Receive us with thy flowery Eden, veiled Lilienbad, me, Gustavus and my sister, give our dreams an earthly floor that they may play before us, and be thou as beautiful in thy twilight haze as a Past!
To-day we made our entry and ouravant-courierwas a sporting butterfly which we drove before us from one flowery station to another. And the path of my pen, also, shall lead over no less charming ground.
The morning of to-day had submerged the whole Auenthal landscape under a sea of fog. The cloudy heavens rested low down upon our flowers. We sallied forth and went into these fluid heavens, into which, generally, only the Alps carry us up. Overhead on this globe of mist the sun painted itself like a paling mock-sun; at last the white ocean ran off into long streams--on the woods lay hanging mountains, every low place was covered with gleaming clouds, overhead the blue celestial circle opened wider and wider, till at length the earth took off from the heavens its tremulous veil and gazed joyfully into the great, eternal face--the white raiment of heaven (as my sister said) laid together by itself still fluttered on the trees, and the fleeces of cloud still overhung blossoms and floated as blond-laces around flowers--at last the landscape was sprinkled with the glittering gold-grains of the dew, and the meadows were overlaid as with magnified wings of butterflies. A cleansed and exhilarating May air cooled as with ice the draught of the lungs, the sun looked down joyously upon our sparkling spring and gazed and glowed into all globules of dew, as God does into all souls.... Oh, if I, this morning, when all things seemed to embrace us and when we sought to embrace all, could not answer myself, when I asked myself: "Was ever thy virtue as pure as thy enjoyment and for what hours doesthisone come to reward thee?"--still less can I now answer, when I see that man can renew his joys, but not his deserts by remembrance, and that the fibres of our brains are the chords of an Æolian harp, which under the breath of a long-forgotten hour begin again to sound. The great Spirit of the Universe could not transform for us the whole stubborn chaotic mass with flowers; but he gave our spirits the power to make out of the second more ductile chaos, out of the globe of the brain, nothing but rose-fields and sunny shapes. Fortunate Rousseau--more fortunate than thou thyself knowest! The heaven which thou hast now won will differ in nothing from that which thy fancy here laid out, except in this, that thou inhabitest it not alone....
But just that makes the infinite difference; and where could I have felt it more sweetly, than by the side of my sister, whose glances have been the reflection of our sky, whose sighs the echo of our brotherly and sisterly harmony. Only be thou always so, precious darling! who hast suffered as much from the sick man as I from the sickness! Besides I know not which I oftener take back from thee, my blame or my praise!
Full of unuttered thoughts we arrived at Unter-Scheerau and found our pale traveling-companion all ready, my Gustavus. He was silent much of the time and his words lay under the pressure of his thoughts; the outer sunshine paled to inner moonlight, for no man is cheery when he is seeking or hoping to find the best that one can lose here below--Health and Love. As in such cases the chords of the soul do not fail to be put out of tune save under the lightest fingers,i. e., those of woman, accordingly I letminerest andfemalefingers play, those of my sister.
When, at length, we had waded through many a stream of fragrance--for one often, out in the air, goes along by little flower-gales, without knowing whence they blow;--and when all the haze of the day's joy had condensed, before the eye, into an evening-dew and sunk with the sun; when that part of the sky over which the sun flamed began to glow white before glowing red, whereas the eastern quarter came forth in dark blue to meet the night; when we had followed with our eyes every bird and butterfly and traveler going in the direction of Lilienbad;--then at last did the lovely vale, into which we brought with us so many hopes as seeds of future joys, open to us its bosom. Our entry was at the eastern end; at the western the sun looked at us along the earth toward which he was going down, and as if from rapture over his well-spent day, melted into an evening-redness which floated through the whole valley and ascended even to the summits of the trees. I never saw the like; it lay, as if it had fallen in drops, in the bushes, on the grass and foliage and painted sky and earth to the likeness of one rosy cup. Single cottages, sometimes pairs of them, embowered themselves with trees; living lattices of twigs pressed themselves up on the prospects of the chambers and overspread the happy one who looked out at these pictures of bliss with shadows, perfumes, blossoms and fruits. The sun had gone down: the vale, like a widowed princess, put on a veil of white fragrant mist, and with its thousand throats sank into silence.
Oh, if our days in Lilienbad should be destined one day to die on thorns; if, instead of sections of joy, I should have to write sections of sorrow; if this is one day to be, then the reader will know it beforehand in the fact of my leaving off from the section the word "joy," and instead of the superscription make only crosses. But it is impossible; I can conclude my sheet in peace. Beata still breathes a low evening-song into her chorded echo; when both have died away then will sleep extinguish the light of the senses in the dwellers of Lilienbad and spread out the night-piece of dream in the twilight of souls....
I went to sleep in the first heaven and woke up in the third. One should never wake up in any but strange places--nor in any chambers except those into which the morning-sun flings its first flames--and before only those windows where the green shadows burn like a traced name in the heavenly firework, and where the bird screams among the leaves through which he is skipping....
I could wish my future reviewer were living with me in my chamber at Lilienbad; he would not (as he does) break over my joy-sections the æsthetic staff, but an oak-twig to crown their father....
That father is just now a ladies' tailor, but merely in the following sense: in the centre of Lilienbad is the medicinal spring, from which is drawn the dispensary gushing out or the earth; from this spring radiate in regular symmetry the artificial peasants'-cottages, which the bathing guests occupy; each of these little cottages is decorated in jest with the hung-out emblem or signature of one or another trade. My little house holds out a pair of shears as a technicalinsigne, to announce that its occupant (myself) drives the trade of a ladies' tailor. My sister (to judge by the exponent of a wooden stocking) is a stocking-weaver; next door to her swings a wooden boot or a wooden leg (who can tell which?) which tells us as plainly as a journeyman's greeting, that the occupant is a shoemaker, who is no other than my Gustavus.
