Volume 2 / Part 3 — 36. DOG-POST-DAY.

36. DOG-POST-DAY.

FOURTH AND LAST DAY OF WHITSUNTIDE.

Hyacinth.—The Voice of Emanuel's Father.—Letter from the Angel.—Flute on the Grave.—Second Nightingale.—Farewell.— Pistols.—Ghostly Apparition.

The appendix to the fourth day of joy has just come in.—Pausing only to breathe the sigh wherewith one usually says, on the day after festal days, that he is burying them, I come back again before the blooming bed of my friend, and open the living-green curtain; not till toward nine o'clock did a ground-sparrow twittering close to his hands draw him with difficulty out of a deep sea of dream. But the shadowy shapes, which the concave mirror of dream had erected in the air, were all forgotten; only the tears, which they had wrung from them, still stood in his eyes, and he could no longer remember why he had shed them. To-day was Ember-day, which, like other changes of moon and weather, makes the echo of our dreams louder and more polysyllabic.—In a singular lassitude he opened his eyes before the white twilight of the canopy of apple-blossoms, before the maze of the green web,—his hand chased the ground-sparrow through the bushes,—it was sultry around this shade, the tree-tops were mute and all the flowers erect,—bees bent down from grains of sand into the springs around him and sipped water,—white flocks dropped from the willows, and all the smelling-bottles of the blossoms and the censers of the flowers diffused over his place of slumber a sweet, sultry steam....

He raises his right hand to his moist eye and sees therein, to his astonishment, a white hyacinth, which some one must have placed there.... He suspected Clotilda; and she it had really been. Half an hour before she had stepped up to this bed of flowers,—had gently let the bushes immediately close again,—but then, however, drawn them apart again, because she saw the tears of the forgotten dream run down the face of the glowing sleeper,—her whole soul became now a tender look and blessing of love, and she could not refrain from laying the memorial of her morning-visit, the flower, on his hand,—and then hastened softly back to her chamber.

He stepped hastily into the beaming day, to overtake the giver, whose morning-offering he unhappily, for fear of destroying it, could no more press to his heart than he could herself. O how it saddened him, when he stood in the open air before the Moravian churchyard of the heavenly night which had gone home, before the reposing garden, and when he looked upon the bald, close-shaven, trodden-down dancing-floor, and on the silent nightingale's-bush, and on the hills where the children were tending sheep, disrobed of yesterday's finery! Then the forgotten dream again appeared and said: Weep once more, for the rose-feast of thy life concludes to-day, and the last of the four rivers of Paradise in a few hours will utterly dry up!—"O ye fair days," said Victor, "ye deserve that I should leave you with a tenderness that knows no measure and with unnumbered tears!"—He fled from the too harsh daylight into the cell of crape, that it might recolor the brilliant foreground of the day into a dim back-ground, overspread with the moonshine of yesterday; and under this pall of the pale dead night he proposed to himself to indulge his heart, so soon to be impoverished, with its last joy, namely, its yearning, in utter overmeasure. He stepped out of the tent, but the nocturnal moonshine faded not from the lawn; he looked up into the blue heaven, which touches us with one long flame, but the veiled stars of the wintry night sent little outwelling rays to the eclipsed soul; he said to himself, indeed, "The ice-mountain on which hitherto my reason has delivered half sermons-on-the-mount, has shrunk up under the glow of joy to a mole-hill," but he added, "To-day I care for nothing."

He came to Emanuel with wet eyes. The latter told him that the first link of yesterday's chain of flowers, namely the Briton with his people, had already loosed itself in the night. But the longer he looked on Emanuel and thought of the morrow,—for to-morrow before day he too would softly close the garden gate of this Paradise behind, and this afternoon he is to take leave of the Abbess and this evening of his beloved, in order not to hinder her in the reading out of the well-known angel's-epistle,—so much the more painful was the straining of his eyes, and he preferred to go out, with a heart bleeding itself full, into the open air, and led the blind one with him, who suspected nothing, saw nothing, and before whom, besides, one loved to lay bare his innermost heart as before a child.

But this time Julius was in the same softened state, because he had all the morning seen the angel playing and hovering in his darkling soul. The yearning for the angel brooded over his reposing heart and warmed it even to beating, and he said with an unaccustomed sorrow, "If I could only see, only something, only my father, or thee!" The dust-covered remembrances of his childhood were shaken up; and out of this cloud-enveloped period emerged before him into special prominence one day, bright with morning, blue and full of song, and bore three forms on its cloud-floor, Julius's own and those of the two children, from whom before their embarkation for Germany he had parted,—drops escaped from him without his perceiving it, when he described to this Victor, the very one who had done what he described, how he had been kissed and hugged and cried after by the one child, that loved him most, and always carried him. "And I think," he continued, "that every one whose voice I love to hear has the face of that good child, and that thou hast too. Often when I contemplate this form alone in my darkness, and feel warm drops on my lips, and fall into a languishing, slumbering rapture, I fancy it is blood trickles from my lips and my heart is boiling,—but my father says if then my eyes were suddenly opened, and I should look upon my angel, or the good child, or a beautiful human being, I should have to die for love."—"O Julius, Julius," cried his Victor, "how noble is thy heart! The good child whom thou lovest so my father will soon lay in thy arms, and he will kiss thee and love thee and clasp thee just as I do now."—

He led him back to dinner; but he himself remained till afternoon under the open heaven, and his heart put on silent mourning under trees full of bees, near thickets full of feeding birds, on all the former walks and ecliptics of this dying festival,—and all the hours of childhood rose out of the winter-sleep of memory and stirred his heart, but it dissolved.—O when far distant moments sound on our ears with their chime, then great drops fall from the softened soul, as the increasing nearness of far-off bells sounding across betokens rain. I blame thee not, Victor,—thou art, after all, only feminine, but not effeminate,—if thy biographer can describe thy emotion and thy reader can feel it, without relaxing the firm muscles of the heart, thou canst do it quite as well, and only a man who can wring bitter tears from others will scorn sweet ones and shed none himself.

