Part 16

Meanwhile he mastered himself at least so far as to go out with his twin-brothers of the heart into the Colosseum of Nature, although he did not conceal from himself that he should be in dread out there of meeting Clotilda. And Emanuel lessened this fear but poorly, when he confessed to him that she had hitherto with her wounded life gone every day round the ponds as around magnetic healing-tubs, and through the lawn as through field-apothecaries'-shops.--Hasten forth at last, ye three good souls, into the Jubilee of Spring, which the Earth celebrates yearly in memory of Creation. Haste, ere the minutes of your life, like the broad waves on the two brooks, now still fleeting, and flashing, and sounding, fly to pieces and extinguish themselves on a weeping-willow,--haste, ere the flowers of your days and the flowers of the meadow are veiled by evening, when instead of the vital oxygen they shall exhale only poisonous air,--and enjoy the first day of Whitsuntide ere it trickles away!

--And it has trickled away, and a summer already lies upon it to-night as a grave; but the three dear hearts have hastened and enjoyed it, before it faded.... They sauntered on among the zephyrs, those sowing-machines of the flowers, as they came fluttering out of all the bushes,--they came before the five pocket-mirrors of the sun, the ponds, (the rivers being pier-mirrors and the gay shores the pier-tables,)--they saw how Nature, like Christ, conceals her miracles, but they saw also the bridal torch of the marriage-making May, the sun, and a bridal chamber in every singing tree-top, and a bridal bed in every flower-cup,--they, the wedding guests of the earth, turned not away the bee, who drunk with honey revelled around them, nor did they scare up the food-bringing mother, before whom the young bird with trembling wings melted into invisibleness,--and when they had climbed all the earthly steps of the eternal temple, whose columns are milky-ways, the sun sank, like the thoughts of men, to meet another world....

The fountain in the _garden of termination_,[102] which rears itself half-way down the declivity of the southern mountain and gleams away high over the mountain, already bore on its thin crystal column a shaft recast by the evening sun into a ruby, and this glittering, full-blowing rose contracted itself, like other flowers that had gone to sleep, to a red point,--and the hanging columns of gnats in the last beam seemed to say: To-morrow it will be fair again; go back; ah, you play longer in the sun than we.--

They went back; but when Victor saw the five high white columns at the western end of the beloved garden blink in the light of evening, his exalted heart felt a yearning and a burden, and he restrained it not from sighing: "Good Clotilda! ah, I should be glad indeed to see thee even to-day; my heart is full of tears of joy over this holy day, and I would fain pour it out before thee."--And when the whole park of the Abbey reared itself proudly beside the evening-heaven, and took possession of their hearts, then all at once said Emanuel,--who was always like himself even in his raptures,--"I will tell the Abbess this very day, so that Clotilda may lay up joy for to-morrow," and he separated from them.... Noble man! thou that in four weeks hopest to leave this flowery spring and mount to the stars above thee,--thou thinkest more of immortality than of death,--no threatening Orthodoxy, but the Indian love of flowers, hath trained thee, hence art thou so blessed; thou art free from wrath, like every dying man, free from greed and from anxiety; in thy soul, as at the Pole when every morning the sultry sun stays away, the _moon_ of the _second_ world never sets day nor night!--

Victor, alone, led the blind youth home, and both were silent and embraced each other with brotherly tears behind every screen, and asked each other neither for the reasons of the embrace nor of the tears. When they had passed through the still village, and as they came along by the park of the Abbey, Victor saw his Emanuel pass out of the last bower into the dazzling convent. It seemed to him as if every one therein already recognized him, as if he must hide himself. The garden of inspiration was to be in the valley only the flower-bed in a meadow, and not violently contrast itself with nature by sharp limits, but hang over into it softly as a dream into waking hours with blooming, embowered borders, and flow over into it with hop-gardens, with green thick-set hedges around corn-fields, and with sowed-over children's gardens. A large wide colonnade of chestnuts, set in silver by two brooks, opened broad and free toward the five ponds with their pierced work of blossoms. The northern mountain lifted itself up over against the park like a terrace, and seemingly continued the Eden over unseen valleys.

