Part 19

Victor went off, in order to conceal an emotion through which he too much heightened another's. But on his far and near ways among tones and blossoms, feelings clung to him which doubled and glorified his love; he felt that the _strongest_ expression of love takes not so firm and deep a hold of the soul as the _finest_. But as he passed along by the sun-dial, which with its measuring-rod of shadow counted out for us other shadows our narrow fortunate islands, and as the moon weighed out on the scale with her shadowy beam in equipoise the last minutes of this glad hour, because she pointed toward midnight, as if she wrote, It will presently be over,--just then the Englishman passed out alone slowly and with downcast eyes from the crape-tent, and went in among the tones, to lead them away with, the whole heaven around them. Victor, who in the still sea of the deepest joy no longer steered for countries, but contentedly tossed or rested upon it, and desired nothing in the future but the present, only paced now to and fro on the long terraces, instead of ascending and descending the garden,--he stood just on the uppermost, on the flower-terrace, at the morning-fountain, and looked along the glimmering way over to the evening-fountain, and the fallen snow of the moon lay deeper and whiter down along the blissful slope, and this blooming sugar-field appeared to his dreaming heart like a point of land with which the island of the blest stretched over into this earth, and he saw on all this enchanted field nothing but blessed ones walking, reposing, dancing, here alone, there in pairs, yonder in groups, and innocent men, quiet children, gentle, virtuous maidens, and he looked up to the starry heaven and his tearful eye said to the All-gracious, O give my good father and my good Flamin also such a sight!----when all on a sudden he perceived that the tones were wafted away, and saw the Briton moving on with the children, and the swan-song of a Maëstoso was borne along before the fleeing youth....

Victor went up with the tones that swam away, and the stars seemed to swim with them, and the whole region to go with them;--all at once he stopped at the end of the terrace of flowers, before the emblems of Giulia, the white hyacinths, before the friend of Giulia, before--Clotilda ... O moment! repeated only in eternity, wear not too strong a lustre, that I may be able to endure it! move not my heart too intensely, so that I may be able to describe thee!--Ah, move it only as thou dost the two hearts to which thou appearedst; thou wilt meet none of us any more ... And Clotilda and Victor stood innocent before God, and God said, Weep and love as in the second world with me!--And they looked on each other speechless in the transfiguration of night, in the transfiguration of love, in the transfiguration of emotion, and tears of bliss closed their eyes, and behind the illuminated tears transfigured worlds rose around them out of the dark earth, and the evening-fountain spread itself gleaming like a milky-way above them, and the starry heaven closed sparkling over them, and the receding and dying sounds washed their uplifted souls away from the shore of earth.... Lo! then a little breath of air brought the escaping sounds more warmly and closely to their hearts, and they wiped the tears from their eyes; and as they looked round in the actual scene, the melodious waving agitated all the blossoms in the garden, and the great night, which with giant limbs slept in the moonshine on the earth, stirred for rapture its wreaths of shadowed tree-tops, and the two beings smiled trembling in unison, and simultaneously cast down their eyes and simultaneously raised them without knowing it. And Victor at last was able to say: "O may the noblest heart that I know be as unspeakably blessed as I, and still more blessed! I have not deserved so much!"--And Clotilda said in a soft tone: "I have remained the whole evening mostly alone, merely for the sake of weeping for joy, but it is too beautiful for me and for the future...."--Her companions turning round came up the garden, and the two had to part; and when Victor added with stifled sounds, "Rest well, thou noble soul,--may such tears of joy have always to stand in thy eyes, may such melodious tones be destined always to float around thy days!--Rest well, thou heavenly soul!"--and when a look full of new love and an eye full of fresh tears thanked him; and when he bowed himself low, low before the saintly, still, modest one, and from reverence did not so much as kiss her hand;--then in the invisibleness did her genius embrace his genius for delight, that their two children were so happy and so virtuous.

