EASTER-FESTIVAL.

A dog-day so long and weighty as the twenty-eighth one may be allowed to break up into three holidays.

FIRST EASTER-HOLIDAY.

Arrival at the Parsonage.–Club of the Three Twins.–Carps.

On the first day of Easter; Sebastian, full of snow-clouds as the heavens above him, stole out of the farm-buildings of the passions,–I mean the residence-city,–but not till towards evening, in order not, to-day, with a heart whose very foundation had been washed away by a half-year's rainstorm, to be long a burden to any friend. On the mountain behind which Flachsenfingen drops down as by a sinking of the earth, he turned round toward the dusky city, and let the remembrance pass by as an evening mist before his soul, how, three quarters of a year ago, in the refulgence of summer and of hope, he had looked out so joyously over these houses,–I described it long ago,–and he compared his prospects of that time with his present desolation; at last he said: "Only say to thyself outright, what thou hast and what thou meanest,–namely, thou hast nothing more, not a loved or loving heart in the whole city,–but thou meanest once more to march to St. Luna, and, all impoverished as thou art, to take the second leave of the pale angel whom thy robbed and ruined heart cannot forget, as thou climbest after the sun, and, having already seen his setting from out a valley, once more seest him sink, from a mountain." ...

Five half Sabbath-day's journeys from the village he espied the Court-Chaplain, pursued by a Catechumen (as well of the tailoring craft as of Christianity). In vain did he and the young tailor seek to overtake the hotly hunted shepherd of souls. The shepherd came not to a stand until the youngster had got into his house. A hundred-and-twenty-pounder (that is my physical weight) gets no addition to his Æsthetic weight by keeping so long to himself the insignificant cause of this insignificant running, and not saying till now that the Chaplain could absolutely hear no one coming after him, because he was afraid the man would smash him from behind. Now the apprentice wanted to tread in the footsteps of his spiritual master and come up with him,–the more fiercely the master dashed forward through space to leave the other behind him, so much the longer leaps forward did the scholar take to overtake him,–that was the whole scrape, but so do men chase men.

Victor ran with outflying arms to a pair of hanging ones, which the owner in his agony could not raise. But in the parsonage two warmer ones folded themselves around his frozen bosom, those of his countrywoman; nor did the parson's wife disturb his and her resurrection-joy with a single complaint of his long absence,–this delicacy of friendship, which spared another unprofitable apologies, he reciprocrated with double warmth, and with a voluminous bill of accusation against his own follies. She led him up a stairway in the joyful parsonage, which to-night was one pierced-work of lighted stories, to her dear son's embrace, and into the presence of the three kindred sons from one mother-country, the three twins....

O ye four men of one heart, press my forlorn Victor's to yours warmly, and make the good youth glad only for one evening!... I myself have verily been so, since the paschal Exodus from the Flachsenfingen Egypt: I will therefore make the twenty-eighth chapter as long as the watering-village itself is. A weightiness will thereby be imparted to my work with true critics,–but with postmasters, too, who, when I despatch it to the bookstore, will draw something considerable from me for their weighing.... But shall an author be so shabby as to abridge his sentiments, for the sake of postage, merely because a post-office clerk weighs them more according to his own than the postal rates? And am I not encouraged to the opposite course–that of protracting my emotions–by the electoral, princely, and city-benches in Ratisbon, inasmuch as the said benches by an imperial recess allow me a deduction of two thirds of my postage for printed matter, in order, as they hope, to give encouragement to literature and to sentiment?

The noble Evangelist, to be sure, was also up there among the rest,–he and Joachime having politely escorted the maid of honor to the house of her parents;–but here in the country, where there are fewer moral weeds than in cities (just as there are fewer botanical in fields than in gardens), and where one enjoys pleasures without maÎtres de dÉplaisirs,–here where in Victor love of country appeased the longing for all other love,–no one could be unhappy but he who deserved to be. Mat disappeared there like a toad among tulips. Victor would have loved the English, even without the blood-relationship of nationality, and would have given a bad name to the Dutch, even with that relation; to this is to be ascribed his inconsiderate speech, that these nations pictured themselves in their tobacco-pipes, inasmuch as the English ones had upright heads and the Belgian hanging ones.

All three were of the opposition party, and lost the coldness of their blood at the ice-coldness of Pitt's. The correspondent of the Dog-Days does not write me, whether it was because the Minister had offended them,–or whether they took a nearer interest in the frightful judgment-day and resurrection of the dead in France, where the sun broods at once over Phoenix-ashes and crocodile's eggs,–or what the reason was. In fact he reports to me nothing further about them than their names, namely, Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar,^[34] which were the names of the three holy kings from the East.

The one who took the whim of calling himself Melchior concealed under a phlegmatic ice-crust an equatorial glow, and was a Hecla, that splits its ice-mountains before it flings out flames; with cold eye and languid voice and pale brow he spoke in a monosyllabic, sententious, condensed style,–he saw the truth only in a burning reflector, and his ink was a tearing waterspout. The second Englishman was a philosopher and German at once. The elder Cato, who likewise represented the Moorish king, every one knows. I am as glad as if it were I myself, that my hero was the very one who was distinguished from them all by a greater serene considerateness of free-thinking. I mean that Socratic bright eye which glances round freely over and through the garden of the trees of knowledge, and which chooses like a man, whereas others are exclusively impelled by instinct toward some one proposition, some one apple of these trees, as every insect is to its fruit. Moral freedom operates no less on our opinions than on our actions; and despite all grounds of decision in the understanding, and all grounds of motive in the will, still man chooses as well his system as his conduct.