Against Beata's cottage, which like ladies of the present day has on a hat or roof of straw, rests a long ladder, which indicates the fair peasant-woman dwelling within, and is the Jacob's ladder, at the foot of which is seen at leastoneangel.
It is well known even in foreign parts, that our principality has and must have its healing springs as well as any one on the princely bench, for everyone of them must carry round with it such a pharmaceutic well as a flask, to smell of, against financial fainting; further, it may be well known that once many guests came hither, and now not a cat--and for this, not the springs, but the Chamber of Finance is to blame, which has built too much into the place and wants to get too much out of it, and which began at as dear a rate as the Selter's springs ended--that consequently our springs will end as cheaply as those began--and that our Lilienbad, with all its medicinal virtues, has not after all the more important one of making people as sick as a chamber-maid--I said, that is all sufficiently well known, and therefore I need not in fact have said it at all.
To be sure, it is not a merit in other healing springs, if they are popular resorts of the sick, around which the whole great and rich world stands in priestly attitude; had we only here in Lilienbad also such female angels as in other watering-places, to agitate the pool of Bethesda and impart to it a medicinal virtue, which is thereverseof that of the Biblical one; had we players who should compel the guests to sit, attendant physicians who should force them to swig, not sip, the eau-de-vie, then would our springs be as capable as any others in Germany of putting the tippling guests into such a state that they would come again every year. But as it is, our Board of Inspection will have to see again and again the sick phalanx of the great world roll by us and throng to other springs; as the wild beasts do round one in Africa; and if Pliny[91]explains by these animal-conventions the proverb in the note, I too would find a key to similar novelties in the mineral-spring-congresses.
The Exchequer is after all the most to be pitied, that in our Valley of Jehosaphat, nothing is to be found but Nature, Blessedness, Temperance and Resurrection.
To-day we all drank, at theBaquet(or water-trough) the water drawn off over iron, amidst the noise of birds and leaves, and swallowed down the image of the sun that gleamed up out of it and its fire too. The winter of sorrow has drawn around the eyelids of Beata and around her mouth the inexpressibly tender lines and letters of her faded grief; her large eye is a sunny heaven, from which escape glistening drops. As a maiden can unfold the peacock's-mirror of her charms with another maiden more easily than with a male person, so she gained greatly by her play with my sister. Gustavus--was invisible, he drank his water after the rest and lost himself amidst the charms of the country, in order, strictly speaking, to escape the greater charms of its fair inhabitant. Except the happiness of seeing her he knew no greater than that of not seeing her. She never speaks of him, nor he of her; his thoughts of her which yearn outward do not grow into words, but only into blushes. Would to Heaven I were composing a romance instead of a biography! then would I bring you, fair souls, nearer together and reconstruct a friendly circle out of its segments; then should we both secure even here such a heaven, that if death should come along looking for us, that worthy man would not know whether we were already settled there or whether we were still waiting for him to get us in....
I acted at once judiciously and delicately, in bringing before Gustavus at this time, as I now do before my readers, a certain sketch which Beata made in the winter and which I came by in an equally honorable and ingenious manner. It is addressed to the picture of her brother and consists of questions. Grief lies upon woman's heart, which yields patiently to its burden, far more heavily than on man's, which by throbbing and thumping labors to shake it off; as on the motionless fir-peaks all the snow piles itself up, whereas on the lower twigs, which are always in motion, none remains.
"To the Picture of my Brother.
"Why dost thou look on me so smilingly, thou precious image? Why dost thy pictured eye remain forever dry, when mine is so full of tears before thee? Oh, how I would love thee, wert thou painted mourning!
"Ah, Brother! dost thou not still long for a sister, does thy heart never tell thee that there is in the desolate world yet another which loves thee so unspeakably?-~Ah had I butonceset my eyes upon thee, clasped thee in my arms ... we could never forget each other! But now, if thou too art forsaken like thy sister, if thou too, like her, ploddest on under a rainy heaven and over a dreary earth, and findest no friend in the hours of sorrow--ah, in that case, thou hast not even a sister's likeness, before which thy heart may bleed to death! Oh, Brother! if thou art good and unhappy, then come to thy sister and take her whole heart--it is torn, but not asunder, and only bleeds! Oh, it would love thee so! Why dost thou not long for a sister? O thou unseen one, if thou too art abandoned, art deceived, art forgotten by strangers, why dost thou not long for a faithful sister? When can I tell thee, how often I have passed thy mute image to my heart, how often I have gazed upon it for hours together, and imagined my tears into its painted eyes, till I myself have burst into a flood of real tears at the thought?--Tarry not so long that thy sister with her worn-out heart shall repose under the coffin-lid, and with all her vain yearnings, her vain tears, her vain love, shall have crumbled into cold, forgotten earth! Nor tarry so long that our youthful meadows shall meanwhile have been mowed down and snowed over, and the heart has stiffened, and years and sorrows have become too many. There comes all at once over my soul so sad, so bitter a feeling.... Art thou perhaps already dead, dear one?--Ah, the thought benumbs my heart--turn thine eyes away, if thou art in bliss, from thy orphaned sister, and behold not her sorrows--ah, I put to myself the heavy question in my bleeding heart:What have I left to love me?and I give myself no answer...."
