My clock strikes two in the morning, and still the birthday festival of Beata and of paradise is not yet closed; for I am just come over to this position to describe it; that is to say, if I remain in my chair and do not sally forth again into the blue vault, which throws over the so great multitude of to-day's joys its starry rays.
Towards evening Ottomar flew hither over the water. He always looks like a man who is thinking of something distant, who is just now only resting, who plucks the flower of joy that hangs over his path, because his flying gondola hurries him along by it, not because he is thinking of it at all. He still retains his sublimely-low voice and that eye of his which has seen death. He is still as much of a Zahouri[96]as ever, who sees through all flower-beds and grass-plots of the earth and down to the motionless dead, who sleep beneath it. So soft and stormy, so humorous and melancholy, so obliging and unconstrained and free! He asserted that most vices were owing to the flying from vices--for fear of acting badly we did nothing and had no longer courage for anything great--we all had so much love for man that we had no longer any honor--out of humane tolerance and love we had no sincerity, no uprightness, we could not hurl down a traitor, a tyrant or the like.
He wondered at Beata, who took not the customary constrained, but a heightening interest in our talk: for he has a notion that one may talk with a woman about heaven and hell, God and the Fatherland, and yet she will be thinking of nothing all the while she listens, but her figure, her attitude, her dress. "I except," said Fenk, "in the first place, everything, and secondly, physiognomy also; to this they all listen, because they can all immediately apply it."
The magic evening drove more and more shadows before it; at last it took up all creatures into its rocking lap and clasped them to its bosom, in order to make them tranquil, tender and glad. We five islanders became so, too. We went out in a body up to a little artificial eminence that we might escort the sun even to the last stairway, before he sailed across the ocean to America. Suddenly, over in another island, five Alpine horns pealed forth, and went on rising and falling with their simple strains. One's condition has more influence on music, than music on one's condition. In our situation and where one's ear places him already at the Alpine fountain, and his eye on the evening-gilded glacier-peak, and around the hut of the herdsman, lie Arcadia and Tempe and youth's pastures, and when we let these fancies fly before the sinking sun and after the fairest day--in such a case the heart follows an Alp-horn with intenser throbs than a concert hall full of gaily bedizened hearers. Oh the admission ticket to joy is a good, and then a tranquil heart! The dark, cloudy, dimly gleamingideas, which the universal philosopher demands of all sensations, must glide slowly over the soul or stand perfectly still, if it is to enjoy itself; just as clouds that move slowly betoken fair weather, while flying ones indicate foul. "There are," said Beata, "virtuous days when one pardons everything and has all power over one's self, when joy seems to kneel down in the heart and pray that it may remain there longer, and when all is cleared up and illumined within us;--then when one weeps over it for joy this grows so great that all is gone by again."
"I," said Ottomar, "love better to throw myself into the rocking arms of the tempest. We enjoy only glancing, glowing moments; this coal must be violently whirled round, that the burning circle of rapture may appear."
"And yet," said he, "I am to-day so glad in thy presence, setting sun!... The gladder I have been in any hour, or week, so much the stormier was the next. Like flowers is man: the more violent the tempest is going to be, so much the more perfume do they exhale." "You must not invite us any more, Herr Doctor," said Beata smiling, but her eye swam, however, in something more than joy.
Amidst the deepening red of the heavens the sun stepped upon his last stair, environed with tinted clouds. He and the Alpine horns vanished in the same instant. One cloud paled after another and the highest still hung transfused with the evening-glow. Beata and my sister talked playfully, after the manner of maidens, about what these illuminated clouds might be--the one resolved them into Christmas lambs with rosy-red ribbons, or a red heavenly scarf--the other into fiery eyes or cheeks under a veil--red and white cloud-roses--a red sun-hat, etc....
