Part 2

With emotion I draw aside from Victor's distracted, irrecognizable face the veil which covers his sorrows. Let us look upon thee, disconsolate man, who art going to meet a spring where thy heart is to lose everything: Emanuel by death, Clotilda by love, Flamin by jealousy, even Joachime by suspicion! Let us look upon thee, impoverished one; I know why thy eye is still dry, and why thou sayst brokenly and with a shake of the head, "No, my dear Emanuel, I shall not come, for indeed I cannot."--What ate most deeply into thy heart was, that thy true Emanuel should be the very one who still believed thou wert loved by his friend.--An undeveloped sorrow is without tears or signs; but when man through fancy draws out of his own bosom a heart full of confluent wounds, and counts the gashes, and then forgets that it is his own, then does he weep sympathetically at that which beats so painfully in his hands, and then he bethinks himself and weeps still more. Victor would fain release as it were by warming his stiff soul from frozen tears, and went to the balcony window and pictured to himself, while the suppressed evening-glow of March burned out of the clouds over the hills of Maienthal, Clotilda's marriage to Julius.--O, in order to make himself right sad, he drew a spring day over the vale, the genius of love flung open, above the nuptial altar, the blue heaven, and bore the sun as bridal torch without cloud-smoke through the pure immensity.--There walked, on that day, Emanuel transfigured, Julius blind, but blissful, Clotilda blushing and long since well again, and every one was happy. Only one unhappy one he saw there standing among the flowers, namely, himself; he saw there, how this afflicted one, chary of words for sorrow, joyous from virtue, more familiar and confidential with the bride from coldness, went round among the rest, so unknown, properly so superfluous; how the guiltless pair, with every sign of love, reckoned up before him all that he had lost, or indeed concealed those signs from forbearance, because they guessed his grief;--this thought darted at him like a blaze;--and how at last, as the heavy-laden past brought all his slain hopes and his withered wishes before him, he turned round, when the beloved pair went from him to the altar and to the eternal covenant, how he turned round inconsolably toward the still, empty fields, to weep infinitely, and how he then remained so alone and dark in the fair region, and said to himself: "In thee, no human being takes an interest to-day,--none presses thy hand, and says, 'Victor, why weepest thou so?'--Oh! this heart is as full of unspeakable love as any other, but it fades unloved and unknown, and its dying and its weeping disturb no one. Nevertheless, nevertheless, O Julius! O Clotilda! I wish you eternal happiness, and only contented days." ... Then he could do no more; he pressed his eyes to his hands and to the window-frame, and gave free play to them, and thought of nothing more; the sorrow, which, like a rattlesnake, had watched with distended jaws him and his charmed and writhing approaches, now seized and swallowed him and crushed him to pieces....

Soft hearts, ye torment yourselves as much on this flinty earth as hard ones do _others_,--the spark which only makes a burn, ye swing round till it becomes a wheel of fire, and under the blossoms a sharp leaf becomes to you a thorn!... But why, I say to myself, dost thou show that of thy friend and open afresh remote similar wounds in men who have been healed?--O, answer for me, ye who resemble him, could you do without a single tear? And since the woes of fantasy are to be reckoned among the joys of fantasy,--a moist eye and a heavily drawn breath are the least with which we buy a fair hour....

--Pride--the best counterpoise to effeminate tears--wiped away my hero's, and said to him: "Thou art worth as much as they who are more fortunate; and if unhappy love has hitherto made thee bad, how good might not a happy love make thee!" There was stillness in and around him; night stood in heaven; he read Emanuel's letter.

"My Horion!

"Within a few hours Time has reversed its hour-glass, and now the sands of a new year are trickling down.--Uranus strikes for our little earth the centuries, the sun strikes the years, the moon the months; and on this concert clock, constructed out of worlds, human beings come forth as images, that utter cries and tones of joy, when it strikes.

"I too come out gladly under the fair new-year's dawn, which gleams through all the clouds, and flames up the high hemisphere of heaven. In a year I shall look into the sin from another world: O how my heart, for this last time, under the earthly cloud, overflows with love toward the Father of this fair earth, toward his children and my brothers and sisters, toward this flowery cradle, wherein we only once awake, and amidst its rocking in the sun only once fall asleep!

