I had been reading an excellent dissertation of Krüger's upon the old vulgar error which regards the space from one earth and sun to another as empty. Our sun together with all its planets fills only the 31,419,460,000,000,000th part of the whole space between itself and the next solar body. Gracious Heavens! thought I,--in what an unfathomable abyss of emptiness were this universe swallowed up and lost, if all were void and utter vacuity except the few shining points of dust which we call a planetary system! To conceive of our earthly ocean as the abode of death, and essentially incapable of life, and of its populous islands as being no greater than snail-shells, would be a far less error in proportion to the compass of our planet than that which attributes emptiness to the great mundane spaces: and the error would be far less if the marine animals were to ascribe life and fulness exclusively to the sea, and to regard the atmospheric ocean above them as empty and untenanted. According to Herschel, the most remote of the galaxies which the telescope discovers lie at such a distance from us, that their light, which reaches us at this day, must have set out on its journey two millions of years ago; and thus by optical laws it is possible that whole squadrons of the starry hosts may be now reaching us with their beams which have themselves perished ages ago. Upon this scale of computation for the dimensions of the world, what heights and depths and breadths must there be in this universe--in comparison of which the positive universe would be itself a nihility, were it crossed--pierced--and belted about by so illimitable a wilderness of nothing! But is it possible that any man can for a moment overlook those vast forces which must pervade these imaginary deserts with eternal surges of flux and reflux, to make the very paths to those distant starry coasts voyageable to our eyes? Can you lock up in a sun or in its planets their reciprocal forces of attraction? Does not the light stream through the immeasurable spaces between our earth and the nebula which is farthest removed from us? And in this stream of light there is as ample an existence of the positive, and as much a home for the abode of a spiritual world, as there is a dwelling-place for thy own spirit in the substance of the brain. To these and similar reflections succeeded the following dream:--
Methought my body sank down in ruins, and my inner form stepped out apparelled in light: and by my-side there stood another form which resembled my own, except that it did not shine like mine, but lightened unceasingly. "Two thoughts," said the form, "are the wings with which I move; the thought ofHere, and the thought ofThere. And behold! I am yonder";--pointing to a distant world. "Come, then, and wait on me with thy thoughts and with thy flight, that I may show to thee the universe under a veil." And I flew along with the Form. In a moment our earth fell back, behind our consuming flight, into an abyss of distance; a faint gleam only was reflected from the summits of the Cordilleras; and a few moments more reduced the sun to a little star; and soon there remained nothing visible of our system except a comet which was travelling from our sun with angelic speed in the direction of Sirius. Our flight now carried us so rapidly through the flocks of solar bodies--flocks, past counting unless to their heavenly Shepherd,--that scarcely could they expand themselves before us into the magnitude of moons, before they sank behind us into pale nebular gleams; and their planetary earths could not reveal themselves for a moment to the transcendent rapidity of our course. At length Sirius and all the brotherhood of our constellations and the galaxy of our heavens stood far below our feet as a little nebula amongst other yet more distant nebulae. Thus we flew on through the starry wildernesses: one heaven after another unfurled its immeasurable banners before us, and then rolled up behind us: galaxy behind galaxy towered up into solemn altitudes before which the spirit shuddered; and they stood in long array through which the Infinite Being might pass in progress. Sometimes the Form that lightened would outfly my weary thoughts; and then it would be seen far off before me like a coruscation amongst the stars--till suddenly I thought again to myself the thought ofThere, and then I was at its side. But, as we were thus swallowed up by one abyss of stars after another, and the heavens above our eyes were not emptier--neither were the heavens below them fuller; and as suns without intermission fell into the solar ocean like water-spouts of a storm which fall into the ocean of waters;--then at length the human heart within me was overburdened and weary, and yearned after some narrow cell or quiet oratory in this metropolitan cathedral of the universe. And I said to the Form at my side, "O Spirit! has then this universe no end?" And the Form answered and said, "Lo! it has no beginning."