Hence, almost even before supper, the three twins had become cold in affection toward Sebastian, merely because he was so in judgment. He was to-day for the first time in a case with them, into which he fell three times every day with Flamin; certain men can better worry down unlimited contradiction than limited concurrence. The case was this: Matthieu, by his satiric exaggerations, gave to the slight dissimilarity between Victor and them an ever-increasing prominence. He said (not for the purpose of making allusion, but only of seeming to) that princes to whom, as from the Chinese king, their subjects prayed for political weather, helped themselves like that rector who himself composed the almanac, and allowed his scholars (in this, case the favorites of the princes) to make the weather for it. He said, too, that the poets could sing for Liberty, indeed, but not speak for it; that they imitated in a timid plight under the mask of tragic heroes the voice of the heroes, just as he had often witnessed a similar joke in the case of a roasted calf's head, which seemed to the whole table to bellow like a living calf, whereas there was nothing inside but a live tree-toad, which sent forth its croaking. "But it were a still greater cowardice," said Victor, "not even to sing; only I know men are now neither barbaric nor cultivated enough to enjoy the Poets and follow them; Poets, Religion, Passions, and Women are four things which live through three ages, whereof we are just in the middle age,–that of despising them; the past age was that of deifying them; the future will be that of honoring them." The indignant trio of twins were of opinion that religion, and women particularly, were merely for the state. Besides, Victor's republican sentiments were ambiguous in their eyes, if only by reason of his aristocratic relations. And now, when he actually added that the freedom of states had nothing at all to do with retrenchment of expenses, with greater security of property, with increased comfort of living, in short, with the promotion of material welfare, that all this was found often still more abundantly in monarchies, and that that for which one sacrificed property and life must of course be something higher than property or life;–when he further said, every man of culture and virtue lived under a republican form of government, notwithstanding his physical relations, just as prisoners in democracies enjoyed nevertheless the rights of freedom;–and when he made himself, not so much for the Minister and the Upper House as for the English people, armor-bearer and Contradictor, because the principles of the first two had from time immemorial combated those of the latter and not yet determined them; because the complaint of to-day was as old as the (English) revolution; because the ground-plan of this last could be torn to pieces only in a formal counter-revolution; because all acts of injustice were committed according to the show of law, which was better than a justice against the show of law; and because the nunnery-grating which had now been built around the freedom of the English press^[35] was no worse than the Athenian prohibition of philosophizing, but better than the permission of the Roman emperors to make pasquils upon them,—

The English love long coats and speeches. As he began with "when," so must, in his as in my period, a "then" follow....

Then was there not a devil of them satisfied, and Cato the Elder said: "If he should deliver these principles in the Upper House, there would arise the greatest uproar on the subject, but from approbation, and every hearer would still cry, Hear him!" Victor said, with the modesty of a man of the world, he was as warm a republican and Old Briton as any of them, only he was incapable to-day of "proving from these principles that he resembled them;–perhaps at the next club!" "And that can be held," said the Court-Chaplain, "on my birthday, in a few weeks."–If we live to see it,–I and the reader,–it is to be hoped they will invite us, too, as old godfathers; the first time (on the sixth Dog-Post-Day) we were, as is well known, a part of the company.

My hero exacted of men (especially as he did not give himself the trouble) too little respect. He labored, to be sure, for these wages; but if they did not give him any, he knew how to make a thousand excuses for men, and drew out his mint-stamp and struck off for himself a medal of honor, swearing meanwhile, "I'll be hanged, if the next time I don't behave myself more proudly, and less indulgently, and altogether more seriously, so as to excite a certain reverence." The next time is yet to come. He therefore forgave the twin-trio so beautifully, that they at last folded the philanthropist with passionate embrace forever to their souls.

After such a commencement-disputation there was nothing he loved to do better than something really nonsensical, gallant, childish,–this time it was going to the kitchen. Catinat said, he only was a hero qui jouerait une partie de quilles au sortir d'une bataille gaynÉe ou perdue,^[36]–or, after winning in a disputation, could go to the kitchen. "Either all or nothing has weight in this mock-life," said he. Into the kitchen, which was not so dirty as a French bedchamber, but as clean as a Belgian cattle-stall, another festal hare and envoy extraordinary had already made his entry, the Court-Chaplain, who had there his calling to attend to. He had to see whether his four-pound carp,–a native of the pastoral pond, and wintered expressly for the adopted son Bastian,–not so much whether it was properly scaled (he passed over that question entirely with very little philosophy) as whether the tail was properly tucked up. It could not surely be a matter of indifference to him, but as a man he must at once feel and fight down his sorrow on the subject, if a carp of as many pounds as a mortal has brains were so miserably slit open that the one quotum of the tail should be no smaller than a hair-bag, and the other no bigger than a fin. And this entire nominal terrorism^[37] is after all of small consequence compared with another real terrorism (so much does important trouble fade before greater) which tormented the Parson with the threat that they would crush the four-pounder's gallbladder.—His own would have at once emptied itself after the other. "For God's sake, more considerately, Appel! Embitter not my first Easter-day," said he. Gall is, according to Boerhaave, true soap: hence the satirical kind washes half the reading world clean and shiny, and the liver of such a man is the soap-ball of a quarter of the world and its colonies.

However, it turned out gloriously. But, by Heaven! the world should for once perceive (after the printing of this book) that a carp of four pounds–so long fed in the fish-box, so skilfully gutted–weighs more in the fish-scales of contentment, than the golden fish-bones in the red field of the arms of Count WindischgrÄtz!

