FIRST WHITSUNTIDE-DAY.

Police-Regulations of Pleasure.–Church.–The Evening.–The Blooming-Cavern.

Hardly had Victor waked from his sleep, though not from his dreams, when the low talking of all his thoughts, the Elysian stillness that pervaded his whole heart, told him that to-day his Sabbatical weeks came on. Without reproach or design of a misstep, without a sigh of his conscience, he went guilelessly to meet joy and love. The tenderer and more delicate a flower of joy is, so much the clearer must be the hand that plucks it, and only cattle pasture can bear filth; just as those who pick Imperial tea deny themselves beforehand all gross fare, that they may pluck the fragrant leaf unsoiled.–Victor had, out of doors, hardly dawn enough to see on his broad hour-watch of Bee-father Lind's the first hour of his Sabbath; but this watch, the step-marker on the so beautiful road of the Bee-father's life, and the morning-service of nature, which consists in stillness, fortified his purpose of prefixing his present life to the second life after death as a still, cool, starry spring-morning.

"By you I swear,"–said he, as, by degrees, more and more larks soared up singing out of their dew into the morning-hora,in Puzzolo^[97]–"I will even in joy remain composed for thirty whole years together, at least for three whole Whitsuntide days,–I will be a university-friend and house-friend, but not a Wertherish lover of enjoyment.–Does not man act as if his path of life must be a bridge of connected honey-combs, through which he has, moth-like, to chew his way, as if his hands were only sugar-tongs of pleasure?–I will again apply the sportive faculty as a bridle to my pleasures and my pains. The warm tears of melancholy, especially those of rapture, a sort of hot vapor which propels and decomposes more mightily than gunpowder and Papin'sin Puzzolo^[98] machines, I will indeed shed, but cool them a little beforehand.–And if I do not get sight of Clotilda every forenoon, I will simply say, A man cannot be always in the third heaven, he must also sometimes stay over night in the first."–He has, perhaps, more reason than power; but, it is true, health of heart is equally removed from hysteric spasms and from phlegmatic torpor, and rapture borders more nearly on pain than on tranquillity. But no tranquillity or coolness is worth aught but that which is attained,–man must have at once the capacity and the mastery of passion. The freshets of the will resemble those of rivers, which for a time muddy all the springs; but take away the rivers, and the springs are gone too.–

The increasing dawn veiled one distant sun, after another; and when at last the near one had risen, or rather nature, then could Victor see and read and take my work (the well-known Mumien) out of his pocket. A book was for him, in the midst of free, stimulative nature, a pair of garden-shears to his wantonly up-shooting dreams and joys. This morning sparkling with a whole spring, this flashing on all brooks, this humming out of blossoms into blossoms,–this blue hanging sea, over which the sun sailed like a Bucentaur,in Puzzolo^[99] in order to throw on the bottom of that sea, the earth, the marriage-ring,–such a Present beside such a Future would even now at the third hour have deprived him of the strength, in obedience to his new constitution, to rule over his ecstasy, and to preserve steadily so much repose as is needed for a mezzotint between a rapturous and a dull day,–I say he would not have had that power without his biographer, I mean, if he had not had my book before him, in the second part of which he had still the schoolmaster Wutzin Puzzolo^[100] to read. But this learned work–I venture without self-conceit to flatter myself–set the proper limits to his rapture. For thus,–as he walked along reading,–(as others, e. g. Rousseau and I, read while eating, and take a bite now from the plate and now from the book,)–as he contemplated the life of the schoolmaster till a new valley or a new wood opened,–as he listened now to this printed chorister, and now to a living one before whose Whitsuntide songs he passed by: in this way he could keep his ideas, with all their rondos and knights'-jumps, in such a fine ball-room-order and church-discipline, that he was as happy as the Wutz he was reading of. Besides, I was still crying to him on the stretch out of my Mumien, to be discreet, and to give heed to my little schoolmaster as a file-leader in the arts of happiness, and to get the kernel out of every day, every hour. "Besides, I am a reprobate," said he, "if I do not do it; good God, is not then the very sense of existence,^[101] and the first sweet breakfast after every waking, a standing enjoyment?"–He reflected, to be sure, that culture gives us spectacles, and takes away in return the papillÆ of the tongue, and compensates to us for our pleasures by the better definitions of them (just as the silk-worm, as caterpillar, has taste, but no eyes, and, as butterfly, has eyes without taste), he confessed to himself, indeed, that he had too much understanding to have so much contentment as the Auenthal schoolman Wutz, and that he philosophized too deeply besides; but he also insisted upon this: that "a higher wisdom must nevertheless (because otherwise the all-wise would be necessarily the all-unhappy) find a way again out of the sweltry parterre of the lecture-room into a parterre of flowers. Lofty men produce, like mountains, the sweetest honey." ...

