Part 2

Through the whole night, a half-lost thundering was heard, as though it murmured in its sleep. In the morning, before sunrise, Karlson and myself stepped out into the wide cloud-tapestried bridal-chamber of nature. The moon approached the double moment of its waning and its fulness. The sun, standing on America as on a burning altar, drove the cloudy incense of its _feu de joie_ high and red into the air; but a morning tempest boiled angrily above it, and darted its fierce lightnings to meet his ascending rays. The oppressive heat of nature drew longer and louder plaints from the nightingales, and evanescent aroma from the long flower-meads. Heavy warm drops were pressed from the clouds, and beat loudly on the stream and on the foliage. Only the Mittagshorn, the pinnacle of the Pyrenees, stood brightly and clearly in the heavenly blue. Now a gust of wind from the waning moon dispersed the raging storm, and the sun stood victoriously under a triumphal arch of lightnings. The wind restored the heaven's blue, and dashed the rain behind the earth, and around the dazzling sun-diamond there lay only the silvered fringes of the once threatening clouds.

O my Victor, what a new-born day was now on earth, encamped in the glorious valley. The nightingales and the larks loudly sung its welcome, the rosechafers rustled round its lily garlands, and the eagle, riding on the highest cloud, surveyed it from mountain to mountain. How rurally all things surrounded the serpentine field-embracing Adour. The marble walls, not raised by human skill, surround its flower-beds like large vases, and the Pyrenees, with their high tops, watch over and protect the lowly scattered shepherd huts. Tranquil Tempe! May a storm never disturb thy gardens and thy murmuring Adour. May a stronger one never visit thee, than would gently rock the cradle of nature, or dash a bee from the honey-dew of the wheat-sheaf, or force but a single drop from the waterfall upon the flowers of thy shores.

You must not think that I am placing my paintbrushes at my side to copy the heavenly rounded valley by the measure of art for you; I will let you peep into this picture-book of nature as chance shall turn each succeeding page. My stations will lead you through its different chambers, in which the rich dowry of Spring, like that of a king's daughter, is placed for show. But truly it is a more glorious thing to see the whole dowry disposed over the person of the royal bride herself.

A servant seeking the chaplain, roused us both from our reverie. We saw him advance towards a gentleman standing on the banks of the Adour, who slowly turned down his rolled-up shirt-sleeves. It was the chaplain, who had been catching crabs during the storm, and had subsequently fished. As I knew that his hairy hand had worked for the food of the critical, as well as his own philosophy, with trowel and mortar, with pen and ink, I boldly advanced towards him, and told him what I was writing. But the coarse, obstinate, yet timid free-mason, coldly welcomed me in a language as broad as his own frosty visage.

He despises biographers; for the windows of a philosophical audience are too high,--perhaps, as in ancient temples, in the roof,--so that they cannot see into the streets of real life, as, according to Winkelmann, the Roman windows were architecturally as high. Lord Rochester is said to have been continually drunk during a whole quintennium; but such a chaplain is capable of being _sober_ for an entire decennium. A man like this bites the buds of all powerful truths, experiences, and fictions, as ants bite the buds from corn-seeds, that they may not fructify, but wither and die and form building materials.

When the Chaplain left me to join the Baron, as consecrator of the marriage sacrament, I found Karlson in the dustrain of a near cascade. Round him, almost close to our windows, the hermitages of the farmers waded in green foliage, with the fresh harvest wreath roofed by faded ones; and inside, there bloomed families, outside, elms. He showed me Gione's card, which, he said, she had given him before her marriage. But it was not so; he had found it on the moss near the cascade. It represented a Roman landscape, and beside the living fountain was the pictured one of Tivoli, and on a stone in the foreground Gione's name was written. Such a printed trifle, a beloved name shortly before its sublunar annihilation, moves the whole heart with a succession of pleasing reflections.

Karlson went to the ceremony. I remained alone under the splendid blue heaven, and rejoiced that all the inhabitants of Campan wore its livery, the blue, which we had yesterday mistaken for black.

