as they stood before the cottage, and Eugenius said: “Oh, thou quiet,
eternal heaven, take nothing more from us!” But his pale child with
its snapped lily-head was before him; he looked at the mother, and she
lay with her moistened eye reaching into heaven, and said softly: “O
take us all at once!”
The angel of futurity, whom I will call the angel of rest, wept as he
smiled, and his wings swept away the sighs of the parents with an
evening breeze, that they might not sadden each other.
The transparent evening flowed round the red mountain like a bright
lake, and washed it with the circles of cool evening waves. The more
the evening and earth grew, still the more did the two souls feel that
they were in the right place. They had no tears too many, none too
few, and their bliss needed no other increase than its repetition.
Eugenius sent the first harmonious tones floating like swans through
the pure Alpine sky. The weary child, twined in a flowery wreath,
leaned against a sun-dial, and played with the flowers which it drew
around it, to entwine them in its circle. The mother at last awoke
from her harmonious transport; her eye fell on the large eyes of her
child, which opened wide upon her; singing and smiling, and, with
overflowing motherly love, she stepped to the little angel, which was
cold and dead. For its life, which had descended from heaven, had,
like other tones, been dissipated in the atmosphere of earth; death had
breathed upon the butterfly, and it had ascended from the rushing
streams of air to the ever-refining ether; from the flowers of earth to
the flowers of paradise.
Oh, ever flutter away, ye blessed children! The angel of rest wakes
you in the morning-hour of life with cradle songs, two arms bear you
and your little coffin, and your body, with the two red cheeks, the
forehead free from the print of grief, and the white hands, glide down
by a chain of flowers to the second cradle, and you have only exchanged
one paradise for another. But we--oh, we are crushed by the
storm-winds of life; our heart is weary, our face is deeply marked with
earthly care, and our soul stiffened, still clings to the earthy clod.
Turn away thine eye from Rosamond’s piercing shriek, fixed glance, and
petrifying features, if thou art a mother, and hast already felt this
pain! look not upon the mother, who, with senseless hand, squeezes
against her the corpse which she now cannot stifle; but look at the
father, who, with his breast, silently covers his struggling heart,
although black grief has twined around it with an adder’s folds, and
poisoned it with an adder’s teeth. Ah, when he at last had conquered
the pain, his heart was envenomed and riven. A man bears the pain of
the wound, but sinks under the scar: a woman seldom combats her grief,
but yet she survives it. “Remain here,” he said, with a suppressed
voice, “I will lay it to rest before the moon rises.” She said
nothing, kissed the child in silence, broke up its wreath of flowers,
sunk down upon the sun-dial, and laid her cold face upon her arm, that
she might not see it carried away.
On the way the dawning light of the moon shone upon the shaking body of
the infant, and the father said: “Burst forth, oh moon! that I may see
the land wherein He dwells. Rise, oh Elysium! that I may think the
soul of the corse is within thee. Oh child, child, dost thou know
me--dost thou hear me? Hast thou above so fair a face as this one, so
sweet a mouth? Oh thou heavenly mouth, thou heavenly eye, no more
spirit visits thee!” He laid the child beneath flowers which supplied
the place of all that we are generally laid upon for the last time; but
his heart was breaking when he covered the pale lips, the open eyes,
with flowers and earth, and streams of tears fell first into the grave.
When with the verdant coating of the clods he had built a little mound,
he felt that he was weary of his journey and of life; that his weakly
chest could not endure the thin mountain air, and that the ice of death
had settled in his heart. He cast a longing glance at the bereaved
mother, who had long stood trembling behind him, and they fell silent
into each other’s arms, and their eyes could scarcely weep more.
At last, from behind a glacier that was glimmering out, the glorious
moon flowed forth in loveliness on the two silent unhappy ones, and
showed them its white peaceful meadows, and the gentle light with which
it softens man. “Mother, look up,” said Eugenius; “yonder is thy son!
