Victor, cast headlong, senseless, at last bestirred his arm and felt
therewith the cold face, on which to-day the crazy skeleton had read
this night beforehand, and which projected above the grave, turned
toward heaven. He threw himself upon it and pressed his face to the
pale one. Before his tears had forced their way through the hard grief,
the clouds carried back their fire-buckets and their funeral torches,
and transparent foam-fleeces softly overflowed the moon and settled
down at last over the whole valley and over the still couple in a
thousand warm drops, which so easily remind man of his own tears. The
blowing up of the powder-house by one of the three Englishmen had
broken up the naval engagement of the burning clouds.
The dismembered tempest had drifted about in little clouds and stood
above the midnight-red in the northeast, when the cold numbness of the
shock still held the two men fastened together; at last a hot hand
glided down from above between their faces, and a timid voice asked,
"Are you asleep?"
"O Julius," said Horion, "come down unto the grave, thy Emanuel is
dead." ...
I care not to count the dismal minutes that let two wretched beings lie
bound by the thorn-girdle of anguish to a pallid one. But brighter
moments came, which first drove every smallest cloud out of the sky and
wiped clean the tarnished moon, and then opened the hot eyes before the
cleansed and cooled silvery night.
"Ah, he has perhaps only fainted," said Victor after a long while. They
raised themselves up with a sigh. Wearily they drew their beloved out
of the grave. They would fain carry him down to his dwelling, in order
there to bring back again from its _solstice_ this fair soul, as the
St. John's sun would return from his. With the slight energies which
grief had still spared them, and with the little light which still
entered into two wet eyes, they struggled along with the crippled
angel, while two laboring shadows beside them frightfully carried a
third in the glimmer, from the mountain down into the meadows. Here
Victor went alone into the village, in order, perhaps, to provide a
more cheerful carriage than a hearse. The blind one stayed himself by a
birch-tree, Emanuel slept like the other flowers, and upon them, before
the moon.... But suddenly Julius heard the dead man speak and graze him
as he passed through the grass; and, pursued by terror, he fled....
--Genius of dreams! thou that walkest through the nebulous sleep of
mortals and bringest up before the lonely soul imprisoned in a corpse
the happy islands of childhood! O thou that therein restorest to our
mouldered friends the bloom of the cheek and showest to our poor
frenzied heart past heavens and reflections of Eden and undulating
lawns, on clouds!----Magic Genius! enter into this holy night before a
man who is not asleep, and turn thy crape-covered glass to my open eye,
that I may see therein, and paint, the Elysian world of light which
struggles with our earthly shadow, as a pale Luna, in the double
eclipse![155]----
The enraptured voice of the dead man cried: "Hail to thee, thou still
Elysium!--O thou glimmering land of rest! receive the new shade. Ah,
how softly thou glowest,--how softly thou breathest,--how softly thou
reposest!" ...
Emanuel's eyes had opened; but in his brain burned the Elysian
delirious idea that he had died and waked up in the second world. O
thou over-blest! and indeed a glittering Eden did encircle thee,--ah,
this glow, this breath, this fragrance, this repose, was too beautiful
for an earth. The moon weaved over with silver threads, as with flying
summer-gossamer, the green of night,--from leaf to leaf, from trees to
trees stretched the sparkling veil of the illuminated rain,--over all
waters floated glimmering banks of vapor,--a gentle fanning threw
jewels from the twigs into the silver streams,--the trees and the
mountains rose like giants into the night,--the everlasting sky stood
over the falling sparks, over the fleeting fragrances; over the playing
leaves, it alone unchangeable, with fixed suns, with the eternal
world-studded vault, great, cool, radiant and blue.--Never did a valley
so glimmer, so exhale, so whisper, so enchant before....
Emanuel embraced the sparkling soil and cried out from a burning
breast, subdued and stammering with rapture: "Ah, is it true, then? do
I really hold thee, my native land?--Ay, in such fields of rest wounds
are healed, tears are stilled, no sighs demanded, no sins committed,
here in sooth the little human heart dissolves for overfulness of
rapture and creates itself anew to dissolve again.... Thus have I long
since imagined thee, blessed, magical, dazzling land, that borderest on
my earth.... O dear earth! where mayest thou be?"