Punch, I think, was brought at last for the gentlemen, one of whom took it in such moderation that he can even now, at 2½ o'clock, compose this section. Then we sauntered round under the rustling and refreshing tree of night, whose blossoms are suns and its fruits worlds. Our enjoyment now led us apart, now brought us together again, and each was equally capable of enjoying himself greatly, with or without company. Beata and Gustavus forgot their own peculiar love and joy out of respect and sympathy for that of others, and where all were friends became simply friends to each other. O, preach out of the world, I pray, the sadness which makes the heart as thick as blood, but not the joy, which in its dance of ecstasy, stretches out its arms not merely after a partner, but also after a tottering unfortunate, and which, as it flies by, takes the tear from the eye of the weeping spectator! To-day we would fain pardon each other everything, although we found nothing to pardon. There was nothing there to forgive, I say; for as one star after another welled out from the depth of shadow, and when Ottomar and I had turned about before a warbling nightingale in order to hear her wails, softened by distance, and when we stood alone together, encompassed by nothing but tones and shapes of love, and when I could no longer contain myself, but, under the great present and future heavens, opened my heart to him, whose own I had long ago seen and loved; then was such a frame of spirit no forgiveness and reconciliation, but.... of that, day after to-morrow....
In alternating groups--now the two maidens alone, now with a third person, now all together--we walked over the grass-embosomed flowers and passed along between two rival nightingales, the one of which sang the praises and inspired the air of the one island, aim the other of the neighboring one. In this musicalpot-pourrithe leaves of the flowers had covered the fragrantpot-pourris, but all the birch-leaves had put on their own and we separated from one another on purpose, so as not to be able to embark hurriedly from an enchanting Otaheite.
At last we met by chance under a silver-poplar, whose snow-white leaves had by their gleam through the dark gathered us around it. "It is high time we took our leave!" said Beata. Only just as we were, or should have been, on the eve of doing it, the moon came up; behind a latticed fan of flowers she opened so modestly her cloudy eyelids, as she silently floated across the blind night, and her eye streamed, and she looked upon us like sincerity itself, and sincerity looked upon her too. "If we would only tarry," said Ottomar, in whose hot hand of friendship we would willingly dispense with every female hand--"till it grows lighter on the water and the moon can shine in upon the vales--who knows when we can have things so again?" At length he added: "Besides, Gustavus and I start on our journey early to-morrow morning, and this weather cannot last long." He referred to the unknown seven-weeks' journey, in regard to which I here gladly take back all those conjectures which have hitherto represented it as so weighty and mysterious.
We again postponed our departure; the conversation grew monosyllabic, our thoughts polysyllabic, and our hearts too full, just as the waning moon on the threshold of its rising appeared to usfullalso. When a company that has once had its hand on the door-latch, draws it away again, this delay excites the expectation of greater enjoyments, and this expectation excites embarrassment; but we were merely more silent about each other, and concealed our sighs over the falcon-flight of joyous hours, and perhaps many an averted eye presented to the moon the offering which the saddest or the gladdest soul finds it so hard to refuse.
Just at this moment I made my way out into its rays and came back again to my writing table, and thank the veil of night, which stretches double around the Universe, that it also folds itself over the greatest sorrows and joys of men.... We were, therefore, on our island as sadly silent as at the gate of a joyous eternity; the land-embracing spring, with its majesty--with its warm, sunken moon--with its twinkling star of Venus--with its sublime midnight-red--with its heavenly nightingales--swept by before five human beings; it flung and heaped up in these five too happy ones, its buds and its blossoms, and its dimly gleaming outlooks and hopes, and its thousand heavens, and took nothing away from them for it, but theirspeech. O spring! O thou earth of God! O thou boundless sky! O that to-day, in all dwellers upon thee, the heart heaved in joyous throbbings, till we all fell down beside each other beneath the stars, and poured out our hot breath in one jubilant voice and all our joys in prayers, and lifted our aspiring hearts to the lofty blue of heaven, and in our ecstasy sent up sighs, not of sorrow, but of bliss, whose way to heaven was as long as ours to the grave!... O bitter thought! of being often the one happy among none but the unhappy! sweeter thought, of being among only happy ones the sole afflicted!
At last the dark slags floated away from before the silvery glance of the rising moon; she stood like an ineffable rapture higher in the night of the heavens, painted out of the background into the foreground. The frogs pierced the night like a mill, and their continuous, many-voiced din had the effect of a silence. O what man whom death had changed into an angel flying over the earth, would not have fallen down upon it, and under the earthly foliage and on the earthly ground, silvered over by the moon (as by the sun it is gilded over), and thought upon the heaven he had left behind and upon his old human pastures, his old spring-times down below here, and of his former hopes among the blossoms?