* * * * *
The reader has the courage to divine from this more to Gustavus's advantage than he himself can. To him, as the hero of this book, this leaf must be a welcome one; but I, as his mere biographer, have nothing from it but two or three more heavy scenes, which however I gladly despatch out of true love for the reader--billions of them would I work out for his pleasure. Only it does my whole biography harm, that the persons whom I have set to work at the same time set me to work, and that the writer of this history or protocol is himself one of the heroes and parties. I should perhaps be more impartial, too, if I composed this history two or three decades or centuries after its birth, as they will have to do who shall in future draw from me. The artists direct the portrait-painter to sit three times as far off from the original as it is tall--and as Princes are so great and consequently can only be drawn by authors who sit at a distance from them, of place or time, equal to such greatness--accordingly it were to be desired that I did not stand so near to the Prince, so that I might portray less partially than I do....
What a Sunday!--To-day is Monday. I know no means of discharging myself, I who (as we all have by our insulation), have become an electrophorus of joy, except by writing, unless, indeed, I should dance. Gustavus makes himself heard over here: he has for a conductor a harpsichord and plays on it. The harpsichord will lighten this section for me and fling out to me many sparks of thought. I have often wished only to be rich enough to keep (as the Greeks did) a fellow of my own who should make music as long as I was writing. Heavens! whatopera omniawould bloom out! The world would at least experience the pleasurable result, that whereas, hitherto, so many pieces of poetical patchwork (e. g. the Medea) have become the occasion of musical masterpieces, the case would be reversed, and that musical blanks would produce poetical prizes.
Yesterday, before day, we rose from our beds, I and my musicalsouffleur. "We must," I said to him, "stir round out of doors four good hours before we go to church."--Namely, toRuhestatt, where the excellent Herr Bürger of Grossenhayn[92]was to appear as invited preacher. So said, so done. Up to this hour I know not whether to prefer a tepid summer night or a cold summer morning: in the former the melted[93]heart dissolves in longing; the latter consolidates the glowing heart to joy and steels its throbbings. In order to reproduce our four hours one would have to bring together the minutes from a hundred summer-houses and hunting-lodges, and even then the description would limp. Morning twilight is to the day what spring is to summer, evening twilight to the night, autumn to winter. We saw and heard and smelt and felt, how one bit of the day gradually woke up after another--how the morning passed over lawn and garden and perfumed them like the morning-chambers of the great with flowers and blossoms--how it opened (so to speak) all windows, that a cooling draught of air might sweep through the whole theatre--how every throat woke every other and invited it into the breezy heights, that they might, with intoxicated bosom, soar to meet the low and rising sun and sing him a welcome--how the changeable sky ground and melted a thousand colors and touched and painted its drapery of clouds.... So far had the morning advanced, when we were still walking in the dewy vale. But when we passed out from its eastern gate into an immense meadow mosaically laid out with growing garlands and stirring foliage, whose soft wave-line sank into deeps and flowed up into heights, so as to keep its charms and flowers moving upward and downward--when we stood before all this--then uprose the storm of bliss and of the living day, and the east wind moved along beside it, and the great sun stood and throbbed like a heart in heaven and set all streams and drops of life whirling around him.
(Gustavus plays at this moment more softly, and his tones arrest my breath which passes over more and more easily into hypochondriacal intensity.)
Now when the mill of Creation roared and stormed with all its wheels and streams, in our sweet intoxication we hardly cared to go on, everywhere we were delighted; we were rays of light, broken on their way by every medium; we journeyed with the bee and the ant and followed every fragrance to its very source, and walked around every tree; every creature was a pole-star that led our needle into deflections and inflections. We stood in a circle of villages, whose roads were all bringing out joyous churchgoers and whose bells were ringing in the holy fair. At last we too followed the devout pilgrimage and entered the cool Ruhestatt church.
If amaître de plaisirsshould draw up for a Prince a plan of decoration for an opera-house, to consist of a rising sun, a thousand Leipsic larks, twenty ringing bells, whole meadows and floras of silken flowers, the Prince would say, it cost too much~-but the master of pleasures should reply, costs a walk--or a crown, say I, because such an entertainment requires not the Prince, but the man.
In the church I seated myself on the organ-stool in order to fire off the clumsy organ, to the astonishment of most of the souls present. When Gustavus stepped into a pew of the nobility, there sat in the opposite one--Beata; for she was as fond of a sermon as other maidens are of a dance. Gustavus bent down with drooping eyes and rising blushes before her and was deeply touched by the pale, afflicted form, which once had glowed before him. She was equally affected by his, on which she read all the mournful recollections which had been on either his or her soul. Their four eyes turned back again from the object of love to that of the general attention, Herrn Brüger of Grossenhayn. He began--I had intended, as temporary organist, not to give heed to him at all--a chorister makes as little out of a sermon as a man ofton;--but Herr Brüger with his first words preached the singing-book, in which I was going to read, out of my hands. He took for his theme the forgiveness of human faults--how hard men were on one side and how frail on the other; how surely, too, and how bloodily every fault avenged itself upon man, and like a hairworm ate its way through him whom it inhabited; and how little reason, therefore, another had to exercise the judicial office of inexorableness; how little merit there was in forgiving faults of heedlessness, little or venial errors, and now very much all merit centered in the overlooking of such faults as reasonably exasperated us, etc. When at last he pointed to the blessedness of love to man, then did the burning and streaming eyes of Gustavus unconsciously rest on Beata's countenance; and when, finally, their eyes, directed toward the preacher, filled with the true solvent of joy and sorrow, and when, during the drying of them, she turned to Gustavus, then did they open upon each other mutually their eyes and their innermost being; the two disembodied souls gazed full into each other and a moment of the tenderest enthusiasm flying over chained their eyes together by a spell.... But suddenly they sought the old place again, and Beata's remained fixed upon the pulpit.