"I shall never live to see another summer-day, therefore will I describe the fairest one, on which, with thy Julius[3] I for the first time tremblingly penetrated through luminous clouds, and through harmonies, and fell down with him before a thundering throne, and said to him, 'Overhead, in the immeasurable cloud which they call eternity, He dwells, who has made us and loves us.' This day will I to-day repeat in my soul; and never, too, may it be extinguished in my Julius or my Horion!

"I have often said to my Julius, 'I have not yet given thee the greatest thought of man, which bows down his soul and yet erects it again forever; but I will name it to thee on the day when thy spirit and mine are the purest, or when I die.' Hence he often begged me, when _his angel_ had been with him, or when the flute and the awe-inspiring night or a tempest had exalted him, 'Name to me, Emanuel, the greatest thought of man!'

"It was a sweet July evening, when my beloved one lay on my bosom, weeping, under the birch-tree on the mountain, and said: 'Tell me why I weep so very much this evening? Dost thou, then, never do it, Emanuel? But there fall also warm drops from the clouds on my cheeks.' I answered: 'There are little warm clouds that float round in heaven, and shake out a few dew-drops; but does not the angel walk up and down in thy soul? For thou stretchest out thy hand to touch him.' Julius said: 'Yes, he stands before my thoughts; but it was only thou that I wanted to touch: for the angel indeed is gone from the earth, and I long right earnestly for his voice. Dreamy shapes undulate into each other within me, but they have no such bright colors as in sleep,--gracious, smiling faces look upon me, and come up to me with outspread, shadowy arms, and beckon to my soul, and melt away, ere I can press them to my heart.[4] My Emanuel, is not thy face, then, one among my shadowy forms?' Here he pressed his wet face glowingly to mine, which seemed to hover before him in shadowy outline; a cloud sprinkled the consecrating water of heaven upon our embrace, and I said: 'We are softened so to-day only by that which encircles us, and which I now see.'--He answered: 'O, tell me what thou seest, and leave not off till the sun is gone down.'

"My heart swam in love and trembled in rapture at my words: 'Beloved, the earth is to-day so beautiful! that indeed makes man more tender: heaven rests with a caress and kiss of love on the earth, as a father on a mother and her children,--the flowers and beating hearts fall into the embrace and nestle around the mother. The twig gently rocks its singer up and down, the flower cradles its bee, the leaf its fly and its drop of honey: in the open flower-cups hang the warm tears, into which the clouds dissolve themselves, as if in eyes, and my flower-beds bear the rainbow, which is built up on them, without sinking. The woods lie nursing themselves at the breast of heaven, and having drunken deeply of the clouds, all summits stand fixed in silent bliss. A zephyr, not stronger than a warm sigh of love, breathes along by our cheeks among the steaming corn-blossoms, and lifts clouds of seed-dust, and one little breeze after another plays its antics with the flying harvests of the lands; but it lays them at our feet when it has done playing. O beloved, when all is love, all harmony, all loves and is loved, all meadows _one_ intoxicating blossom-chalice, then indeed in man also does the lofty spirit stretch out its arms, and long to embrace with them a spirit, and then, when it folds its arms only around shadows, then it grows very sad for infinite, inexpressible longing after love.'

"'Emanuel, I am sad too,' said my Julius.

