Volume 2 / Part 3 — 38. DOG-POST DAY.

38. DOG-POST DAY.

The Sublime Hour before Midnight.—The Blissful After-Midnight.—The Soft Evening.

To-day I present Emanuel's last day (which now lies cooled off and extinguished among the days of eternity) with pale outlines to the fantasies of men. My hand trembles and my eye burns before the scenes which in funeral veils glide around me and lift their veils so near to me.—I shut myself up to-night,—I hear nothing but my thoughts,—I see nothing but the night-suns which move across the heavens,—I forget the weaknesses and the stains of my heart, that I may get the courage to lift up my head as if I were good, as if I dwelt on the height where around the great man like constellations lie only God, Eternity, and Virtue. But I say to them who are better,—to the silent great heart, which increases its obligations in fulfilling them, and which satisfies itself as its conscience grows only with daily increasing merits,—to the lofty men who have warmly pressed the hand of death, who can calmly ask him, when he walks round on morning-meadows, "Seekest thou me to-day?"—to the panting soul which cools itself under the cypress-tree,—to the men with tears, with dreams, with wings,—to all these I say, "Kinsmen of my Emanuel, your brother stretches out his hand after you through the shortest night; grasp it, he would fain bid you farewell!"

THE SUBLIME HOUR BEFORE MIDNIGHT.

Victor rose sadly from his dreams, in which he had seen nothing but graves and funeral piles for his friend; but he gathered secret hopes at the morning-greeting, as he saw him step forth into his alleged death-morning without fever, without oppression, without change. His only concern was about the impression which the disappointed hope of departure would make upon the heart of the beloved friend, already half torn from the earthly soil and laid bare from earthly environment. The latter, on the contrary, still held fast to his dreams, to which even his nightly ones gave nourishment; and he looked yearningly into the starless blue, and calculated the long road to the twelfth night-hour, when, out of heaven should peer forth the stars, and death with that dark, immense mantle of his, in which he bears us through his cold realm. His heart lay in a sweet siesta, which proceeded partly from bodily exhaustion and from the beauty of the day. His inner calm, never so great and magical as in souls in which whirlwinds and hurricanes have swept to and fro, overspread his whole being with a bliss of yearning which in other eyes than his would have melted in tear-drops.

O Rest! thou soft word!—autumnal bloom of Eden! Moonlight of the spirit! Rest of the soul, when wilt thou hold our head, that it may be still, and our heart, that it may cease beating? Ah, ere the one grows pale and the other stiff, thou comest often and goest often, and only down below with sleep and with death thou abidest, whereas above, men with the greatest wings, like birds of paradise, are whirled about most of all by the storms!

The tranquillity with which Emanuel played out the star-part of life, even to the last catch-word,—with which he packed up everything—set all to rights—gave all directions—took leave of all,—stirred up tears and tempests together in his tormented friend. His heart had been, indeed, dragged till it was sore over a stony road, but its inflammations were now softly cooled off by the thought of death; yet he could not—though with the greatest incredulity about Emanuel's death—endure to hear it, when Emanuel committed to him at a distance the blind Julius, from whom this death was concealed, with the low-spoken words, "Hold him dear as I do, protect, provide for the poor child, till thou canst deliver him over to Lord Horion." His trembling hands could hardly take from him a packet to that lord, which the friend handed to him with tender eyes and with the words, "When these seals are opened, then my oaths have ceased and thou wilt learn all." For his tender conscience allowed him to conceal only the import, not the existence of secrets.—It will not astonish us, as Victor's veins received one wound after another, that, in order not to increase their bleeding by agitations, he begged the flute-player not to play to-day; music would, on this day, have had too much power over his dissolved heart.

The morning they spent in farewell-visits to old paths, bowers, and heights; but Emanuel performed not here the sharp, passionate climax-part of the fifth act; he broke not forth, upon an earth where death grazes, into any unphilosophical outcry because he should not see the flowers plucked and the grain cut, nor the green fruit grow yellow; but with a higher rapture, which beyond the earthy spring promised itself still fairer ones, he took his leave of every flower, went through every leafy winding and shadowy night-piece, drew out of every mirroring pond his transfigured form lying as it were in the earth, and showed a more affectionate attentiveness to nature, now that he hoped to-night to come nearer to Him who created it. He sought and Victor shunned every occasion to speak of all this. "Only not for the last time!" said the latter. "Not?" said Emanuel.—"Does not everything happen only once and for the last time?—Do not Autumn and Time, as well as Death, separate us from all?—Does not all part from us, even if we do not part from it?—Time is nothing but a death with softer, thinner sickles; every minute is the autumn of the past one, and the second world will be the spring of a third.—Ah, when I one day retire again from the flowery surface of a second, and when on the heavenly death-day I see the twilight of the memory of two lives,—O in the future lies a groundwork for infinite bliss as well as woe, why does man shrink with awe only before this?"—Victor disputed the immortality of memory. "Without memory," said Emanuel, "there is no life, only existence, no years, only seconds,—no I, only representations of it.—A being breaks up into as many million beings as it has thoughts,—memory is merely consciousness of present existence."^[150]—Even the Poet philosophizes at least for poetry and against philosophy.—Victor thought: "Thou good man! to myself, not to thee, I made these objections."

It was towards noon; the sky was clear, but sultry; the flowers announced by their shutting up the gathering of the electric fires; all meadows were altars of incense, and fragrances went forth as prophets of the storm-clouds. With the physical stormy material there accumulated in Victor a corresponding moral element;—he reflected that often a hot day ended the life of consumptive patients;—he confounded at times the bitterness of parting with its probability; for man, deceived by the aerial perspective of fear, fancies a shape of terror so much the nearer, the larger it is; he wept at the very thought that he might weep; but nevertheless reason would have held the upperhand of the feelings, had not the following occurrence benumbed both.

