When she was out of Victor"s sight,--and when, from her _present_ look of _increased paleness_, he drew the conclusion that the vale of Emanuel would hardly restore her spring-colors, since the prospect of the journey had brought no healing influence,--and when this _short absence_ held before him as it were in a pocket-mirror the death-apparition of an _eternal_ one,--and when, at last, to be sure, the swelling heart carried away the dam of dissimulation,--then he rushed out into the winter,--bared his inflamed breast to the cooling flakes, and tore wider the clefts into which fate grafted its sorrows,--and ran up through the white night to the observatory;--and here, covered with the snow-avalanche silently descending from heaven, he looked out into the gray, whirling, trembling, flickering landscape, and in the broad snow-pierced night,--and all the tears of his heart fell, and all the thoughts of his soul cried: "So looks the future! So glistening fall the joys of men from heaven, and dissolve even while they fall! So does everything melt away! Ah, what air-castles I saw shine around me on this eminence, and how they gleamed in the evening red! Alas! all are buried under the snow and under the darkness of night!" He looked down into Clotilda"s garden, in whose dark bowers, now whitened with snow, he had found and lost again the Eden of his heart. "The tones which flowed over this garden are dried up, but not the tears which streamed after them," thought he. He looked down into her brother"s garden, where the tulip-C had dropped its leaves, and the blooming names had pa.s.sed away into obscurity.
With such a soul, which had looked into this landscape as into the charnel-house of mouldered days, he returned to the joyous club. The alternation of cold and warmth had kept up his similarity to the punch-union, which meanwhile had gone on drinking. He and all had touched the limits of drinking, where one laughs and weeps in the same breath; but I am glad that man can after all extract true nourishment of mind and heart (though not from a cloister-kitchen or cloister-library, yet) from a cloister-cellar; that he drinks the health of his wit; that every cup (not merely on the altar) spiritually strengthens him, and that, if serpents take off their crowns upon drinking,[41] he puts his on during the process; and that the vine sheds tears not merely of itself, or from the eyes of a Catholic image of the Virgin, but also from those of a man, who has drunk of it. The club hit upon the fancy of making parliamentary speeches. The Chaplain proposed occasional discourses. Victor jumped up in a chair and said: "I am going to deliver a funeral-sermon on myself,--I preached here long ago in my childhood."
All drank once more, even the corpse, and the latter began the following harangue:--
"_Most beloved and distressed hearers and brethren!_"
A mortal, deeply-afflicted hearers, may sink into the next world, without having a mourning-steed prance after him, just as he makes his entrance into this, without having a festive-nag trot before him. We, for our part, have jointly taken the _funeral-cup_ beforehand, in order to be able to go through it all; for man expands by moistening, and shrinks up when he is dry, I mean, when he takes only solid food, like the bloodsucker, which, when out of water, loses four inches in length.
And I hope I and the deeply afflicted funeral-procession have _toasted_ the deceased sufficiently.
"And so then I see before me" ... --Here he beckoned to the Parson to toss out his nightcap, that something death-like might lie there on which his emotion could "vent itself--
"I see lying before me him, the never-to-be-forgotten Mr.
Court-Physician, Sebastian Victor von Horion, and dead he is and is about to go down under the covering of earth, into the place full of long repose. What do we see still lying at rest before us but the diving-bell, wherein the covered soul descended into this vapory life,--what but the dry sh.e.l.l of a kernel which is sown for the first time in a second planet,--what but his hull,--what but (so to speak) the cast-off nightcap of his awakened spirit?
"Behold, weeping hearers, this emblematic pale cap! Here it lies, the head is out of it, which once mused therein. Our Victor is gone and is hushed, who talked so often of mathematics, clinical medicine, heraldry, precautionary jurisprudence, _medicina forensis_, Sphragistics and their auxiliary sciences. We have lost much in him--who shall console you for this loss, excellent Herr von Schleunes, and the other gentlemen likewise? One has not however, absolutely, in this absurd life, which may well be a sort of ante-death, time enough to administer proper consolation. Not merely church-pews are often built on tombstones, but also princely chairs--_they_ particularly--and even pulpits.