"'Lo, the sun goes down, the earth veils itself: let me still see all and tell it to thee. Now a white dove flies dazzling, like a great snow-flake, across the deep blue.... Now she sails round the gold-spark of the lightning-rod, as if around a glistening star hung out in the day-sky. O, how she floats and floats, and sinks and vanishes in the tall flowers of the churchyard!... Julius, didst thou feel nothing, while I spoke? Ah, the white dove was perhaps thy angel, and therefore thy heart melted when he was so near thee to-day. The dove does not fly up, but clouds of dew, with a silver border, like fragments torn from summer-nights, glide across the church-yard, and overspread the blooming graves with colored shadows.... Now, one such shadow falling from heaven swims towards us and bathes our mountain. Melt, melt, fleeting night, emblem of life, and hide not long from me the sinking sun!... Our little cloud moves on into the flames of the sun.... O thou gracious sun, looking back so softly from behind the shore of earth, thou maternal eye of the world, truly thou sheddest thy evening light from thee as warmly and slowly as trickling blood, and palest as thou sinkest, but the earth, hung up and laid upon thee in fruit-festoons and flower-chains, reddens as if new-created, and with swelling energy.... Hark! Julius, now the gardens resound,--the air hums,--the birds with their calls wheel across each other's tracks,--the storm-wind lifts its mighty wing, and flaps against the woods; hark! they give the sign that our good sun is departed.

"'O Julius, Julius!' said I, and embraced his breast, 'the earth is great; but the heart which rests upon it is still greater than the earth, and greater than the sun.... For it alone thinks the _greatest thought_!'

"Suddenly there came forth a coolness from the deathbed of the sun, as from a grave. The high sea of the air undulated, and a broad stream, in whose bed woods lay prostrate, came roaring back through the heaven along the path by which the sun had departed. The altars of Nature, the mountains, were veiled in black as at a great mourning. Man was fastened down to the earth by the mist-cloud and separated from heaven. Transparent lightnings licked at the foot of the cloud, and the thunder smote three times at the black arch. But the storm upreared itself and rent it asunder; it drove the flying ruins of the shattered prison through the blue, and flung the dismembered masses of vapor down below the sky,--and for a long time it still continued to roar alone over the open earth, through the bright and cleansed plain.... But above it, behind the curtain which it had torn aside, glistened the all-holiest, the starry night.--

"Like a sun, the greatest thought of man rose in heaven,--my soul was borne down when I looked toward heaven, it was lifted up when I looked upon the earth.--

"For the Infinite has sowed his name in the heavens in burning stars, but on the earth He has sowed his name in tender flowers.

"'O Julius,' said I, 'hast thou been good to-day?' He answered: 'I have done nothing but weep.'

"'Julius, kneel down and put away every evil thought,--hear my voice quiver, feel my hand tremble;--I kneel beside thee.

"'We kneel here on this little earth before immensity, before the immeasurable world floating over us, before the radiant circumference of space. Raise thy spirit and conceive what I see. Thou hearest the storm-wind which drives the clouds around the earth,--but thou hearest not the storm-wind which drives the earth around the sun, nor yet the greatest, which blows beyond the suns and carries them around a veiled All which lies with sun-flames in the abyss.--Step from the earth into the void ether, here float and see it dwindle to a flying mountain, and with six other particles of sun-dust play around the sun,--moving _mountains_, after which _hills_[5] flutter, whirl along before thee, and go up and down before the sunshine,--then gaze about thee in the round, flashing, high vault, built up of crystallized suns, through whose chinks looks the immeasurable night in which hangs the sparkling arch.--Thou fliest for thousands of years, but thou wilt never set foot on the last sun, nor step out into the great night.--Thou shuttest thine eyes and throwest thyself with a thought over the abyss and over the visible universe, and when thou openest them again, lo! there sweep around thee, as thoughts do around souls, new streams, surging up and down, composed of light waves of suns, of dark drops of earths, and new successions of suns stand over against each other in the east and in the west,--and the fire-wheel of a new Milky-Way revolves in the stream of time.--Ay, let an infinite hand remove me out of the whole heaven; thou lookest back and fixest thine eye on the paling, shrivelling sea of suns; at last the remote creation hovers now as nothing more than a pale, still cloudlet in the depths of night; thou imaginest thyself alone and lookest round thee and----just as many suns and milky-ways flame up and down, and the pale cloudlet hangs still paler between them, and out around the whole dazzling abyss move nothing but pale, still cloudlets.----

"'O Julius! O Julius! amidst the onward moving fire-mountains, amidst the milky-ways hurled from one abyss to another, there flutters a particle of blossom-dust made of six thousands of years and the human race,--Julius, who beholds and who cares for the fluttering particle of dust which consists of all our hearts?--