Victor avoided every opening window of the convent by means of the chestnut-trees under which he led his blind one, and behind which he could, unobserved, observe more nearly. On the shed-roof of the avenue woven of green roof-laths the evening lay like an autumn gleaming through with red streaks of splendor. He went, despite the danger of detection, to the very middle, where the avenue divides into two arms; but here he chose the right arm of the leafy hall, which bent away with him from the convent, as well as from a nightingale which, in the midst of the garden, sent out from a consecrated thorn-hedge her young and her tones. The arbor rendered to him by its softening distances from the bravura-airs of the feathered Prima Donna the services of a pedal and lute-stop;--gently was he led on by the windings which the gradual darkening and narrowing of the alley concealed, through the tones of the nightingale that floated after him, through the thinner trickling of the evening rays among the leaves between the two brooks, which now glided away _inside_ of the chestnut-lane.--The brooks came closer together and left room only for love.--The portico closed in more coseyly.--The scattered flowers of the two banks crowded together and passed over into bushes.--The bushes grew up into a garden wall and touched each other at first in summits hanging towards each other, loose and transparent, and at last darkly knit together.--And the avenue and the arbor which had grown up under it blended their green together, so as to make with their coinciding blossom-veils only a single night.--Then in the green twilight was the arbor stopped up by a web of honeysuckle and nest of blossoms, but five ascending steps invited to the tearing asunder of the blooming curtain. And when one parted it, one sank into a blossom-cleft, into a narrow, tangled vault, as it were into a magnified flower-cup. In this Delphic cave of dreams the cushion was made of high grass, and the arms of the seat of blossoming-twigs, and the back of flowers massed together, and the air of the breath of dusting dwarf-fruit-trees. This flowery Holy of Holies was peopled only with bees and dreams, illuminated only with white blossoms; it had for evening-red only the purple of night-violets, for heaven's blue only the azure of elder-blossoms, and the blest one therein was lulled only by bees' wings and by the five mouths of the brooks meeting around him into the slumber in which the distant nightingale struck the harmonica- and evening-bells of dream....

--And as Victor to-day, beside the blind one, trod the five steps, and opened the blossom-woven tapestry door of the heaven: lo!--there--O man beatified this side of death!--reposed a female saint with weeping eyes, absorbed in Philomela's expiring plaints.... It was thou, Clotilda, and thou thoughtest of _him_ with softened soul and heightened love,--and he on thee with reciprocal love! O when two loving ones meet each other in the _selfsame_ emotion, then and not till then do they respect the human heart and its love and its bliss!--Hide not, Clotilda, with any blossoms the tears under which thy cheeks blush, because they should fall only before solitude! Tremble, but only for joy, as the sun trembles, when he comes out of a cloud on the horizon! Cast not down yet thy eye curtained with flowers, which for the first time falls so calmly opened and with such a stream of love on the man who deserves thy fair heart, and who rewards all thy virtues with his own!... Victor was struck with the lightning of joy and must needs remain immovable in the sweet smile of rapture, when the beloved rose behind the flower-clouds like the moon behind an Eden standing in full bloom, and in the womanly transfiguration of love resembled an angel dissolved into a prayer.

The blind youth knew nothing as yet of the third blessed one. She moved her hand, in sweet confusion, towards a too thin twig to raise herself from the deep grass-bench; it seemed to her lover, as if this hand reached to him out of the clouds of the second life a second heart, and he drew the hand to himself and sank with his mute, overflowing face down through the blossom on her throbbing veins. But hardly had Clotilda bade _both_ a stammered welcome during the coming out from the green closet, when there appeared to them the angel--Emanuel, who had hastened from the convent to seek his friend. He said nothing, but looked on both with a nameless rapture, to find out whether they were right joyful, and as if to ask, "Are you not, then, now right happy, ye good souls? do you not, then, love each other inexpressibly?"----Oh, only a mortal is needed for sympathy in sorrow, but an angel for sympathy in joy; there is nothing more beautiful than the radiant Christ's head, on which the laying aside of the Moses' veil shows the still, glad interest in another's blameless joys, in another's pure love; and it is quite as godlike (or still more so) to contemplate the love of others with a mutely congratulating heart, as to have it one's self.... Emanuel, thy greater praise is kept in kindred souls, but not on paper!--