"Can it be supposed that thy soul, deceased Sebastian, in its intermediate state after death, should know anything of its body, from which it is unpacked, as out of its hat-box, and of the last honors which we here pay to its case? If it still has consciousness and an eye for this room, wherein it has been so often, then will it be glad that the three holy kings, of whom the Moor is Cato the Elder, are standing round its worm-bag, hardly willing to let the bag go; it must be pleased, that we are unitedly lamenting: where is his equal in common chemistry, in physiognomies and physiognomy,--in the modern languages,--in the _doctrine of ribbons_, from which he imbibed a love for all kinds of ribbons? Who sought less than he that strict concatenation of ideas, which misleads the Germans to cement good ones with bad ones, and to use more mortar than stones? Not even the Court--hence he never liked to go thither, when fun was going forward--could break him off from a certain serious sedate way, which he ran even into a ridiculous one, which last was always his aim.----By heaven! through the hour-gla.s.s of death, through which he peeped, as through a pocket spygla.s.s, everything came out so small to him, that he knew not why he should be serious--I hope I may not be standing here alive and well, if in the aforesaid gla.s.s all the _steps_ of the throne did not appear to him as diminutive as the thumb-long _wood-stair_ of the tree-frog in his preserving jar.
"He was a very good preacher, particularly of funeral sermons, hence even a very good preacher asked him for G.o.dfather, and the G.o.dson stands among the present company and takes his part in the weeping, for the stomach-ache.... Only great court preachers, who deliver the princely funeral oration in the Cathedral Church, can boast of what I, to my greatest satisfaction, now hear, that they make the mourning company laugh, and this is to me an earnest that my consolation is effectual....
"And yet one who lies upon the death-bed has more consolation than one who only stands at the foot of the bed. The souterrain of the earth"s crust is peopled only by still, reposing human beings, who draw close together; but above the souterrain stand their uneasy friends, and long to go down to the beloved arms of dust; for the linen on the eye of the dead is truly a padded hat for the cold brow, the coffin is a parachute to the unhappy, and the winding-sheet the last bandage of the widest wounds. Ah! why does weary man love better to sink into the short than into the long, undisturbed, sure sleep? Take, then, good Sebastian, the death-certificate as an eternal peace-instrument from the hand of gentle nature....
"But, the Deuse! where then is our dead man? what has the white cap to do down there? I see the corpse in the looking-gla.s.s opposite--it must be somewhere--I must fetch it":----with a shudder running through his soul he sprang down; an exalted frenzy pa.s.sed, through the stages of tears, of smiles, of torpor, up and down his face. He ran behind a screen which had been placed before his wax statue--and brought out the waxen man--and threw him down as a corpse--and a veil was wound over the corpse--and with a distorted face he mounted the chair to proceed:--
"This is the night-corpse,--the scorified, carbonized man,--into such stiff lumps are conscious beings fastened and compelled to turn them round. Why do you tremble at me, hearers, because I tremble, to stare so at this overturned form of humanity?--I see a spectre hover round this corpse which is an "I." ... I! I! thou precipice that in the mirror of thought runnest back deep down into the darkness,--I! thou mirror within the mirror,--thou terror within a terror! Draw the veil away from the corpse! I will boldly look on the dead, till he destroys me."
Every one shuddered in response; but one of the Englishmen drew aside the veil from the dead.... Rigid, speechless, horror-struck and quaking, Victor looked upon the unveiled face, which also in a living shape hung round his soul; but at last tears gushed out down his cold cheeks, and then he spoke in a lower tone, as if his heart were melting:--
"See how the corpse smiles! why, then, dost thou smile so, Sebastian?
Wast thou perchance so happy on the earth, that thy mouth stiffened and grew cold in a rapture of delight?... No, happy thou canst scarcely have been,--joy itself was often to thee a seed-vessel of sorrow. And thou saidst thyself very often, I am well contented and deserve hardly my hopes and wishes, to say nothing of their fulfilment.----
"Flamin! look upon this a.s.sumed countenance here,--it smiles from friendship, not from joy. Flamin, this extinct breast was arched over a heart that loved thee without limit, and even unto death.