In Maienthal there dwelt a madman whom they called by no other name than that of the crazy skeleton. For three reasons he was called so: first, because he was an anatomical preparation of leanness; secondly, because he carried round the fixed idea, that Death was after him and wanted to seize and abduct him by the left hand, which he therefore concealed; thirdly, because he gave out that he could see when any one was going to die soon by the look of the face, which in that case was already overspread with the indentations and abscesses of corruption. In Moritz's experimental psychology^[151] a similar man is described, who is also said to be able to detect the forerunners of death and its triturating hand on faces which appear to others smooth and ruddy, whereas he sees them seamed with the lunar caustic of corruption.—This skeleton it was, which, on the night of the fourth Whitsuntide day, when Clotilda was in the churchyard, cried out, Death! I am already buried.^[152]—Victor and Emanuel went home during the striking of the twelfth hour, and on their way passed a hill, whereon the skeleton sat agitated; the left hand, at which Death grasped, buried itself deep into the opposite arm-pit: "Brrr!" it said, shaking its head at Emanuel, "he has thee, but not me! Nothing but mould is hanging on thee! The eyes are gone! Brr!"

The words of the insane are, to a man who listens at the gate of the invisible world, more memorable than those of the wise man, just as he listens more attentively to sleepers than to the waking, to the sick than to the well. Victor's blood stiffened under the ice-cold clutch at his warm life. The crazy skeleton ran off, shielding the left hand with the right. Victor took his friend's left, looked up at the warm sun, and sought to conceal and to warm himself and could say nothing. Down near the margin of the deep-blue heaven little clouds smoked up, the germs of an evening tempest; and in the sultry air nothing but vermin flew abroad.

Emanuel was more quiet and almost troubled, but it was not the anxiety of fear, but that uneasiness of expectation with which we always look upon the folds and flutterings of the curtain of great scenes. The stinging sun kept the couple at home. To Emanuel, oppressed by the sultry atmosphere, the last afternoon was almost too long. But his friend saw all the time hanging in this atmospheric vault a mouldering countenance, which seemed to work its way into the beloved fresh one, and he continually heard the crazy skeleton repeating in his ear, "His eyes are out!"

In the sultry stillness, when the sun dug and charged the mining pits of the thunder, and when the two friends ventured before the ears of the blind Julius to speak only with looks of to-day's future, towards four o'clock a fanning, evening-breeze came up, which refreshed all drooping wings and heads. Emanuel let in these cool waves, which ran lullingly and comfortingly over the bent flowers at the window, and flowed down along the wavering folds of the curtains, and strayed and plashed through the fragrant foliage of the room. Then came an infinite stillness, a dissolving bliss, an inexpressible yearning into Emanuel's heart. The joys of his childhood, the features of his mother, the images of Indian fields, all beloved, mouldering forms, the whole gliding reflection of his youth's morning, flowed along glimmeringly before him;—a melancholy longing for his native land, for his dead friends, distended his bosom with sweet, distressful emotions. That evergreen palm-grove of youthful memory he laid as a cooling herb around his own and Horion's brows, and brought over the whole first circle of his existence out of the Indian Eden into this narrow housing before the two latest objects of his affection. But as he thus heaped up the ashes of the Phœnixes of joy on the altar of the evening-sun,—as he thus at his exodus looked back over all the Elysian fields of his life as they lay behind each other,—as the whole of earth and life, overspread with morning dew and morning redness, transformed themselves before him into the glimmering playground of humanity;—then was he unable to master any longer his emotion and his melted heart, and in a blissful agitation, in a trembling gratitude to the Eternal, he begged the blind youth to take his flute and let the Song of Ecstasy, which he always had played for himself on the morning of the new year and of his birthday, sound after him as an echo of his dying life.

Julius took the flute. Horion went out under a loud-rustling tree and looked into the setting sun. Emanuel placed himself at the breezy window opposite the purple stream of the evening light, and the song of rapture began and flowed in streams into his heart and round the sinking sun.

And as the tones of the spheres seemed to well out from the sun, which in the evening redness, like a swan dissolved in melodies, died of rapture before God in gold-haze and dew of joy,—and as all the flowers wherewith the Eternal goodness covers our heart, and all the blissful fields through which its gentle hand conducts uncertain man, flew by before Emanuel like angels,—and as he saw the future heavens, into which the way of life leads, drawing nearer,—and as he saw these infinite arms cover all wounded hearts, stretch over all millenniums, bear all worlds and yet even him too, him, puny son of earth;—O then was it impossible for him longer to restrain his full heart; it burst with gratitude, and from his eyes again fell the first tear-drops after long, long years. These holy drops he wiped not away; in them the evening-red ran to a blazing sea; the flute died away; Victor found his eyes still glistening; Emanuel said, "O see, I weep for joy at the thought of my Maker!"—Then were there between these exalted men, on this holy spot, no more words,—death had lost his form,—a sublime sorrow deadened the pangs of separation,—the sun, over which the earth had rolled, touched with his erect beams the heavens and the night and the bottom of the clouds,—the earth glimmered magically like a dream-landscape, and yet it was easy to quit it, for the other dream-landscapes covered the sky.

The earths of night (the planets) had already come out, the suns of night (the fixed stars) had already come forth after them, the moon had already enveloped itself in the southeast storm: when Emanuel saw that it was time to end the scenes of the valley and go up to his Tabor, to give Death the wing-casing of his soul. Hesitating, he begged Victor to go forward a little, that he might not see his parting with the blind one, and haply betray himself by sympathy; for Victor had represented: to the blind one the journey into the other world as only one upon this earth. He stationed himself unhappily out before the hushed sultry fields through which once had passed the rivers of paradise of his love, on which he had once at Clotilda's side seen fairer evenings; on the earth was the stillness of death, as in a church by night, only a leaden cloud, bent down toward the earth, blustered round the heavens, and Death seemed to go from cloud to cloud and array them for battle.