On the cross-way of the alley the fair society parted, and the left branch of the same led Clotilda along by the nightingale back to the abode of gentle hearts. Victor, dissolved by his heightened love for three human beings at once, arrived at the dusky apartments of Emanuel, lighted only by setting stars, and found there a spread table which the refined Abbess had sent to the guest or to the host, for Emanuel at evening ate only fruit. One wishes to share everything with one's love, even the kitchen. Emanuel after Easter never lighted a light. In the clar-obscure, made of the fusion of lunar silver and linden green, the blissful trefoil[103] bloomed under the evening star. Victor, by his professional pictures of the night-cold, put his invalid friend out of conceit with night-walks, and went alone with the blind one at this late hour out to the dormitory of hushed Nature.... Blessed is the evening which is the fore-court of a blessed day. The May-frost had cleansed the stars from the warm breath of the vapor, and deepened the blue of the celestial hemisphere, to make a beautiful night the earnest of a beautiful day. All was silent around the village, except the nightingale in the garden and the rustling May-chafers, those heralds of a bright day.--And when Victor went home with an upward sigh of thanks for these Whitsuntide hours, of which each handed the next the box of powdered sugar to sweeten the short moments of a still mortal; as he passed along before the muffled confession-hymns, which here a twelve-years-old little man who to-morrow was to take the sacrament, and there one by the side of his mother, sang; and when, finally, a vesper-hymn breathed out from the Abbey, and, swimming forth as it were on a single lute-tone, brought the fair day with a swan-song to its close, and when nothing more was left of the soft day except its resonance in the heart of the happy one and in the evening song of the convent, and its reflection in the fleeting evening-red of heaven, and in the contented and still smiling face of the sleeping Emanuel;--then did the mute joys in Victor's face look like prayers, the undisturbed tears like overrunning drops from the cup of gladness, his stillness like a good deed, and his whole heart like the warm tear of joy shed by a higher genius.

Victor led the beloved blind one softly to his place of slumber, where dream restored his disordered eyes and arrayed the little landscapes, of his childhood, with morning hues, more brightly around him.--He then laid himself down without undressing himself, opposite to the moon which hung low above the horizon, and sank to sleep on the building-ground of our fairer air-castles, on the sounding-board of childhood, where morning-dreams lead consecrated man out of the wilderness of day to the mount of Moses, and let him look over into the dark, promised land of Eternity....

The first Whitsuntide day, dear reader, in this tri-clang of rapture, has died away; but in these three high festivals of joy, as with those in the almanac, the second is still fairer, and the third the fairest of all. I shall not at all hurry with the movement of my pen through these three heavens,--nay, if I could certainly know that the acting persons in this history would never get to see my work, I should shift the boundaries of this Eden, by adding much that, on nearer inspection, would not prove historically true.--

34. DOG-POST-DAY.

SECOND DAY OF WHITSUNTIDE.

Morning.--The Abbess.--The Water-Mirror.--Dumb Action for Libel.--The Rain and the Open Heaven.

At two o'clock the morning-wind swept in more loudly and coolly through Victor's open chamber, and shook already dew-drops from shiny foliage, and the near whisper of leaves murmured through his ears into his dreams. The lark, as the overture of the day, flung herself high up into the gray of heaven, and rang in the morning's feast of trumpets. This alarmist became in his dreaming the hovering after-echo which blended with the morning; amidst the soft in-fall of the neighboring sounds he slowly opened his eyes and dreamed on, and closed them again, and was more awake, and sleep did not pass off like a thick shroud made of night, but floated upward like a veil of morning perfume; and his soul, without making a single movement of the body, opened with the still awaking of a flower-cup in the presence of the morning....

