Part 24

We should all think of death as a less hideous object, if it simply untenanted our bodies of a spirit, without corrupting them; secondly, if the grief which we experience at the spectacle of our friends' graves were not by some confusion of the mind blended with the image of our own; thirdly, if we had not in this life seated ourselves in a warm domestic nest, which we are unwilling to quit for the cold blue regions of the unfathomable heavens; finally,--if death were denied to us. Once in dreams I saw a human being of heavenly intellectual faculties, and his aspirations were heavenly; but he was chained (methought) eternally to the earth. The immortal old man had five great wounds in his happiness--five worms that gnawed forever at his heart: he was unhappy in springtime, because _that_ is a season of hope--and rich with phantoms of far happier days than any which this aceldama of earth can realize. He was unhappy at the sound of music, which dilates the heart of man into its whole capacity for the infinite, and he cried aloud,--"Away, away! Thou speakest of things which throughout my endless life I have found not, and shall not find!" He was unhappy at the remembrance of earthly affections and dissevered hearts: for love is a plant which may bud in this life, but it must flourish in another. He was unhappy under the glorious spectacle of the starry host, and ejaculated forever in his heart,--"So then I am parted from you to all eternity by an impassable abyss: the great universe of suns is above, below, and round about me: but I am chained to a little ball of dust and ashes." He was unhappy before the great ideas of Virtue--of Truth--and of God; because he knew how feeble are the approximations to them which a son of earth can make. But this was a dream: God be thanked, that in reality there is no such craving and asking eye directed upwards to heaven--to which death will not one day bring an answer!

IMAGINATION UNTAMED BY THE COARSER REALITIES OF LIFE.

Happy is every actor in the guilty drama of life, to whom the higher illusion within supplies or conceals the external illusion; to whom, in the tumult of his part and its intellectual interest, the bungling landscapes of the stage have the bloom and reality of nature, and whom the loud parting and shocking of the scenes disturb not in his dream!

SATIRICAL NOTICE OF REVIEWERS.

In Swabia, in Saxony, in Pomerania, are towns in which are stationed a strange sort of officers,--valuers of author's flesh, something like our old market-lookers in this town. They are commonly called tasters (or _Praegustatores_) because they eat a mouthful of every book beforehand, and tell the people whether its flavor be good. We authors, in spite, call them _reviewers_: but I believe an action of defamation would lie against us for such bad words. The tasters write no books themselves; consequently they have the more time to look over and tax those of other people. Or, if they do sometimes write books, they are bad ones: which again is very advantageous to them: for who can understand the theory of badness in other people's books so well as those who have learned it by practice in their own? They are reputed the guardians of literature and the literati for the same reason that St. Nepomuk is the patron saint of bridges and of all who pass over them,--namely, because he himself once lost his life from a bridge.

FEMALE TONGUES.

Hippel, the author of the book "Upon Marriage," says, "A woman, that does not talk, must be a stupid woman." But Hippel is an author whose opinions it is more safe to admire than to adopt. The most intelligent women are often silent amongst women; and again the most stupid and the most silent are often neither one nor the other except amongst men. In general the current remark upon men is valid also with respect to women,--that those for the most part are the greatest thinkers who are the least talkers; as frogs cease to croak when _light_ is brought to the water edge. However, in fact, the disproportionate talking of women arises out of the sedentariness of their labors: sedentary artisans,--as tailors, shoemakers, weavers,--have this habit as well as hypochondriacal tendencies in common with women. Apes do not talk, as savages say, that they may not be set to work: but women often talk double their share--even _because_ they work.

FORGIVENESS.

Nothing is more moving to man than the spectacle of reconciliation: our weaknesses are thus indemnified, and are not too costly--being the price we pay for the hour of forgiveness: and the archangel, who has never felt anger, has reason to envy the man who subdues it. When thou forgivest,--the man, who has pierced thy heart, stands to thee in the relation of the sea-worm that perforates the shell of the muscle, which straightway closes the wound with a pearl.

* * *

The graves of the best of men, of the noblest martyrs, are like the graves of the Herrnhuters (the Moravian brethren)--level, and undistinguishable from the universal earth: and, if the earth could give up her secrets, our whole globe would appear a Westminster Abbey laid flat. Ah! what a multitude of tears, what myriads of bloody drops have been shed in secrecy about the three corner-trees of earth,--the tree of life, the tree of knowledge, and the tree of freedom,--shed, but never reckoned! It is only great periods of calamity that reveal to us our great men, as comets are revealed by total eclipses of the sun. Not merely upon the field of battle, but also upon the consecrated soil of virtue--and upon the classic ground of truth, thousands of _nameless_ heroes must fall and struggle to build up the footstool from which history surveys the _one_ hero, whose name is embalmed, bleeding--conquering--and resplendent. The grandest of heroic deeds are those which are performed within four walls and in domestic privacy. And, because history records only the self-sacrifices of the male sex, and because she dips her pen only in blood,--therefore is it that in the eyes of the unseen spirit of the world our annals appear doubtless far more beautiful and noble than in our own.