Although, even while he was in the last village, the suburbs as it were of Maienthal, he heard the last tolling, still he was not provoked at the belated arrival. Nay, to show himself that he was the philosopher Socrates, he passed on with a diligent increase of slowness, and did not, like the Athenian, make a libation of the cup of joy, but did not, in fact, yet fill it up. "Float on," he said to a little cloud formed of collected lily-pollen, "and be wafted before me in advance over the good hearts, thou pillar of cloud at the entrance of the promised land!–And may thy little shadow silhouette for them the more fixed one, which follows more lazily, and which is absorbed later by the blue of heaven!"–And ere the winding footpath placed him before the flower-curtained gate of the valley, wherein stood the beloved cradle and nursery-garden of his fair three-days future, he was arrested by a closed thistle, around whose sealed honey-cups a white butterfly was drawing his third parallel,–and the mosaic thistles on Le Baut's floor started into life before him, and showed him the stings of the past; then he felt it incomprehensible how he had been able to endure his sorrows, and easier to bear the heaven of joy....

He took out Lind's watch, in order to know the birth-hour of his honeymoon or honey-week,–precisely at 11 o'clock he came out before the neat village, before the green-house of his heaven, before the colony of his hope, before Eden.... Ah, the murmuring little village buried in foliage seemed to throw all its blooming twigs, like arms, around, and knit himself to itself; it was green and white and red,–not painted, but overspread with leaves and blossoms. And when, as the ringing died away,–in order avariciously to hoard up for himself the embrace of his Emanuel, and in order to come upon the Maienthal church music with a heart opened by Nature,–he stole into the long, clean village, and ran Friendship's toll for a few minutes at Emanuel's house, it seemed to him as if his peacefully glad heart in the still lanes rocked with the birds on the cherry-twigs that latticed the window-panes, and hovered with the bees in the cherry blossoms. "Come right in," all seemed to say, "thou good man, we are all happy, and thou shalt be so too."–He approached the shining church, whose dazzling stucco flung by contrast upon the blue of the sky a sublime darkness, and his beating heart trembled blissfully with the waves of the organ within, and with the rustling birch-tree fixed in the ground before the church-door, and with the dry May-pole, in the middle of the village, bowed by the morning-wind....