"And this, after all, is the only misfortune of the poor man now at rest. In and for himself, and so far as concerned his original condition and temper, the good Bastian might have fared well enough; but he was too sensitive for joy,--too inconsiderate,--too ardent,--almost too much a child of fantasy. He wanted even to love (during his lifetime), and it could not be done. The flower-G.o.ddess of love pa.s.sed by him, she denied him the transfiguration of man, the melodrama of the heart, the golden age of life.... Cold form, erect thyself, and show men the tears that flow from a tender heart, which breaks for love and finds none!...
"If our Horion was not happy, then, of course, it may well be a comfort to him, if he is permitted even in the noonday of life to take his siesta, if he is permitted to die, and released from the hotly-beating heart, hushed by the death-angel, to lay himself down so early under the long shroud, which the genius of humanity draws over whole peoples, as the gardener draws the cover over the flower-bed to shield it from sun and rain,--against the glow of our joys, against the gush of our sorrow.... _Rest thou too, Horion!_" ...
His grief at these words from the old dream so overmastered and so unmanned him that he pa.s.sed over from it--by way either of excuse or of relief--into an almost frenzied humor.
"The whole joke, however, is half against my taste, which at court I wanted to cultivate. Life absolutely does not pay for one"s scolding on its account at our good friend Death, or fumigating him with the incense of praise. The fear of dying excepted, there is nothing more pitiable than the fear of living. People of true talents should get drunk in order to see life in the right light, and afterward report it to us. The wretchedest of all (but so that _human_ life in the comparison turns out still pa.s.sable) is _civil_ life, at which I could let fly for years, because it has nothing but long troughs for the stomach, from which hang down chains for the fancy,--because it perverts man into a cit,--because it turns our fleeting existence from a corn-field into a drill-plough,--because it exhales a pestilential vapor which lies thick before the grave and over the heavens, and in which the poor expeditionary committee-man, sweating, chewing, fat, and besmeared, without a warm sunbeam for his heart, without a streak of light for his eye, drives round, till the ramming-block of the pavior[42] pounds him down on the marshy ropewalk. The only advantage such a poor piece of marble has, out of which a _pavement_ is made, instead of a _statue_, is that it looks upon the whole of human life as something really edifying, which it cannot sufficiently praise. And yet to us good fools the outer world could not appear so small, were there not something eternal and great within us, whereto we contrast it,--were there not a sunlight in us, which falls into this opera-house, just as the daylight, sometimes, when a door opens, falls in upon the nightly stage,--were it not that, like men in old pictures of the resurrection, we are half bedded in the earth and half out of it,--and if this ice-life were not an _Aiguille percee_,[43] and had not an opening out into an eternal blue.... Amen!
"I have, however, still to announce to the sorrowing a.s.sembly, that I have been making an April-fool of it; for the dead man, whose funeral sermon I have been delivering, is really myself." ...
But here all his friends embraced him, in order to set limits to his ingenious frenzy,--and to press such an impa.s.sioned, true British heart to their own. The embrace softly warmed all his cold wounds, and he was healed, though exhausted; another"s life grew into his, and love conquered death. The Englishmen, in whose eyes stood the tears of a double intoxication, could hardly tear themselves away from the humorous darling.
