Part 36

The Alpine echoes sounded back far into the night and sank to a murmuring breath, which resembled a memory, not out of youth, but out of the depths of childhood. We reeled, filled full of enjoyment, through dew-dripping bushes and through drooping, drowsy and dew-drunken meadows, from which we plucked slumbering flowers, in order to see on the morrow their folded form in sleep. We thought upon the sunless paths of this day's morning; we passed along without a sound before the little Lilliputian house and garden, and the children and the bread-baking housewife were clasped and entwined in the deathlike arms of slumber. The hours had rolled the moon, like a stone of Sysiphus, up the steep of heaven, and let it roll down again.[97] In the east stars rose, in the west stars set, in mid-heaven little starlets sent off from the earth exploded into fragments--but eternity stood dumb and great beside God, and all passed away before it and all arose before its face. The field of life and of infinity hung down near and low above us, like _one_ flash, and all that is great, all that is immortal, all the dead and all angels lifted the human spirits into their blue circle and sank to meet it....

At last, I taking the hand of my sister and Gustavus that of Beata, we entered our little Lilienbad stiller, fuller, holier, than we had left it in the morning. Gustavus took leave of me first, saying: "In five days we meet again." He led Beata to her cottage, which blazed in Luna's silver flames. The white summit of the pyramid on the hermitage mount glimmered across out of the depth of its seclusion over the long green avenue to the vale and through the darkness of the night. Beside this pyramid the two happy ones had first given each other their hearts, beside it a friend rested from the toil of life, and its white peak pointed to the place where blooms a fairer spring. They heard the leaves of the terrace whisper, and the Tree of Life under which after set of sun, they had for the second time given their souls to each other.... O ye two good and over-happy beings! at this moment a good seraph is drawing up for you a silvery minute out of the sea of joy which lies in a fairer earth--on this fleeting drop glances the whole perspective of the Eden wherein the angel is; the minute will run down to you, but ah! so soon will it pass by!

Beata gave Gustavus, as a hint for departure, the desired leaf--he pressed the hand from which it came to his mute lips--he could not speak either thanks or farewell--he took her other hand and all within him cried and repeated: "She is truly once more thine and remains so forever," and he must needs weep over his bliss. Beata looked into his overflowing heart, and hers ran over into a tear and yet she knew it not: but when the tear of the holiest eye trickled down the rosy cheek and hung on that rose-leaf with trembling glimmer--when his locking and her locked hands could not wipe it away--when with his flaming face, with his too blissful, bursting heart, he was about to wipe the tear, and bent toward the fairest object on earth like a rapture bending toward virtue, and touched her face with his--then did the angel who loves the earth draw the two purest lips together into an inextinguishable kiss--then did all trees sink out of sight, all suns passed away, all heavens fled, and Gustavus held heaven and earth in a single heart clasped to his breast;--then didst thou, seraph, pass into the beating hearts and gavest them the flames of the immortal love--and thou heardst the breathed sounds fly from the hot lips of Gustavus: "O thou dear! thou undeserved one! and so good! so good!"

Enough--the lofty moment has flown by--the earthly day sends up already its morning-redness into the heavens--let my heart return to its rest and every other heart likewise!

FIFTY-FOURTH, OR SIXTH JOY, SECTION.

Day After This Night.--Beata's Leaf.--Something Memorable.

I ask pardon of the critics, if I made last night too many metaphors and too much fire and noise: a section of joy (as well as the critique upon it) must content itself with the like, when once the author contents himself with a like over-freight of lemon-juice, tea-blossoms, sugar-cane and arrack, as I did.

I did not lie down again to-day; the birds had already begun to sing again, and when my dreams had hardly reproduced the past spectacle some forty times over before my closed eyes, I opened them again, because the sun was blazing around me.

A night through which one has been awake and enjoying himself leaves behind a morning when in a sweet languor one not so much feels and fantasies, when the nightly tones and dances still sound on in our inner ears, when the persons with whom we spent it float before our inner eyes in a lovely twilight, which charms our hearts. In fact, we never love a woman more than after such a night, in the morning before one has breakfasted.

