O Salis! in that yet are all our expired sighs, all our dried-up tears, and they lift the aspiring heart from its roots and veins, and it fain would die!

The voice of the noble singer gave way to sadness, but still she sang the last of the strophes of this song of the spheres, though lower under the—weight of overmastering sorrow:—

Her voice broke, as an eye breaks into tears or a heart in death.... Her friend veiled his head with the leaves of the bower,—the whole of earthly life passed before him like a dirge.—Clotilda's sad past, Clotilda's dark future, drew together before his vision, and cast, in the darkness, the funeral veil over this angel, and bore her shrouded into the grave of her sister.... He had even forgotten his farewell.... He had not the heart to look upon the great scene around him and the bowed form beside him....

He heard the little one go and say, "I will fetch thee a larger pillow to put under thy head."

Clotilda stood up and clasped his hand,—he turned round again toward the earth,—and she looked on him with eyes worn with weeping, yet tender, whose drops were too pure for this unclean world, but in those large eyes stood something like the terrible question, "Do we not love each other in vain for this world?" And her beating heart shook the bloody pink. The moon and the evening star gleamed solitary, like a past, in heaven.—Julius lay mute and prostrate, with outspread arms, on the low mound which had been rolled upon the dust of his shattered paradise.

The tones of the nightingale throbbed now like high waves on the night,—then he gathered up his courage to bid her farewell....

Reader! raise not thy spirit to any pitch of rapture, for it will soon stiffen in a spasm,—but I raise my soul thereto, because even the fatal stumble at the gate of paradise is not unlovely when one is going out of it!

The first call of the confiding nightingale was suddenly answered still-higher by a new nightingale that had fluttered along and whose voice was muffled by thick blossoms, who kept flying as she sang, and now made her languishing melody flow out of the blossoming hollow. The two lovers, who delayed and dreaded parting, wandered confusedly after the receding nightingale, and were on the way to the blessed blooming hollow; they knew not that they were alone; for in their hearts was God; before their sight shone the whole second world full of risen souls. At last Clotilda recovered herself, turned round before the nightingale, and gave the mournful sign of separation.—Victor stood on the shore of his late blissful island,—all, all was now over,—he lingered, took both her hands, could not yet look upon her for anguish, bowed down with tears, raised himself up again, when he was able to say softly: "Farewell,—my heavy heart can say no more,—fare thee right well, far better than I,—weep not so often as thou usedst to do, that thou mayest not perchance have to leave me utterly.—For then I too should go."—Louder and more solemnly he continued: "For we can no more be separated,—here under Eternity I deliver to thee my heart,—and when it forgets thee, then—may a sorrow crush it which shall reach over the two worlds." ... In a lower and tenderer tone, "Weep not to-morrow, angel,—and Providence give thee rest." Like a transfigured one to a transfigured he inclined himself modestly to her holy lip, and in a gentle, devout kiss, in which the hovering souls only glide tremulously from afar to meet each other with fluttering wings, with a light touch he took from the yielding, dissolving lips the seal of her pure love, the repetition of his late Eden, and her heart and his all—

—But here let the gentler soul, which the thunderbolts of fate too sorely agitate, turn its eye away from the great yellow flash which suddenly darts through the still Eden!

* * * * *

"Scoundrel!" cried Flamin, rushing out with sparkling looks, with snow-white cheeks, with locks hanging down like a mane, with two pocket-pistols in his hands,—"there take, take; blood I want," and thrust the deadly weapon towards him; Victor forced Clotilda aside, saying, "Innocent one! do not aggravate thy sorrows!"—Flamin cried in a new kindling of fury, "Blood!—Faithless one, take, fire!"—Matthieu fell upon his right arm, but the left, trembling, forced the weapon upon Victor.—Victor snatched it towards him, because the muzzle was swaying about Clotilda.—"Thou art in truth my brother," cried the tortured girl, whose deathly agony alone kept her by its rack from the death of a swoon.—Flamin with both arms flung all from him and said with a horribly low and long-drawn voice in his raving exhaustion, "Blood!—Death!"—Clotilda sank to the ground. Victor looked at her and said, turning to him, "Only fire, here is my life!"—Flamin cried aloud, "Thou first!"—Victor shot, lifting his arm high up, so as to shoot into the air, and the splintered top of a branch was brought down by his ball.—Clotilda came to.—Emanuel flew to the spot,—threw himself on his pupil's heart,—from his breast for the first time in years rent with passion the sickly blood gushed out. Flamin proudly hurled away his pistol and said to Matthieu, "Come!—it isn't worth the trouble," and went off with him.

When Clotilda saw Emanuel's blood on her lover's clothes, she supposed him to have been hit, and laid her handkerchief on the blood and said, "Ah, you have not deserved this of me!"—Emanuel breathed again through his blood, no one could speak any more, no one could think, every one feared to give consolation, the mortally crushed hearts parted with suppressed woe; only Victor, whom the horrible word "scoundrel" at every recollection of it pierced through like a dagger, said to the sister: "I love him no more, but he is unhappier than we; ah! he has lost all and kept nothing but a devil."

Namely, Matthieu. It was he who had to-day imitated the voice of Emanuel, which had seemed to speak with Julius, and whose voice Dahore had taken for his father's, and afterward the voice of the nightingale, which Victor had followed, in order to convince the Regency Counsellor through his own ears and eyes of Victor's love for Clotilda.

Victor led his weak teacher to the Indian cottage. He felt his nerves now after so many relaxing days cooled and steeled by this tempest; his anguish of soul and sacrifice had made his blood, as the confinement of narrowing channels does streams, more swift and impetuous, and his love for Clotilda had been made manlier and bolder by the thought that he now entirely deserved it. There is nothing more beautiful than magnanimity and gentleness, except the union of the two.

Emanuel was nothing more than faint, and, as the evening brooded with a sweltering influence over all, he seated himself with Victor on the grassy bench of his house in order to keep his palpitating breast in an erect posture, and a tender joy gleamed in his features at every fallen drop of blood, because each was a red seal upon his hope of dying. But when Victor took the good man's weary head to his bosom and let him go to sleep thereon, then in the still evening sadness came over him again, and for the first time his heart pained him. He thought to himself all alone there, how over at the Abbey hot swords would pass hissing through the innocent bleeding soul,—he felt how now the two-syllabled, two-edged word of Flamin's wrath had cut through the whole bond of their friendship,—he represented to himself the blooming theatre of beautiful days beside him deserted and desolate, and the sweeping by of joys, which only play round us like butterflies in wide circles, while the hairworm^[125] of grief bites deeply into our nerves. At last he leaned weeping on the slumbering father, and pressed him softly, and said, "Ah! without friendship and love I could not bear the earth."—And at length his distracted and exhausted soul also was weighed and dragged down by the heavy body into the thick atmosphere of sleep.