At length Victor went to take his last pleasure, to the garden of termination, in order to take leave with tender tears of all his female friends at the Abbey. A singular incident delayed it a little: for as he left Emanuel, he encountered Julius coming from the garden, who told him, "if he wanted to find Emanuel, he was in the garden."—This raised a friendly dispute, because each of them insisted on having just talked with him. Victor went back with him to Emanuel, and Julius related to his teacher every word of the alleged garden-talk with him: "e. g. about Victor, about Clotilda, about the farewell he was to-day taking, about his previous happy days."

During the narration Emanuel's face grew radiant, as if moonlight flowed down from it,—and instead of representing to the beloved child the impossibility of his appearance in the garden, he humored his notion of the apparition, and said with delight: "I shall die, then!—It was my departed father,—his voice sounds like mine,—he promised me when he died to come back from the next world to this before I should go hence.—Ah, ye beloved ones beyond the graves over yonder, ye still then think of me.—O thou good father! break through even now into my presence with thy fatal radiance, and release my spirit in thy lips!"—

He was still more confirmed in his conclusion, because, Julius added that the shape had demanded of him the angel's letter, but given it back again after a short whisper. The seal was uninjured. Emanuel's joyful enthusiasm at these telegraphs of death implied that he had drawn dissatisfying inferences from his previous health. Victor never set himself in opposition to the exalted errors of his teacher; thus, e. g., he never arrayed the reasons he had, and which I will show in the next Intercalary day, against the innocent delusion, that "from dreams, and from the independence of the personal consciousness on the body, one could infer its future independence after death,"—that "in dream the inner diamond dusted itself and drank in light from a fairer sun."—Victor was alarmed about the matter,—but for other reasons, Julius took them both along with him to the place of the interview, which was in the darkened avenue near the blossoming hollow. No one was there, nothing appeared; leaves whispered, but no spirits; it was the place of bliss, but of earthly bliss.—

Victor went into the other place of bliss, the Abbey. Clotilda was not over there, but in the intricate labyrinth of the Park, probably for the purpose of facilitating for its possessor, Julius, the opportunity of hearing read the angel's letter. Just as the sun blazed over against the window-panes, he took leave of the good Abbess with that refined, feeling courtesy to which in her position the highest enthusiasm was limited. The refined Abbess said to him: "The visit was so short, that it would be inexcusable, if Victor did not make it good by persuading her second spring guest (Clotilda) to lengthen hers; for she too was going soon to leave them."—He took his leave of her with a heart-felt respect: for his tender heart knew, quite as well behind the lace mask of refinement and knowledge of the world as behind the leather-crust of roughness, how to feel the tender heart of another.

But as he hastened to the garden, the tears of his heart gushed up higher and warmer,—and he felt as if he must here in the face of the sun embrace the rising moon, as he thought: "Ah, when thy pale fleece hangs this evening brighter overhead there, when thou lookest down alone, I shall have departed or be in the act of departing from my pastoral world."—And below near the nightingale's hedge reposed his Julius, shedding bright streams of tears,—for this whole evening swarmed with greater and greater wonders^[123] of chance,—he hastens down to him, the letter of the so-called angel is opened in his hand, Victor says softly, "Julius, why weepest thou so?"—"O God," said the latter in broken tones, "guide me under a bower!"—He conducted him to the crape one. Julius said, when they were under cover: "Good! here the sun does not burn!" and flung his right arm around Victor, and gave him the letter, and folded his arm round even to his heart and said: "Thou good soul! tell me when the sun is down, and read me once more the letter of the angel!"

Victor began: "Clotilda!"—"To whom is it?" said he.—"To me!" said Julius, "and Clotilda has already read it to me; but I could not understand her on account of her weeping, and besides I also was too much distressed.—I shall die for sorrow, thou good Giulia, why didst thou not tell me of it before thy death.—The dead one wrote it, read on!"—He read:

"Clotilda!

"I cover my blushing cheeks with the funeral veil. My secret lies hidden in my heart, and will be laid with it under the grave-stone. But after a year it will force its way out of the mouldered heart. O, then let it rest forever in thine, Clotilda!—and forever in thine, Julius!—Julius, was not a silent form often about thee that called itself thy angel? Did it not once, as the death-bell tolled for the burial of a blooming maiden, lay a white hyacinth in thy hand, and say, Angels pluck such white flowers? Did not a mute form once take thy hand and wipe away its tears therewith, and it could not tell why it wept? Did not a low voice once say, Farewell, I shall no more appear to thee, I go back to heaven? That form was I, O Julius; for I have loved thee and even unto death. Lo! here I stand on the shore of the second world, but I look not over into its infinite fields, but I turn my face, while I am still sinking, back to thee, to thee, and my eye grows dim over thy image.—Now I have told thee all.—Now come, quieting death, crush slowly the white hyacinth, and rend the heart asunder speedily, that Julius may see the love enclosed therein.—Ah, wilt thou then take a dead one into thy soul? Wilt thou weep, when thou hearest this read? Ah, when my covered, sunken dust can no more touch thee, will my remote spirit be loved by thine?—But I conjure thee, O ever-remembered one, go, on the day when this tearful leaf is read to thee, then go, at sundown, up to my grave and offer to the pale face below, which the old mound is already crushing asunder, and to the dissolved heart that can beat for nothing more, then present to the poor heart that has loved thee so much, and on thy account has hid itself under the earth, thy funeral offering,—bring to it on thy flute the tones of my loved song, 'The grave is deep and silent.'—Sing it softly to the accompaniment, Clotilda, and thou too visit me.—Ah, poor Giulia, lift up thy soul, and sink not now, as thou imaginest thy Julius on thy grave!—When thou bringest thy offering to the dead, my spirit will, it is true, already have gone up higher; I shall have lived a year beyond the earth, I shall already have forgotten the earth,—but nevertheless, but, O God, if Thou shouldst let the tones above my grave penetrate into Elysium, then should I sink down and shed hot tears and stretch out my arms and cry: Yes! here in eternity I love him still,—may it fare well with him on the earth, may his soft heart repose softly and long on life below there!—No, not long! Come up hither, mortal, to the Immortals, that thine eye may be healed, and see the friend who died for thee!