Suddenly, however, the heavens above us appeared to be emptied, and not a star was seen to twinkle in the mighty abyss,--no gleam of light to break the unity of the infinite darkness. The starry hosts behind us had all contracted into an obscure nebula: and at lengththatalso had vanished. And I thought to myself, "At last the universe has ended": and I trembled at the thought of the illimitable dungeon of pure,--pure darkness which here began to imprison the creation: I shuddered at the dead sea of nothing, in whose unfathomable zone of blackness the jewel of the glittering universe seemed to be set and buried forever; and through the night in which we moved I saw the Form which still lightened as before, but left all around it unilluminated. Then the Form said to me in my anguish, "O creature of little faith! Look up! the most ancient light is coming!" I looked; and in a moment came a twilight,--in the twinkling of an eye a galaxy,--and then with a choral burst rushed in all the company of stars. For centuries gray with age, for millennia hoary with antiquity, had the starry light been on its road to us; and at length out of heights inaccessible to thought it had reached us. Now then, as through some renovated century, we flew through new cycles of heavens. At length again came a starless interval; and far longer it endured, before the beams of a starry host again had reached us.
As we thus advanced forever through an interchange of nights and solar heavens, and as the interval grew still longer and longer before the last heaven we had quitted contracted to a point,--and as once we issued suddenly from the middle of thickest night into an Aurora Borealis,--the herald of an expiring world, and we found throughout this cycle of solar systems that a day of judgment had indeed arrived; the suns had sickened, and the planets were heaving--rocking, yawning in convulsions, the subterraneous waters of the great deeps were breaking up, and lightnings that were ten diameters of a world in length ran along--from east to west--from Zenith to Nadir; and here and there, where a sun should have been, we saw instead through the misty vapor a gloomy--ashy--leaden corpse of a solar body, that sucked in flames from the perishing world--but gave out neither light nor heat; and as I saw, through a vista which had no end, mountain towering above mountain, and piled up with what seemed glittering snow from the conflict of solar and planetary bodies;--then my spirit bent under the load of the universe, and I said to the Form, "Rest, rest: and lead me no farther: I am too solitary in the creation itself; and in its deserts yet more so: the full world is great, but the empty world is greater; and with the universe increase its Zaarahs."
Then the Form touched me like the flowing of a breath, and spoke more gently than before: "In the presence of God there is no emptiness: above, below, between, and round about the stars, in the darkness and in the light, dwelleth the true and very Universe, the sum and fountain of all that is. But thy spirit can bear only earthly images of the unearthly; now then I cleanse thy sight with euphrasy; look forth, and behold the images." Immediately my eyes were opened; and I looked, and I saw as it were an interminable sea of light,--sea immeasurable, sea unfathomable, sea without a shore. All spaces between all heavens were filled with happiest light: and there was a thundering of floods: and there were seas above the seas, and seas below the seas: and I saw all the trackless regions that we had voyaged over: and my eye comprehended the farthest and the nearest: and darkness had become light, and the light darkness: for the deserts and wastes of the creation were now filled with the sea of light, and in this sea the suns floated like ash-gray blossoms, and the planets like black grains of seed. Then my heart comprehended that immortality dwelled in the spaces between the worlds, and death only amongst the worlds. Upon all the suns there walked upright shadows in the form of men: but they were glorified when they quitted these perishable worlds, and when they sank into the sea of light: and the murky planets, I perceived, were but cradles for the infant spirits of the universe of light. In the Zaarahs of the creation I saw--I heard--I felt--the glittering--the echoing--the breathing of life and creative power. The suns were but as spinning-wheels, the planets no more than weavers' shuttles, in relation to the infinite web which composes the veil of Isis; which veil is hung over the whole creation, and lengthens as any finite being attempts to raise it. And in sight of this immeasurability of life, no sadness could endure; but only joy that knew no limit, and happy prayers.