I cannot assert whether he, Herr Brüger, has yet inserted this practical discourse in his printed volume; nevertheless, this commendation shall not prevent my confessing that his sermons, however good in themselves, are perhaps wanting in the proper soporific power, a defect which one perceives in reading as well as in hearing. I will here, for the benefit of other clergymen, interpolate some extra pages upon the false style of church architecture.
Extra lines on the false architecture of Churches.
I have already delivered this lecture before the Consistory and the building inspector; but it had no effect. We and they all know that every church, a cathedral as well as a chapel of ease, has to care for the head orbrainof the diocese,i. e., for itssleep, because, according to Brinkmann, nothing strengthens the former so much as the latter. It were ridiculous if I should set to work to elaborate the point, that this disorganizing sleep can be induced in a cheaper way and for fewer pence and less opium, than it is done among the Turks; for our opium, like quicksilver, is rubbed in outwardly and applied mainly at the ears. Now, no one knows so well as I what has been already done in the whole matter. As in Constantinople (according to De Tott) there are special baths and seats for opium eaters, but only near the Mosques; so with us they are actually in them and are called church pews. Further, regularnight-lampsburn on the altar. The window-panes have in Catholic temples, glass paintings, which answer for shade as well as window-curtains. Sometimes the columns are so arranged or multiplied that they help toward that darkening of the church which is such a promoter of sleep. As the sleeping-chambers in France have only dull and dead colors, so in the great canonical dormitory is at least so much provision made for sleeping, that those parts of the church at least on which the eye chiefly rests: altar, preacher, chorister, and pulpit, are painted black. It will be seen that I omit no good point, and if I censure it is in no censorious spirit.
But still much is wanting to make a temple a true dormitory. I have in Italy and even in Paris, stood (I might saylain) in many theater boxes, which were rationally arranged and furnished; one could in them (for everything was provided for the purpose) sleep, play, eat, and--so forth.... One had his female friends with him also. Now this the great folks have been accustomed to; how shall one expect them to go to church and sleep there when their money can procure them all friends sooner than sleep? With thetiers ètat, with poor and burghers, even with the college of burgomasters, which wears itself out through the week with voting, it is no wonder, of course, that it should be easy enough to induce them to fall asleep in any pew, in any loft; I do not deny it; but the libertine, the sleeper on eider-down, will not (even were a Consistorial Counsellor preaching) sleep on any back seat; he therefore prefers not to go to church at all. For such people oftonregular church-beds must therefore be made up in the boxes, so that the thing may succeed; just as gaming-tables, eating-tables, ottomans,female friends, and the like, are such indispensable things in a court-chapel, that they might better be left out in any other place than there.
One may therefore without offending me and the truth, call it no flattery if I contend that nothing but the stupid church architecture and the want of all house and kitchen utensils, all beds, etc., is to blame, and not the well and philosophically or mystically elaborated sermons of clever court university--barrack--Vesper-preachers, that people of rank are able to sleep in them far less than one hopes to.
End of the Extra Pages.
After church we all met in the vestry. I pass over trivialities and come at once to the point, that we all withdrew in a body and that Gustavus gave his arm to our fair Dauphiness and took hers. It was a quiet walk under the festal sun and beneath the blossoms of the bushes. The finery of the female peasantry, the wainscoted foreheads, the front locks stretched across them like the hairs of the fiddle-bow, the frocks lying one over another in layers, like the skins of an onion, all this, together with their laughing faces prefigured Sunday to us more vividly than whole parüres of city dames could. On Sunday, too, I find much more beautiful faces than on the six work days which disguise everything in smut.
The conversation must have been indifferent, I think, even at the forget-me-not. Beata, namely, found one lying in the grass, and ran up to it and--lo, it was made of silk: "Oh, it's a false one," said she. "Only a dead one," said Gustavus, "but a durable." Among persons of a certain refinement everything easily turns to allusion! Good nature is therefore indispensable to them, that they may infer no allusions but kindly ones. Nothing delighted me so much all through the little pilgrimage as the feeling that I was the back-ground and fair wind that followed them; for if I had gone ahead I should have failed to see the most beautiful gait in which the most beautiful female soul that ever was manifested itself through the body--Beata's. Nothing is more characteristic than a woman's gait, especially when it has to be accelerated.
In the vale we found, beside shade and noontide, something still finer, Doctor Fenk. He had arranged a little dinner-concert-spirituelamong the flowers, where we all, like princes and players, kept open table, but only before seated and musical spectators, the birds. We made no complaint, that occasionally a blossom fluttered down into the saucepan, or a leaf into the vinegar cruet, or that a puff of wind blew the powdered sugar sidewise out of the sugar-bowl;per contra, the greatestplat de ménage, Nature, lay around our joyous table, and we were ourselves a part of the show-dish. Fenk said, as he played with a branch which he had drawn down: "Our table had at least one advantage over the tables of the great world, that the guests at ours knew each other, whereas the great ones in Scheerau and Italy,i. e., feasted more people than they became acquainted with; as in the fat of the animal which was so much abhorred and irritated by the Jews mice lived, without the creatures noticing it."
A physician may be ever so delicate in expression, he is so only to the mind of physicians.
During the coffee my dear Pestilentiary asserted that all pots, like coffee-pots, chocolate-pots, tea-pots, pitchers, etc., had a physiognomy which was too little studied; and if Melancthon[94]had been the missionary and cabinet preacher of pots, still they stood in need of a Lavater.
