"Horion!
"Man climbs a mountain, as the child does a chair, in order to stand nearer the face of the infinite Mother, and to reach her with his puny embrace. Around my height the earth lies sleeping, with all its eyes of flowers under the soft mist; but the heavens already lift themselves up with the sun under the eyelid; under the paled Arcturus mists begin to glow, and colors extricate themselves from colors; the globe of earth rolls, vast and full, to rapture, of blossoms and living creatures, into the burning lap of morning.
"So soon as the sun comes, I look into it, and my heart lifts itself up and swears to thee that it loves thee, Horion!... Glow, Aurora, through the human heart as through thy field of cloud, illuminate the human eye like thy dew-drops, and send up into the dark breast, as into thy heaven, a sun!...
"I have now sworn to thee, I give thee my whole soul and my little life, and the sun is the seal on the bond betwixt me and thee.
"I know thee, beloved; but knowest thou whose hand thou hast taken into thine? Lo, this hand has closed in Asia eight noble eyes,—no friend survives me,—in Europe I veil myself,—my sad history lies near the ashes of my parents, in the waters of the Ganges, and on the 24th of June of the coming year I go out of the world.... O Eternal One, I go; on the longest day the happy spirit wings its way out of this temple of the sun, and the green earth opens and closes with its flowers over my sinking chrysalis, and covers the heart that is gone with roses....
"Waft greater waves upon me, morning-air! Draw me into thy broad floods that stand over our lawns and woods, and bear me in clouds of blossoms over sparkling gardens and over glimmering streams; and dizzied between flying blossoms and butterflies, melting away under the sun with outspread arms, faintly floating over the earth, let me die, and let the bloody garment, dissolved into a red morning-vapor, like the ichor of the butterfly[103] just released, fall into the flowers, and let a hot sunbeam absorb the azure-bright spirit out of the rose-chalice of the heart up into the next world.... Ah, ye beloved, ye departed, are ye indeed departed? are ye, then, moving along as dark waves[104] in the quivering blue of heaven? even, now, in that abyss, full of veiled worlds, do your ethereal garments billow around the hidden suns? Ah, come back, sweep hitherward; in a year I melt and flow into your heart!
"—And thou, my friend, seek me soon! No one on earth can love thee so truly as a man who must soon die. Thou good heart, which these mild days press into my hands, even at this last moment, for a farewell, I will love and warm thee inexpressibly. During this year in which I am not yet taken away, I will stay with thee entirely; and when Death comes and demands my heart, he shall find it only on thy breast.
"I know my friend, his life and his future. In thy coming years stand open dark chambers of martyrdom; and when I die, and thou art with me, I shall sigh, Why can I not take him with me, before he sheds his tears?
"Ah, Horion! there lies in man a black Dead Sea, out of which only when it is agitated the blessed island of the next world lifts itself up with its clouds. But my lips will already lie under the earthly clod when the cold hour comes to thee in which thou wilt no longer see any God,—in which Death shall lie on his throne, and mow around him, and fling even to the domain of nothingness his frosty shadows and the lightnings of his scythe. O beloved, my grave-mound will then be already standing when thy inner midnight comes on; with anguish thou wilt mount upon it, and look sternly into the soft wreaths of the constellations, and cry:[105] 'Where is he whose heart crumbles beneath me? Where is eternity, the mask of time? Where is the Infinite One? The veiled self grasps after itself on all sides, and strikes against its cold form.... Gleam not upon me, broad starry field; thou art only the conglomerate picture, formed of colored earths, on an infinite churchyard-gate, that stands before the desert of a life buried under space.... Laugh me not to scorn, ye shapes on higher stars, for, if I melt away, ye melt away also. One, one thing, which man cannot name, glows forever in the immeasurable smoke, and a centre without limit calcines a circumference without limit.—Still I exist; the Vesuvius of death yet smokes above me, and its ashes envelop me; its flying rocks bore through suns, its lava-torrents move dissolved worlds, and in its crater the former world lies stretched out, and it sends up nothing but graves.... O Hope, where abidest thou?' ...
"Float enraptured around me, animated gold-dust, with thy thin wings,—I will not crush thy short flower-life; swell upward, giddy zephyr, and waft me down into thy blossom-cups. O thou immeasurable flood of radiance, fall from the sun over this narrow earth, and bear up on thy waves of splendor the heavy heart before the highest throne, that the eternal and infinite Heart may take the little ones which are nigh to ashes, and heal and warm them!
"Is, then, a poor son of this earth so unhappy that he can quail in the midst of the splendor of morning, so near to God on the hot steps of his throne?