But in the midst of this great vision of the Universe the Form that lightened eternally had become invisible, or had vanished to its home in the unseen world of spirits: I was left alone in the centre of a universe of life, and I yearned after some sympathizing being. Suddenly from the starry deeps there came floating through the ocean of light a planetary body; and upon it there stood a woman whose face was as the face of a Madonna; and by her side there stood a child, whose countenance varied not--neither was it magnified as he drew nearer. This child was a king, for I saw that he had a crown upon his head: but the crown was a crown of thorns. Then also I perceived that the planetary body was our unhappy earth: and, as the earth drew near, this child who had come forth from the starry deeps to comfort me threw upon me a look of gentlest pity and of unutterable love--so that in my heart I had a sudden rapture of joy such as passes all understanding; and I awoke in the tumult of my happiness.
I awoke: but my happiness survived my dream: and I exclaimed, O how beautiful is death, seeing that we die in a world of life and of creation without end! and I blessed God for my life upon earth, but much more for the life in those unseen depths of the universe which are emptied of all but the Supreme Reality, and where no earthly life nor perishable hope can enter.
"Ah!" said the imprisoned bird, "how unhappy were I in my eternal night, but for those melodious tones which sometimes make their way to me like beams of light from afar, and cheer my gloomy day. But I will myself repeat these heavenly melodies like an echo, until I have stamped them in my heart; and then I shall be able to bring comfort to myself in my darkness!" Thus spoke the little warbler, and soon had learned the sweet airs that were sung to it with voice and instrument. That done, the curtain was raised; for the darkness had been purposely contrived to assist in its instruction. O man! how often dost thou complain of overshadowing grief and of darkness resting upon thy days! And yet what cause for complaint, unless indeed thou hast failed to learn wisdom from suffering? For is not the whole sum of human life a veiling and an obscuring of the immortal spirit of man? Then first, when the fleshly curtain falls away, may it soar upwards into a region of happier melodies!
Ephemera die all at sunset, and no insect of this class has ever sported in the beams of the morning sun. Happier are ye, little human ephemera! Ye played only in the ascending beams, and in the early dawn, and in the eastern light; ye drank only of the prelibations of life; hovered for a little space over a world of freshness and of blossoms; and fell asleep in innocence before yet the morning dew was exhaled!
A delicate child, pale and prematurely wise, was complaining on a hot morning that the poor dewdrops had been too hastily snatched away and not allowed to glitter on the flowers like other happier dewdrops that live the whole night through and sparkle in the moonlight, and through the morning onwards to noonday: "The sun," said the child, "has chased them away with his heat--or swallowed them in his wrath." Soon after came rain and a rainbow; whereupon his father pointed upwards: "See," said he, "there stand thy dew-drops gloriously re-set--a glittering jewelry--in the heavens; and the clownish foot tramples on them no more. By this, my child, thou art taught that what withers upon earth blooms again in heaven." Thus the father spoke, and knew not that he spoke prefiguring words: for soon after the delicate child, with the morning brightness of his early wisdom, was exhaled, like a dewdrop, into heaven.
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, becausethatis 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!
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!
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 (orPrægustatores) because they eat a mouthful of every book beforehand, and tell the people whether its flavor be good. We authors, in spite, call themreviewers: 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.
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 whenlightis 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--evenbecausethey work.
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 ofnamelessheroes must fall and struggle to build up the footstool from which history surveys theonehero, 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.
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,thisis it which makes him the immortal creature that he is.
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.
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.
To die for the truth--is not to die for one's country, but to die for the world. Truth, like theVenus 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.
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.
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.
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 Fichtéan 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.
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 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 isinnate, that is,feelingandpower; whereas in the estimate of the multitude whatsoever isself-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 manwasmore, though he had not yetbecomeso much, had a childlike feeling of sympathy with all the gifts of the Infinite--for example, with strength--beauty--and good fortune; and even theinvoluntaryhad 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.
"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 thatman 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.