Clotilda, who with her female friends overheard the funeral oration in the adjoining chamber, at first held them back beseechingly from opening it. But when Victor said, "Cold form, erect thyself, and show men the tears which flow from a tender heart that breaks for love,"--then she took leave of them with a hasty "good-night," unable to master an emotion which upheaved her whole being. When they reported to him the time of her withdrawal, then did he, who was now already so weary, weak, and tender, become inexpressibly so,--all the lights which his effort had brightened on his countenance seemed to melt away in love like moonlight in dew-drops,--he waited not for his chamber to be empty, but showed that which Clotilda in hers would conceal,--he could even contemplate the unveiled wax statue with softened spirit, and said smilingly: "I fancy, the reason why I have let the _whole_ of me be repeated in wax is the same for which the Catholic does it with single limbs, in order to hang them on a saint, and thereby give thanks or pray for recovery; or like the Roman Emperors, whose wax statues the physicians visited after the death of the original."[44] The company went away, and he was at last alone. The moon, which had risen at 11 o"clock and 57 minutes, just began to throw its still low and waning light up against the windows of Clotilda"s sitting-room. Victor put out his night-lamp, and, in order not to sink with his still tossing, dreaming heart into the dreams of sleep, seated himself at the window, almost in the wonted place of his wax copy and in a similar att.i.tude----when fate ordained, that he, who to-day had given out the wax mummy to be his own person, should now inversely be looked upon as the image--by Clotilda! She stood at some distance from her window, on which no light fell but that from heaven; Victor, as this latter could not yet reach him, was quite in shadow, and turned towards her with five quarters of his profile. Scarcely had he observed that she fixed upon him an unchanging glance, that seemed as if it would not only take him in but go through him, when he guessed that she confounded him with the man of wax; he also observed out of the corner of his eye that something white fluttered around her, i. e. that she often dried her eyes. But how would it have been possible for his fine feeling by the least motion to take away from her her error, and to make her blush with confusion for her innocent gaze! Another, e. g. the misunderstood Mat, would in such an emergency have composedly straightened himself up and looked indifferently out of the window; but he ossified himself, as it were, in his att.i.tude of lifelessness. But only the night and the distance could conceal from her his trembling, when her tears shed for his corpse seized like a hot stream his dismembered heart, and softened and dissolved the little of it which this evening had still left whole into a burning wave of love. Children"s tears flow more freely, when one shows them sympathy; and in this hour of exhaustion, Victor, who was generally made more hard by another"s sympathy for him, grew softer; and when Clotilda seated herself at the window, to lean upon it her weary head, it seemed to him as if something exhorted him now to verify that which he had said to-day to the statue: Cold form, erect thyself, and show men the tears which flow from a soft heart.
Clotilda at length closed the curtains and disappeared. But he still cautiously acted for some time longer the part of his image, and just when he made less effort to play the statue he succeeded better. All his thoughts flowed now like balm over the lacerated spots of his inner man, and he said: "Though thou art only my friend, I am satisfied, and thou canst appease this bosom"s tumultuous yearnings. O, besides, this full heart would fly to pieces, if it should entertain the thought that thou lovest me!" For the rest he took home to himself to-day for the first time the improbability of his recent supposition, that a person so reserved as she could have demeaned herself in so unreserved a manner towards the blind Julius, and he asked himself: "Is there not, then, sufficient explanation of her departure from the court, in January"s and Matthieu"s unholy love, and the holy love of Emanuel?"
But that she might not in the morning discover her erroneous confounding of things, he gave his wax figurant exactly the position which he had occupied at the window.
THIRD EASTER-HOLIDAY.
F. Koch"s double Jews-harp.--The Sleigh-ride.--The Ball--and....
The reader will wish, with me, that the third Easter-holiday ended something worse than the long 28th Dog-Post-Day.
The sleigh went tolerably, so far as could be foreseen.----I however foresee yet something quite different: that half a million of my reading-customers (for the other half I will answer) cannot find out what is in my hero. It is therefore my office to tell them only so much as this: Victor was never pusillanimous, man"s subjection to the yoke of fortune disgusted him; once every day Death took him up on the Sublime Arm, and let him, looking down therefrom, remark how diminutive were all mountains and hills, even graves. Every misfortune hardened him to steel, the Medusa"s head of the death"s-head turned him to stone, and the melting sun-glance of joyful emotion always vexed him in the remembrance. His sportive humor, his ideal of female perfection, the want of opportunity, and the shield of Minerva, had helped him along over the wind-months of feeling, and he had hitherto worshipped no other sun than the one which is twenty-one million miles distant,--till Heaven or the Devil brought along the nearer one, just in the year 1792. Still things would have gone quite tolerably, and the misfortune would have been easy enough to get through with, if he had been discreet or cool; I mean, if he had not said to himself: "It is fine to weep never for one"s self, but yet for another; it is fine to worry down every loss, except that of a heart; and which will a departed friend from his lofty place count greater, if I deliver consolatory sermons to myself on his decease with true composure, or if I sink, yearning, after the loved one, in voluntary, overmastering sorrow?"
