial
vault without an opening." Before eyes which were fastened on suns,
flashing glowworms trailed by, and a bat whizzed after a gray
night-butterfly,--three St. John's day fires; lighted by superstition,
brought three distant hills out of night,--all life slept under its
leaf, under its twig, nearer to its mother, and in the dreams that were
strewed about lay storms,--fishes tumbled up like corpses on the
surface of the water as forerunners of the thunder.
Suddenly Emanuel began, with an ill-fitting, not sufficiently
controlled voice: "Verily we should stand more composedly beside the
genius who lets fall the last sands of slumber on the eyes of our
loves, if they did not afterward sleep out their last sleep in church
vaults, in churchyards, but upon meadows, under the open heavens, or as
mummies in chambers.... Now then, my beloved," they heard already the
waving of the weeping-birch, "control thy fantasy; thou wilt see near
the birch-tree my resting-pit open; I have for four weeks sown and
clothed it with flowers which are now mostly in bloom,--thou wilt lay
me thus to-morrow, without any _other_ preparation, in my night-dress
among the flowers,--and cover it up to-morrow,--but do not, thou good
man, give my little flower-piece such hard names as other men
do,--to-morrow, I say; to-day go immediately home to thy Julius, when
I...." (_am dead_, he would have said, but could not find for emotion
the soft paraphrase).--
Ah! Horion with a sigh tore his agonized eyes out from the cold open
grotto of his beloved, and could not look down to its blooming flowers.
He sobbed aloud and looked out through tears faintly into Emanuel's
face, to see whether he was living or dying. Two glowworms crossed one
another in glimmering curves above the grave, they settled down beside
it, and were extinguished, for their light ceases with their motion.
The thunder now struck into Victor's wounds with its first clap,--a
dissolving lightning covered the Eastern horizon, and the flame ran
over the Alpine ridges,--the lightning-rod on the powder-house glowed,
its alarm-bells rang, the ignes-fatui played about the tower, and in
mid-air a hovering luminous point moved fearfully towards it.
In Maienthal eleven o'clock was called,--at twelve Emanuel believed he
should be gone hence. At last Emanuel, unmanned himself by another's
sorrow, fell upon his friend and said: "What hast thou further to
say to me, my beloved, my inexpressibly dear friend?--by hours are
fled,--our farewell approaches,--say thine, and then disturb not my
dying. Be still, when death climbs the mountain, and send no
lamentations after me, when he takes me up.--What hast thou more to say
to me, my eternally beloved?"--"Nothing more, thou angel of heaven! nor
can I," said Victor with bleeding and exhausted heart, and laid his
oppressed head with streams of tears on Emanuel's shoulder.
"Now then break off thy heart from mine, and farewell,--be happy, be
good, be great. I have loved thee very much, I shall love thee once
more and then forever. Good, faithful one,--mortal like me, immortal
like me!"
The storm-bells tolled more violently,--the hovering luminous point
advanced upon the powder-house,--all the covered cloud-volcanoes
bellowed side by side and flung their flames together, and the thunders
passed like alarm-bells between them,--the two friends lay in each
other's arms, close, mute, gasping, clasping, trembling before the last
word.
"O speak once more, my Horion, and take leave of thy friend,--only say
to me, Rest well! and leave the dying."
Horion said, "Rest well!" and left him. His tears ceased and his sighs
were hushed. The thunder came to a fearful pause. Nature was mutely
ordering her chaos in the tempest. Not a flash gleamed through the
funeral pile in heaven. Only the funeral tolling of the alarm-bells on
the lightning-rod continued to speak, and the luminous point to creep
onward.
Under the wide stillness lay sleep, dreams, and a friend's inconsolable
heart.
In this stillness of eternity Emanuel went up without any other hand in
his to the high gate which soars away in black darkness above time.
Silence is the speech of the world of spirits, the starry heaven its
nunnery-grating,--but behind this nunnery-grating appeared now no
spirit, not even God.
The moment was coming when man looks upon his body and then on his
individual self, and then shudders.--The _I_ stands alone beside its
shadow,--a foam-globe of being trembles, snaps, and collapses, and one
hears the bubble vanish and _is_ one himself.
Emanuel peered into Eternity, it looked like a long night.
He looked round him to see whether he cast a shadow,--a shadow casts no
shadow.
Ah! a mute lays man in the cradle, a mute stretches him out in the
grave.--When he has a joy, it looks as if a sleeper smiled,--when he
weeps and wails, it looks like weeping in one's sleep.--We all look up
to heaven and pray for solace; but overhead in the endless blue there
is no voice for our heart,--nothing appears, nothing consoles us,
nothing answers us.--
And so we die....
--O All-gracious One! we die more happily; only the poor Emanuel
wrestled in the silent darkness with fierce thoughts which for so long
a time he had not seen, and which clutched at his paling countenance.
But these masks flee away, when a friendly fraternal face appears
before thee and embraces thee.--Horion raised himself up and warmed
again his bowed friend by a mute farewell. A storm-wind precipitated
itself out of the clear west into the dumb, laboring hell, and chased
out all the lightnings and all the thunders. Lo, at that moment the
bright moon flew out from the backward-drifted mass of cloud like an
angel of peace into the unstained blue,--_then in the light Emanuel
stood distinguished from his shadow_,--then did the moon illuminate a
rainbow of pale color grains, which in the Southeast (the gate to the
East Indies) penetrated through the dark water-columns, and arched
itself over the Alps,--then Emanuel saw again, as previously, the
Jacob's ladder leaning against the earthly night,--then came rapture
without measure, and he cried with outspread arms: "Ah, yonder in the
_East_, in the East, over the road to my _native land_, there glows the
arch of triumph, there opens the gate of glory, there the dying march
through." ...
And as just then it struck twelve o'clock, he spread out his hand
ecstatically towards heaven, which was blue above the mountains, and
toward the moon, which reposed serenely beside the tempest, and cried,
breaking into blissful tears, "Thanks, Eternal One, for my first life,
for all my joys, for this fair earth."--
The flute tones of Julius floated around Maienthal, and he looked down
upon the earth.
"And be thou ever blest, thou good earth, thou good mother-land, bloom,
ye fields of Hindostan, farewell, thou glowing Maienthal, with thy
flowers and with thy people,--and ye brothers, all of you, after a long
smile, come and blissfully follow me. Now, O Eternal One, take me up,
and console the _two_ survivors."
The death angels stood on all the clouds, and drew their glittering
swords out of the nights,--one thunder clapped after another, as if one
prison-door of this earthly life after another were flung open.
The terrible luminous point had crept out of mid-air into the
powder-house.
The death-hour had already passed, and yet life had not.
Emanuel trembled with yearning and apprehension, because he felt as yet
no sign of dying,--moved his hands as if he would give them to some
one,--stared into the lightnings as if he would draw them upon him....
"Death! seize me," he cried, beside himself,--"ye dead friends! O
father! O mother! tear my heart away, take me,--I cannot--cannot live
any longer."----
At that moment a blazing, rattling globe flew up into the tempest, and
the powder-house shot itself to pieces like an undermined hell.--The
explosion threw the flaming Emanuel pale into his flowery grave; the
whole thundering east trembled; the moon and the rainbow were
darkened....