V
THE FAREWELL
There is in man a phenomenon which is the despair of those reflective minds who endeavor to find some meaning in the march of social vicissitudes, and to formulate some laws of progress for the movement of intellect. However serious a fact may be, or, if supernatural facts could exist, however magnificent a miracle could be, publicly performed, the lightning flash of the fact, the thunderbolt of the miracle would be lost in the moral ocean, and the surface, rippled for an instant by some slight ebullition, would at once resume the level of its ordinary swell.
Does the Voice, to be more surely heeded, pass through an animal's jaws? Does the Hand write in strange characters on the cornice of the hall where the Court is reveling? Does the Eye light up the King's slumbers? Does the Prophet read the dream? Does Death, when summoned, stand in the luminous space where a man's faculties revive? Does the Spirit crush matter at the foot of the mystical ladder of the seven spiritual worlds hung one above another in space, and seen by the floods of light that fall in cascades down the steps of the heavenly floor? Still, however deep the inner revelation, however distinct the outward sign, by the morrow Balaam doubts both his ass and himself; Belteshazzar and Pharaoh call in seers to explain the sign—Daniel or Moses.
The Spirit descends, snatches a man above the earth, opens the seas and shows him the bottom of them, calls up vanished generations, gives life to the dry bones thickly strewn in the great valley; the Apostle writes the Apocalypse; and twenty centuries later human science confirms the Apostle and translates his figures of speech into axioms. What difference does it make? The mass of people live to-day as they lived yesterday, as they lived in the first Olympiad, as they lived the first day after creation, and on the eve of the great cataclysm. Doubt drowns everything in its waters. The same waves beat, with the self-same ebb and flow, on the human granite that hems in the sea of intellect.
Man asks himself whether indeed he saw what he saw, whether he really heard the words that were spoken, whether the fact was a fact, and the idea really an idea; and then he goes on his way, he thinks of his business, he obeys the inevitable servitor of Death—Forgetfulness, who throws his black cloak over the old humanity of which the younger has no remembrance. Man never ceases to move, to go on, to grow as a vegetable grows, till the day when the axe falls. If this flood-like force, this mounting pressure of bitter waters, hinders all progress, it also, no doubt, is a warning of death. None but the loftier spirits open to faith can discern Jacob's mystical stair.
After listening to the reply in which Seraphita, being so urgently questioned, had unrolled the divine scroll, as an organ fills a church with its roar, and shows the power of the musical universe by flooding the most inaccessible vaults with its solemn notes, playing, like light, among the frail wreaths of the capitals, Wilfrid went home, appalled at having seen the world in ruins, and, above the ruins, a light unknown, shed by the hand of that young creature.
On the following day he was still thinking of it, but his terrors were allayed; he was not in ruins, nor even changed—his passions and ideas woke up fresh and vigorous.
He went to breakfast with the Minister, and found him lost in the study of Jean Wier's treatise, which he had been looking through that morning to be able to reassure his visitor. With the childlike simplicity of a sage, the pastor had turned down the leaves at some pages where Jean Wier adduced authentic evidence demonstrating the possibility of such things as had happened the day before; for to the learned an idea is an event, whereas the greatest events are to them hardly an idea.
By the time these two philosophers had swallowed their fifth cup of tea, that mystical evening seemed quite natural. The heavenly truths were more or less substantial arguments, and open to discussion. Seraphita was a more or less eloquent girl; allowance must be made for her exquisite voice, her enchanting beauty, her fascinating manner, all the oratorical skill by which an actor can put a world of feelings and ideas into a sentence which in itself is often quite commonplace.
"Pooh!" said the good minister, with a little philosophical grimace, as he spread a slice of bread with salt butter, "the answer to all these riddles is six feet beneath the mould!"
"At the same time," said Wilfrid, sugaring his tea, "I cannot understand how a girl of sixteen can know so many things; for she squeezed everything into her speech as if it were in a vise."
"But only read the story of the Italian girl who, at twelve years old, could speak forty-two languages, ancient and modern," said the pastor. "And again, that of the monk who read thought by smell. These are in Jean Wier, and in a dozen other treatises which I will give you to read, a thousand proofs rather than one."
"I daresay, my dear Pastor; but Seraphita remains to me a wife it would be divine joy to possess."
"She is all intellect," replied the minister dubiously.
Some days passed by, during which the snow in the valleys insensibly melted away; the greenery of the forests peeped through like a fresh growth; Norwegian nature made itself beautiful in anticipation of its brief bridal day. All this time, though the milder temperature allowed of open-air exercise, Seraphita remained in solitary seclusion. Thus Wilfrid's passion was enhanced by the aggravating vicinity of the girl he loved, and who refused to be seen. When the inscrutable being admitted Minna, Minna could detect the symptoms of an inward fever; Seraphita's voice was hollow, and her complexion was wan; whereas hitherto its transparency might have been compared by a poet to that of the diamond, it now had the sheen of the topaz.
"Have you seen her?" asked Wilfrid, who had prowled round the house, awaiting Minna's return.
"We shall lose him!" said the girl, her eyes filling with tears.
"Do not try to fool me!" cried the stranger, controlling the vehemence of tone that expressed his fury. "You can only love Seraphita as one girl loves another, not with such love as I feel for her. You cannot conceive what peril you would be in if there were anything to alarm my jealousy.—Why can I not go to see her? Is it you who raise difficulties?"
"I cannot think," said Minna, calm on the surface, but quaking with mortal terror, "what right you have to sound the depths of my heart.—Yes, I love him," she went on, summoning the courage of conviction to confess the faith of her soul. "But my jealousy, though natural to love, fears nobody here. Alas! What I am jealous of is some unconfessed feeling in which he is absorbed. Between him and me lies a space I can never abridge. I want to know whether the stars love him more than I, whether they or I would be the more eagerly devoted to his happiness? Why, why, should I not be free to declare my affection? In the presence of death we may all confess our attachment—and Seraphitus is dying."
"Minna, indeed you are under a mistake; the siren round whom my desires have so often hovered, who allows me to admire her as she reclines on her couch, so graceful, fragile, and suffering, is not a man."
"Nay," replied Minna, in some agitation, "he whose powerful hand guided me over the Falberg to the sœter under the shelter of the Ice-cap up there"—and she pointed to the peak—"is certainly not a mere, weak girl. If you had but heard her prophesy! Her poetry is the music of thought. No young girl could have had the solemn depth of voice which stirred my soul."
"What certainty have you——?" Wilfrid began.
"None but that of my heart!" replied Minna in confusion, and hastily interrupting the speaker.
"Well, but I," cried Wilfrid, with a terrible glance of murderous eagerness and desire, "I, who know what the extent of her power is over me—I will prove your mistake."