"Giulia."

* * * * *

"I will go,"—said Julius hesitatingly, but with quiverings in his face,—"although the sun is not down. My father shall console me till sundown, that my heart may not beat so violently against my breast, when I stand at the grave and make the offering to the dead."—Let me say nothing, reader, of the choking heart with which I proceed,—nor of this too sensitive Giulia, who like a morning sun-dial was ere noon in shade and coolness, who, like a dove, unfolded her wings to the rain and to tears,—nor of her soul's-sisters, who in the second decade of life hang, the skeleton of death all over with flowers, that they may not be able to see its limbs, and who rest their white arm merely on a myrtle-twig of love as upon a bleeding-support, and watch calmly the bleeding to death of its severed veins!—

I could not have said even this, if Victor had not thought it, whose heart was mortally distraught by an infinite grief and an infinite love; for ah! how far on the way was not his irreplaceable Clotilda already, to follow her friend and hide her unloved heart in the earth, as they lay down carnations in the frost?

The sun sank lower, the moon mounted higher,—Victor saw Clotilda, like an ethereally embodied angel, reclining in a niche that opened towards the west,—the little girl mentioned yesterday played, in her lap, with a new doll,—it seemed to him as if he saw her soaring toward heaven, and when she lifted her great eyelids, weighed down with tears for the departed friend, whose secret she had long since guessed and concealed, towards him, who to-day increased them by his departure; and when she saw his face also melted in emotion; then did like sorrowful thoughts drown in both even the first sounds of welcome, and both turned away their faces, because they wept for the parting.—"Have you," said Clotilda, at least with a composed voice, "just spoken with Julius?"—Victor did not answer, but his eyes said yes, in the simple fact that they streamed more passionately and looked on her fixedly. She cast hers down with a slight blush for Giulia. The little child took the falling of the eyelids over the great drops for a sign of sleepiness, and drew the little hay-stuffed pillow away from the doll, spread it out for Clotilda, and said innocently, "There, lie down on it and go to sleep!" A shudder thrilled through her friend, as she answered, "Not to-day, dear; on pillows of hay only the dead sleep." He shuddered, as he saw a snow-white pink, in the centre of which there was a great dark-red point, like a bloody drop, trembling on her agitated bosom. The fearful pink seemed to him to be the lily which superstition formerly found in the choir-seat of the priest, whose death was said thereby to be predicted.

She fixed her gaze painfully on, the low sun and the churchyard, behind which in the May days it sank like a mortal. "Leave this prospect, dearest," he said, though without a hope of obedience,—"a tender integument is most easily destroyed by a tender soul,—your tears make you too sad." But she replied: "Only in earlier years—but long ago it ceased to be so—did they make my eye-sockets burn and benumb my brain."—Suddenly, as the thought of the beclouded perspective of her eyes exhausted with weeping wrung his heart out of his bosom, the sunlight died upon her cheeks,—streams of tears broke violently from her eyes,—he turned round,—over on the churchyard the veiled youth had prostrated himself on the grave-mound of the veiled one beneath,—the sun was already below the earth, but the flute had as yet no voice, sorrow has only sighs,—no tones.... At last the beautiful blind one raised himself erect, amidst convulsive sorrows, for the funeral-offering, and the wailings of the flute went up from the closed grave into the evening-redness,—three hearts melted away like the tones, like the fourth heart that was buried below. But Clotilda lifted herself up by force out of her dumb woe, and sang low as an offering to the dead the heavenly song, for which the departed one had entreated her and which I give with inexpressible emotion:—

O Salis! in that yet are all our expired sighs, all our dried-up tears, and they lift the aspiring heart from its roots and veins, and it fain would die!

The voice of the noble singer gave way to sadness, but still she sang the last of the strophes of this song of the spheres, though lower under the—weight of overmastering sorrow:—

Her voice broke, as an eye breaks into tears or a heart in death.... Her friend veiled his head with the leaves of the bower,—the whole of earthly life passed before him like a dirge.—Clotilda's sad past, Clotilda's dark future, drew together before his vision, and cast, in the darkness, the funeral veil over this angel, and bore her shrouded into the grave of her sister.... He had even forgotten his farewell.... He had not the heart to look upon the great scene around him and the bowed form beside him....

He heard the little one go and say, "I will fetch thee a larger pillow to put under thy head."

Clotilda stood up and clasped his hand,—he turned round again toward the earth,—and she looked on him with eyes worn with weeping, yet tender, whose drops were too pure for this unclean world, but in those large eyes stood something like the terrible question, "Do we not love each other in vain for this world?" And her beating heart shook the bloody pink. The moon and the evening star gleamed solitary, like a past, in heaven.—Julius lay mute and prostrate, with outspread arms, on the low mound which had been rolled upon the dust of his shattered paradise.

The tones of the nightingale throbbed now like high waves on the night,—then he gathered up his courage to bid her farewell....

Reader! raise not thy spirit to any pitch of rapture, for it will soon stiffen in a spasm,—but I raise my soul thereto, because even the fatal stumble at the gate of paradise is not unlovely when one is going out of it!

