* * * * *
The fever images of death, with which every sleep, even the last,
begins, gleamed in Emanuel's eyes. His spirit hung swaying in his loose
nerves, breathed upon by soft airs; for he was already in that
dissolving nervous ecstasy of the fainting, the child-bearing, the
exhausted by bleeding, the dying. But his emptied breast rose the more
lightly, his departing spirit drew out thinner the thread of life.
Victor would have enjoyed the comfort of the dull numbness, wherewith
pains heaped one upon another crush us down, had he not been obliged
every minute to tell these pains, i. e. all the preparations of death,
to the poor blind youth. Ah, the blind one feared perhaps that he might
call after this teacher too late with the song of rapture.
Evening came. Emanuel grew stiller and his eye more rigid, and it
seemed to see the fantasies of his busy brain in the apartment, until
the gold strip of the far-sinking sun, which a looking-glass directed
towards him, darted like a lightning-flash through his world of dream.
Softly, but with altered voice, he said, "Into the sun!"--They
understood him, and moved his bed and his head toward the evening-rain
of the setting sun, to which he had of old so often unfolded his
susceptible heart. Victor started, when he saw that his eyes stood,
undazzled and immovable, open to the sun.
There was a sublime stillness round three discomposed beings; only a
breath of evening wind fluttered among the linden-leaves of the
apartment, and a bee hovered about the linden-blossoms; but out of
doors away from the theatre of distress a blissful evening reposed on
the pastures red with sunlight, among joyous, fluttering, singing,
intoxicated creatures.
Emanuel gazed silently into the sun, which sunk lower toward the earth;
he clutched not at the bed-clothes like others, but flung his arms
aloft as if for a flight or an embrace. Victor took his beloved hands,
but they hung down into his without a pressure. And when the sun, like
a blazing world on the day of judgment, sank down in a last upshooting
glow: then the silent one still hung with cold eyes on the vacant place
of the sun, and remarked not the setting; and Victor saw suddenly
shifting flashes of the scythe of death pass yellow across the
undistorted face.--Then, deeply troubled, he handed the flute to
Julius, and said in a broken voice, "Play the song of rapture, he is
dying now."--
And Julius, with streaming, darkened eyes, compressed his sobbing
breath into the flute and raised his sighs to heavenly tones, that he
might muffle and benumb the parting soul, during the tearing away of
its earthly roots, with the after-echoes of the first world, with the
preluding echoes of the second.
And as, during the song, a blissful smile at an unknown dream glorified
the face that was growing cold,--and when only a quiver of the hand
pressed the hand of the disconsolate friend, and only a quiver winked
with the eyelid and farther down opened the pale lips and passed away,
and when the evening redness overspread the pale form,--lo, then death,
cold to the earth and our lamentations, iron, erect, and dumb, stalked
through the fair evening under the linden blossoms to the enwrapped
soul in the tranquillized corpse and transferred the veiled soul with
immeasurable arms from the earth through unknown worlds into Thy
eternal, warm, fatherly hand which has created us,--into the Elysium
for which Thou hast formed us,--among the kindred of our hearts,--into
the land of rest, of virtue, and of light....
Julius stopped for sorrow, and Victor said, "Play on the song of
rapture, he has only just died."--During the tones Victor shut to the
eyes of his beloved, and said with a heart above the earth, "Now close
yourselves,--the spirit is above the earth, to which you gave
light,--thou pale, hallowed form, thou hallowed heart, the angel within
thee is gone out and thou fallest back into the earth."--And here he
embraced once more the cold, empty wrappage, and pressed the heart,
which beat no more, knew him no longer, to his hot bosom; for the
flute-tones tore his pale wounds too widely open.--Oh, it is well that
when man in grim woe stiffens to solid ice, no tones are with him: the
tender tones would lick all the sad blood out of his transpierced
bosom, and man would die of his agonies, because he would be able to
express his agonies....
--Here let my curtain fall before all these scenes of death, before
Emanuel's grave and Horion's grief!--Thou and I, my reader, will
now go forth from another's death-chamber, to look into nearer ones
where we ourselves lie prostrate or where our dearest have lain. We
will in those chambers behold our death-bed, but let not our eye
sink;--the flame of love and of virtue blazes upward above the
corruptions,--around the death-bed we see a bier as a couch of rest on
which all burdens are laid down, and the broken heart also,--around the
deathbed we see a great, unknown form, who breaks off from the _image_
of God the earthly _frame_.--But if the heart is made great beside our
own resting-place, it becomes tender beside another's.--If thou, my
reader, and if I now, with this deeply moved soul, look into the
chambers where we received the perpetual wounds of earth, then will the
pale forms which therein raise their dead men's eyes once more to meet
us, agitate and wound us too sorely.--Ah, that may you well do, too, ye
loved mutes,--what have we then left to give you, but a tear which
pains us, a sigh which oppresses our hearts? Ah, if the mourning-crape
on our faces is torn as soon as the funeral veil on yours,--if the
marble gravestone with your name must be turned over above your
corpses, in order to cover a new one with its new name,--O, if we so
easily forget all the eternal love, the eternal remembrance, which we
promised you in your last hour,--ah, then, indeed, in these tumultuous
days of life a still hour like this is holy and beautiful, in which we
lay our ear as it were close to the sunken graves, and, from the depth
of the earth, although every day more darkly, hear the voices that we
know call up: "Forget us not,--forget me not, my son--my friend--my
beloved, forget me not!"
No, and we will not forget you! And, if it makes us ever so sad, still
let each one of us at this moment summon the most precious forms before
him out of their resting-places, and behold the wasted features, the
reopened eyes full of love, which were so long closed, and contemplate
full long the dear, uncovered face, till the old remembrances of the
fair days of their love break the heart and he can weep no more.