Could he then stay long in the kitchen,–that widow's seat of his old departed youth,–among so many female friends of Clotilda, who all bewailed to him her sinking and going away (in a double sense), without having the oxymel of regretted pleasures run over his lips, and the pang of sympathy shoot through his heart,–although he had to-day in the second story spread the disputation on Freedom, as a true scattering medicine, as an arquebusade-water,^[38] at least as a bandage over his open veins? I asked whether he could long avoid thinking of the good soul. But I absolutely would not give the answer, from sympathy with the innocent Victor I absolutely would not disclose before so many thick-skinned souls–who in their empty breasts approve the poetical joys of love, and yet not its poetical sorrows–how often he again and again mixed fate's sugar of milk with memory's sugar of lead, were I not obliged to for the reason–

–that little Julia came back from the castle and brought with her the promise that Aunty (Clotilda) was coming to-morrow. This promised, then, that the Minister's daughter would leave to-morrow. Let no one think hardly of the parsonage-people for their importunity about Clotilda: for on the third holiday she goes to the ball, on the day following to Maienthal,–and all they had left was to-morrow and to-day.... Our Flamin had brought along with him little Julia herself, being well pleased with her office of penny-post. I am morally certain, the Chaplain's wife saw in my hero as much as I write of him, and she loved him so much, that, had she been obliged to decree instead of Fate, she would have died for sorrow, before she could have brought herself to bless the son at the expense of the friend. So very much did he win, by a beautiful blending of refinement, sensibility, and fancy, the fairest and tenderest hearts,–I mean those of women.

This tiny Julia, the after-flora of the faded Giulia, twined together in Victor's soul roses and nettles, and all his flowers of to-day's joy had their roots in tears deep buried in his breast. Even the kiss of Clotilda's friend, of Agatha, affected him. He thought of the Stamitz concert, and of their sitting side by side, and of the crape hat which veiled the grief of two beloved eyes. He begged Agatha to borrow that hat of Clotilda, and make him an exact copy of it, because he wanted to give it as a present. "When she is gone," he said to himself,—"no, when she is dead,–then I will weep without concealment, and tell all men openly that I loved her." My dear fellow, at the souper–a parson can give one–they will ascribe the glistening of thine eyes more to thy self-discharging wit than to the repressed flood of tears, and, if I were at the table, I could not look upon thee for emotion, when during the hammering and "hardening" of the red eggs I saw thee try to fix thy overflowing and downcast eye, half shut, steadfastly on the pole of a red egg, and silently place thy egg-gable under the cross-block of Eymann's egg, in order to gain time for victory over thy voice and eye-socket! And yet I cannot see what important advantage thou wilt then think to gain by this mask, when Old Appel sends thee by the little Iris and express, Julia,–she can never, herself, undertake it,–a stained, tattooed egg, a real, boiled, allegorical picture, and when thou readest over in the fragile shell the flower-pieces etched into it with aqua-fortis, and thy name bordered with forget-me-nots; I say, what help can thy previous dissimulation be to thee, when thou now, in order not to think out the thought "Forget-me-not," hurriest from the room under the double pretext of having to thank Apollonia, and on account of exhaustion, to retire thus early to rest? Ah, the thanking thou wilt! undoubtedly do, but rest thou wilt not!...

SECOND EASTER-HOLIDAY.

Funeral-Discourse on Himself.–Two Opposite Sorts of Fatality to the Wax-Statue.

The snow-heavens had fallen and lay upon the landscape. The snow made me melancholy, and reminded one of the wintry lace-knots of Nature. It was the 1st of April, when Nature, so to speak, made the season itself an April fool. Victor had long ago learned manners (mores) enough to teach him that, when one is visiting a Court-Chaplain, he must go with him to sermon. And then, too, he loved to march to sacristies for the same reason that he loved to steal away to the huts of shepherds, hunters, and fowlers. It did not strike him as overwrought that the Chaplain (as he himself did at last) should place his mounting of the pulpit,–merely on account of the multitude of preparations he made for it,–in point of importance, side by side with the scaling of a wall. Nay, he disputed with him during the long hymn about the surplice-fees of a stillborn foetus, and proved by a short argument that a parson could demand of every foetus–and though it were five nights old–the appropriate burial-fees, whether the miserly parents bespoke a funeral sermon for the thing or not. The Chaplain made a weighty objection, but Victor removed it by the weighty proposition that a clergyman (for otherwise he would be cheated out of his best foetuses) could make every couple pay him burial-fees as often as it could pay baptismal moneys. The Chaplain replied: "It is stupid that the best pastoral Theologies hurry over this point like a pinch of snuff in the wind."

With all the humor of my hero, and with all the gayety of my parson,–who on every holy eve scolded and, condemned like a revolutionary tribunal, and who on every first holiday softened, till on the third he became absolutely an angel,–the world should promise itself something different from what nevertheless is coming: namely, that Victor saw gleaming out of every hour of the approaching evening which was to bring Clotilda for the last time but one into his company, a protruding sacrificial knife against which he must press his wounded bosom. She was invited to-day, as it were to a farewell-supper,–the three twins of course.

At last she came at evening on the arm of the misunderstood Matthieu.–If, as Ruska asserts, the number of devils (44,435,556) who, according to the assertion of Guliermus Parisiensis, flank a dying Abbess, is made much too small,^[39] one can readily imagine how many devils may form the escorting squadron of a living, a blooming one. I, for my part, assume as many devils around a fair one, as there are male persons.

When Clotilda appeared with that face of hers smiling down into its fading beauty, with the exhausted lute-voice, which sorrow draws from us, as a peculiar pianoforte variation, by the pressure of the stop,–but is it not with men as with organs, of which the human voice goes most finely with tremolos?–when she thus appeared, then had her noblest friend the choice, either to fall down before her with the words, "Let me die first," or to be, to-day, right funny.