I have thought a thousand times to-day upon my Gustavus, who before day-break began his five days' journey, and of my Ottomar who goes with him. Would that you might never come upon any thorns but such as are hidden under the rose, might never pass under any cloud except one that leaves you the whole blue sky and takes away merely the blazing disc, and that your joys might want one only, namely, that of being able to relate it to us!

All sunlight merely encircled with a magic spell and overflowed like a lofty moonlight before me all the shaded avenues of Lilienbad: the past night seemed to me to reach over into the present day, and I cannot tell how the moon, which was still sinking with its wiped-out luster, like a snow-flake, low in the west, became so welcome and so dear to me. O, pale friend of need and of night! I still think even now of thy Elysian splendor, of thy cooled off rays, wherewith thou accompanyest us by brooks and in leafy lanes, and wherewith thou transformest the sad night into a day seen afar! Magical scene-painter of the future world for which we mourn and weep, as a dead man becomes beautiful, so dost thou paint the second world upon our earthly one, when with all its flowers and people it sleeps or looks up to thee with silent gaze!

I would give up the most distinguished visit to-day in exchange for it, if I could make one to the happy parties of yesterday, but it is not practicable. Even Beata had one to-day from her mother; and my eyes were not able to get a glimpse of anything about her except the five white fingers with which she turned round a flower-pot at her window out of the shadow of a twig. O if our old life and our walks begin again and all live together again, what things the republic of letters will then get to read!

To-day I deliver into its hands nothing more than Beata's safe conduct to Gustavus, because that I have only to copy off. Then I slip out again into the open air, steer once more by a chart I have in my head yesterday's course and, in gathering up as after-flora the scattered flowers our full hands let fall yesterday, I find the higher ones also. One will pardon Beata some passages in the following composition, when I premise that she, perhaps imposed upon by her heart, as well as by her father, who was only a nominal renegade of Catholicism--believed more of the angels and of their worship, than Nicolai and the Smalcald (mercantile) articles can admit. For weak and so often helpless woman, who dares not soar far above this earth, so loves in the hour of need to lay down her prayers and her sighs before a Mary, a saint, an angel; but more self-reliant man will indulgently forbear to censure a delusion which can be so consoling.

"_Wishes for my friend_.

"It is no delusion, that angels, in the midst of their joys, watch over threatened children of men, as the mother amidst her joys and labors guards her children. O ye unknown immortals! does a single and separate heaven shut you in? Do you never pity the defenceless son of earth? Can you never have wiped away greater tears than ours? Ah, if the creator has breathed his love into you as into us, then you certainly descend to this earth and console the besieged heart beneath the moon, hover around the oppressed soul, cover with your hand the parching wound and think on poor human creatures!

"And if here below there walks a spirit who will one day be like you, can you forget your brother?--Angel of joy! be with my friend and thine, when the sun comes, and let fair, holy mornings bloom around him! Be with him when the sun mounts higher--and when toil weighs him down!--Oh take the distant sigh of a sister and friend and cool his therewith! Be with him when the sun declines, and direct his eye to the moon as she rises in white morning-dress and to the broad heavens wherein the moon and thou walk!...

"Angel of tears and of patience! Thou that art oftener about men! Oh, forget my heart and my eye and let them bleed--indeed they do so willingly;--but tranquillize, like death, the heart and the eye of my friend, and show them on the earth nothing but the heavens beyond it. Ah, angel of tears and of patience! Thou knowest the eye and the heart, which pours itself out for him, thou wilt bring his soul before them, as one sets out flowers under the summer rain! But do it not, if it makes him too sad! O, angel of patience! I love thee! I know thee! I shall die in thy arms!

"Angel of friendship!--perhaps thou art the former angel?... Oh!... let thy heavenly wing cover his heart and warm it more tenderly than a human being can--ah, thou on another earth and I on this would weep, if his heart should, like the warm hand pressed upon freezing iron, cleave to a cold heart and tear itself away bleeding!... O shield him! but if thou canst not do it, then let me not learn his misery.