To these two happy men was added a happy woman also. Justa, an orphan, sole mistress of her property, had entirely left and sold the trading-house which had been her father's, in the town, and had removed into the upper part of a good peasant's cottage, to live entirely in the country. Justa did nothing in the world by halves, but she often did things more than most would deem completely, at least in all that touched her generosity. She had not long resided in the village of Heim, and had seen the meek Gottreich, and listened to some of his springtide sermons, ere she discovered that he had won her heart, filled as it was with the love of virtue; she nevertheless refused to grant him her hand until the conclusion of the great peace, after which they were to be married. She was ever fonder of doing what is difficult than what is easy. I wish that it was here the place to tell of the May-time life they led, which seemed to blossom in the low parsonage-house hard by the church-door under Justa's hand; how she came in the morning from her own cottage, to order matters in the little dwelling for the day; how the evenings were passed in the garden, ornamented with few, but pretty flower-beds, and commanding a view of many a well-watered meadow and distant hill, and stars without number; how these three hearts played into one another, no one of which in this most pure and intimate intercourse knew or felt anything which was not of the fairest; and how good and gay intention marked the passage of their lives. Every bench was a church chair, all was peaceful and holy, and the firmament above an infinite church dome.
In many a village and in many a house a true Eden may be hid, which has neither been named nor marked down; for joy is fond of covering over and concealing her tenderest flowers. Gottreich reposed in such a fulness of bliss and love, of poetry and religion, of springtime, of the past and of the future, that he feared in the bottom of his heart to speak his happiness out, save in prayer. In prayer, thought he, man may say all, his happiness and his misery. His father was very happy also; there came over him a warm old age,--no winter night, but a summer evening, without frost or darkness: albeit the sun of his life was sunk pretty deep below the mound of earth under which his wife was lain down to sleep.
Nothing recalls the close of life to a noble-hearted young man so much as precisely the happiest and fairest hours which he passes. Gottreich, in the midst of the united fragrance and beauty of the flowers of joy, even with the morning-star of life above him, could not but think on the time when the same should appear to him as the evening star, warning him of sleep. Then said he to himself: "All is now so certain and so clear before me,--the beauty and the holiness of life, the splendor of the universe, the Creator, the dignity and the greatness of man's heart, the bright images of eternal truth, the whole starry firmament of ideas, which enlightens, instructs, and upholds man! But when I am grown old, and in the obstruction of death, will not all that now rustles so bloomingly and livingly about me appear gray and dull? Just when man is approaching that heaven which he has so long contemplated, Death holds the telescope inverted before his dim eye, and lets him see only what is empty, distant, shadowy. But is this indeed true? Shall I be more likely to be right when I only feel and think and hope, with half a life, incapable of a keen glance or an intense sensation,--or am I right now, that my whole heart is warm, that my whole head is clear, and my strength fresh? I acknowledge that the present is the fittest season, and that precisely because I do acknowledge it to be the fittest. I will then live through this daytime of truth attentively, and bear it away with me to the evening dusk, that it may lighten my end."
In these sweetest May-hours of youth, when heaven and earth and his own heart were beating together in harmony, he gave ardent words to his ardent thoughts, and kept them written down under the title of "Reminiscences of the best Hours of Life for the Hour of Death." He meant to cheer himself at his last hour with these views of his happy life, and to look back from the glow of the evening to the brightness of the morning of his youth.
Thus lived these three beings, ever rejoicing more deeply in one another and in their genial happiness, when at last the chariots of the struggle and the victories of the holy War[77]began to roll over the land.
Now Gottreich became another man; like a young bird of passage, which, though it know nothing of summer climates, frets in its warm cage that it cannot fly away with the older birds of its kind. The active powers of his nature, which had heretofore been the quiet audience of his poetical and oratorical powers, arose; and it seemed to him as if the spirit of energy, which hitherto had wasted itself like the flames of a bituminous soil on the empty air, were now seeking an object to lay hold of. He dared not, however, risk to propose a separation to his father, but he by turns tormented and refreshed himself inwardly with the idea of laboring and combating with the rest. To Justa alone he confided his wishes, but she did not give them encouragement, because she thought the old man's solitude would be too great for him to bear. At last the old man himself, inspirited for war by Gottreich and his betrothed one, said that his son had better go, that he had long desired it, and had only been silent through love for him. He hoped, with God's aid, to be able to discharge his pastoral duties for a twelvemonth; so that he, too, should be doing something for his country.