"Fly not from me, my dear one, because a shadow always encompasses me, which daily grows darker, until at last it shall wall me in as a little night. I see the heavens and thee through the shadow, in the midnight I smile, and in the night-wind my breath goes forth full and warm. For, O man, my soul has stood erect toward the stars; man is an asthmatic, who suffocates if he lies down and does not lift up his breast.—But darest thou despise the earth, that forecourt of heaven, which the Eternal has thought worthy to move along as one in the bright host of his worlds? The great, the godlike, which thou hast in thy soul and lovest in another's,—seek it not in any sun-crater, on any planet-floor; the whole next world, the whole of Elysium, God himself, appear to thee in no other place than in the midst of thee. Be great enough to despise the earth; be greater, so as to respect it. To the mouth which is bent down to it, it seems a rich, flowery plain; to man in his perigee, a dark world; to man in his apogee, a glimmering moon. Then, and not till then, will the holy element, which from unknown heights is sent down into man, flow from the soul, mix itself with the earthly life, and quicken all that surrounds thee. So must the water, shed from heaven and its clouds, first run under the earth, and well up from it again, before it is purified into a fresh, clear draught. The whole earth is trembling now for rapture, till all rings and sings and shouts, as bells sound of themselves during an earthquake. And the soul of man is made greater and greater by its nearness to the Invisible....
"I love thee exceedingly!
"Emanuel."
Horion read through swimming eyes. "Ah," he wished, "were I only, this very day, near thee, with my disordered heart, thou glorified one!" and now, for the first time, occurred to him the nearness of St. John's day, and he proposed to himself on that day to see him. The sun had already vanished; the evening red fell like a ripe apple-blossom; he felt not the hot drops on his face, nor the icy dew of twilight on his hands; and with a bosom illuminated by dreams, and a heart tranquillized and reconciled to earth, he wandered back....
—By the way! is it, then, necessary that I should elaborate an apology for Emanuel as stylist and as stylite (in the higher sense)? And if such is necessary, need I therein bring forward anything more than this,—that his soul is still the echo of his Indian palms and the River Ganges; that the walk of the better sort of unfettered men, just as in dream, is always a flight; that he does not manure his life, like Europeans, with the blood of other animals, nor hatch it out of dead flesh, and this abstinence in eating (quite another effect than that of excess in drinking) makes the wings of fancy lighter and broader; that a few ideas, to which he guides with partial hand all the mental sap and nutriment (and this distinguishes not only madmen, but also extraordinary men; from ordinary ones), must in him obtain a disproportionate weight, because the fruits of a tree become so much thicker and sweeter when the rest have been plucked; and more of the same sort? For, to speak candidly, those readers who desire an apology, themselves need one, and Emanuel deserves something better than a—criminal defence.—
At this moment the consolation leaped up within my hero like a fountain, that he was to begin on Thursday his metempsychosis through nature,—his journey. "Deuse take it!" said he, skipping up; "what needs a Christian to coin money for the present distress,[106] and put on mourning-cloaks, when he can journey on Thursday to Kussewitz to see the handing-over of the Italian Princess, and on Saturday to the Isle of Union, and, what is more, on the same day, which is one day before St. John's, to Maienthal, to his dear one, his angel?"
O Heavens! I would that he and I were already about the journey,—really it may perhaps, unless all hopes deceive me, be quite tolerable!—
During the week-day prayer-hour of Wednesday, two carriages rolled along. Out of the full one stepped his Lordship and the Prince; out of the empty one, nobody. Old Appel had dressed herself up splendidly, and locked herself into the pantry. The Chaplain was happier,—he taught in the Temple. Seldom does one make a clever face when one is presented, or a stupid one when one presents. His Lordship led his son to the Prince's hand and heart, as a collateral security for his future loyalty, but with a dignity which won as much reverence as it showed. My good hero behaved himself like a—fool; he had far more wit than our deference for higher persons, or theirs towards us, allows. A talent which expresses itself outside the limits of feudal service may be regarded as high-treason.
His wit was only a covered embarrassment, into which he was thrown by two faces and a third cause. First, the Prince's....