He had once known a coffee-pot in Holland, the nose of which was so faint and flat, its profile so shallow and Dutch, that he told the ship's-physician with whom he was drinking, there certainly must be just as miserable a soul in that pot, or all physiognomy was mere wind; on pouring it out, he found the stuff was not fit to drink. He said, in his own house, not a milk pitcher was bought of which he had not at first, as Pythagoras did of his pupils, made a physiognomical inspection.
"To whom have we to ascribe it," he went on in his humorous enthusiasm, "that around our faces and figures not so many lines of beauty are described as around the Greek,--unless it be to the cursed tea-pots and coffee-pots, which often have hardly human conformation, and which nevertheless our women gaze at all through the week and thereby copy in their children? The Greek women, on the other hand, were watched only by beautiful statues, nay, the Spartan women had thelikenessesof fair youths hung up even in their sleeping-chambers."--(I must however say in justification of many hundred dames, that they certainly do the same with theoriginals, and that something is to be done even in that way.)--
As in this family-spectacle I have respect for no Goddess but that of Truth; I cannot sacrifice her even to my sister, although her sex and her youth place her, too, among the Goddesses. It vexes me, that it will not vex her, to read herself hereprintedandcensured, because she makes more account of the gain to her vanity by the printing, than of the loss to her pride by the censure.
Pride is in our strategic century the most faithful patron-saint and guardian of female virtue. No one, to be sure, will require me to name publicly the ladies of my acquaintance who would certainly like Milan (according to Keissler) have been besieged forty times and taken twenty, had they not been bravely proud, nay, had not one of them, in a single evening full of dances, been proud two and a half times; but I could not name her, if I would.
Thou teachest me, dear Philippina, that the noblest feelings do not always exclude vanity, and that, except the business of loving thee, I can have no better than that of scolding thee--and thy medical adviser, Fenk, too, who indulges toward thee in too great a degree his reckless humor; fortunately she is still at an age, when maidens always love the one they have talked with longest, and when their heart, like the magnet, lets the old iron drop, when one applies to it a new one.
Beata and Gustavus touched each other's sore souls like two snow-flakes; even in the voice and in the movement was pictured a tender, forbearing, honorable, self-sacrificing reserve. O if even the denials of coquetry itself give so much, how much more must the present ones of virtue give!
The afternoon had sped away on the wings of the butterflies, which sought by our side their lower flowers; the conversation like the eyes, increased in interest, and we sauntered (or shall I write sawntered?)[95]along on the terraced alley which winds round the mountain like a girdle and in which the eye can pass over the hedges of the vale into the pastures. Toward the west a tempest strode across the heavens with its thunder-tread and hung its bier-cloth of black cloud over the sun. The country looked like the life of a great but unhappy man; one mountain glowed under the sun's fiery glance, the other darkled under the descending night of a cloud--over in the western region there pealed forth in the heavens instead of the song of birds the heavenly pedal, the thunder, and in rows of white water-columns the warm rain came down from heaven and filled again its flower-cups and summits out of which it had ascended--it was to the soul as solemn as if a throne were set up for God and all were waiting for him to come down and sit thereon.
Gustavus and Beata, swallowed up in this heaven, went forward on the terrace; the Doctor, my sister, and I at a little distance behind them. At last single rain drops pattered down on the foliage of the alley, which flew and fell over us out of the border of the broad storm-cloud; thus does a thundering, lightning-flashing calamity of a neighborhood only sprinkle the distant lands with a few tears, that steal from the eye of sympathy. We all betook ourselves to the shelter of the nearest trees. Gustavus and Beata stood, for the first time, again in many months, alone beside each other, without ear-witnesses, though with eye-witnesses not far off. They faced the west and were silent. There are situations, in which man feels himself too great to start a conversation, or to be polite or to make allusions. Both remained mute, till Gustavus in the hottest solstice of his emotions turned round from the deluged western country toward the eyes of Beata--hers raised themselves slowly and openly to his and the lips beneath them remained quiet and her soul was with no one but God and virtue.
The cloud had emptied itself and disappeared. The Doctor had to hurry home. No one could break from his blissful silence. In this perfect silence we had all come down the terrace--and everything had already gone from under its leafy umbrella--when, all at once, the low sun blazed through the black cloud canopy and rent it asunder, and flung the funereal veil of the tempest far back and gleamed over us and over the glistening thickets and every fiery bush.... All birds screamed, all human creatures were mute--the earth became a sun--the heavens trembled tearfully over the earth for joy and embraced her with hot, immeasurable rays of light.
The landscape burned around us in the heavenly rain of fire; but our eyes saw it not and hung blindly on the great sun. In the effort to set the heart free from blood and joy, Gustavus's hand sank into Beata's--he knew not what he took--she knew not what she gave--and their present feelings were exalted far above insignificant refusals. At last the thunder-beset sun laid himself down like a philosopher under the cool earth, his evening glow calmly reposed under the flashes of the retiring tempest, he seemed like a soul gone to God and a clap of thunder followed his death.
Twilight came on.... Nature was a mute prayer.... Man stood more sublime therein, like a sun; for his heart apprehended the speech of God.... But when that language comes into the heart and it grows too great for its breast and its world, then does the great genius whom it thinks and loves breathe the tranquillizing love of humanity into the stormy bosom and the infinite lets himself be tenderly loved by us in the person of the finite....
Gustavus felt the hand which pulsed in his and struggled to escape from it--he held it more faintly and looked back into the loveliest eyes--his own begged Beata in an infinitely touching manner for forgiveness of the past days and seemed to say: "O! in this blissful hour take my last sorrow away also!"--And now when, in a tone that was as much as a good deed, he asked softly: "Beata?" and when he could say no more and she turned her blushing face to the earth and ceased to draw her hand out of his, and with deep emotion looked up again and showed him the tear that said to him: "I will forgive thee;" then the two souls which were still greater than the nature around them became two angels and they felt the heaven of the angels; they stood silent, lost in endless gratitude and rapture. At length, agitated with reverent joy, he took her trembling arm and joined us.