I will not hide from you that during the coupling, softened by the many beauties of spring, I lost myself in Nadine's equally charming ones, which were an undiscovered Central Africa for me, while I wished she were as warm. After eight or ten dreams, I saw the beautiful couples cross my path. How earnestly glad and serene we all stood under the spring music of flutes and pipes, and harps and warbling, which were living around us, with and without wings. Gione and Karlson concealed an equal emotion, as at an almost equal fate. Wilhelmi, who is, as a comet, sometimes in the burning, sometimes in the freezing point of a sun, requires no joys than those of others to make him happy. But a tear stood in Nadine's bright eye, which could not be smiled or looked away. Her heart seemed to me to resemble the earth, whose exterior is cold, but which carries in its centre a latent heat. And yesterday her whole being seemed so mirthful and so gay!

We never make more erroneous conclusions in our opinions on any subject than on woman's cheerfulness. Oh! how many of these charming beings there are, who decay unvalued, who, while jesting, despair, and while joking, bleed to death; who hide their merry laughing eyes behind a wall, as behind a fan, to give glad vent to their long-restrained tears; who pay for a merry day by a tearful night, just as an unusually clear, transparent, and fogless air betokens rain. Remember the beautiful N. N., and also her youngest sister. In the mean time, the charming, sun-variegated dew-drop under Nadine's eye was balanced by a wart of half the size, the solitaire among her personal charms.

Wilhelmi's lyric and dithyrambic head was filled with projects for pleasure, and with the eagerness of delight, he demanded a hasty determination concerning the proper use and enjoyment of the day. "O yes," said I, quickly and impertinently, "life flies to-day on a minute-hand, like an alarum it winds off; but how shall we form a plan, a good plan?" Nadine, who had arranged everything beforehand with the bridegroom, replied: "I think we need none for such a delightful day, and such a charming valley. We will pilgrimize carelessly along the banks of the Adour, the length of the Vale, and rest at every new flower, and at every bud, and in the evening we will sail back by moonlight! That would be quite Arcadian and shepherd-like in this Arcadia. Will you all? You certainly will, dearest sister?" "O yes," said Gione, "for I think we are as yet all strangers to the charms of this paradise." The Baron seemed to hesitate before giving his consent, and said: "It depends whether the ladies can walk two and a quarter miles in one day."[7] I was mad with joy, and cried, "Charming!" Such a long horizontal heaven-journey, such a melodious Arpeggio through the chords of delight was an old innate wish of my youth. I imparted my delight to the Chaplain, to whose feelings this _voyage pitturesque_ was as repugnant as a Good Friday procession, and to whom, instead of this heaven-way, that of Hoefer[8] would have been more acceptable, because he would rather have remained at home to read, and because he did not enjoy the Epopee of nature as a man, nor scan it as a naturalist, but like an usher, separated and divided it, for practice in building up again. I said to him: "If we two will be shepherds, representing the old Myrtil and Phylax, it would be interesting. You know best that whims should be ten times less bold before ladies and refined ears than on print, and that for such people it has to be filtered through so many filtering-papers and strainers, that I would not give a proof-sheet for it after the process."

A hired country-house, at the end of the valley, was the architectural Eden with which Wilhelmi intended to surprise and delight his bride in this botanic one. But Nadine alone knew it.

In as many moments as a swan would take to spread his wings and rise, we were all ready. I do not blame man for making preparations for the examination for death, but for no (shorter) journey. The long _hunt_ destroys the game of enjoyment. I, for my part, never think of starting until I am on the road.

Wilhelmi loaded himself with his bride's guitar; Karlson carried a portable ice-cellar. The ladies had their parasols; the Chaplain and I had nothing. I whispered to the shallow Phylax,--so I can now call him, and myself the old Myrtil,--"Sir Chaplain, we rebel against all good manners if we follow empty-handed." He immediately offered himself to Gione, as pack-horse, wagon, and carrier for her--parasol. But clever genius prompted me to return to Karlson's chamber, and bring two cushions from the sofa, and I returned with these twins in my arms; nothing could have been more appropriate, as the ladies sat down a thousand times on the way, and could not have dipped their silken elbows in the juicy paint of the flowers. To his vexation, Phylax was obliged to carry the soft block in his arms; I hung the other one, like a stick, to my thumb. At last we started.