—If the reading world complains that so gradually, as they observe, one new name and actor after another steals into this star Venus, and makes it so full, that, at last, the historical picture-gallery becomes a regular gallery of vocables, in which they must wander round with a directory in their hands, they have really only too much ground for the complaint, and I have myself already complained the most bitterly of the same thing; for, after all, the greatest load remains on my shoulders, inasmuch as every fresh ninny is a new organ-stop drawn out, which I have to take into my performance, and which makes the pressing down upon the keys more disagreeable to me; but my correspondent forwards to me in the gourd-flask, without leave asked, all these people to be quartered on me, and the rogue actually writes me I have only to tell the world, There are still more people coming.—
The Prince's face threw our hero into embarrassment, not from anything imposing about it, but because everything of that kind was discharged from it. It was a week-day and current face, that belonged on coins, but not on prize-medals,—with arabesque lines, which mean neither good nor evil,—tinged with a little dead gold of court-life,—anointed with a soft oil, which might stifle the strongest waves,—a sort of sweet wine, more drinkable for women than men. Of the finest turns, which Victor had intended to reciprocate, there was nothing to be heard or seen; but of apt and easy ones so much the more. Victor was embarrassed by the conflict and interchange of politeness and truth. Social embarrassments arise not from the uncertainty and impracticableness of the path, but from the crossways of choice and the perplexity of the scholastic ass between his two bundles of hay. Victor, whose politeness always sprang from philanthropy, must to-day let it spring from self-interest; but this was precisely what he could not get into him. Beside the paternal face, before which, with most children, the whole wheelwork of a free behavior grates and sticks, a third cause made him disconcerted and witty,—namely, that he was after something. I can tell by the look of every one,—except a courtier, whose life, like a Christian's, is a constant prayer for something,—the moment he enters the door, whether he calls as an alms-beggar and saint-by-works, or as merely a member of the joy-club.
Long before the people left the church, Victor already conceived a hearty love for the Prince,—the reason was, he was determined to love him, though the Devil himself stood before him there incarnate. He often said, Give me two days, or one night, and I will fall in love with whomsoever you propose. He was delighted to find on January's face no second-hands, no minute-hands, of those assignation-hours with which a good Cæsar generally seeks gladly to interleave, as with honeymoons, the tedious years of wedlock; but on his face nothing was displayed but continence, and Victor would rather swear by the face than by the reputation. He misses the mark; for on the male face—although it is made of mere printed characters of physiognomy, as certain pictures are of written letters—Nature has, nevertheless, written the matres lectionis[107] and signs of sensuality very small, but upon the female larger, which is really lucky for the former and stronger and less chaste sex. In fact, adultery is, with princes of the January stamp, nothing but a milder sort of ruling and conquering. And yet honest regents always return—with pleasure the wives, so soon as they have conquered them, to their former lords. This, however, is only the same greatness which led the Romans to deprive the greatest kings of their realms, in order afterward to present them with them again.
As princes are not, like jurists, bad Christians, but prefer to be none at all, January prepossessed our Victor by sundry sparks of religion, and by some hatred of the French Encyclopedists; although he saw that for a prince religion has indeed its good, but also its bad side, since only a crowned Atheist, but no Theist, possesses the invaluable privilegium de non appellando, which consists in this, that the accused party is not permitted (per saltus or by a salto mortale) to appeal to the highest jurisdiction beyond the pale of earth.
The conversation was indifferent and empty, as in such cases it always is. In fact, men deserve, for their conversation, to be dumb; their thoughts are always better than their talk; and it is a pity that one could not apply to good heads some barometrograph, or compositor's harpsichord, which should write off outwardly what is thought within. I would bet that every great head goes to the grave with a whole library of unprinted thoughts, and lets only some few book-shelves of printed ones go out to the world.
Victor submitted to the Prince the usual medical interrogatories, not merely as physician-in-ordinary, but also as a man, for the sake of loving him. Although people from the great world and the greatest have, like the sub-man, the orang-outang, lived out and died out in their twenty-fifth year,—for which reason, perhaps, in many countries kings are placed under guardianship as early as their fourteenth,—nevertheless January had not ante-dated his life so far, and was really older than many a youth. The Prince won the good, warm heart of Sebastian most by the unpretending simplicity which served neither vanity nor pride, and whose ingenuousness differed from the usual sort only in refinement. Victor had seen vassals stand in such a manner beside the mouth[108] of their liege-lord; that the latter looked like a shark carrying a man crosswise in his jaws; but January resembled a Peter-fish, which holds forth in its jaws a fine stater.
The Court-Chaplain, when he arrived, in his astonishment at a crowned guest, found it impossible to stir lip or foot; he remained immovable in the broad water-spout of the priestly frock, which was thrown around him like a sheet of royal paper round marchpane. The only thing in which he indulged, and on which he ventured, was—not to put away the Bible (the mouse-trap), but—to send his eyes secretly round the room, to spy out whether it had been properly stitched, folded, and superscribed by the registresses of rooms.
The Prince proceeded at once on his journey with his Lordship, who had to reserve his leave-taking of his son and his farewell sermons till the solitary day they were to spend on the Isle of Union. The son contracted a liking for the company of the Prince, when he thought over his demeanor towards his father; he had a double joy, a filial and a human, as that father transformed his own happiness into the happiness of the poor country, and only for the sake of doing good made foot-tracks for himself in the rock of the throne, as in Italy the footsteps of angels who have appeared and left a blessing are shown in the rocks. Other favorites resemble the executioner who hollows out for himself foot-holes in the sand, so as to stand steadier when he—beheads.
