CHAPTER XIV.

A LOVER'S DISMISSAL--FANTAISIE--THE CHILD WITH THE BOUQUET--THE EDEN OF THE NIGHT, AND THE ANGEL AT THE GATE OF PARADISE.

It was not the deeper blue of the sky (which, on the Saturday, was as rich and pure as in winter, or by night)--nor the thought of actually standing in the very presence of the sorrowing soul whom he had driven from Paradise with the Sodom apple of the serpent (Venner)--nor his own feeble health--nor memories of his own domestic life;--it was none of these matters taken singly, but the combination of all these semitones and minor intervals together which attuned our Firmian to a melting _maestoso_, and gave to his looks and thoughts (for his afternoon visit) much such a kind and degree of tenderness as he expected he should find in Nathalie's.

What he did find was precisely the reverse. In and about Nathalie there reigned such a noble _cold_, serene gladsomeness as you may find upon the loftiest mountain peaks; the cloud and the storm are _beneath_, while around there rests a purer, colder air, but a deeper blue, too, and a paler sunlight.

It cannot, of course, surprise me that you are on the tenter-hooks of anxiety to hear the account she is going to give of her rupture with Everard. But her account of it was so brief--it might have been written round a Prussian dollar--so that I must supplement it with mine, which I have taken from Rosa's own written record of it. The fact is, the Venner, five years afterwards, wrote a very passable novel (if we may credit the praise bestowed upon it in the 'Universal German Library'), into which he artfully built the whole of the rupture with Nathalie--(that severance between soul and body); at all events, this is the conclusion to which sundry hints of Nathalie's would point us. The said novel, accordingly, is my fountain of Vaucluse. Emasculate intelligences, such as Rosa's, can only reproduce _experiences_; their poetic _fœtuses_ are nothing but adopted children of the actual.

To be brief, what took place was as follows. Scarce were Firmian and Heinrich gone out among the trees, when the Venner brought up his reserve of vengeance, and asked Nathalie, in a tetchy manner, how it was that she could tolerate visitors of such a poor and plebeian sort. The haste and the coldness of the departed pair had already set Nathalie on fire, and this address made her blaze forth in a flame upon her yellow-silken questioner. "A question such as that," she answered, "is very little short of an insult;" and she immediately added one of her own--for she was too warm and too proud to dissemble in the slightest, or to hold other than the straightest course with him. "You call at Mr. Siebenkæs's pretty often yourself, do you not?" "Oh!" said this empty braggart, "I call on his _wife_ (to speak the simple truth); _he_ is merely my pretext." "Really," said she, making her syllables last as long as her look of scorn. Meyern, amazed at this behaviour, so very unlike the tone of the antecedent epistolary correspondence (he gave the twin cronies the credit of it)--Meyern, whom her beauty, his own money, and her poverty and dependence upon Blaise (to say nothing of his position of betrothed bridegroom), had now inspired with the utmost audacity--Meyern, this brave and courageous lion, undertook, without a moment's hesitation, a task which nobody else would have ventured upon, namely, that of humiliating and bringing to her proper senses this irate Aphrodite, by reading to her the catalogue of his Cicisbean appointments, and, in general terms, unfolding before her the long perspective of the hundreds of gynæcœa and jointure-houses open to him. "It is such an easy matter to worship false goddesses and open their temple doors, that I am charmed to be restored to the worship of the true feminine godhead, through my Babylonish captivity to you."

All her crushed heart sighed forth, "Ah! then it is all true--he is a wicked wretch, and I am miserable indeed." But she kept silence, outwardly, and went and looked out of the window, in anger. Her soul was one of those whose seats are the knight's upper dais of womankind; it was ever eager to do rare, heroic acts of self-devotion and self-sacrifice; indeed, a fondness for remarkable and out-of-the-way greatness was the only littleness about it. And now, when the Venner tried to make amends for his braggadocio by a sudden jump into a light and sportive tone (a tone which, in minor warfares with the ordinary fair sex, heals breaches much quicker and better than a more serious one)--and proposed a walk in the pretty park to her, as being a spot better adapted for a reconciliation--this noble soul of hers spread wide its pure white pinions and soared away from out the foul heart of this crooked pike with his silver scales for ever! And she drew near to him and said (all a-glow, but dry-eyed wholly), "Mr. von Meyern, I have quite decided--we are parted for ever. We have never known each other, and our acquaintance is at an end. I will send you back your letters to-morrow, and you will have the goodness to return mine to me." Had he employed a more serious tone, he might have kept hold of this strong soul for some days--perhaps weeks--longer. Without looking at him anymore, she opened a casket and began arranging letters. He tried, in a hundred speeches, to flatter and pacify her; she answered never a word. His heart boiled within him, for he gave the two advocates the blame for all this. At length he thought he would humble this deaf mute (as well as make her alter her determination), by saying, as he now did, "I don't know what your uncle in Kuhschnappel will say to all this. _He_ appears to me to set a much greater value upon my sentiments towards you than you do yourself; indeed, he seems to consider our marriage as essential to your happiness as I think it to mine." This was a burden heavier than her back, so sore bent down by Fate, could bear. She shut up the casket hurriedly, sat down, and rested her bewildered head upon her trembling arms, shedding burning tears, which her hands strove in vain to hide. A reproach of our poverty uttered by lips we have loved, darts like red-hot iron into the heart, and scorches it dry with fire. Rosa, whose vengeance, now wreaked, gave place to the most eager love, (in hopes that her feelings were of the same selfish type as his own), threw himself on his knees before her, crying, "Oh! forget it all! What are we breaking with one another _for_, if we come really to think about it? Your precious tear-drops wash it all away. I mingle mine with them in rich abundance."

She arose with haughty port, leaving him on his knees. "My tears," she said, "have not the smallest reference to anything connected with you. I _am_ poor, and I would not be rich. After the base, ignoble insult you have put upon me, you shall not stay and see me weep. Have the goodness to leave the room." So that he retired; and--when one considers the weight of the sacks he had to carry--sacks of every kind (including one full of muzzles)--he really did it in a surprisingly brisk and lively manner, holding his head pretty high. His command of his temper and his apparent good humour strike one the more (for I may give him what praise he deserves), that he retained them and took them home with him, and this on an afternoon when, with the two finest and longest levers in all his collection he had utterly failed in touching the smallest point in Nathalie's heart, or the auricles thereof. One of these levers was his old one, which he had tried upon Lenette--that of gradually twisting himself in, corkscrew fashion, in spiral serpentine lines of petty advances, approaches, attentions and illusions; but Nathalie was neither weak nor light enough to be penetrated thus. The other lever was one from which something might really have _been_ expected in the way of effect--though it actually _had_ less than even the first. It consisted in showing his old scars (like an old warrior), and rejuvenating them into wounds; in this manner he bared his suffering heart, pierced by so many a false love, and which (like a dollar with a hole in it), had hung as a votive offering upon so many a shrine. His soul put on Court mourning (of sorrow) of all degrees, whole and half, in hopes of being, like a widow, more enchanting in black. The friend of a Leibgeber, however, could be softened by manly sorrows only--the womanly sort could but harden her.

Meanwhile (as we have said), he left, his _fiancée_ without any pity for her self-sacrifice indeed, and equally without the slightest indignation at her refusal of him. He merely thought, "She may go to the devil;" and he could scarce sufficiently congratulate himself that he had so easily escaped the incalculable annoyance of having to endure life with a creature of the kind from one year's end to another, and to pay her the necessary respect throughout an infernal, long matrimonial life. On the other hand, his bile was mightily stirred against Leibgeber, but more particularly against Siebenkæs (whom he suspected of being the real judge of his Divorce Court), and he laid the foundation of several gall-stones in his gall-bladder, and of a slight bilious yellow tint in his eyes, with hating the advocate, which he could not do enough.

We return to the Saturday. Nathalie derived her calmness and serenity partly from her own strength of mind, but also in good measure from the pair of horses (and of rose maidens) with whom Rosa had been seen driving to the Hermitage. A woman's jealousy is always a day or two older than her love. Moreover, I know of no excellence, no weakness, shortcoming, virtue, womanliness, _manliness_, in a woman which does not tend rather to enkindle than to appease jealousy.

Not only Siebenkæs, but even Leibgeber (anxious to breathe some warmth upon her freezing soul, all stripped of its warm plumage), was this afternoon serious and cordial, not (as he usually did) dressing his rewards and punishments up in irony. Perhaps, too, her gratifying (and flattering) readiness to obey him tamed him down to some extent. Firmian had, in addition to the reasons above set forth, the more powerful ones--that the English lady was expected home the next day but one, and her coming would put a stop to all this garden pleasure, or interfere with it at all events--that he who knew well, from his own experience, what the wounds of a lost love were, had a boundless compassion for hers, and would gladly have given his own heart's blood to make up for the loss of hers--moreover, accustomed all his life to bare, mean and empty rooms, he felt a keen enjoyment in being in the richly-furnished, bright and tasteful chamber he was now in, and naturally carried over a portion of this to the account of their inhabitant and hermit.

The maid-servant, whom we have seen this week already, came in just then, with tears in her eyes, faltering out that she was going to confession, and hoped she had done nothing to displease her, &c., &c. "Anything to displease me?" cried Nathalie; "most certainly not--and I know I can say the same in your mistress's name;" and went out of the room with her and kissed her, unseen, like some good genius. How beautiful are pity and kindness to distress, in a soul which has just risen up in might to resist oppression.