He chose the latter (excepting with her) by way of drowning his dreams. He therefore flung about him with stories and healthy observations. Therefore he threw into the imperial military chest against sentimentalism this satirical contribution, that it was the March-gall or moist-gall in the human field, i. e. a spot that always remained damp, and on which everything rotted. As this availed nothing, he entered into alliance with whole states, and promised himself some help from remarking concerning them, that their summits, like forest-trees, had grown into each other, and that it had no effect to saw one through down below,–that the equality of kingdoms was a substitute or a preparation for the equality of ranks,–and that gunpowder, which had hitherto been the sticking powder of the great powers, would finally burn out and heal the hydrophobous wounds of the human race. At last, when he plainly perceived that it helped him very little, as he expressed the conjecture that Europe would one day become the North India, and the same North which had once been the breaking-tools and building-materials of the earth would be so once more, but the North in the other hemisphere, he struck, with his chemical process, into the wet road, and (like a secretary of legation) instead of politics took–punch.

But only cares, not melancholy nor love, can be drowned by drinking. The other spirits, dissolved in the nervous spirit, array themselves in a magically sparkling circle around every idea, around every emotion, which thou hast therein, as in breweries the lights, by reason of the steam; burn in a colored circle. The glass with its hot cloud is a Papin's digester^[40] even to the densest heart, and decomposes the whole soul; the draught makes every one at once more tender and bold. A soft heart was of old ever associated with a bold, hardened fist. As it kept on snowing, he offered Clotilda for to-morrow his shell-shaped sleigh and himself (as he was, besides, invited to the ball) as knight-errant,–whereby he compelled the Evangelist to offer himself as sledge-gondolier to the stepmother.

Clotilda withdrew now from the merry male company into the adjoining room, where her Agatha and all were,–it was not done from disapproval of decorous, manly festivity,–still less from embarrassment, as it is, in fact, easier, and made easier for her sex, to behave itself naturally under forty eyes than under four,–still less from inability to disguise her sisterly love towards Flamin; for her flying soul had long since learned to fold together its wings and hide its tears and wishes, brought up as she had been among strangers, trained in thorny relations and between discordant parents. She did it merely, like the Parson's wife, because it is a British custom, that the ladies shall take themselves away from the men and their incense-kettle of punch.

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 passed 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 shell 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-glass of death, through which he peeped, as through a pocket spyglass, 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 glass 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 godfather, and the godson 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-glass opposite–it must be somewhere–I must fetch it":—with a shudder running through his soul he sprang down; an exalted frenzy passed, 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 assumed 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-goddess of love passed 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 passed 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 passable) 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 percÉe,^[43] and had not an opening out into an eternal blue.... Amen!

"I have, however, still to announce to the sorrowing assembly, 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 impassioned, 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 attitude—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 attitude 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 noble 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 lithopÆdia (petrified foetuses), 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 bass-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 constituted,–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 assistant-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 ennobled 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, pass 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 clustered 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 shore 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 snatch 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.

The still angel at Victor's side could no longer veil them, and Victor heard Clotilda's first sigh.

Ay, then he took her hand as if he would sustain her, hovering over an open grave.

She gave up her hand to him, and her pulse throbbed trembling in unison with his.

Finally only the last lingering tone of the song still flung out its melodious circles in the ether, and its wake undulated away over a whole past,–then a distant echo wrapped it up in a fluttering breath of air, and wafted it away through deeper echoes, and finally over to the last which lay round about heaven,–then the tone expired and flew as a soul into one of Clotilda's sighs.

Then the first tear escaped from her, and fell like a hot heart on Victor's hand.

Her friend was overpowered,–she was carried away,–he pressed the soft hand,–she drew it out of his,–and went slowly out of the chamber, in order to come again to the help of the too tender heart, over whose sweet signs night hung her veil....

The light which was brought in took away these dream-worlds. Matthieu and the Chamberlain's lady appeared also. We will not, however, in this soft mood, when one is precisely the severest against evil natures, say or think anything about the new couple which cannot help its contrast to our tenderness. Victor said this to himself, too, but more than once; because the Apothecary's lyingly alleged engagement of Clotilda to Matthieu impressed itself upon him in the liveliest colors, as resembling that platonic union, in which the pure spirit, driven out of its ether and with crooked-up wings, is immured in an unclean body. Clotilda came back. She was in a state of embarrassment towards Victor, merely because he was in one, or was to be still more so by her side in the sleigh,–the swollen ball of her eye she withdrew from the light. As condensation of tears, like inspissation of milk, oppresses and destroys; his sadness, repressed and drawn back into his innermost being, sought an outlet through the voice, which was vehement and abrupt; through the motions of the body, which were quick; even through vivacity of expression;–in short, it was well that they started.

He thought the opposite again, when he stood behind her on the sleigh. The night seemed to have withdrawn behind the clouds, whose wide arch occupied the heavens. He could not hunt up any subject of conversation, let him think as much as he would,–he ran through Clotilda's, Victor's, all his acquaintances' lives,–nothing occurred to him. The reason was, that his thoughts, which he sent out on this errand, returned every minute without his knowledge, and hung like bees on Clotilda's noble profile, or on her soft eye, or buried themselves in that tear of hers which had fallen on his hand, and in the whole ethereal sea of to-day's tones. The dark heaven above him finally put into his head Emanuel's last communication, and he could relate to her out of that the blind youth's initiation into the highest thought of man. Clotilda listened to him with delight, and at last said: "No one is more fortunate than a pupil of such a teacher: but he must never go into the world,–there he will be so no longer. His teacher has given him too soft a heart; and a soft heart, as you yourself say, hangs, like soft, fruit, so low down, that every one can reach and wound it; the hard fruits hang higher."