* * * * *

Reader! the last moment in Maienthal is the greatest,—raise thy soul through awe and mount up on graves as on high mountains, in order to look over into the other world!

At midnight when fancy draws the buried dead from their coffins and sets them upright in the night round about her, and unknown shapes drift to us from the second world,—just as indistinguishable corpses driven from America to the coasts of the Old World announced to it the New,—in the ghostly hour Victor opened his eyes, but with inexpressible serenity. A forgotten dream had sunk far away to-day's past with all its din and cloud;—the bright moon stood overhead in the blue dark like the silvery fissure and sparkling fountain-like mouth, from which the stream of light out of the other world breaks into ours and comes down in ethereal vapor.—"How still and radiant is all!" said Victor. "Is not this glimmering region a relic of my dream? is not this the magic suburbs of the supernal city of God?"—A voice hurrying over said, Death! I am already buried.

Emanuel opened his eyes at that, sent them through the foliage over to the churchyard that overlooked the village and said, with a convulsion of his being, "Horion, wake up; Giulia has left eternity and is standing on her grave."—Victor cast a feverish glance up thither; and all the warm thoughts and nerves of life grew hard and stiff in a cutting ice-cold shudder, as he saw up there a white, veiled form resting on the grave. Emanuel snatched himself up, and his pupil, and said: "We will go up to the theatre of the spirits; perhaps the dead one will lay hold on my soul and take me with her." ... Fearful was the silence of the regions around their way.... Men start up out of the ground like dumb-waiters, like serving-machines, and drop down again when they are emptied.... The human race darts like a flying summer through the sunshine, and the bedewed web hangs fluttering on two worlds and in the night it passes away.... So thought both on their pilgrimage to the dead one; they wondered at their own heavy incarnation and at the noise of their steps. Emanuel fastened his gaze on the veiled form that now knelt down; he thought she heard his thoughts and would fly over to his heart through the moonlight....

The hearts of the two men rose and fell as if under two gravestones, as they climbed the long, grass-grown steps to the churchyard, and touched and opened the heavy gate which was painted with forms of risen saints, half effaced by the weather. The warm earthly blood congeals and the soft brain runs to a single image of terror, when the great cloud rolls away from eternity and from the gate of the spiritual world; on the stage of the dead Emanuel called as if beside himself: "Awful spirit, I am a spirit like thee, thou too standest below God,—wilt thou kill me, then kill me not by a stroke of horror, not by a crushing form, but smile like men and quietly wring off my heart."—Then the veiled form rose up and came,—Emanuel wildly grasped his friend, buried himself in his face, and said clinging to him: "On thee I die, on thy warm heart,—O live happy, unless thou wilt grow cold with me, ah! go with me!" ...

"Ah, Clotilda!" said Victor; for she was the form. She was dumb as the realm of spirits, for the dead one whom she had visited still clung around her heart; but she was great as a spirit from that realm: for the ethereal luminous nebula of the moon, the standing over the dead, the look into eternity, the lofty night, and the mourning exalted her soul, and one almost forgot that she wept.—Emanuel still held his wings spread out over the scene, and looked sublimely over the graves: "How all sleeps and rests here on this great green death-bed! I would lie down there and die.—Did not something just speak?—The thoughts of mortals are words of spirits.—We are night birds stealing through the dubious atmosphere, we are dumb night-walkers who fall into these pits, when they awake.—Ye dead! crumble not so mutely into dust; ye spirits, ye that come forth out of your buried hearts, flutter not so transparent around us!—O, man were vanity and ashes and a plaything and vapor on the earth, did he not feel that he were so^[126]—O God, this feeling is our immortality"^[127]—

Clotilda, by way of drawing him down from this desolating inspiration, took him by the hand and said: "Farewell, O worthy of veneration! I bid farewell this very day, because to-morrow I leave Maienthal. Live happily,—happily till we see each other again; my heart will never forget your greatness, but I shall see you again soon." ... Her melancholy at the thought of his predicted death, her fear of an eternal parting, stifled her remaining words, for she wanted to say more and thank him more warmly. Emanuel said: "We shall never see each other again, Clotilda; for I die in four weeks."—"O God! no!" said Clotilda with the most heart-felt and impassioned tone.—"My good Emanuel," said Victor, "torment not this tormented one.—Cheer thyself, O tortured one, our friend will certainly stay with us."—Here Emanuel raised his eyes to heaven and said with a look in which a world lay, "Eternal One! Couldst thou hitherto have so deceived me?—No, no, on the longest day thy stars will draw me upward, and thy earth will cool my heart.—And thee, thou good Clotilda, thou soul from heaven, thee, then, I certainly see to-day, God knows! for the last time with thy lovely cheeks and in thy earthly form,—I bless thee and bid thee farewell, but heavily and sadly, because I must still live so many days without thee. Go through life with soft influences breathing around thee, keep thy heart high above the many-colored mist of earth and above its storm-clouds,—indeed, thou hearest me not, thou bitterly weeping face; God pour solace into thy soul, let thy parting be more glad!—Thy friend will be with me when I go hence."—Here Victor grasped the hands of the trembling form, exhausted with weeping, who vainly wiped away her tears to see her teacher once more and press his image on her soul; and when Victor cried wildly, "Giulia! sainted one! mitigate the woe of thy friend in this hour, hold this breaking heart," then said Emanuel, looking on both with indescribable tenderness: "I bless you, like a father, holy pair of souls! never forsake, never forget each other!—O ye blessed spirits here above the glimmering mould of the crumbling coffins, give these two hearts peace and, happiness, and when I am dead, I will float around your souls and quiet them. And Thou, Eternal One, make these two mortals beneath thy stars as happy as I,—O take nothing from them, nothing on the earth, but life.—Good-night, Clotilda!" ...

—The Whitsuntide days are over!—

And I thank thee, kind Destiny, that Thou hast given me health for the joy of sketching such a fleeting golden age, since my weak, unequally beating heart deserves not to paint such raptures.—And for thee, my dear reader, may the Whitsuntide feast have sweetened some ash-Sunday or passion-week of thy life!^[128]—

hornstart

FOURTH PREFACE,

OR, EXTORTED ANTICRITIQUE AGAINST ONE OR ANOTHER REVIEW, WITH WHICH I MIGHT POSSIBLY BE DISPLEASED.