He lifted his intoxicated eye to the star-bedewed heaven, and saw the
low-sunken moon hanging faint and yellow in the south; this he took for
the earth, from which he supposed death had borne him into this
Elysium. Here his voice dissolved into emotion at the beloved earliest
garden of his life, and he addressed the earth flying overhead above
the stars:--
"Globe of tears! Dwelling of dreams! Land full of shadows and
spots!--Ah, on thy broad shadowy spots[156] the good children of men
will be at this moment trembling and sinking!... A ring of clouds[157]
encircles thee, and they see not Elysium.... Ah, how silently thou
bearest through the still, blessed heavens thy battle-cry--thy
storms--thy graves; thy enveloping atmosphere shuts in like a coffin
all the voices of wailing round about thee, and thou glidest with thy
bowed and enshrouded ones only as a pale, still ball away above
Elysium!...
"Ah, ye precious ones, my Horion! my Julius! Ye are still up yonder in
the tempest, ye cover up my corpse, ye look weeping towards Heaven and
cannot see Elysium.... O that you were already through the wet cloud of
life!--but perhaps ye have already been long sleeping and waking,
perhaps time goes otherwise on earth than in eternity.--Ah! that you
might come down into the still pastures!" He saw in the magically
magnifying glimmer two forms walking. "Oh, who is it?" he cried, flying
to meet them. "O father! O mother! Are you here?"--But when he came
nearer, he sank into four other arms, and stammered, "Blessed, blessed
are we now, my Horion! my Julius!"--At last he said: "Where are my
parents and my brothers and Clotilda and the three Brahmins? know they
not that their Dahore is in Elysium?"
Victor beheld disconsolately the delirious ecstasy of his beloved, and
said neither yes nor no. The latter gazed with a heavenly smile and a
stream of love into the face of Julius, and said, "Look on me, thou
couldst never see me on the earth."--"Thou knowest well that I am
blind, my Emanuel," said the blind one. Here the frenzied man, turning
away his quivering eyes suddenly and with a sigh to the moon, fled from
his friends, saying to himself in a low voice: "The two forms are only
shadowy dreams from the earth,--I will not look upon them, so that they
may melt away.--So then the shadowy and dreamy woe of earth reaches
over even into Eden. Haply I am still in a dream of death, for the
region round about me looks like the landscapes in my life-dreams,--or
is this only the fore-court of heaven, as I do not find my parents?"
... He looked toward the lofty stars: "Where do I now stand below you?
New heavens lie on new heavens.----Ah, does one yearn then even here?"
He sighed and wondered that he sighed. He leaned down on the
pearl-glistening hill of flowers, with his back to the beloved shadows
and his eyes towards the kindling dawn, and groped and dreamed,--but at
last the coolness of morning overspread the seeking, dazzled, burning
eyes, which to-day had fallen now upon shapes of terror, now into seas
of ecstasy, with gentle slumber and with corresponding dreams... "Rest
softly, thou weary man!" said his friend; but the sleeper glowed with
the horizon, and the old delusion played on within him again....
A dream and the morning laid for him the groundwork of a still higher
Elysium.
He dreamed God would descend from a throne of suns, and in the form of
an invisible, infinite zephyr's breath move over Elysium.
The first morning of summer heaped around him the bridal finery of the
earth,--it lined the fields with pearl-banks of dew, and flung over the
burrowing brooks the gold tinsel and spangles of the descending flush
of morn, and hung upon the bushes the bracelets of burning drops.--But
not until it had cloven open all the flowers,--sent out all the birds,
quivering with gladness through the radiant heavens,--hid singing
voices in all tree-tops,--not till it had sunk the faded moon behind
the earth, and set up the sun like a god's throne over wreaths of
clouds just burst into bloom, and over all gardens and around all woods
had hung intertwined rainbows of dew,--and not till the blissful one
stammered in his dreaming, "All-gracious One, All-gracious One, appear
in the Elysium!"--not till then did the slowly flowing morning wind
awaken him and usher him into the thousand-voiced jubilant choirs of
creation, and set him to reeling blindly in the ringing, blazing
Elysium.----
And lo! at this moment, a vast, boundless breath, cool, stirring,
whispering, overflowed the whole enkindled Paradise; and the little
flowers bowed themselves down silently, and the green ears soughing
undulated together, and the stately trees trembled and murmured,--but
only the great breast of man drank in in streams the infinite breath,
and Emanuel's heart dissolved, ere it could say, "This is Thyself,
All-loving One!"
--Thou, that readest me here, deny not God, when thou steppest out into
the morning or under the starry heavens, or when thou art good or when
thou art happy!--
--But, unhappy Emanuel!
Thou beheldest five sporting black butterflies, and thoughtest the fair
creatures blessed Psyches.--Thou heardest behind thy hill a hewing into
the earth, as if men were making a grave.--Thou lookedst upon thy good
blind darling, and yet saidst, "Shadow! retire.... Tremble before God,
who just passed by, and vanish!"--But thou saidst, before that,
something else which I to-day do not disclose.--