The first call of the confiding nightingale was suddenly answered still-higher by a new nightingale that had fluttered along and whose voice was muffled by thick blossoms, who kept flying as she sang, and now made her languishing melody flow out of the blossoming hollow. The two lovers, who delayed and dreaded parting, wandered confusedly after the receding nightingale, and were on the way to the blessed blooming hollow; they knew not that they were alone; for in their hearts was God; before their sight shone the whole second world full of risen souls. At last Clotilda recovered herself, turned round before the nightingale, and gave the mournful sign of separation.—Victor stood on the shore of his late blissful island,—all, all was now over,—he lingered, took both her hands, could not yet look upon her for anguish, bowed down with tears, raised himself up again, when he was able to say softly: "Farewell,—my heavy heart can say no more,—fare thee right well, far better than I,—weep not so often as thou usedst to do, that thou mayest not perchance have to leave me utterly.—For then I too should go."—Louder and more solemnly he continued: "For we can no more be separated,—here under Eternity I deliver to thee my heart,—and when it forgets thee, then—may a sorrow crush it which shall reach over the two worlds." ... In a lower and tenderer tone, "Weep not to-morrow, angel,—and Providence give thee rest." Like a transfigured one to a transfigured he inclined himself modestly to her holy lip, and in a gentle, devout kiss, in which the hovering souls only glide tremulously from afar to meet each other with fluttering wings, with a light touch he took from the yielding, dissolving lips the seal of her pure love, the repetition of his late Eden, and her heart and his all—

—But here let the gentler soul, which the thunderbolts of fate too sorely agitate, turn its eye away from the great yellow flash which suddenly darts through the still Eden!

* * * * *

"Scoundrel!" cried Flamin, rushing out with sparkling looks, with snow-white cheeks, with locks hanging down like a mane, with two pocket-pistols in his hands,—"there take, take; blood I want," and thrust the deadly weapon towards him; Victor forced Clotilda aside, saying, "Innocent one! do not aggravate thy sorrows!"—Flamin cried in a new kindling of fury, "Blood!—Faithless one, take, fire!"—Matthieu fell upon his right arm, but the left, trembling, forced the weapon upon Victor.—Victor snatched it towards him, because the muzzle was swaying about Clotilda.—"Thou art in truth my brother," cried the tortured girl, whose deathly agony alone kept her by its rack from the death of a swoon.—Flamin with both arms flung all from him and said with a horribly low and long-drawn voice in his raving exhaustion, "Blood!—Death!"—Clotilda sank to the ground. Victor looked at her and said, turning to him, "Only fire, here is my life!"—Flamin cried aloud, "Thou first!"—Victor shot, lifting his arm high up, so as to shoot into the air, and the splintered top of a branch was brought down by his ball.—Clotilda came to.—Emanuel flew to the spot,—threw himself on his pupil's heart,—from his breast for the first time in years rent with passion the sickly blood gushed out. Flamin proudly hurled away his pistol and said to Matthieu, "Come!—it isn't worth the trouble," and went off with him.

When Clotilda saw Emanuel's blood on her lover's clothes, she supposed him to have been hit, and laid her handkerchief on the blood and said, "Ah, you have not deserved this of me!"—Emanuel breathed again through his blood, no one could speak any more, no one could think, every one feared to give consolation, the mortally crushed hearts parted with suppressed woe; only Victor, whom the horrible word "scoundrel" at every recollection of it pierced through like a dagger, said to the sister: "I love him no more, but he is unhappier than we; ah! he has lost all and kept nothing but a devil."

Namely, Matthieu. It was he who had to-day imitated the voice of Emanuel, which had seemed to speak with Julius, and whose voice Dahore had taken for his father's, and afterward the voice of the nightingale, which Victor had followed, in order to convince the Regency Counsellor through his own ears and eyes of Victor's love for Clotilda.

Victor led his weak teacher to the Indian cottage. He felt his nerves now after so many relaxing days cooled and steeled by this tempest; his anguish of soul and sacrifice had made his blood, as the confinement of narrowing channels does streams, more swift and impetuous, and his love for Clotilda had been made manlier and bolder by the thought that he now entirely deserved it. There is nothing more beautiful than magnanimity and gentleness, except the union of the two.

Emanuel was nothing more than faint, and, as the evening brooded with a sweltering influence over all, he seated himself with Victor on the grassy bench of his house in order to keep his palpitating breast in an erect posture, and a tender joy gleamed in his features at every fallen drop of blood, because each was a red seal upon his hope of dying. But when Victor took the good man's weary head to his bosom and let him go to sleep thereon, then in the still evening sadness came over him again, and for the first time his heart pained him. He thought to himself all alone there, how over at the Abbey hot swords would pass hissing through the innocent bleeding soul,—he felt how now the two-syllabled, two-edged word of Flamin's wrath had cut through the whole bond of their friendship,—he represented to himself the blooming theatre of beautiful days beside him deserted and desolate, and the sweeping by of joys, which only play round us like butterflies in wide circles, while the hairworm^[125] of grief bites deeply into our nerves. At last he leaned weeping on the slumbering father, and pressed him softly, and said, "Ah! without friendship and love I could not bear the earth."—And at length his distracted and exhausted soul also was weighed and dragged down by the heavy body into the thick atmosphere of sleep.

* * * * *

Reader! the last moment in Maienthal is the greatest,—raise thy soul through awe and mount up on graves as on high mountains, in order to look over into the other world!

At midnight when fancy draws the buried dead from their coffins and sets them upright in the night round about her, and unknown shapes drift to us from the second world,—just as indistinguishable corpses driven from America to the coasts of the Old World announced to it the New,—in the ghostly hour Victor opened his eyes, but with inexpressible serenity. A forgotten dream had sunk far away to-day's past with all its din and cloud;—the bright moon stood overhead in the blue dark like the silvery fissure and sparkling fountain-like mouth, from which the stream of light out of the other world breaks into ours and comes down in ethereal vapor.—"How still and radiant is all!" said Victor. "Is not this glimmering region a relic of my dream? is not this the magic suburbs of the supernal city of God?"—A voice hurrying over said, Death! I am already buried.