Ye reviewers! forgive me this once and let me go on! At last we stepped into a gondola as into a Charon's bark, and rapturously and reluctantly cleared the bushy shore and the reflection streaming from the water upon its leaves. The greatest enjoyment, the highest gratitude, send, nothorizontallybutvertically, their hidden and grasping roots into the heart; we could not therefore say much to Fenk, who was not to go away to-night from the scene of joy. Thou friend! dearer to me than all others, perhaps when all is more quiet and the moon is higher and purer, and the night more eternal, toward morning, thou wilt begin to weep over both--what the earth has given thee and what it has taken away. Beloved! if thou doest it now, at this moment--then I shall surely do so too!...
With our first step into the boat the Alp-horns (probably under Fenk's direction) again pierced the night; every tone rang through it like a past, every chord like a sigh for a spring-time of the other world; the night-mist played and smoked over woods and mountains and drew itself out, like the boundary lines of men, like morning-clouds of the future world, around our spring-awakened earth. The Alp-horns died away, like the voice of first love, in our ears and grew louder in our souls; the rudder and boat cut the water in two into a gleaming milky way; every wave was a trembling star; the fluctuating water reflected tremulously the moon, which we would rather have multiplied a thousand-fold than doubled, and whose soft lily-face bloomed still paler and more sweetly under the waves. Encircled with four heavens--the one in the blue above, on the earth, in the water and within us--we sailed on through the swimming blossoms. Beata sat at one end of the boat, facing the other, the moon, and the friend of her tender soul--her glance glided easily up and down between the moon and him--he was thinking of his morrow's journey and of his longer tour as ambassador, and begged us all for written souvenirs, that he might always have a good abiding among us as now, and reminded Beata of her promise to give him one also. She had already written it and gave it to him to-day at their parting. The happy day, the happy evening, the heavenly night filled her eyes with a thousand souls and with two tears that lingered there. She covered and dried one eye with her white handkerchief and looked upon Gustavus with the other, with a glance as pure and calm as an image in a mirror.... Thou fanciedst, thou good soul, that thou wast also hiding thy open eye!
At last--O thou everlasting, unceasing At Last!--our silvery course through the waves broke also upon its shore. The opposite one lay there deserted and overshadowed. Ottomar tore himself away in the most melancholy inspiration and amidst the dying echoes of the Swiss tones my renewed friend said: "It is all over again--all tones die away--all waves sink to rest--the fairest hours strike their last and the sands of life run out. There is surely and absolutely nothing, thou vast heaven above us, that can fill or bless us! Farewell! I shall take leave of you all along my way."
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, likeoneflash, 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!
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 atotal eclipse of the sunno less than in the longernightthe 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.
---- 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 theGeniuswho 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.
* * * * *
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 inprison. 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 melèe. The thumps upon the floor startle the listening Röper 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 hadsixfingers. 'I took a solemn oath,' said he, 'in that hole in the woods, never to reveal to a soul oursubterranean 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."
1: The German word for the dash isGedanken-strich:Thought-stroke: (orPause for Reflection).--(Tr.)
2: He would not have known that, had he not got it from the new Tacticians, Messrs. Hahn & Müller, 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.
3: An allusion to an imagined mystic virtue in the number 4.--(Tr.)
4: Lit. "Knee-piece."--(Tr.)
5: Famous grammarian and purist.--(Tr.)
6:Stieck, oder Steckte, is the German, quizzing the grammatical purists of the day.
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.
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.
9: By which the physicians mean; 1, sleeping and waking; 2, eating of drinking; 3, motion; 4, breathing; 5, discharges; 6, passions.
10:Rastrivenmeans literally to rule a staff formusic.--(Tr.)
11:Gross-gezogenandKleingezogenis Jean Paul's contrast.--(Tr.)
12: Ohr-rose (ear-rose.)--(Tr.)
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.
14: According to the Rabbins, the devil helped build the temple, and the worm gnawed the stones smooth.
15: The butterflies of Spring have (through the celibate) lingered over from the former year; the Autumn ones are this year's children.
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. Vœtii 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.
17: Wolfe's lect. memorab. Cent. XVI. p. 994 etc.
18: Loco cit.