Clever Romance-writers create out of writing-ink and printer's-ink a new and terrible tyrant, give him a throne either in Italy or the Orient,—and then (unlike children who run away from the figure they have drawn) they step up courageously before the painted, crowned tyrant, and tell him the grandest, but boldest truths to his face, which betray the free man, and which no crooked courtling could well repeat before his sovereign. Such dare-devils remind me so often of two abecedarians, when I pass a gate in Oat Lane in Hof, on which a painted lion rears himself and his mane, and curls and sways his tail and his tongue. For one of the aforesaid abecedarians said to the other as I was hurrying by: "Hear me, I tell you I'll seize him by the tail, I'm not a bit afraid." But the other tyro, who had a much bolder thought, coolly mounted a corner-stone and said: "I first, Sir, I thrust my fist right into his jaws,—so!"—

It is the same boldness with which an author often attacks on paper, not only the aforementioned grim king of beasts, but also the critical feline race,—which Linnæus reckons in the royal line of lions,—while he shakes judicial chairs as coldly and boldly as if they were painted thrones, and so in general scolds and assails Journals in his Prefaces. A writer of power can do this. I, for my part, am perhaps as audacious in this as any one, and paint out for myself expressly the following review-cat, in order to grapple with her freely and fearlessly, and to show by her what courage can do.

In the first place, the Reviewer who charges me with being indebted to the amount of two whole Intercalary Days,—the one after the Fortieth and the one after the Forty-fourth Dog-Post-Days,—cannot have seen this Second Edition at all; the two Prefaces with which I have enriched it, the first and this, will answer with all sensible men for true Intercalary Days.

Secondly, my Reviewer will find fault (in future) with my indulging my manner. But let him hear now the Philosopher (namely, myself): Manner is of itself nothing but what follows: the æsthetic ideal and integral, like every other, is reached only by an infinite power, but we with our finite strength are incessantly coming nearer to it, never so much as near; Manner is, therefore, as the Philosopher takes it, a finite mirror of infinity, or the expression of the relation in which every temperament and number of strings of any given Æolian harp stands to the score of the infinite music of the Spheres, which it has to echo. Every combination of human powers gives only a manner; and higher spirits would find in Homer and Goethe the human manner at least; nay, the higher angelic hierarchy would find the lower manneristic, the seraph the angel of the churches. But as I am not even an ordinary angel,—not to say a seraph,—another Reviewer than he who will criticise me would have presumed beforehand that I should have a manner.—And such I manifestly have.—But yet more: as the degree and the relation of our powers change from year to year,—and consequently the product and proceeds of the same also, the manner—: accordingly and unfortunately the manner of the fiftieth year generally sets itself as the corrector of that of the twenty-fifth; or rather there ensues a heterogeneous adoption of children of two marriages, in which both are losers. Such a simultaneous Hysteron-Proteron^[129] is still worse than if one should undertake to clip and grind down the Grecian statues of one of Winkelmann's ages of art according to the statues of another. Pour rather a pure, flowing work into thy present mould, and do not wait to force it in when it is cast and hardened!—Even granting I should become hereafter another and a wiser man, I would never graft the old man upon the youth.

Man regards himself in the concert-hall of the universe, if not as the solo-player, yet as one of the instruments,—instead of a single tone,—as in fact the Prince looks upon himself as an Oberon's or at least hunter's horn,—the poet as an oaten pipe,—the author as a composing-instrument,^[130]—the Pope as the organ-works,—the belle as Bestelmeier's hand-steel-harmonica, or as a quail-whistle,—my reviewer as a pitch-pipe,—and I on myself as Maelzel's great Panharmonicon. But we are all only tones, as in Potemkin's orchestra every one of the sixty metallic flutes gave only one tone. Therefore I am glad of every individuality, of every manner, as of a new semitone in the church music of natures.

Thirdly, I know nothing by which I can see more clearly my future reviewer's perplexity for want of materia peccans to censure, than this, that he sticks to such pitiful trifles—in future—as the following evidently are, that I, e. g., have appended this Preface, that I have bound the work in four separate Parts, and by this fourth part have made, for an earlier possessor and bookworm, the sheet-worm^[131] of the old edition wholly useless. From the like specimens and sayings, wherewith such a Spartan Ephor Emerepes will rob me of the fourth and highest string, which I stretch on my fiddle full of rising fifths, let the indulgent reader form an idea how the whole of the Review must look. I am ashamed to go on.

Fourthly, I find universally, that, if an author in his Preface charges himself with a slight fault, which, however, he himself hardly believes, then the critics forthwith adopt and double this charge, as, among the Romans, a suicide who failed to accomplish the act was afterward regularly executed. If the author, having his eyes thus opened, strikes into another line, and bestows upon himself, beforehand, some praise,—and that not apparent,—this is not even accepted, not to say doubled. In that case the Devil may be speaker of the prologue!—

Meanwhile he seems also to be only Reviewer, and less a sly than a coarse customer. Many and really glaring incivilities, however, I willingly forgive my future reviewer, whereas I pardon nothing to a Gallic or British one, because he knows how one should treat people.—I play with him myself in this anticritique in no specially polite manner, nor do I, as the peasant doffs his hat before higher lightnings, doff mine before his. Besides, the judges after the Special Recension address the defendant as "thou." A mild (critical) winter is unwholesome to him upon whom it comes. For the rest, I simply wait and watch for the hour when I shall be celebrated and have on laurel-leaves: then I shall not, any more than other contemporaries who have now set up laurel-trees, suffer any one to find fault with me; and few will undertake it, just as on pictures which have been smeared with laurel oil no flies alight.

Fifthly and finally. It is well known that the deceased authoress, Ehrmann, when the advocate Ehrmann had accepted and noticed with much approbation one of her works in the Strassburg Gazette, married him on account of the review. If the editor of some journal play his cards so adroitly that a female coadjutor in the magazine shall welcome and announce my Second Edition of Hesperus (or Star Venus) with the admiration which the First Edition universally receives on account of its charms; and if he will only tip me a wink as to the sex of my reviewer,—in which connection, however, this must be looked to, that the critical person shall be, on the whole, still in the best blooming period of a reviewer's life, wherein one can still readily feel and impart and favorably review the fire of the Evening Star or Venus, and so much the more, as even in physics only green wood is a conductor of the electrical flame, but dry a nonconductor,—if the editor will see to and execute all this, then the author of this anticritique pledges himself with his signature to wait upon the coadjutress immediately after the receipt of the review, and with the usual ceremonies to marry her.