Thereby,--and from unacquaintance with the over-powering influence of n.o.ble but untamed feelings,--and because he confounded his previous accidental calm of the heart with a voluntary one,--and from an overflowing love of humanity,--he had intentionally let the feelers of his inner man up to this time grow too large,--and thus, by the whirl of all the previous influences, the previous bereavements, the previous emotions of these Easter-days, of this fair village of his youth, he had been driven so far out of his course, that, notwithstanding his considerateness, his court-life, his humor, he forfeited (at least for Easter) somewhat of his old dissimilarity to those geniuses who, like the sea-crab, stretch out feelers which a man can hardly span with his arms....
That sympathetic look of Clotilda which yesterday, after his previous heat, had been a cooling balm, was to him to-day a very burning one; the thought of her eye full of tears for him conjured up all the days of his love for her and her whole image in his heart. I am convinced that not even the Regency-Counsellor, who, for the rest, might by yesterday"s funeral-sermon have lost something of his jealousy, as well as, by the republican diversion, somewhat of his love for Clotilda, failed to note the drunken and dreamy look of his eye. The parsonage itself was fortunately to-day an exchange, or a spiritual intelligence-office and recruiting-house; the Chaplain registered--not any of your French _car tel est notre plaisir_, but--the catechumens who were to confess at Whitsuntide.
He would not go over to the castle--his misunderstood friend Mat had already by ten o"clock called to him out of the window a morning-greeting and congratulation upon the snow-storm--until his sleigh had come from the city, so that he might start off at once, because he would not show over yonder any ridiculous emotion. Since the great world had become for him a work-day world, to disguise his feelings from it became harder; one conceals one"s self most easily from those whom one respects.
But the three twins and Franz Koch carried him over earlier than he would have gone, as early as half past five o"clock in the afternoon.
The name of Franz Koch in the Dog"s papers made me jump off of my feet.
If any one of my readers is a guest of the Carlsbad waters, or should happen to be his Majesty, the King of Prussia, William the Second, or one of his court, or the Elector of Saxony, or the Duke of Brunswick, or any other princely person, he has heard the good Koch, who is a modest pensioned soldier, and travels round everywhere with his instrument and plays on it. This instrument, which he calls the double Jews-harp, or mouth-harmonica, consists of an improved pair of jaw-drums, or humming jaws-harps, played at once, which he shifts according to the piece he is playing. His handling of the buzzing-irons bears the same relation to the old Jews-harp playing as harmonica-bells do to servants" bells. I am under obligation to induce such of my readers as have wren"s wings to their fancy, or at least, from the heart upwards are _lithopaedia_ (petrified f[oe]tuses), or have the ear-drum membrane for nothing but to be drummed on,--to induce, I say, with the little oratory I have, such readers to tumble the aforesaid Franz out of the house, if he undertakes to come and buzz before them.
For it amounts to just nothing, and the wretchedest ba.s.s-viol or rebeck screams louder in my opinion; nay, its hum is so low, that he played at Carlsbad before not more than twelve customers at once, because one cannot sit near enough to him, particularly as in his leading pieces he has the light carried away, that neither eye nor ear may disturb the fantasies. If, however, a reader is differently const.i.tuted,--a poet, perchance,--or a lover,--or very tender,--or like Victor,--or like me; then, indeed, let him without scruple listen with still and melting soul to Franz Koch, or--for to-day is just the time when he is not to be had--to _me_.
The jolly Englishman had sent this harmonist to Victor with the card: "The bearer of this is the bearer of an echo which he carries in his pocket." Victor preferred, therefore, to take him over to the friend of all sweet tones, that her departure might not deprive her of this melodious hour. It seemed to him like going through a long church, when he entered Clotilda"s Loretto-chapel; her simple chamber was like Mary"s sitting-room, enclosed with a temple. She had already completed arranging herself in her black ornamental dress. A black costume is a fine eclipse of the sun, wherein one absolutely cannot take one"s eyes away from it: Victor, who, with his _Chinese_ regard for this color, brought with him to-day to this magic a defenceless soul, an enkindled eye, grew pale and confused at the radiant face of Clotilda, over which the trace of a trouble that had rained out, hovered like a rainbow over the bright, blue sky. It was not the cheerfulness of light thoughts, which every maiden takes on when she dresses herself, but the cheerfulness of a pure soul full of patience and love. He trembled lest he should tread on two kinds of thistles,--on the painted ones of the floor, over which he took care to step, and upon the satirical ones of the fine observers around him, with which he was always coming in contact. Her stepmother was still upon the stucco-work and finishing of her worm-bag,[45] and the Evangelist was in her toilet-chamber as a.s.sistant-priest and collaborator in the finery department. So that Clotilda had still time to hear the performer on the mouth-harmonica; and the Chamberlain offered himself to his daughter and my hero for he was a father of good breeding towards his daughter--as part of the audience, although he could make little out of music, table- and ball-music excepted.