At last he heard Julius weeping. Emanuel came flying out, but in his eyes stood heavier drops than his former ones. And as the forsaken blind one turned away his dark head from his friends in the house-door-way, either because he knew not which way they had gone or would listen to know, then was Victor barely able, for inward sadness, to call back to the bowed form, which dwelt in a double night, that he would return after twelve o'clock.

In the bald evening greeting, "Good night, a pleasant sleep," which Emanuel gave and received, there was more stuff for tears than in whole elegies and farewell-speeches; so true it is that words are only the inscriptions upon our hour,^[153] and the ripieno^[154]-voices of the scoring of our keynotes.

So soon as Emanuel came out before the night heavens, before the hurricane chained thereto and before his death-mountain, angels lifted up again his softened soul,—he saw death descend from heaven and set up the liberty-tree on his grave,—he saw the friendly stars draw nearer, and they were the heavenly eyes of his friends and of all blessed beings. Victor dared not disturb his poetic hopes by any reasons; much rather was he himself from hour to hour drawn deeper into the belief of his death; at least he feared that to-day's storm of rapture might rend asunder the frail dwelling of this fair heart and of its sighs, and that death would creep about the noble soul till by its very wings, as it rose in its ecstasy, he could pluck it away from life, as children go round and round the butterfly till at last it lifts its wings folded on one another into their predatory fingers.

Emanuel delayed by circuitous paths the ascent of the mountain, in order to raise his broken friend, whose eyes were no longer dry, from one sun to the other, so that in that high position he might look down from the midst of lights upon this shadowy earth and hardly notice the corpse of his friend on account of its littleness. "Yes, this is the reason," said he, "why the earth is every day darkened, like the cages of birds, that we may in the dark more easily catch the higher melodies.—Thoughts which the day makes a dark smoke and vapor stand round about us in the night as flames and lights, as the column which floats over Vesuvius appears a pillar of cloud by day and is a pillar of fire by night." Victor perceived the design, namely, of consoling him, and became the more disconsolate and continued silent.

They did not go up on the side of the mountain to the weeping-birch, but over its slowly ascending ridge. They overlooked the theatre of night, over which the moon and the storm were coming up under a veil; Emanuel stopped and said: "O look up and see the eternally sparkling morning-meadows which lie around the throne of the Eternal! Had never a star shone out of heaven, only then would man lay himself down with anguish in his last sleep, on a dark earth built over like a burial vault without an opening." Before eyes which were fastened on suns, flashing glowworms trailed by, and a bat whizzed after a gray night-butterfly,—three St. John's day fires; lighted by superstition, brought three distant hills out of night,—all life slept under its leaf, under its twig, nearer to its mother, and in the dreams that were strewed about lay storms,—fishes tumbled up like corpses on the surface of the water as forerunners of the thunder.

Suddenly Emanuel began, with an ill-fitting, not sufficiently controlled voice: "Verily we should stand more composedly beside the genius who lets fall the last sands of slumber on the eyes of our loves, if they did not afterward sleep out their last sleep in church vaults, in churchyards, but upon meadows, under the open heavens, or as mummies in chambers.... Now then, my beloved," they heard already the waving of the weeping-birch, "control thy fantasy; thou wilt see near the birch-tree my resting-pit open; I have for four weeks sown and clothed it with flowers which are now mostly in bloom,—thou wilt lay me thus to-morrow, without any other preparation, in my night-dress among the flowers,—and cover it up to-morrow,—but do not, thou good man, give my little flower-piece such hard names as other men do,—to-morrow, I say; to-day go immediately home to thy Julius, when I...." (am dead, he would have said, but could not find for emotion the soft paraphrase).—

Ah! Horion with a sigh tore his agonized eyes out from the cold open grotto of his beloved, and could not look down to its blooming flowers. He sobbed aloud and looked out through tears faintly into Emanuel's face, to see whether he was living or dying. Two glowworms crossed one another in glimmering curves above the grave, they settled down beside it, and were extinguished, for their light ceases with their motion.

The thunder now struck into Victor's wounds with its first clap,—a dissolving lightning covered the Eastern horizon, and the flame ran over the Alpine ridges,—the lightning-rod on the powder-house glowed, its alarm-bells rang, the ignes-fatui played about the tower, and in mid-air a hovering luminous point moved fearfully towards it.

In Maienthal eleven o'clock was called,—at twelve Emanuel believed he should be gone hence. At last Emanuel, unmanned himself by another's sorrow, fell upon his friend and said: "What hast thou further to say to me, my beloved, my inexpressibly dear friend?—by hours are fled,—our farewell approaches,—say thine, and then disturb not my dying. Be still, when death climbs the mountain, and send no lamentations after me, when he takes me up.—What hast thou more to say to me, my eternally beloved?"—"Nothing more, thou angel of heaven! nor can I," said Victor with bleeding and exhausted heart, and laid his oppressed head with streams of tears on Emanuel's shoulder.

"Now then break off thy heart from mine, and farewell,—be happy, be good, be great. I have loved thee very much, I shall love thee once more and then forever. Good, faithful one,—mortal like me, immortal like me!"

The storm-bells tolled more violently,—the hovering luminous point advanced upon the powder-house,—all the covered cloud-volcanoes bellowed side by side and flung their flames together, and the thunders passed like alarm-bells between them,—the two friends lay in each other's arms, close, mute, gasping, clasping, trembling before the last word.

"O speak once more, my Horion, and take leave of thy friend,—only say to me, Rest well! and leave the dying."