JEAN PAUL FR. RICHTER.

Hof in Voigtland, June 8, 1797.

NINTH INTERCALARY DAY.

VICTOR'S ESSAY ON THE RELATION OF THE SOUL TO THE ORGANS.

Victor was an enemy to the exclusive taste in philosophy quite as much as in poetry. On all systems—even of the heretics of Epiphanius and of Walch—the form of truth is imprinted, as the human form is in the bestial kingdom, although in bolder and bolder lines. No man can believe in nonsense proper, although he may speak it. Singular it is, that precisely the consequent or consistent systems, without the atomic Clinamen^[132] of feeling, deviate from each other the most widely. Systems, like the passions, only at the focal distance throw the brightest point of light upon the object;—how pitifully, e. g., does the great theory of self-subjugation run out of Christianity over into Stoicism,—then into Mysticism,—then into Monachism, till the stream spreads out and oozes away into Fohism, as the Rhine loses itself in the sand!—The theory of Kant, with all logical systems, has this tendency to run into sand, and has that deflection^[133] of feeling in common with the inconsequent ones, which brings together the wasting arms again to a renewing fountain-head. The two hands of the Pure Reason, which in the antinomy^[134] scratched and beat each other, the Practical Reason peacefully joins together, and presses them, folded, to the heart, and says, here is a God, a Conscious Person, and an Immortality!—

Victor first fructified his soul with great Nature or with poets, and then, and not till then, awaited the dawn of a system. He discovered (not invented) the truth by soaring and surveying, not by penetration, microscopic inspection, and syllogistic groping from one syllable of the book of nature to another, whereby one gets its words indeed, but not their sense. That creeping and touching belongs, he said, not to the finding, but to the proving and confirming of truth; for which he always took lessons of Bayle: for no one is a poorer teacher in the discovery of truth, or a better one for the proof of it, than acuteness or Bayle, who is its mint-assayer, but not its miner.

* * * * *

THE ESSAY.

If I wrote it in Göttingen, I might make it in paragraphs and more thoroughly, because the Flachsenfingen folks would not disturb me. Meanwhile it must still be written here, in order that I may have a patron and advocate in my own person against the court-gentlemen, who want to transform my soul into my body.

The Brain and Nerves are the true body of the "I"; the rest of the environment is only the body of that body, the nourishing and protecting bark of that tender pith.—And as all the changes of the world appear to us only as changes of that pith or marrow, accordingly the pith- and pulp-ball with its streaks is the proper world-globe of the soul. The inverted nervous tree springs from the swollen brain of the fœtus as from a kernel, which it also resembles in appearance, and ascends with—sensitive branches as spinal marrow, even to the anatomical summit of the horse-tail. This marrowy growth is grafted upon the venous tree as a consuming parasitic plant. And as every twig is a tree in miniature, accordingly—for all this is not a correspondence of wit, but of nature—the nervous ganglia are fourth cerebral chambers in small. The terminations of the nerves, in their development, open out on the retina, on the Schneiderian^[135] membrane, in the gustative knot, &c., into leaf and flower. Hence, e. g., we see not with the continuation of the optic nerve, but with the delicate unravelling of its stamina; for the great dissolving picture-gallery on the retina cannot possibly, by a movement of the nervous spirit, (or whatever one will assume—for after all it comes back to motion,) be slid back to the brain; in which case, besides, the two galleries of the two eyes would have to pass through the two prongs of the visual nerve and coincide at its handle to one picture.

Consequently the image in the eye, ear, &c., if it is to serve any purpose, must be felt forward on the point of the nerve,—in one word, it is even more absurd to shut up the soul in the locker^[136] of the fourth ventricle of the brain, i. e. in a pore of this tubercular plant, than it would be if one who, like me, ascribes an animating soul to the flower, should imprison the same in the ground-story of the dull kernel. Rather would I, surely, locate the soul in the finest honey-vessels of the senses, the eyes, than in the insensible brain, if I did not, in fact, believe that, like a Hamadryad, it inhabits and warms and stirs every nervous bough of this animal plant. The under-tied or severed nerve conveys, it is true, no further sensation, not however on account of the interruption of the connection with the soul and residence chamber in the brain, but because the nutritious spirit of life is cut off from it; for the nerves, like all finer organizations, need so much a continuous supply of food, that the arrested beating of heart and artery suspends in one minute all their powers.

I go further and say outright, beforehand,—by way of contradicting two errors: these organs do not feel, but are felt; secondly, the organs are not the condition of all feeling in general, but only of a certain kind.

The last first: as the organ (i. e. its changes), which is as much a body as any gross object, whose own changes it brings in contact with the soul, is nevertheless felt by the spiritual nature immediately and without a second organ: accordingly all corporeal substances give the spiritual essence sensations as well as the nerves do, and an unembodied soul is not possible, for the simple and sole reason, that in case of the dissolution of the body it would then wear the whole material universe as a heavier one.

My first assertion was, one should not say the perceptive, but the perceived organization. The nerves do not feel the object, but only change the place where it is felt, and their changes and those of the brain are only objects of sensation, not instruments thereof, nor in fact sensation itself. But wherefore?—

I have more than one Therefore. A body is capable only of motion, although, to be sure, that motion is only the show of the aforementioned combination and the result of the powers concealed in simple parts. The string, the air, the auditory ossicles, the auricular nerves, vibrate; but the vibration of the latter no more explains the sensation of a tone than the vibration of the string could, if the soul were chained to that. Thus, despite all images in the eye and brain, the discernment of them is still not yet made out or explained; or will you say, perhaps, that for some such reason as this, because the senses are mirrors full of images, therefore the spiritual eye is dispensed with or made good? And does not the change of the nerve presuppose a second in a second essence, if it is to be perceived? Or does another motion in this essence represent the first motion?