At this moment, when words were rushing to Wilfrid's tongue as vehemently as ideas in his head, he saw Seraphita come out of the Swedish Castle, followed by David. The sight of her soothed his effervescent state.
"Look," said he; "none but a woman can have that grace and languor."
"He is ill; it is his last walk!" said Minna.
At a sign from his mistress, David left her, and she advanced towards Wilfrid and Minna.
"Let us go to the falls of the Sieg," said the mysterious being; it was the wish of a sufferer which all hasten to accede to.
A thin, white haze hung over the heights and dales of the fiord, and the peaks, glittering like stars, pierced above it, giving it the effect of a milky way moving onwards. Through this earth-born vapor the sun was visible as a globe of red-hot iron. In spite of these last freaks of winter, gusts of mild air, bringing the scent of the birch-trees, already covered with their yellow flowers, and the rich perfume exhaled by the larches, whose silky tufts were all displayed—breezes warm with the incense and the breathing of the earth testified to the exquisite springtime of Northern lands, the brief rapture of a most melancholy nature.
The wind was beginning to roll away the veil of mist that hardly hid the view of the gulf. The birds were singing.
Where the sun had not dried off the frost that trickled down the road in murmuring rills, the bark of the trees was pleasing to the eye by its fantastic appearance.
They all three went along the strand in silence. Wilfrid and Minna were lost in contemplation of the magical scene after their long endurance of the monotonous winter landscape. Their companion was pensive, and walked as though trying to distinguish one voice in the concert. They reached the rocks between which the Sieg tumbles, at the end of the long avenue of ancient fir-trees which the torrent had cut in meandering through the forest, a path covered in by a groined arch of boughs, meeting like those of a cathedral. From thence the whole of the fiord was seen, and the sea sparkled on the horizon like a steel blade. At this instant the clouds vanished, showing the blue sky. Down in the hollows and round the trees the air was full of floating sparkles, the diamond dust swept up by a light breeze, and dazzling gems of drops were hanging at the tip of the branches of each pyramid. The torrent was rolling below; a smoke came up from the surface, tinted in the sunshine with every hue of light; its beams, decomposed, displayed perfect rainbows of the seven colors, like the play of a thousand prisms meeting and crossing there. This wild shore was curtained with various kinds of lichen, a rich web, sheeny with moisture, like some gorgeous hanging of silk. Heath, already in blossom, crowned the rocks with flowers in skilful disorder. All this stirring foliage, tempted by the living waters, hung their heads over it like hair; the larches waved their lace-like arms, as if caressing the pines, that stood rigid like careworn old men.
This luxuriant display was a contrast to the solemnity of the antique colonnades of the forests, range upon range on the hillside, and to the broad sheet of the fiord, in which the torrent drowned its fury at the feet of the three spectators. Beyond it all, the open sea closed in this picture, traced by the greatest of poets—Chance—to which we owe the medley beauty of creation when left, as it would seem, to itself. Jarvis was a speck almost lost in this landscape, in this immensity—sublime, as everything is, which, having but a brief existence, offers a transient image of perfection; for by a law, fatal only to our sight, creations that appear perfect, the delight of our heart and of our eyes, have but one spring to live here.
At the top of that cliff these three beings might easily fancy themselves alone in all the world.
"How exquisite!" exclaimed Wilfrid.
"Nature sings its hymns," said Seraphita. "Is not this music delicious? Confess now, Wilfrid, no woman you ever knew could create for herself so magnificent a retreat. Here I experience a feeling that the sight of great cities rarely inspires, and which makes me long to remain here, lying among these grasses of such rapid growth. Then, with my eyes on the sky, my heart laid bare, lost in the sense of immensity, I could let myself listen to the sighs of the flower, which, scarcely released from its primitive nature, would fain run about; and to the cries of the eider, aggrieved at having only wings, while I thought of the cravings of man, who has something of everything, and who also is for ever full of desires!—But this, Wilfrid, is a woman's poetic fancy! You can find a voluptuous thought in that hazy expanse of water; in those fantastic veils, behind which nature plays like some coquettish bride; and in this atmosphere, where she perfumes her green hair for her bridal. You would fain see the form of a naiad in that wreath of mist, and I, as you think, ought to hear a manly voice in the torrent."
"And is not love in it all, like a bee in a flower?" replied Wilfrid, who, seeing in her for the first time some trace of earthly feeling, thought it a favorable moment for the expression of his fervent affection.
"Always the same?" said Seraphita, laughing, Minna having left them; the girl was climbing a crag where she had seen some blue saxifrages.
"Always!" exclaimed Wilfrid. "Listen," he said, with an imperious glance that met a panoply of adamant, "you know not who I am, nor what my power is, nor what I demand. Do not reject my last entreaty. Be mine, for the sake of the world within your heart! Be mine, that my conscience may be pure, that a heavenly voice may sound in my ears and inspire me aright in the undertaking I have vowed to carry out, impelled by my hatred of the nations, but to be achieved for their welfare if only you are with me. What nobler mission may a woman dream of?—I came to these lands meditating a great scheme."
"And you are prepared to sacrifice it and its glories," said she, "to a very simple girl, whom you will love, and who will guide you into a peaceful path?"
"What do I care? I only want you! This is my secret," he replied, going on with his speech. "I have traveled all over the North, the great workshop where the new races are produced who overspread the earth like floods of humanity sent forth to renew worn-out civilization. I wanted to have begun my work on one of these points, conquering there the ascendency that force and intellect can assert over a small race; to have trained it to battle, to have declared war, and have sent it raging like a conflagration to consume Europe, while shouting to these 'Liberty!' to those 'Plunder!' to some 'Glory!' to others 'Pleasure!' I, standing meanwhile like the image of Fate, pitiless and cruel, moving like the storm which assimilates from the atmosphere the atoms of which the lightning is compounded, and feeding on men like a rapacious monster. I should then have conquered Europe; she is now at a period when she looks for the coming of the new Messiah, who is to devastate the world and to reform the nations. Europe can believe in no one but Him who will trample her under foot.
"Some day historians and poets would have justified my existence, have magnified me, have ascribed great ideas to me—to me, to whom this huge pleasantry, written in blood, is but revenge.
