THE QUARRELS OF FRIENDS.
Why is it that the most fervent love becomes more fervent by brief interruption and reconciliation? and why must a storm agitate our affections before they can raise the highest rainbow of peace? Ah! for this reason it is--because all pa.s.sions feel their object to be as eternal as themselves, and no love can admit the feeling that the beloved object should die. And under this feeling of imperishableness it is that we hard fields of ice shock together so harshly, whilst all the while under the sunbeams of a little s.p.a.ce of seventy years we are rapidly dissolving.
DREAMING.
But for dreams, that lay Mosaic worlds tessellated with flowers and jewels before the blind sleeper, and surround the rec.u.mbent living with the figures of the dead in the upright att.i.tude of life, the time would be too long before we are allowed to rejoin our brothers, parents, friends: every year we should become more and more painfully sensible of the desolation made around us by death, if sleep--the ante-chamber of the grave--were not hung by dreams with the busts of those who live in the other world.
TWO DIVISIONS OF PHILOSOPHIC MINDS.
There are two very different cla.s.ses of philosophical heads--which, since Kant has introduced into philosophy the idea of positive and negative quant.i.ties, I shall willingly cla.s.sify by means of that distinction. The positive intellect is, like the poet, in conjunction with the outer world, the father of an inner world; and, like the poet also, holds up a transforming mirror in which the entangled and distorted members as they are seen in our actual experience enter into new combinations which compose a fair and luminous world: the hypothesis of Idealism (i. e. the Fichtean system) the Monads and the Pre-established Harmony of Leibnitz--and Spinozism are all births of a genial moment, and not the wooden carving of logical toil. Such men therefore as Leibnitz, Plato, Herder, &c., I call positive intellects; because they seek and yield the positive; and because their inner world, having raised itself higher out of the water than in others, thereby overlooks a larger prospect of island and continents. A negative head, on the other hand, discovers by its acuteness--not any positive truths, but the negative (i. e. the errors) of other people.
Such an intellect, as for example Bayle, one of the greatest of that cla.s.s,--appraises the funds of others, rather than brings any fresh funds of his own. In lieu of the obscure ideas which he finds he gives us clear ones: but in this there is no positive accession to our knowledge; for all that the clear idea contains in development exists already by implication in the obscure idea. Negative intellects of every age are unanimous in their abhorrence of everything positive.
Impulse, feeling, instinct--everything, in short, which is incomprehensible, they can endure just once--that is, at the summit of their chain of arguments as a sort of hook on which they may hang them,--but never afterwards.
DIGNITY OF MAN IN SELF-SACRIFICE.
That for which man offers up his blood or his property must be more valuable than they. A good man does not fight with half the courage for his own life that he shows in the protection of another"s. The mother, who will hazard nothing for herself, will hazard all in defence of her child:--in short, only for the n.o.bility within us--only for virtue, will man open his veins and offer up his spirit: but this n.o.bility--this virtue--presents different phases: with the Christian martyr, it is faith; with the savage, it is honor; with the republican, it is liberty.
FANCY.
Fancy can lay only the past and the future under her copying-paper: and every actual presence of the object sets limits to her power: just as water distilled from roses, according to the old naturalists, lost its power exactly at the periodical blooming of the rose.
The older, the more tranquil, and pious a man is, so much the more holy does he esteem all that is _innate_, that is, _feeling_ and _power_; whereas in the estimate of the mult.i.tude whatsoever is _self-acquired_, the ability of practice and science in general has an undue pre-eminence; for the latter is universally appreciated, and therefore even by those who have it not, but the former not at all. In the twilight and the moonshine the fixed stars, which are suns, retire and veil themselves in obscurity; whilst the planets, which are simply earths, preserve their borrowed light un.o.bscured. The elder races of men, amongst whom man _was_ more, though he had not yet _become_ so much, had a childlike feeling of sympathy with all the gifts of the Infinite--for example, with strength--beauty--and good fortune; and even the _involuntary_ had a sanct.i.ty in their eyes, and was to them a prophecy and a revelation: hence the value they ascribed, and the art of interpretation they applied, to the speeches of children--of madmen--of drunkards--and of dreamers.
As the blind man knows not light, and through that ignorance also of necessity knows not darkness,--so likewise, but for disinterestedness we should know nothing of selfishness, but for slavery nothing of freedom: there are perhaps in this world many things which remain obscure to us for want of alternating with their opposites.
Derham remarks in his Physico-theology that the deaf hear best in the midst of noise, as, for instance, during the ringing of bells, &c. This must be the reason, I suppose, that the thundering of drums, cannons, &c., accompany the entrance into cities of princes and ministers, who are generally rather deaf, in order that they may the better hear the pet.i.tions and complaints of the people.
MISCELLANEOUS PIECES.