"Oh ye ever blessed ones in other worlds' with you nothing dies, you lose nothing and have all! what you love you clasp to an eternal breast, what you have you hold in eternal hands. Can you then feel in your shining heights above there, in your eternal bond of souls, that human beings here below are torn asunder, that we reach our hands to one another only out of coffins, before they sink; ah, that death is not the only, not the most painful thing that parts human beings?--Ere that snatches us from one another, many a colder hand breaks in and severs soul from soul----then indeed does the eye fail and the heart sink in anguish, just as much as if death had divided them, as in a _total eclipse of the sun_ no less than in the longer _night_ the dew falls, the nightingale mourns, the flower closes in death!

"May all that is good, all that is fair, all that blesses and exalts man be with my friend; and all my wishes are summed up in my silent prayer."

* * * * *

In all which I join, not merely for Gustavus, but for every good soul of my acquaintance and for all others too.

Though it is already eleven o'clock at night, still I must report to the reader something of melancholy beauty, which has just gone by. A singing person passed through our valley, concealed, however, by leaves and shadows, because the moon was not yet up. The voice sang more sweetly than any I ever heard before:

---- No one, nowhere, never. ---- The tear that falls. ---- The angel that shines. ---- There is silence. ---- It suffers. ---- It hopes. ---- I and thou.

Evidently half of each line is wanting, and to every answer the question. It has already occurred to me several times that the _Genius_ who educated our friend under the ground, left him at his departure questions and dissonances, whose answers and solutions he took away with him; I think, too, I have said as much to the reader. Would that Gustavus were here. But I have not the courage to conceive what would be our delight if the Genius himself should introduce himself into our garland of joy at Lilienbad! I still forever hear the long drawn flute-tones from that unknown bosom wail behind the blossoms; but they make me sad. Here lie the ever-sleeping flowers, which I collected today on the path of our last night's ramble, beside the unfolded, waking ones which I have just palled up--they too sadden me. There is nothing I and my readers need more than to begin a new section of joy, so that we may continue our old life.

O Lilienbad! thou appearest only once in the world; and if thou still once more becomest visible thy name is B----zka.

LAST SECTION.

* * * * *

Alas for us unhappy guests of the Spring! It is all over with the pleasures of Lilienbad. The above superscription my brother could still make, before hurrying off to Maussenbach. For there Gustavus lies in _prison_. It is all incomprehensible. My friend Beata sinks under the news we have received and which came to-day in the following letter to my brother from Dr. Fenk. Probably the following Job's-post will conclude this whole book as well as our previous happy days.

* * * * *

"I will not, as a woman would, spare thee, my dear friend, but relate to thee at once the whole extraordinary blow which has smitten our happy hours and most of all those of our two friends.

"Three days after our charming night--dost thou still remember a certain remark of Ottomar about the danger of raptures?--Professor Hoppedizel undertakes to carry out his inconsiderate joke of breaking into the palace of Maussenbach. The sly hunter Robisch was just then away from home; but had gone for fun with thy predecessor, the Government Counsellor Kolb, on a cruise after thieves. Observe, a multitude of persons and circumstances are involved here, which can hardly have been brought together by accident.

"The Professor comes with six comrades, and brings a ladder with him, in order to set it up against a window which had been broken for years and which looks over towards Auenthal. But when he comes up under the window--lo! one is already standing there. He takes it as the most fortunate accident and they go up in a body, almost on each other's heels. At the top a hand reaches out a silver sword-belt as if offering it to some one--the Professor seizes both and leaps in at the window. There he found what appeared to be a thief, who was expecting accomplices on the ladder. The thievish realist, in the fury of desperation falls upon the nominalist--the gallery on the ladder tumbles in after him and increases the fighting melee. The thumps upon the floor startle the listening Roeper less out of his sleep than out of his bed--he alarms the whole house and they his tipstaff--to tell all in a word: in a few minutes, with the fury of a miser saving and clutching his goods, he had made both the humorous and the serious thieves prisoners, however much the true thief might lay about him and however much the Professor might argue. And now all are sitting fast and waiting for thee.

"--Ah! wilt thou be able to bear it--if I tell thee all? The scouts of Kolb and Robisch find around Maussenbach the associates of the captured thief--they penetrate the woods, they go to a cave, as if they knew it led to something--they find a subterranean human world. Oh, that of all men thou to thy sorrow shouldst have been destined to be found there, thou innocent and unfortunate one! Now thy tender heart beats even against a prison wall!--Must I name to thee thy friend Gustavus?--Haste, haste, that the course of things may be changed!