The Sabbath closed with silent thoughts, silent raptures, silent recollections and a still rain out ofalldischarged tempests.
Since I have, beside my biographical business, also driven the trade of a Ladies' Tailor, a wholly new life has grown up in me. Nevertheless the future Shröckh who shall offer to hang me up also in his picture-gallery of famous men, must be advised to be moderate and not deduce everything from my tailoring, but something from my imagination. This latter has during the last winter and autumn so strengthened itself by the painting of so many scenes in nature, that the present spring finds quite other eyes and ears in me than I have ever had before. This is what we all, I and the reader, should have considered before now. If the attraction of certain vices becomes through the daily growing efforts of the imagination, insuperable, why do we not give her irresistible pencil worthy subjects? Why do we not direct her in winter to sketch or rather to create the spring? For one enjoys in nature not what one sees (else the Forester and the Poet would find out of doors the same kind of enjoyment) but what one's poetic sense imparts to the visible, and the feeling for nature is at bottom the fancy for it.
But in no brain did more graceful shades of dream and fancy crystallize than in Gustavus's. His health and his happiness have come back to him; this is shown by his nights, wherein dreams like violets open again their spring-chalices. Such an Eden-fragrance floats around the following dream.
* * * * *
"He died," it seemed to him, "and was to play out the interval before his new incarnation in mere dreams. He sank into a tossing sea of blossoms, which was the conflux of the starry heavens; on the ground of immensity all stars bloomed white and neighborly blossom-leaves tossed against each other. But why did this flower-field growing from the earth up even to heaven intoxicate with the exhaling spirit of a thousand cups all souls that flew over it and sunk down in bewildering ecstasy? Why did a juggling wind mingle souls together with souls and flowers amidst a snow-flurry of sparks and many-colored flakes of fire? Why did so sweet and so sportive a dream envelop deceased men?--O, for this reason; the gnawing wounds of life were to be closed by the balmy breath of this immeasurable spring, and man, still bleeding from the blows of the former earth, was to be healed under the flowers for the future heaven where the greater virtue and knowledge demand a healthy soul. For ah! the soul suffers here indeed, quite too much! When on every snow-field one soul embraced another, then out of love they walked intooneglowing dew-drop; then it trembled downward and alighted on a flower, which breathed it up again, rent asunder, as holy incense. High over the blooming field stood God's paradise, out of which the echo of its heavenly tones, in the form of a brook, flowed down to the plain; its melody wandered through all the windings of the lower paradise and the intoxicated souls plunged in their ecstasy from the flowery shore into the stream of flute-music; in the resonance of paradise all their senses expired, and the too finite soul, dissolved into a bright tear or joy, floated on upon the running waves. This flowery field rose and rose incessantly, to meet the uplifted paradise, and the heavenly air, through which it flew, swept from above downward, and its descending undulations unfolded all flowers and did not bend them. But often, in the darkest height, God passed far away above the waving meadows; then when the Infinite One veiled his infinity overhead in two clouds, the one charged with lightning, or the Eternal Truth, and the other a warm one, trickling down on everything and weeping, or the Eternal Love; then they stood arrested, the soaring meadow, the sinking ether, the echoing brook, the quivering leaf of the flower; then God gave the signal that he was passing by, and an immeasurable love constrained all souls in this lofty stillness to embrace each other, and none sank upon one, but all on all--a blissful slumber fell like a dew on the embrace. Then when they awoke out of each other's arms, lightnings flashed out of the whole field of flowers, all blossoms exhaled, all leaves sank under the drops of the warm cloud, all windings of the melodious brook rang in unison, the whole paradise gleamed with heat-lightning above them and nothing was mute but the loving souls which were too blessed...."
Gustavus awoke into a nearer world, which was a beautiful counterpart of his dreamed one; the sun was transformed into a single glowing ray, and this ray also broke off on the earth; the cloud of twilight gathered round, flowers and birds hung their drowsy heads in the dew and only the evening-wind still stirred round in the leaves and stayed up all night....
Thus do our green hours creep through our unvisited vale, they glide with an unheard, butterfly's pinion through our atmosphere, not with the buzzing wing-sheath of a chafer--joy lights upon us softly as an evening-dew and does not rattle down like a rushing rain. Our happy bath-time will refresh our spirits, our powers of work and of endurance, for a long time, forever; the green Lilienbad will remain in our fancy a green oasis, whereon, if ever the years shall have buried in deep snow all Elysian fields, the whole landscape of our joy, under its warm breath all the snow will melt and which will ever look green to us, that we may thereon, as painters do on green cloth, refresh our old eyes.... I wish you, my readers, for your old age very many such places left open, and every sick man his Lilienbad.
Were I not doing it to please the German public, I should hardly for very joy succeed in describing it. And yet I will not begin a new joy-section before Beata's birthday. This is celebrated in the little Molucca, Teidor, whither we are all invited by the Doctor; he has his country-seat on that island; the weather, too, will continue fine. This much I can easily foresee without any great prophetic talent, that the Birthday, or Teidor section, will not so much combine as fully surpass all the fine things that were ever burnt up in the Alexandrian library or mouldered in Imperial ones or have ever been kept in all others.
In the following letter inviting me to the Molucca Island, the Doctor writes me a piece of news which deserves a place here, in so far as there is use for it, and I would gladly have my section full, inasmuch as I merely transcribe.