See there, the white flowery groves, in which our child will play, are
passing over the moon.” Now a burning fire filled his inmost self with
consuming power,--the moon made his eye blind to all that was not
light; sublime forms rolled before him in the light stream, and he
heard in his soul, new thoughts which are not indigenous in man, and
are too great for memory; just as in a dream small melodies may come to
the man who can make none when awake. Death and pleasure press upon
his heavy tongue. “Rosamond, why sayest thou nothing? Dost thou see
thy child? I look beyond the long earth, even to where the moon
begins. There is my son flying between angels. Full flowers cradle
him,--the spring of earth waves over him--children lead him--angels
instruct him--God loves him. Oh! thou dear one, thou art smiling; the
silver light of paradise flows with heavenly radiance about thy little
mouth, and thou hearest me, and callest thy parents. Rosamond, give me
thy hand; we will go and die!”
The slight corporeal chains grew longer. His advancing spirit
fluttered higher on the borders of life. With convulsive power he
seized the paralysed Rosamond, and blind and sinking, stammered forth,
“Rosamond, where art thou? I fly! I die! We remain together!”
His heart burst,--his spirit fled; but Rosamond did not remain with
him, for fate snatched her from his dying hand, and cast her back upon
earth, living. She felt if his hand had the coldness of death, and
since it had, she placed it softly against her heart, sunk slowly upon
her failing knees, and raised her face, which had become inexpressibly
serene, towards the starry power. Her eyes, from their tearless
sockets, pressed forth dry, large, and happy, into the sky, and therein
calmly sought a supernatural form, which should descend and bear her
up. She almost fancied she was dying then, and prayed thus: “Come,
thou angel of rest, come and take my heart, and bear it to my beloved.
Angel of rest! leave me not so long alone among the corses. Oh, God!
is there then nought invisible about me? Angel of death! thou must be
here, thou hast already snatched away two souls close by me, and hast
made them ascend. I, too, am dead, draw forth my glowing soul from its
cold kneeling corse.”
With mad disquiet, she looked about in the vacant sky. Suddenly, in
that still desert, a star shone forth, and wound its way towards the
earth. She spread her arms in transport, and thought the angel of rest
was rushing towards her. Alas! the star passed away, but she did not.
“Not yet? Do I not die yet, All-merciful One?” sighed poor Rosamond.
In the east a cloud arose,--it passed over the moon, sailed in
loneliness across the clear sky, and stood over the most agonised heart
upon earth. She threw back her head, so as to face the cloud, and said
to the lightning, “Strike this head, and release my heart!” But the
cloud passed darkly over the head that was thrown back for it, and
flying down the sky, sunk behind the mountains. Then, with a thousand
tears, she cried, “Can I not die? Can I not die?”
Poor Rosamond! How did pain roll itself together, give an angry
serpent-spring at thy heart, and fix in it all its poisonous teeth.
But a weeping spirit poured the opium of insensibility into thine
heart, and the bursts of agony flowed away in a soft convulsion.
She awoke in the morning, but her mind was unsettled. She saw the sun
and the dead man, but her eye had lost all tears, and her burst heart
had, like a broken bell, lost all tone; she merely murmured, “Why can I
not die?” She went back cold into her hut, and said nothing but these
words. Every night she went half an hour later to the corpse, and
every time she met the rising moon, which was now broken, and said,
while she turned her mourning, tearless eye towards its gleaming
meadows, “Why cannot I die?”