"'A star was just now cast down. Fall willingly, O star caught in the atmosphere of the earth; the stars above the earth also, as well as thyself, fall headlong into their distant graves,--the sea of worlds without shore or bottom wells up here, dries up there; the great moth, the earth, flies round the sunlight and sinks into the light and is consumed;--O Julius, who sees and sustains the fluttering particle of dust on the moth, in the midst of the fermenting, blooming, dissolving chaos? O Julius, if every moment witnesses the dissolution of a man and a world,--if time passes over the comets and treads them out like sparks, and grinds to powder the carbonized suns,--if the milky-ways dart only like returning flashes of lightning out of the great gloom,--if one procession of worlds after another is drawn down into the abyss,--if the eternal grave is never full and the eternal starry firmament is never empty: O my beloved, who then sees and sustains us little mortals made of dust?--Thou, all-gracious One, sustainest us, thou Infinite One, thou, O God, thou formest us, thou seest us, thou lovest us.--O Julius! raise thy spirit and grasp the greatest thought of man! There where Eternity is, there where Immensity is, and where night begins, there an Infinite Spirit spreads out its arms and folds them around the great falling universe of worlds and bears it and warms it. I and thou and all men, and all angels and all worms, rest on His bosom, and the roaring, beating sea of worlds and suns is an only child in his arms. He sees away through the ocean, wherein coral-trees full of earths sway to and fro, and sees the little worm that cleaves to the smallest coral, which is I, and He gives the worm the nearest drop, and a blissful heart, and a future, and an eye to look up even to Himself--yea, O God, even up to thee, even to thy heart.'--

"Inexpressibly moved, Julius said, weeping: 'Thou seest, then, O Spirit of Love, poor blind me also!--O, come into my soul, when it is alone, and it rains warm and still on my cheeks, and I weep at it and feel an inexpressible love: ah, thou good, great Spirit, it is surely Thou whom I have hitherto meant and loved! Emanuel, tell me yet more, tell me his thoughts and his beginning.'

"'God is eternity, God is truth, God is holiness,--He has nothing, He is all, the _whole heart_ conceives Him, but no _thought_; and _we are only His thought, when He is ours_.[6]----All that is infinite and incomprehensible in man is his reflection; but beyond this let not thy awestricken thought go. Creation hangs as a veil, woven out of suns and spirits, over the infinite, and the eternities pass by before the veil, and draw it not away from the splendor which it hides.'

"Silently we went hand in hand down the mountain, we perceived not the storm-wind for the voice of our thoughts, and when we entered our cottage, Julius said: 'I shall always think the greatest thought of man, amidst the music of my flute, amidst the roar of the storm, and amidst the falling of the warm rain, and when I weep and when I embrace thee, and when I am dying!'--And thou, my beloved Horion, do so too.

"Emanuel."

* * * * *

The petty woe of earth, the petty thoughts of earth, had now flown away from Horion's soul, and, after a devout look into the open starry heaven, he went, led by the hand of sleep, into the realm of dreams.--Let us imitate him, and come upon nothing further to-day.[7]

26. DOG-POST-DAY.

Tergemini.--Zeusel and his Twin-Brother.--The Ascending Peruke.--Detection of Knaveries.

If I were in Covent Garden, and had wept over the tragedy, I would still stay to the epilogue, although I should have to laugh over it. Only, however, from tragedy does a cross-lane lead over to comedy, but not from the epic; in short, man can laugh after _tender_, but not after _exalting_ emotion. I cannot, therefore, allow a fast reader, immediately after the twenty-fifth chapter, to begin this one. In fact, when one sees how they read a book,--namely, even five times as miserably, thoughtlessly, fragmentarily as it is written--(I speak merely of attention; knowledge is, of course, out of the question during the reading, and the author's pen cannot raise the spirits of the reader, any more than the piston can the water, beyond a certain level); how, at the best passages, they turn over two leaves at once,--now grapple two unlike chapters, and now spend four weeks in reading through a chapter which ought to have been finished in one sitting; how such classical readers often just before a visit, or during the twisting on or in fact the heating of the hair-roller, or during the combing out of the hair (which absolutely powders the sublimest chapter) how they take that moment to read one of this last kind, or an affecting one while scolding at the whole room;--when one considers that such readers comprise most of those in Scheerau and Flachsenfingen, those female readers only excepted who know how to hit the way into all books and men, and to whom it is all one what they read or marry,--and when one actually learns by sad observation, that, if not even the reading-penny which they have to pay for the book has power enough to persuade them into the enjoyment of affecting and sublime pages, this long period will still less constrain them to it,--one must congratulate the German public, which is still nourished by works in which, as in turkey-fowls, the best part is the _white_.