"Professor Hoppedizel, who, except philosophizing and flogging, loves nothing so much as practical joking, will, so soon as the moon by-and-by rises later, play a new one, namely play the rogue. I found him several days ago with a long beard which he had been stiffening and straightening for himself; moreover he had concealed crowbars and chosen masks. I asked him into what redoubt he was going to steal? He said into that of Maussenbach--in short, he proposes by breaking in with a small band and instead of plundering, turning it into a joke, to drive thy Legal Chief into a theatrical and artificial fright. It were to be wished that this artistic and satirical robber-captain might be taken for a real one, and be bundled into a police-wagon with his burglar's tools and publicly marched in--not that the good Hoppedizel might be injured in the matter, but only that this stoical corsair might be brought to the rack and thereby place three persons at once in full light: first, himself, since he would confess not so much a crime as his stoical principles--secondly, the Pestilentiary or myself, since I, on the rack (as we do in all sufferings) should prescribe regard to his health--thirdly, the justiciary, or thyself, who couldst show that thou hadst thy academical criminal-sheets already--in thy trunk...."
I fancy it will fare with the reader as with me, that on the flowery shore amidst the melodies of nature this sea-fight on the great sea of the world and the firing during it seems to create a screaming dissonance.
To-day is Beata's festival, and is growing finer and finer--my writing-desk is nine million square miles broad, namely the earth--the sun is my lamp of Epictetus, and instead of the portable library the leaves of the whole book of nature rustle before me.... But to begin at the beginning--merely adding here that I am already ensconced on the island of Teidor.
The days preceding foul weather are, meteorologically also, the fairest. As we to-day--being the most pacific quadruple alliance that exists--went out through our tuneful valley ere yet the morning-rays had entered it, so as to arrive comfortably at the Molucca island before 9 o'clock--a whole crystalline day, clear as a sparkling well, lay stretched out on the broad meadows before us--we had hitherto been used to the beautiful, but not to the most beautiful. The earthly ball seemed a bright lunar globe compacted out of airs and mists--the summits of hills and woods stood bare in the deep blue, unpowdered (so to speak) with fogs--all prospects had drawn nearer to us and the mist was wiped away from theglassthrough which we looked; the air was not sultry, but it lay in motionless repose on the fragrant meadows and the leaf nodded, but not the twig, and the hanging flower swayed a little, but only under two fighting butterflies.... It was the Sabbath of the Elements--the Siesta of Nature. Such a day, when the very morning has the nature of a rapturous evening and when even it reminds us of our hopes, our past and our longings, comes not often, comes not to many, to the few into whose swelling hearts it does shine may not venture to come often, because it makes the poor human beings, who open their hearts to it like leaves of flowers, too glad, and transports them from the financial feudal soil, where one must mow more flowers than he smells, too suddenly and too far into the magic Arcadia. But ye financiers and economists and leaseholders, if almost all seasons of the year minister to the skin and the stomach, why shall notoneday--especially for guests of the springs--belong merely to the too tender heart? If one forgives you for hardness, why will you not forgive any softness? Oh, you offend enough besides, you unfeeling souls! the fairer, finer soul is to you simply insignificant and ridiculous; but you are to it a torment and wound it constantly. Singular it is, that we sometimes concede to others superiority oftalents, but never superiority insentiment, and that we admit errors in our own judgment, but never in our own taste.
A transparent balustrade of forest-trees was now all that remained between us and the Indian Ocean, wherein lay the green Teidor, when our path led through the high grass which grew in over it, along by a hermitage or an isolated house, which lay too enchantingly in this flowery ocean for it to be possible one should walk or ride by it. We reclined on a spot of mown grass, on the right side of the house, to the left of a little round garden, which hid itself away in the middle of the meadow. In this poor little garden were and supported themselves (as in a tolerant state) on the same bed, beans and peas and lettuce and cabbages; and yet in this dwarf-garden a child had also his little infusorial garden. In the little red and dazzling bird-house a nimble woman was just carrying on her fragrant field-bakery; and two children's-shirts hung on the garden-hedge and two stood at the house-door, in which latter couple two brown children played and watched us--nothing gave them pleasure this morning but the sun on their hare feet. O Nature! O Blessedness! thou, like benevolence, lovest to seek out poverty and obscurity!
The cleverest thing I have said, or probably shall say, to-day, was certainly the grass-discourse in the morning beside the little house. As I stood there and observed the steadfast sky, the lull of wind and leaves, in which the vertical wing of the butterfly and the hair of the caterpillar remained unbent, then I said: "We and this little worm stand in and under three almighty seas, the aërial sea, the watery sea and the electric sea; and yet the roaring waves of these oceans, these mile-long waves, that can tear a land to pieces, are so smoothed so tamed, that this Sabbath-day comes forth, in which not a breath of air moves the broad wing of the butterfly or plucks from it a particle of feathered dust, and in which the child toys and smiles so peacefully among the elemental leviathans. If no infinite genius had compelled this, if we may not trust this genius with the harmonious ordering of our future world and our future destiny ...
"O infinite genius of the earth! in thy bosom we will bury our childish eyes, when the tempest breaks loose from its chain--on thy almighty heart will we sink back, when iron death puts us to sleep in passing by!"