"Lo! not merely on thy breast, but upon mine also has this day laid a heavy load. Canst thou endure that I should tell thee more still?--that it is the merest chance that Ottomar still lives. I carried him the news of our misfortune. With a frightful struggle of his nature, in which every fibre battled with a different horror, he heard me through, and then asked me whether no one had been taken prisoner who had _six_ fingers. 'I took a solemn oath,' said he, 'in that hole in the woods, never to reveal to a soul our _subterranean league_, until an hour before my death. Fenk, I will now divulge the whole secret. My supplications and struggles availed nothing; he told me all, 'Gustavus must be vindicated,' said he. But this history is nowhere safe, hardly in the most faithful bosom, least of all on this paper. Ottomar was attacked by his so-called moment-of-annihilation. I let not his hand go out of mine, so that he might outlive his hour and break his oath. There is nothing higher than a man who despises life; and in this lofty position my friend stood before me, who, in his cave, had risked more and lived better than all they in Scheerau. I saw upon him the sign that he meant to die. It was right. We were in the chamber where the wax mummies stand with the black garlands, to remind man how little he was, and how little he is. 'Bend thy head aside,' said he (for I chained myself to him), 'that I may look into Sirius--that I may see out into the infinite heavens and have a solace--that I may transport myself over an earth more or less. O friend, make not dying so bitter to me--and be neither angry nor sad. O, see how all heaven gleams from one infinity to another, how it lives and nothing is dead up yonder; the human originals of all these waxen corpses dwell there in that blue.--O ye departed ones, to-day I too join you, into whatever sun my human spark of light may fly, when the body melts away from it. I shall find you again.'"

"The striking of every quarter of an hour had up to this time pierced my heart; but the last quarter struck upon my ear like a funeral knell; I watched anxiously his hands and steps; he fell on my neck: 'No! no!' said I, 'here is no parting--I shall hate thee into the very grave, if thou hast any design--embrace me not.' He had already done it; his whole being was a throbbing heart; he would fain expire in the very emotion of friendship; I pressed his bosom to mine, and his soul to mine: 'I embrace thee,' said he, 'on the earth; into whatever world death may cast me, never shall I forget thee; I shall there look toward the earth and spread out my arms after the earthly friend and nothing shall fill these arms but the faithful, heavy-laden breast which here has suffered with me, here with me has endured the earth.... Behold! thou weepest and yet wouldst not embrace me! O beloved!--on thy bosom I feel not the vanity of earth----thou too wilt die!... Mighty Being above the earth!' ... Here he tore himself away from me and fell on his knees and prayed: 'Destroy me not, punish me not! I go away from this earth; thou knowest what man comes to; thou knowest what earthly life is and our earthly condition. But, O God! man has a second heart; a second soul, his friend! Give me again the friend, together with my life--when one day all human hearts and all human blood molder in graves; O gracious, loving Being! then breathe thou over men and show Eternity their love!' A leap upward--a sudden dart towards me--a crushing embrace--a blow upon the wall--a shot from it.--

"But he still lives.

"Fenk."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: The German word for the dash is _Gedanken-strich_: _Thought-stroke_: (or _Pause for Reflection_).--(Tr.)]

[Footnote 2: He would not have known that, had he not got it from the new Tacticians, Messrs. Hahn & Mueller, who teach the young officer the Differential Calculus in order that it may not be hard for him in the heat of battle to calculate the right base angle in wheeling and deploying. Even so have I a hundred times wanted to write a book in which to enable the poor-aiming billiard player merely by a few solutions in mechanics and higher mathematics to carom with his eyes shut.]

[Footnote 3: An allusion to an imagined mystic virtue in the number 4.--(Tr.)]

[Footnote 4: Lit. "Knee-piece."--(Tr.)]

[Footnote 5: Famous grammarian and purist.--(Tr.)]

[Footnote 6: _Stieck, oder Steckte_, is the German, quizzing the grammatical purists of the day.]

[Footnote 7: Cambyses took Pelusium by storm, by interspersing among his soldiers sacred animals, cats, etc., at which the Egyptian garrison did not dare to shoot, and discharged prayers instead of arrows.]

