SUPPLEMENT TO THE SUPPLEMENT.
While the first edition has been getting out of print, I have learned some very interesting additional circ.u.mstances for the second. Julius hugged his Victor in the garden right heartily, and said: "I am very glad to be here again,--I have been so alone all day, and not heard a human being,--thy Italian domestic has absolutely run away." In Victor"s bosom, this unaccountable absconding of a faithful and contented servant raised, if not a storm-cloud, yet a dark mist. The quiet Marie had diligently discharged toward the blind one the duties of the fugitive. "I would gladly have given the Italian his letter first," Julius continued, "but here I have it still." Victor looked at it, and found, to his amazement, the address in the handwriting of--his Lordship. The letter was handed to the _blind one_ a few minutes after the man"s flight, with the request that he would give it to no one but the Italian. Although Flamin and her Ladyship promised to be answerable for the breaking of the seal, still Victor addressed himself reluctantly to this solution of a new charade of his life; for Clotilda was silent in the matter. Here is an authentic copy:--
"You are right. Do not, however, start till to-morrow, but go immediately to Mr. * * *. The place remains 5. But VI are necessary."
_Mr_. might mean _Monsieur_ (the fifth son). Further than that there was nothing to be guessed from this flight of clouds of the coming weather by the best weather-prophets. The reader, however, may imagine, merely from his own eager desire to know the significance of these celestial signs, how great must have been that of our hero.
45. OR LAST CHAPTER.
Knef.--The Town of Hof.--Sorrel Horse.--Robbers.
--Sleep.--Oath.--Night Journey.--Bushes.--End.
I say only this much beforehand: in all the time that ink--like currant-wine--has been drawn from quill-tubes,--in all the time that quills have been cut to make instruments of peace, or carbonized to make instruments of war (for the coal used in manufacturing gunpowder is prepared from feathers[196]),--and still further back, in all that time the singular occurrence has never till now happened which I am now to report to the world. As I said, this is all I say beforehand; the incident is a tolerable one.
Inasmuch as the Post-Dog has, since the forty-fourth chapter, withdrawn his hand, or paw, from this learned work, my plan was to make it out alone, and only append one more and last chapter,--but not this one,--as capstone and swan-song, so that the _opus_ might be given at once to the post, the press, and the world. Good reviewers (thought I) I can let wrangle with the Post-Dog and biographical bell-wether as long as they please over the want of a final cadence.... It was already getting toward the end of October, and of my Robinsonade on the island of St. John"s, when the good old Friday of this Robinson, my Dr. Fenk, returned from his long botanical Alpine tour home to Scheerau, but immediately put out to sea again, and landed on my St. John"s domain.
We sat down to two or three courses with minced-meat (or ragout) of travelling-anecdotes. At last, I drew his attention--as all literati do--to what I had written, to my latest _opusculum_, what stood before us in a cursed pile as high as a conical orrery: "It has dropped from me," said I, "in an entirely cursory manner, often in the night, just as Voltaire or the pea-hens let fall their eggs on the straw in their sleep. I have taken pleasure in endowing the world with this legacy of four volumes; but the legacy still waits for its last chapter,--without which the labor of the dog (in the n.o.ble sense) will be in the bad sense a dog"s-work." He read the whole bequest through before my eyes,--which gives an author a foolish, oppressive sensation,--and flung his two arms up and down often during the perusal, and would fain make the author red with extravagant praise. But it did not take; for an author has already bestowed every compliment upon himself beforehand a thousand times, and is at the same time his own flesh-scales, his own flesh-weight, and his own flesh, because, like a virtuous man, he is satisfied with his own approbation.
"The hero of thy Post-Days," said he, "is modelled somewhat after thyself."--"That," I replied, "is for the world and the hero to decide, when they both become acquainted with me; but all authors do so,--their personality is either pictured opposite the t.i.tle-page, or farther on in the midst of the work, as the painter Rubens and the designer Ramberg in almost all their works bring on a dog."