We advanced towards the Pyrenees. Corn-fields, waterfalls, shepherd huts, marble blocks, woods and grottoes, animated by the vascular system of the many-branched Adour, passed beautifully before our eyes, and we were forced to leave them behind, like the bright years of youth changed into dreams by the stern hand of Time.

Ah, Victor, travelling alone is life, as life, on the contrary, is only a journey. And if, like certain shell-fish, I could only push myself on with one foot, or, like sea-nettles and women, I could only progress six lines in a quarter of an hour, or if I lived under Fritz II. or Fritz I. (Lycurgus), who both forbade a long journey, I would make a short one, that I might not perish like the loach, which languishes in every vessel, if not shaken.

How spirited, how poetical, how inventive can we not be while we run onwards. As Montaigne, Rousseau, and the sea-nettle only shine when they move on. By Heaven! it is no wonder that man rises and will go on; for does not the sun follow the pedestrian from tree to tree? does not its reflected likeness swim after him in the water? do not landscapes, mountains, hills, men, rapidly changing, come and go? and does not Freedom's breath blow on the ever-varying Eden, when, released from the neck and heart-breaking chains of narrow circumstances, we fly freely and gladly, as in dreams, over ever-new scenes.

For unfortunately the bell-glass over men and melons, which at first is covered by a broken bottle, must always be raised higher and higher, and at last removed entirely. At first, a man will go into the next town, then to the university, then to an important residency, then--if he has only written twenty lines--to Weimar, and finally, to Italy or to heaven. And if the planets were stringed together on a cord, and near each other, or if the rays of light were roads, and the atoms of light bridges, then surely would post-houses be erected in Uranus, and the insatiable inner man--for the outer one is so very satiable--would go longing and roaming from planet to planet.----

Therefore, my Victor, nothing is confined in so many prison-walls as is this our human self. And our cages are enclosed, onion-like, one in the other. Tour and my _self_ are imprisoned not only on this earth, but in this King's Bench are the town walls; in these our four walls surround us; in the four walls, the arm-chair or the bed; in this again, the shirt or the coat, or both; and lastly, the body. And, to be minute (according to Soemmering), in the brain crevices, the duck's pond.---- Start at the fatal many-sided suite of houses of correction which surround thy_self_?----

503d STATION.

Lampoon on the Chaplain.--Praise of Him.--The Diamond.--Opinions against Immortality.--Eden Jokes.

We two fellow-carriers formed the rear-guard. I wished to enter into discourse, but Phylax had a very poor opinion of me; at most he thought me a fickle sentimentalist who only portrays feelings. Yet feelings are the sponge of atmospheric air, which the poet, on his high Parnassus, as well as the philosophical diver in his depths, _must_ hold in his mouth, and yet poetry has cast an earlier light on many obscure works of nature than philosophy, as the dark _new moon_ borrows light from _Venus_.

But the philosopher sins against poets more than you sin against the followers of Kant, from whom you seem to expect that they shall write pleasingly. Your arguments are ideas, not reasonings, when you say that philosophy's attendants are like those of Turkish ladies, mute, black, and deformed; that the philosophical market-place is a _forium morionum_,[9] and that beauty is forbidden to philosophers, as it was to the Helots, who were killed for possessing it. Is it not evident that a certain barbarous, un-German, far-fetched language is more an ornament than a detriment to it. Oracles despise grace, _vox dei sol[oe]cismus_, i. e. a Kantist cannot be read,--he must be studied. Further, it is not beneath a philosopher to enrich the language instead of the science. For some other may seek the ideas for the terms, and find them, as animals were found for the Ammonites. Therefore the Greeks have the same term for _word_ and _knowledge_, which combination was at last deified. The philosopher should always write over his door _pour l'oudalgie_,[10] instead of "here lives a dentist." This is the best reason, except a second one, why the philosopher, especially the Kantist, as I saw in Phylax, needs not books, nor men, nor experience, nor chemistry, botany, the fine arts, nor natural history. He can and must decipher the positive, the material, the given number, the unknown X. He creates the term, and sucks, as children often do,--it may suffocate them,--his own blistered tongue.