Emanuel opened his eyes at that, sent them through the foliage over to the churchyard that overlooked the village and said, with a convulsion of his being, "Horion, wake up; Giulia has left eternity and is standing on her grave."—Victor cast a feverish glance up thither; and all the warm thoughts and nerves of life grew hard and stiff in a cutting ice-cold shudder, as he saw up there a white, veiled form resting on the grave. Emanuel snatched himself up, and his pupil, and said: "We will go up to the theatre of the spirits; perhaps the dead one will lay hold on my soul and take me with her." ... Fearful was the silence of the regions around their way.... Men start up out of the ground like dumb-waiters, like serving-machines, and drop down again when they are emptied.... The human race darts like a flying summer through the sunshine, and the bedewed web hangs fluttering on two worlds and in the night it passes away.... So thought both on their pilgrimage to the dead one; they wondered at their own heavy incarnation and at the noise of their steps. Emanuel fastened his gaze on the veiled form that now knelt down; he thought she heard his thoughts and would fly over to his heart through the moonlight....

The hearts of the two men rose and fell as if under two gravestones, as they climbed the long, grass-grown steps to the churchyard, and touched and opened the heavy gate which was painted with forms of risen saints, half effaced by the weather. The warm earthly blood congeals and the soft brain runs to a single image of terror, when the great cloud rolls away from eternity and from the gate of the spiritual world; on the stage of the dead Emanuel called as if beside himself: "Awful spirit, I am a spirit like thee, thou too standest below God,—wilt thou kill me, then kill me not by a stroke of horror, not by a crushing form, but smile like men and quietly wring off my heart."—Then the veiled form rose up and came,—Emanuel wildly grasped his friend, buried himself in his face, and said clinging to him: "On thee I die, on thy warm heart,—O live happy, unless thou wilt grow cold with me, ah! go with me!" ...

"Ah, Clotilda!" said Victor; for she was the form. She was dumb as the realm of spirits, for the dead one whom she had visited still clung around her heart; but she was great as a spirit from that realm: for the ethereal luminous nebula of the moon, the standing over the dead, the look into eternity, the lofty night, and the mourning exalted her soul, and one almost forgot that she wept.—Emanuel still held his wings spread out over the scene, and looked sublimely over the graves: "How all sleeps and rests here on this great green death-bed! I would lie down there and die.—Did not something just speak?—The thoughts of mortals are words of spirits.—We are night birds stealing through the dubious atmosphere, we are dumb night-walkers who fall into these pits, when they awake.—Ye dead! crumble not so mutely into dust; ye spirits, ye that come forth out of your buried hearts, flutter not so transparent around us!—O, man were vanity and ashes and a plaything and vapor on the earth, did he not feel that he were so^[126]—O God, this feeling is our immortality"^[127]—

Clotilda, by way of drawing him down from this desolating inspiration, took him by the hand and said: "Farewell, O worthy of veneration! I bid farewell this very day, because to-morrow I leave Maienthal. Live happily,—happily till we see each other again; my heart will never forget your greatness, but I shall see you again soon." ... Her melancholy at the thought of his predicted death, her fear of an eternal parting, stifled her remaining words, for she wanted to say more and thank him more warmly. Emanuel said: "We shall never see each other again, Clotilda; for I die in four weeks."—"O God! no!" said Clotilda with the most heart-felt and impassioned tone.—"My good Emanuel," said Victor, "torment not this tormented one.—Cheer thyself, O tortured one, our friend will certainly stay with us."—Here Emanuel raised his eyes to heaven and said with a look in which a world lay, "Eternal One! Couldst thou hitherto have so deceived me?—No, no, on the longest day thy stars will draw me upward, and thy earth will cool my heart.—And thee, thou good Clotilda, thou soul from heaven, thee, then, I certainly see to-day, God knows! for the last time with thy lovely cheeks and in thy earthly form,—I bless thee and bid thee farewell, but heavily and sadly, because I must still live so many days without thee. Go through life with soft influences breathing around thee, keep thy heart high above the many-colored mist of earth and above its storm-clouds,—indeed, thou hearest me not, thou bitterly weeping face; God pour solace into thy soul, let thy parting be more glad!—Thy friend will be with me when I go hence."—Here Victor grasped the hands of the trembling form, exhausted with weeping, who vainly wiped away her tears to see her teacher once more and press his image on her soul; and when Victor cried wildly, "Giulia! sainted one! mitigate the woe of thy friend in this hour, hold this breaking heart," then said Emanuel, looking on both with indescribable tenderness: "I bless you, like a father, holy pair of souls! never forsake, never forget each other!—O ye blessed spirits here above the glimmering mould of the crumbling coffins, give these two hearts peace and, happiness, and when I am dead, I will float around your souls and quiet them. And Thou, Eternal One, make these two mortals beneath thy stars as happy as I,—O take nothing from them, nothing on the earth, but life.—Good-night, Clotilda!" ...

—The Whitsuntide days are over!—

And I thank thee, kind Destiny, that Thou hast given me health for the joy of sketching such a fleeting golden age, since my weak, unequally beating heart deserves not to paint such raptures.—And for thee, my dear reader, may the Whitsuntide feast have sweetened some ash-Sunday or passion-week of thy life!^[128]—

FOURTH PREFACE,

OR, EXTORTED ANTICRITIQUE AGAINST ONE OR ANOTHER REVIEW, WITH WHICH I MIGHT POSSIBLY BE DISPLEASED.