But now let one imagine with what astonishment I clapped my hands when the Doctor named to me the little country where the whole story transpired: * * * is the little country"s real name. "I had only to go thither," he said, "and I could draw the forty-fifth (tail-) chapter from the fountain-head. As he pa.s.sed through Flachsenfingen, they had only just got to the Fortieth Dog-Post-Day. If I would take my own horses," ("That I will," said I, "I will buy me some this very day,") "I might, perhaps, come up with a distinguished pa.s.senger, who, unless all signs deceived him, was his Lordship incarnate." For the sake of a few ounces of asaf[oe]tida which Fenk needed on the road, he had even been with Zeusel in his apothecary"s shop, upon whom, he said, the number ninety-nine was as legibly imprinted as the number ninety-eight was on the b.u.t.terfly[197] (the Catalanta).
No one certainly can blame an author who was crabbing and fishing for his forty-fifth, tail- or train-chapter, for running away as if distracted,--packing up,--tackling up,--jumping in,--starting off, and driving so furiously, as he shot by hotels, country-houses, processions, stars, and nights, that not in * * days, but in * * * days (many a one will actually think I am drawing a long bow[198]), I sprang, bedusted but unpowdered, into the inn of the _Golden Lion_. The said inn is situated in the town of Hof, which again on its part is situated in something greater; namely, in Voigtland. I am careful not to name either the days of my journey or the gate through which I shot into Hof, in order that I may not reveal to curious knaves and _mouchards_[199] by my route of march the real name of Flachsenfingen.
Hof I could name right out without harm, because from there--the moment one is past the gates--one can travel to all points of the compa.s.s; and so, too (which is a very good thing), one can arrive there from all places,--from Monchberg, Kotzan, Gattendorf, Sachsen, Bamberg, Boheim, and from America, and from the Rascally Islands, and from any part of Busching and Fabri.[200]
Not far from the Golden Lion (properly in Oat Lane) stood a distinguished Englishman, looking on while his four smoking horses took a medicine of two thirds common saltpetre and one third horse-brimstone against foundering. The stranger--who might have been about as many years old as this book is days was dressed in black; tall, respectable, rich (to judge by his equipage), and of a manly build. His bright and fixed eye lay kindling like a focus on men,--his face was fine and cold,--on his forehead stood the perpendicular secant as the time-_bar_ denoting business, as sign of exclamation at the toil and trouble of life,--faint, horizontal lines were ruled across this time-bar like staves; both sorts of lines were cut into the too high forehead, as if for signs how high the tear-water of affliction had already risen on this brow, on this soul. "I would," thought I, "have painted Lord Horion differently, if this face had appeared to me sooner." Perhaps the reader thinks this was his Lordship himself.
When the Englishman had seen my tiercet of sorrels, he came straight up to me and introduced a project of exchange, and wanted to take my sorrel for a black. He had the fancy of Russians in the higher ranks, of travelling with a regular cento[201] of differently-colored horses,--as he also had the finer custom of the Neapolitans, to let a free, loose horse prance along beside the carriage. Accordingly, for the sake of the equine quodlibet, he wanted to bid in my miserable sorrel, who, to tell the truth, wore nowhere any hair of his own, except behind on the bob. I told him frankly,--to leave him no suspicion of selfishness or design,--"My three sorrels looked like the three Furies, and represented tolerably well the three cavities of anatomy; only the dark sorrel which he wanted was magnificently built, particularly about the head, and I should be sorry to lose him now, when the head was just going to be of use to me."--"So?" said the Briton.--"Of course," said I; "for a horse"s head is the best remedy against bed-bugs, and this one must now very soon fall off from the nag, like a ripe plum,--the head I can then put into my bed-straw." The Englishman did not even smile; during the whole bargain he stirred not a finger, not a feature, not a muscle. Not until I myself had said, "If the three Fates only keep on their legs till I have fetched away the forty-fifth chapter on wheels," did it strike me that he had been in a distant manner studying and sounding me more than the sorrel,--and I fell upon the hypothesis, whether he had not misused the whole horse-exchange as a mere cloak and blinder of his suspicious, pumping questions.