This brings me to the brain. That greatest and grossest nerve—the sounding-board of all the others—shows up to the soul the delineations of those images which are introduced by the rest. Upon the whole, I am of opinion that the brain serves more the nerves of the muscles, the veins of the limbs, which meet in the hand of the soul, and all, in fact, more as nourishing root, than it serves as a case of instruments to the pictorial soul. As most of our ideas are served up on visual images, and take from them their ground color, it is probable we think more with the optic nerve than with the brain. Why is it, as Bonnet has observed, that deep-thinking wearies the eyes and sharp-seeing the brain? Why do certain excesses blunt at the same time the memory and the eyes? The fever-images playing their antics outside of the eyes of the sick and people of lively fancy, like Cardan, who saw in the dark whatever he thought vividly and glowingly, are explained in my hypothesis.

In regard to the brain there are two errors; but Heaven save my friends only from one of them. For from the other Reimarus can guard them, who has fully proved that the brain is no Æolian harp with trembling strings, nor a camera-obscura with sliding pictures, nor a barrel-organ with pins for every idea, which the spirit turns, in order of itself to play to and from itself its ideas. If now not even the pre-established harmony of the brain and the mind, nor the mutual accompaniment of the two, is conceivable, so is their identity absolutely impossible; and this is precisely the error from which the abovementioned Heaven has to keep my friends. The materialist must first set up all that which Reimarus has overthrown; he must petrify in the brain-pap the millions of picture-cabinets of seventy years, and yet again make them movable like Eidophysica,^[137] and deal out the shuffled card-images to every second of time; he must see to it that these animated dancing images are forced into rank and file. And then, after all, and only then, does his difficulty properly begin; for now—even if we grant him that the images see themselves, the thoughts think themselves, that every imagination darkly mirrors all others, and even the conscious "I," as a monad, does the universe—now (we say) he must first get him a generalissimo who shall command and array this immeasurable, fluctuating host of ideas, a compositor who shall set up the idea-book from an unknown manuscript, and, when dreams, fevers, passions, have shaken all the letter-cases into pi, shall rearrange all the letters alphabetically. This ruling unity and power—without which the symmetry of the microcosm is as inexplicable as that of the macrocosm, that of the ideal world as that of the actual—is precisely what we call a spirit. To be sure, by this unknown power neither the origin nor the succession of ideas is mediated or explained, but, assuming only the known force of matter, motion, all that is not only incredible, but absolutely impossible; and Leibnitz can more easily explain motion by dark imaginings, than the materialist can imaginings by motions. In the former case motion is only semblance, and exists only in the second contemplating being, but in the latter the representation would be show and would exist in the second—representing substance.

I have often quarrelled with men of the world who make good observations and miserable conclusions, because in case of the least dependence of the soul upon the body—e. g. in old age, intoxication, &c.—they made the one a mere repeating-work of the other; nay, I have even said, no dancing-master was so stupid as to conclude: "Inasmuch as I dance awkwardly in leaden shoes, more nimbly in wooden ones, and best of all in silk ones, I see clearly from this, that the shoes have special springs to communicate rapidity; and as with leaden shoes I can hardly lift my feet, if I were barefoot I could hardly make out a single Pas." The soul is the dancing-master, the body the shoe.

We cannot conceive any action either of bodies upon bodies or of monads upon monads; consequently, of the organs upon the conscious being, still less. This we know, that the cohesion and community of goods between soul and body is always the same, or at most greater at the times when others would expect it to be less; for the greatest depth of thought, the holiest emotion, the highest flight of fancy, are precisely what need the waxen wing-work of the body most, as its consequent exhaustion also gives assurance; the more incorporeal the object of the ideas is, so much the more corporeal hand-and-draught-services are necessary to the holding of it fast, and at most the periods of stupid sensuality, of spiritual enervation, of blear imbecility, are the ones with which we must make coincide the periods of liberation from the chains of the body. Even the moral power with which we trample down wanton, upshooting bodily impulses works with bodily crows and tools; and the soul in this case merely summons the brain against the stomach.—Add to this, that the limits and hindrances to such fettering and unfettering are as little to be assigned as the causes of the same. Still less can the bonds of the soul, as some think, grow looser and longer in dream. Sleep is the rest of the nerves, not of the whole body. The involuntary muscles, the stomach, the heart, keep on working therein, not much less than when one lies down awake. Only the nerves and the brain, i. e. thinking and perceiving, are suspended. Hence slumber refreshes men while riding and driving, who therefore rest nothing but the nerves. Hence weak-nerved patients, whom all rest wearies, are refreshed by dreamless sleep. By the way, without the theory of disorganization which assumes negative and positive nervous electricity, the phenomena of sleep are inexplicable;—e. g. it is inexplicable in that case, why opium, wine, manipulation, animality, childhood, plethora, nourishing food, perfumes, on the one hand, are precisely what promote sleep; while, on the other hand, torture, exhaustion, old age, temperance, pressure on the brain, winter, loss of blood, fear, grief, phlegm, fat, spiritual enervation, also provoke it.—At most in deep sleep, when the nerve-body rests, could we suppose the soul loosed from earthly chains; in dream, on the contrary, it should rather be supposed the more closely fastened, because dreaming, as well as deep thinking, which also locks the gates of the five senses as well, is surely no sleeping. Hence dreams wear out the nerves, to the inner overstrainings of which they add outer impressions. Hence morning lends both the brain and our dreams equal animation. Hence the sleeping animal—except the effeminate tame dog—has no unhealthy dreams. Hence even Aristotle assigns unusual dreams as forerunners of the sick-nurse. Hence—I have now dreamed enough, and the reader has slept enough.—

shieldstart

37. DOG-POST-DAY.

The Amoroso at Court.—Preliminary Recesses of Marriage.—Defence of Courtly Back-bending.

On the morning after that great night Victor took leave of this consecrated burial-ground of his fairest days with unconcealed tears. Often he looked back on these ruins of his Palmyra, till nothing of them was left standing except the mountain-ridge as a fire-proof wall. "When I come back hither four weeks hence," thought he, "it will only be to see the death-angel lay my Emanuel on the altar and under the sacrificial knife." He bethought himself how dearly he paid for this feast of tabernacles by the death of a friend;^[138] and how the latter, without such compensation, suffered just as great a loss. For he felt that the frightful word "scoundrel" had now come in as an eternal wall of rock between their sundered souls.—He called to mind, indeed, and right gladly, what there was to acquit his late friend, particularly his being hounded on by Matthieu and his listening when he swore eternal love to Clotilda; nay, he even suspected that the Evangelist had perhaps let poor Flamin see far in the background peculiar motives (these suggested by the Apothecary) for a love, by whose object the favor of the Prince was to be secured,—but his feelings incessantly repeated to him: "He still ought not to have believed it!—ah, hadst thou only," said he with emotion, at the sight of the city, "pierced me with balls or with other terms of contempt, that I might have easily forgiven thee!—But that thou shouldst have done it with just this ever-gnawing venomous sound!"—He is right; the injury of honor is not therefore the less, because the other inflicts it from full conviction of right.—For the conviction is precisely the offence; and the honor of a friend is something so great, that a doubt of it should hardly dare to arise except by its own confession. But thus do separations easily grow out of little concealments, as from March clouds July tempests. Only a perfected noble soul can forbear to try any longer the tried friend,—can believe when the enemies of the friend deny,—can blush as at an impure thought, when a dumb, flying suspicion soils the gracious image,—and when at last the doubts are no more to be conquered, can still banish them for a long time from one's actions, willing rather to fall into an economical improvidence than into the heavy sin against the Holy Spirit in man. This firm confidence is easier to deserve than to have.