Horion said, "Rest well!" and left him. His tears ceased and his sighs were hushed. The thunder came to a fearful pause. Nature was mutely ordering her chaos in the tempest. Not a flash gleamed through the funeral pile in heaven. Only the funeral tolling of the alarm-bells on the lightning-rod continued to speak, and the luminous point to creep onward.

Under the wide stillness lay sleep, dreams, and a friend's inconsolable heart.

In this stillness of eternity Emanuel went up without any other hand in his to the high gate which soars away in black darkness above time.

Silence is the speech of the world of spirits, the starry heaven its nunnery-grating,—but behind this nunnery-grating appeared now no spirit, not even God.

The moment was coming when man looks upon his body and then on his individual self, and then shudders.—The I stands alone beside its shadow,—a foam-globe of being trembles, snaps, and collapses, and one hears the bubble vanish and is one himself.

Emanuel peered into Eternity, it looked like a long night.

He looked round him to see whether he cast a shadow,—a shadow casts no shadow.

Ah! a mute lays man in the cradle, a mute stretches him out in the grave.—When he has a joy, it looks as if a sleeper smiled,—when he weeps and wails, it looks like weeping in one's sleep.—We all look up to heaven and pray for solace; but overhead in the endless blue there is no voice for our heart,—nothing appears, nothing consoles us, nothing answers us.—

And so we die....

—O All-gracious One! we die more happily; only the poor Emanuel wrestled in the silent darkness with fierce thoughts which for so long a time he had not seen, and which clutched at his paling countenance. But these masks flee away, when a friendly fraternal face appears before thee and embraces thee.—Horion raised himself up and warmed again his bowed friend by a mute farewell. A storm-wind precipitated itself out of the clear west into the dumb, laboring hell, and chased out all the lightnings and all the thunders. Lo, at that moment the bright moon flew out from the backward-drifted mass of cloud like an angel of peace into the unstained blue,—then in the light Emanuel stood distinguished from his shadow,—then did the moon illuminate a rainbow of pale color grains, which in the Southeast (the gate to the East Indies) penetrated through the dark water-columns, and arched itself over the Alps,—then Emanuel saw again, as previously, the Jacob's ladder leaning against the earthly night,—then came rapture without measure, and he cried with outspread arms: "Ah, yonder in the East, in the East, over the road to my native land, there glows the arch of triumph, there opens the gate of glory, there the dying march through." ...

And as just then it struck twelve o'clock, he spread out his hand ecstatically towards heaven, which was blue above the mountains, and toward the moon, which reposed serenely beside the tempest, and cried, breaking into blissful tears, "Thanks, Eternal One, for my first life, for all my joys, for this fair earth."—

The flute tones of Julius floated around Maienthal, and he looked down upon the earth.

"And be thou ever blest, thou good earth, thou good mother-land, bloom, ye fields of Hindostan, farewell, thou glowing Maienthal, with thy flowers and with thy people,—and ye brothers, all of you, after a long smile, come and blissfully follow me. Now, O Eternal One, take me up, and console the two survivors."

The death angels stood on all the clouds, and drew their glittering swords out of the nights,—one thunder clapped after another, as if one prison-door of this earthly life after another were flung open.

The terrible luminous point had crept out of mid-air into the powder-house.

The death-hour had already passed, and yet life had not.

Emanuel trembled with yearning and apprehension, because he felt as yet no sign of dying,—moved his hands as if he would give them to some one,—stared into the lightnings as if he would draw them upon him....

"Death! seize me," he cried, beside himself,—"ye dead friends! O father! O mother! tear my heart away, take me,—I cannot—cannot live any longer."—

At that moment a blazing, rattling globe flew up into the tempest, and the powder-house shot itself to pieces like an undermined hell.—The explosion threw the flaming Emanuel pale into his flowery grave; the whole thundering east trembled; the moon and the rainbow were darkened....

THE BLISSFUL AFTER-MIDNIGHT.

Victor, cast headlong, senseless, at last bestirred his arm and felt therewith the cold face, on which to-day the crazy skeleton had read this night beforehand, and which projected above the grave, turned toward heaven. He threw himself upon it and pressed his face to the pale one. Before his tears had forced their way through the hard grief, the clouds carried back their fire-buckets and their funeral torches, and transparent foam-fleeces softly overflowed the moon and settled down at last over the whole valley and over the still couple in a thousand warm drops, which so easily remind man of his own tears. The blowing up of the powder-house by one of the three Englishmen had broken up the naval engagement of the burning clouds.

The dismembered tempest had drifted about in little clouds and stood above the midnight-red in the northeast, when the cold numbness of the shock still held the two men fastened together; at last a hot hand glided down from above between their faces, and a timid voice asked, "Are you asleep?"

"O Julius," said Horion, "come down unto the grave, thy Emanuel is dead." ...

I care not to count the dismal minutes that let two wretched beings lie bound by the thorn-girdle of anguish to a pallid one. But brighter moments came, which first drove every smallest cloud out of the sky and wiped clean the tarnished moon, and then opened the hot eyes before the cleansed and cooled silvery night.

"Ah, he has perhaps only fainted," said Victor after a long while. They raised themselves up with a sigh. Wearily they drew their beloved out of the grave. They would fain carry him down to his dwelling, in order there to bring back again from its solstice this fair soul, as the St. John's sun would return from his. With the slight energies which grief had still spared them, and with the little light which still entered into two wet eyes, they struggled along with the crippled angel, while two laboring shadows beside them frightfully carried a third in the glimmer, from the mountain down into the meadows. Here Victor went alone into the village, in order, perhaps, to provide a more cheerful carriage than a hearse. The blind one stayed himself by a birch-tree, Emanuel slept like the other flowers, and upon them, before the moon.... But suddenly Julius heard the dead man speak and graze him as he passed through the grass; and, pursued by terror, he fled....