Let the reader only just read on--The Englishman started off with my sorrel muscle-preparation; and I followed some time after with my black, who was as strong, black, and glossy as the old Adam in man.
But I must first tell what I was going to do in Hof,--I was going to dedicate. At first each of these volumes was to be inscribed to a female friend; but I had reason to fear I should rue it, because my wont is to quarrel with a different one--never with all at once--every month. I should like to know in what parallel of lat.i.tude the man were to be found who does not fall out with his lady friend a thousand times oftener than with his male one. The biographer must, therefore, of necessity, because he is too changeable, cross the street from the Golden Lion with his four volumes, and enter the house of the only man towards whom he never alters, and who never does himself either, and say to him, "Here, my dear good Christian Otto, I dedicate something to thee again,--four volumes at once.--It were handsome, if thou again wouldst dedicate each to one of thy family,--three are just enough, and thou hast thine own left for thee, too.--I am riding now after the forty-fifth chapter, and thou--cut and clear away meanwhile at the forty-four other beds as much as thou wilt."
And here, my faithful one, must thou absolutely have the last chapter also; and I only add further, "This _Hesperus_, which stands as _morning-star_ over my life"s fresh morning, thou mayest still look upon when my earthly day is over; then is it a quiet _evening-star_ for quiet men, till it also sets behind its hill."
Inasmuch as all letters to me are notoriously delivered in the busy and somewhat surly city of Hof, and as in fact many travellers pa.s.s this way, one will readily indulge me with the small s.p.a.ce for two observations, which the town itself makes upon the town. The Hofites, namely, all remark and complain that they cannot exactly become accustomed to each other. "We ought all to be able," they say, "to bear with each other very well, and, if only thereby, refute the observation of the great Montesquieu, that trade knits together nations and sunders individuals." Secondly, they all reproach each other, that from year to year they barter for in quant.i.ty, and acc.u.mulate and store away in green-houses, great cornucopias full of balsam, rose, clover, and lily-seed, and tall boxes full of splendid apple-seeds (particularly of princes" apples, violet apples, Adam"s- and virgin-apples, and Dutch ketterlings),----but that they sow or set out of this seed little or nothing. "In old age," they say, "good fruits and flowers will come apropos to us, if we save a good quant.i.ty of seed out of the present ones, and then plant it."--A certain candidate (an academical chum of mine) took occasion from these two observations to make two very good points in an afternoon sermon. In the first part, he showed his Hofites out of the Epistle that they should not torment, but heartily love, each other in this fleeting vapor of life, without reference to the numbers of their houses; and in the second _pars_, he made it plain that they ought in this brief, waning light of life to make from time to time one and another joke....
I had hardly travelled a few hours--days--weeks (for I do not state the truth), and had gone to sleep towards midnight in my carriage as I mounted a hill in a thick forest, when suddenly two hands, which had worked their way in behind through the back window, jammed down a bee-cap[202] over my head, fastened it hastily round my neck with a padlock, covered and blinded my eyes, and ten or twelve other hands seized, held, and bound my body. The worst thing in such a case is, that one expects to be killed and robbed of his jewel-caskets; but nothing can vex and annoy more an author who has not yet finished his book than to take away his life. No man wishes to die in the midst of a plan; and yet every one at every hour of the day bears about with him at once budding, green, half-ripe, and wholly ripe plans. I sought, therefore, to defend my life with such valor--since the forty-fifth chapter and its critics weighed upon my mind--that I--although I say it--could easily have mastered four or five prince-stealers, had there not been half a dozen. I laid down my arms, but occupied the battle-field (namely, the coach-cushion),--and observed, in fact, that they did not want so much to kill the Mining-Superintendent as to blind him. The adventure grew still more romantic,--my own fellow was not tumbled from the throne of his box,--my carriage continued on the road to Flachsenfingen,--two gentlemen seated themselves in beside me, who, to judge by their feminine hands, were persons of rank,--and, strangest of all, a dog began to bark, who, by his barking, must have labored as ma.s.s-a.s.sistant and fellow-master on this learned work.