"But, dear Seraphita, what I have seen has disgusted me with the North; force here is too blind, and I crave for the Indies. A duel with a selfish, cowardly, and mercenary government fascinates me more. Besides, it is easier to arouse the imagination of the races that dwell at the foot of Caucasus than to convince the minds of men in these frozen lands. I am tempted to cross the Russian steppes, to reach the frontiers of Asia, to cover it as far as the Ganges with my victorious flood of human beings, and then I shall overthrow the English rule. Seven men, at different periods, have already carried out such a scheme. I shall renew Art, as the Saracens did when Mahomet cast them over Europe. I will not be so sordid a king as those who now govern the ancient provinces of the Roman Empire, quarreling with their subjects over custom-house dues. No, nothing shall arrest the flash of my gaze or the storm of my speech! My feet, like those of Genghis Khan, shall cover a third of the globe; my hand shall grasp Asia as did that of Aurung Zeeb.
"Be my partner; take your seat, fair and lovely being, on a throne. I have never doubted my success, but with you to dwell in my heart, I should be certain of it."
"I have reigned already," said Seraphita.
The words were like the blow dealt by the axe of a skilful woodsman at the root of a sapling, felling it at once. Men alone can know what a storm a woman can rouse in a man's soul when he has been trying to impress her with his strength or his power, his intellect or his superiority, and the capricious fair nods her head and says, "Oh, that is nothing!" or, with a bored smile, observes, "I know all that," when power is as nought to her.
"What!" cried Wilfrid in despair, "the riches of Art, the wealth of the world, the splendor of a court——"
She checked him by a mere curl of her lips, and said:
"Beings more powerful than you are have offered me more."
"Well, have you no soul, then, that you are not fascinated by the prospect of consoling a great man who will sacrifice everything to dwell with you in a little home by the side of a lake?"
"Why," said she, "I am loved with a boundless love."
"By whom?" cried Wilfrid, going towards Seraphita with a frenzied gesture, as if to fling her into the foaming falls of the Sieg.
She looked at him; his arm dropped; and she pointed to Minna, who came running down, all rose and white, and as pretty as the flowers she carried in her hand.
"My child!" said Seraphitus, going forward to meet her.
Wilfrid stood on the edge of the cliff as motionless as a statue, lost in thought, longing to cast himself into the flow of the torrent, like one of the fallen trees that passed under his eyes and vanished in the abyss beneath.
"I gathered them for you," said Minna, giving the nose-gay to the being she adored. "One of them—this one," said she, picking out a particular blossom, "is like the flower we gathered on the Falberg."
Seraphitus looked at the blossom and then at Minna.
"Why do you question me thus? Do you doubt me?"
"No," said the girl, "my confidence in you is unbounded. While you are far more beautiful to me than this beautiful scenery, you also seem to me to be superior in intelligence to all the rest of humanity. When I have been with you, I seem to have communed with God. I only wish——"
"What?" asked Seraphitus, with a flashing look that revealed to the girl the vast distance that divided them.
"I wish I could suffer in your stead."
"This is the most dangerous of Thy creatures," thought Seraphitus. "Is it a criminal thought, O God, to long to present her to Thee?—Have you forgotten," he said aloud, "all I told you up there?" and he pointed upwards to the peak of the Ice-cap.
"Now he is terrible again!" thought Minna with a shudder.
The roar of the Sieg formed an accompaniment to the thoughts of these three beings, who stood together for a few minutes on a projecting slab of rock, parted, as they were, by immeasurable gulfs in the spiritual world.
"Teach me then, Seraphitus," said Minna, in a voice as silvery as a pearl and as gentle as the movements of a sensitive plant. "Teach me what I must do to avoid loving you? Who could fail to admire you? And love is the admiration that is never tired."
"Poor child!" said Seraphitus, turning pale, "only one Being can be loved thus."
"Who is that?" asked Minna.
"You shall know!" was the reply in the weak voice of one who lies down to die.
"Help! He is dying!" cried Minna.
Wilfrid hastened forward, and seeing this being reclining gracefully on a block of gneiss over which time had thrown its carpet of velvet, its glistening lichens, and dusky mosses, lustrous in the sunshine,—
"She is lovely!" he exclaimed.
"This is the last glance I may give to nature in travail," said Seraphita, collecting all her strength to rise. She went to the edge of the cliff, whence she could see the whole of the sublime landscape, but lately wrapped in its mantle of snow, now full of life, green and flowery.
"Farewell," said she, "oh, burning hotbed of love! whence everything tends from the centre to the utmost circumference, while the extremities are gathered up, like a woman's hair, to be spun into the unknown plait by which thou art linked, in the invisible ether, to the Divine Idea!
"Behold him who is bending over the furrow, watered with his sweat, and pausing for an instant to look up to heaven; behold her who gathers the children in to feed them from her breast; him who knots the ropes in the fury of the tempest; her who sits in the niche of a rock awaiting her father; and, again, all those who hold out their hands for help after spending their life in thankless toil? Peace and courage to them all, and to all farewell!
"Do you hear the cry of the soldier who dies unknown, the wrath of the man who laments, disappointed, in the desert? Peace and courage to all, to all farewell! Farewell, you who die for the kings of the earth; but farewell, too, ye races without a native land, and farewell, lands without a people—seeking each other. Farewell, above all, to thee, sublime exile, who knowest not where to lay thy head! Farewell, dear innocence, dragged away by the hair of your head for having loved too well! Farewell, mothers sitting by your dying sons! Farewell, holy, broken-hearted wives! Farewell, O ye who are poor, young, weak, and suffering, whose woes I have so often made my own! Farewell, all ye who gravitate in the sphere of instinct, suffering there for others!
"Farewell, ye discoverers who seek the East through the thick darkness of abstractions as grand as first principles; and ye martyrs of thought, led by thought to the true light! Farewell, realms of inquiry, where I can hear the moans of insulted genius, the sigh of the sage to whom light comes—too late!
"I perceive the angelic harmonies, the wafted fragrance, the incense from the heart exhaled by those who move on, praying, comforting, diffusing divine light and heavenly balm to sorrowing souls. Courage, Choir of Love! to whom the nations cry, 'Comfort us! Protect us!' Courage, and farewell!
"Farewell, rock of granite, thou shalt become a flower; farewell, flower, thou shalt be a dove; farewell, dove, thou shalt be a woman; farewell, woman, thou shalt be Suffering; farewell, man, thou shalt be Belief; farewell, you, who shall be all love and prayer!"
Exhausted by fatigue, this inexplicable being for the first time leaned on Wilfrid and Minna to support her back to her house. Wilfrid and Minna felt some mysterious contagion from her touch. They had gone but a few steps when they met David in tears.
"She is going to die; why have you brought her here?" he exclaimed from afar.
Seraphita was lifted up by the old man, who had recovered the strength of youth, and he flew with her to the door of the Swedish castle, like an eagle carrying some white lamb to his eyrie.