—Genius of dreams! thou that walkest through the nebulous sleep of mortals and bringest up before the lonely soul imprisoned in a corpse the happy islands of childhood! O thou that therein restorest to our mouldered friends the bloom of the cheek and showest to our poor frenzied heart past heavens and reflections of Eden and undulating lawns, on clouds!—Magic Genius! enter into this holy night before a man who is not asleep, and turn thy crape-covered glass to my open eye, that I may see therein, and paint, the Elysian world of light which struggles with our earthly shadow, as a pale Luna, in the double eclipse!^[155]—

The enraptured voice of the dead man cried: "Hail to thee, thou still Elysium!—O thou glimmering land of rest! receive the new shade. Ah, how softly thou glowest,—how softly thou breathest,—how softly thou reposest!" ...

Emanuel's eyes had opened; but in his brain burned the Elysian delirious idea that he had died and waked up in the second world. O thou over-blest! and indeed a glittering Eden did encircle thee,—ah, this glow, this breath, this fragrance, this repose, was too beautiful for an earth. The moon weaved over with silver threads, as with flying summer-gossamer, the green of night,—from leaf to leaf, from trees to trees stretched the sparkling veil of the illuminated rain,—over all waters floated glimmering banks of vapor,—a gentle fanning threw jewels from the twigs into the silver streams,—the trees and the mountains rose like giants into the night,—the everlasting sky stood over the falling sparks, over the fleeting fragrances; over the playing leaves, it alone unchangeable, with fixed suns, with the eternal world-studded vault, great, cool, radiant and blue.—Never did a valley so glimmer, so exhale, so whisper, so enchant before....

Emanuel embraced the sparkling soil and cried out from a burning breast, subdued and stammering with rapture: "Ah, is it true, then? do I really hold thee, my native land?—Ay, in such fields of rest wounds are healed, tears are stilled, no sighs demanded, no sins committed, here in sooth the little human heart dissolves for overfulness of rapture and creates itself anew to dissolve again.... Thus have I long since imagined thee, blessed, magical, dazzling land, that borderest on my earth.... O dear earth! where mayest thou be?"

He lifted his intoxicated eye to the star-bedewed heaven, and saw the low-sunken moon hanging faint and yellow in the south; this he took for the earth, from which he supposed death had borne him into this Elysium. Here his voice dissolved into emotion at the beloved earliest garden of his life, and he addressed the earth flying overhead above the stars:—

"Globe of tears! Dwelling of dreams! Land full of shadows and spots!—Ah, on thy broad shadowy spots^[156] the good children of men will be at this moment trembling and sinking!... A ring of clouds^[157] encircles thee, and they see not Elysium.... Ah, how silently thou bearest through the still, blessed heavens thy battle-cry—thy storms—thy graves; thy enveloping atmosphere shuts in like a coffin all the voices of wailing round about thee, and thou glidest with thy bowed and enshrouded ones only as a pale, still ball away above Elysium!...

"Ah, ye precious ones, my Horion! my Julius! Ye are still up yonder in the tempest, ye cover up my corpse, ye look weeping towards Heaven and cannot see Elysium.... O that you were already through the wet cloud of life!—but perhaps ye have already been long sleeping and waking, perhaps time goes otherwise on earth than in eternity.—Ah! that you might come down into the still pastures!" He saw in the magically magnifying glimmer two forms walking. "Oh, who is it?" he cried, flying to meet them. "O father! O mother! Are you here?"—But when he came nearer, he sank into four other arms, and stammered, "Blessed, blessed are we now, my Horion! my Julius!"—At last he said: "Where are my parents and my brothers and Clotilda and the three Brahmins? know they not that their Dahore is in Elysium?"

Victor beheld disconsolately the delirious ecstasy of his beloved, and said neither yes nor no. The latter gazed with a heavenly smile and a stream of love into the face of Julius, and said, "Look on me, thou couldst never see me on the earth."—"Thou knowest well that I am blind, my Emanuel," said the blind one. Here the frenzied man, turning away his quivering eyes suddenly and with a sigh to the moon, fled from his friends, saying to himself in a low voice: "The two forms are only shadowy dreams from the earth,—I will not look upon them, so that they may melt away.—So then the shadowy and dreamy woe of earth reaches over even into Eden. Haply I am still in a dream of death, for the region round about me looks like the landscapes in my life-dreams,—or is this only the fore-court of heaven, as I do not find my parents?" ... He looked toward the lofty stars: "Where do I now stand below you? New heavens lie on new heavens.—Ah, does one yearn then even here?"

He sighed and wondered that he sighed. He leaned down on the pearl-glistening hill of flowers, with his back to the beloved shadows and his eyes towards the kindling dawn, and groped and dreamed,—but at last the coolness of morning overspread the seeking, dazzled, burning eyes, which to-day had fallen now upon shapes of terror, now into seas of ecstasy, with gentle slumber and with corresponding dreams... "Rest softly, thou weary man!" said his friend; but the sleeper glowed with the horizon, and the old delusion played on within him again....

A dream and the morning laid for him the groundwork of a still higher Elysium.

He dreamed God would descend from a throne of suns, and in the form of an invisible, infinite zephyr's breath move over Elysium.

The first morning of summer heaped around him the bridal finery of the earth,—it lined the fields with pearl-banks of dew, and flung over the burrowing brooks the gold tinsel and spangles of the descending flush of morn, and hung upon the bushes the bracelets of burning drops.—But not until it had cloven open all the flowers,—sent out all the birds, quivering with gladness through the radiant heavens,—hid singing voices in all tree-tops,—not till it had sunk the faded moon behind the earth, and set up the sun like a god's throne over wreaths of clouds just burst into bloom, and over all gardens and around all woods had hung intertwined rainbows of dew,—and not till the blissful one stammered in his dreaming, "All-gracious One, All-gracious One, appear in the Elysium!"—not till then did the slowly flowing morning wind awaken him and usher him into the thousand-voiced jubilant choirs of creation, and set him to reeling blindly in the ringing, blazing Elysium.—

And lo! at this moment, a vast, boundless breath, cool, stirring, whispering, overflowed the whole enkindled Paradise; and the little flowers bowed themselves down silently, and the green ears soughing undulated together, and the stately trees trembled and murmured,—but only the great breast of man drank in in streams the infinite breath, and Emanuel's heart dissolved, ere it could say, "This is Thyself, All-loving One!"