"But," says my reader, "could then his eye so long deny itself the fairer prospects, and his heart the more beloved beauty, and, instead of the Abbey, seek out only the church?"–Oh, he looked after that the very first thing of all, and his eye ran trembling around all the windows of his sun-temple; but as he found all of them open and empty, and all the curtains drawn up, he guessed that its fair conclave of sisters, and among them the conclave-sister of his heart, were there where he sought–and found them,–in the temple. He went up unheard, during the tramping down of the church-goers, into the front-stall of the nobility, which from without appeared empty, that flower-stand of the convent-nuns. There was nothing there but dropped birch-leaves; for the body of nuns and the Abbess and Clotilda stood–below in the Church, and encircled the altar with a choir of singing angels, and took the sacrament there.–With a thrill of joy he beheld the queen of his heaven, the so dearly loved and undeserved, the shining angel, melting her vestment of earthly snow with heavenly warmth to tears, in order soon to become invisible.—His spirit bowed itself as she knelt: "Drink heaven's peace," he said, "out of the sacred chalice of the great man, among whose thoughts was never a cloud nor a sigh,–and may the thought which thou now contemplatest with such steadfast devotion be destined to become more and more luminous and immovable, like a sun, and always to throw a warm evening-light over the weary soul!"–This angel in mourning-attire called forth in his inner being by an awakening of the dead all the virtues of his life and all its faults, and gave those a heaven and these a hell; he was, therefore, now too holy to disturb a saint by making his appearance, even supposing her tranquil eye, absorbed in pious emotions, which did not so much as fall on the nearer devout beauties to the height of the waist, had been able to lift itself to him. The birch at the first window of the loft he kept before him as a leafy fan;–this green veil playing on his cheeks covered his attentiveness and his tears of joy from the whole church. The place where he was so happy seemed, to judge from an inscription on the glass, to have been once the usual stand of Clotilda; for Giulia's was near by, as I know for certain, because on the stall-window a G and C, enclosed by a wreath, had been cut in with the words by Giulia: "Thus are we united by the flowers of life and the circle of eternity." ...

Victor slipped away unseen and early out of this niche of removed goddesses, and bore his heart filled with love to the open breast of friendship,–to Emanuel. He saw already the latter's tabernacle of the covenant in the temple of Nature,–when his rapture was delayed by one of earlier date. Julius lay in the blooming grass with its waves rippling over him, and holding a cherry-twig full of open honey-cups in his hand, in order to draw the bees to him, and to delight himself with their murmurous hovering over the blossoms. Victor embraced him, and forgot in the ecstasy to name his name,–"Art thou my angel?" said he.–"I am only thy Victor!"–"O come! O come!" said the blind youth, trembling like a melody, and drew his friend to Emanuel's house; but he led him, behind the cloud of his blindness, the longer way, and, besides, he turned round at every fourth step for a renewed embrace.

When they came to the water-wheel, which loudly emptied its sprinkling-cans on the flower-beds, and whose shivered lightnings flitted against Emanuel's windows and ceiling, then the blind one said, "Embrace me once more right heartily."–But amidst the din of the rain-shower, and amidst the stupefaction of love, they were pressed together by other arms than their own, and the two young hearts were linked to a third, and the East Indian gazed like a god of love from one to the other, and said: "O ye good youths, remain ever thus, and weep on in your blissful love!–Blessings on thee, my Horion, and a welcome in the great spring round about us!"–And when Emanuel and Victor sank on each other's necks, then was it as if all the flower-beds bowed down for rapture, as if all the waves flamed more radiantly under super-earthly lightnings flying over them, as if the zephyrs swelled with sighs of love, as if higher beings must needs whisper in the over-measure of joy: O ye good human beings, verily ye love like us!–

An arm out of a river of Paradise lifted and bore this loving trinity into the leafy rooms, and here, for the first time, Victor saw that the spring was on Dahore's cheeks and the summer in his eyes, as well as twelve May months in his heart. The white mourning-roses on his cheeks, which always seemed to bloom like mural crowns of death against St. John's-day, had given place to the red ones,–in short, Emanuel's face gave the hope that he had been, in regard to his death, a false prophet.–

In this waving apartment, whose golden wall borders were linden-boughs, and whose splendid tapestries were linden blossoms, and over whose door, as door-paintings, flickered the reflection and the mock-suns of the flashing water-wheel, in this four-walled island, surrounded by Nature's roaring sea of joy, through whose open windows the zephyrs flung bees and butterflies over the window-flowers among the lindens, my hero, to whom, besides, the noonday hum of bells appeared like a ringing call to a peace-festival of the earth, felt himself wading through flowers of joy up to his heart.–Emanuel's poesy sounded to him, in this epic intoxication, like prose; he was, as it were, sunk in a thicket of flowers, and, lifting his eyes, saw overhead a healed immortal who bent apart the blooming envelopment,–and still higher up an eternal Whitsuntide sun in the infinite blue,–and nearer above him the sprouting of the flower-leaves, and above this the swarming of bees,–and a golden morning-red, wound as a living frame round about the whole variegated incense-breathing woodland....