THE GRANDEUR OF MAN IN HIS LITTLENESS.

Man upon this earth would be vanity and hollowness, dust and ashes, vapor and a bubble,--were it not that he felt himself to be so. That it is possible for him to harbor such a feeling,--_this_, by implying a comparison of himself with something higher in himself, _this_ is it which makes him the immortal creature that he is.

NIGHT.

The earth is every day overspread with the veil of night for the same reason as the cages of birds are darkened,--namely, that we may the more readily apprehend the higher harmonies of thought in the hush and quiet of darkness. Thoughts, which day turns into smoke and mist, stand about us in the night as lights and flames: even as the column which fluctuates above the crater of Vesuvius, in the daytime appears a pillar of cloud, but by night a pillar of fire.

THE STARS.

Look up, and behold the eternal fields of light that lie round about the throne of God. Had no star ever appeared in the heavens, to man there would have been no heavens; and he would have laid himself down to his last sleep, in a spirit of anguish, as upon a gloomy earth vaulted over by a material arch--solid and impervious.

MARTYRDOM.

To die for the truth--is not to die for one's country, but to die for the world. Truth, like the _Venus del Medici_, will pass down in thirty fragments to posterity: but posterity will collect and recompose them into a goddess. Then also thy temple, O eternal Truth! that now stands half below the earth--made hollow by the sepulchres of its witnesses, will raise itself in the total majesty of its proportions; and will stand in monumental granite; and every pillar on which it rests will be fixed in the grave of a martyr.

THE QUARRELS OF FRIENDS.

Why is it that the most fervent love becomes more fervent by brief interruption and reconciliation? and why must a storm agitate our affections before they can raise the highest rainbow of peace? Ah! for this reason it is--because all passions feel their object to be as eternal as themselves, and no love can admit the feeling that the beloved object should die. And under this feeling of imperishableness it is that we hard fields of ice shock together so harshly, whilst all the while under the sunbeams of a little space of seventy years we are rapidly dissolving.

DREAMING.

But for dreams, that lay Mosaic worlds tessellated with flowers and jewels before the blind sleeper, and surround the recumbent living with the figures of the dead in the upright attitude of life, the time would be too long before we are allowed to rejoin our brothers, parents, friends: every year we should become more and more painfully sensible of the desolation made around us by death, if sleep--the ante-chamber of the grave--were not hung by dreams with the busts of those who live in the other world.

TWO DIVISIONS OF PHILOSOPHIC MINDS.

There are two very different classes of philosophical heads--which, since Kant has introduced into philosophy the idea of positive and negative quantities, I shall willingly classify by means of that distinction. The positive intellect is, like the poet, in conjunction with the outer world, the father of an inner world; and, like the poet also, holds up a transforming mirror in which the entangled and distorted members as they are seen in our actual experience enter into new combinations which compose a fair and luminous world: the hypothesis of Idealism (i. e. the Fichtean system) the Monads and the Pre-established Harmony of Leibnitz--and Spinozism are all births of a genial moment, and not the wooden carving of logical toil. Such men therefore as Leibnitz, Plato, Herder, &c., I call positive intellects; because they seek and yield the positive; and because their inner world, having raised itself higher out of the water than in others, thereby overlooks a larger prospect of island and continents. A negative head, on the other hand, discovers by its acuteness--not any positive truths, but the negative (i. e. the errors) of other people. Such an intellect, as for example Bayle, one of the greatest of that class,--appraises the funds of others, rather than brings any fresh funds of his own. In lieu of the obscure ideas which he finds he gives us clear ones: but in this there is no positive accession to our knowledge; for all that the clear idea contains in development exists already by implication in the obscure idea. Negative intellects of every age are unanimous in their abhorrence of everything positive. Impulse, feeling, instinct--everything, in short, which is incomprehensible, they can endure just once--that is, at the summit of their chain of arguments as a sort of hook on which they may hang them,--but never afterwards.

DIGNITY OF MAN IN SELF-SACRIFICE.