I must return to the company! As the Chaplain carried his walking-stick, or rather walking-tree of a cushion, with the greatest indifference towards me, I wished to prejudice him for me by a panegyric at the expense of Kant. I said to him: "It surprised me that the philosophers should have suffered Kant to have made so great a distinction between them and artists, and only allowed the merit of genius to the latter. He says, in Sec. 47 of his 'Kritik der Urtheilkraft,' 'In sciences, the greatest inventor is only distinguished from the most labored imitator and apprentice by gradation; but from, those whom nature has gifted for beautiful nature, he is specifically distinguished.' This is derogatory, Sir Chaplain, and besides, not true. Why can Kant, then, only make Kantists, but no Kants?[11] Are new systems discovered by syllogisms, yet they are proved and tried by them? Can, then, the connection of a new philosophical idea with the old one better explain or facilitate its comprehension than the same connection which each new poetic one must have with old ones, which are the means of its creation. Sir Chaplain, I know not whom Kant has most sinned against, Truth, himself, or his school. Leibnitz's 'Monadology,' _harmonia praestabilita_, &c., are as much pure, brilliant emanations of genius, as any beaming form in Shakespeare or Homer. Besides, Leibnitz is a genial almighty Demiurg in the philosophical world, its greatest and first circumnavigator, and who, happier than Archimedes, found in his genius the standing-point from which he might move the philosophical _universa_, and play with worlds. He was an extraordinary spirit, he threw new chains on the earth, but he himself bore none: I think you agree with me, Sir Chaplain!" He replied, He did not, that the critical philosophy knew what to make of Leibnitz's experiments, his immaterial world, the asserted approximation of the definite to the indefinite line, and how to honor genius. In short, I had rather angered than conquered him.

Karlson, whom even Amor's torch could not blind to the philosophical one, took as much interest in our war as could be taken with the ears. Fortunately we all stood still. A small diamond had fallen from Nadine's necklace, and she sought for the silver petrified spark in the grass. Strange that a man always hopes to find a thing on the spot where he perceives his loss. Nadine looked for her hardened dew-drop on the sparkling, spangled mead. As a bright diamond of the first water, it was so easily mistaken for a dew-drop, that I remarked, seeing one in Nadine's breast-rose, "Everything is covered with soft diamonds, and who will find the hard one? The dew in your rose sparkles as brightly as the lost stone." She looked down, and in the rose-cup lay the sought-for gem! It was thought I had been clever, and I was angry with myself for having been so stupid. But Nadine liked me no less for it, and that was reward enough.

As the Adour bent, not an arm, but a finger, around this gay moss-bank and bees' sugar-field, the whole company sat among the bees and the flowers, and the cushion-bearers laid down their burdens. Nadine said, playfully, "If flowers have souls, the bees, whose nurses they are, must seem to them like dear sucking children." "They have," said Karlson, "souls like frozen window flowers, or like the tree of Petit,[12] which I once showed to you, or like pyramids of alum." "O, you always destroy, sir," said Gione. "Nadine and I once painted to ourselves an elysium for the souls of faded flowers." "I believe in a middle path for flowers after their death," said Wilhelmi, seriously; "the souls of lilies probably go into woman's forehead; hyacinth and forget-me-not souls into woman's eyes, and rose souls into lips and cheeks." I added, "It is a fortunate coincidence for this hypothesis, that a girl has perceptibly more color from the departing soul at the moment when she breaks or kills a rose."

Joyfully and affectionately we continued our journey. Only into my carrier-companion the souls of thistles and sloes seemed to have entered. This play of ideas and this politeness in argument provoked him. Only Karlson pleased him.

At last the Chaplain said to me: "No immortality but that of moral beings can be discussed, and with them it is a postulate or apprenticeship of practical sense. For as a full conformity of the human will to the moral law, with which the just Creator never can dispense, is quite unattainable by a finite being, an eternally continuing progress, i. e. an unceasing duration, must contain and prove this conformity in God's eyes, who overlooks the everlasting course. Therefore our immortality is necessary."