They had arrived now at the hard fruits of the capital, and her remark was her own history. But the new scenes,–the rattling carriages and rustling dresses,–the much ado about little or nothing,–the hall-lights like systems of fixed stars,–the double mouth-unharmonicas,–the masculine court-fauna,–the feminine court-flora,–the whole mobilized pleasure camp,–this din of a fair drowned the muffled echo which passed to and fro between two harmonious souls.

Our hero was received by the Princess in a more friendly manner than even by the Prince. Joachime, Clotilda's lieutenant in office, had, in addition to her cold angry friendliness, a montre À rÉgulateur rich in jewels. In a public place it costs less than in a cabinet to cover the inner man with the outer as with a theatrical mask. Victor, on whom, besides, every sorrow produced the witty effect of intoxication, betrayed the former at most by the exuberance of his vivacity.

A woman betrays herself by the opposite,–Clotilda by nothing. He expressed to her in the singular stunned state into which outer tones of joy and inner fantasies put one, when they come together like two streams meeting, the following ideas: "Were I the Goddess of delight (if there is one), I would have it strike three; round the chandeliers I would draw prismatic colors, or in fact would hang them up in the cabinets and diffuse through the dancing-hall with incense a magic twilight,–then I should have to set back the tones of the orchestra through so many apartments, that nothing of the music should find its way hither but a soft echo,–and then if in the glimmering maze, breathing throughout with melodies, the people did not, after some silent movements, feel like sinking away with ecstasy, I greatly mistake." ... "Add further," said she, "in order that we too may have one, that we stay here and observe the dissolving."

But his composure hardly ever at any ball survived the minuet. After the first din was over, at least about the witching hour, his whole soul was always dissolved into a poetic melancholy which hardly left him the mastery of his eyes. Besides the tones, I can further adduce the motion as an explanation of this phenomenon: all motion, in the first place, is sublime,–that is to say, of great masses; or rather every quick motion imparts to the object the greatness of the space hurried through: hence, in contrast with the end in view, objects in motion are more comic than those at rest. Secondly, the movement of men imaged to him their fluttering by, their fleeing into graves; often at night he would stop in sad musing under the windows of houses, where they were dancing in the second story, and look up, and the gliding by of heads in their movement was to him the mad dance of ignes fatui in the churchyard.

To-night with his melted, overflowing soul, he felt this sooner than ever. The Anglaise, in which one couple after another disappears from the column, was the very image of our shadowy life, into which we all march out with drums, and encircled with thousands of playmates, and in which we grow poorer and poorer every year as we move onward, every hour more solitary, and in which we hurry to the end forsaken by all except a hired man, who buries us behind the goal. But death spreads out, as it were, our arms, and folds them around our beloved brothers and sisters; a human being feels for the first time on the brink of the tomb, when he comes upon the realm of unknown beings, how much he loves the known ones who love him, who suffer like him, and like him die.

As a woman in no way discloses to us more touchingly the whole blessed past, than when she lifts her eyelids and shows us her beaming eyes, accordingly he could not well help, during the dance, at least, looking into an eye, which pictured to him nothing but heavens that had set,–and to-night all was to set for him, even the eye itself. And as Clotilda usually grew pale with dancing, he entered through her eyes into her innermost being, and counted there the tear-drops that hung undisturbed on the still soul,–the many incisions made by the grafting-knife of fate for new virtues,–the clipped roots which fate shortens in this flower as we do in lowlier plants, before transplanting into another soil,–and the thousand honey-vessels of sweet thoughts. And as he thought on all her hidden virtues at once, on the supremacy of her womanly reason over her sensibility, on her easy consent in regard to the ball which the Prince now imposed upon her, as well as in regard to the rouging on which the Princess had before insisted, and on her ready compliance, whenever she had to sacrifice nothing but herself;–and as he held the thought before his mind how she, not like the women of court and city, who, like shrubs at the window of the greenhouse, spread themselves out after the light, but like spring flowers, loved to bloom in the shade, and yet made as little show of her fondness for country life as of her modesty;–he had to turn away his eye from the delicate, upright flower, on which death threw down the gravestone; from that loveliest soul who never yet saw her worth in the glass of an equal; from the dying heart, which nevertheless was not happy.

And then, to be sure, the thought before which he shrank into himself sprang up like a storm: "I will tell her to-day how good she is,–O, I shall certainly never see her again, and she will die, otherwise unknown to herself! I will fall at her feet and confess my inexpressible love. She cannot be angry; God knows I crave not her holy heart, which no man deserves; I will only say, Mine shall never forget thee, but it desires not thine, only it will break more gently when it has trembled and bled and wept and spoken before thee." ...

Close behind this thought came to him Clotilda herself, hand in hand with her step-mother, and, the face robbed of its color by the warmth as roses are by the sun, the tired and more sick-looking features put forth the silent prayer to come out into the fresh air and go home.

She went; her step-mother followed her at a distance. What a change of scene! Under the eastern gate of heaven stood the moon, who had taken off the funeral veil of cloud from the milky-way and the whole blue abyss. She gradually laid out a ground of silver, and sketched upon it with gleams and shadows a growing night-piece. The frost seemed to condense her light into body, into white meadows, into tumbling streams, into floating flakes; it hung glistering as white blossoming foliage on the bushes, it glimmered up the eastern mountains, which the sun had cast into ice-mirrors. And all above man and around man was sublimely still,–sleep played with death,–every heart rested in its own night.