VI
THE ROAD TO HEAVEN
On the day after Seraphita had had this foretaste of her end, and had bidden farewell to the earth, as a prisoner looks at his cell before quitting it for ever, she was suffering such pain as compelled her to remain in the absolute quietude of those who endure extreme anguish. Wilfrid and Minna went to see her, and found her lying on her couch of furs. Her soul, still shrouded in the flesh, shone through the veil, bleaching it, as it were, from day to day. The progress made by the spirit in undermining the last barrier which divided it from the infinite was called sickness; the hour of life was named death. David wept to see his mistress suffering, and refused to listen to her consolations; the old man was as unreasonable as a child. The pastor was urgent on Seraphita to take some remedies; but all was in vain.
One morning she asked for the two she had been so fond of, telling them that this was the last of her bad days. Wilfrid and Minna came in great alarm; they knew that they were about to lose her. Seraphita smiled at them, as those smile who are departing to a better world; her head drooped like a flower overweighted with dew, which opens its cup for the last time and exhales its last fragrance to the air. She looked at them with sadness, of which they were the cause; she had ceased to think of herself, and they felt this without being able to express their grief, mingled as it was with gratitude.
Wilfrid remained standing, silent and motionless, lost in such contemplation as is suggested by things so vast that they make us understand, here on earth, the Supreme Immensity. Minna, emboldened by the weakness of this powerful being, or perhaps by her dread of losing her beloved for ever, bent down and murmured, "Seraphitus—let me follow you!"
"Can I hinder you?"
"But why do you not love me enough to remain here?"
"I could not love anything here."
"What, then, do you love?"
"Heaven."
"Are you worthy of heaven if you thus despise God's creatures here?"
"Minna, can we love two beings at the same time? Is the Best-beloved really the Best-beloved if He does not fill the whole heart? Ought He not to be the first and last and only One? Does not she who is all love quit the world for her Beloved? Her whole family becomes but a memory; she has but one relation—it is He! Her soul is no longer her own, but His! If she keeps anything within her that is not His, she does not love; no, she does not love! Is loving half-heartedly loving at all? The voice of the Beloved makes her all glad and flows through her veins like a purple tide, redder than the blood; His look is a light that flashes through her, she is fused with Him; where He is all is beautiful. He is warmth to her soul, He lights everything; near Him, is it ever cold or dark to her? He is never absent; He is always within us, we think in Him, with Him, for Him. That, Minna, is how I love Him."
"Whom?" said Minna, gripped by consuming jealousy.
"God!" replied Seraphitus, whose voice flashed upon their souls like a beacon light of freedom blazing from hill to hill—"God, who never betrays us! God, who does not desert us, but constantly fulfils our desires, and who alone can perennially satisfy His creatures with infinite and unmixed joys! God, who is never weary, and who only has smiles! God, ever new, who pours His treasures into the soul, who purifies it without bitterness, who is all harmony, all flame! God, who enters into us to blossom there, who fulfils all our aspirations, who never calls us to account if we are His, but gives Himself wholly, ravishes us, and expands and multiplies us in Himself—God, in short!
"Minna, I love you because you may be His! I love you because if you come to Him you will be mine."
"Then lead me to Him," said she, kneeling down. "Take me by the hand; I will leave you no more."
"Lead us, Seraphita," cried Wilfrid vehemently, coming forward to kneel with Minna. "Yes, you have made me thirst for the Light and thirst for the Word; I thirst with the love you have implanted in my heart, I will cherish your soul in mine; impart your Will, and I will do whatsoever you bid me do. If I may not win you, I will treasure every feeling that you can infuse into me as part of you! If I cannot be united to you but by my strength alone, I will cling as flame clings to what it consumes.—Speak!"
"Angel!" cried the incomprehensible being, with a look that seemed to enfold them in an azure mantle. "Angel! heaven is thine inheritance!"
And a great silence fell after this cry, which rang in the souls of Wilfrid and Minna like the first chord of some celestial symphony.
"If you desire to train your feet to walk in the way that leads to heaven, remember that the first steps are rough," said the suffering soul. "God must be sought for His own sake. In that sense He is a jealous God, He will have you altogether His; but when you have given yourself to Him, He never abandons you. I will leave you the keys of the kingdom where His light shines, where you will everywhere be in the bosom of the Father, in the heart of the Bridegroom. No sentinel guards the gates; you can enter from any side; His palace, His treasures, His sceptre, nothing is forbidden; He says to all, 'Take them freely!' But you must will to go thither. You must start as for a journey, leave your home, give up your plans, bid farewell to your friends—father, mother, sister, even the infant brother that cries—an eternal farewell, for you will never return, any more than martyrs bound for the stake returned to their homes; you must, in short, strip yourself of the feelings and possessions to which men cling; otherwise, you will not be wholly given up to your enterprise.
"Do for God what you would have done for your ambitious schemes, what you do when you take up an art, what you did when you loved a creature more than Him, or when you were studying some secret of human knowledge. Is not God Knowledge itself, Love itself, the Fount of all poetry? Is not His treasure a thing to covet? His treasure is inexhaustible, His poetry is infinite, His love unchangeable, His knowledge infallible and full of mysteries. Cling to nothing, then; He will give you All! Yes, in His heart you will find possessions beyond all compare with those you leave on earth.
"What I tell you is the truth. You will have His power, you will be allowed to use it as you use anything that belongs to your lover or your mistress.
"Alas! most men doubt, lack faith, will, and perseverance. Though some set out on the road, they presently look back and return. Few are they who know how to choose between these two extremes—to go or to stay; heaven or the muck-heap. All hesitate. Weakness leads to wandering, passion to evil ways, vice as a habit clogs the feet, and man makes no progress towards a better state.
"Every being passes a preliminary life in the Sphere of Instinct, laboring with endless toil to amass earthly treasures, only to recognize their futility at last. But how many times must we live through this first life before quitting it fit to begin another stage of trial in the Sphere of Abstractions, where the mind is exercised in false science, and the spirit is at last weary of human speech—for, matter being exhausted, the spirit prevails? How many forms must the being elect to heaven wear out, before he has learned the preciousness of silence, and of the solitude whose star-strewn steppes are the floor of the spiritual world? It is after testing and trying the void that his eyes turn to the right path. Then there are other existences to be worn through or ever he may reach the road where the Light shines.
"Death marks a stage on this journey. After that, his experience is in a reversed order; it takes a whole life, perhaps, to acquire the virtues that are the antithesis of the errors in which he has previously lived.
"Thus, first we live the life of suffering, where torments make us thirst for love. Next comes the life of loving, where devotion to the creature teaches us devotion to the Creator; where the virtues of love, its thousand sacrifices, its angelic hope, its joys paid for by grief, its patience and resignation, excite an appetite for things divine. After this comes the life during which we seek, in silence, the traces of the Word, and become humble and charitable. Then the life of high desire; finally, the life of prayer. There we find eternal sunshine; there are flowers, there is fruition!