O what comfort did his overwhelmed soul now find in his beloved Dahore, whom he followed under the loud chestnut-trees, and on whose neck he could fall with all his tears of ecstasy, with all his caresses of a raptured heart: "My Emanuel, rest softly! I stay to-night under this good, warm sky round about us."--"Aye, stay, good heart," said Emanuel, "such a night will never pass through any spring again.... Hear'st thou," he continued, as the tones receding into immensity, like evening stars, as it were, of the sunken glory, like autumnal voices of the departing summer-song, sent their call into the yearning soul, "hear'st thou the sweet dying away of the strains? Lo, even thus may my soul die away on the longest day, even so may thy heart lie on mine and say as now, Rest well!" ...

Sinking from the arms of his last remaining loved friend, Victor went reeling back in the confused twilight of inspired sadness through the avenue pierced by moonlight, as it were dropping with rays, in order to recline, in the blossom-cave, where he had here first found Clotilda, his dreaming head on a pillow of blossom-cups.... And as he slowly and alone and with Elysian remembrances and hopes staggered along through the arbor which had grown into the avenue, between the lulling rivulets, low waves of the departed melody still swam more into his fancy than into his ears, and only the nightingale reigned aloud over the inspired night. Then, unspeakably blest and burdened with ecstasy, the last man of this night glided from the five steps of his heavenly bed through the lattice of twigs into the dark thicket of blossoms.----Bedewed leaves fell, cooling, on his fevered brow, he laid his two outstretched arms on two supports of dwarf-trees, and closed in rapture his burning eyelids, and the continuing tones of the nightingale and of the five fountains around him wafted him some spaces onward into the glimmering illusion of dreams,--but the nightingale, screaming out in the jubilee of joy, warbled through his dream, and when he opened his eyes, drifted away into half-dreams, the glimpses of the moon shot through the white shrubbery,----nevertheless, satisfied with the previous scenes, he only smiled half beside himself, and closed his eyes again and sank completely into the harmonious slumber ... only a few broken tones he still sang to himself,--only a few times more he stirred his prostrate arms for embraces ... and in the euthanasia of slumber and rapture only obscurely stammered once more, Beloved!...

And so sweetly, great All-gracious One, let the rest of us mortals sink to sleep in the last night as Victor does in this, and let our last word also be, Beloved!--

36. DOG-POST-DAY.

FOURTH AND LAST DAY OF WHITSUNTIDE.

Hyacinth.--The Voice of Emanuel's Father.--Letter from the Angel.--Flute on the Grave.--Second Nightingale.--Farewell.-- Pistols.--Ghostly Apparition.

The appendix to the fourth day of joy has just come in.--Pausing only to breathe the sigh wherewith one usually says, on the day after festal days, that he is burying them, I come back again before the blooming bed of my friend, and open the living-green curtain; not till toward nine o'clock did a ground-sparrow twittering close to his hands draw him with difficulty out of a deep sea of dream. But the shadowy shapes, which the concave mirror of dream had erected in the air, were all forgotten; only the tears, which they had wrung from them, still stood in his eyes, and he could no longer remember why he had shed them. To-day was Ember-day, which, like other changes of moon and weather, makes the echo of our dreams louder and more polysyllabic.--In a singular lassitude he opened his eyes before the white twilight of the canopy of apple-blossoms, before the maze of the green web,--his hand chased the ground-sparrow through the bushes,--it was sultry around this shade, the tree-tops were mute and all the flowers erect,--bees bent down from grains of sand into the springs around him and sipped water,--white flocks dropped from the willows, and all the smelling-bottles of the blossoms and the censers of the flowers diffused over his place of slumber a sweet, sultry steam....