When the room was emptied, the first of Eymann's members to wake up—he still stood in the sentry-box of the priest's frock—was the index-finger, which stretched itself out, and pointed out to the family-circle the bed. "It would have been more satisfactory and serviceable to me," said he, "to have been strangled to death with that rag, than to have had his Serenissimus spy it out." He meant, however, his own soiled cravat, which he himself had thrown upon the nuptial bed,—that art-chamber and wareroom of his linen. Whenever one contradicted any tormenting notion of his, he argued it so long that at last he believed it himself; but if one admitted it, then he conjured up certain scruples, and adopted a different opinion. "His Highness must inevitably have seen the tattered thing through the bed-curtains," he replied. Finally he travelled over all the places where January had stood, and took observations at the torn neck-tie, and investigated its parallax. "We must adhere to the blinding of the windows, if we want to have any peace," he concluded, and—
So do I.
P. S. I shall always remark after an eighth chapter (because I get ready exactly two Dog-post-days in a week), that I have again worked for the space of a month. I therefore report that to-morrow June comes on.
Must Treaties be kept, or is it enough that they are made?
The latter.—To-day the mining-superintendent exercises, for the first time, on the reader's ground and soil the right (servitus oneris ferendi, or I may say servitus projiciendi) which, according to the contract of May 4, he actually possesses. The main question now is, whether a dog-contract between two such great powers—inasmuch as the reader has all the quarters of the world, and I, in turn, have the reader—must, after being concluded, also be kept.
Frederick, the Antimachiavellist, answers us, and backs himself by Machiavelli: Certainly every one of us must keep his word so long as it—is for his advantage. So true is this, that such treaties would never be broken, if they were not once—concluded; and the Swiss, who, as late as 1715, swore one with France, might quite as well in all the Cantons have lifted their fingers and taken an oath they would every day regularly—make water.
But so soon as the advantage of contracts ceases, then is a regent entitled to break them in two cases,—those which he makes with other regents, and those he makes with his own step-children of the country,—his subjects.
While I was already at work in the cabinet, (not later than six o'clock, with the goose-wing, dusting the session-table, not with the pen,) I had under the latter a clever fugitive paper, wherein I proposed to show that the ouverture of treaties (au nom de la Sainte Trinité or in nomine Sanctissimæ et individuæ Trinitatis) was the cipher which ambassadors sometimes place over their reports, meaning that the opposite is to be understood. Nothing, however, came of the fugitive paper but a—manuscript. In this I was simple enough, and proposed first to advise princes, that, in regard to lies of necessity and truths of necessity, they must have, for every latitude and hour, declinations and inclinations. I proposed to whistle the state-chanceries to myself into a corner, and whisper in their ears, I would never suffer it, and, though I had only nine regiments in pay and starvation, that my hands and feet should be glued together with the sealing-wax of contracts, and my wings clogged with ink. That would I for the first time introduce into state-praxis; but the state-chanceries laughed at me, afar off in my foolish corner, and said, The whistler may believe, himself,—we do the thing otherwise.
In the works of Herr Herkommen[109]—the best German publicist, who, however, writes no acta sanctorum it is proved that a reigning prince need not observe at all any treaties, privileges, and concessions granted by his predecessor to his subjects; hence it follows that he is far less bound to keep his own covenants with them, since the enjoyment of the benefit of these covenants, which consists in nothing but the keeping or breaking, manifestly vests in him as proprietor. Mr. Herkommen says the same on every page, and absolutely swears to it. Nay, can there be a dean or rector magnificus who exercises so little reason—considering that, according to a general assumption, a king never dies, and consequently predecessors and successors grow together into one man—as not to draw from this the conclusion that the successor may regard his own covenants as those of his predecessor, and accordingly, since the two make only one man, may break them just as much as if they were transmitted ones?
Whoso chose to discourse philosophically about this might prove that, in fact, no man whatever needs keep his word, not merely no prince. According to physiology, the old body of a king (a reader, a superintendent of mines) in three years makes way for a new one. Hume carries it still farther with the soul, inasmuch as he considers that as a fleeting (not frozen) stream of phenomena. How much soever, then, the king (reader, author) may, at the moment of making a promise, be bound to keep it, still he cannot possibly be held thereto the next minute after, when he has already become his own successor and heir; so that, in fact, of us two contracting parties of the 4th of May, nothing more is extant than our mere posthumi and successors,—namely, ourselves. As now, fortunately, promising and fulfilling never enter into one and the same moment, herefrom may follow the conclusion, pleasant to all of us, that, in fact, no one at all is bound to keep his word, whether he is the top of a throne or only a chip thereof. Nor will courtiers (the corner-clips of the throne) oppose this proposition.