Leibgeber took a volume of 'Tristram Shandy' from the English lady's library, and lay down with it on the lawn under the nearest tree, with the view of making over to his friend the undivided fruition of this anise, marchpane and honeycomb of an afternoon of talk, which to him was merely so much every-day household fare. Moreover, all that day when he made any sign of jesting, Nathalie's eyes would implore him, "Please do not, for just this one day. Do not take pains to point out every pock-pit which Fate has left upon my inner soul to him--spare me for this once." And lastly (which was his principal reason), it would be much easier for Firmian to tell this sensitive Nathalie (now upon one-eighth pay) all his project of making her his appanaged widow, his heiress in jest--to tell it to her wrapped in a triple shroud, written in distorted characters.

Siebenkæs looked upon this undertaking as a sort of day's work at fortification making, a journey across the Alps--round the globe--into the grotto of Antiparos, a discovery of the longitude; he had not the slightest notion how even to _begin_ to set about it. Indeed, he had previously told Leibgeber that, if his death were but a real one, nobody would be more ready to talk to her about it, but that for a sham death, he really could not sadden her; so that she would have to consent, altogether by some chance, and unconditionally, to become his widow. "And is my death a thing so very improbable after all?" he said. "Of course it is," answered Leibgeber. "If it were not, what would become of our death in jest. The lady will e'en have to make the best of it." It would appear that he dealt with women's hearts in a fashion somewhat colder and harder than Siebenkæs, in whose opinion (hermit connoisseur as he was of rarities in the shape of strong female souls) a delicate, suffering one like this could not be too tenderly treated. However, I do not set up to judge between the two friends.

When Leibgeber had gone out with Yorick, Siebenkæs went and stood before a fresco representing the said Yorick, and poor Maria with her flute and her goat. For the chambers of the great are picture-bibles, and an _orbis pictus_,--they sit, eat and walk in picture exhibitions, which makes it all the harder a matter for them that two, at least, of the greatest expanses in nature--the sky and the sea--cannot be painted over for them. Nathalie went up to him, and at once cried out, "What is there to see in that to-day? Away from it!" She was just as open and unconstrained in her manner with him as he could not manage to be with her. She displayed the warmth and beauty of her soul in that wherein we (unconsciously) un_veil_, or un_mask_ (as the case may be), ourselves more completely than in anything--namely, her mode of bestowing praise. The illuminated triumphal arch which she erected over the head of her English lady-friend, elevated her own soul so that she stood at that gate of honour as conqueror, in laurel wreath, and glittering collar of the Order of Goodness and Worth. Her praises were the double chorus and echo of the other's excellence; she was so warm and so earnest! Ah! maidens, fairer are ye a thousand times when ye twine bridal-wreaths and laurel garlands for your companions than when ye plait them crowns of straw, and bend them collars of iron.

She told him how fond she was of British men and women, both in and out of print, although she had never seen any until the previous winter. "Unless," she said, with a smile, "our friend outside may be considered one."

Leibgeber, out on his grass mattress, raised his head and saw the couple looking down at him with faces of regard; and the shimmer of love shone forth in three pairs of eyes. One single moment of time thus clasped three sister souls together in one tender embrace.

The maid coming back from confession about this juncture in her white dress--('twas heavy-wing _cases_ rather than light butterfly wings to her)--with a trifle of pretty-tinted ribbon about it here and there; Firmian looked at this absolved one for a minute or two, and then took up her black and gold hymn-book, which she had laid down in her haste, finding inside it a whole pattern-card of silks, besides peacock's feathers. Nathalie, who saw a satirical expression dawning on his face, drove it away in an instant. "Your sex attaches just as much value to adornment as ours. Look at your Court dresses, the Coronation robes at Frankfort, and uniforms and official costumes of all kinds. Then, the peacock was the bird of the old knights and poets, and if you make vows upon his feathers, or wear garlands of them, _we_ may surely wear them, or at all events _mark_ (if not reward) songs with them." Every now and then a barely polite expression of astonishment at what she knew escaped the advocate in spite of himself. He turned over the leaves of the festival hymns, and came upon gilt figures of Our Lady, and found a picture wherein were two parti-coloured blotches (supposed to represent two lovers), and a phosphorescent heart, which the male blotch was offering to the female with the words:

"And is to thee my fond love all unknown! How my heart burns is here full plainly shown"

--the whole surrounded by a tracery of leafwork. Firmian loved family and society miniature pictures when (as in this case) they were exceedingly poor as works of art. Nathalie saw and read this; she took the book in haste, snapped the clasp to, and then, when she had done so, said, "You have no objection, have you?"

Courage towards women is not inborn, but acquired. Firmian had had familiar experience of very few; wherefore this natural awe made him look upon every feminine body--particularly if of any standing in society--as a kind of sacred Ark of the Covenant whereon no finger might be laid; (for though it is proper to rise superior to considerations of rank where men are concerned, it is otherwise with women), and upon every female foot as that on which a Queen of Spain stands, and every female finger as a Franklin point emitting electric sparks. If in love with him, I might have likened her to an electrified person, _feeling_ all the sparks and mock pains she emitted. At the same time, nothing could be more natural than that his reverent timidity should diminish as time went on, and that at length, (at a moment when she was looking the other way) he should take courage to deftly snatch hold of the end of one of the ribbons in her hair between his fingers--and she never be aware of it. It may have been by way of preliminary studies towards the execution of this feat that he had previously once or twice tried the effect of taking up into his hands things which had been a good deal in hers--such as her English scissors, a broken pincushion, and a pencil-case.

Taking heart of grace hereupon, he thought he would venture to take up a bunch of wax grapes (which he imagined to be made of stone, like those upon butter-boats). He gripped them, accordingly, in his fist as in a wine-press, crushed two or three of them to pieces, and then proffered as many petitions for mercy and pardon as if he had knocked over and broken the porcelain Pagoda of Nanking. "There's no harm done," she said, laughing. "We all find plenty such berries in life--with fine ripe skins--no intoxicating juice--and as easily broken--or easier."

He was in terrible dread lest this glorious, many-tinted rainbow of happiness of his should melt away into evening dew, and it disconcerted him that he no longer saw Leibgeber reading upon the flowery turf. Outside, the world was brightened into a land of the sun--every tree was a rich, firm-rooted joy-flower--the valley a condensed universe, ringing with music of the spheres. Nevertheless he had not the courage to proffer his arm to this Venus for a stroll through the sun, _i. e_. the sunny Fantaisie; the Venner's fate, and the fact that there was a late harvest of a few visitors still walking about the gardens, rendered him bashful and mute. Of a sudden Leibgeber knocked at the window with the agate-head of his stick, crying, "Come over to dinner. My stick-head is the Vienna lantern.[67] We are sure not to get home before midnight." He had ordered a dinner in the café. Presently he cried out, "There is a pretty child here asking for you." Siebenkæs hurried out, and found it was the very child into whose hand he had pressed his flowers on the evening when, after the great feast-eve at the Hermitage, he had been soaring along on the wings of fancy through the village of Johannis. "Where is your wife, sir?" asked the child; "the lady who took me out of the water the day before yesterday? I have some beautiful flowers here that my godpapa sent me to give her. Mother will come and give her best thanks, too, as soon as she can, but just now she's in bed very unwell."

Nathalie, who had heard what the child said, came down, and said, with a blush, "Is it I, darling? Give me your flowers, then." The child, recognising her, kissed her hand, the hem of her dress, and, lastly, her lips, and would have recommenced this round of kisses, when Nathalie, in turning the flowers over, came upon three silken counterfeits amidst its living forget-me-nots and red and white roses. To Nathalie's questions as to whence these costly flowers came, the child answered, "Give me a kreuzer or two, and I'll tell you." This was done, and she added, "I got them from my godpapa, and he is a very, very grand gentleman;" then ran away among the bushes.

This bouquet was a veritable Turkish Selam-and-Flower riddle to them all. Leibgeber accounted with ease for the child's sudden marriage of Nathalie and Siebenkæs, by the circumstance that the advocate had been standing beside her at the water-side, and people, who had seen no one so constantly with her as himself, had been misled by the bodily likeness between them.

Siebenkæs's mind, however, ran more on the machine-master, Rosa (so fond of setting his patchwork life-scenes for every woman to play her part before), and the resemblance these silk flowers bare to those which the Venner had once redeemed from pawn for Lenette in Kuhschnappel struck him at once; yet how could he sadden this gladsome time, and spoil the pleasure of receiving these votive flowers, by giving words to his suspicions? Nathalie insisted upon a distribution of this floral inheritance, inasmuch as each of the three had taken part in the rescue, and Siebenkæs and Leibgeber had, at all events, rescued the rescuer. She kept the white silk roses for herself, allotted the red ones to Leibgeber (who would not have them, but asked for a proper, real, living rose instead, which he immediately put in his mouth); to Siebenkæs she gave the silken forget-me-nots, and one or two living, perfume-breathing ones as well (souls, as it were, of the artificial ones). He took them with rapture, and said the tender real ones should never wither for him. Nathalie here took a brief temporary leave of the pair, but Firmian could not find words to express all his gratitude to his friend for the means he had adopted to prolong this little day of grace which orbed his whole life round with a new heaven and a new earth.