"The qualities we acquire, and which slowly grow up in us, are the invisible bonds binding each of these existences to the next; the soul alone remembers them, since matter has no memory for spiritual things. The mind alone preserves a tradition of former states. This unbroken legacy of the past to the present, and of the present to the future, is the secret of human genius: some have the gift of form, some the gift of number, some the gift of harmony; these are all steps in the way to the Light. Yes, whoever possesses one of these gifts, touches the infinite at one spot.
"The Word, of which I have here uttered a few axioms, has been distributed over the earth, which has reduced it to powder, and infused it into its works, its doctrines, its poetry. If the tiniest speck of it shines on a work, you say, 'This is great; this is true; this is sublime!' And that mere atom vibrates within you, giving you a foretaste of heaven. Thus, one has sickness, to divide him from the world; another has solitude, bringing him near to God; a third poetry; in short, everything that throws you in on yourself, striking you and crushing you, is a ringing call from the Divine Sphere.
"When a being has traced the first furrow straight, it is enough to make the others by; one single profound thought, a voice once heard, an acute pang, a single echo that finds the Word in you, changes your soul for ever. Every road leads to God; hence you have many chances of finding Him if you walk straight on. When the happy day dawns that finds you with your foot on the road, starting on your pilgrimage, the earth knows no more of you, it understands you no more, you are no longer in harmony with it, it rejects you.
"Those who come to know these things, and who speak a few utterances of the true Word, find not where to lay their head; they are hunted like wild beasts, and often perish on the scaffold amid the rejoicing of the assembled populace; but angels open the gates of heaven to them. So your destination is a secret between you and God, as love is a secret between two hearts. You are as the hidden treasure over which men trample, greedy for gold, but not knowing that it is there.
"Your life is one of incessant activity. Each act has a purpose that tends to God, just as when you love, your acts and thoughts are full of the creature you love; but love and its joys, love and its sensual pleasures, is but an imperfect image of the infinite love that unites you to the Celestial Bridegroom. Every earthly joy is succeeded by anguish and dissatisfaction; for love to bring no disgust in its train, death must quench it at the fiercest, or ever you see the ashes; but God transforms our miseries into raptures, joy is multiplied by itself, it constantly increases, and knows no bounds.
"Thus, in the earthly life a transient love is ended by enduring tribulations; whereas, in the spiritual life, the tribulations of a day end in infinite joys. Your soul is for ever glad. You feel God close to you, in you; He gives a flavor of holiness to all things, He shines in your soul, He seals you with His sweetness, He weans you from the earth for your own sake, and makes you care for it for His sake by suffering you to use His power. You do, in His name, the works He inspires you to do; you wipe away tears; you act for Him; you have nothing of your own; like Him, you love all creatures with inextinguishable love; you long to see them all marching towards Him, as a truly loving woman would fain see all the nations of the earth obedient to her Beloved.
"The last life—that in which all previous lives are summed up—is the life of prayer; in it every power is strung to the highest pitch, and its merits will open the gates of heaven to the being made perfect. Who can make you understand the greatness, the majesty, the power of prayer? Oh that my voice may be as thunder in your hearts, and that it may change them! Be now, forthwith, what you will become after trials. There are certain privileged beings—prophets, seers, evangelists, martyrs, all who suffer for the Word or who have declared it—these souls cross the human spheres at a single bound, and rise at once to prayer. So, too, do those who are consumed by the flame of faith. Be ye then such a daring pair! God accepts such temerity; He loves those who take Him with violence, He never rejects such as can force their way to Him. Understand this: Desire, the torrent of will, is so potent in a man, that a single jet forcibly emitted is enough to win anything, a single cry is often enough when uttered under the stress of faith. Be ye one of those beings, full of force, will, and love! Be victorious over the earth! Let the hunger and thirst for God possess you wholly; run to Him as the thirsting hart runs to the water-brook. Desire will give you wings; tears, the flowers of repentance, will fall like a heavenly baptism, whence your nature will come forth purified. From the bosom of these waters leap into prayer!
"Silence and meditation are efficacious means of entering on this road; God always reveals Himself to the solitary and contemplative man. By this method the necessary separation is effected between matter, which has so long held you shrouded in darkness, and the spirit, which is born in you and gives you light, and day will dawn in your soul. Your broken heart receives the light which floods it; you no longer feel convictions, but dazzling certainties. The poet has expression, the sage meditates, the righteous man acts; but he who is on the frontier of the divine worlds prays, and his prayer is expression, meditation, and action all in one! Yes, his prayer contains everything, includes everything; it completes your nature by showing you the Spirit and the Way.
"Prayer is the fair and radiant daughter of all the human virtues, the arch connecting heaven and earth, the sweet companion that is alike the lion and the dove; and prayer will give you the key of heaven. As pure and as bold as innocence, as strong as all things are that are entire and single, this fair and invincible queen rests on the material world; she has taken possession of it; for, like the sun, she casts about it a sphere of light. The universe belongs to him who will, who can, who knows how to pray; but he must will, he must be able, and he must know how—in one word, he must have power, faith, and wisdom. And, indeed, when prayer is the outcome of so many trials, it is the consummation of all truth, of all power, of all emotion. The offspring of the laborious, slow, and persistent development of every natural property, and alive by the divine insufflation of the Word, she has enchantments in her hand, she is the crown of worship—neither material worship, which has its symbols, nor spiritual worship, which has its formulas, but worship of the divine order.
"We do not then say prayers; prayer lights up within us, and is a faculty which acts of itself: it acquires the vital activity which lifts it above all forms; it links the soul to God, and you are joined to Him as the root of a tree is joined to the earth; the elements of things flow in your veins, and you live the life of the worlds themselves. Prayer bestows external conviction by enabling you to penetrate the world of matter through a cohesion of all your faculties with elementary substances; it bestows internal conviction by evolving your very essence, and mingling it with that of the spiritual spheres.
"To pray thus you must attain to absolute freedom from the flesh; you must be refined in the furnace to the purity of a diamond; for that perfect communion can only be achieved by absolute quiescence, the stilling of every storm. Yes, prayer, literally an aspiration of the soul set wholly free from the body, bears up every power, applying them all to the constant and persistent union of the visible and the invisible. When you possess the gift of praying without weariness, with love, assurance, force, and intelligence, your spiritualized nature soon attains to power. It passes beyond everything, like the whirlwind or the thunder, and partakes of the nature of God. You acquire alacrity of spirit; in one instant you can be present in every region; you are borne, like the Word itself, from one end of the world to the other. There is a harmony—you join in it; there is a light—you see it; there is a melody—its counterpart is in you. In that frame you will feel your intellect expanding, growing, and its insight reaching to prodigious distances; in fact, to the spirit, time and space are not. Distance and duration are proportions proper to matter; and spirit and matter have nothing in common.