And here, at this entrance, as it were, out of the turmoil of earth into the still twilight-shrouded underworld, cold thrills and after them glowing thrills ran over Victor's nerves. This happens when the soul of man is too full and too sorely agitated, and all the threads of the trembling web of the fleshly organism sway with it. His sleigh became now a flying gondola. The night-air blowing against him kindled all his flames. O the stream full of ice-points, if it had only swept over him! the cool coverlet of snow, if it were only laid upon him! A voice was continually crying within him: "Thou art bearing the still, the patient one with her black veil to death; it is her hearse: the noble pearl-diver has given heaven her sign that she has collected here below enough sorrows and virtues, that it may draw her up again to itself." The procession of mountains gliding by, the trees that whirled past, the fields that fled away, this flight of nature seemed to form together one great cataract that carried all before it, and man first of all, and left nothing behind it but time. And as he rolled down into the valley, where the city disappears, as did a year ago his female escort, and the moon behind the trees began seemingly to scud through the heavens, then he lifted his eyes toward the stars, and, bent backward in a rigid gaze, spoke aloud as out of a shattered heart to the heavens: "Deep blue grave over men, thou hidest thy broad nights behind crowded suns! Thou drawest us and our tears upward like vapors. Ah, cast not poor short-sighted mortals so far asunder, so infinitely far! And why cannot man look up to thee without thinking: who knows what loved heart I may not a year hence have to seek up yonder!"

His darkened eyes fell painfully from heaven–upon Clotilda's, which were lifted over against his. The tear which had just fallen from her eye down to her cheek she could neither conceal through the veil, nor make believe to be a snow-flake which had melted on her face, since the veil kept off the flakes; but such a tear needed no veil. Clotilda had thought lie meant merely Emanuel, and therefore she was touched and softened.... Like two parting angels, the two now beheld each other with tearful eyes. But Clotilda withdrew hers, and her sinking head bent. Nevertheless, she turned round again, and with her heavenly face and heavenly voice presented to him the sweet prayer: "Bestow this warm friendship upon my brother also; and forgive his sister today this prayer, as I may not for a long time have an opportunity to renew it." He bowed himself down low, and could not answer.

But when now her place of residence and her castle, from which the silver rain of the moon ran down, gleamed before their eyes,–as the moment came on, darker and darker, in which the parting (perhaps the mask of death) was to take this still angel from his side,–as every indifferent formula of leave-taking which he could imagine to himself lacerated his sick heart,–as he saw how she leaned her head on her hand and on the veil, in order, unobserved, to remove or check the first signs of her farewell,–then did the whole cloud which had so long been letting fall single drops into his eyes, rent asunder, rush down upon him and flood his heart.... Suddenly he stopped.... He looked with still gushing eyes toward St. Luna.... Clotilda turned round, and beheld a colorless face, a brow full of sorrows, and a quivering lip, and said bashfully, "Your soul is too good and too tender." Ay, then his over-full heart burst in twain. Then gushed up all the depths of his soul in which old tears had been so long accumulating, and lifted up from the roots his swimming heart, and he sank down before Clotilda, radiant with heavenly love and streaming sorrow,–mantled with the flame of virtue,–transfigured by the moonlight,–with his true, helpless breast, with his veiled eyes,–and the dissolving voice could only utter the words: "Angel of heaven! the heart breaks at last which loves thee inexpressibly. O, long indeed have I been silent. No, thou noble form, never canst thou pass out of my soul.–O soul from heaven, why have thy sufferings and thy goodness, and all that thou art, inspired me with an eternal love, and with no hope, but with an eternal sorrow?" Her agitated face lay bent aside from him in her right hand, and the left covered only her eyes, but not her tears. A dying sound implored him to rise. They heard the second sleigh far off. "Never-to-be-forgotten one! I torment thee, but I will remain where I am till thou hast granted me a token of forgiveness." She extended to him her left hand, and the gesture disclosed a holy countenance full of emotion. He pressed the warm hand to his flaming face, into his hot streams of tears. Trembling, he again asked: "O, my fault grows greater every moment! Will you, then, wholly forgive it?" ...

Then did the blushing face bury itself in the folded veil, and, turning away, stammered: "Ah, then I must share it, noble friend of my teacher."

Blessed, blessed man! After this word, the whole of earthly life has no greater heaven to offer thee! Rest now in silent rapture with thy overpowered face upon the angelic hand, into which the noblest of hearts pours the blood that kindles for virtue! Shed all thy tears of joy upon the dear hand which has given them to thee! And then,–if thou canst for rapture or for reverence,–then lift up thy pure, glistening eye, and show her therein the look of sublime love, the look of the love which is eternal and speechless and blissful and unspeakable!

Ah! he, who had ever been loved by a Clotilda, could now read no farther,–write no farther,–for ecstasy ... or else for pain!

Silent and sanctified he now sped along the fair road; the moon hung down from heaven like a dewy morning overlaid with white blossoms; spring stirred its meadows and its flowers under the veil of snow; rapture throbbed in Victor's heart, swelled in his breast, shone in his eye; but speechless reverence controlled his rapture.... They arrived. And when, in the harmonica-chamber, where in the evening he had grasped her hand for anguish, they now stood alone face to face, so changed, so blest for the first time, two such hearts,–she like an angel who had descended from heaven, he like a mortal who had risen from the earth, to fill on the heart of the timid angel, and, speechless, to go back with her to heaven.... What an hour! O, only for you, ye fair souls, who have never experienced such an hour, and yet have deserved it, do I go on picturing this one!... Like two risen ones before God, they look into each other's eyes and souls,–like a zephyr, which two swaying roses prolong, breathes between the trembling lips the speechless sigh of bliss, drunk in by the bosom in quick inspirations, and issuing with a tremulous thrill of glad awe in long expirations,–they continue silent, to look at each other, they lift their eyes, to see through the drop of joy, and cast them down again to dry it away with the eyelid.... No, it is enough: O, there is another tear that now lies heavily on the fair heart, which is silent and would say, I was never happy, nor ever shall be!