Victor now saw for the first time, by Clotilda"s delight in the musician he had brought with him, that her harmonious heart loved to tremble in unison with strings; in fact, he was often mistaken about her, because she--like thee, dearest * * *--expressed her highest praise as well as her highest censure by silence. She begged her father, who had already heard the mouth-harmonica in Carlsbad, to give her and Victor an idea of it,--he gave it: "It expressed in masterly manner, not so much the _fortissimo_ as the _piano-dolce_, and, like the simple harmonica, was best adapted to the _adagio_." She answered,--leaning on the arm of Victor, who led her into a still chamber darkened for the occasion,--music was perhaps too good for drinking-songs and for mirthful sensations. As sorrow enn.o.bled man, and, by the little cutting pangs which it gave him, unfolded him as regularly as they do the buds of the carnation, which they slit open with a knife that they may bloom without bursting; so music as an artificial sorrow took the place of the true." "Is the true so rare?"
said Victor in the dark chamber which only _one_ wax-taper lighted. He came close to Clotilda, and her father sat opposite to him.
Blissful hour! thou--that didst once, with the echo-strains of this harmonica, pa.s.s through my soul,--glide along by me once more, and let the resonance of that echo again murmur around thee!
But scarcely had the modest, quiet virtuoso put the instrument of enchantment to his lips, when Victor felt that now (before the light was removed) he should not dare to do as at other times, when he pictured to himself at every adagio appropriate scenes, and underlaid every piece with peculiar fantasyings for its texts. For it is an unfailing method of giving tones their omnipotence, when one makes them the accompanying voices of our inner mood, and so out of instrumental music makes as it were vocal music, out of inarticulate tones articulate ones, whereas the fairest series of tones, which no definite subject arranges into alphabet and speech, glides off from bathed, but not softened hearts. When, therefore, the sweetest sounds that ever flowed over human lips as consonants of the soul began to well forth from the trembling mouth-harmonica,--when he felt that these little steel-rings, as if they were the setting and touch-board[46] of his heart, would make their agitations his own,--then did he constrain his feverish heart, on which, besides, all wounds came out to-day, to shrink up against the tones, and not picture to itself any scenes, merely that he might not burst into tears before the light was gone.
Higher and higher swept the drag-net of uplifting tones with his heart in its grasp. One melancholy remembrance after another said to him in this short ghostly hour of the past, "Crush me not out, but give me my tear." All his imprisoned tears were cl.u.s.tered around his heart, and in them his whole inner being, lifted from the ground, softly swam. But he collected himself: "Canst thou not yet deny thyself," he said to himself, "not even a moist eye? No, with a dry eye receive this sad, stifled echo of thy whole breast, receive this resonance from Arcadia, and all these weeping sounds, into a broken heart."--Amidst such a secret melting away, which he often took for composure, it always seemed within him as if a breaking voice from a far region addressed him, whose words had the cadence of verses; the breaking voice again addressed him: "Are not these tones composed of vanished hopes? Do not these sounds, Horion, run into one another like human days? O, look not on thy heart; on the dust-cloud of the crumbling heart, as on a mist, the gleaming forms of former days cast their image."--Nevertheless he still answered calmly, "Life is truly too short for two tears,--the tear of woe, and the other." ... But now, as the white dove, which Emanuel saw fall in the churchyard, flew through his imaginings,--as he thought to himself, "This dove, truly, once fluttered in my dream of Clotilda, and clung to the ice-mountains; ah! it is the image of the fading angel beside me,"--and as the tones fluttered more and more faintly, and at last ran round in the whispering leaves of a death-garland,--and as the breaking voice returned again and said: "Knowest thou not the old tones? Lo! they sounded in thy dream before her birthday festival, and there made the sick soul beside thee sink up to her heart in the grave, and she left nothing behind for thee but an eye full of tears, and a soul full of grief"----"No, that was all she left me," said in broken tones his weary heart, and all his suppressed tears gushed in torrents from his eyes....