--Now I am again already at boiling and blazing point,--and yet, as often as I dip my pen in the ink, I make up my mind to gain the good graces of the critics, and to write with my pen as with an icicle. But it is impossible for me,--in the first place, because I am getting into years. With most men, it is true, as with birds, singing ceases when love does; but with those who make their head a hot-house of their ideas, years, i. e. the days of drill therein, give the fancy as well as the _passions_ a higher growth. Poets resemble glass, which, when it is old and breaks, takes on motley colors.--But secondly, though I were just blooming in my twentieth year, still I could not now write frostily, seeing winter is at the door. Rousseau says that in prison he produced the best poem on Liberty,--hence the French, those state's-prisoners, used to write better prose on the subject than the free Britons,--hence Milton poetized in winter. I have often carried out my writing-tablets in summer, and undertaken to press it to this silhouette board, and then take its profile; but fantasy can lay only Past and Future under its copying-paper, and every actual Present limits its creative power,--just as, according to the old naturalists, the water distilled from roses loses its virtue precisely at the time when roses bloom. Therefore I always had to wait till I became unfaithful, before I could go at love with my drawing instruments.... On the contrary, a man who now, towards after-summer, on a Molucca Island, primes and sketches the spring, must, for the foregoing reasons, and for the further one that the flying-summer is the regretful after-echo and silver-wedding of spring, hand it over to the Gallery-inspectors with much too bright sap-colors.--

The gayly-embroidered description of Victor's sojourn in Maienthal may well get to be as long as that of Voltaire's in Paris, with the publisher's compensation for which the lean wag might have cleared the rent of his _chambres garnies_. For just at this moment the dog has actually handed in a fourth Whitsuntide day, and expanded the trinomial root of the given _power_ of joy into a quadrinomial. As in this quadruplicate of joy again, there is no wailing, no murder, no pestilence, but only good, I joyfully catch the remaining images of this spring in my camera-obscura, nor hover in anxious suspense, lest I should have to drag out my hero (Knef has made over to me all the Whitsuntide-days, and is only to send a little supplementary page afterward) somewhat as I did my Gustavus,[104] from the collapsed rubbish of his pleasure-palace and summer-house.--

Emanuel despatched in the forenoon his day's work of writing in his astronomical tables, in order to spend the whole afternoon with his guest at the Abbess's; he also offered him a little collaboratorship at his flowers, namely, to pluck out the rosemary blossoms, and spread the sunshade over the carnation-stand. With Emanuel, even in the prosaic repose of the day, the wings always protruded far out from under the half-wing-shells. Victor took the requests of his teacher as gifts. As he picked away out there at the rosemary, the rising sun opened the valves of the wind, and then, under its breath, all the registers of the great organ of being began to go, and the tremolo of the brooks rolled its waves on his ear, the flute-work of the birds pealed, and the thirty-two footed pedal-register of the woodland roared. One little parishioner's head after another, as he carried his twelve years together with the same number of Herculean labors of memory to the Holy Sacrament, creeping along behind its father, embroidered and stiffened up with a wreath-knob, and generally with gold-spangles, passed by before him. What a beautiful second Whitsuntide-day, which is generally full of rain-clouds, have you, ye little folks, to-day!--Victor right gladly indulged the grandees of the village, i. e. the drivers of a full span and the schoolmaster's son, the hair-modeller and queue-preacher Meuseler, who on the second Whitsuntide-day frizzled the neighboring villages, and who with his holy-(powder)-sprinkler effected the last effusion upon the little heads, which the Parson had been moistening these six weeks. Victor's heart beat for joy, as if he had a child, or were himself a child among them, when the motley, powdered, animated chain, with dancing spangles, with long-stemmed nosegays, with black-glistening spiritual _Musen-annuals_, marched in under the commander's staff and shepherd's crook of their two consuls, singing and besung and rung in and trumpeted in through the triumphal gate of the church.--Ah! joy sits still more beautifully on children than on us, just as an unhappy, a begging child, whose first child's-garden fate has trampled down, and before whose eyes, at the first bursting into existence, nothing hangs but black, misshapen morning cloud, afflicts our heart more than his father beside him.--