We supped and lunched in the open air. Here a surgical order-ribbon was drawn around my naked body, because I had unfortunately, during the quarter-wheelings and manual evolutions of my defence, run my shoulder-blade upon the point of a sword. I could eat very well, inasmuch as the tin canary-cage door of my bee-cap was turned wide open. Good heavens! if the public had seen the author of the Dog-Post-Days shove in his eatables through the open leaves of the leaden gate, he would have died with shame!--During the meal, I called the dog to me by the name, Hofmann! He actually came; I felt all over him, if haply any forty-fifth chapter might be hanging on his neck,--it was bare.
After a long alternation of journeying,--eating,--saying nothing,--sleeping,--days,--nights,--I was at last set down in a sea, and there carried about (or did it come from a narcotic?) till I slept like a rat. What followed--strange as it is--I shall not make known till I have first written out the observation, that, to be sure, great _joy_ and great _sorrow_ enliven and gratify the n.o.bler propensities within us; but that _hope_, and far more _anxiety_, hatch the whole worm"s nest of miserable hankerings, the infusorial sp.a.w.n of petty ideas, and unravel them and set them to gnawing,--so that in this way the _Devil_ and the _Angel_ within us contrive to maintain a worse _parity_ of their two religions than holds even in Augsburg with two others,[203] and that each of the two religious parties in man has in pay its own night-watch, censor, innkeeper, gazetteer, just as much as the aforesaid ones in Augsburg....
--I had my eyes still closed, when a whispering, swelled and multiplied into a great murmur by a thousand tree-tops, floated round me; the rushing aerial sea swept through narrow aeolian harps, and raised waves thereon, and the waves rippled over me with melodies,--a high mountain air, flung down from a cloud shooting by overhead, fell like a cooling stream of water on my breast.--I opened my eyes, and thought I was dreaming, because I was without the iron mask.--I was leaning against the fifth column on the upper step of a Grecian temple, whose white floor was encircled by the _summits_ of tossing poplars,--and the tops of oaks and chestnuts ran waving only as fruit-hedges and espaliers round the lofty temple, and reached only up to the heart of a man standing within.
"I must surely be acquainted with this luxuriant harvest of tree-tops,"
said I.--"Lo, weeping birches hang their arms yonder,--out there stems kneel before the thunder which blasted them,--do not nine c.r.a.pe veils and sprayey fountains, in many-colored twigs, flutter through each other?--and the tempests have planted here their conductors as five iron sceptres in the earth.---This is most certainly a dream of the _Island of Reunion_, which has. .h.i.therto so often darted rays across the mist of sleep, and with heavenly and winning radiance beamed upon my soul."----
But it was no dream. I rose from the step, and was about to enter the illuminated Grecian temple, which consisted only of a Grecian roof, of five columns, and the whole earth encamped around it, when eight arms embraced me, and four voices accosted me: "Brother!--we are thy brothers." Before looking upon them, before addressing them, I fell gladly with outspread arms into the midst of three hearts which I knew not, and shed tears upon a fourth, which I knew not, and at last lifted my eyes, not inquiringly, but blissfully, from the unknown hearts to their faces; and while I looked upon them, I heard behind me my beloved Dr. Fenk say: "Thou art the brother of Flamin, and these three Englishmen are thy incarnate brothers." ... Joy darted through me convulsively like a pang.--I pressed my lips mutely to those of the four embraced and embracing ones,--but I fell then upon my elder friend, and stammered, "Dear, good Fenk! tell me all! I am distracted and enchanted with things which I still do not comprehend."