That for which man offers up his blood or his property must be more valuable than they. A good man does not fight with half the courage for his own life that he shows in the protection of another's. The mother, who will hazard nothing for herself, will hazard all in defence of her child:--in short, only for the nobility within us--only for virtue, will man open his veins and offer up his spirit: but this nobility--this virtue--presents different phases: with the Christian martyr, it is faith; with the savage, it is honor; with the republican, it is liberty.

FANCY.

Fancy can lay only the past and the future under her copying-paper: and every actual presence of the object sets limits to her power: just as water distilled from roses, according to the old naturalists, lost its power exactly at the periodical blooming of the rose.

* * *

The older, the more tranquil, and pious a man is, so much the more holy does he esteem all that is _innate_, that is, _feeling_ and _power_; whereas in the estimate of the multitude whatsoever is _self-acquired_, the ability of practice and science in general has an undue pre-eminence; for the latter is universally appreciated, and therefore even by those who have it not, but the former not at all. In the twilight and the moonshine the fixed stars, which are suns, retire and veil themselves in obscurity; whilst the planets, which are simply earths, preserve their borrowed light unobscured. The elder races of men, amongst whom man _was_ more, though he had not yet _become_ so much, had a childlike feeling of sympathy with all the gifts of the Infinite--for example, with strength--beauty--and good fortune; and even the _involuntary_ had a sanctity in their eyes, and was to them a prophecy and a revelation: hence the value they ascribed, and the art of interpretation they applied, to the speeches of children--of madmen--of drunkards--and of dreamers.

* * *

As the blind man knows not light, and through that ignorance also of necessity knows not darkness,--so likewise, but for disinterestedness we should know nothing of selfishness, but for slavery nothing of freedom: there are perhaps in this world many things which remain obscure to us for want of alternating with their opposites.

* * *

Derham remarks in his Physico-theology that the deaf hear best in the midst of noise, as, for instance, during the ringing of bells, &c. This must be the reason, I suppose, that the thundering of drums, cannons, &c., accompany the entrance into cities of princes and ministers, who are generally rather deaf, in order that they may the better hear the petitions and complaints of the people.

MISCELLANEOUS PIECES.

REMINISCENCES OF THE BEST HOURS OF LIFE FOR THE HOUR OF DEATH.

"Give me," said Herder to his son, as he lay in the parched weariness of his last illness,--"give me a great thought, that I may quicken myself with it."

It marks a strange perversity in human nature, that we are wont to offer nothing but images of terror--no stars of cheering light--to those who lie imprisoned in the darkness of a sick-bed, when the glitter of the dew of life is waxing gray and dim before them. It is indeed hard that lamentations and emotions are frequently vented upon the dying, which would be withheld from the living in all their vigor; as if the sick patient was to console those in health. There stands no spirit in the closeness of a sick-chamber to awaken a cheering smile on that nerveless, colorless countenance; but only confessors, lawyers, and doctors, who order everything, and relatives who lament at everything. There stands no lofty spirit, elevated above the circumstance of sorrow, to conduct the prostrate soul of the sufferer, thirsty for the refreshment of joy, back to the old springtide waters of pious recollection; and so to mingle these with the last ecstasies of life, as to give the dying man a foreboding of his transition to another state. On the contrary, the death-bed is narrowed into a coffin without a lid. The value of life is enhanced to the departing one by lies which promise cure, or words which proffer consolation; the bier is represented as a scaffold, the harsh discord of life is trumpeted into the ears which survive long after the eyes are dead, instead of letting life ebb away like an echo in sounds ever deeper, though fainter. Nevertheless, man has this of good in him, that he recalls the slightest joy which he has shared with a dying person, far rather than a thousand greater pleasures given to a person in health; perhaps because, in the latter case, we hope to repeat and redouble our attentions,--so little do mortals reflect that every pleasure they give or they receive may be the last.

Our exit from life would therefore be greatly more painful than our entrance into it, were it not that our good mother Nature had previously mitigated its sufferings, by gently bearing her children from one world into another when they are already heavy with sleep. For in the hour before the last she allows a breastplate of indifference toward the survivors to freeze about the heart of the lamented one; and in the hour immediately preceding dissolution (as we learn from those who have recovered from apparent death, and from the demeanor of many dying persons), the brain is, as it were, inundated and watered by faint eddies of bliss, comparable to nothing upon earth better than to the ineffable sensations felt by a patient under magnetic treatment.

We can by no means know how high these sensations of dying may reach, as we have accounts of them from none but those in whom the process has been interrupted; nor can we ascertain whether it is not these ecstatical transports which exhaust life more than the convulsions of pain, and which loosen the tie of this terrestrial state in some unknown heaven.