"Although these things proceed in silence and stillness, without disturbance or external emotion, everything is action in prayer; but vital action, devoid of all substantiality, refined like the motion of worlds into a pure and invisible force. It comes down from above like light, and gives life to the souls that lie in its rays, as nature lies in those of the sun. It everywhere resuscitates virtue, purifies and sanctifies action, peoples the solitude, and gives a foretaste of eternal bliss. When once you have known the ecstasy of the divine transport that comes of your internal struggles, there is no more to be said; when once you have grasped the sistrum on which to praise God, you will never lay it down. Hence the isolation in which angelic spirits dwell and their scorn of all that constitutes human joys.
"I say unto you, they are cut off from the number of those who must die; if they understand their speech, they no longer understand their ideas; they are amazed by their doings, by what is termed politics, by earthly laws and communities; to them there are no mysteries, nothing but truth. Those who have attained the degree at which their eyes can discern the gates of heaven, and who, without casting a single glance behind, without expressing a single regret, can look down upon the worlds and read their destinies,—those, I say, are silent, and wait and endure the last conflict; the last is the hardest, resignation is the supreme virtue. To dwell in exile and make no complaint, to have no care for things on earth and yet to smile, to belong to God and be left among men!
"Do you not plainly hear the voice that cries to you, 'On! on!' Often in a celestial vision the angels descend and wrap you in song. Then you must see them soar back to the hive without a tear, without a murmur. To murmur would be to fail. Resignation is the fruit that ripens at the gate of heaven. How impressive and beautiful are the calm smile, the unruffled brow of the resigned creature! How radiant the light that adorns his face! Those who come within his range grow better; his look is penetrating and pathetic. He triumphs merely by his presence, more eloquent in his silence than the prophet in his speech. He stands alert like a faithful dog listening for his master.
"Stronger than love, more eager than hope, greater than faith, Resignation is the adorable maiden who, prone on the earth, clings for an instant to the palm she has won by leaving the print of her pure white feet; and when she is no more, men come in crowds and say, 'Behold!' God preserves her there as an image, and at her feet creep all the shapes and species of animal life seeking their way. Now and again she shakes and sheds the light that emanates from her hair, and we see; she speaks, and we listen; and all say to one another, 'A miracle!'
"Often she triumphs in the name of God; men in their terror deny her and put her to death; she lays down her sword and smiles at the stake after saving the nations!
"How many pardoned angels have stepped from martyrdom to heaven! Sinai and Golgotha are not here nor there. The angel is crucified everywhere, and in every sphere. Sighs go up to God from every world. The earth on which we live is one ear of the harvest; humanity is but a species in the vast field where flowers are grown for heaven.
"In short, God is everywhere the same, and it is easy everywhere to go to Him by prayer."
After these words, falling as from the lips of a second Hagar in the desert, and stirring the souls they pierced like the spears shot by the fiery word of Isaiah, the Being was silent to collect some little remaining strength. Neither Wilfrid nor Minna dared to speak. Then on a sudden HE sat up to die.
"Soul of the universe, oh God, whom I love for Thyself! Thou, Judge and Father, gauge a fervor that knows no limit but Thine infinite goodness! Impart to me Thine essence and Thy faculties, that I may be more truly Thine! Take me, that I may no longer be my own. If I am not duly purified, cast me back into the furnace. If I am not finely moulded, let me be made into some useful ploughshare or victorious sword. Grant me some glorious martyrdom to proclaim Thy word. Even if Thou reject me, I will bless Thy justice. If my exceeding love may win in a moment what hard and patient labor may not obtain, snatch me up in Thy chariot of fire! Whether Thou shalt grant me to triumph or to suffer again, blessed be Thou! But if I suffer for Thee, is not that a triumph! Take me—seize, snatch, drag me away! Or, if Thou wilt, reject me! Thou art He whom I worship, and who can do no wrong.—Ah!" he cried after a pause, "the bonds are breaking. Pure spirits, holy throng, come forth from the depths, fly over the surface of the luminous flood! The hour has struck, come, gather round me. We will sing at the gates of the sanctuary, our chants shall disperse the last lingering clouds. We will unite to hail the morn of everlasting day. Behold the dawn of the true Light! Why cannot I take my friends with me?—Farewell, poor earth, farewell!"
VII
THE ASSUMPTION
This last hymn was not uttered in words, nor expressed by gestures, nor by any of the signs which serve men as a means of communicating their thoughts, but as the soul speaks to itself; for, at the moment when Seraphita was revealed in her true nature, her ideas were no longer enslaved to human language. The vehemence of her last prayer had broken the bonds. Like a white dove, the soul hovered for a moment above this body, of which the exhausted materials were about to dissever.
The aspiration of this soul to heaven was so infectious, that Wilfrid and Minna failed to discern death as they saw the radiant spark of life.
They had fallen on their knees when Seraphitus had turned to the dawn, and they were inspired by his ecstasy.
The fear of the Lord, who creates man anew and purges him of his dross, consumed their hearts. Their eyes were closed to the things of the earth, and opened to the glories of heaven.
Though surprised by the trembling before God which overcame some of those seers known to men as prophets, they still trembled, like them, when they found themselves within the circle where the glory of the Spirit was shining.
Then the veil of the flesh, which had hitherto hidden him from them, insensibly faded away, revealing the divine substance. They were left in the twilight of the dawn, whose pale light prepared them to see the true light, and to hear the living word without dying of it.
In this condition they both began to understand the immeasurable distances that divide the things of earth from the things of heaven.
The life on whose brink they stood, trembling and dazzled in a close embrace, as two children take refuge side by side to gaze at a conflagration—that Life gave no hold to the senses. The Spirit was above them; it shed fragrance without odor, and melody without the help of sound; here, where they knelt, there were neither surfaces, nor angles, nor atmosphere. They dared no longer question him nor gaze on him, but remained under his shadow, as under the burning rays of the tropical sun we dare not raise our eyes for fear of being blinded.
They felt themselves near to him, though they could not tell by what means they thus found themselves, as in a dream, on the border line of the visible and the invisible, nor how they had ceased to see the visible and perceived the invisible.
They said to themselves, "If he should touch us, we shall die!" But the Spirit was in the infinite, and they did not know that in the infinite time and space are not, that they were divided from him by gulfs, though apparently so near. Their souls not being prepared to receive a complete knowledge of the faculties of that life, they only perceived it darkly, apprehending it according to their weakness.