19: Loco cit.
20: Common to several denominations.--(Tr.)
21: A Linnæan class with hermaphrodite flowers having five stamens.--(Tr.)
22: Of Saint Theresa.--(Tr.)
23: Even children in the mother's womb. See Allgem. Deutsch. Bilb., Bd. 67 S. 138.
24: With which insects make the hole to lay their eggs in.--(Tr.)
25: "Aufgelüftet"--the wordluft(Scotch,lift) gives a double sense here:liftingto giveair.--(Tr.)
26: I mean a harpsichord disguised under the form of a table.
27: In Scheerau, as in some States even at this day, all mourning was forbidden the subjects.
28:Fou' is the Scotch fortipsy. See Burns. A German proverb runs: "Voll-toll." These are Jean Paul's words, "Full and foolish."--(Tr.)
29: Pantheon?--(Tr.)
30: This remark has in the la««t twenty years, if not in France yet in Germany, become much less extensively applicable.
31: "Gild refined gold." etc.--(Tr.)
32: In a child's story-telling there is the same contempt of finery, of side-glances and brevity, the same naiveté, 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.
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?
34: Do all Germans, then, feel theMessiahwho are at home in the German language and Biblical history?
35: Lit.: "Philanthropin." A natural system of education instituted by Basidow.--(Tr.)
36: A word coined by Harvey, signifying a corrupt condition of the fluids of the body--hence ill-humor.--(Tr.)
37: The Vehmgericht.--(Tr.)
38:Stundemeans bothhourandleague.--(Tr.)
39: "Nature's soft nurse."--Shakespeare.--(Tr.)
40:Glove, in German, isHand-shoe.--(Tr.)
41: Gustavus's courage in kissing is, on the whole, natural. Our sex runs through three periods of boldness toward the other--the first is that of childhood, when one is yet daring with the female sex from want of feeling, etc.--the second is the era of enthusiasm, when one poetizes, but does not dare--the third is the last, in which one has experience enough to be frank and feeling enough to spare and respect the sex. Gustavus's kiss fell in the first period.
42:Apotheke--from the Greek--literally a depository.--(Tr.)
43: Frederick Jacobi in Düsseldorf. Whoever, in reading his Woldemar, the best that has yet been written upon and against the Encyclopedia; or his Allwill--in which he balances the storms of feeling with the sunshine of principle; or his Spinoza and Hume--the best upon philosophy, for and against--has admired the too great condemnation (the effect of the oldest acquaintance with all systems) or the profundity, or the fancy, or some other traits which elevate certainrarermen; such a one's ear will be sorely shocked by the first yelp, amidst which Jacobi had to enter the temple of German fame; but he has only to remember, that in Germany (not in other countries) new energetic geniuses meet always a different reception at the threshold of the temple (e. g. from barking Cerberuses) from what they find in the temple itself, where the Priests are; and even a Klopstock, a Goethe, a Herder did not fare otherwise. Nor, in fact, thou, poor Hamann in Königsberg! How many Mordecais have in theUniversal German Libraryand in other journals, helped build thy gallows and spin for thy hangman's rope: Meanwhile thou hast happily come down from the gallows only seemingly dead.
44: Heaven grant that the reader may understand all this and still remember in some measure the first sections, where he was informed that the wife of the commercial agent Röper had been the first love of Captain Falkenberg and had brought the agent her first-born child by the Captain as a marriage morning present.
45: "Si ad illam quae cum virtute degatur,ampulla aut strigilisaccedat, sumpturum sapientum eam vitam potius qua haec adjecta sint, nec beatiorem tamen ob eam causam fore." Cic. de. fin. bon. et mal. L. IV.
46: The fourth finger.--(Tr.)
47:Zum Sterben schon.--"Awfully beautiful."--(Tr.)
48:I. e., Day-board.--(Tr.)
49: A Russian title answering nearly to Baron.--(Tr.)
50:Leuterirt--lit.:referred back for explanation--(a law term)--(Tr.)
51:Bankmeans bench in German.--(Tr.)
52: The picture of the lost little one, which he brought with him on his neck from his abductress, and which looked so like himself.
53: Elementary maxims of the law--a Scotch term.--(Tr.)
54: General experts.--(Tr.)