—Thou, that readest me here, deny not God, when thou steppest out into the morning or under the starry heavens, or when thou art good or when thou art happy!—

—But, unhappy Emanuel!

Thou beheldest five sporting black butterflies, and thoughtest the fair creatures blessed Psyches.—Thou heardest behind thy hill a hewing into the earth, as if men were making a grave.—Thou lookedst upon thy good blind darling, and yet saidst, "Shadow! retire.... Tremble before God, who just passed by, and vanish!"—But thou saidst, before that, something else which I to-day do not disclose.—

My heart trembles before the coming line!—

Howling with pain, grinning with exultant fury, the crazy skeleton sprang forth from behind the hill into the blessed plain, bearing in its right hand a bloody hand that had been hewed off, and shook from the left stump, from which its madness had hacked it off, trickling fountain-curves of blood, and pressed to itself with the right arm a spade, designed for the burying of the hand, and screamed with a grin of exultation and agony: "Death grabbed me by it, but I snapped it off,—and when he sees the grave of the fist, he will be so stupid as to think it is I lying there ... Ah, thou there! Lay thyself, prithee, to bed in the coffin; he has bored out thy eyes and clogged thy maw with mould.... Brr!"

"O All-gracious One, thou hast damned me!" stammered Emanuel; the driven blood broke from his crushed lung, and the disconsolate one staggered and sank dying on the blood-stained flowers of his lost heaven....

Thus does one day rob another of its heaven, and ere bereaved man enters yonder into the last paradise, he has lost too many here below!—Ah, we bear into every spring-air of this life and into the ether of the second a breast yawning with wounds; and it must first be closed, before it can fill itself!...

THE SOFT EVENING.

Towards noon he opened his weary eyes, but only to let them fall into the grave, which death had opened beside him during his sleep. However, one madman had been the God of Medicine to the other; his dream of Elysium was dreamed out, shortly before it seemed about to be fulfilled, and he was rational again. Victor saw by all signs, that toward sundown at least death with his fruit-gatherer would pluck this white fruit from its stem; but he saw it more calmly than yesterday. As he had already rehearsed the part of disconsolateness, the instruments of grief sawed no fissure into his heart, but only moved bloodily to and fro in the old one. Whoever after years deposits for the second time in the coffin one who has been once awakened therein, scarcely mourns with so much intensity as the first time.

With what altered eyes did Emanuel awake in the evening hour, when he yesterday had shed the first tears for joy! His soul, like the mourning tree of Goa,^[158] let fall by day the nightly load of blossoms; to his chilled head the earth turned no longer the meadow-side of poesy, but the light side of cold reason. He confessed now that he had nourished into fulness of blood the nobler parts of his inner man at the expense of the lower,—that his hope of death had been too great as well as his poetic wing-feathers,—that he had contemplated the earth not from the earth, but too much from Jupiter, seen from whose observatory it must needs dwindle to a fiery spark, and that he had therefore lost the earth without getting Jupiter instead. Vainly did Victor oppose him with the true proposition, that the higher man, as the painters do with water-colors, always begins his life-piece with the background and with the sky, which the painters in oil and inferior men make last; his answer was the complaint that he unfortunately had not completed his picture so far as the foreground. At last he reproached himself with having made too much ado about so slight a separation as death was, at least for him who goes, since the other separations on the earth were after all longer, more bitter and two-sided.

They came in this way upon the subject of recognitions on the other side of this stage of being. Victor said, he could not decry, as many a philosopher had done, conjectures reaching out beyond the earth; for after all we must guess about what was beyond this world, whether we asserted or denied. "Without the continuance of memory," said he, "the continuance of my conscious self is no more than that of my knowledge of another's, i. e. nothing at all; so soon as I forget my present self, then surely might any other one instead of me be immortal. Nor does the destruction of my memory follow from its earthly dependence on my body; for this dependence all the spiritual powers have in common with it, and in that case the destruction of the others would follow from this dependence; and what then would be left for immortality?"—Emanuel said: the thought of recognition, however much it presupposed of the sensuous, was so sweet and transporting, that, if men could make themselves sure of it, no one would be willing to tarry here an hour, particularly if one painted out to himself the heavenly thought of finding all great and noble men at once. "I have often," said he, "pictured out the future recollection after the analogy of the present, and always had to leave off for rapture when I thought to myself how in that remembrance the earth would shrink up to a dim morning-meadow, and our life to a far-removed day illumined with moonlight.—Oh, if we now, dissolve at the image even of a few years of childhood, how tenderly will the image of all childish years one day look upon us!"—Victor waived off these deathly raptures, and after saying, by way of transition, "one connection, at all events, this world must have with the second," he came upon something else, which had struck him so much among the incidents of this night....

* * * * *

* * * * *

I still throw a veil to-day over what Victor asked and what Emanuel disclosed; the new perspective would draw away our eyes too long from the great patient.

The blind one held in one steady and agonized grasp his hot hand, in order not to lose the beloved father; and when Emanuel had for a long time been laying soft consolation concerning his death, like cool leaves around the inflamed temples, he still said nothing except, in a tone of fervent supplication, "Ah, father, if I had only seen thee, only once!"—

Emanuel seemed to be composed; but he deceived himself; his present indifference to the earth was in fact more piercing than that in the night, which was merely a different enjoyment of life mixed with the magic drinks of fantasy. With his remorse for his poetic suicide there seemed almost to mingle joy at its consequences. Hence he said, with a look of touching certainty: "To-day towards evening he should certainly go, and no longer torment his two last and best friends with these delayings of his departure. The genius of the world would forgive him his last fault, and not let their to-day's separation from him, which for him was too long, be followed by any second one yonder."