Fenk went back with me smiling to the four brothers, and said to them: "See, this is the _monsieur_, your fifth and lost brother of the seven islands,-and your biographer into the bargain.--Now at last he has caught his forty-fifth chapter."--Then turning to me: "Thou seest, of course," said he, "that this is the Isle of Union,--that the three twins here are the sons of the Prince, whom our Lord wanted to bring back.--For thy sake, because thou hast this long time been absent from the seven islands, he has travelled through all market towns, and around all islands of Europe. At last I wrote to him." ...
"Thou hast certainly, also," I interrupted him, "been my correspondent through the dog."--
"Just go on," said he.
"And _Knef_ is _Fenk_ spelt backward,--and thou gavest thyself out with Victor for an Italian, who could speak no German,--copiedst off all day his own list of rules for deportment, for his Lordship, and for me too, in fact, in order to be his and my spy."--
"It is so,--and therefore I also wrote to his Lordship," said he, "that thy French name, _Jean Paul_, brought thee under suspicion; and as thou, besides, didst not thyself know thy origin, and, in addition to that, thy foolish bit of life-road, which, as in an English garden, would not reach a mile in a straight direction"----
"The biographer," said I, "should, in fact, be his own."[204]--
"It is incomprehensible to me now how it was that I did not happen upon this in the first instance; for thy resemblance to Sebastian, which the fifth son of the Prince should also have, thou hast thyself long since remarked,--and thy Stettin box-picture on the shoulder-blade, which these gentlemen here all have about them, and which his Lordship himself beheld day before yesterday, during the bandaging."
"So! so!" said I, "it was for this, then, that your biographer got the falcon"s hood, the wound in the back, the fine black steed, and the stranger in Hof was his Lordship?"--
In short, by all this his Lordship had fully convinced himself that I was the one whom he had so long sought; for he had previously long since received Fenk"s communication through fifteen hands, inasmuch as it travelled from Hamburg, or rather from the land of the Hadeln, to Ziegenhain in Lower Hesse, then into the Princ.i.p.ality of Schwabeck, then into the Duchy of Holzapfel, to Schweinfurt, to Scheer-Scheer, and still back again to * * and to * * *, and finally to Flachsenfingen, where he at last received it; there, in the Isle of Union, he had been concealed a long time, until the communication, the ending of October, which as it were underscored the maternal marls with red ink, and, most of all, the banishing from St. Luna of the three brothers who landed on the island, constrained him to travel off to Scheerau, or rather to Hof in Voigtland. Here, naturally, I was obliged to meet him, according to a concert with the Italian servant (i. e. with Dr. Fenk), on account of which he sent me from my island after the forty-fifth chapter, and whose repet.i.tion came to hand in the billet intercepted by the blind one, and now deciphered; and my old face, which he forthwith compared with a younger engraving of the fifth princely son, threw at once in the "Oat-lane" the most ample light upon everything.
So soon as he knew this, he left me to travel on alone, under my tin bee-cap and Moses"s veil, and hurried forward to the Prince just one minute before it was too late. For Matthieu had betrayed all; and they were just on the point of sending to arrest the three twins, on the island where they had taken refuge, and our Victor at his mother"s house, wherein he had already forgotten court and n.o.bility for patients and sciences and bride, when his Lordship sent in his name to the Prince. The Prince was afraid of being persuaded by him, as Caesar was of Cicero. His Lordship--whose soul, indeed, was a _petrographic_[205]
chart of sublime ideas--confounded the measures of the Prince by a more daring and defiant boldness than these measures had reckoned on. He began with the intelligence, that he brought not merely _one_ son to the Prince, but all; which last thing he had not promised, for the reason that he could not know how far fate would perhaps leave or lead him.--He forced the Prince to listen to a long and cold discourse, wherein he laid before him the plan of study for the five sons, and their development, history, and destiny; while he seemed to presuppose the proofs of their extraction, he however wove them elaborately into the inferences he drew from it. Thus, e. g., he said, no one had known about the important secret but her Ladyship and Clotilda and Emanuel, whose sacred doc.u.ments, sealing all with death, he here presented him, together with others for the children; only a certain court-page had, during his blindness, stolen and abused one of five secrets. His Lordship did not pluck to pieces this snare of a soul, because, as he said, it was too insignificant for satisfaction, too black-dyed for punishment, and because he himself besides would soon depart out of these regions forever. In short, with his omnipotence he took such a hold of the Prince, and drew all veils so clean off from the past, that he almost compelled him, instead of condemning or acquitting, merely to deprecate and to exchange accusation and mistrust for grat.i.tude. The single good thing, Lord Horion said in conclusion, which the Page had done, was, that, by his weed-sowing-machines, he had ripened and expedited the great and fair recognition precisely for a monthly period, when the festoon of the five shoulders (the maternal moles) were in full bloom. The Prince, in spite of the other party"s iciness, was melted, for his paternal love was enriched with new treasures.