No King of Spain ever took as little out of some six, or so (at the outside), of the hundred dishes which, by the laws of the realm, are daily served at his table, than Siebenkæs did that day out of one. Historians, worthy of credence, inform us, however, that he managed to drink a very little--a little wine it was--and that in a considerable hurry for he could not be happy enough that day to satisfy Leibgeber. The latter, not apt to be easily swayed by heart and feeling, was all the more delighted that his beloved Firmian should at last have a pole star of happiness shining in the zenith point of the heavens above his head, beaming down genial warmth upon the blossoming time of his few scattered flowers.

The rapid rate at which his duplex enjoyment kept on moving enabled him to steal a march upon the sun, and he arrived once more at the villa, whose walls were now tinted red by his beams, while the glory of evening was gilding its windows into fire. Nathalie, on the balcony, was like some sunlit soul, just ready to take wing after the departing sun, hanging with her great eyes upon the shining, quivering world rotunda all full of church-music--and on the sun flying downward from this temple, like some angel--and at the holy, luminous tomb of night into which earth was sinking.

When they came under the balcony (Nathalie beckoning them to come up to her) Heinrich handed him his stick, saying, "Keep that for me. I have enough to carry without it--if you want me, blow the whistle." As regarded his _morale_ and physique, our good Henry had the kindest and softest of human hearts within his shaggy, Bruin breast.

Ah! happy Firmian, happy in spite of all your troubles. When now you pass through the door of glass and on to the floor of iron, the sun confronts you, and sets for a second time. Earth closes her great eye, like some dying goddess! Then the hills smoke like altars--choruses call from the woods--shadows, the veils of day, float about the enkindled, translucent tree-tops and rest upon their many-tinted breast-pins (of flowers), and the gold-leaf of the evening sky throws a dead-gilt gleam towards the east, and touches with a rosy ray the vibrating breast of the hovering lark, far up evening bell of Nature. Ah! happy Firmian, should some glorious spirit from realms afar wing its flight athwart earth and her spring tide, and, as he passes, a thousand lovely evenings be concentrated into one burning one--it would not be more Elysian than this, whereof the glow is now dying out around you as the moments fly.

When the flames of the windows paled, and the moon was rising heavily behind the earth, they both went back into the twilight room, silent, and with full hearts. Firmian opened the pianoforte and, in music, went through his evening once more. The trembling strings were as tongues of fire to his full heart; the flower-ashes of his youth were blown away, and two or three youthful minutes bloomed back into life.

But as the music poured its warm life-balsam upon Nathalie's swollen heart in all its constraint (for its wounds were only closed, not healed), it melted and gave way, the heavy tears which had been burning within it flowed forth, and it grew weak and tender, but light. Firmian, who saw she was passing once more through the gate of sacrifice towards the sacrificial knife, stopped the sacrificial music, and tried to lead her away from the altar. Just then the first beam of the moon alighted, like a swan's wing, upon the waxen grapes. He asked her to come out into the silent, misty, after-summer of the day, the moonlit evening. She placed her arm in his without saying yes.

What a sparkling, gleaming world! Through the branches, through the fountains, over the hills and over the woodlands, the flashing molten silver was flowing, which the moon was fining from out the dross of night. Swiftly shot her glance of silver athwart the rippling wavelet, and the glossy, shining, gently-trembling apple-leaves, pausing to rest upon the marble pillars and birch-tree stems. Nathalie and Firmian paused upon the threshold of the magic valley (it gleamed like some enchanted cavern, where night and light were playing, and all the founts of being--which by day cast up sweet odour, melody of songs and voices, feathery wings, translucent pinions--seemed sunk in voiceless slumber deep into some silent chasm). They looked up to the mountain, the Sophienberg, with its summit flattened as by the weight of years; a great mist Colossus was veiling all its Alp-like peak; next at the pale-green world, lying asleep beneath the shimmering radiance of the far-off silent suns, gleaming depths of silver star-dust, flowing faint and far before the ever-brightening rising moon; and then at one another, with hearts full to the brim of holy friendship, such a gaze as only two blest angels, new created, free and gladsome, bend in rapture on each other. "Are you as happy as I?" he asked. "No," she answered, involuntarily pressing his arm, "that I am not; for, on a night like this should follow, not a day, but something far lovelier and richer--something that should satisfy the heart's thirst, and staunch its bleeding for ever." "And what should that be?" he asked. "Death," was her answer. She lifted her streaming eyes to his and said, "You think so, too, do you not? Death for _me_." "No, no," he added quickly, "for _me_, if you will, not for _you_." To break the course of this overpowering moment, she added hurriedly, "Shall we go down to the place where we first met, and where, two days too soon, I became your friend;[68] and yet it was not too soon. Shall we?"

He obeyed her; but his soul was still a-swim among his precious thoughts, and as they went down the long, hollow, gravel-way, besprent with the shadows of the shrubs, and moonlight rippling over its white bed (flecked with shadows for stones), he said, "Yes, in an hour like this, when death and sleep send forth their brothers to us, a soul like yours may think of death.[69] But I have more cause than you, for I am happier. Oh! of all guests at Joy's festival-banquet, Death is the one whom she loves best to see; for he is himself a joy, the last and highest rapture upon earth. None but the common herd can associate humanity's lofty flight of migration into the distant land of spring with ghosts and corpses here below on earth; as when they hear the owls' voices when they are going away to warmer countries they take them for the cries of goblins. But, oh! dear, dear, Nathalie, I cannot and will not bear to think of what you say as in any shape connected with _you_. No, no, so rich a soul must come into full bloom in a far nearer, earlier spring than that beyond this life! Oh, God! it _must_!" They had reached a wall of rock over which a broad cascade of moonlight was falling; against it leant a trellis of roses, whence Natalie gathered a spray, all green and tender, with two young rose-buds just beginning to swell, and, saying "You will never blow," she placed it on her heart, and said (looking at him with a strange expression), "While they are young they scarcely prick at all."

And when they got down to the stone water-basin--the sacred spot where they first met--and could as yet find no words to utter what was in their hearts, they saw some one come up out of the dry basin. Though they smiled, it was a smile full of emotion--in all three cases--for this was their Leibgeber, who had been lying in wait for them in hiding, with a bottle of wine, among the imaged water-gods. A certain something there had been in his troubled eyes, but it had been poured out by way of libation to this spring night from our cup of joy. "This port and haven of your first landing here," said he, "must be properly consecrated, and _you_ (to Nathalie) must join in the pledge. I swear by Heaven that there is more fruit hanging on its blue dome to-night within reach than ever hung on any green one." They took three glasses, pledged one another, and said (some of them, I imagine, in somewhat subdued tones). "To friendship! may it live for ever! may the spot where it commenced be always green! May every place blossom where it has grown, and, though all its flowers may fade, and its leaves fall and wither, may it live on for ever and for evermore!" Nathalie was obliged to turn her eyes away. Heinrich laid a hand upon the agate head of his stick (but only because his friend's hand which was holding it was over the top of it, that he might give the latter a warm and hearty pressure), and said, "Give it me; you shall have no clouds in your hand to-night;" for nature had graven cloud-streaks on the agate in her subterranean studio. Any heart--not Nathalie's only--must have been touched by this bashful cloaking of the warm token of friendship. "Are you not going to stay with us?" she asked somewhat faintly, as he was leaving them. "I'm going up to the landlord," he said, "to see if I can get hold of a flute or a horn, and if I do I shall come out and musicise over the valley, and play the springtime in."

When he was gone his friend felt as if his youth had gone with him. Suddenly he saw, high above the whirling may-beetles and the breeze-born night-butterflies, and their arrow-swift pursuers, the bats, a great train of birds of passage winging their way through the blue, like some broken cloud, coming back to our spring. Then flashed upon his open heart the memory of his lodgings in the market-town, and the time when he saw a similar flight of (earlier) birds of passage, and thought that his life would soon be at an end. These recollections, with all their tears, brought back the belief that he was soon to die; and this he must tell Nathalie. He saw the wide expanse of night stretched over the world like some great corpse but her shadowy limbs quiver under the moonlit-branches at the first touches of the morning breeze awaking in the east. She rises towards the coming sun as a dissolving vapour, an all-embracing cloud, and man says "It is day." Two crape-covered thoughts, like hideous spectres, fought within Firmian's soul. The one said, "He is going to die of apoplexy, so he never can see her more." And the other said, "He is going through the farce of a pretended death, and then he never _must_ see her more." Overborne by the past as well as by the present, he took Nathalie's hand, and said, "You must pardon my being so deeply moved to-night. I shall never see you more. You are the noblest of your sex that I have ever met, but we shall never meet again. Very soon you must hear that I am dead, or that my _name_, from one cause or other has passed away, but my _heart_ will still be yours, be _thine_. Oh! that the present, with its mountain-chains of grave-hillocks, but lay behind me, and the future were come, with all its open graves, and I stood on the brink of my own! For I would look once more on _thee_, then throw myself into it in bliss."