The longer he spoke, so much the more did the old blooming Eden re-enter into his languid soul.—Now he made a singular, heart-rending request to his friends. As, notoriously, the sense of hearing remains longest with the dying, when all other senses have already closed to earth, Emanuel said to Victor: "So soon as thou seest that a change is about to come over me, then give thy Julius the flute, and thou! play me then the old song of rapture, that I may die upon the tones, as I have already often wished, and continue to play on some minutes after the end."

He began now to reflect how beautifully tones would glide around his last thoughts, like the song of birds around the setting sun; and in his extinguished spirit the old sparks flew up again: "Ah, I shall go hence blissfully,—O my soul could even to-night lay upon this earthly soil a super-earthly adornment, and take it for Eden: ah then, at length; when the soil is fairer and the soul is greater...."

He swooned away again, but the pulse still beat faintly.—And here, in this brooding state, it was that he received from the earth as a last gift the awfully-sweet dream, into which the body infused the feelings of its sickliness, and which, after his resuscitation, he related with a new after-dreaming. It is the last soft triad of our body with our expiring soul, that the former, even in its dissolution (as we know by fainting persons and those apparently dead under the water, &c.), communicates to the latter sweet plays and dreams.—

EMANUEL'S DREAM, THAT ALL SOULS WERE ANNIHILATED BY ONE BLISS.

He reposed in a glorified form in a transparent, dark, and yet colored tulip-cup, which rocked him to and fro, because a gentle earthquake made the tulip-bower sway on its bowed shaft. The flower stood in a magnetic sea, which attracted the blest one more and more strongly; at last he was drawn so far out, that he weighed it down, and fell as a pearl of dew out of the drooping chalice....

What a colored world! A fleecy throng of ethereal forms like his stood hovering over a broad island, about which played a circular balustrade of great flowers in full blow,—above, in mid-heaven, over the island, flew evening suns behind evening suns,—farther in, beside them ran white moons,—near the horizon, stars traced their circles—and as often as a sun or a moon flew downward, they gazed with a heavenly look as of angels' eyes through the great flowers along the shore. The suns were divided from the moons by rainbows, and all the stars ran between two rainbows, and embroidered with silver the variegated ring of the heavenly sphere. One above another rose gay clouds, in which burned a kernel of gold, of silver, of precious stones,—from butterflies' wings clouds of dust were shed, which like flying colors mantled the ground, and out of the cloud flashed rushing floods of light, which were all intertwined in one another....

And in this din of colors a sweet voice went round, saying everywhere, Die more sweetly of light.

But the souls were only dazzled, and did not yet die.

Then evening winds and morning winds and noonday winds conspiring fell upon the meadow and wafted down the bright-blue and gold-green clouds, which had arisen out of flower-fragrance, and unfolded the ring of flowers on the horizon, and bore the sweet perfume to the hearts of the blest. The cloud of blossoms swallowed them into itself, the heart was baptized into the dark scents as into a feeling from the deepest depths of childhood, and, overwhelmed with the hot steam of flowers, would fain drop asunder therein.—Now the unknown voice drew nearer, and softly whispered, Die more sweetly of fragrance.

But the souls only grew giddy, and did not yet die. Far in the depths of Eternity out of the south rose and fell, as in a curve, a single tone,—a second rose in the east,—a third in the west,—at last from the distance the whole heaven sounded, and the tones streamed over the island, and seized upon the softened souls.... When the tones were upon the island, all beings wept for bliss and longing.... Then on a sudden the suns ran still faster, then the tones flew still higher, and, ascending spirally, lost themselves in a keen, endless height,—ah, then all the wounds of men opened again, and warmed softly with the trickling blood every breast, which died in its melancholy,—ah then, indeed, all came flying before us that we had loved here, all that we had lost here, every precious hour, every lamented pasture, every beloved being, every tear and every wish.—And when the highest tones were hushed and pierced again, and were still longer mute and pierced more deeply; then harmonica-bells trembled beneath human beings who stood upon them, so that the piercing hum agitated to pieces every trembler.—And a lofty form, around which a little dark cloud floated, came up in a white veil and said melodiously, Die more sweetly of tones.

Ah! they would have died and died gladly of the sadness of melody, if every heart had held the heart for which it languished on its breast; but every one still wept on lonesomely without his beloved.

At last the form threw off the white veil, and the Angel of the end stood before men. The little cloud that floated round him was Time,—so soon as he should grasp the little cloud, he would crush it, and time and men would be annihilated.

When the Angel of the end had unveiled himself, he smiled on men with indescribable affection, in order to dissolve their hearts with bliss and with smiles. And a soft light fell from his eyes upon all the shapes, and every one saw standing before him the soul he most loved,—and when they gazed upon each other with a dying look for love and sent a languid smile after the angel, he grasped at the little cloud which was near him,—but he could not reach it.