As the _Vienna Magazine_ is also such a turkey-cock, and I had a dream last week that my dog wrote for it, this will be a fitting place to revoke my error. The dream does not strike me as strange,--(since my bestial correspondent is likewise named _Hofmann_,[8])--that this same beast was the Professor swaddled and chrysalized into the body of a dog. I certainly never should have hit upon the idea that a Professor of "practical eloquence" would in the form of a dog give the world printed things, had not once in Paris a fellow got himself sewed up with _contraband_ goods in a poodle-skin, in order, thus disguised, to make his way through the gate. I might have known well enough, from the inequality of size between the two creatures, what was in the wind;[9] but I went so far in my crazy dream as actually to pinch and feel of the dog to probe him, when the Professor, whom I sought behind this mask, himself in person entered the door. He at once removed all confusion; I imposed on myself, however, as it were to give him satisfaction, the penalty of making the whole thing known, and of being, into the bargain, his fellow-laborer, i. e. his monthly pigeon, which hatches every month.... Many are actually said, therefore, to have looked in the Vienna Magazine (for in the first edition I forgot to state that I had only dreamed) for articles by me: is it possible, I ask?----

We left our Victor in suspense under a cloud of dark conjectures: now we meet him again in the presence of an incident that confirms them all.

Whoso knows, though only by hearsay, the Apothecary Zeusel, around whom the whole occurrence revolves, knows that he is a hare's-foot.[10] The said foot--a hare and the Devil, though the whole skin is stripped off, still retain the foot--was delighted when a gentleman of the court got a dinner out of him and--a laugh upon him; he could not keep within the bounds of modesty, when a distinguished person made a fool of him. The noble Mat, therefore, often took away his modesty. From him he could, like the Flachsenfingeners, bear everything, from Victor nothing. I can explain it only by the fact, that Victor's satires were general and apt, and improving; but men sooner forgive lampoons than satire, slander than admonition, jests upon orthodox and aristocrats than reasonings about them.[11] Notwithstanding, though Zeusel was again this time the victim of practical jokes[12] and trouncings at Matthieu's hands, he could not fairly forgive him for it, but got the gout on the subject.

It was, namely, just before the first of April--many have three hundred and sixty-five first of April's every year--when the page made the apothecary an April fool.[13] In St. Luna three bathing and drinking visitors had already arrived, three wild young Englishmen, who announced themselves as _tergemini_, but were probably only brothers born in succession, not at once. Only their souls seemed three twins of the spirit of freedom and fraternity; they were so republican, that they did not even appear at court, and, like every Englishman, accounted us all, me and the reader and the Professor of Eloquence, as Christian slaves, and the enfranchised as turnkeys' assistants. The magic influence of a congenial heart soon drew the Regency-Councillor Flamin into their Cartesian vortex; they had hardly been there eight days, when they had held with him a club at the Chaplain's. He promised them for Easter a sight of their countryman Sebastian; and the noble Matthieu he had at the very beginning brought with him. Mat's liberty-tree was merely a satirical thorn-bush; his satires supplied the place of principles. Only a single one of the three twins, whom the very evil one with horns and buck's feet,--namely, the Satyr[14]--rode, could properly like the biting _Evangelist_ and false _Apostle_ of liberty; for in a clear, bright head every word of wit and lightning from another, assumes a greater lustre, as glowworms gleam brighter in dephlogisticated gas.