Clever Romance-writers create out of writing-ink and printer's-ink a new and terrible tyrant, give him a throne either in Italy or the Orient,—and then (unlike children who run away from the figure they have drawn) they step up courageously before the painted, crowned tyrant, and tell him the grandest, but boldest truths to his face, which betray the free man, and which no crooked courtling could well repeat before his sovereign. Such dare-devils remind me so often of two abecedarians, when I pass a gate in Oat Lane in Hof, on which a painted lion rears himself and his mane, and curls and sways his tail and his tongue. For one of the aforesaid abecedarians said to the other as I was hurrying by: "Hear me, I tell you I'll seize him by the tail, I'm not a bit afraid." But the other tyro, who had a much bolder thought, coolly mounted a corner-stone and said: "I first, Sir, I thrust my fist right into his jaws,—so!"—

It is the same boldness with which an author often attacks on paper, not only the aforementioned grim king of beasts, but also the critical feline race,—which Linnæus reckons in the royal line of lions,—while he shakes judicial chairs as coldly and boldly as if they were painted thrones, and so in general scolds and assails Journals in his Prefaces. A writer of power can do this. I, for my part, am perhaps as audacious in this as any one, and paint out for myself expressly the following review-cat, in order to grapple with her freely and fearlessly, and to show by her what courage can do.

In the first place, the Reviewer who charges me with being indebted to the amount of two whole Intercalary Days,—the one after the Fortieth and the one after the Forty-fourth Dog-Post-Days,—cannot have seen this Second Edition at all; the two Prefaces with which I have enriched it, the first and this, will answer with all sensible men for true Intercalary Days.

Secondly, my Reviewer will find fault (in future) with my indulging my manner. But let him hear now the Philosopher (namely, myself): Manner is of itself nothing but what follows: the æsthetic ideal and integral, like every other, is reached only by an infinite power, but we with our finite strength are incessantly coming nearer to it, never so much as near; Manner is, therefore, as the Philosopher takes it, a finite mirror of infinity, or the expression of the relation in which every temperament and number of strings of any given Æolian harp stands to the score of the infinite music of the Spheres, which it has to echo. Every combination of human powers gives only a manner; and higher spirits would find in Homer and Goethe the human manner at least; nay, the higher angelic hierarchy would find the lower manneristic, the seraph the angel of the churches. But as I am not even an ordinary angel,—not to say a seraph,—another Reviewer than he who will criticise me would have presumed beforehand that I should have a manner.—And such I manifestly have.—But yet more: as the degree and the relation of our powers change from year to year,—and consequently the product and proceeds of the same also, the manner—: accordingly and unfortunately the manner of the fiftieth year generally sets itself as the corrector of that of the twenty-fifth; or rather there ensues a heterogeneous adoption of children of two marriages, in which both are losers. Such a simultaneous Hysteron-Proteron^[129] is still worse than if one should undertake to clip and grind down the Grecian statues of one of Winkelmann's ages of art according to the statues of another. Pour rather a pure, flowing work into thy present mould, and do not wait to force it in when it is cast and hardened!—Even granting I should become hereafter another and a wiser man, I would never graft the old man upon the youth.

Man regards himself in the concert-hall of the universe, if not as the solo-player, yet as one of the instruments,—instead of a single tone,—as in fact the Prince looks upon himself as an Oberon's or at least hunter's horn,—the poet as an oaten pipe,—the author as a composing-instrument,^[130]—the Pope as the organ-works,—the belle as Bestelmeier's hand-steel-harmonica, or as a quail-whistle,—my reviewer as a pitch-pipe,—and I on myself as Maelzel's great Panharmonicon. But we are all only tones, as in Potemkin's orchestra every one of the sixty metallic flutes gave only one tone. Therefore I am glad of every individuality, of every manner, as of a new semitone in the church music of natures.

Thirdly, I know nothing by which I can see more clearly my future reviewer's perplexity for want of materia peccans to censure, than this, that he sticks to such pitiful trifles—in future—as the following evidently are, that I, e. g., have appended this Preface, that I have bound the work in four separate Parts, and by this fourth part have made, for an earlier possessor and bookworm, the sheet-worm^[131] of the old edition wholly useless. From the like specimens and sayings, wherewith such a Spartan Ephor Emerepes will rob me of the fourth and highest string, which I stretch on my fiddle full of rising fifths, let the indulgent reader form an idea how the whole of the Review must look. I am ashamed to go on.

Fourthly, I find universally, that, if an author in his Preface charges himself with a slight fault, which, however, he himself hardly believes, then the critics forthwith adopt and double this charge, as, among the Romans, a suicide who failed to accomplish the act was afterward regularly executed. If the author, having his eyes thus opened, strikes into another line, and bestows upon himself, beforehand, some praise,—and that not apparent,—this is not even accepted, not to say doubled. In that case the Devil may be speaker of the prologue!—

Meanwhile he seems also to be only Reviewer, and less a sly than a coarse customer. Many and really glaring incivilities, however, I willingly forgive my future reviewer, whereas I pardon nothing to a Gallic or British one, because he knows how one should treat people.—I play with him myself in this anticritique in no specially polite manner, nor do I, as the peasant doffs his hat before higher lightnings, doff mine before his. Besides, the judges after the Special Recension address the defendant as "thou." A mild (critical) winter is unwholesome to him upon whom it comes. For the rest, I simply wait and watch for the hour when I shall be celebrated and have on laurel-leaves: then I shall not, any more than other contemporaries who have now set up laurel-trees, suffer any one to find fault with me; and few will undertake it, just as on pictures which have been smeared with laurel oil no flies alight.

Fifthly and finally. It is well known that the deceased authoress, Ehrmann, when the advocate Ehrmann had accepted and noticed with much approbation one of her works in the Strassburg Gazette, married him on account of the review. If the editor of some journal play his cards so adroitly that a female coadjutor in the magazine shall welcome and announce my Second Edition of Hesperus (or Star Venus) with the admiration which the First Edition universally receives on account of its charms; and if he will only tip me a wink as to the sex of my reviewer,—in which connection, however, this must be looked to, that the critical person shall be, on the whole, still in the best blooming period of a reviewer's life, wherein one can still readily feel and impart and favorably review the fire of the Evening Star or Venus, and so much the more, as even in physics only green wood is a conductor of the electrical flame, but dry a nonconductor,—if the editor will see to and execute all this, then the author of this anticritique pledges himself with his signature to wait upon the coadjutress immediately after the receipt of the review, and with the usual ceremonies to marry her.