Gottreich departed, trusting to the autumnal strength of his father's life. He enlisted as a common soldier, and preached also wherever he was able. The entrance on a new career awakens new energies and powers, which rapidly unfold into life and vigor. Although fortune spared him the wounds which he would so willingly have brought back with him into the peaceful future of his life, in memory as it were of the focus of his youth, yet it was happiness enough to take part in the battles, and, like an old republican, to fight together with a whole nation for the common cause.
When at length, in the most beautiful month of May which ever Germany had won by conquest, the festivals of victory and of peace began in more than one nation. Gottreich was unwilling to pass those days of rejoicing so far from those who were dearest to him; he longed for their company, that his joy might be doubled: so he took the road to Heim. Thousands, before and after him, journeyed at that time over the liberated land, from a happy past to a happy future; but few there were who saw, like Gottreich, so pure a firmament over the mountains of his native valleys, in which not a star was missing, but every one of them was twinkling and bright. Justa had already sent him the little annals of the parsonage; had told him how she longed for his return, and how his father rejoiced; how well the old man stood the labors of his office, and how she had still better secrets of joy in store for him. To these latter belonged, perhaps, one which he had not forgotten, namely, her promise to give him her hand after the great peace.
With such prospects he enjoyed in thought, ever from Whitsuntide forwards, that holy evening when he should unexpectedly relieve the old man from all his labors, and begin to prepare the tranquil festivities of the village.
As he was thus thinking upon that day's meeting, and as the mountains above his father's village, in which he was so soon to clasp those fond hearts to his own, were seen more and more clearly in relief against the blue sky, his "Reminiscences of the best Hours of Life for the Hour of Death" re-echoed in his soul, and he could not refrain from noting amongst them, as he went along, the joy of meeting again here below.
Behind him there was coming up a storm from the east, in the direction of his home, before which he seemed to come a happy messenger; for the storms of war, which he had seen upon the earth, had reconciled to him and made him love those of heaven; and the parched ground, the dropping flowers, and the ears of corn had long been thirsting for the waters of the warm clouds. A parishioner of Heim, who was laboring in the fields, saluted him as he passed, and expressed his joy that the rain and Gottreich had both come at last together.
And now he caught sight of the low church-steeple, peeping from the clustered trees, and he entered upon that tract of the valley where the parsonage lay, all reddened by the evening sun. At every window he hoped to see his betrothed one, if perchance she might be looking out on the sunset before the storm came on; and as he came nearer, he hoped to see the lattice open, and Whitsuntide brooms in the chief apartment; but he found nothing of all this.
At last he entered quietly the parsonage-house, and slowly opened the well-known door. The room was empty, but he heard a noise overhead. When he opened the door of his upper chamber, which was filled with a glow from the west, Justa was kneeling before the bed of his father, who, sitting half upright, was looking with a haggard, stiff, and bony countenance toward the setting sun before him. A clasp of her lover to her breast, and one exclamation, was all his reception. But his father stretched his wizened hand slowly out, and said, with difficulty, "Thou art come at the right time!" without adding whether he spoke of the preachings or of their separation.
Justa hastily related how the old man had overworked himself, till body and spirit had given way together,--so that he no longer took a share in anything, though he longed to be with the sharers,--and how he lay prostrate with broken wings, looking upwards like a needy child. The old man was grown hard of hearing, and she could say all this in his presence.