In the noisy foundery and mill of the city he felt as if in a dreary forest. Accustomed as he was to tender souls, the city ones appeared to him all so thorny and unpolished; for love had, like tragedy, purified his passions in exciting them. All hung over so ruinous and moss-grown as if on the verge of a collapse, whereas the clean mirror-walls of Maienthal rose firm and radiant. For love is the only thing which fills the heart of man to the brim, although with a nectar-foam that soon sinks again; it alone composes a poem of some thousand minutes without the rattling repetitions of the letter R, as the Dominican Cardone^[139] executed a poem upon it quite as long under the name L' R— sbadita^[140] without a single R,—hence, like crabs, it is finest in the months without an R in their name.

The first thing he had to do in Flachsenfingen was to write to Clotilda. For as the Evangelist Matthieu would now in all probability go out into all the world and preach the gospel of the pistol-duel between the two friends to all people, there was nothing else to do for the sacred reputation of his beloved than to transform her into a betrothed by a publicly declared engagement. Flamin's newly kindled passion could not be considered at all in comparison with Clotilda's justification. The exclamation, "Thou art my brother," which the convulsions of anguish had wrung from Clotilda, had of course been incomprehensible to Flamin, and had fallen unheeded on his ear; but for the listening Mat it had become a grand text and dictum probans of his doctrinal system respecting their being brother and sister.—In the letter, therefore, Victor besought his friend for a tacit assent to his suit; he left it to her, by his silence, to guess the most disinterested motives of his prayer.

He appeared now on the war-theatre of souls, of which one seldom catches an exact map, the court;—to his heart, filled with paradises, even the apartments seemed like glass cases of a stuffed aviary, which one strews with powder-brass, conchs, and flowers, and the live articles of the rooms like dried birds stuffed with wood or arsenic; through the snakes wire was drawn, as through the tails of great beasts, and the tree-runners on the throne stood on wire.—So very much had he become through the Whitsuntide festival the antipode of us who in colder blood easily remark what is sublime and noble about a court.—The newest news he heard there was that the Prince in company with the Princess was to take a journey to the mineral springs of St. Luna, he to cure his gouty feet, she to cure her eyes. Victor was really not quite tolerant, when he thought to himself, "If you will not fare any better, then, for all I care, go to the D—." The Paullinum was to him a slaughter-house, and every antechamber a chamber of torture; the Prince treated him not with courtly courtesy, but with coldness, which pained him so much the more as it proved that he had loved him,—the Princess more proudly,—only Matthieu, who loved best to talk with people who mortally hated him, had a face full of sunshine. From him and from his sister and some unknown persons he had to take and worry down some light snake-poison of persiflage about his duel, which the stomach indeed digests, like other snake-poison, but which injected into wounds dissolves the blood of life.—Does not even my correspondent fall into a fury and send his fury to me through his Capsarius,^[141]—the Pomeranian dog, saying: "Let any one keep cool, if he can, who is warm, that is to say in love, and whom death has not yet made cold, let him keep cool, I say, before the stinging smiles of a court-sisterhood at his sensitive love, especially before those higher ladies who are Goddesses, and on whose Cyprian altar always (as with the Scythians) a stranger is sacrificed, and to whom (as the Gauls believed of their Gods) malefactors, roués, Orleanses, are the most acceptable offerings!—Or, even if he can dispose of that, let him composedly hear himself mocked for his love by an Evangelist who invents and dresses up on the subject the following maxims: La décence ajoute aux plaisirs de l'indecence: la vertue est le sel de l'amour; mais n'en prenez pas trop.—J'aime dans les femmes les accés de colère, de douleur, de joie, de peur: il y a toujours dans leur sang bouillant quelque chose qui est favorable aux hommes.—C'est là où la finesse demeure courte, qu'il faut de l'enthousiasme.—Les femmes s'étonnent rarement d'être crues, foibles; c'est du contraire qu'elles s'étonnent un peu.—L'amour pardonne toujours à l'amour, rarement à la raison.^[142]—Blessed are the adversaries [sighs Knef] who are at liberty to cudgel one another."

The Evangelist threw a corrosive drop on the nerves of Victor's heart, when, despite his knowledge of Flamin's noble extraction, he twitted him with this, that like a modern French Equilibrist of Freedom, he could not marry indeed a citizen, but yet could—fight with one. And it went through his soul to see the friend who had been stolen from him so sorely impoverished in friends, that this Matthieu was the last scion and support of the line, who did not even before Victor take the trouble in the higher circles to assume and continue playing the part of a friend of Flamin. A good man has his sensitive heart screwed, as it were, into a flattening press, when he is obliged to stand before people (as Victor here is before so many) who hate and insult him,—in the beginning he is cheerful and cool, and is glad that he cares nothing about it,—but he unconsciously arms himself with more and more contempt, by way of opposing something to the insult,—at last the growth of the contempt announces itself by the disagreeable feeling of love going out and hatred coming in, and the bitter aqua-fortis seizes and devours its own vessel, the heart.—Then the pain becomes so great, that he lets the old human love, which was the warm element of his soul, run again in streams into his bosom. With Victor something else was added to the embittering elements,—his previous softening; one is never colder than after great warmth, just as water, after boiling, assumes a greater coldness than it had before. Love, intoxication, and sometimes the inspiration drunk from the sight of nature, make us too kind towards our favorites, and too hard upon our antipodes. Now when Victor in this bitter mood looked on at a card-table, and delivered to himself internal lectures upon the whole assembly, lectures on heads,^[143] in which, instead of heads of pasteboard, he availed himself of thicker ones: then the recollection of the still, humane tolerance wherewith Clotilda had accommodated herself to these very people out of love to her parents, made the whole ice-panoply which had formed around his heart, as round a flower, melt down, and his warmed heart said with the first joy it had known to-day: "Why then do I hate these full as much tormented as tormenting shapes so bitterly? Are they here only on my account? Have not they also their conscious being? Must they not drag with them this defective, afflicted self through all Eternity? Is not each of them still loved by some soul or other? Why shall I then see in them only matter for detestation, and draw acid from every look, every tone? No, I will love men merely because they are men."—Yes, indeed! friendship may desire merits, but philanthropy only the human form. Hence it is precisely that we have all such a cold changeable love of man, because we confound the worth of men with their claim, and will not love anything about them, but virtues.