REMINISCENCES OF THE BEST HOURS OF LIFE FOR THE HOUR OF DEATH.
"Give me," said Herder to his son, as he lay in the parched weariness of his last illness,--"give me a great thought, that I may quicken myself with it."
It marks a strange perversity in human nature, that we are wont to offer nothing but images of terror--no stars of cheering light--to those who lie imprisoned in the darkness of a sick-bed, when the glitter of the dew of life is waxing gray and dim before them. It is indeed hard that lamentations and emotions are frequently vented upon the dying, which would be withheld from the living in all their vigor; as if the sick patient was to console those in health. There stands no spirit in the closeness of a sick-chamber to awaken a cheering smile on that nerveless, colorless countenance; but only confessors, lawyers, and doctors, who order everything, and relatives who lament at everything. There stands no lofty spirit, elevated above the circ.u.mstance of sorrow, to conduct the prostrate soul of the sufferer, thirsty for the refreshment of joy, back to the old springtide waters of pious recollection; and so to mingle these with the last ecstasies of life, as to give the dying man a foreboding of his transition to another state. On the contrary, the death-bed is narrowed into a coffin without a lid. The value of life is enhanced to the departing one by lies which promise cure, or words which proffer consolation; the bier is represented as a scaffold, the harsh discord of life is trumpeted into the ears which survive long after the eyes are dead, instead of letting life ebb away like an echo in sounds ever deeper, though fainter. Nevertheless, man has this of good in him, that he recalls the slightest joy which he has shared with a dying person, far rather than a thousand greater pleasures given to a person in health; perhaps because, in the latter case, we hope to repeat and redouble our attentions,--so little do mortals reflect that every pleasure they give or they receive may be the last.
Our exit from life would therefore be greatly more painful than our entrance into it, were it not that our good mother Nature had previously mitigated its sufferings, by gently bearing her children from one world into another when they are already heavy with sleep. For in the hour before the last she allows a breastplate of indifference toward the survivors to freeze about the heart of the lamented one; and in the hour immediately preceding dissolution (as we learn from those who have recovered from apparent death, and from the demeanor of many dying persons), the brain is, as it were, inundated and watered by faint eddies of bliss, comparable to nothing upon earth better than to the ineffable sensations felt by a patient under magnetic treatment.
We can by no means know how high these sensations of dying may reach, as we have accounts of them from none but those in whom the process has been interrupted; nor can we ascertain whether it is not these ecstatical transports which exhaust life more than the convulsions of pain, and which loosen the tie of this terrestrial state in some unknown heaven.
The history of the dying is a serious and prodigious history, but on earth its leaves will never be unrolled.
In the little village of Heim, Gottreich Hartmann resided with his old father, who was a curate; and although the old man had wellnigh outlived all those whom he had loved, he was made happy by his son.
Gottreich discharged his duties for him in the parish, not so much in aid of his parent"s unflinching vigor, as to satisfy his own energy, and to give his father the exquisite gratification of being edified by his child and companion.
In Gottreich there thrilled a spirit of true poetry; he was not, like the greater number of poetical young men, a bulbous plant, which, when it has sent forth its own flower, fattens its unseemly fruit underground; but he was a tree which crowned its variegated blossoms with sweet and beautiful fruits; and these buds were as yet coiled up from the warmth of the earliest springtide of a poet"s life.
His father had had in his youth a poet"s ardor of like intensity, but it was not favored by the times; for in the last century many a spirit which might have soared was engaged to the pulpit or the law-court, because the old-fashioned middle cla.s.ses were convinced that their offspring would find richer pasture on the meadow and in the valley than on the peaks of the mountain of the Muses.
Nevertheless, the repressed spirit of a poet, when it cannot exhale itself in creation, recoils but the more closely into the depths of his heart. His unuttered feelings speak in his motions as with a voice, and his actions express his imagery, and in this manner the poet may live as long as the man; just as the short-lived b.u.t.terfly may last out the long, hard winter in its chrysalis state, if it has not burst its prison in the preceding summer.
Such had been the life of the elder Hartmann; and yet more beautiful was it, because the virginal soul of the poet lives in the offices of religion, as in a nun"s cell; and the twin sisters Piety and Poetry are wont to dwell together and stand by one another.
How beautiful and how pure is the position of G.o.d"s ministers! All that is good dwells around them,--religion, poetry, and the life of a shepherd of souls; whilst other professions oft serve only to choke up this goodly neighborhood. Son and father seemed to live in one another, and on the site of filial and paternal love there arose the structure of a rare and singular friendship. Gottreich not only cheered his father by the new birth of his lost poet"s youth, but by the still more beautiful similarity of their faith. In days gone by, a minister who sent his son to the public theological schools might expect him to return the sworn antagonist of all that he had himself daily prayed to at the altar in the discharge of his office: the son returned to his father"s roof as a missionary sent to convert the heathen, or as an antichrist. There may have been sorrows of a father, which, though all unspoken, were deeper than a mother"s sorrows. But times are perhaps better now.