Gottreich soon confirmed it to himself. He would fain have infused the fire of conquest, reflected in his own bosom, which, like a red evening cloud, was announcing a fair dawn to Europe, into that old and once strong heart; but he heard neither wish nor question of it. The old man gazed steadily upon the sun, until at last it was hid by the storm. Nevertheless the war of the elements seemed to touch him but little; the glare of life broke dimly through the thickening ice of death. A dying man knows no present,--nothing but the future and the past.
On a sudden the landscape grew dark, all the winds stood pent, the earth oppressed; then there came a gush of rain and a crash of thunder. The lightning streamed around the old man, and he looked up altered and astonished. "Hist!" said he; "I hear the rain once more;--speak quickly, children, for I shall soon depart."
Both his children clung to him, but he was too weak to embrace them.
And now, as the warm, healing springs of the clouds bathed the sick earth, down from the dripping tree to the blades of grass, and as the sky glistened mildly as with a tear of joy, and the thunder went warring away behind the distant mountains, the sick man pointed upwards, and said, "Seest thou the lordliness of God? My son, strengthen now at the last my weary soul with something holy, in the spirit of love, and not of penance; for if our hearts condemn us not, then have we confidence toward God. Say something rich in love to me of God and of his works."
Then the eyes of his son overflowed, to think that he should read the Reminiscences which he had prepared for his own death-bed at the death-bed of his father. When he said this to him, the old man answered, "Hasten, my son!" and with a faltering voice, Gottreich began to read:--
"Remember, in the darkening hour, that the glow of the universe once filled thy breast, and that thou hast acknowledged the magnitude of existence. Hast thou not looked forth into one half of infinity by night, and into the other half by day? Think away the nothingness of space, and the earth which is around thee; worlds above, around, and beneath arch thee about as a centre, all impelling and impelled, splendor within splendor, magnitude within magnitude; all brightness centring in the universal Sun. Carry thy thoughts forwards through eternity, toward that universal Sun; thou shalt not arrive at darkness nor emptiness. What is empty dwells only between the worlds, not around the world.
"Remember, in the dark hour, those times when thou hast prayed to God in ecstasy, and when thou hast thought on him,--the greatest thought of finite man,--the Infinite One!"
Here the old man clasped his hands, and prayed low.
"Hast thou not known and felt the existence of that Being, whose infinity consists not only in his strength, in his wisdom, and his eternity, but also in his love and in his justice? Canst thou forget the time when the blue sky by day and the blue sky by night opened on thee, as if the mildness of God was looking down on thee? Hast thou not felt the love of the Infinite, when it veiled itself in its image, in loving hearts of men; as the sun, which casts its light not on our moon alone, for our nights, but on the morning and evening star also, and on every little twinkler, even to the farthest from the earth?
"Remember, in the dark hour, how in the spring of thy life the mounds of earth which are graves appeared to thee only as the mountain-tops of another far and new world; and how in the midst of the fulness of life thou didst acknowledge the value of death. The snow of the grave shall warm the frost-bitten limbs of age to life again. As a navigator who suddenly disembarks from the cold, wintry, and lonely sea, upon a coast which is laden with the warm, rich blossoms of spring, so with one leap from our little bark we pass at once from winter to an eternal springtime.
"Rejoice, in this dark hour, that thy life dwells in the midst of a wider and larger life. The earth-clod of the globe has been divinely breathed upon. A world swarms with life,--for the leaf of every tree is a land of souls; and every little life would freeze and perish, if it were not warmed and borne up by the eddies of life about it. The sea of time glitters, like the sea of space, with countless beings of light: death and resurrection are the valleys and mountains of the ever-swelling ocean. There exists no dead anatomy; what seems to be such is only another body. Without a universal living existence, there would be nothing but a wide, all-encompassing death. We cling like mosses to the Alps of nature, drawing life from the high clouds. Man is the butterfly which flutters up to Chimborazo, but above the butterfly soars the condor: however many, small or great, the giant and the child are free wanderers in one garden; and the fly of a day may retrace its infinite series of progenitors to those first beings of its kind which played over the waters of Paradise before the evening sun.