Nevertheless, he mixed in with his thanks this delicate reproach against Victor"s pretended n.o.bility: "I am full of grat.i.tude for you, although you deprive me too soon of the opportunity of showing it.
Hitherto I have rejoiced that I could at least prove to the son how very much indebted, if not grateful, I was to the father. But you know my error." His Lordship--now made more pliant by victory--replied: "I know not whether good intentions and bad circ.u.mstances excuse me; but I could regard him only as worthy to be your body physician, whom I-- acknowledged worthy to be my son."--The Prince embraced him cordially; his Lordship reciprocated it quite as warmly, and said: "On the 31st of October," (that is to-day, and he said it yesterday,) "he would seal his honest sentiments toward the Prince in a manner more decisive than words."----
n.o.ble man! Thou consumest nothing on the earth beyond thyself, and art a storm-bird, through whose fat a wick of the lamp is threaded, and which is now burned out and carbonized by its own light,--I have a presentiment, as if thy fair soul would soon be on another, _higher Isle of Reunion_ than this earthly one!
I write this on the" forenoon of the 31st of October, at ten o"clock, on the island.
EVENING, AT SIX O"CLOCK, IN MAIENTHAL.
Wherewith will this book end at last?--with a tear or with an exultation?--
Dr. Fenk, until two o"clock (for not till then would his Lordship arrive), threw the brown or lump-sugar of humor upon our minutes and sorrows; his whimsical red face was the violet sugar-loaf paper of sweetness. My good Victor was with Clotilda in Maienthal. Fenk kept up one continued laugh at me as a dauphin. He makes many similes, he says: "I should not, until the end of a book and of the whole play, get my true t.i.tle, as they do not print the general t.i.tle-page of the journals till the last number,--or," he says, "like a p.a.w.n at chess, I should not be promoted until the last row to be an officer." It is, however, very well known to me from history, that in France, even under Louis XIV., the present system of equality already existed, though first with reference to princes, whom the king made equal, whether they entered upon life as Mestizoes[206] or Creoles, or Quatroons[207] or Quintoons, or as born to the throne. As now one can produce new laws and novellae[208] of imperial statute quite as well in Germany as beyond its limits, it might well happen in my lifetime that legitimated princes should be declared competent to the throne,--whereby I of course should come to be ruler. It were well for Flachsenfingen if that should happen, because I will buy me beforehand the best French and Latin works on government, and study the subject in them so well that I cannot fail. I think I may venture to take it upon me to set the poor human race, which is forever living in the _first of April_, and which never gets out of its standing-stool or go-cart,--the only change being the addition of more wheels to the cart,--on its legs again a little by my sceptre. Time was when a n.o.bleman and the horse of an English riding-master were capable of doffing the hat, of firing a pistol, of smoking tobacco, of telling whether there was a damsel in the company, &c.; but now-a-days horse and n.o.bleman have come to be so distinguished from each other by culture, that it is a true honor to be the latter, and that it does not harm my n.o.bility (though I feared it in the beginning) that I have more than common learning. In our days the head-horses of the n.o.bility are no longer harnessed on so far ahead of the citizenly wheel-horses to the chariot of state as they were a hundred years since; hence duty, or at least prudence, dictates (even for a new n.o.bleman like me) that he (or I) should let himself down, and hide the consciousness of his rank (why should not I succeed in that as well as another?) under the grace of an easy and complaisant good-breeding, and in fact take no airs upon himself about any ancestors, except for the _future_ ones, of whose collective merits I cannot think greatly enough, because the earth is still mighty young,[209] and just in petticoats, and, like the Poles, in Polish frock.