He raises his right hand to his moist eye and sees therein, to his astonishment, a white hyacinth, which some one must have placed there.... He suspected Clotilda; and she it had really been. Half an hour before she had stepped up to this bed of flowers,--had gently let the bushes immediately close again,--but then, however, drawn them apart again, because she saw the tears of the forgotten dream run down the face of the glowing sleeper,--her whole soul became now a tender look and blessing of love, and she could not refrain from laying the memorial of her morning-visit, the flower, on his hand,--and then hastened softly back to her chamber.

He stepped hastily into the beaming day, to overtake the giver, whose morning-offering he unhappily, for fear of destroying it, could no more press to his heart than he could herself. O how it saddened him, when he stood in the open air before the Moravian churchyard of the heavenly night which had _gone home_, before the reposing garden, and when he looked upon the bald, close-shaven, trodden-down dancing-floor, and on the silent nightingale's-bush, and on the hills where the children were tending sheep, disrobed of yesterday's finery! Then the forgotten dream again appeared and said: Weep once more, for the rose-feast of thy life concludes to-day, and the last of the _four_ rivers of Paradise in a few hours will utterly dry up!--"O ye fair days," said Victor, "ye deserve that I should leave you with a tenderness that knows no measure and with unnumbered tears!"--He fled from the too harsh daylight into the cell of crape, that it might recolor the brilliant foreground of the day into a dim back-ground, overspread with the moonshine of yesterday; and under this pall of the pale dead night he proposed to himself to indulge his heart, so soon to be impoverished, with its last joy, namely, its yearning, in utter overmeasure. He stepped out of the tent, but the nocturnal moonshine faded not from the lawn; he looked up into the blue heaven, which touches us with _one_ long flame, but the veiled stars of the wintry night sent little outwelling rays to the eclipsed soul; he said to himself, indeed, "The ice-mountain on which hitherto my reason has delivered half sermons-on-the-mount, has shrunk up under the glow of joy to a mole-hill," but he added, "To-day I care for nothing."

He came to Emanuel with wet eyes. The latter told him that the first link of yesterday's chain of flowers, namely the Briton with his people, had already loosed itself in the night. But the longer he looked on Emanuel and thought of the morrow,--for to-morrow before day he too would softly close the garden gate of this Paradise behind, and this afternoon he is to take leave of the Abbess and this evening of his beloved, in order not to hinder her in the reading out of the well-known angel's-epistle,--so much the more painful was the straining of his eyes, and he preferred to go out, with a heart bleeding itself full, into the open air, and led the blind one with him, who suspected nothing, saw nothing, and before whom, besides, one loved to lay bare his innermost heart as before a child.

But this time Julius was in the same softened state, because he had all the morning seen the angel playing and hovering in his darkling soul. The yearning for the angel brooded over his reposing heart and warmed it even to beating, and he said with an unaccustomed sorrow, "If I could only see, only something, only my father, or thee!" The dust-covered remembrances of his childhood were shaken up; and out of this cloud-enveloped period emerged before him into special prominence one day, bright with morning, blue and full of song, and bore three forms on its cloud-floor, Julius's own and those of the two children, from whom before their embarkation for Germany he had parted,--drops escaped from him without his perceiving it, when he described to this Victor, the very one who had done what he described, how he had been kissed and hugged and cried after by the one child, that loved him most, and always carried him. "And I think," he continued, "that every one whose voice I love to hear has the face of that good child, and that _thou_ hast too. Often when I contemplate this form alone in my darkness, and feel warm drops on my lips, and fall into a languishing, slumbering rapture, I fancy it is blood trickles from my lips and my heart is boiling,--but my father says if then my eyes were suddenly opened, and I should look upon my angel, or the good child, or a beautiful human being, I should have to die for love."----"O Julius, Julius," cried his Victor, "how noble is thy heart! The good child whom thou lovest so my father will soon lay in thy arms, and he will kiss thee and love thee and clasp thee just as I do now."--

He led him back to dinner; but he himself remained till afternoon under the open heaven, and his heart put on silent mourning under trees full of bees, near thickets full of feeding birds, on all the former walks and ecliptics of this dying festival,--and all the hours of childhood rose out of the winter-sleep of memory and stirred his heart, but it dissolved.--O when far distant moments sound on our ears with their chime, then great drops fall from the softened soul, as the increasing nearness of far-off bells sounding across betokens rain. I blame thee not, Victor,--thou art, after all, only _feminine_, but not _effeminate_,--if thy biographer can describe thy emotion and thy reader can feel it, without relaxing the firm muscles of the heart, thou canst do it quite as well, and only a man who can wring bitter tears from others will scorn sweet ones and shed none himself.