Nathalie answered not a word. She faltered suddenly in her walk, her arm trembled, her breath came thick and fast. She stopped, and, with a face as pale as death, said, in trembling accents, "Stay here on this spot; let me sit alone for a minute on that turf-bank. Ah! I am so headlong!" He saw her move trembling away. She sank, as if overwhelmed with some burden, down upon a bank of turf. She fixed her blinded eyes upon the moon (the blue sky around it seemed a night, the earth a vapour); her arm lay rigid on her lap; she did not move, except that a spasm, distantly resembling a smile, played about her lip; her eyes were tearless. But to her friend, life at that moment seemed a realm of shadows, whose outlines were floating and blending in endless changes of confusion; a tract all hollow, sunken mine-shafts full of mists in the likeness of mountain-spirits, with but _one_ single opening of outlet to the heavens, the free air, the spring, the light of day; and _that_ outlet so narrow, so remote, and far above his head.

There sat Nathalie in the white crystal shimmer, like some angel upon an infant's grave; and, suddenly, the tones of Heinrich's music broke in, like bells pealing in a storm, upon their souls as they paused, all stunned (like Nature before the thunder breaks), and the warm river of melody bore away their hearts, dissolving them the while. Nathalie made an affirmative sign with her head, as if she had come to some conclusion: she rose and came forward from the green, flowery grave like some enfranchised, glorified spirit; she opened her arms wide, and came towards him. Tear after tear came coursing down her blushing face, but as yet her heart could find no words; sinking under _the_ WORLD which was in her heart, she could totter no further, and he flew to meet her. She held him back that she might speak the first, her tears flowing faster and faster, but when she had cried, "My first _friend_, and my last--for the first and last time," she grew breathless and dumb, and, overburdened with sorrow, sank into his arms, upon his lips, upon his heart.

"No! no!" she murmured; "Oh! Heaven, give me but the power to speak. Firmian! my Firmian! Take all my happiness away with you--all that I have on earth. But never, by all you hold most sacred, never see me more in this world. Now" (she added very softly), "you must _swear_ this to me." She drew her head back, and the tones of Heinrich's music flowed between and around them like the voice of sorrow. She gazed at him, and his pale care-worn face wrung her heart with agony; with eyes dim with tears, she implored him to swear that he would never see her more.

"Yes, noble, glorious soul," he answered, in trembling tones; "yes, then, I _swear_ to thee I will never see thee more." Mute and motionless, as if smitten by the hand of death, she sank with drooping head upon his breast; and once again, like one dying, he said, "I will never see thee more." Then, beaming like some angel, she raised her face, worn with emotion to him, saying, "All is over now; take the death kiss, and speak no more." He took it, and she gently disengaged herself from his arms. But as she turned away, she put back her hand and gave him the green rosebuds with the tender thorns, and saying, "Think of to-night," went resolutely away (trembling, nevertheless), and was soon lost in the dark-green alleys, where but few beams of light struck through.

And the end of this night every soul that has loved can picture for itself without the aid of any words of mine.

FIRST FRUIT PIECE.

LETTER OF DR. VICTOR TO CATO THE ELDER, ON THE CONVERSION OF _I_ INTO _THOU_, _HE_, _SHE_, _YE_, AND _THEY_; OR, THE FEAST OF KINDNESS OF THE 20TH MARCH.

Flachsenfingen, 1st April, 1795.

MY DEAR CATO THE ELDER,

A breaker of his word like you--who made such a solemn promise to come to my feast, and yet did not come--will have to be punished by having his mouth--not stitched up (which is what savages do to word-breakers,) for that would be a loss only to your hearers--but _made to water_. When I shall have painted a full and faithful picture of our peace-festival of the soul for you, I shall stop both my ears against the curses which you will pour out on your evil genius. At this feast we all philosophised, and we were all converted, except me, who could not be reckoned a convert, inasmuch as I was myself the converter of the heathen.

Our flotilla of three boats--(the third we were obliged to take in deference to the timidity of the ladies)--got under way about one o'clock in the afternoon of the 20th of March, ran into the stream, gained the open water, and soon after one we were well in sight of the very anther-filaments and spider's-webs on the island. At a quarter-past two we landed--the professor, his wife, and a girl and boy--Melchior--Jean Paul--the Government Counsellor,--Flamin--the lovely Luna--(off goes the first of your curses here!)--the undersigned, and his wife.

Some Burgundy was then disembarked. At the commencement of spring (which was to take place that day at 38 minutes past 3 o'clock) we meant to enter upon a "stream of life," coloured and sweetened after a most superlative sort. With the island, Cato, many of us were quite enraptured, and nearly all of us wished we had paid a visit to this beautiful bowling-green in the Rhine--thin pleasure camp amid the waves--long before. Luna, elder Cato--if I mistake not thou hast seen, certainly once at the very least, that tender soul, which ought to dwell in (and heighten the tint of) a white rose in place of a body--Luna shed tears, half of delight (for they were half of sorrow for _everybody_ who was not there), half of delight not so much at the families of alders upon the rounded bank, or the Lombardy poplars lying trembling in intoxication of bliss in the gentle air which breathed about them, or the sunny green paths, as at _all this_ together (in the first place), and at the spring sky and the Rhine (which was showing that sky a picture, as it were, of its antipodean sky somewhere over America), and at the peace and gladness of her soul--but (above all) at the Alp in the centre of the island.

The Alp will be sketched, if an opportunity offers, in this letter. I at once asked Luna where _you_ were. She said, "At the Frankfort Fair." Was she right?

When a party arrives at a place it is not, like the _Anguis Fragilis_, to be broken into ten twitching fragments by every touch of chance. Even the ladies kept with us, for I had deprived them of all opportunity of doing anything in the shape of household labour, by the arrangements I had made for the dinner. This Barataria Island was going to be an intellectual _Place d'Armes_ and theatre of war that day. I love disputation. Intellectual bickerings further and heighten the happiness of congenial society, just as lovers' quarrels are a renewal of love, and fisticuffs a necessity of Marionette operas. Certain people are like the Moravians, among whom the confessor and penitent change places, each laying a picture of his soul before the other, his own police-notice of an absconded criminal--his own advertisement in the "Hue and Cry"; and I am like them. Any blemish or shortcoming which I discover in myself or other people I immediately publish over half the town in a universal German gazette, as ladies do the witnesses' depositions of evidence concerning strangers. For the last three weeks, dear Cato, my soul has been glowing in the brightest sunlight of peace and love, cast upon me by the deceased chief _Piqueur_ (a man who had not a trace of either the one or the other about him)--and now I cannot rest till I entail this precious legacy upon all of you.

As _Lieutenant de Police_ of the island, I possessed the power of issuing police regulations with respect to the conversation permissible thereon, and I directed the thread of _our_ talk towards the _Piqueur_ in question. But the wasps came buzzing out of their nests; the first of them being your brother, Melchior, who drove his sting into the _Piqueur's_ avarice, saying that people who didn't bestow their plunder upon the poor till they were in their own coffins, were like pikes who eject their (swallowed) prey when caught themselves; they should rather do as Judas Iscariot did--cast their pieces of silver into the church _before_ their hanging. The next wasp was your second brother, Jean Paul, who said, "Misers are the only people who haven't had enough of life when they die. Even when they are in the very grip of Death's hand, they would fain grasp hold of money with their own. Like cap-mushrooms, when they are broken off, they cling terribly to the earth's surface with, their bleeding moiety."

"Ah!" said I, "_everyone_ is a thorough miser as regards something or other, I am sorry to say. I cannot now be so hard upon a man who confines himself to mortifying and chastening _himself_ as I used to be. Where is the extraordinary difference between one of your learned antiquary mint-assayers who distils, evaporates, and injects all the pleasures of his life into the rust of a collection of coins--and a miser who counts and weighs the specimens in _his_ cabinet like so many votes at an election? Not, in reality, so great a difference as there is between _our opinions_ of the two." I thought I had a fine chance of turning deftly to the subject of the _Piqueur_ at this point, but the entire company called out to me to tell them what o'clock it was. In my capacity of Viceroy, I had disarmed all the islanders of their watches at the landing-place (as if they had been so many swords), that they might pass their day in a blissful eternity, where time was not. The only one allowed to keep his was Paul--and this was because it was one of the new Geneva sort, whose hands always point to 12 o'clock, only telling the real time when one touches a spring.

It was now past three. In thirty-eight minutes, spring, that pre-heaven upon earth--that _second_ paradise--would make her grand processional progress over the ruins of the _first_. Already the clouds were all cleared away from the sky, spring breezes played coolingly about the sun, burning in the blue; on a vine-clad hill by the Rhine shore, a solo-singer from the great choir of spring--a nightingale--sent on in advance of her--was pouring out her song in a smooth-grown thicket of pruned cherry-trees; through the open trellis-work of the boughs we could see the notes vibrate in the feathers of her throat.