[Footnote 8: The "one-leg" is myself. I have made the Preface, which every one will have skipped and this note which must not be, for the purpose of making known that I have only one leg, leaving out of account the abridged one, and that in my neighborhood they call me by no other name than the "one-leg" or "one-legged author," whereas my proper name is Jean Paul. See the Baptismal Register and the Preface.]

[Footnote 9: By which the physicians mean; 1, sleeping and waking; 2, eating of drinking; 3, motion; 4, breathing; 5, discharges; 6, passions.]

[Footnote 10: _Rastriven_ means literally to rule a staff for _music_.--(Tr.)]

[Footnote 11: _Gross-gezogen_ and _Kleingezogen_ is Jean Paul's contrast.--(Tr.)]

[Footnote 12: Ohr-rose (ear-rose.)--(Tr.)]

[Footnote 13: In Haller's great physiology it is stated that man according to Sanctorius sheds his old body every eleven years--according to Bernouilli and Blumenbach every three years--according to the Anatomist Keil every year.]

[Footnote 14: According to the Rabbins, the devil helped build the temple, and the worm gnawed the stones smooth.]

[Footnote 15: The butterflies of Spring have (through the celibate) lingered over from the former year; the Autumn ones are this year's children.]

[Footnote 16: Affirmant idem corpus existens in duobis locis habere posse utrobique, formas absolutas non dependentes--ita ut hic moveater localiter, illic non, hic calidum sit, illic frigidum, etc. hic moriatur, illic vivat, hic eliceret actus vitales tum sensitivos tum intellectivos, illic non. V[oe]tii disp. throl. T. 1, p. 632. Bekanas with philosophic acumen limits it so far as to say that such body--ergo a woman--cannot be pious in one place and godless in another at the same time; which is also clear to my mind.]

[Footnote 17: Wolfe's lect. memorab. Cent. XVI. p. 994 etc.]

[Footnote 18: Loco cit.]

[Footnote 19: Loco cit.]

[Footnote 20: Common to several denominations.--(Tr.)]

[Footnote 21: A Linnaean class with hermaphrodite flowers having five stamens.--(Tr.)]

[Footnote 22: Of Saint Theresa.--(Tr.)]

[Footnote 23: Even children in the mother's womb. See Allgem. Deutsch. Bilb., Bd. 67 S. 138.]

[Footnote 24: With which insects make the hole to lay their eggs in.--(Tr.)]

[Footnote 25: "Aufgelueftet"--the word _luft_ (Scotch, _lift_) gives a double sense here: _lifting_ to give _air_.--(Tr.)]

[Footnote 26: I mean a harpsichord disguised under the form of a table.]

[Footnote 27: In Scheerau, as in some States even at this day, all mourning was forbidden the subjects.]

[Footnote 28: _Fou_' is the Scotch for _tipsy_. See Burns. A German proverb runs: "Voll-toll." These are Jean Paul's words, "Full and foolish."--(Tr.)]

[Footnote 29: Pantheon?--(Tr.)]

[Footnote 30: This remark has in the la""t twenty years, if not in France yet in Germany, become much less extensively applicable.]

[Footnote 31: "Gild refined gold." etc.--(Tr.)]

[Footnote 32: In a child's story-telling there is the same contempt of finery, of side-glances and brevity, the same naivete, which often seems to us caprice and yet is not, and the same forgetting of the narrator in the narrative, that we find in the stories of the Bible, the elder Greeks, etc.]

[Footnote 33: What the moderns write in the taste of the ancients is little understood; and can it be that the ancients themselves are so frequently understood?]

[Footnote 34: Do all Germans, then, feel the _Messiah_ who are at home in the German language and Biblical history?]

[Footnote 35: Lit.: "Philanthropin." A natural system of education instituted by Basidow.--(Tr.)]

[Footnote 36: A word coined by Harvey, signifying a corrupt condition of the fluids of the body--hence ill-humor.--(Tr.)]

[Footnote 37: The Vehmgericht.--(Tr.)]

[Footnote 38: _Stunde_ means both _hour_ and _league_.--(Tr.)]