At length Victor went to take his last pleasure, to the garden of termination, in order to take leave with tender tears of all his female friends at the Abbey. A singular incident delayed it a little: for as he left Emanuel, he encountered Julius coming from the garden, who told him, "if he wanted to find Emanuel, he was in the garden."--This raised a friendly dispute, because each of them insisted on having just talked with him. Victor went back with him to Emanuel, and Julius related to his teacher every word of the alleged garden-talk with him: "e. g. about Victor, about Clotilda, about the farewell he was to-day taking, about his previous happy days."

During the narration Emanuel's face grew radiant, as if moonlight flowed down from it,--and instead of representing to the beloved child the impossibility of his appearance in the garden, he humored his notion of the apparition, and said with delight: "I shall die, then!--It was my departed father,--his voice sounds like mine,--he promised me when he died to come back from the next world to this before I should go hence.--Ah, ye beloved ones beyond the graves over yonder, ye still then think of me.--O thou good father! break through even now into my presence with thy fatal radiance, and release my spirit in thy lips!"--

He was still more confirmed in his conclusion, because, Julius added that the shape had demanded of him the angel's letter, but given it back again after a short whisper. The seal was uninjured. Emanuel's joyful enthusiasm at these telegraphs of death implied that he had drawn dissatisfying inferences from his previous health. Victor never set himself in opposition to the exalted errors of his teacher; thus, e. g., he never arrayed the reasons he had, and which I will show in the next Intercalary day, against the innocent delusion, that "from dreams, and from the independence of the personal consciousness on the body, one could infer its future independence after death,"--that "in dream the inner diamond dusted itself and drank in light from a fairer sun."--Victor was alarmed about the matter,--but for other reasons, Julius took them both along with him to the place of the interview, which was in the darkened avenue near the blossoming hollow. No one was there, nothing appeared; leaves whispered, but no spirits; it was the place of bliss, but of earthly bliss.--

Victor went into the other place of bliss, the Abbey. Clotilda was not over there, but in the intricate labyrinth of the Park, probably for the purpose of facilitating for its possessor, Julius, the opportunity of hearing read the angel's letter. Just as the sun blazed over against the window-panes, he took leave of the good Abbess with that refined, feeling courtesy to which in her position the highest enthusiasm was limited. The refined Abbess said to him: "The visit was so short, that it would be inexcusable, if Victor did not make it good by persuading her second spring guest (Clotilda) to lengthen hers; for she too was going soon to leave them."--He took his leave of her with a heart-felt respect: for his tender heart knew, quite as well behind the lace mask of refinement and knowledge of the world as behind the leather-crust of roughness, how to feel the tender heart of another.

But as he hastened to the garden, the tears of his heart gushed up higher and warmer,--and he felt as if he must here in the face of the sun embrace the rising moon, as he thought: "Ah, when thy pale fleece hangs this evening brighter overhead there, when thou lookest down alone, I shall have departed or be in the act of departing from my pastoral world."--And below near the nightingale's hedge reposed his Julius, shedding bright streams of tears,--for this whole evening swarmed with greater and greater wonders[123] of chance,--he hastens down to him, the letter of the so-called angel is opened in his hand, Victor says softly, "Julius, why weepest thou so?"--"O God," said the latter in broken tones, "guide me under a bower!"--He conducted him to the crape one. Julius said, when they were under cover: "Good! here the sun does not burn!" and flung his right arm around Victor, and gave him the letter, and folded his arm round even to his heart and said: "Thou good soul! tell me when the sun is down, and read me once more the letter of the angel!"