We climbed up the artificial Mount St. Gothard. It was set round with turf-banks and leafy niches; an oak stood on its summit by way of crown. Man (day-fly, as he is, playing above a ripple of time) cannot do without watches and date-indicators on the banks of the time-stream. Although every day is a birthday and a new year's day, he must have one of his own into the bargain. Thirty-eight minutes struck in us. And down from the waves of throbbing blue above us came floating a broad breath of breeze, rocking the swelling grapes and the bare grafts, the delicate young branchlets, and the strong, sharp-pointed winter-corn, and lifting the soaring pigeons higher in their flight. The sun, above Switzerland, looked, in blissful intoxication, at his own face reflected in the sublime glittering ice-mirror of Mont Blanc, parting (unaware) day and night into equal halves, as if with two arms of fate, and throwing down equal portions to every land and every eye. We sang Goethe's "Hymn to the Spring." The sun sent us down (like dew) from the hill-top to the valley--the earth swelling loose fell rustling at our feet; and wine (Lethe of life) hid from our sight the misty bunks within which it rolled its way--mirroring only heaven and flowers. Clotilda said (not to us, but to her Luna)--(and here, dear Cato, I am drank with remembering; and I beg, accordingly, to invite you, at once, for the 10th of April), "Ah! dearest, how beautiful the world is sometimes. We ought not to think so poorly of it. Are we not like Orestes in the 'Iphigenia'--fancying we are in exile, though we really are in our own native land."

With every downward step from the hill we sank back into the workaday marsh-meadow of life. "What the better are we," cried Melchior, quite angrily, "for all this splendour in and around us, when to-morrow a single passionate earthquake may hurl down an avalanche of snow-masses upon all that is warm and blooming in us? it is the April of the human heart--not the April of the universe--that causes me such vexation. We are always at our hardest just after an _attendrissement_--and moved to tears just after some murderous rage--as earthquakes set warm springs flowing. Now I know quite well that, to-morrow, at the sitting of the council, I shall attack and oppose everybody and everything. Pitiable! pitiable! And you are not a whit better, Flamin."

"Not a whit," said Flamin, with touching candour. Luna and my wife took the Professor's wife between them (each taking one of her children in her lap), and sat down upon the green nether slope of the hill, on the sunny side of the nightingale. We, however, were too restless to sit down. "Alas!" (said Jean Paul, walking up and down, with his hands folded and hanging, and his hat thrown away, so that his _eyes_, at all events, might be higher and freer). "Alas! is _any_ one a whit better? We take a vow of universal love to our fellow men whenever we are deeply touched--when we have buried some one, or have been thoroughly happy, or have committed some grand transgression, or looked long and closely at Nature, or are intoxicated with love, or some earthly form of intoxication: but we are really only perjurers, not philanthropists, as we fancy ourselves. We long and thirst for the love of others--but it is like mercury, it feels and looks like fountain water, and flows and glitters like it--but it _is_ cold, dry, and heavy in reality. It is just those very people upon whom Nature has bestowed most gifts (and who, consequently, should not covet other people's, but be content with distributing their own), who, like princes, demand the more from their fellow men the more they _have_ to give them, and the less they _do_ give them. Dissensions are the more bitterly painful, the more alike the souls are between whom they take place, just as discords are harsher the nearer they approach the unison. We forgive without reason because we have found fault without reason, for a rightful and righteous anger must, of necessity, be everlasting. Nothing is a stronger evidence of the miserable subordination of our reason to our ruling passion than the fact that we place such a flat every-day matter as _time_ among the cures for hate, grief, love, &c.; our impulses are to _forget_ to conquer, or to grow _tired_ of doing so--our wounds are to be sanded over with the Margrave's sympathetic powder of drift-sand out of Time's sand-glass! Too miserable a business altogether! But can anything make a better of it? Certainly, least of all my complaints of it!"

"The fact is," said the serene, gentle, Professor (who only uses a _very_ few pedantic tints in his style of painting), "_feelings_ of love to our fellow men[70] are useless without _reasons_." "So are reasons without feelings," said Paul.

"Consequently," continued the Professor (for I could _not_ manage to get my _Piqueur_ brought to bear anyhow, but had to keep him idly in reserve), "the two have to be combined like _genius_ and _criticism_--of which the former can produce only master-pieces and scholar-pieces, the latter only something of an everyday sort between the two. What I think is, that our lack of love arises, not from our coldness, but from a conviction that others do not deserve it. The coldest of men would acquire a greater warmth of feeling for their fellows if they acquired a higher opinion of them."

"But," asked Clotilda, "must we not forgive even the _wrong_ done by our enemies? The _right_ is not matter for forgiveness."

"Of course it is not," he answered, but would let himself be no further diverted from his point. "The only ugliness and hatefulness which we can truly experience hatred for is that of a _moral_ sort."

"In opposition to that view of the question," said Jean Paul, "I might adduce the fierce combats of animals, and nurseries in a state of war; for in neither of these cases is there any idea of _immorality_ of the enemy, although _hatred_ of him exists. But were I to adduce these cases, I could answer myself--at least, so so. If we directed our hatred against things other than the immoral, we should be just as angry with the hanging branch which strikes us in the face as with the person who broke it so that it should be so placed as to do so. The rage of a chastised child is quite a different thing from the alarmed instinct of self-conservancy--the feeling of avoidance of nitric acid, or of bodily hurt. The former has in it a duplex sense of dislike, the two components of which are most dissimilar--the one referring to the cause, the other to the effect. We must distinguish between beings which are capable of morality, and such as are not, in _kind_--not in _degree_; those _incapable_ of morality can never be made capable of it by the mere lapse of time, or step by step. Whence, if children at any period of their age were _utterly_ non-moral beings, it would follow that they could never, at _any_ period, _begin_ to _become_ moral beings. In brief, their anger is nothing other than a dim sense of other people's injustice. As to the animals, I don't know what else to say than that there _must_ be in them something analogous to our moral sense. Those who (like us) believe them to have immortal souls, must, as a matter of course, concede them _some_ beginnings some pre-existent germs of morality--although these may be overpowered and kept in the background by their animal natures even to a greater extent than (for instance) conscience is in sleep, drunkenness, or insanity. But alas! all this is night within night! And I hope this obscurity will be considered some excuse, Professor, for the manner in which I have obstructed and built out _your_ light."

"Now," he went on, "since hatred only concerns itself with _moral_ defects, how strange it is that we never hate _ourselves_, even for the gravest moral defects."

"_I_ think," said Flamin, "that one _does_ sometimes feel the _deadliest_ hatred of one's self, for over-haste."

"And then," said Jean Paul, "your argument would apply just as well to love--at least it would half apply. Come, let's hear what you've got to say to that?"

"We never _hate_ ourselves," I said. "We _despise_ and _pity_ ourselves, when we have done wrong. Although--I _must_ add this--we hate all men, our ownselves excepted, for vices. Can this be right?" "Self-hatred," went on the Professor, "is not possible, for hatred is nothing but the wishing of evil to the object of it--_i. e_., a desire to punish, not for _bettering's_ sake, but for _punishing's_. But the most repentant of sinners never can wish himself made the subject of a chastening of this kind; and even if he could, such a wish would be merely a _disguised_ desire for _bettering_--_i. e_., for greater happiness. But to a transgressor other than ourselves we hardly can concede _rapidity_ of conversion, not, at all events, until he has gone through a proper expiation. What distinguishes our feeling concerning other people's errors from our feeling concerning our own is a sham self-love. The very minutest particle of hatred desires the unhappiness of its object; that is what I have got to prove now."

His own wife here interrupted him with the words, "My heart tells me, as plainly as possible, that I could never wish any serious misfortune to happen to my bitterest enemy--such as money troubles, or anything about her children. I could not bear even the idea of a tear being brought to her eyes on my account."

"No, I suppose not," he went on. "The better nature within us never wishes its antipode a broken leg, would not leave him without a strip of lint, or a wish for his recovery. But I know that that same 'better nature' does take a delight in his minor skin-wounds--his being put to confusion, his sleigh slipping down hill backwards, his losing his hair. The gentlest of souls hides, at the back of its tender sympathy with great troubles, its _untender_ satisfaction with small ones, such as call for condolence (_a smaller thing than sympathy_). The tenderest of people, people incapable of indicting the smallest wound imaginable on their enemy's _skin_, are delighted to make a thousand deep ones in his _heart_." "Ah!" said Luna, "how can that be possible?" "I don't think it _would_ be possible," Clotilda answered her, "if the pain of the soul had as definite a physiognomy, and as real tears, as that of the body."

"Exactly," said the Professor; "that is just where it is. To make ourselves feel more gently towards the wicked we have only to think of them as delivered wholly over into our hands. For what harm would one do them then? The moment they _acknowledged_ their fault we would stay the rack, and bid the torture cease. What redoubles our indignation, and renders it everlasting, is the very impossibility of inflicting any punishment."

"Yes, that is quite true," said Melchior. "The oftener I read of these two live guillotines of their age, Alba and Philip (whose lips were shears of the Parcæ), or of those two other mowers of mankind, Marat and Robespierre, the deeper does the aquafortis of anger etch their condemnation into my heart, although death has drawn up their Acts of Amnesty."

"And yet, after all," I put in (leaving the Piqueur in the rear for the present), "if anybody would deliver over the King and the Duke to you and me here this afternoon, and a couple of caldrons of boiling oil into the bargain, _I_ feel quite certain I couldn't throw one of them in--at any rate till the oil had stood a long time in the cold. I should let them off with a good flogging--say 100 lashes, or so. Ah! what a cast-iron sort of fellow were he who should not soothe, and comfort with cooling, healing touch (had he the power) a heart breaking with anguish, a face whereon the worm of suffering was ploughing its tortuous track! At the same time (I continued, rapidly; for I was determined to bring in my Piqueur somehow or other), where emotion is concerned, the memory of past errors is not the smallest safeguard against new ones."