"Pluck, like a berry, _every_ minute of your first day of triumph, ye good children, and I wish the sermon would be right long, that you might keep on so much longer your handsome dress!" said Victor, and looked round toward the convent, whose windows were full of unrecognizable spectatresses; he proposed to himself, on the return of the juvenile procession, to seek out for himself from among the windows with a pocket spy-glass the one with the fairest contents.--Just go, kindly man, who lovest fair souls like fair nature, and endurest cold ones like the winter-landscape, and who never revengest, just walk up and down by the brooks, for there is the footpath of the fishers, and because on thy poetic ring-races thou wouldst not harm a peasant by trampling down so much as a forked wagon of hay, such as the children braid out of hazel-rods! Fill the interval between the first heaven and the third, when thou wilt sit down not with Abraham, but with thy Clotilda at the table of the Abbess,--fill it up with a second, namely with the embrace of all nature, which never looks more sweetly into the soul, than when on it, not far from the soul, a beloved dwells!--

A stroll between two brooks that mingled their flashings and between their lackered willows snowed over with foam-worms[105] overspread the whole inner man even to every corner of a dark tear with morning-splendor.--In addition to that Victor kept looking across the meadow up at Emanuel's open window, and letting a smile float down from it like a running wave full of light.--In addition to that, he did not stop there, but went up twice and disturbed him in the midst of his writing with a childlike embrace.--In addition to that, he put seven-leagued boots on his eyes, and ran over the whole landscape, here rising, there sinking, here shining, there shadowing, in order to catch and size even here in anticipation a postal and travelling map of the finest places for the afternoon-rambles with Clotilda, because in the afternoon the raptures themselves will perhaps spoil the choice of raptures!--And thus did Nature create over again in his spirit her morning and her spring out of the earth-clod of the first spring, i. e. out of the hot sun, out of the cool brook, out of the butterfly, whom May shelled out of his hull, from the motley flies which the prolific earth hatched out of the larva-seed like winged flowers.--Then he closed his eyes amid the din of sparrows and swallows in the village, and amidst the watch-cries of the larks, and against the dazzling waves of the brooks, and let his soul dive down into the ringing sea and into the chiaroscuro painted by the eyelid; but then would his heart have been overwhelmed by creation's flood, which swept over it out of all pipes and beds and mouths of life around him, out of the tangled vein-work of the stream of life, which shoots at once through flower-runnels, through tree-channels, through white flies' veins, through red blood-canals and through human nerves, ... he would, in the impotence of enjoyment, have been drowned in the deep, broad ocean of life, which life-streams cross and fill, had he not, like every drowning man, heard a peal of bells far down into the waves.

In short--church was out, and he had to go behind a leafy hunter's-screen, in order, when the Panists[106] of the Lord's Supper should march by out of the church, whose organ-music still followed, and under the tower that still trumpeted after them, that then he might see with his pocket-glass _who_ looked out of the convent. Clotilda's face floated, as if called forth by magic out of the second world, close to the glass, and he could, without fear of being driven away, close his butterfly-wings around this flower; he could freely sink into her great eyes, as into two flower-cups filled with the splendor of dew. Never did he see so pure a snow of the white around the blue heaven's-opening, which went far into the soul, now fairer than ever; and when she cast down her eye toward the garden, the great veiling eyelid with its trembling lashes stood just as beautifully over it as a lily over a fountain. _Love_, like _drawing_ and like the germ of man, begins at the _eye_.--When the children had gone by, then Clotilda slowly and freely turned her face toward Emanuel's cottage, and gazed across with the far-reaching, longing look of love....