Gottreich, though he entered the high schools with his share of the uppish, quibbling of early youth, returned with the faith of his ancestors and of his father. For he had studied under instructors who had taught him to cling rather to the teachings of the old faith than to the ingenious explanations of the commentators, and who had exposed to the light alone what is serviceable to man, as to a plant, and to its outward growth, but not the roots perniciously. Thus the father found again his old Christian heart sending forth new shoots in the bosom of his Gottreich, and moreover the best justification of the convictions of his life and of his love.
If it be pain to us to love and at the same time to contradict, to refuse with the head what the heart grants, it is all the sweeter to us to find ourselves and our faith transplanted forwards in a younger being. Life is then a beautiful night, in which not one star goes down but another rises in its place.
Gottreich possessed a paradise, in which he labored as his father"s gardener; he was at once the wife, the brother, the friend, the all that is to be loved by man, of his parent. Every Sunday brought him a new pleasure, that of preaching a sermon before his father. He displayed so much power in his pulpit eloquence, that he seemed to labor more for the elevation and edification of his father than for the enlightenment of the common people; though he held a maxim, which I take to be far from erroneous, that the highest subjects of intellectual speculation are good for the people as for children, and that _man can only learn to rise, from the consideration of that which he cannot surmount_. If the eye of the old man was moistened, or if his hands were suddenly folded in an att.i.tude of prayer, the Sunday became the holiest of festivals; and many a festival has there been in that quiet little parsonage, whose festivity no one understood and no one perceived. He who looks upon sermon-preaching and sermon-hearing as a dull pleasure, will but little understand the zest with which the two friends conversed on discourses delivered, and on those yet to come, as if pulpit-criticism was as engrossing as the criticism of the stage.
The approbation and the love of an energetic old man like Hartmann, whose spiritual limbs had by no means stiffened on the chilly ridge of years, could not but exercise a powerful influence on a young man like Gottreich, who, more tenderly and delicately formed both in body and mind, was wont to shoot forth in loftier and more rapid flame.
To these two happy men was added a happy woman also. Justa, an orphan, sole mistress of her property, had entirely left and sold the trading-house which had been her father"s, in the town, and had removed into the upper part of a good peasant"s cottage, to live entirely in the country. Justa did nothing in the world by halves, but she often did things more than most would deem completely, at least in all that touched her generosity. She had not long resided in the village of Heim, and had seen the meek Gottreich, and listened to some of his springtide sermons, ere she discovered that he had won her heart, filled as it was with the love of virtue; she nevertheless refused to grant him her hand until the conclusion of the great peace, after which they were to be married. She was ever fonder of doing what is difficult than what is easy. I wish that it was here the place to tell of the May-time life they led, which seemed to blossom in the low parsonage-house hard by the church-door under Justa"s hand; how she came in the morning from her own cottage, to order matters in the little dwelling for the day; how the evenings were pa.s.sed in the garden, ornamented with few, but pretty flower-beds, and commanding a view of many a well-watered meadow and distant hill, and stars without number; how these three hearts played into one another, no one of which in this most pure and intimate intercourse knew or felt anything which was not of the fairest; and how good and gay intention marked the pa.s.sage of their lives. Every bench was a church chair, all was peaceful and holy, and the firmament above an infinite church dome.
In many a village and in many a house a true Eden may be hid, which has neither been named nor marked down; for joy is fond of covering over and concealing her tenderest flowers. Gottreich reposed in such a fulness of bliss and love, of poetry and religion, of springtime, of the past and of the future, that he feared in the bottom of his heart to speak his happiness out, save in prayer. In prayer, thought he, man may say all, his happiness and his misery. His father was very happy also; there came over him a warm old age,--no winter night, but a summer evening, without frost or darkness: albeit the sun of his life was sunk pretty deep below the mound of earth under which his wife was lain down to sleep.
Nothing recalls the close of life to a n.o.ble-hearted young man so much as precisely the happiest and fairest hours which he pa.s.ses. Gottreich, in the midst of the united fragrance and beauty of the flowers of joy, even with the morning-star of life above him, could not but think on the time when the same should appear to him as the evening star, warning him of sleep. Then said he to himself: "All is now so certain and so clear before me,--the beauty and the holiness of life, the splendor of the universe, the Creator, the dignity and the greatness of man"s heart, the bright images of eternal truth, the whole starry firmament of ideas, which enlightens, instructs, and upholds man! But when I am grown old, and in the obstruction of death, will not all that now rustles so bloomingly and livingly about me appear gray and dull?