But the light was just then carried from the chamber, and the first stream fell unseen into the lap of night.
The harmonica began the melody of the dead: "How softly they slumber."
Ah, in such tones do the far-wandering waves of the sea of eternity beat against the hearts of darkling mortals who stand on the sh.o.r.e and yearn to put forth! Now art thou, Horion, wafted by a wave of harmony out of the mist-rain of life over into the light of eternity! Hear, what tones murmur round the broad fields of Eden! Do not the strains, dissipated into breaths, reverberate from distant flowers, and float, swollen by echo, round the swan-bosom, which, blissfully dissolving, swims on pinions, and draw it on from flood to flood of melody, and sink with it in the distant flowers, which a cloud of fragrances fills, and does not in the fragrant dusk the soul glow again like a ruddy evening, ere it sets in bliss?
O Horion, does the earth still abide under us, drawing its circle of death-hills round the breadth of life? Do these tones tremble in an earthly air? O Music! thou that bringest the Past and the Future with their flying flames so near to our wounds, art thou the evening-breath of this life, or the morning air of the life to come? Ay, thy sounds are echoes, which angels s.n.a.t.c.h from the second world"s tones of gladness, to convey down into our mute hearts, into our dreary night the faint spring-melodies of heavens flying far above us! And thou, dying harmonica-tone! verily thou comest to us out of an peal of exultation, which, driven from heaven to heaven, dies at last in the remotest mute heaven, which consists of nothing but a deep, broad, tranquil, and eternal bliss....
"Tranquil and eternal bliss," repeats Horion"s dissolving soul, whose rapture I have hitherto made my own, "ay, _there_ will lie the region where I shall lift up my eyes toward the All-gracious, and spread out my arms toward _her_, toward this weary soul, toward this great heart.
Then shall I fall upon thy heart, Clotilda, then shall I clasp thee forever, and the flood of tranquil and eternal bliss will close around us. Breathe again toward life, earthly tones, between my breast and hers, and then let a little night, an undulating shadowy outline, swim along on your light waves, and I will look toward it and say, That was my life;--then shall I say more softly, and weep more intensely, Ay, man is unhappy, but only on the earth."
O, if there is a human being over whom, at these last words, memory draws great rain-clouds, to him, to her, I say, Beloved brother, sister, I am, to-day, as much moved as thou; I respect the sorrow which thou hidest,--ah! thou excusest me, and I thee....
The tune stopped and died away. What stillness now in the dark! Every sigh took the form of a long-drawn breathing. Only the nebulous stars of sensibility sparkled brightly in the darkness. No one saw whose eye had been wet. Victor looked into the still, black air before him, which a few minutes ago had been filled with hanging-gardens of tones, with dissolving air-castles of the human ear, with diminished heavens, and which now remained a naked, black firework-scaffold.
But the harmonica soon filled this darkness again with meteorological apparitions of worlds. Ah, why, then, must it needs strike precisely that melody which woke such restless yearnings in my Victor, the "Forget-me-not," which sounded out to him the verses, as if he repeated them to Clotilda. "Forget me not, now that fate sternly calls thee away from me. Forget me not, when the cool earth one day rests lightly upon this heart, that fondly beat for thee. Think it is I, when some soft voice shall whisper to thy thought, Forget me not." ... And O, when these tones intertwine themselves with waving flowers, when they flow backward from one past to another, when they ripple more and more faintly through the past years that repose back of man"s memory,--at last only murmur under the dawn of life,--only well up inaudibly under the cradle of man,--and stiffen in our cold twilight and dry up in the midnight, when each of us was not,--then does man, deeply moved, cease any longer to conceal his sighs and his infinite pangs.