Ay, why canst thou not, good soul? for the cold earth would have sucked
out of all thy wounds the last venom with which the human heart is laid
beneath its surface, just as the hand when buried in earth recovers
from the sting of a bee. But I turn mine eye away from thy pain, and
look up at the glimmering moon, where Eugenius opens his eyes among
smiling children, and his own child, now with wings, falls upon his
heart. How quiet is every thing in the dimly lit portico of the second
world, a misty rain of light silvers o’er the bright fields of the
first heaven, and beads of light instead of sparkling dew hang upon
flowers and summits,--the blue of heaven is darker over the lily
plains, all the melodies in the thinner air are but a dispersed
echo,--only night-flowers exhale their scents, and dazzle waving around
calmer glances--here the waving plains rock as in a cradle the crushed
souls, and the lofty billows of life fall gliding apart--then the heart
sleeps, the eye becomes dry, the wish becomes silent. Children flutter
like the hum of bees around the heart which is sunk in earth, and is
still palpitating, and the dream after death represents the earthly
life, as a dream here represents childhood here, magically, soothingly,
softly, and free from care.
Eugenius looked from the moon towards the earth, which for a long
moon-day--equal to two earth-weeks--floated like a thin white cloud
across the blue sky; but he did not recognise his old motherland. At
last the sun set to the moon, and our earth rested, large, glimmering,
and immoveable, on the pure horizon of Elysium, scattering, like a
water-wheel upon a meadow, the flowing beams upon the waving Elysian
garden. He then recognised the earth, upon which he had left a heart
so troubled, in a breast so beloved; and his soul, which reposed in
pleasure, became full of melancholy, and of an infinite longing after
the beloved of his former life, who was suffering below. “Oh, my
Rosamond! why dost thou not leave a sphere, where nothing more loves
thee?” And he cast a supplicating look at the angel of rest, and said:
“Beloved one, take me down from the land of quiet, and lead me to the
faithful soul, that I may see her, and again feel pain, so that she may
not pine alone.”
Then his heart began suddenly, as it were, to float without any bounds;
breezes fluttered around him, as though they raised him flying, wafted
him away as they swelled, and veiled him in floods; he sank through the
red evening twilights as through roses, and through the night as
through bowers, and through a damp atmosphere which filled his eye with
drops. Then it seemed as though old dreams of childhood had
returned--then there arose a complaint from the distance, which
re-opened all his closed wounds; the complaint, as it drew nearer,
became Rosamond’s voice--at last she herself was before him,
unrecognisable, alone, without solace, without a tear, without colour.
And Rosamond dreamed upon the earth, and it was to her as though the
sun took wings, and became an angel. This angel, she dreamed, drew
down towards her the moon, which became a gentle face. Beneath this
face, as it approached her, a heart at last formed itself. It was
Eugenius, and his beloved arose to meet him. But as she exclaimed,
with transport, “Now I am dead!” the two dreams, both hers and his,
vanished, and the two were again severed.
Eugenius waked above, the glimmering earth still stood in the sky, his
heart was oppressed, and his eye beamed with a tear which had not
fallen on the moon. Rosamond waked below, and a large warm dew-drop
hung in one of the flowers of her bosom. Then did the last mist of her
soul shower down in a light rain of tears, her soul became light and
sun-clear, and her eye hung gently on the dawning sky; the earth was
indeed strange to her, but no longer hateful; and her hands moved as
though they were leading those who had died.
The angel of rest looked upon the moon, and looked upon the earth, and
he was softened by the sighs from both. On the morning-earth he
perceived an eclipse of the sun, and a bereft one; he saw Rosamond
during this transient night sink upon the flowers that slept in the
darkness, and into the cold evening-dew which fell upon the
morning-dew, and stretching forth her hands towards the shaded heaven,
which was full of night-birds, look up towards the moon with
inexpressible longing, as it floated trembling in the sun. The angel
looked upon the moon, and near him wept the departed one, who saw the
earth swimming deep below,--a flood of shade, fitted into a ring of
fire, and from whom the mourning form that dwelt upon it, took all the
happiness of heaven. Then was the heavenly heart of the angel of peace
broken--he seized the hand of Eugenius and that of his child--drew both
through the second world, and bore them down to the dark earth.
Rosamond saw three forms wandering through the obscurity, the gleam
from whom reached the starry heaven, and went along hovering over them.