–By Heaven! only to lie in a literal flower-wood of this kind were of itself something,–to say nothing of lying actually in a metaphorical one!–Victor was devout with joy, still from overfulness, contented from gratitude. The aspect of their common teacher gave, it is true, to Clotilda's image warmer colors, and to his soul higher flames, but imparted to his wishes no insatiableness and no impatience.

Emanuel immediately began speaking of that beloved pupil of his; not at all as if Clotilda had clearly described to him the third Easter-holiday, or as if Emanuel had guessed it, but this guileless man simply knew not the difference between love and friendship, and he would have said of himself as well as of Victor, that he loved her. And just this childlike naÏvetÉ, which, through the open chamber of a woman's heart, watched for no right of transit nor for any breaches, but laid bare his own, and which fished for no confessions, found fault with none, took advantage of none,–this quality must have been just what would bind with the Gordian ganglion of sympathy the shyest female soul to so open a manly one. Nay, I believe Clotilda could more easily have made known her love to her teacher than to her beloved.–As this Emanuel now told him how he had pictured to her all the scenes of his former sojourn here,–and all his raptures,–and his confession of friendship for her,–how he had read to her his letters, and how the second (that disconsolate one on the night of the Stamitz concert) had forced so many tears into her eyes,–and as Victor saw how very much his friend had by his breathing on it drawn her love open like a closing tulip-cup,–all this kindled his love for her, his friendship for him even to devotion, and in a blissful embarrassment he kissed the blind one. By this double love he now explained to himself Clotilda's easy consent to his Whitsuntide journey.

He would have held it all Angel's- and a Peter's-fall from friendship, not to propose directly the question to Emanuel, when he might see this beloved–of Virtue.–"Now!" said the latter, who, despite his respectful East-Indian gentleness toward women, knew not the nose-rings, binding-keys, and dampers of our Harem-decency. But Victor acted otherwise and yet thought just so. He had already asked when abroad: "Why do they suffer the wretched police-regulation to stand for maidens, that they, e. g., must never walk out singly, but always, like Nuremberg Jews, under the escort of an old crone, or like the monks, in pairs?" Not as if this would in any manner embarrass me, if I acted a romance, but that it would, if I wrote one, where I should have to keep to the female rules-of-march at the expense of the critical, and trail round with me a convoy of auxiliary-women through the whole book as an abattis to my heroine. Should I not be obliged, if I would so much as get her out beyond the house door-steps, to march along beside her with a crown-guard of female keepers of the seal? Should I not be obliged by this confounded co-investiture and trading in company with Virtue–there would be no such thing as doing business on one's own account–to foist female friends on my heroine contrary to all probability? I should think hard, to be sure, of a Spanish maiden if she showed me her foot, and of a Turkish, if she showed me her face, and of a German, if she went alone to see the best young man; but just because the most fanatical blue laws, which surely are blue vapor on blue Mondays, become a real moral law for them, therefore am I vexed at this deplorable pusillanimity, and wish to see nothing forbidden but–waltzing and falling!... He has here, perhaps, satire in petto; for, to speak seriously of the matter, this sanitary-ordinance, that maidens must with us, as petitions with princes, always present themselves in duplicates, has manifestly the design of accustoming them all to one another, because they must have each other's friendship for visits;–secondly, brothers and sisters must be out of each other's hair, because they do not know whether they shall need each other as collateral securities of their virtue and second exchange-bills of love;–thirdly, these human ordinances give to female virtue by the minor moral-service (because great temptations are too rare) daily exercise in religion, and higher importance, and bear the same relation as the articles of the Talmud do to the Bible, although a right Jew would sooner transgress the Bible than the Talmud;–fourthly, we owe to these symbolic books of propriety the earlier culture of that female acuteness for which we unhappily furnish no other opportunities of attention than the oath they swear on those books affords.