Victor began: "Clotilda!"--"To whom is it?" said he.--"To me!" said Julius, "and Clotilda has already read it to me; but I could not understand her on account of her weeping, and besides I also was too much distressed.--I shall die for sorrow, thou good Giulia, why didst thou not tell me of it before thy death.--The dead one wrote it, read on!"--He read:

"CLOTILDA!

"I cover my blushing cheeks with the funeral veil. My secret lies hidden in my heart, and will be laid with it under the grave-stone. But after a year it will force its way out of the mouldered heart. O, then let it rest forever in thine, Clotilda!--and forever in thine, Julius!--Julius, was not a silent form often about thee that called itself thy angel? Did it not once, as the death-bell tolled for the burial of a blooming maiden, lay a white hyacinth in thy hand, and say, Angels pluck such _white_ flowers? Did not a mute form once take thy hand and wipe away its tears therewith, and it could not tell why it wept? Did not a low voice once say, Farewell, I shall no more appear to thee, I go back to heaven? That form was I, O Julius; for I have loved thee and even unto death. Lo! here I stand on the shore of the second world, but I look not over into its infinite fields, but I turn my face, while I am still sinking, back to thee, to thee, and my eye grows dim over thy image.--Now I have told thee all.--Now come, quieting death, crush slowly the white hyacinth, and rend the heart asunder speedily, that Julius may see the love enclosed therein.--Ah, wilt thou then take a dead one into thy soul? Wilt thou weep, when thou hearest this read? Ah, when my covered, sunken dust can no more touch thee, will my remote spirit be loved by thine?--But I conjure thee, O ever-remembered one, go, on the day when this tearful leaf is read to thee, then go, at sundown, up to my grave and offer to the pale face below, which the old mound is already crushing asunder, and to the dissolved heart that can beat for nothing more, then present to the poor heart that has loved thee so much, and on thy account has hid itself under the earth, thy funeral offering,--bring to it on thy flute the tones of my loved song, 'The grave is deep and silent.'--Sing it softly to the accompaniment, Clotilda, and thou too visit me.--Ah, poor Giulia, lift up thy soul, and sink not now, as thou imaginest thy Julius on thy grave!--When thou bringest thy offering to the dead, my spirit will, it is true, already have gone up higher; I shall have lived a year beyond the earth, I shall already have forgotten the earth,--but nevertheless, but, O God, if Thou shouldst let the tones above my grave penetrate into Elysium, then should I sink down and shed hot tears and stretch out my arms and cry: Yes! here in eternity I love him still,--may it fare well with him on the earth, may his soft heart repose softly and long on life below there!--No, not long! Come up hither, mortal, to the Immortals, that thine eye may be healed, and see the friend who died for thee!

"GIULIA."

* * * * *

"I will go,"--said Julius hesitatingly, but with quiverings in his face,--"although the sun is not down. My father shall console me till sundown, that my heart may not beat so violently against my breast, when I stand at the grave and make the offering to the dead."----Let me say nothing, reader, of the choking heart with which I proceed,--nor of this too sensitive Giulia, who like a morning sun-dial was ere noon in shade and coolness, who, like a dove, unfolded her wings to the rain and to tears,--nor of her soul's-sisters, who in the second decade of life hang, the skeleton of death all over with flowers, that they may not be able to see its limbs, and who rest their white arm merely on a myrtle-twig of love as upon a bleeding-support, and watch calmly the bleeding to death of its severed veins!--

I could not have said even this, if Victor had not thought it, whose heart was mortally distraught by an infinite grief and an infinite love; for ah! how far on the way was not his irreplaceable Clotilda already, to follow her friend and hide her unloved heart in the earth, as they lay down carnations in the frost?