So we sauntered on in innocent contentment, without haste or heat, toward the waves which rippled around Fenk's country-seat. Singular it is, there are days, when we willingly let our still, continuous enjoyment ofoutwardobjects suffice us (wherewith we rarely repel genuine stoicism)--still more singular is it, that many a day really does this. What I mean is, a certain gentle, water-level contentedness--not earned by virtue, not won by reflection--is sometimes supplied us by a day, by an hour, when all the miserable trifles and ravelings of which our puny and petty life is sewed together, harmonize with our pulses and do not run contrary to our blood--e. g., when (as happened to-day) the sky is cloudless, the wind asleep, the ferryman at hand to carry us over to Teidor, the master of the country-house, Doctor Fenk, ready and waiting for us an hour ago, the water smooth, the boat dry, the landing-haven deep and everything just right.... Verily we are all on such a foolish footing, that amonghuman pleasures, upon which the Consistorial Counsellor of Zerbst,Sintenis, has composed two volumes, may be reckoned--in Germany (though far less in Italy and Poland)--the catching now and then of one or another flea.... If, then, one would experience such a day of paradise, then must there not so much as a trifle, such as one strides over in hours of stoical energy, lie in the way; just as when one will draw down the sun with a burning-glass, not the thinnest cloud must intrude before his face.... I am now on fire, and assure the reader I cannot possibly think of anything more foolish than our life, our earth, and its inhabitants, and our remarking upon this folly....
The Indian Ocean was a noisy market-place, resembling a Chinese river; on every side it was crowded with joy, life and splendor, from its upper surface to its bottom, where the second hemisphere of the heavens with its sun was tremulously reflected. In the country-house the walls were white, because (said Fenk) for a man who comes in from a nature that stands in a blaze of fire and light into a narrow cell, no coloring of this cell can be bright enough to counteract a mournful and confined impression.
Then we rested, changing our position from one shaded grassy bank of the island to another, fanned by birch-leaves and Indian waves--then we made music--then dined; first, at the table of a host who knows how to be refined and delicate, in a jovial manner; secondly, at the windows which opened to all four points of the compass, and drew us more than ever into all the vortices of joyous nature, and thirdly, each of us by himself, with a hand that knew how to pluck the soft berry of enjoyment without crushing it. At evening comes Ottomar--the two maidens have lost themselves among flowers and Gustavus among shadows--the biographer lies here, like the jurist Bartolus, on the tossing grass depicting it all--Fenk is arranging for the evening. Not till evening does our to-day's joy come out into full light; and I thank heaven that I have now overtaken, with my biographical pen, the actual course of things, and that no one knows more than I report; whereas heretofore I always knew more, and embittered for myself the biographical enjoyment of the happiest scenes by the knowledge of the most mournful. But now, though in the next quarter of an hour the sea might swallow us all up, in the present one we looked out on it with a smile.
As I am so quiet and care not to go to walk, I will talk about taking walks--a thing which so often occurs in my work--and not without keenness. A man of understanding and logic would, in my opinion, distribute all walkers, like the East Indians, into four castes.
In the first caste trot along the most miserable ones, who do it from vanity or fashion, and want to show either their feeling or their clothes or their gait.
In the second caste run the fat and the scholarly, who do it for the sake of getting amotion, and not so much to enjoy as to digest what they have enjoyed already; into this innocent, passive department they are also to be thrown, who do it without reason and without enjoyment, or as companions, or from an animal satisfaction with fine weather.
The third caste comprise those in whose heads are the eyes of the landscape-painter, whose hearts are penetrated by the grand outlines of the universe, and whose eyes trace the immeasurable line of beauty which flows with ivy-tendrils around all created things--which rounds the sun and the drop of blood and the pea, and cuts out all leaves and fruits into circles. Oh, how few such eyes rest on the mountains and on the setting sun and the closing flower!
A fourth and better caste, one would think, could hardly be produced after the third; but there are persons who look upon creation not merely with an artistic but with a holy eye--who transplant into this blooming world the world to come, among the creatures find the Creator--who kneel down amidst the rustling and roaring of the thousand-twigged, thickly-leaved tree of life, and are fain to speak with the genius whose presence pervades it, they themselves being only leaves that tremble thereon--who use the profound temple of Nature--not as a villa full of pictures and statues, but as a holy place of worship--in snort, who go to walk not merely with the eye, but with the heart....
I know no greater praise than being able to glide over easily from such persons to our loving couple--their love is such a walk; the life of high-minded persons is also such a walk. I will only add, before rising from the crushed grass, the single remark, that Gustavus's love quite fits the practical definition of it which is to be made in a rapturous summer-midnight. The noblest love (as one may define it) is simply the tenderest, deepest, most substantial respect, revealed less by what is done than by what is left undone, which is divined by both parties mutually, which stretches across both souls (in an astonishing degree) the same chords, which exalts the noblest feelings with a new glow, which will always sacrifice, never gain, which takes away nothing from love for the whole sex, but gives all through the individual; this love is a respect, in which the pressure of hand and lips are not indispensable constituents and good actions are quite essential; in short, a respect which must be laughed to scorn by the majority of men and profoundly honored by the smallest part. Such a heart-exalting respect was the love of Gustavus, which not only endured, but even gladdened and warmed noble eye-witnesses, because it was without that innocently-sensuous toying with lips and hands, in which the spectator can take no more interest than in the artificial, theatrical viands of the players. A sign of virtuous esteem or love is this, when the spectator takes the more interest in it, the greater it is. Gustavus's love had--since his Peter's-fall, and still more since the forgiveness of this fall (for many faults one feels most deeply, only when they are pardoned)--gained such an access of tenderness, of reserve, and sense of another's worth, that he won more hearts than the tenderest one, and ruled other eyes than the fairest, those of Beata, before which his glances fell, like snow-flakes in the blue under the cloudless sun, pure, sparkling, trembling and melting away.
All have just arrived, Ottomar and the rest.