"You see, you won't allow me to speak," the Professor broke in. "I still owe you a tremendous number of proofs, and I am most anxious to acquit the debt. Our _hatred_, being an emotion, always turns every _action_ into a _whole life_; every _attribute_ into a _personality_ (or, to speak more accurately, because our only mode of _seeing_ any personality is by its reflection in the mirror of its attributes) converts _one_ attribute into the sum of them. It is only in the case of liking--of friendship--that we find it easy to separate the attribute from the personality. Hatred can not do it. Nay, in the case of liking, the _converse_ transformation takes place--that of the personality into the attribute. We hate as if the object of our hatred had never possessed any virtues, or inclination to them--neither pity nor truthfulness, love of the young, one single good hour, anything whatever. In brief, since it is with the _individuality_ of the person whose punishment we are decreeing that we are angry (not with its characteristic of the moment), we make him out to be a _wholly_ wicked being. Yet such a being is not conceivable. The voice of conscience speaking in that being would be of itself _one_ goodness in him, even though it spoke in vain; the pain of that conscience would be another; each joy and each impulse of his life another."

"Ah! how delightful," said Luna, "that there is nobody so utterly bad; nobody whom one would have to hate altogether."

"You see," he continued, "it cannot be the _me_ of a person that we hate; for the _me_ is still the same _me_ when it improves, and wins our regard."

In the warmth of our discussion we were losing sight altogether of one of the two concave mirrors which distort other people's moral distortions for us even more wildly than they are distorted to begin with--I mean, our own egotism. Often, when I have seen and heard women squabbling in the market-place (women of whom one was just as good as the other, and with just as good an opinion of herself), and one hurling her invectives with delight, like a red-hot stone, at the other's head, which seethed and swelled in waves of anger around that stone, while a third woman kept calm and cool in the midway-path between, I have been ashamed of the human race--ashamed that the self-same reproach, or immorality, which _ought_ to produce exactly the same effect upon all the three, should make _too_ strong an impression on the one, too weak a one on the other, none whatever on the third.

Paul pointed to the _second_ of these distorting mirrors--our bodily senses. For these render the vinegar of hatred doubly bitter by throwing into its fermenting-vat these parts of the enemy which _they_ take cognizance of--his clothes, movements, gestures, tones, &c.

Here we reached the Gordian knot which only I could cut with the Piqueur. "Who is to save us from these bodily senses?" I inquired (with a certain amount of hopeful expectancy). Melchior answered, "I do not allow them to influence my philanthropy, at all events. They are the straw which feeds the flame under that ascending windbag balloon, the heart."

Jean Paul thrust me back from the Gordian knot. "I," he said, "have an admirable sweetener at all times in readiness to apply when a sinner embitters my senses. I take him, and (like a victorious enemy) strip all the clothes off him, not leaving him so much as his hat or his wig. When once I've got him standing there before me, cold and wretched as any corpse (I mean, of course, in imagination), I begin to feel sorry for the scoundrel. But this is not enough. I have got to sweeten myself a good deal more than this; so I proceed to slit him up with a long, slicing cut from top to bottom into three cavities (as if he were a carp), so that I can see his heart and brain pulsating. The mere sight of a red human heart (Danaid's bucket for happiness--safe storehouse of so many a sorrow) makes my own soft and heavy; and I have often not forgiven a street robber till the Professor has been shewing us his heart and brain in the anatomical theatre. 'Thou unhappy, sorrowful heart,' I have always found myself thinking, with deep, sympathetic emotion, 'how many a blood-billow has gone surging through thee, glowing and freezing in the same moment.' But if all this process failed to have its effect, I should proceed to extremities, and smite my enemy dead; then take the naked, fluttering, trembling soul--like an evening moth--out of its brain-chamber chrysalis, and, holding up the quivering night-creature between my forefinger and thumb, gaze at it without a trace of rancour left in me."

"To picture one's enemy to one's self as unclothed, or disembodied," said I, "so as to be able to put up with him, as though he were dead (perhaps that is the chief reason why we love the dead), is just the operation _I_ perform too. I often try to soften the unpleasant effect which some repulsive physiognomy produces upon me by thinking of it as scalped, and with its skin folded back."

And now I determined, seriously and in earnest, that the sceptre and throne insignia of the conversation, should no more depart from my hands. Wherefore I commenced as follows: "But who is to provide us with the time and the power, not only to remember, but to act upon, this precious and reliable principle, or rule of conduct, right in the thick of this world's Pyrrhic war-dance, and the rapid evolutions of our emotions? Who is to stoke the æther-flame of philanthropy with a sufficient supply of combustible matter, seeing that there are such hosts of people continually drowning it out, smothering it up, and building it in! Who is to make up to us for the lack of a gentle, quiet temperament? Who, or what?"

Just as I was going to fix the Piqueur on to this lance-shaft by way of point, the cold dinner was brought, and the Professor's wife went to fetch her children. For the dinner had to be over before sunset; because, like a fresh supply of green firewood, it would drown out the flame of enthusiasm for a time, and break the unity of its vertical, purple fire pyramid. The company, therefore, waited in vain for me to go on with what I had to say. I shook my head, expressing, by nods, that I should do so when we were all together again, and sitting down.

While we were at dinner I was able to set up my speaking machine, and set it a-going at my ease.

"I asked you once or twice before dinner," I commenced, "_who_ can invigorate and quicken our principles of love to our fellows, and set them fully to work? I answer, the chief Piqueur can; only I'm afraid I've made so many false starts, and baulked in so many of my runs before making this grand jump of mine, that I have led you to entertain far greater expectations concerning it than it (or I) may be able to fulfil. A day or two before the stump-end of the chief Piqueur's life-candle fell down and went guttering out in its candlestick-socket, he sent for me to the side of his bed of suffering and begged me--not to prescribe for him, but--to make a thorough inspection of his house. He drew my head down close to his wretched pillow, and said, 'You see, doctor, Death has got his hunting-knife at my throat. But I'm not sorry to go, and what little I leave behind me in the shape of worldly gear goes all to the poor. It's but little that I have ever thought of scraping together for _myself_, and that is a comfort to think on now. It's for the _poor_ that I have screwed and saved, pinched and pared; and when a man has done that it's a pleasure to him to make his will; he knows it will be paid back again _elsewhere_. But there's one hard stone at my heart still. You see I have neither chick nor child belonging to me, and when the breath is out of my body, the old woman who keeps my room in order will be in the house by herself. She's an honest body enough, but as poor as a church mouse, and pretty sure to help herself to something before the seals are put on my effects. Now, doctor, you are a man who are just as good to the poor as I am myself; you often prescribe for them gratis; I want to ask _you_ to go through the house with the notary (I don't trust _him_ a bit more than I do the old woman), take an inventory of what there is, and have a regular notarial instrument drawn up concerning my property. I've left the whole of it to the Poor-house and the Institution for Destitute Gamekeepers. The notary must begin with my breeches under the pillow here, because my purse is there.'

"A man whose stubble Death is in the very act of turning up with his plough, has, upon me, a more powerful claim than that of the _first_ request--that of the _last_. I came the next day, bringing with me the notary, and also my dislike to the dying man and his distrustful suspicions. With gay indifference I helped to protocol the effects in the sick-room--his shooting-jacket, worn into shining patches by his old game-bag--his old guns and knives--even such matters as a leather over-shoe for his thumb, and a long mummy bandage for his nose, which he had worn on occasions when he had hurt himself in these members with his gun.

"As we went through the other silent chambers--empty snail-shells of his shrivelled, dried-up life--my frozen blood began to thaw within me, and to move in warm, light mercury-globules. But when I came to the lumber-room, with the notary, and tuned over the rag-fair of his old night-shirts--(caterpillar cases and blood-shirts of his feverish nights, in which I seemed still to see him groaning and thirsting)--and his _Pathebrief_,[71] and his name copied from thence with all its flourishes on to his pointer's collar--and the picture of his pretty mother with him as a smiling infant in her lap--and his wife's bridal garland of wire, covered with green silk--(Oh! for goodness' sake do _not_ interrupt me with talk--I've had enough of that, Heaven knows). When I took in my hands these opera-costumes, these theatrical properties, in which the sick player down-stairs had performed his _probe-rolle_[72] of a Harpaxus for the benefit of the poor--not only did the poor fellow's _moral_ emptiness of treasury, and miserable rate of monthly salary, strike me with pain, but, moreover, I wished him _no heavier suffering, no severer punishment, than he would wish for himself, were he really to repent in good earnest before his plunge into the depths of the soil_. No, not so much, for the matter of that. Therefore, my dislike to him was gone. For I put myself in his place--not _outwardly_ only, as people generally do, fancying themselves in another person's physical place with _their_ own souls, _their_ own wishes, habitudes, &c.--but _inwardly_--in _his_ mind, his youth, wishes, sufferings, thoughts.