Otherwise, when the Living Word rang forth, of which the distant sound fell on their ear, its meaning entering into their soul as life enters into a body, a single tone of that Word would have swept them away, as a whirl of fire seizes a straw.
Thus they beheld only what their nature, upheld by the power of the Spirit, allowed them to see; they heard only so much as they were able to hear.
Still, in spite of these mitigations, they shuddered as they heard the voice of the suffering soul, the hymn of the Spirit awaiting life, and crying out for it. That cry froze the very marrow in their bones.
The Spirit knocked at the sacred gate.
"What wilt thou?" asked a choir, whose voice rang through all the worlds.
"To go to God."
"Hast thou conquered?"
"I have conquered the flesh by abstinence; I have vanquished false speech by silence; I have vanquished false knowledge by humility; I have vanquished pride by charity; I have vanquished the earth by love; I have paid my tribute of suffering; I am purified by burning for the faith; I have striven for life by prayer; I wait adoring, and I am resigned."
But no reply came.
"The Lord be praised!" said the Spirit, believing himself rejected. His tears flowed, and fell in dew on the kneeling witnesses, who shuddered at the judgments of God.
On a sudden, the trumpets sounded for the victory of the Angel in this last test; their music filled space, like a sound met by an echo; it rang through it, making the universe tremble. Wilfrid and Minna felt the world shrink under their feet. They shivered, shaken by the terrors of apprehending the mystery that was to be accomplished.
There was, in fact, a vast stir, as though the eternal legions were forming to march, and gathering in spiral order. The worlds spun round, like clouds swept away by a mad whirlwind. It was all in a moment. The veils were rent; they saw far above them, as it were, a star immeasurably brighter than the brightest star in the skies; it fell from its place like a thunderbolt, still flashing like the lightning, paling in its flight all that they had ever hitherto thought to be light.
This was the messenger bearing the good tidings, and the plume in his helmet was a flame of life. He left behind him a wake, filled up at once by the waves of the luminous flood he passed through.
He bore a palm and a sword; with the palm he touched the Spirit, and it was transfigured; its white wings spread without a sound.
At the communication of the Light, which changed the Spirit into a seraph, the garb of heavenly armor that clothed its glorious form, shed such radiance that the two seers were blinded. And, like the three apostles to whose sight Jesus appeared, Wilfrid and Minna were conscious of the burden of their bodies, which hindered them from complete and unclouded intuition of the Word and the True Life.
They saw the nakedness of their souls, and could measure their lack of brightness by comparison with the halo of the seraph, in which they stood as a shameful spot. They felt an ardent desire to rush back into the mire of the universe, to endure trial there, so as to be able some day to utter at the sacred gate the answer spoken by the glorified Spirit.
That seraph knelt down by the gate of the sanctuary, which he could at last see face to face, and said, pointing to them:
"Grant them to see more clearly. They will love the Lord, and proclaim His Word."
In answer to this prayer, a veil fell. Whether the unknown power that laid a hand on the two seers did for a moment annihilate their physical bodies, or whether it released their spirit to soar free, they were aware of a separation in themselves of the pure from the impure.
Then the seraph's tears rose round them in the form of a vapor which hid the lower worlds from their eyes, and wrapped them round and carried them away, and gave them oblivion of earthly meanings, and the power of understanding the sense of divine things. The True Light appeared; it shed light on all creation, which, to them, looked barren indeed when they saw the source whence the worlds, earthly, spiritual, and divine, derive motion.
Each world had a centre to which tended every atom of the sphere; these worlds were themselves each an atom tending to the centre of their species. Each species had its centre in the vast celestial region that is in communion with the inexhaustible and flaming motor power of all that exists. Thus, from the most vast to the smallest of the worlds, and from the smallest sphere to the minutest atom of the creation that constitutes it, each thing was an individual, and yet all was one.
What, then, was the purpose of the Being, immutable in Essence and Faculty, but able to communicate them without loss, able to manifest them as phenomena without separating them from Himself, and causing everything outside Himself to be a creation immutable in its essence and mutable in its form? The two guests bidden to this high festival could only see the order and arrangement of beings, and wonder at their immediate ends. None but angels could go beyond that, and know the means and understand the purpose.
But that which those two chosen ones could contemplate, and of which they carried away the evidence to be a light to their souls for ever after, was the certainty of the action of worlds and beings, and a knowledge of the effort with which they all tend to a final result. They heard the various parts of the infinite forming a living melody; and at each beat, when the concord made itself felt as a deep expiration, the worlds, carried on by this unanimous motion, bowed to the Omnipotent One, who in His unapproachable centre made all things issue from Him and return to Him. This ceaseless alternation of voices and silence seemed to be the rhythm of the holy hymn that was echoed and sustained from age to age.
Wilfrid and Minna now understood some of the mysterious words of the being who on earth had appeared to them under the form which was intelligible to each—Seraphitus to one, Seraphita to the other—seeing that here all was homogeneous. Light gave birth to melody, and melody to light; colors were both light and melody; motion was number endowed by the Word; in short, everything was at once sonorous, diaphanous, and mobile; so that, everything existing in everything else, extension knew no limits, and the angels could traverse it everywhere to the utmost depths of the infinite.
They saw then how puerile were the human sciences of which they had heard. Before them lay a view without any horizon, an abyss into which ardent craving invited them to plunge; but burdened with their hapless bodies, they had the desire without the power.
The seraph lightly spread his wings to take his flight, and did not look back at them—he had nothing now in common with the earth.
He sprang upwards; the vast span of his dazzling pinions covered the two seers like a beneficent shade, allowing them to raise their eyes and see him borne away in his glory escorted by the rejoicing archangel. He mounted like a beaming sun rising from the bosom of the waters; but, more happy he than the day star, and destined to more glorious ends, he was not bound, like inferior creatures, to a circular orbit; he followed the direct line of the infinite, tending undeviatingly to the central one, to be lost there in life eternal, and to absorb into his faculties and into his essence the power of rejoicing through love and the gift of comprehending through wisdom.
The spectacle that was then suddenly unveiled to the eyes of the two seers overpowered them by its vastness, for they felt like atoms whose smallness was comparable only to the minutest fraction which infinite divisibility allows man to conceive of, brought face to face with the infinitely numerous which God alone can contemplate as He contemplates Himself.
What humiliation and what greatness in those two points, strength and love, which the seraph's first desire had placed as two links uniting the immensity of the inferior universe to the immensity of the superior universe! They understood the invisible bonds by which material worlds are attached to the spiritual worlds. As they recalled the stupendous efforts of the greatest human minds, they discerned the principle of melody as they heard the songs of heaven which gave them all the sensations of color, perfume, and thought, and reminded them of the innumerable details of all the creations, as an earthly song can revive the slenderest memories of love.