The public is requested to consider the Preface as the Second Intercalary Day, for the sake of symmetry.
barstart
A Heavenly Morning; a Heavenly Afternoon.—A House without Walls; a Bed without a House.
Ah, the poor miner, the delver in rock-salt pits, and the island-negro have in their calendar no such day as is here described or repeated! Sebastian stood on Thursday, as early as three o'clock, on the flying-board of his bee-hive, in order in one day to land in Great Kussewitz and be off again before people were up. A reader who has an atlas on the floor at his feet cannot possibly confound this market-town, where the presentation of the Princess takes place, with a namesake of a town, which the city of Rostock has annexed to its immovable property. Unfortunately, the whole house loved him so that it had already, for half an hour earlier, been out of the morning feathers of which the greatest wings of dream are made. Amidst the din of carriage-chains, dogs, and cockerels, he tore his tender heart away from eyes that were all love, and, as the beating of the former and the melting of the latter annoyed him, all grew still worse; for external noise stills the inner tumult of the soul.
Out of doors all the grass-pastures and grain-fields were bathing in the shower-bath of the dew and in the cold air-bath of the morning-wind. He hardened in it, like hot iron; a morning-land full of immeasurable hopes encircled him; he stripped his breast, threw himself all aglow into the dripping grass, washed (but not with any higher purpose than girls have) his firm face with liquid June-snow, and; strung with tenser fibres, stepped back from the shower-bath to his toilet,—only hair and breast he confined in no imprisonment.
He would certainly have started earlier, but he wanted to avoid the moon, whom he could no more marry to the sun than he could their respective children to each other,—namely, night-thoughts and morning-thoughts. For when the morning-clouds envelop man in their dew, when the loving birds dart noisily through the gleaming mist, when the sun looms forth out of the hazy glow, then does man, quickened in spirit, press his foot more deeply into the earth, and cling with new ivy-twigs of life more firmly to his planet.
Slowly he waded through a low avenue of hazel-bushes, and reluctantly swept off their chilled chafers; he held himself in, and stopped at last, in order to make himself late, that he might not reach the neighboring thicket just when the sun was entering his theatre. Already he heard the musical mêlée in the thicket; rosy clouds were spread like flowers in the sun's pathway; the watch-tower of the parsonage and village, that high altar whereon his first lovely evening had glowed, kindled again; the singing world of the air hung exulting in the hues of morning and the heavenly blue; sparks of clouds darted up from gold bars along the horizon; at last the flames of the sun streamed in over the earth....
Truly, were I every evening to depict sunrise, and every morning to see it, still I should cry, like the children, Once more, once more!
With benumbed nerves of vision, and with flakes of color swimming before him, he passed on slowly into the wood, as into a dark minster, and his heart swelled even to devotion....
—I will not assume that my reader has such a prosaic feeling in regard to morning as to deem this poetic one irreconcilable with Victor's character; nay, I venture to presume that his knowledge of human nature will find little trouble in discovering the key-note between two such distant tones in Victor as humor and sensibility. I will therefore commit myself unconcernedly to the happy contemplations of his feeling soul, and to my assurance of having all hearts in unison with mine.
The planet Venus and a grove show most beautifully in the morning and the evening; on both, at these hours, more rays of the sun fall than at any other. Hence our Victor felt, in the thicket, as if he went through the gate of a new life, as on this fiery morning he sauntered onward with the sun, which darted beside him from twig to twig, through the murmuring wood, away along under symphonious branches, which were so many music-barrels set in motion, over moss that lay in green sun-fire, and under evergreen bathed in heavenly blue. And this morning renewed in his heart the painful likeness of four things,—life, a day, a year, a journey, which resemble each other in their fresh, exultant beginning, in the oppressive interlude, in the weary, sated close.—
Outside in the copse, in the background of the woodland, Nature unrolled before him her altar-piece, miles long, with its chains of hills, with its dazzling country-houses, which had decked themselves with gardens as with festoons, and with the miniature-colors of the flowerets which played on the silver line of beauty traced by the brooks. And a cloud of enraptured, sporting, buzzing little creatures of silk-dust swept or hovered over the undulating picture.—What way should Victor take in the labyrinth of beauty?—All the sixty-four radii of the compass stretched themselves out as so many fingerposts, and he had sense enough not to propose to himself any particular hour of arriving. He therefore slipped off everywhere, to the right and to the left; he climbed over into every vale that hid itself behind a hill; he visited the pierced shadow-projection of every row of trees; he laid himself down at the feet of a more than commonly beautiful flower, and refreshed himself with pure love by its spirit, without breaking its body; he was the travelling-companion of the powdered butterfly, and observed his burying himself in his flower, and the hedge-sparrow he followed through the bushes to her brooding-cell and nursery; he let himself be spell-bound in the circle which a bee drew around him, and quietly suffered himself to be immured in the shaft of his own nosegay; he exercised upon every village which the motley landscape held up to him the right of way, and loved best to meet the children, whose days played even like his hours—
But men he avoided....