"Never forget the thought, which is now so clear to thee, that the individuality of man lasts out the greatest suffering and the most entrancing joy alike unscathed, while the body crumbles away in the pains and pleasures of the flesh. Herein are souls like marsh-lights, which shine in the storm and the rain unextinguishable.
"Canst thou forget, in the dark hour, that there have been mighty men amongst us, and that thou art following after them? Raise thyself like the spirits which stood upon their mountains, having the storm of life only about and never above them. Call back to thee the kingly race of sages and of poets, who have inspirited and enlightened nation after nation."
"Speak of our Redeemer!" said the father.
"Remember Jesus Christ, in the dark hour,--remember Him who also passed through life,--remember that soft Moon of the infinite Sun, given to enlighten the night of the world. Let life be hallowed to thee, and death also, for he shared both of them with thee. May his calm and lofty form look down on thee in the last darkness, and show thee his Father!"
A low roll of thunder was now heard to pass over the dun clouds which the tempest had left, and the setting sun filled the entire vault of heaven with the magnificence of his fire.
"Remember, in the last hour, how the heart of man can love. Canst thou forget the love wherewith one heart repays a thousand hearts, and the soul during life is nourished and vivified from another soul, as the oak of a hundred years clings fast to the same spot with its roots, and derives new strength, and sends forth new buds during its hundred springs?"
"Dost thou mean me?" said the father.
"I mean my mother also," replied the son.
Justa wept, when she heard how her lover would console himself in his last hours with the reminiscence of the days of her love; and the father said, but very gently, thinking on his wife, "To meet again, to meet again!"
"Remember then, in the last hour," continued Gottreich, "that pure being with whom thy life was beautiful and great,--with whom thou hast wept tears of joy, with whom thou hast prayed to God, and in whom God appeared unto thee, in whom thou didst find the first and last heart of love,--and then close thine eyes in peace!"
On a sudden the clouds were cleft into two huge, black mountains, and the deep sun looked forth from between them, as it were out of a valley between buttresses of rock, gazing upon the earth with its joy-glistening eye.
"See!" said the dying man, "what a glare!"
"It is the evening sun, father."
"Ay, this day shall we see one another again!" continued the old man; but he spoke of his wife, who was long since dead.
The son was unable, from his emotion, to paint to his father the blessedness of meeting again upon the earth, which he had that very day enjoyed by anticipation and described upon his journey; or to say to him how it comes, that meeting again is a renewal of love in a better state; and that, if the first meeting was apt to overflow into the future, reminiscence binds the flowers of the present and the fruits of the past upon one stem.
Who could have courage to speak of the joys of earthly meeting to one who seemed to be already in the contemplation of a meeting in heaven?
Startled, he asked, "Father, what ails thee?"
"Idothink thereon in the dark hour; ay, thereon and thereupon again; and death is also beautiful, and the parting in Christ," murmured to himself the old man, as he tried to take Gottreich's hand, which he had not strength to press. It was but the usual nervous snatching of the fingers of the dying. He continued to think that his son was still speaking to him, and said, more and more distinctly and emphatically, "O thou blessed God!" until all the other luminaries of life were extinguished, and in his soul there stood nothing but the one sun,--God!
At length he raised himself, and, stretching out his arm forcibly, exclaimed: "There are three fair rainbows over the evening sun; I must go after the sun, and pass through with him!" He then fell back, and all was over.
At that moment the sun went down, and there glimmered at his setting a broad rainbow in the east.
"He is gone!" said Gottreich to Justa, in a voice choked with grief; "but he is gone from us unto his God, in the midst of great, pious, and unmingled joy; then weep no more, Justa!"
At that moment his own hitherto restrained tears found a vent, and he pressed the dead hand against his face.
It grew dark, and a warm rain distilled gently over the earth. The children left his motionless form alone, and wept more tranquilly for that sun of their love, which, with its pure light, had withdrawn from the clouds and tempests of the world to another dawn.