Victor at once blamed and followed, like a good girl, the female rules of the order; court life had made him more courageous, but also more refined, and, like the court itself, he was, among women, reconciled to the writing-lines of the ceremonial. Therefore he purposed not until the second day of Whitsuntide to make his regular diplomatic appearance at the Abbess's, since to-day it was too late for anything, and besides that he would not fly into the sweet, holy emotions over yonder like a comet. And then too, his contentment told him, indeed, how little the neighborhood of a loved heart differs from its presence, which, besides, is nothing but a nearer neighborhood.

Meanwhile he mastered himself at least so far as to go out with his twin-brothers of the heart into the Colosseum of Nature, although he did not conceal from himself that he should be in dread out there of meeting Clotilda. And Emanuel lessened this fear but poorly, when he confessed to him that she had hitherto with her wounded life gone every day round the ponds as around magnetic healing-tubs, and through the lawn as through field-apothecaries'-shops.–Hasten forth at last, ye three good souls, into the Jubilee of Spring, which the Earth celebrates yearly in memory of Creation. Haste, ere the minutes of your life, like the broad waves on the two brooks, now still fleeting, and flashing, and sounding, fly to pieces and extinguish themselves on a weeping-willow,–haste, ere the flowers of your days and the flowers of the meadow are veiled by evening, when instead of the vital oxygen they shall exhale only poisonous air,–and enjoy the first day of Whitsuntide ere it trickles away!

–And it has trickled away, and a summer already lies upon it to-night as a grave; but the three dear hearts have hastened and enjoyed it, before it faded.... They sauntered on among the zephyrs, those sowing-machines of the flowers, as they came fluttering out of all the bushes,–they came before the five pocket-mirrors of the sun, the ponds, (the rivers being pier-mirrors and the gay shores the pier-tables,)–they saw how Nature, like Christ, conceals her miracles, but they saw also the bridal torch of the marriage-making May, the sun, and a bridal chamber in every singing tree-top, and a bridal bed in every flower-cup,–they, the wedding guests of the earth, turned not away the bee, who drunk with honey revelled around them, nor did they scare up the food-bringing mother, before whom the young bird with trembling wings melted into invisibleness,–and when they had climbed all the earthly steps of the eternal temple, whose columns are milky-ways, the sun sank, like the thoughts of men, to meet another world....

The fountain in the garden of termination,^[102] which rears itself half-way down the declivity of the southern mountain and gleams away high over the mountain, already bore on its thin crystal column a shaft recast by the evening sun into a ruby, and this glittering, full-blowing rose contracted itself, like other flowers that had gone to sleep, to a red point,–and the hanging columns of gnats in the last beam seemed to say: To-morrow it will be fair again; go back; ah, you play longer in the sun than we.–

They went back; but when Victor saw the five high white columns at the western end of the beloved garden blink in the light of evening, his exalted heart felt a yearning and a burden, and he restrained it not from sighing: "Good Clotilda! ah, I should be glad indeed to see thee even to-day; my heart is full of tears of joy over this holy day, and I would fain pour it out before thee."–And when the whole park of the Abbey reared itself proudly beside the evening-heaven, and took possession of their hearts, then all at once said Emanuel,–who was always like himself even in his raptures,–"I will tell the Abbess this very day, so that Clotilda may lay up joy for to-morrow," and he separated from them.... Noble man! thou that in four weeks hopest to leave this flowery spring and mount to the stars above thee,–thou thinkest more of immortality than of death,–no threatening Orthodoxy, but the Indian love of flowers, hath trained thee, hence art thou so blessed; thou art free from wrath, like every dying man, free from greed and from anxiety; in thy soul, as at the Pole when every morning the sultry sun stays away, the moon of the second world never sets day nor night!–