55: The whole career of his father,Maria Wutz, I have appended to Vol. II. of this work. But although it is an episode, which has no other connection with the main work than is given by the thread and paste of the binder, still I trust the world will do me the favor to read itimmediatelyafter reading this note.
56: I have preferred to render word for word what seems to mean achronic sickness or soreness.--(Tr.)
57: This name was given to the English garden around Marienhof, which the spouse of the dead Prince had laid out in a romantic, sentimental spirit, and one that went beyond all rules of art. Some one suggested to her the name and plan of the Silent Land. But, now even this land is too noisy for her dying soul, and she lives in-doors. Readers who were never there I shall oblige by a description of the garden.
58: I cannot help it, that my hero is so stupid as to hope to be useful. I am not, but I show in the sequel that the medical treatment of a cacochymic body-politic (e. g., better political, educational, and other institutions, special edicts, etc.) is like the taking of medicine by a patient of weak nerves, who works against the symptoms and not against the essence of the malady, and undertakes now to sweat off, now to vomit out, or to evacuate, or wash away his sickness by bathing.
59: The reader will remember that she had journeyed hither from the Resident Lady von Bouse's merely to join in celebrating the paternal birthday.
60: These few parts I describe but briefly: ThePlace of Restis a burnt-out village with a standing church, both of which had to remain as they were, after the Princess had indemnified the inhabitants for the loss of the place and all within a quarter of a league's radius, at the greatest expense and with the help of Herr von Ottomar, to whom it belongs and who is not yet arrived there. TheFlower Islandsare single, separate, turf-hillocks in a pond, each decked withonedifferent flower. TheRealm of Shadowsconsists of a manifold lattice-and-nest-work of shadow, thrown by great and small foliage, by branches and trellises, bushes and trees in various colors on a ground of pebbles, grass or water. She had arranged the deepest and the brightest parts of shadow, some for the waning noon, and others for the evening twilight. TheDumb Cabinetwas a miserable little house with two opposite doors over each of which hung a veil and which no hand whatever was permitted to unlock, except that of the Princess. To this day no one knows what is therein, but the veils are destroyed.
61: A bed invented by one Dr. Graham for lifting the invalid during change of sheets.-(Tr.)
62: See how Jean Paul has elaborated this same idea in Titan, 21st Cycle.--(Tr.)
63: See this sentiment also worked out still more fully and finely in the last paragraph of the 8th Jubilee of Titan.--(Tr.)
64: "Erectos ad sidera tollere vultus."--(Tr.)
65: "The human face divine."--(Tr.)
66: A Prince Rupert's-drop.--(Tr.)
67: A refusal.--(Tr.)
68:Aus der Luft: the German phrase for "out of the whole cloth."--(Tr.)
69: For, notoriously, man's breast is much harder and more inflexible, and like that which it sometimes encloses.--It is singular that parents let their daughterssing, with all feeling, things which they would not allow to be read to them.
70: In the Roman Pantheon there stand only two divinities: Mars and Venus.
71: As in well known, the pebble or mountain crystal concealed in the setting on adoublette, is called aculasseand the diamond blazing over it apavillon.
72: The Rose-maiden is the one who gains the garland for her distinguished virtue.--(Tr.)
73: The three cures which, as above stated, I use against my lung disease, I have from three nations--following in freshly ploughed furrows the English advise--strengthening by a dog's bedfellowship is the advice of a Frenchman (de la Richebandiere)--breathing the air of cow-barns is prescribed to Swedish consumptives.
74: Or "Liripoop, a long tail or tippet of a hood, passing round the neck, and hanging down before."--(Worcester's Dictionary.)
75: Hollowed ice is, as is well known, applied to the head in case of headache, vertigo or madness.
76: Shakespeare's Prologues to the Henrys.--(Tr.)
77: An odd forerunner of our modern local quiz, that good Bostonians hope, when they die, to go to Paris (short for Paradise)--(Tr.)
78: Of course, German miles.--(Tr.)
79: So much the finer is it, that they keep the sentiment of love pure, thereby omnipotent; other feelings float therein, but dissolved and opaque; with men the latter merely standbesideit and independent of it.
80:
"O youth adown time's winding brook,Toward life's vast ocean-grave I look."