Victor had so much to say to her, and had so few minutes more left for it; and yet not so much joy as reverence made him dumb,–for sacred to the loving heart is the form that has said to it, I am thine. But think not he would make any such rude request to her, as that she would stay here on his account; only the question whether he might visit her in Maienthal, only the prayer that she would take thought of her recovery, can he venture upon. Clotilda had only one to make to him, which she could not sufficiently veil over, namely, that, for the sake of her jealous brother, he would not see her in Maienthal.

During the lingerings of rapture, they hear the bells of the second sleigh. Haste necessitated courage. Victor transformed his prayer into the wish that spring might favor the design of her journey (restoration to health), and the question into the joyful thought how happy she would be in Maienthal by the side of Dahore, how blest he had once been there, and how little he had once dreamed that one could ever be still more so there. Clotilda answered (probably to his wish of following her thither): "I leave behind quite as much to you,–my brother and your friend; forget not my former prayer."

Not until the approaching parents reminded Clotilda to throw back her veil, and admonished her beloved to take his first leave of the heart which he had won,–not till then did they both look far into the great Eden which had opened around their life,–and the bright moment which now darted by in the stream of time projected into eternity the images of two heavenly forms,–one unveiled, pale-red, transfigured with tears, and one glorified by love, radiant with the reflection of hope. And now let no longer the hand sketch souls, which not even the great, glowing eye of love can portray....

When the parents came, he felt, but he forgave, all possible contrasts. He soon took his leave, that he might at home, in the silence of night, throw the first prayerful glance over the stream of his future life, which now glided on toward the grave in lines of beauty, and in which gay minutes played like goldfishes.

In the stillness of night, not far from his wax-mummy, the happy one thought to fall down before the Infinite Genius and thank him, with new tears, for this night, for this friend, of whom he is the first love. But the thought of doing it is the deed, and O, how could our touched heart, which even before men is dumb, find ally other words before the Infinite than tears and thoughts?

And in this resigned frame, full of deep tranquillity, wherein I lay down the pen, mayst thou, dear reader, lay aside this book, and say with me, There may well be more sad days that will conclude like the Twenty-eighth Dog-Post-Day.

PREFACE TO PART III.

(Which in the first edition came on a dozen sheets earlier.)

As the Intercalary Day this time falls in with the Preface, and as it begins, too, with the letter V,^[47] both indeed can, with uncommon felicity, be despatched together.

SEVENTH INTERCALARY DAY.

End of the Register of Extra-Shoots.

U. V.

Unfeelingness of Readers.–Vol. III. (Preface to.)

There were once happy times, when one had nothing to suffer from his fellow-savage and neighbor, except being struck dead,–when the hail was the only knout-master of the skin, whereas now the trade-wind of the visiting-fan is to us a whirlwind, and the cool breath over the teacup a sea-breeze,–when one took less interest in another's trouble than in his fodder,–when the ladies never wounded the gentlemen in bear-skins in any way (least of all with glances, charms, tresses), except with clubs, and when, to be sure, they possessed themselves, as well as to-day and to-morrow, of the heart of an honest man, but only in this way, by first stretching out the proprietor of it on an altar and regularly slaughtering him, before they cut out the heavenly globe from his chest.

These times we have now all forfeited; in those which are upon us, things look badly. By heaven! one really needs not much less than everything to make him happy, and little more than nothing to make him unhappy,–for the former he requires a sun, for the latter a particle of sun-dust! We should be well off, and have the key to large apartments in all pleasure-castles, if fate had provided for us that we should endure, say as many degrees of torture as the Jurists have, namely, three,–no more plagues than the Egyptians underwent, namely, seven,–no more persecutions than the first Christians stood out, namely, ten. But for such drawings of fortune a man of sense does not look; at least, no one promises himself such prizes, who like me sits down and considers our humming-bird stomachs,–our soft caterpillar skins,–our ears tingling of themselves,–our eyes which are their own tinder,–and our culs de Paris, which can be pierced, not by a crumpled rose-leaf, but by the very shadow of a thorn,–and our fine complexion, which without a moon-umbrella would blacken in the moonlight.... And yet in this account of our troubles,–because I am diligently intent upon lessening them,–I have not included other quite different, most accursed items, but have left out riches, e. g., entirely, that smart-money for so many thousand gashes and fractures of the breast, and in fact millions of wounds which would make our riddled self absolutely transparent, were it not fortunately clothed from head to foot in English court-plaster.... But I left out all such stuff, because I knew it would after all amount to nothing, if I should set it off against a quite different purgatory and tempest into which we male-kind particularly are thrown, if we are so unfortunate as to keelhaul ourselves, that is to say, fall in love, which in my poor opinion is a slight foretaste of hell, as well as of heaven. Let the best peeress in this department write to me, and enclose it post-paid to the publishing office in Berlin, and give me her name, if she was capable of not flaying and impaling her poor pastor fido, nor persecuting him with backbitings, nor filling his heart full of bruises with the compression-machines of her hands, his head full of fissures with the bastinado of the fan, his breast full of blisters with her eyes, nor of giving him, as they do to tobacco, a mellowing with her tears.... At least I myself at this present moment come straight from such a house of correction and baiting-house, and my skin looks as pitiably as if I had a scalped one over my limbs.