Strung by the excessive exaltation of their faculties to a pitch for which there is no word in any language, for a moment they were suffered to glance into the divine sphere. There all was gladness. Myriads of angels winged their way with one consent and without confusion, all alike but all different, as simple as the wild rose, as vast as worlds.
Wilfrid and Minna did not see them come nor go; they suddenly pervaded the infinite with their presence, as stars appear in the unfathomable ether. The blaze of all their diadems flashed into light in space, as the heavenly fire is lighted when the day rises among mountains. Waves of light fell from their hair, and their movements gave rise to undulating throbs like the dancing waves of a phosphorescent sea.
The two seers could discern the seraph as a darker object amid deathless legions, whose wings were as the mighty plumage of a forest swept by the breeze. And then, as though all the arrows of a quiver were shot off at once, the spirits dispelled with a breath every vestige of his former shape; as the seraph mounted higher he was purified, and ere long he was no more than a filmy image of what they had seen when he was first transfigured—lines of fire with no shadow. Up and up, receiving a fresh gift at each circle, while the sign of his election was transmitted to the highest heaven, whither he mounted purer and purer.
None of the voices ceased; the hymn spread in all its modes:
"Hail to him who rises to life! Come, flower of the worlds, diamond passed through the fire of affliction, pearl without spot, desire without flesh, new link between earth and heaven, be thou Light! Conquering spirit, queen of the world, fly to take thy crown; victorious over the earth, receive thy diadem! Be one of us!"
The angel's virtues reappeared in all their beauty. His first longing for heaven was seen in the grace of tender infancy. His deeds adorned him with brightness like constellations; his acts of faith blazed like the hyacinth of the skies, the hue of the stars. Charity decked him with oriental pearls, treasured tears. Divine love bowered him in roses, and his pious resignation by its whiteness divested him of every trace of earthliness.
Soon, to their eyes, he was no more than a speck of flame, growing more and more intense, its motion lost in the melodious acclamations that hailed his arrival in heaven.
The celestial voices made the two exiles weep.
Suddenly the silence of death spread like a solemn veil from the highest to the lowest sphere, throwing Wilfrid and Minna into unutterable expectancy. At that instant the seraph was lost in the heart of the sanctuary, where he received the gift of eternal life.
Then they were aware of an impulse of intense adoration, which filled them with rapture mingled with awe. They felt that every being had fallen prostrate in the divine spheres, in the spiritual spheres, and in the worlds of darkness. The angels bent the knee to do honor to his glory, the spirits bent the knee to testify to their eagerness, and in the abyss all knelt, shuddering with awe.
A mighty shout of joy broke out, as a choked spring breaks forth again, tossing up its thousands of flower-like jets, mirroring the sun which turns the sparkling drops to diamond and pearl, at the instant when the seraph emerged, a blaze of light, crying:
"Eternal! Eternal! Eternal!"
The worlds heard him and acknowledged him; he became one with them as God is, and took possession of the infinite.
The seven divine worlds were aroused by his voice and answered him.
At this instant there was a great rush, as if whole stars were purified and went up in dazzling glory to be eternal. Perhaps the seraph's first duty was to call all creations filled with the Word to come to God.
But the hallelujah was already dying away in the ears of Wilfrid and Minna, like the last waves of dying music. The glories of heaven were already vanishing, like the hues of a setting sun amid curtains of purple and gold.
Death and impurity were repossessing themselves of their prey.
As they resumed the bondage of the flesh from which their spirit had for a moment been released by a sublime trance, the two mortals felt as on awakening in the morning from a night of splendid dreams, of which reminiscences float in the brain, though the senses have no knowledge of them, and human language would fail to express them. The blackness of the limbo into which they fell was the sphere where the sun of visible worlds shines.
"We must go down again," said Wilfrid to Minna.
"We will do as he bids us," replied she. "Having seen the worlds moving on towards God, we know the right way.—Our starry diadems are above!"
They fell into the abyss, into the dust of the lower worlds, and suddenly saw the earth as it were a crypt, of which the prospect was made clear to them by the light they brought back in their souls, for it still wrapped them in a halo, and through it they still vaguely heard the vanishing harmonies of heaven. This was the spectacle which of old fell on the mind's eye of the prophets. Ministers of various religions, all calling themselves true, kings consecrated by force and fear, warriors and conquerors sharing the nations, learned men and rich lording it over a refractory and suffering populace whom they trampled under foot,—these were all attended by their followers and their women, all were clad in robes of gold, silver and azure, covered with pearls and gems torn from the bowels of the earth or from the depths of the sea by the perennial toil of sweating and blaspheming humanity. But in the eyes of the exiles this wealth and splendor, harvested with blood, were but filthy rags.
"What do ye here in motionless ranks?" asked Wilfrid.
They made no answer.
"What do ye here in motionless ranks?"
But they made no answer.
Wilfrid laid his hands on them and shouted:
"What do ye here in motionless ranks?"
By a common impulse they all opened their robes and showed him their bodies, dried up, eaten by worms, corrupt, falling to dust, and consumed by horrible diseases. "Ye lead the nations to death," said Wilfrid; "ye have defiled the earth, perverted the Word, prostituted justice. Ye have eaten the herb of the field, and now ye would kill the lambs! Do ye think that there is justification in showing your wounds? I shall warn those of my brethren who still can hear the Voice, that they may slake their thirst at the springs that you have hidden."
"Let us save our strength for prayer," said Minna. "It is not your mission to be a prophet, nor a redeemer, nor an evangelist. We are as yet only on the margin of the lowest sphere; let us strive to cleave through space on the pinions of prayer."
"You are my sole love!"
"You are my sole strength!"
"We have had a glimpse of the higher mysteries; we are, each to the other, the only creatures here below with whom joy and grief are conceivable. Come then, we will pray; we know the road, we will walk in it."
"Give me your hand," said the girl. "If we always walk together, the path will seem less rough and not so long."
"Only with you," said the young man, "could I traverse that vast desert without allowing myself to repine."
"And we will go to heaven together!" said she.
The clouds fell, forming a dark canopy. Suddenly the lovers found themselves kneeling by a dead body, which old David was protecting from prying curiosity, and insisted on burying with his own hands.
Outside, the first summer of the nineteenth century was in all its glory; the lovers fancied they could hear a voice in the sunbeams. They breathed heavenly perfume from the new-born flowers, and said as they took each other by the hand:
"The vast ocean that gleams out there is an image of that we saw above!"
"Whither are you going?" asked Pastor Becker.
"We mean to go to God," said they. "Come with us, father."
Geneva and Paris,
December 1833—November 1835.