Victor, alone, led the blind youth home, and both were silent and embraced each other with brotherly tears behind every screen, and asked each other neither for the reasons of the embrace nor of the tears. When they had passed through the still village, and as they came along by the park of the Abbey, Victor saw his Emanuel pass out of the last bower into the dazzling convent. It seemed to him as if every one therein already recognized him, as if he must hide himself. The garden of inspiration was to be in the valley only the flower-bed in a meadow, and not violently contrast itself with nature by sharp limits, but hang over into it softly as a dream into waking hours with blooming, embowered borders, and flow over into it with hop-gardens, with green thick-set hedges around corn-fields, and with sowed-over children's gardens. A large wide colonnade of chestnuts, set in silver by two brooks, opened broad and free toward the five ponds with their pierced work of blossoms. The northern mountain lifted itself up over against the park like a terrace, and seemingly continued the Eden over unseen valleys.

Victor avoided every opening window of the convent by means of the chestnut-trees under which he led his blind one, and behind which he could, unobserved, observe more nearly. On the shed-roof of the avenue woven of green roof-laths the evening lay like an autumn gleaming through with red streaks of splendor. He went, despite the danger of detection, to the very middle, where the avenue divides into two arms; but here he chose the right arm of the leafy hall, which bent away with him from the convent, as well as from a nightingale which, in the midst of the garden, sent out from a consecrated thorn-hedge her young and her tones. The arbor rendered to him by its softening distances from the bravura-airs of the feathered Prima Donna the services of a pedal and lute-stop;–gently was he led on by the windings which the gradual darkening and narrowing of the alley concealed, through the tones of the nightingale that floated after him, through the thinner trickling of the evening rays among the leaves between the two brooks, which now glided away inside of the chestnut-lane.–The brooks came closer together and left room only for love.–The portico closed in more coseyly.–The scattered flowers of the two banks crowded together and passed over into bushes.–The bushes grew up into a garden wall and touched each other at first in summits hanging towards each other, loose and transparent, and at last darkly knit together.–And the avenue and the arbor which had grown up under it blended their green together, so as to make with their coinciding blossom-veils only a single night.–Then in the green twilight was the arbor stopped up by a web of honeysuckle and nest of blossoms, but five ascending steps invited to the tearing asunder of the blooming curtain. And when one parted it, one sank into a blossom-cleft, into a narrow, tangled vault, as it were into a magnified flower-cup. In this Delphic cave of dreams the cushion was made of high grass, and the arms of the seat of blossoming-twigs, and the back of flowers massed together, and the air of the breath of dusting dwarf-fruit-trees. This flowery Holy of Holies was peopled only with bees and dreams, illuminated only with white blossoms; it had for evening-red only the purple of night-violets, for heaven's blue only the azure of elder-blossoms, and the blest one therein was lulled only by bees' wings and by the five mouths of the brooks meeting around him into the slumber in which the distant nightingale struck the harmonica- and evening-bells of dream....

–And as Victor to-day, beside the blind one, trod the five steps, and opened the blossom-woven tapestry door of the heaven: lo!–there–O man beatified this side of death!–reposed a female saint with weeping eyes, absorbed in Philomela's expiring plaints.... It was thou, Clotilda, and thou thoughtest of him with softened soul and heightened love,–and he on thee with reciprocal love! O when two loving ones meet each other in the selfsame emotion, then and not till then do they respect the human heart and its love and its bliss!–Hide not, Clotilda, with any blossoms the tears under which thy cheeks blush, because they should fall only before solitude! Tremble, but only for joy, as the sun trembles, when he comes out of a cloud on the horizon! Cast not down yet thy eye curtained with flowers, which for the first time falls so calmly opened and with such a stream of love on the man who deserves thy fair heart, and who rewards all thy virtues with his own!... Victor was struck with the lightning of joy and must needs remain immovable in the sweet smile of rapture, when the beloved rose behind the flower-clouds like the moon behind an Eden standing in full bloom, and in the womanly transfiguration of love resembled an angel dissolved into a prayer.