Our Victor felt as light as after a tempest; the bitterest thing which insults can do to us is, that they compel us to hate. On the other hand, he felt now how impure our resistance to evil, which we give out for virtue, is, sand how disagreeable it is even to a noble soul to combat enemies without bearing malice against them; for this is still harder than blessing and protecting them without loving them.

Thus some weeks elapsed during his enforced landings at the hostile court,—for the request of his father ruled his heart,—and vain hopes of Clotilda's decision, and tearful retrospective yearnings toward the suspended days of love and the desolated days of friendship. Clotilda's silence, however, was precisely an assent to his coming; still he superfluously announced to her by a second letter the day of the same. For the rest, to him, thus bound to the throne as to a whipping-post, thus hurled out from all the objects of his love, thus fixed upon nothing but a far-off thundering future, in which his Emanuel after fourteen days sinks into the earth and his Clotilda into a thousand sorrows, the present grew close and sultry. Around him whirled an unripe tempest, and, as at the equinoxes, the clouds hung immovably about him as a great thick mass, and the secret laboring in the high element had not yet decided whether it was to run together in tear-drops or break up into blue.

At last he went to St. Luna ... in sooth only sadly blest! O could he glance at the Luna footpath or at the Parsonage, which covered the stages of buried friendship, without turning away his overflowing eye, without thinking how much vainer is the loving than the life of men, how fate employs precisely the warmest hearts for the destruction of the best (just as one uses only burning-lenses for the calcining of precious stones), and how many a silent breast is nothing but the sunken coffin of a beloved and faded image?—It is a nameless feeling to wish to love a friend for memory's sake, and be obliged to shun him from honor. Victor wished he could forgive his infatuated darling; but in vain: the arsenical word which pains me in his name remained still, in spite of all sweetening juices with which he swathed it, lying undissolved and corroding and deadly in his soul. Good Flamin! a stranger could love thee, I, for example; but the friend of thy youth, no more.

Victor strode along tremblingly before the picture-gallery and music-hall of his mirrored and echoed childhood, the parsonage, likewise before the scouring Apollonia, to whom he gladly gave a deeper greeting than his rank allowed, and before old Mops, who mixed himself up in no family feuds, but cordially invited him with his tail.—Not his pride kept him back from visiting the (assumed) parents of his adversary, but the anxious apprehension that the good people would perhaps worry themselves to death before him in an embarrassing conflict between politeness, between old love and new resentment. But he resolved by a letter to the noble-souled Parson's wife to satisfy his love and her sensibility.

Then he came into the presence of his beloved!—I remarked day-before-day-before-yesterday, while reading the German-French history, where, as is well known, the crowned name Clotilda also reigns, by the redoubled beatings of my heart, how I should feel then, when I came actually to see this Clotilda, whom for three quarters of a year I have praised; for that Knef, and the dog too, are no knaves, and that the whole history has not merely transpired, but is still transpiring, I see by a hundred traits which no fancy can well invent. If the biographer should get sight of the heroine, there would arise nothing but a new volume and a new—hero, who would be—myself.

She was sick; that evening had pounced like a vulture upon her heart, and had not yet drawn out its bloody claws. Her soul seemed only the angel that guards the earthly casing of a saint, from which the soul has fled. The Chamberlain met the Court Physician, as if he knew nothing of any duelling. What mothers generally do, that the father did; he forgave every one who was in high station and who wanted his daughter. The proposal which Victor at last made to him surprised him only because he had hitherto thought the latter postponed it merely on account of uncertainty respecting Clotilda's inheritance and relations in life. His answer consisted in infinite pleasure, infinite honor, &c., and other infinities; for with him all was one; hence, too, Platner asserts with justice that it is in fact only the finite of which man cannot conceive.^[144] Le Baut would have handed over his daughter, even if he had not wished to; he could not refuse anything to one's face, not even a daughter. Moreover, no one could come and sue for Clotilda who would not have fitted into some one of his projects (the four chambers of his brain were full of them up to the ceiling). Naturally, therefore, a son-in-law was what he now most wished, since his daughter might actually die without his having yet used her for a leaping-pole and lever of his body,—and because, secondly, the duel-talk preyed upon his heart; not as if he had not by healthy vermiform^[145] motions digested the hardest things, but because, like cultivated men without honor, he loved to appear on occasion of slight insults with alarm-cannon and fire-drums, in order to steal the right, in the case of complete but productive cases of dishonor, pierced with veins of silver, to lie there still as a mouse. The only thing which looked unpleasant to the Chamberlain, but which he immediately got over by the fact of giving his word (regarding his daughter) to the Court Physician, was, that he had previously given the selfsame word (secretly) to our Mat. As his Lordship, who was soon to return, could harm him and help him more than the minister could, he gladly broke his old word, for the sake of keeping his newest; for not only his last will, but every will, man can change as he will, and if he is a man of his word, he will be fond of making entirely opposite promises, in order to oblige himself to keep one of them. If the lying conduct of the Chamberlain, after such excuses, still needs one, he has this in his favor, that he certainly hoped Clotilda, when he had given his Yes, would answer No, and dare and—suffer instead of him. At least he held out this hope before his angry wife, and referred her to Clotilda's former No, which had laid upon our Victor such heavy hours, and to her unchangeableness. I wish one could have afterward petrified or cast his face in plaster in the state into which it fell upon being informed of Clotilda's Yes. What could the stepmother, the Chamberlain's lady, who was always the esquire and ally of the Evangelist, do in the matter further than to make a friendly face and the remark, that "no one was harder to manage than a spouse whom everybody managed"?