Suddenly each one saw once more beside him his own self,—the second I trembled transparently beside the first, and the two smiled consumingly on each other and exalted each other,—the heart which trembled in man hung once more, tremblingly, in the second self, and saw itself dying therein.—

O then was every one constrained to fly from himself to his beloved, and, seized with dread and love, to twine his arms round other beings who were dear to him.—And the angel of the end opened his arms wide, and clasped the whole human race together in one embrace.—Then the whole meadow glimmers, breathes fragrance, rings with music,—then the suns stop, but the island itself whirls around the suns,—the two sundered selves run into each other,—the loving souls fall on each other like snow-flakes,—the flakes become cloud,—the cloud melts into a dark tear.—

The great tear of bliss, made out of us all, swims more transparent and yet more transparent in Eternity.—

At last the Angel of the end said softly, They have died most sweetly of their beloved.—

And he crushed weeping the little cloud of time.—

* * * * *

The fever images of death, with which every sleep, even the last, begins, gleamed in Emanuel's eyes. His spirit hung swaying in his loose nerves, breathed upon by soft airs; for he was already in that dissolving nervous ecstasy of the fainting, the child-bearing, the exhausted by bleeding, the dying. But his emptied breast rose the more lightly, his departing spirit drew out thinner the thread of life.

Victor would have enjoyed the comfort of the dull numbness, wherewith pains heaped one upon another crush us down, had he not been obliged every minute to tell these pains, i. e. all the preparations of death, to the poor blind youth. Ah, the blind one feared perhaps that he might call after this teacher too late with the song of rapture.

Evening came. Emanuel grew stiller and his eye more rigid, and it seemed to see the fantasies of his busy brain in the apartment, until the gold strip of the far-sinking sun, which a looking-glass directed towards him, darted like a lightning-flash through his world of dream. Softly, but with altered voice, he said, "Into the sun!"—They understood him, and moved his bed and his head toward the evening-rain of the setting sun, to which he had of old so often unfolded his susceptible heart. Victor started, when he saw that his eyes stood, undazzled and immovable, open to the sun.

There was a sublime stillness round three discomposed beings; only a breath of evening wind fluttered among the linden-leaves of the apartment, and a bee hovered about the linden-blossoms; but out of doors away from the theatre of distress a blissful evening reposed on the pastures red with sunlight, among joyous, fluttering, singing, intoxicated creatures.

Emanuel gazed silently into the sun, which sunk lower toward the earth; he clutched not at the bed-clothes like others, but flung his arms aloft as if for a flight or an embrace. Victor took his beloved hands, but they hung down into his without a pressure. And when the sun, like a blazing world on the day of judgment, sank down in a last upshooting glow: then the silent one still hung with cold eyes on the vacant place of the sun, and remarked not the setting; and Victor saw suddenly shifting flashes of the scythe of death pass yellow across the undistorted face.—Then, deeply troubled, he handed the flute to Julius, and said in a broken voice, "Play the song of rapture, he is dying now."—

And Julius, with streaming, darkened eyes, compressed his sobbing breath into the flute and raised his sighs to heavenly tones, that he might muffle and benumb the parting soul, during the tearing away of its earthly roots, with the after-echoes of the first world, with the preluding echoes of the second.

And as, during the song, a blissful smile at an unknown dream glorified the face that was growing cold,—and when only a quiver of the hand pressed the hand of the disconsolate friend, and only a quiver winked with the eyelid and farther down opened the pale lips and passed away, and when the evening redness overspread the pale form,—lo, then death, cold to the earth and our lamentations, iron, erect, and dumb, stalked through the fair evening under the linden blossoms to the enwrapped soul in the tranquillized corpse and transferred the veiled soul with immeasurable arms from the earth through unknown worlds into Thy eternal, warm, fatherly hand which has created us,—into the Elysium for which Thou hast formed us,—among the kindred of our hearts,—into the land of rest, of virtue, and of light....

Julius stopped for sorrow, and Victor said, "Play on the song of rapture, he has only just died."—During the tones Victor shut to the eyes of his beloved, and said with a heart above the earth, "Now close yourselves,—the spirit is above the earth, to which you gave light,—thou pale, hallowed form, thou hallowed heart, the angel within thee is gone out and thou fallest back into the earth."—And here he embraced once more the cold, empty wrappage, and pressed the heart, which beat no more, knew him no longer, to his hot bosom; for the flute-tones tore his pale wounds too widely open.—Oh, it is well that when man in grim woe stiffens to solid ice, no tones are with him: the tender tones would lick all the sad blood out of his transpierced bosom, and man would die of his agonies, because he would be able to express his agonies....

—Here let my curtain fall before all these scenes of death, before Emanuel's grave and Horion's grief!—Thou and I, my reader, will now go forth from another's death-chamber, to look into nearer ones where we ourselves lie prostrate or where our dearest have lain. We will in those chambers behold our death-bed, but let not our eye sink;—the flame of love and of virtue blazes upward above the corruptions,—around the death-bed we see a bier as a couch of rest on which all burdens are laid down, and the broken heart also,—around the deathbed we see a great, unknown form, who breaks off from the image of God the earthly frame.—But if the heart is made great beside our own resting-place, it becomes tender beside another's.—If thou, my reader, and if I now, with this deeply moved soul, look into the chambers where we received the perpetual wounds of earth, then will the pale forms which therein raise their dead men's eyes once more to meet us, agitate and wound us too sorely.—Ah, that may you well do, too, ye loved mutes,—what have we then left to give you, but a tear which pains us, a sigh which oppresses our hearts? Ah, if the mourning-crape on our faces is torn as soon as the funeral veil on yours,—if the marble gravestone with your name must be turned over above your corpses, in order to cover a new one with its new name,—O, if we so easily forget all the eternal love, the eternal remembrance, which we promised you in your last hour,—ah, then, indeed, in these tumultuous days of life a still hour like this is holy and beautiful, in which we lay our ear as it were close to the sunken graves, and, from the depth of the earth, although every day more darkly, hear the voices that we know call up: "Forget us not,—forget me not, my son—my friend—my beloved, forget me not!"

No, and we will not forget you! And, if it makes us ever so sad, still let each one of us at this moment summon the most precious forms before him out of their resting-places, and behold the wasted features, the reopened eyes full of love, which were so long closed, and contemplate full long the dear, uncovered face, till the old remembrances of the fair days of their love break the heart and he can weep no more.