The history of the dying is a serious and prodigious history, but on earth its leaves will never be unrolled.

In the little village of Heim, Gottreich Hartmann resided with his old father, who was a curate; and although the old man had wellnigh outlived all those whom he had loved, he was made happy by his son. Gottreich discharged his duties for him in the parish, not so much in aid of his parent's unflinching vigor, as to satisfy his own energy, and to give his father the exquisite gratification of being edified by his child and companion.

In Gottreich there thrilled a spirit of true poetry; he was not, like the greater number of poetical young men, a bulbous plant, which, when it has sent forth its own flower, fattens its unseemly fruit underground; but he was a tree which crowned its variegated blossoms with sweet and beautiful fruits; and these buds were as yet coiled up from the warmth of the earliest springtide of a poet's life.

His father had had in his youth a poet's ardor of like intensity, but it was not favored by the times; for in the last century many a spirit which might have soared was engaged to the pulpit or the law-court, because the old-fashioned middle classes were convinced that their offspring would find richer pasture on the meadow and in the valley than on the peaks of the mountain of the Muses.

Nevertheless, the repressed spirit of a poet, when it cannot exhale itself in creation, recoils but the more closely into the depths of his heart. His unuttered feelings speak in his motions as with a voice, and his actions express his imagery, and in this manner the poet may live as long as the man; just as the short-lived butterfly may last out the long, hard winter in its chrysalis state, if it has not burst its prison in the preceding summer.

Such had been the life of the elder Hartmann; and yet more beautiful was it, because the virginal soul of the poet lives in the offices of religion, as in a nun's cell; and the twin sisters Piety and Poetry are wont to dwell together and stand by one another.

How beautiful and how pure is the position of God's ministers! All that is good dwells around them,--religion, poetry, and the life of a shepherd of souls; whilst other professions oft serve only to choke up this goodly neighborhood. Son and father seemed to live in one another, and on the site of filial and paternal love there arose the structure of a rare and singular friendship. Gottreich not only cheered his father by the new birth of his lost poet's youth, but by the still more beautiful similarity of their faith. In days gone by, a minister who sent his son to the public theological schools might expect him to return the sworn antagonist of all that he had himself daily prayed to at the altar in the discharge of his office: the son returned to his father's roof as a missionary sent to convert the heathen, or as an antichrist. There may have been sorrows of a father, which, though all unspoken, were deeper than a mother's sorrows. But times are perhaps better now.

Gottreich, though he entered the high schools with his share of the uppish, quibbling of early youth, returned with the faith of his ancestors and of his father. For he had studied under instructors who had taught him to cling rather to the teachings of the old faith than to the ingenious explanations of the commentators, and who had exposed to the light alone what is serviceable to man, as to a plant, and to its outward growth, but not the roots perniciously. Thus the father found again his old Christian heart sending forth new shoots in the bosom of his Gottreich, and moreover the best justification of the convictions of his life and of his love.

If it be pain to us to love and at the same time to contradict, to refuse with the head what the heart grants, it is all the sweeter to us to find ourselves and our faith transplanted forwards in a younger being. Life is then a beautiful night, in which not one star goes down but another rises in its place.

Gottreich possessed a paradise, in which he labored as his father's gardener; he was at once the wife, the brother, the friend, the all that is to be loved by man, of his parent. Every Sunday brought him a new pleasure, that of preaching a sermon before his father. He displayed so much power in his pulpit eloquence, that he seemed to labor more for the elevation and edification of his father than for the enlightenment of the common people; though he held a maxim, which I take to be far from erroneous, that the highest subjects of intellectual speculation are good for the people as for children, and that _man can only learn to rise, from the consideration of that which he cannot surmount_. If the eye of the old man was moistened, or if his hands were suddenly folded in an attitude of prayer, the Sunday became the holiest of festivals; and many a festival has there been in that quiet little parsonage, whose festivity no one understood and no one perceived. He who looks upon sermon-preaching and sermon-hearing as a dull pleasure, will but little understand the zest with which the two friends conversed on discourses delivered, and on those yet to come, as if pulpit-criticism was as engrossing as the criticism of the stage. The approbation and the love of an energetic old man like Hartmann, whose spiritual limbs had by no means stiffened on the chilly ridge of years, could not but exercise a powerful influence on a young man like Gottreich, who, more tenderly and delicately formed both in body and mind, was wont to shoot forth in loftier and more rapid flame.