Her beloved and her child flew like spring-days to her heart, and said,
“Oh, thou dear one, come with us!” Her maternal heart broke with
maternal love, the circulation of earth-blood was stopped, her life was
ended; and happily, happily, did she stammer forth to the two beloved
hearts, “Can I not then die?” “Thou hast died already,” said the angel
of the three fond ones, weeping with joy, “Yonder thou seest the sphere
of earth, whence thou comest, still in shade.” And the waves of joy
closed on high over the blessed world, and all the happy and all
children looked upon our sphere which still trembled in the shade.
* * * * *
Yea, indeed, is it in shade! But man is higher than his place. He
looks up and spreads the wings of his soul, and when the sixty minutes,
which we call sixty years, have finished striking, he then lifts
himself up, and kindles himself as he rises, and the ashes of his
plumage fall back, and the unveiled soul rises alone, free from earth,
and pure as a musical tone. But here, in the midst of dark life, he
sees the mountains of the future world standing in the morning gold of
a sun that does not arise here. Thus, the inhabitant of the North Pole
in the long night, when the sun has ceased to rise, discerns at twelve
o’clock, a dawn gilding the highest mountains, and he thinks of his
long summer, when it will set no more.
J. O.
[1] Or, perhaps, “angelic garden,” meaning a church-yard. The reading
given above is most probably correct.
THE ELEMENTARY SPIRIT.
BY E. T. W. HOFFMANN.
On the 20th of November, 1815, Albert von B----, lieutenant-colonel in
the Prussian service, found himself on the road from Liège to
Aix-la-Chapelle. The corps to which he belonged was on its return from
France to march to Liège to head-quarters on that very day, and was to
remain there for two or three days more. Albert had arrived the
evening before; but in the morning he felt himself attacked by a
strange restlessness, and--as he would hardly have confessed to
himself--an obscure dream, which had haunted him all night, and had
foretold that a very pleasant adventure awaited him at Aix-la-Chapelle,
was the only cause of his sudden departure. Much surprised even at his
own proceeding, he was sitting on the swift horse, which would, he
hoped, take him to the city before nightfall.
A severe cutting autumn wind roared over the bare fields, and awakened
the voices of the leafless wood in the distance, which united their
groans to its howling. Birds of prey came croaking, and followed in
flocks the thick clouds which gathered more and more, until the last
ray of sunlight had vanished, and a faint dull gray had overspread the
entire sky. Albert wrapped his mantle more closely about him, and
while he trotted on along the broad road, the picture of the last
eventful time unfolded itself to his imagination. He thought how, a
few months before, he had travelled on the same road, in an opposite
direction, and during the loveliest season of the year. The fields
then bloomed forth luxuriantly, the fragrant meadows resembled
variegated carpets, and the bushes in which the birds joyously chirped
and sung, shone in the fair light of golden sunbeams. The earth, like
a longing bride, had richly adorned herself to receive in her dark
nuptial chamber, the victims consecrated to death--the heroes who fell
in the sanguinary battles.
Albert had reached the corps to which he was appointed, when the cannon
had already begun to thunder by the Sambre, though he was in time
enough to take part in the bloody battles of Charleroi, Gilly, and
Gosselins. Indeed, chance seemed to wish that Albert should be present
just when any thing decided took place. Thus he was at the last
storming of the village Planchenoit, which caused the victory in the
most remarkable of all battles--Waterloo. He was in the last
engagement of the campaign, when the final effort of rage and fierce
despair on the part of the enemy wreaked itself on the immoveable
courage of the heroes, who having a fine position in the village of
Issy, drove back the foe as they sought, amid the most furious
discharge of grape, to scatter death and destruction in the ranks; and
indeed drove them back so far, that the sharp-shooters pursued them
almost to the barriers of Paris. The night afterwards (that of the 3rd
and 4th of July), was, as is well known, that on which the military
convention for the surrender of the metropolis was settled at St. Cloud.