To return: at two o"clock, his Lordship came with his blind son, like Philosophy with Poesy. Beautiful, beautiful youth! innocence has sketched thy cheeks, love thy lips, enthusiasm thy forehead. His Lordship, with his Laudon"s[210] forehead, and with a face more obscured and shaded to-day than in Hof, on which the honeymoon of youth and the pa.s.sion-weeks of later age threw a confused chiaroscuro,--he came to us to-day almost warmer than usual, although with features expressive of nothing but the feeling that life is an intercalary day, and that he loves only philanthropy, not men. He said, we must do him and the Hof-medicus the pleasure of visiting the latter this very day in Maienthal, and bringing him hither, because he had still to complete here without eyewitnesses all sorts of arrangements for the arrival of the Prince; we must, however, come back again with Victor in the night, because our distinguished father would arrive very early in the morning. The blind one, as blind, could stay where he was. It did not occur to me, that he concealed from the good, darkened Julius, that he was his father, for he said, with double and treble meaning: "As the good creature has once already had to endure the pain of losing a father, we must not a second time expose him to this sorrow." But _this_ did strike me, that he begged us to requite him for what he had hitherto sought to do in behalf of Flachsenfingen, by doing _this_ ourselves, and a.s.suring him with an oath, that in the public offices which we should get, we would fulfil his cosmopolitan wishes, which he delivered to us in writing, at least until such time _as he should see us again_. The Prince had been obliged to give him the same solemn a.s.surance. We looked up at him as at a beclouded comet, and took the oath with sorrow.
We entered on the road to Maienthal. An Englishman related to us that he had seen behind the mourning-thicket--the sleeping chamber of the blind one"s mother, his Lordship"s beloved, who rests beneath a black marble slab--a second marble set up, which the c.r.a.pe-veils sweeping over it were meant to cover, but could not. O then did each of us look round him with a heavy heart toward the island, as towards an undermined city, ere it is blown to pieces and hurled into the air.--But my longing to behold Victor and Maienthal, that labyrinthine flower-garden of my warmest dreams, drowned the anxious apprehension.
At last we climbed the southern mountain, and the variegated Eden, with its fulness of foliage and with the mult.i.tude of its pulsating twigs, grew with a murmur down into the valley.--Up yonder among the boughs lay, like a nightingale"s nest, Emanuel"s peaceful cottage, in which was now my Victor,--nearer to us rustled the chestnut avenue, and without, overhead, reposed the mowed churchyard.--To me, who had seen all this. .h.i.therto only in the dream of fancy, it seemed now again as if dreams were coming on; and the opaque ground became a transparent one, full of shapes created out of vapor,--and I sank full of sadness on the hill.... I went down at last as into a promised land, but my whole soul was swathed in a soft funeral veil.
--And my Victor tore away the veil, and pressed his warm soul to mine, and we melted together into one glowing point.--But I will, by and by, when he comes back from the abbey, once more and still more warmly fall on his breast, and then at length truly tell him my love.... O Victor, how gentle thou art, and how harmonious, how enn.o.bled, how beautiful in the tear of joy, how great in thy inspiration!--Ah, love of man, thou that givest to the inner man the Grecian profile, and to his motions lines of beauty, and to his charms bridal ornaments, redouble thy wondrous and healing powers in my hectic breast, when I see fools, or sinners, or uncongenial men, or enemies, or strangers!