And yet there leaped from his heart a high fountain of love, which penetrated even to the remotest brother; and yet was he so entirely free from egotism, from that sensitive intolerance, which has its degree and source in common with the Moravian.—-The reason, however, was this: the first day of a journey was wholly different from the second, third, eightieth; for on the second, third, eightieth, he was prosaic, humoristic, social,—i. e. his heart adhered everywhere like hooked seed, and sent the roots of its happiness into every other being's lot. But on the first day came veiled spirits from all hours into his soul, who vanished if a third spoke,—a soft intoxication, which the atmosphere of nature, like that of a wine-store, communicated to him, spread itself, like an enchanted solitude, around his soul.... But why shall I depict the first day before I depict him?
In the first hours of the journey, he was to-day fresh, glad, happy, but not blissful; he drank as yet, only he was not drunken. But when he had thus for some hours wandered on, with drinking eye and absorbing heart, through pearl-strings of bedewed web-work, through humming vales, over singing hills, and when the violet-blue sky peacefully joined itself to the smoking heights and to the dark woods, rising like garden-walls behind each other,—when Nature opened all the pipes of the stream of life, and when all her fountains leaped up, and, flashing, played into each other, painted over by the sun,—then was Victor, who went through these flying streams with a rising and thirsty heart, lifted and softened by them; then did his heart swim, trembling like the sun's image in the infinite ocean, as the salient point of the wheel-animal[110] swims in the fluttering water-globule of the mountain stream.—
Then did flower, meadow, and grove dissolve into a dim immensity, and the color-grains of Nature melted away into a single broad flood, and over the glimmering flood stood the Infinite One as a sun, and in it, as a reflected sun, the human heart.—
All was one; all hearts grew to one greatest heart; a single life throbbed; the blooming pictures, the growing statues, the dusty clod of earth, and the infinite blue vault became the beholding face of an immeasurable soul.—
He might shut his eyes as much as he pleased, still there lingered in his dark breast this blooming immensity.
Ah, if he could have plunged up into the clouds, so as to sweep thereon through the undulating heavens over the boundless earth!—ah, if he could have floated with the flower-fragrance over the flowers,—could have streamed with the wind over the summits, through the woods!—O now would he rather have fallen on the heart of a great man, and sunk, enraptured and weeping, into his bosom, to stammer out, "How happy is man!"
He must needs weep, without knowing why; he sang words without sense, but their tone went to his heart—he ran, he stopped—he dipped his glowing face into the cloud of blossoming bushes, and would fain lose himself in the humming world between the leaves; he pressed the scratched face into the deep, cooling grass, and hung delirious on the breast of the immortal mother of Spring.
Whoever saw him from a distance took him for a madman; perhaps many a one does so still, who has never himself experienced how, through the cleared-up, blissful breast, as through the serenest sky, storm-winds may sweep, which in both dissolve in rain.
In this hour of his regeneration-day, his genius gave his heart the fiery baptism of a love, which clasped all men and all creatures into its flames. There are certain precious minutes of rapture—ah, why not years?—when an inexpressible love towards all human creatures flows through thy whole life, and opens thy arms softly to every brother. The least that Victor could do, whose heart was on the sunny side of love, was, if any one met him near a mountain, to turn out for him toward the steep side,—not to pass by any one who was fishing, for fear of throwing a frightening shadow on the water,—to wander slowly through a flock of sheep, and, if a child was shy of him, to make a long circuit aside. Nothing could surpass the soft voice with which he wished every pilgrim more than this good morning; nothing the look of anticipating emotion with which in every village he sought to spy out any poor body whose calluses and scars and gashes required a sponge or pain-killing drops. "Ah, I know as well as an amanuensis[111] to a Professor of Morals," he said to himself, "that it is no virtue, but only a luxury, to take away the crown of thorns from a lacerated brow, the prickly girdle from sore nerves; but this innocent pleasure will still be begrudged me, and when on so many roads mangled men are lying, why on mine does no one stretch out his hand that I might place in it some compensation for this undeserved heaven in my breast?"