The formalities of the betrothal itself awaited the return of the Lord, and other circumstances. Let me not say anything of the love of this couple, exalted as it had been by so many sorrows. When, to love, the love of man also is actually wedded (a thing which many a one will not understand at all);—when in the breath of love all other charms of the heart become more beautiful, all fine feelings still finer, every flame for the sublime still higher, as in oxygen gas every spark becomes a lightning-flash, and every glowworm a flame;—when the eyes of the two lovers seldom meet, but their thoughts often;—when Victor almost dreads to retain a heart to which he has cost so much, so many dark days, so many anxieties and almost a brother;—and when Clotilda divines this delicate shrinking and rewards him for her sufferings;—then is it impossible to convey to many persons a sketch of such an ethereal flame, to say nothing of its colors; for the few it is unnecessary.

In every new relation into which a beloved object enters, love begins again at the beginning and with new flames; e. g. when we meet her in a strange house,—or among new persons,—or as a traveller,—or as a hostess,—or as a flower-gardener,—or as a dancer,—or (which has the greatest effect) as a betrothed. This was Victor's case; for from the hour when the wish of inclination is exalted into the command of duty, and when the dear soul delivers herself and all her hopes, and the reins of her whole future, into the beloved hands, there must in every good man's heart be a voice calling: "Now she has no longer any one on earth but thee,—now let her be holy to thee; O, now spare and guard and reward the dear soul who believes in thee!"—Victor was inexpressibly moved by this relation through the incidental circumstance that this very Clotilda, this firm, proud ball-queen and queen of heaven, who with so many energies and so much independence went her way over the snares of men and under their laurel-wreaths, was now by the betrothal giving her Declaration of Independence with a gentle smile into Victor's hands, and wished now nothing more than to love and to be loved; for this sweet condescension of so lofty a form Victor knew no sacrifice, no wound, no gift, which would have seemed to him great enough to repay her.—Thus should one love; and every new right and sacrifice which chills the common man, makes the good one warmer and more tender.

Although Victor by the rights of his new relationship found a more domestic and comfortable life with his parents-in-law; nevertheless it pained him that he was daily obliged to see the ever-memorable parsonage-people in their garden, and yet that the iron fence of the previous duel and the present betrothal shut him off from their hearts. For the same reason must he also renounce the Britons and their standing club. Le Baut however thought it an act of prudence: "for it was known on good authority, that they were Jacobins, and Frenchmen in disguise."—

But Clotilda's soul could no longer bear the deep sorrow which she felt to be weighing on her friend, the Parson's wife; she invited her by a note to a friendly walk. They met on the observatory; and Victor saw, with the deepest emotion, how Clotilda immediately took the hand of her oldest friend, and never, for the whole way, let it go from hers.

Clotilda came back with a countenance illumined with joy, and with eyes which had wept much, and with heavenly features in which shone an unnamable, not so much more ardent as more tender, love. Not for some time could she sufficiently command her emotions to communicate to Victor something of the interview: for I think I can detect that it was not all. The Parson's wife—Clotilda related—received her with a look full of crushing sorrows, but neither with coldness nor suspicion. At first neither could do anything but weep, and they spoke not a word; Clotilda was still more overcome, and her tears still continued to flow, when she began to relate her betrothal. She laid the hand of her friend upon her heart, and said: "Now is our friendship severely tried. I still believe in yours,—believe in mine!—O only this once, dear friend, stand firm! Heavy secrets, over which I have no right and to which I have only in a small degree the key, bring us all so near to these dreadful misunderstandings. Only this time rely upon it firmly, that you and I are changing our relation to each other as little as our characters."—Here the Parson's wife beheld her with a great look in which the old love for Victor still gleamed on, and then embraced her all at once with dry eyes and said: "Yes, I rely upon you, do you what you will, and though I should at last be the only soul left."—The last addition would at another time have offended Clotilda; ah, it could not do so now; O, she was glad to have something to forgive!

After the narration she told her friend, that, in case the invisibleness and the silence of his Lordship lasted much longer, she should perhaps, rather than wait, undertake the toilsome journey to London to her and Flamin's mother, in order to persuade the latter, as the solution of all these dangerous riddles, to come to Germany.—Ah, could Victor's self-sacrificing heart make an objection to the sacrifices of others?—No! his woe was redoubled, but also his respect and love.

In this situation of things there came to Clotilda a short letter from Emanuel.

* * * * *

Last evening my Julius came to me with a basket full of garden-earth and begged me for flower-pots and for hyacinths, because, he said, he was bringing earth for both. He had fetched the soil for his flowers from the hill of thy Giulia.—I drew his white- and red-blooming face, which resembles the pink with the red point, to my breast and said, 'Ah, who tends the flowers of man, when he has passed away?' And I meant him too with his tender bloom, into which may sorrow never fling its heavy rain-drops!—O Victor and Clotilda, when the lilies of the earth benumb me and put me into the last slumber, then adopt ye my blind Julius, and let this soul full of love be guarded by your loving souls!

"Clotilda! I now beg or wish something of you, which you perhaps can hardly grant. Ah, come on the longest day to Maienthal, thou fair soul! Cannot thy heart bear it? Didst thou not accompany thy Giulia even to the blind gate of the grave and there see her soul soar up and her body fall to the earth? O, if thou and thy friend, in the last hour, when life folds up its flashing peacock-mirrors and lets them sink heavy and colorless into the grave, could stay by me, as the two first angels of the future world!—For at the moment when the whole earth like a shell breaks off from the heart, the naked heart clings faster to hearts and would fain warm itself against death, and when all bonds of earth tear away, the flower-chains of love bloom on. O Clotilda! how heavenly to close my life in the presence of thy Elysian form! I should already be hovering around thee unfettered on the wings of eternity, to look upon thee, and if I could not wipe away thy tears with the ethereal hand, I would console thy heavy heart with a strange rapture! Ay, if man were blinded in the forecourt of the second world, still thy form would remain as an after-shining sun-image before my closed eyes!—O Clotilda, if thou shouldst come! Ah, probably thou wilt not come; and only the Eternal, who numbers the hours of the second life, knows when I shall see thee again, on the second earth, and how great are there the pains of longing. And so then farewell, and move on, lofty soul, in thy path beneath the clouds,—when I behold thy friend, thou wilt touchingly stand before me,—and when I die on his heart, I shall pray for thee, and say to God: Give her to me again, when on her head the flower-wreath of earth is great enough—or the crown of thorns too great!—Clotilda, never change, and then I shall not ask Destiny: How long will she smile down below there, how long will she weep there? Never change!

"Emanuel."