"'Poor _Piqueur_,' I said, as I went down-stairs; 'I have no more satiric pleasure now over your gnawing suspicion, your errors, your self-shooting covetousness, your hungry avarice. You have got to live through a long eternity with that self, that "me" of yours, the best way you can, just as I have with mine. You have got to rise with that self of yours at the Resurrection, and go about with it, and look after it, and care for its welfare. And, of course, you can't but be _fond_ of _yourself_, just as _I am_ of _myself_, and put up with all that self's defects and shortcomings whether you will or not. Go in peace then into the other world, where the broken glasses of your harmonica of life will be replaced with fresh-tuned ones--in the great home of all the spirits!'

"The old woman met us on the stairs crying out that the man was dying. I went to his bed-side, looked upon his cold, yellow, senseless form, and saw that he would very soon throw off his last stage-dress, his body. Next day the tolling bell announced that, he had returned to the dust--gone back into the ground--that, stage dressing-room of souls and flowers. (And we are _rung_ off and on to that stage, as well as others.)

"Meanwhile I made an experiment with my modified and mildened system of treatment, upon the poor notary devil; the day after I tried it on the jurists who came from the college. (Jean Paul! communicate your idea to us by-and-bye--do _not_ interrupt me just now)--I did this, I say, and found that I was able to establish a heart-peace even with the plebeians among them--who dishonour their calling--the only really _free_ one in all the body politic. For in the cases of these lawyers, and those of my own medical colleagues from whose breasts I have been so often in such a hurry to cut off, and melt down, the medals of honour which they have cast for themselves, I have had merely to take away the roof from over their heads, lift the rafters from their walls, and bare their houses to the four winds of heaven. Then I could look in and see everything there--their housekeeping, their unoffending wives, their sleep (_i. e_., mock-death), sicknesses, sorrows, birth-days, and funeral-days, and this reconciled me to them! Of a truth, to love a man, I have only to think of his children, his parents--the love he feels and inspires. One can easily perform this philanthropic transmigration of soul at any moment, without help of the balloon of phantasy, or the diving-bell of profound reflection. Good heavens! it _does_ seem hard (and a shame and disgrace into the bargain) that it should have taken me thirty years of my life to understand properly what it is that self-love is really driving at--my own and everybody else's--what it wants is, to be surrounded with mere repetitions of its own 'me.' It insists upon every infant on earth being a parson's son (as I am)--that everybody shall have lost, and gained, noble friends--that everybody shall be an M.D., and have studied at Göttingen--that his name shall be Sebastian, and that he shall be an overseer of mines, and write his life in forty-five dog-post-days--in brief, that this world shall contain a thousand million Victors instead of one. I beg that everybody may send spies into his soul, to look carefully about them and see whether it be not the case that there are thousands of instances in which what we hate a man for is, either that he is as fat as a prize pig, or as lean as a stick of vermicelli--or that he is a district secretary, or a Roman Catholic watchman in Augspurg, and wears a coat white on the one side, and green on the other--or that he eats his veal with melted butter;[73] (or, at all events, hate them _more_ for these reasons; for when we are _indifferent_ to people, all their external characteristics, beautiful or ugly, merely increase our indifference). People are so deep sunk in their dear selves that everybody yawns at the _menu_ of everybody else's favourite dishes, but expects _them_ to be interested when _he_ reads out _his_ to _them_."

That feathered echo, the nightingale, was singing to us phrases of the music of the spheres, to us inaudible until thus repeated to us by her. But I had my rapid descent from my Mont Cenis to finish, and could but give utterance to my applause (of the bird and her music) by a hasty nod. "Heavenly! Elysian! I've been hearing it every now and then. But, one thing more. Since my sentimental journey in other people's souls, I have been happier and fatter than I used to be, in ball-rooms, anterooms, and large assemblages (hot lark-spits which roasted all the fat out of a Swift). This enduring of transgressors includes a greater enduring still of fools and dunces, although the great world makes war on these three tolerated sects in just the contrary ratio.

"The amnesty thus granted to humanity makes the duty of loving more easy to perform; moreover, it renders the deep blissfulness of friendship and love more justifiable; for the glow, the fire of the latter often vitrifies and calcines the heart towards the rest of mankind. And this is the reason why the last and best fruit...."

Clotilda looked inquiringly here, as if begging to be allowed one word of remonstrance with me for forgetting to put myself in the place of those whose transformation I was thus extolling. I reddened, and paused. "This," observed Jean Paul, "is the reason why a concert-room audience cries out the loudest against noise or disturbance just during the loveliest adagios--when people are most deeply touched--and swear and weep at the same time."

"I cannot help being ashamed of an experience of my own," said Clotilda. "The other day I cried so at reading Silly's letters (in Allwill's Papers) that I was obliged to put the book down. Then I went to the casino with my head full of what I had been reading--and I dare not tell you what hard opinions I entertained, several times that very evening, of several people of my acquaintance. I expected of _them_ that they should all be in exactly the same mood of mind as myself--although, of course, they had not just come from reading Silly's letters."

"That is exactly what I was coming to," concluded I. "The last and best fruit, which ripens late in a soul ever warm, is tenderness towards the hard--patience with the impatient--kindly feeling for the selfish--and philanthropy towards the misanthropic."

It is a very odd thing, beloved Cato, but Jean Paul has just come and told me a murder-tale of human iniquity, which goes hissing through my heart like a red-hot iron. All my _theories_ stand bright and clear as stars around my soul, but I can do nothing save look inactively down upon the billows in which my blood is foaming, heated by this subterranean earth-fire, and wait until they cool down and subside. Alas! we poor, poor mortals! Jean Paul, who knew the story the day before yesterday, and had consequently all that time to put the cooling process in practice in advance of me, is going to take charge of the picture exhibition of our insular flower-pieces in my stead, and add a postscript to this. Which is well, for to-day I really could not do it. By the 10th of April the air will have cooled; then _you_ are sure to be coming, as the French election meetings begin then. We must keep the "settling weeks" of your great feast and fairtide here. Alas! in what a disquiet condition have I to stop writing to you. _You_ will go on reading, but not

Your Victor.

* * * * *

POSTSCRIPT BY JEAN PAUL.

DEAR BROTHER.

Our Victor's virtuous indignation will soon be over and past. The reason why he, and I too, now, have made a written confession of the cure of our disposition to censure our fellows, is, that we may be compelled to be excessively ashamed of ourselves if ever we chide for more than a minute, or hate for more than a moment. This all embracing love demands a sacrifice, which is made with greater hesitation than one would expect--the sacrifice of the pleasure of being satisfied with one's self--which anger adds to the contemplation of other people's faults (and satire to the contemplation of other people's follies)--by way of a sweetening ingredient, and whose place is taken by a pure and unalloyed regret at the frequency with which the disease shifts its seat, and at the chronicity of the bleeding of the wounds and scars of helpless man.

However, for the present, what I would fain do is to steer our floating island, and its blessed twilight, close up to your view.

The sun was sinking towards the cloud Alps, and glowing white over France in the west as if it should shortly drop down on its plains as a gleaming shield of freedom, or fall into its billowy ocean as a wedding-ring between heaven and earth. The shades of evening were already overflowing the first two steps of the hill, and the darkening Rhine seemed to be passing an arm of night around the earth. We ascended our little steps as the sun descended his great ones, seeming, as we ascended, to rise from his burning grave with the face of a saint at the Resurrection. The hill lifted up our eyes and our souls. Remembering my shortcomings I took Victor's hand, and said, "Ah! dear Victor! could it but come to pass that one could make a treaty of peace with all mankind, and with one's own self--if one's shattered heart could absorb and retain, from out the leaven of the hating and hated world, nothing but the sweet, mild, life-sap of love--as the oyster, amid mud and slime, takes nothing save bright pure water into his house. Ah! if one but knew that such an event were about to come to pass of a truth, an evening of happiness such as this would refresh and fill one's thirsting breast, (all _cracked_ with thirst and dryness)--would still the everlasting sigh." Victor answered (not looking round, but keeping his glowing and beglowed face--which his loving heart suffused with a brighter tint--turned to the sun, now burning half sunk in the earth), "Perhaps," he said, "that time may come; a time when we shall all be happy when a human being smiles--even should he not deserve it--when we shall speak kindly to every one--not by way of a mere sacrifice to the laws of polite society, but for very love--and there will be no difficulties, no complications, for hearts which will no longer have any inward annoyance to conceal. To-day the spring sun rests upon the world like the eye of a mother, and shines warm upon every heart, the wicked as well as the good. Yes, thou Eternal One, we here now give our hands and our hearts to thy whole creation, and no longer hate anything which thou hast made." We were overpowered, and we embraced with tears, and no words, in the first darkening of the night. Over the sun's burial place stood the zodiacal light, a red grave pyramid, flaming unmoved up into the silent deep of blue.

The City of God which hangs displayed on high above our earth, built on the arch of the Milky Way, appeared from out the endless distances with all its shining sun-lights.

We came down from the hill--each spot of earth was a hill just then; an unseen hand lifted our souls on high above the dark vapour-circle, and they looked down as if from alps, seeing nothing save gleaming peaks of other mountain ranges--for all the mean, all that was not the high, all graves, petty goals, and life careers of humanity, were veiled in heavy mist.

We lost each other amongst the paths, but in our hearts we were all together. We met again, but the silence in our souls was not broken, for each heart beat just as did all the others, and there was no difference, save the being alone, between a prayer and an embrace.