JEAN PAUL FR. RICHTER.

Hof in Voigtland, June 8, 1797.

NINTH INTERCALARY DAY.

VICTOR'S ESSAY ON THE RELATION OF THE SOUL TO THE ORGANS.

Victor was an enemy to the exclusive taste in philosophy quite as much as in poetry. On all systems—even of the heretics of Epiphanius and of Walch—the form of truth is imprinted, as the human form is in the bestial kingdom, although in bolder and bolder lines. No man can believe in nonsense proper, although he may speak it. Singular it is, that precisely the consequent or consistent systems, without the atomic Clinamen^[132] of feeling, deviate from each other the most widely. Systems, like the passions, only at the focal distance throw the brightest point of light upon the object;—how pitifully, e. g., does the great theory of self-subjugation run out of Christianity over into Stoicism,—then into Mysticism,—then into Monachism, till the stream spreads out and oozes away into Fohism, as the Rhine loses itself in the sand!—The theory of Kant, with all logical systems, has this tendency to run into sand, and has that deflection^[133] of feeling in common with the inconsequent ones, which brings together the wasting arms again to a renewing fountain-head. The two hands of the Pure Reason, which in the antinomy^[134] scratched and beat each other, the Practical Reason peacefully joins together, and presses them, folded, to the heart, and says, here is a God, a Conscious Person, and an Immortality!—

Victor first fructified his soul with great Nature or with poets, and then, and not till then, awaited the dawn of a system. He discovered (not invented) the truth by soaring and surveying, not by penetration, microscopic inspection, and syllogistic groping from one syllable of the book of nature to another, whereby one gets its words indeed, but not their sense. That creeping and touching belongs, he said, not to the finding, but to the proving and confirming of truth; for which he always took lessons of Bayle: for no one is a poorer teacher in the discovery of truth, or a better one for the proof of it, than acuteness or Bayle, who is its mint-assayer, but not its miner.

* * * * *

THE ESSAY.

If I wrote it in Göttingen, I might make it in paragraphs and more thoroughly, because the Flachsenfingen folks would not disturb me. Meanwhile it must still be written here, in order that I may have a patron and advocate in my own person against the court-gentlemen, who want to transform my soul into my body.

The Brain and Nerves are the true body of the "I"; the rest of the environment is only the body of that body, the nourishing and protecting bark of that tender pith.—And as all the changes of the world appear to us only as changes of that pith or marrow, accordingly the pith- and pulp-ball with its streaks is the proper world-globe of the soul. The inverted nervous tree springs from the swollen brain of the fœtus as from a kernel, which it also resembles in appearance, and ascends with—sensitive branches as spinal marrow, even to the anatomical summit of the horse-tail. This marrowy growth is grafted upon the venous tree as a consuming parasitic plant. And as every twig is a tree in miniature, accordingly—for all this is not a correspondence of wit, but of nature—the nervous ganglia are fourth cerebral chambers in small. The terminations of the nerves, in their development, open out on the retina, on the Schneiderian^[135] membrane, in the gustative knot, &c., into leaf and flower. Hence, e. g., we see not with the continuation of the optic nerve, but with the delicate unravelling of its stamina; for the great dissolving picture-gallery on the retina cannot possibly, by a movement of the nervous spirit, (or whatever one will assume—for after all it comes back to motion,) be slid back to the brain; in which case, besides, the two galleries of the two eyes would have to pass through the two prongs of the visual nerve and coincide at its handle to one picture.

Consequently the image in the eye, ear, &c., if it is to serve any purpose, must be felt forward on the point of the nerve,—in one word, it is even more absurd to shut up the soul in the locker^[136] of the fourth ventricle of the brain, i. e. in a pore of this tubercular plant, than it would be if one who, like me, ascribes an animating soul to the flower, should imprison the same in the ground-story of the dull kernel. Rather would I, surely, locate the soul in the finest honey-vessels of the senses, the eyes, than in the insensible brain, if I did not, in fact, believe that, like a Hamadryad, it inhabits and warms and stirs every nervous bough of this animal plant. The under-tied or severed nerve conveys, it is true, no further sensation, not however on account of the interruption of the connection with the soul and residence chamber in the brain, but because the nutritious spirit of life is cut off from it; for the nerves, like all finer organizations, need so much a continuous supply of food, that the arrested beating of heart and artery suspends in one minute all their powers.

I go further and say outright, beforehand,—by way of contradicting two errors: these organs do not feel, but are felt; secondly, the organs are not the condition of all feeling in general, but only of a certain kind.

The last first: as the organ (i. e. its changes), which is as much a body as any gross object, whose own changes it brings in contact with the soul, is nevertheless felt by the spiritual nature immediately and without a second organ: accordingly all corporeal substances give the spiritual essence sensations as well as the nerves do, and an unembodied soul is not possible, for the simple and sole reason, that in case of the dissolution of the body it would then wear the whole material universe as a heavier one.

My first assertion was, one should not say the perceptive, but the perceived organization. The nerves do not feel the object, but only change the place where it is felt, and their changes and those of the brain are only objects of sensation, not instruments thereof, nor in fact sensation itself. But wherefore?—

I have more than one Therefore. A body is capable only of motion, although, to be sure, that motion is only the show of the aforementioned combination and the result of the powers concealed in simple parts. The string, the air, the auditory ossicles, the auricular nerves, vibrate; but the vibration of the latter no more explains the sensation of a tone than the vibration of the string could, if the soul were chained to that. Thus, despite all images in the eye and brain, the discernment of them is still not yet made out or explained; or will you say, perhaps, that for some such reason as this, because the senses are mirrors full of images, therefore the spiritual eye is dispensed with or made good? And does not the change of the nerve presuppose a second in a second essence, if it is to be perceived? Or does another motion in this essence represent the first motion?