The battle of Issy now rose brightly before Albert’s soul; he thought
of things, which as it seemed, he had not observed, nay, had not been
able to observe during the fight. Thus the faces of many individual
officers and men appeared before his eyes, depicted in the most lively
manner, and his heart was struck by the inexplicable expression, not of
proud or unfeeling contempt of death, but of really divine inspiration,
which beamed from many an eye. Thus he heard sounds, now exhorting to
fight, now uttered with the last sigh of death, which deserved to be
treasured up for posterity like the animating utterances of the heroes
of antiquity.
“Do I not,” thought Albert, “almost feel like one who has a notion of
his dream when he wakes, but who does not recollect all its single
features till several days afterwards? Ay, a dream, and only a dream,
one would think, by flying over time and space, with its mighty wings,
could render possible, the gigantic, monstrous, unheard-of events, that
took place during the eighteen eventful days of a campaign, which mocks
the boldest thoughts, the most daring combinations of the speculative
mind. Indeed the human mind does not know its own greatness; the act
surpasses the thought. For it is not rude physical force, no! it is
the mind, which creates deeds as they have happened, and it is the
psychic power of every single person, really inspired, which attaches
itself to the wisdom and genius of the general, and helps to accomplish
the monstrous and the unexpected.”
Albert was disturbed in these meditations by his groom, who kept about
twenty paces behind him, and whom he heard cry out, “Eh! Paul
Talkebarth, where the deuce do you come from?” He turned his horse,
and perceived that a horseman, who had just trotted past him, and whom
he had not particularly observed, was standing still with his groom,
beating out the cheeks of the large fox-fur cap with which his head was
covered, so that soon the well-known face of Paul Talkebarth, Colonel
Victor von S----’s old groom, was made manifest, glowing with the
finest vermilion.
Now Albert knew at once what it was that impelled him so irresistibly
from Liège to Aix-la-Chapelle, and he could not comprehend how the
thought of Victor, his most intimate and dearest friend, whom he had
every reason to suppose at Aix, merely lay dimly in his soul, and
attained nothing like distinctness. He now also cried out, “Eh! Paul
Talkebarth, whence do you come? Where is your master?”
Paul curvetted up to him very gracefully, and said, holding the palm of
his hand against the far-too-large cockade of his cap, by way of
military salutation: “Yes, ‘faith, I am Paul Talkebarth indeed,
gracious lieutenant-colonel. We’ve bad weather here, Zermannöre (_sur
mon honneur_). But the groundsel brings that about. Old Lizzy always
used to say so. I cannot say, gracious lieutenant-colonel, if you know
Lizzy: she lives at Genthin, but if one has been at Paris, and has seen
the wild goat in the Schartinpland (_Jardin des Plantes_).--Now, what
one seeks for one finds near, and here I am in the presence of the
gracious lieutenant-colonel, whom I was to seek at Liège. The spirus
familis (_spiritus familiaris_), whispered yesterday evening into my
master’s ear, that the gracious lieutenant-colonel had come to Liège.
Zackermannthö (_sacré mon de Dieu_), there was delight! It may be as
it will, but I have never put any faith in the cream-colour. A fine
beast, Zermannöre, but a mere childish thing, and the baronness did her
utmost--that is true! There are decent sort of people here, but the
wine is good for nothing--and when one has been in Paris--! Now, the
colonel might have marched in, like one through the Argen trumph (_Arc
de triomphe_), and I should have put the new shabrach on the white
horse; gad, how he would have pricked up his ears! But old Lizzy,--she
was my aunt, at Genthin, was always accustomed to say--I don’t know,
gracious lieutenant-colonel, whether you--”
“May your tongue be lamed,” said Albert, interrupting the incorrigible
babbler. “If your master is at Aix, we must make haste, for we have
still above five leagues to go.”
“Stop,” cried Paul Talkebarth, with all his might; “stop, stop,
gracious lieutenant-colonel, the weather is bad here; but for
fodder--those who have eyes like us, that shine in the fog.”
“Paul,” cried Albert, “do not wear out my patience. Where is your
master? Is he not in Aix?”