He would fain carry his joy to another's heart to be tasted, as the bee delivers its mouthful of honey to the lips of another bee. At length two children came puffing along, one of whom was tackled as pulling beast of burden to a wheelbarrow, and the other harnessed on in front as pushing driver. The barrow was freighted with six porous bags full of pine-cones which the poor span were hauling to feed a consumptive fire. The two frequently exchanged places, so as to hold out; and the driver always wanted presently to be the horse again. "My good children! can't your father push, then?"—"The tree has broken both his legs short off."—"Then certainly your big brother could go to the wood?"—"He has to plough over yonder."—Victor stood on the fallow-field beside a waistcoat with full as many colors as holes, and near a dirty bread-sack, both which belonged to the brother, who at a distance was ploughing on the stage of this scene with half a post-team of lean cows. The emptying of a full hand into the lap of misery lightened Victor's heavy soul, as did the outgushing, which followed, of the full eye; his conscience, not his selfishness, was his objector to the greatness of his gift—he gave it, however, but in coins of small denominations—the children left their merchandise, and while one of them ran across the field to the plough, the other ran down to the village to his mother. The ploughman in the distance pulled off his hat—would fain have uttered loud thanks, but could only blow his nose—went on ploughing without his hat; but when at length he called out his thanks after the youth, the latter had already escaped far beyond earshot....
Do not, dear reader, wish this or the succeeding interlude of human sorrow left out of the great scenes of happy nature; and may thy heart, like Victor, by giving deserve to receive!
In his good-hearted haste he soon overtook a journeyman blacksmith sick with fever, whose travelling-trunk or portmanteau was a filled handkerchief; he also carried on a stick a wretched, faded pair of boots, which he had to spare, because the other which he dragged along on other sticks, namely, on his legs, was still wretcheder and less without color than without soles. When he had tenderly greeted the feverish man and made him a present, he looked into his pale, livid face, and he could not deny him some smart-money.... Ah, the whole smart-money for this life is not paid out till we reach a higher! When he had civilly questioned him and informed himself about his hungry journeyings, about his correction-house fare, about his flights from one country to another, and about his thin viaticum which the mistress denied him when the master was out,—then was he ashamed, before the All-gracious One, of his flower-field of rapture, which he no more deserved "than that poor devil there," and he made him an additional present; and when he again waited for him to speak, and learned that he was fifty years old without any prospects, and when the distress overmastered him which he always felt at the sight of old but undeveloped men, gray apprentices, old clerks, old dispensers, old amanuenses, then was he somewhat excusable for running back again and silently giving the astonished old man the new signs of his overflowing, benignant soul; and when, at this renewed parting, he felt his heart, which was dissolved into love, and only floated, as it were, round his soul, thirst more and more for doing good, and felt an incomprehensible inclination for fresh giving, and a longing to pour out upon somebody to-day everything, everything, then for the first time did he perceive that he was now too tender and too happy and too giddy and too weak.
So soon as the people in the village had in hand the certain intelligence of this transit-toll of generosity, in the afternoon about fifteen children stationed themselves on different posts along the way, manned the narrow passes, and distributed sentries and enfans perdus to prevent evasion of the revenue-laws....
A man who, like Victor, construed three straight leagues into seven crooked ones, is often hungry, but certainly more so than he;—he took merely a Leibnitz's monad-meal out of his pocket, biscuit and wine, and appeased therewith the stomach which hung and drew upon his spirit, in order not to darken and foul, by throwing in any pieces of flesh, the clear lake of his inner being, with its reflected arch of heavenly blue and heavenly red. In fact, he hated gormandizers as men of too gross selfishness, as well as all living larders, where layers of fat crush in the spirit, as masses of snow do a house. The soul, he said, takes an odor from the contents of the body, just as wine does from the fruit which is near it in the cellar, and in the mephitic vapor in which the souls of the Flachsenfingenites bob up and down over the brew-kettles which seethe their potatoes and beer, the poor birds must surely fall down tipsy and stifled into this dead sea.
He broke his biscuit not in any house, but in the skeleton, i. e. framework of a house, which had just come from the hands and axes of the carpenters into the sight of the village. As he looked through all the divisions and subdivisions of this architectural skeleton, and saw at once through sitting-room, kitchen, stable, and loft, he thought to himself: "Another play-house for a poor, little human troupe, who are here to play out their benefit comedy, their Gay's Beggars'-opera, with no voice to cry from the stage-box, Encore! Ah! before these beams have blackened to ebony by the winter smoke, many an eye-socket will have grown red with grief; many a northwester of life will blow through the window upon trembling hearts, and into these nooks, which are yet to be darkly walled up, will many a back, sore with bruises from the warfare of common life, creep away to wipe off sweat or blood. But joy (he went on soliloquizing as he looked at the place for stove and table) will also set a gilliflower-tree or two before the window for your inmates, and drive up before your house-door, which is yet to be hung, and unload its freight of the three holy feasts, and the church fair, and the child's baptism.—Heavens! how foolish that I should prefer thinking all this in the mere ribs of a house to seeing it yonder in the walled-up houses of the village!"