We will say no more of this. My intention in all this is to brace up the reader, because a wholly new rainy-constellation (Pleiad) which I have not at all named is rising in his horizon, to snow upon him. This will rage worse than all that has gone before. What I mean is this: An imperial citizen may be just giving the finishing touch to everything,–his coffers^[48] and his enemies may have been already overturned, and his labors right well received by the public or the board,–his pleas for delay have been allowed, and the quinquenniats^[49] of his debtors refused,–his youngest daughter, who, like the eldest of the French king's brother, is called Mademoiselle, may already have got through with the measles and her betrothal afterward; it avails him nothing, the worst of all, a whole Gehenna still awaits him on his book-shelves; for there may the fair spirits (let him have swallowed as he may all bitter salt of fate) have sliced for him, under the name of romance-manna, a hard tear-bread, which I, for my part, should be glad neither to bake nor to chew,–truly they may (to use another metaphor) have composed and placed in readiness for him dead-marches and funeral cantatas, which shall utterly upset him and make him so warm that his eyes shall run over.

And unfortunately warm-blooded and soft-skinned excellent men are just the ones least remarkable for steadiness and moderation in bearing the poetical sorrows which authors send them. I cannot, therefore, possibly leave this third part, which will too easily affect people, wholly without a preface in the way of counterpoise, unless I am willing to be myself the cause of innocent persons weeping over the best scenes of this part, and suffering from sympathy. Such too sensitive persons, to whom Nature has denied Æsthetic apathy to cases of great distress in tragedies and romances, should,–unless they are fat, for sorrow is good for fatness as a fasting-cure and lapis infernalis,^[50]–these should make themselves cold, and arm themselves against the tragic poet with philosophy; they should console themselves during the reading of a great affliction and say: "How long does such a printed misery last? How soon a book and a life are over! To-morrow thou wilt think very differently. The unhappy condition into which I am here brought by Shakespeare exists, in truth, only in my own imagination, and my sorrow over it is indeed, according to the stoic, only illusion. One must not, says Epictetus in his handbook, bewail that which lies not in our will, and the sad scene of Klopstock here is, in fact, an external thing, which thou canst not alter. Wilt thou let thyself be shamed by a North American, by a saltwork-man of Halle, by the rabble, by the Cretin from Gex,^[51] who bore that whole scene from Goethe's Tasso quietly and composedly, without the moistening of an eye?"

I assure the readers that I take the field here only against their wives and sisters; for among readers of our sex stout-hearted spectators of Æsthetic woes have never been wholly wanting, and still less than among the vulgar themselves; and least of all would I have the appearance of disputing the great majority of business-people, reviewers, criminal-lawyers, and Dutchmen, the possession of great composure during the reading of sad crape-clad scenes, which I and others give to the press. Much rather do I fondly persuade myself that–if there ever was hope of the like–it is precisely now, when the German promises to put on that Belgian stoicism, that noble insensibility, which so becomes him, and through which he is made bullet- and blade-proof against Melpomene's dagger, and goes through Dante's hell, as Christ did through the real one, without suffering. We never, to be sure, had the sensibility of the French, and their Racine would never have been for us anything more than a prince's jester; but we are now, if an author does not absolutely push the matter too far and bring in too many battle-fields, and cups of rat-poison, and gallows-trees,–for that takes hold of us,–but if he only half good-humoredly trots along–I seem really to see him at this moment riding–on a mourning-steed, and shakes with one hand a death-bell, and with the other swings (ah, woe!) a funeral-marshal's baton; or if, finally, he only delineates the invisible, stanched gashes of the tenderer, more delicate soul;–then are we now already in a condition to maintain our merry humor, and to show what a German can endure. People of more moderate force sleep at least, so as not to suffer over a Goethe's Iphigenia, because sleep sets sufferers right; or we absolutely forget such elegies, because, according to Plattner, we have no memory for sorrows, and because oblivion–as a prince wrote–is the only remedy for sorrows; or Heaven sends us, as after sorrow joy, after a Messiad (of which a good travesty were to be desired for us) a Blumauer's parody, over which we can easily forget the preceding epopee.

W.

Women.–Ye sweet, soft spring flowers and angel shoots by the side of us hard winter-cabbage-stumps, I have indeed already, under the former letter, remembered you and your tenderness in contrast to the German immeltableness! What shall I further say, except that, when you are good, you are so in the highest degree, and that you and the Cornwall tin have one and the same kind of stamp,–namely, the figure of an angel?

X (see I K S).–Y (see I).–Z (see T S).

Tz.

Spitz.–Poor Spitz likes as well to be in Prefaces among Extra-Shoots as his Master, and comes in just right with the Twenty-ninth Chapter. I can talk for hours with Pomeranian dogs, as Yorick did with asses. I will now set the messenger of the gods on his hind-feet and hold him by the fore-paws, that he may listen to me in an erect posture.—"Stand, nimble beast!–I talk with thee about something only that I may place thee in the third Preface. It deserves, Spitz, to be remarked, that thou art a rogue as men are, and like them wilt not remain straight, but crooked and bowed down, merely for the sake of eating well; thou and they will, like Faro-cards, win by bending and crooking, as the common English bend their bad silver money that it may not be passed for less, namely, two pieces for one. Thou hast false eyes, but nevertheless thy actions are good. The reviewers, impatient cattle, say, if they were in thy place, they would bring along the biographical building-stuff more industriously, that the biography might be over before it snows;–meet them not with the counter-assertion, that I might do like Baronius, who began his annals without a beard and ended them with a gray one. In that can only reviewers (but not I) imitate him, who have time to polish, and who can begin a work beardless, on shaving day, and not till three days after finish it, when they are lathered.–-Just fall down, Hofmann, and eat; thou art at least not wholly without sense, and givest more heed to an harangue, after all, than a Dauphin-foetus, and at least waggest thy tail, which the foetus does not. I have now to talk with quite other people, and the fewest possible among them wag their tails in token of appreciation, Spitz!"

Jean Paul.

hornstart