Karlson stood still at Gione's side, that we might approach, and said: "Dear philosopher, pray take from this proof the boldness or the indistinctness which it has for laymen. How can we imagine the supervision, i. e. the termination, of an infinite, a never-ending course? or how will you make the eternity of time harmonize with the eternity of the moral requirements. How can a righteousness, scattered and dispersed over an interminable period of time, satisfy Divine Justice, which must require this righteousness in each portion of the period. And has the constant approximation of man towards this state of purity been proved? And will not the number, if not the grossness of faults, in this infinite space, increase with the number of virtues? And what comparison will the list of faults bear to that of the virtues at the examination? But let us leave that also. Will, in the sight of the Divine eye, the moral purity of two different beings--for instance, a seraph and a man, or of two different men, as Robespierre and Socrates--be equally contained in two equally long, i. e. eternal, courses of time? If on comparing the two, a difference appear, then one of them cannot have attained the so-called perfection, and must still be mortal."

The Chaplain answered: "But Kant does not intend to demonstrate immortality by this argument. He says even, that it has been left so uncertain in order that free, pure will, and no selfish views, shall prompt our aspirations to immortality." "Strange," said Karlson. "But as we have now discovered this intention, its object would be defeated. Philosophers ought then to imitate me, and attack immortality to the advantage of virtue. It is a strange axiom to presuppose the truth of an opinion from its indemonstrability. Either immortality can be proved, then one half of your argument is right, or it cannot, then the whole of it is wrong. Besides, if the belief in immortality makes virtue selfish, the experience of it in the next world would make it more so. Does the belief in it deter the common man from doing what his confessor forbids, and forgives him? As little as the first stroke of apoplexy deters the drunkard from rushing to the second."

504th STATION.

Flower Toying.

Karlson joined the others in conversation, and Phylax was enraged that he could not triumph,--not even dispute. I said to him, that my opinions agreed with his, though not on the same grounds, and that, uniting, we would subsequently together issue forth and attack Karlson.

I then went with my silken club to Nadine, and on a rose-bush showed her the flying light-magnets, the shining will-o'-the-wisps of night, the brown glowworms which she had never seen by day. I colonized a box with them for a living firework in the evening. Chance had romantically bent a bright rose-bush between graceful bluebells, on a green marble boundary stone; its foliage had the appearance of being seamed with black glowworms;[13] the lily-chafer hung like gold embroidery on the pale, ripe roses; long-legged, shining gnats ran glittering over the thorns; the flower-divers and nectary treasure-diggers, the bees, covered the rose-cups with new thorns; the butterflies, like moving tints, like Epicurean colors, gently floated round the branch's gay world. I cannot tell you how this glance, turned from the vast whole on to a beautiful small portion, gave a warmer glow to our hearts and to nature. Instead of the hand, we could only hold, like children, the fingers of the great mother of life, and reverently kiss them. By the creation, God became human for men, as therefore for angels an angel,--like the sun whose bright immensity the painter gently divides into the beauties of a human face.

Wilhelmi said, that, to rise into Eden or Arcadia, he would need no larger wings than the four of a butterfly. What a poetical, paradisaical existence, like the papilio, to roam without stomach or hunger, among buds and flowers, to suffer no long night, no winter, and no storm, to toy away one's life in a delightful chase for another papilio, or to nestle, like the flower-colored bird of paradise, among lemon-blossoms, to float round blooming honey-cups, and to be rocked in silken cradles!

Blissfully we proceeded on our way, and each new step drove an exciting blood-drop to our warmed hearts. I said to the Chaplain, that the temple of nature had been changed into a concert-hall for me, and every vocal into instrumental music. Victor! should not philosophy and the philosophers imitate electric bodies, which not only enlighten, but also attract? The soul's wine will indeed ever taste of the bodily barrel-hoops, but the soul is scarcely spirit-like enough only to serve as a body to another soul.

505th STATION.