During this table-talk and house-warming-oration, whereat, however, no drinking-glass was shivered, the white breast of a swallow swooped low across the road, and her bill took up a load of slacked lime for her little garret. The wasp shaved off from the joist-work paper-shavings for the layers of her bulbous sphere. The spider had already knit her spider's house into the larger one. All creatures played the carpenter and mason in building up for themselves their little islands in the infinite sea; but grovelling man looks not over his shoulder, and sees not that all is like him.
Sebastian quitted his wooden inn, his skeleton of a Frankfort Red House, more intoxicated with happiness than he could have gone from a fully-built one. In certain men a dark melancholy diffuses itself,—a shadow of the soul all the greater when the shadows around them are the smallest: I mean about one o'clock of a summer afternoon. When in the afternoon the lawns lie more intensely perfumed, and the woods with drooping leaves stand, more softly sighing and sleeping beneath the brooding sun, and the birds sit on the trees as dumb figurants or supernumeraries,—then in the Eden that lay sweltering under the cloud of blossoms an oppressive yearning seized upon his heart,—then was he wafted by his fancies under the eternally blue sky of the East, and under the wine-palms of Hindustan,—then did he rest himself in those still lands, where, without stinging necessities or scorching passions, he sank dissolved into the dreamy tranquillity of the Brahmin, and where the soul in its elevation holds itself steady and no longer trembles with the trembling earth, like the fixed stars whose gleam trembles not, seen on mountains,—then was he too happy for a German colonist, too poetic for a European, too luxurious for a neighbor of the North Pole.... Every summer morning he feared that in the summer afternoon he should fantasy too effeminately.
Fasting, wine, heaven, and earth had to-day so lavishly filled the chambers of his heart with the sleep-potion of rapture, that they must needs, when anything more was poured in, overflow through the eyes. These now gushed forth; and behind his dimmed eyes, in the overshadowed inner chamber, lined with the green of nature, and darkened, as it were, with curtains of evening redness, a colored night came on, wherein all the little shapes of his childhood rose cloudily before him,—the earliest playthings of life were laid out,—his first May months played like little angels on an evening cloud, and they could not in their wing-clothes fly round the great cloud, and the sun did not scorch them.
Ah! what he had long forgotten,—long lost,—long loved,—songs without sense and tones without words, nameless plays,—buried nurses,—dead servants,—all these came to life again; but before all, and greatest of all, moved the form of his first, his dearest teacher, Dahore, in England, who said to his melted soul, "We were once side by side."—O this eternally loved spirit, who even then saw in our Victor the wings that lift themselves toward the next world,—who even then was more the friend than the master of his so tender, tempestuous, loving, aspiring heart,—this never-to-be-forgotten spirit would not leave him; his form pushed aside the shroud, began to shine and to say, "Horion, my Horion, did I not hold thee by the hand, wast thou not in my heart? But it is long since we loved each other, and my voice is no longer recognizable to thee, scarcely my face; ah, the seasons of life roll not back, but onward, downward, forever." He leaned against a tree and kept drying his eye, which could no longer find the road, and his sight was fixed calmly on the woods which stretch toward St. Luna, and on the hazy hills that separate him from Maienthal and from his second teacher....
Kussewitz burst upon him. But too soon; his soul in its emotion was not ready to go among strangers. He was glad to come upon an overturned trough, out of which sheep were licking salt, and a hedge-pen, which folded them at night, and the hut on two wheels wherein their keeper slept. He had a peculiar curiosity and predilection for little copies of houses; he always walked into or up to every collier's hut, every hunter's and fowler's house, for the sake of saddening and comforting himself with his own confinement, and with the parodies of our little life and with the ground-floor of poverty. He never went blindly by anything small, over which the world's man and business man stalk so scornfully; just as, on the other hand, he never stopped before any pomp of citizenly life. He opened, therefore, a little door to the travelling bed of the shepherd: it looked so poverty-stricken in there, and the straw, which took the place of eider-down and silk pillow-cases, was so lowly and rumpled, that he felt an indescribable longing to enter; he needed now a diving-bell that should separate him from the rushing, crushing, sublime sea around him. I wish one could conceal the fact from the European cabinets, the Imperial Diet, and the Chief Commissary, that he actually laid himself down therein. But now the excitement of his senses, into which the door of his bedchamber admitted only a small section of the blue sky, soon passed over into the exhaustion of slumber, and over the hot eye the lid closed.