The blind youth knew nothing as yet of the third blessed one. She moved her hand, in sweet confusion, towards a too thin twig to raise herself from the deep grass-bench; it seemed to her lover, as if this hand reached to him out of the clouds of the second life a second heart, and he drew the hand to himself and sank with his mute, overflowing face down through the blossom on her throbbing veins. But hardly had Clotilda bade both a stammered welcome during the coming out from the green closet, when there appeared to them the angel–Emanuel, who had hastened from the convent to seek his friend. He said nothing, but looked on both with a nameless rapture, to find out whether they were right joyful, and as if to ask, "Are you not, then, now right happy, ye good souls? do you not, then, love each other inexpressibly?"—Oh, only a mortal is needed for sympathy in sorrow, but an angel for sympathy in joy; there is nothing more beautiful than the radiant Christ's head, on which the laying aside of the Moses' veil shows the still, glad interest in another's blameless joys, in another's pure love; and it is quite as godlike (or still more so) to contemplate the love of others with a mutely congratulating heart, as to have it one's self.... Emanuel, thy greater praise is kept in kindred souls, but not on paper!–

On the cross-way of the alley the fair society parted, and the left branch of the same led Clotilda along by the nightingale back to the abode of gentle hearts. Victor, dissolved by his heightened love for three human beings at once, arrived at the dusky apartments of Emanuel, lighted only by setting stars, and found there a spread table which the refined Abbess had sent to the guest or to the host, for Emanuel at evening ate only fruit. One wishes to share everything with one's love, even the kitchen. Emanuel after Easter never lighted a light. In the clar-obscure, made of the fusion of lunar silver and linden green, the blissful trefoil^[103] bloomed under the evening star. Victor, by his professional pictures of the night-cold, put his invalid friend out of conceit with night-walks, and went alone with the blind one at this late hour out to the dormitory of hushed Nature.... Blessed is the evening which is the fore-court of a blessed day. The May-frost had cleansed the stars from the warm breath of the vapor, and deepened the blue of the celestial hemisphere, to make a beautiful night the earnest of a beautiful day. All was silent around the village, except the nightingale in the garden and the rustling May-chafers, those heralds of a bright day.–And when Victor went home with an upward sigh of thanks for these Whitsuntide hours, of which each handed the next the box of powdered sugar to sweeten the short moments of a still mortal; as he passed along before the muffled confession-hymns, which here a twelve-years-old little man who to-morrow was to take the sacrament, and there one by the side of his mother, sang; and when, finally, a vesper-hymn breathed out from the Abbey, and, swimming forth as it were on a single lute-tone, brought the fair day with a swan-song to its close, and when nothing more was left of the soft day except its resonance in the heart of the happy one and in the evening song of the convent, and its reflection in the fleeting evening-red of heaven, and in the contented and still smiling face of the sleeping Emanuel;–then did the mute joys in Victor's face look like prayers, the undisturbed tears like overrunning drops from the cup of gladness, his stillness like a good deed, and his whole heart like the warm tear of joy shed by a higher genius.

Victor led the beloved blind one softly to his place of slumber, where dream restored his disordered eyes and arrayed the little landscapes, of his childhood, with morning hues, more brightly around him.–He then laid himself down without undressing himself, opposite to the moon which hung low above the horizon, and sank to sleep on the building-ground of our fairer air-castles, on the sounding-board of childhood, where morning-dreams lead consecrated man out of the wilderness of day to the mount of Moses, and let him look over into the dark, promised land of Eternity....

The first Whitsuntide day, dear reader, in this tri-clang of rapture, has died away; but in these three high festivals of joy, as with those in the almanac, the second is still fairer, and the third the fairest of all. I shall not at all hurry with the movement of my pen through these three heavens,–nay, if I could certainly know that the acting persons in this history would never get to see my work, I should shift the boundaries of this Eden, by adding much that, on nearer inspection, would not prove historically true.–

barstart