The scattered flames of our emotion had gradually merged into one glowing sun sphere, as the ancients believed that the fluttering after-midnight fires thickened ere morning into a sun.[74]

But I, a stranger, alas! in this paradise stood beneath the leafless branches, sad, and alone, beside the dark-blue Rhine stream where the stars were mirrored--it glided, with gently heaving wavelets, over the German soil, binding two great republics[75] together, like some heavenly band; and to me it seemed as though the thirst, the fire, of a breast no broader even than mine could be quenched with nothing less than the waters of this great river. Alas! we are all like this. In the transient clasp of our little grandeurs and blisses, we long to rest, and _die_, upon something _great_. We long to cast ourselves into the depths of the heavens when we see them glitter and sparkle above us--or down upon the many-tinted earth, when her flowers and grasses wave--or into the endless river, flowing as if from out the past onwards into the future.

Our ladies and the children had gone away--departing in silence from this anchorage of hours so happy--I saw them as they floated over the wavelets, singing like swans, and dropping spring flowers into the ripples, that they might float back as souvenirs to us upon our island shore. The children were sleeping softly in their arms, between the glories of the heaven and of the earth, lulled by the arms, the songs, and the ripples.

When it was 12 o'clock, and the first morning of spring was come, Victor summoned us all to the hill, we knew not wherefore. All around and beneath us was the music of the rush of the Rhine, and through it, came gliding clear the bright spring-melody of the nightingale; the stars of the twelfth hour sank, drop by drop, into the darkened grave of the sun, and went paling out among the grey ashes of the western clouds. Suddenly a straight, beautiful flame shot up in the west, and music came palpitating through the darkness.

"Do you not think of your France," said Victor, "the first hour of day is breaking for _her_ this 21st of March--the day when the six thousand primary assemblies form themselves, like stars, into one constellation, that one law may burst into being from out a million hearts."

As I looked up to the sky, the Milky Way struck me as being the beam of the balance of hidden destiny, in whose weighing-pans (which are worlds) the broken, shattered, bleeding nations are weighed out for eternity. These destiny scales waver up and down as yet, because it was only a century or two ago that the weights were put into them.

We drew closer together, and (inspired by the night and the music) said, "Thou, poor country! may thy sun and thy day rise higher ere long, and cast away the blood-shirt of its morning red. May the higher genius wipe away the blood from thy hands, and the tears from thine eyes! Oh! may that genius build, support, and guard for ever the Grand Freedom Temple which is vaulted over thee like a second heaven: but also comfort every mother and every father, every child and every wife--and dry all eyes which weep for the beloved, crushed hearts which have bled and fallen, and now lie under that temple as basement stones."

What I am going to say now can only be said to my brother, for nobody else would pardon it. Victor and I got into a boat, which was made fast with a rope to the bank, and which was drifting about with the current. We worked ourselves back to the bank, and then let the boat drift northwards again upon the ripples. In our souls (as in the world without us) sadness and exaltation were strangely blent: the music on the bank came and went--tones and stars rose and fell. The vault of heaven showed in the Rhine like some shattered bell, and up above us the dome of the temple wherein dwelleth Eternity lay in calm and motionless rest, with all its unchanging suns. From the eastward the spring breathed upon us, and the tree skeletons in the churchyard of the winter felt the presage of a near resurrection. Of a sudden Victor said--"It feels to me as though the river here were the stream of Time--our fluctuating life is carried along upon the waves of both towards the midnight." Here my brother called to me from the island, "Brother, come into harbour and sleep; it is between one and two o'clock."

This fraternal voice, coming to me athwart the music of the wavelets, suddenly brought a new world--perhaps the under-world--into my open soul. For a lightning flash of memory gleamed in a moment over all my dim being, reminding me that it was on this very night two-and-thirty years ago that I had made my entry upon this overclouded earth, shrouded with daily nights--and that this hour, between one and two o'clock, in which my brother was calling me into haven and to sleep, was the hour of my birth (which so often deprives man of both).

There come to us moments of twilight in which it seems as though day and night were in the act of dividing--as if we were in the very process of being created or annihilated; the stage of life and the spectators fly back out of view, our part is played out, we stand far off, in darkness and alone, but we have still got on our theatre dress, and we look at ourselves in it, and ask, "What is it that thou art, _now_, my _me_!" When we thus ask ourselves this, there is, beyond ourselves, nothing of great or of firm--everything has turned to an endless cloud of night (with rare and feeble gleams within it), which keeps falling lower and lower, and heavier with drops. Only high up above the cloud shines a resplendence--and that is God; and far beneath it a minute speck of light--and that is a human "Me"!

The heart is made of heavy earth, and therefore it cannot long endure such moments. I passed on to those sweeter seasons in which the full, tear-intoxicated heart neither can, nor will, do aught but simply weep. I had not the courage to drag my dear Victor down from the sublime region in which he was to my trifling pettinesses--but I asked him to remain beside me for a little time in this stillness which lay so silently upon the dark stream as it went flowing toward midnight and the south. Then I leant and pressed myself fondly to his side--and my little tears fell unseen into the great river--as though it had been the great stream of Time itself, into which all eyes drop their tears, and so many thousand hearts their blood-drops--for all which it neither swells nor flows the faster.

I thought as I gazed at the Rhine, "And thus, too, the dancing, billowy current of Life goes flowing on its course from out its source--hidden like the Nile's. How little, as yet, have I done, or enjoyed! Our deserts, and our enjoyments, what petty things they are! Our _metamorphoses_ are greater; our heads and our hearts go into the ground irrecognisable--altered a thousandfold--like the head of the man with the iron mask.[76] Ay! and _did_ we but change! but we change so little in the earth, or even in ourselves. Every moment is to us the goal of all that have come before it. We take the seed of life for the harvest of it--the honey-dew on the ears for the sweet fruit--and we chew the flowers, like cattle! Ah! thou great GOD! what a night lieth around our sleep! we _fall_ and _rise_ with closed eyelids, and fly about blind, and in a deep slumber."[77]

My hand was hanging into the water, and the cool ripples buoyed it up and down. I thought, "How straight and immovable the little light within us burns, amid the blasts of Nature's storm! Everything around me contends and clashes together with gigantic might. The stream seizes upon the islands and the cliffs--the night-wind comes upon the river, and stalks across it, thrusting its wavelets back, and wages its strife with the forests--even up there in the tranquil blue, worlds are working against worlds--the eternal, endless mights flowing and rushing, like rivers, one against another, they come together in whirl and roar--and on the face of that eternal whirl the little worlds float eddying round the sun-vortex; nay, those shimmering constellations themselves rising zenithwards with that grand and gentle peace and calm--what are they but mountain ranges of raging sun-volcanoes, stretching into infinity beyond the reach of mind to follow. And yet the human spirit lies at rest amid this storm, peaceful as a quiet moon above a windy night. In me, at this moment, all is gentle peace. I see my own little life-brook running by me, falling, with all the rest, into the river of Time. The clear-eyed soul looks through the raging blood-rivers which are flowing round it, and through the storms which darken and obscure it, and sees, beyond them all, quiet meadows, gentle, peaceful waters, moon-shimmer, and a lovely, beautiful, tranquil, placid, peaceful angel slowly wandering there." Yes, yes; within my soul there was a quiet Good Friday--wind-still, rain-free, and mild--neither cold nor over-warm--though shrouded in a tender cloud.

But a clear consciousness of rest is speedily the undoing thereof. I saw, floating near the island, three hyacinths which Clotilda had dropped into the wavelets as she went away. "Now, in this, thy birth-hour," I said to myself, "the ocean of eternity is washing thousands of little hearts on to the stony shore of this world; how will it be with them one day when their birthday feast comes round? And what are your countless brothers who, with you, came thirty-two years ago into this vapour-ball, thinking now? Perhaps some terrible sorrow makes them think with bitterness of their first hour. Perhaps they sleep now--as I have slept--and must again--only deeper, deeper." And then all my younger and older friends, now sleeping that deeper sleep, fell heavy upon my broken breast.

"I know, I think," my Victor said, "what you are reflecting on so silently, and regretting so mutely." I answered "No," and then I told him all.

Then we went quickly back, and I put my arms about my other brother, and my heart went out in longing towards thee. At length we took our departure from this building-place of a more peaceful system of doctrine for our hearts--this quiet island; and the lofty hill--grand pedestal of the vases of our joy-flowers, chancel of the great temple, light-house tower in our haven of rest--seemed to gaze long after us, the hanging garden of our souls lying upon it in starry light.

And as we came to the shore, Hesperus, as star of the morning (spark which springs and shines so near the sun), rose up above the morning mists, and earlier than even the Aurora of morning, proclaimed his sire's approach. And as we thought that he shines, too, as the star of evening upon our nights here below, and yet adorns the east, and the after-midnight hours with the first of the glittering pearls of dew, each said to his gladsome heart, "And so shall all the evening stars of this our life shine upon us as stars of morning at a future day."

Think thou, too, of morning, my brother, when thou art looking upon the even; and when a sun is setting for thee, turn thee about and thou mayest see a moon rising in the east. The moon gives warrant that the sun is shining still--as Hope says, there still is happiness. But come now soon to thy Victor--and to

Thy Brother,

J. P.

END OF BOOK III.