This brings me to the brain. That greatest and grossest nerve—the sounding-board of all the others—shows up to the soul the delineations of those images which are introduced by the rest. Upon the whole, I am of opinion that the brain serves more the nerves of the muscles, the veins of the limbs, which meet in the hand of the soul, and all, in fact, more as nourishing root, than it serves as a case of instruments to the pictorial soul. As most of our ideas are served up on visual images, and take from them their ground color, it is probable we think more with the optic nerve than with the brain. Why is it, as Bonnet has observed, that deep-thinking wearies the eyes and sharp-seeing the brain? Why do certain excesses blunt at the same time the memory and the eyes? The fever-images playing their antics outside of the eyes of the sick and people of lively fancy, like Cardan, who saw in the dark whatever he thought vividly and glowingly, are explained in my hypothesis.

In regard to the brain there are two errors; but Heaven save my friends only from one of them. For from the other Reimarus can guard them, who has fully proved that the brain is no Æolian harp with trembling strings, nor a camera-obscura with sliding pictures, nor a barrel-organ with pins for every idea, which the spirit turns, in order of itself to play to and from itself its ideas. If now not even the pre-established harmony of the brain and the mind, nor the mutual accompaniment of the two, is conceivable, so is their identity absolutely impossible; and this is precisely the error from which the abovementioned Heaven has to keep my friends. The materialist must first set up all that which Reimarus has overthrown; he must petrify in the brain-pap the millions of picture-cabinets of seventy years, and yet again make them movable like Eidophysica,^[137] and deal out the shuffled card-images to every second of time; he must see to it that these animated dancing images are forced into rank and file. And then, after all, and only then, does his difficulty properly begin; for now—even if we grant him that the images see themselves, the thoughts think themselves, that every imagination darkly mirrors all others, and even the conscious "I," as a monad, does the universe—now (we say) he must first get him a generalissimo who shall command and array this immeasurable, fluctuating host of ideas, a compositor who shall set up the idea-book from an unknown manuscript, and, when dreams, fevers, passions, have shaken all the letter-cases into pi, shall rearrange all the letters alphabetically. This ruling unity and power—without which the symmetry of the microcosm is as inexplicable as that of the macrocosm, that of the ideal world as that of the actual—is precisely what we call a spirit. To be sure, by this unknown power neither the origin nor the succession of ideas is mediated or explained, but, assuming only the known force of matter, motion, all that is not only incredible, but absolutely impossible; and Leibnitz can more easily explain motion by dark imaginings, than the materialist can imaginings by motions. In the former case motion is only semblance, and exists only in the second contemplating being, but in the latter the representation would be show and would exist in the second—representing substance.

I have often quarrelled with men of the world who make good observations and miserable conclusions, because in case of the least dependence of the soul upon the body—e. g. in old age, intoxication, &c.—they made the one a mere repeating-work of the other; nay, I have even said, no dancing-master was so stupid as to conclude: "Inasmuch as I dance awkwardly in leaden shoes, more nimbly in wooden ones, and best of all in silk ones, I see clearly from this, that the shoes have special springs to communicate rapidity; and as with leaden shoes I can hardly lift my feet, if I were barefoot I could hardly make out a single Pas." The soul is the dancing-master, the body the shoe.

We cannot conceive any action either of bodies upon bodies or of monads upon monads; consequently, of the organs upon the conscious being, still less. This we know, that the cohesion and community of goods between soul and body is always the same, or at most greater at the times when others would expect it to be less; for the greatest depth of thought, the holiest emotion, the highest flight of fancy, are precisely what need the waxen wing-work of the body most, as its consequent exhaustion also gives assurance; the more incorporeal the object of the ideas is, so much the more corporeal hand-and-draught-services are necessary to the holding of it fast, and at most the periods of stupid sensuality, of spiritual enervation, of blear imbecility, are the ones with which we must make coincide the periods of liberation from the chains of the body. Even the moral power with which we trample down wanton, upshooting bodily impulses works with bodily crows and tools; and the soul in this case merely summons the brain against the stomach.—Add to this, that the limits and hindrances to such fettering and unfettering are as little to be assigned as the causes of the same. Still less can the bonds of the soul, as some think, grow looser and longer in dream. Sleep is the rest of the nerves, not of the whole body. The involuntary muscles, the stomach, the heart, keep on working therein, not much less than when one lies down awake. Only the nerves and the brain, i. e. thinking and perceiving, are suspended. Hence slumber refreshes men while riding and driving, who therefore rest nothing but the nerves. Hence weak-nerved patients, whom all rest wearies, are refreshed by dreamless sleep. By the way, without the theory of disorganization which assumes negative and positive nervous electricity, the phenomena of sleep are inexplicable;—e. g. it is inexplicable in that case, why opium, wine, manipulation, animality, childhood, plethora, nourishing food, perfumes, on the one hand, are precisely what promote sleep; while, on the other hand, torture, exhaustion, old age, temperance, pressure on the brain, winter, loss of blood, fear, grief, phlegm, fat, spiritual enervation, also provoke it.—At most in deep sleep, when the nerve-body rests, could we suppose the soul loosed from earthly chains; in dream, on the contrary, it should rather be supposed the more closely fastened, because dreaming, as well as deep thinking, which also locks the gates of the five senses as well, is surely no sleeping. Hence dreams wear out the nerves, to the inner overstrainings of which they add outer impressions. Hence morning lends both the brain and our dreams equal animation. Hence the sleeping animal—except the effeminate tame dog—has no unhealthy dreams. Hence even Aristotle assigns unusual dreams as forerunners of the sick-nurse. Hence—I have now dreamed enough, and the reader has slept enough.—