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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Victor, alone, led the blind youth home, and both were silent and embraced each other with brotherly tears behind every screen, and asked each other neither for the reasons of the embrace nor of the tears.

When they had pa.s.sed through the still village, and as they came along by the park of the Abbey, Victor saw his Emanuel pa.s.s out of the last bower into the dazzling convent. It seemed to him as if every one therein already recognized him, as if he must hide himself. The garden of inspiration was to be in the valley only the flower-bed in a meadow, and not violently contrast itself with nature by sharp limits, but hang over into it softly as a dream into waking hours with blooming, embowered borders, and flow over into it with hop-gardens, with green thick-set hedges around corn-fields, and with sowed-over children's gardens. A large wide colonnade of chestnuts, set in silver by two brooks, opened broad and free toward the five ponds with their pierced work of blossoms. The northern mountain lifted itself up over against the park like a terrace, and seemingly continued the Eden over unseen valleys.

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

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

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

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

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

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

34. DOG-POST-DAY.

SECOND DAY OF WHITSUNTIDE.

Morning.--The Abbess.--The Water-Mirror.--Dumb Action for Libel.--The Rain and the Open Heaven.

At two o'clock the morning-wind swept in more loudly and coolly through Victor's open chamber, and shook already dew-drops from shiny foliage, and the near whisper of leaves murmured through his ears into his dreams. The lark, as the overture of the day, flung herself high up into the gray of heaven, and rang in the morning's feast of trumpets.

This alarmist became in his dreaming the hovering after-echo which blended with the morning; amidst the soft in-fall of the neighboring sounds he slowly opened his eyes and dreamed on, and closed them again, and was more awake, and sleep did not pa.s.s off like a thick shroud made of night, but floated upward like a veil of morning perfume; and his soul, without making a single movement of the body, opened with the still awaking of a flower-cup in the presence of the morning....

--Now I am again already at boiling and blazing point,--and yet, as often as I dip my pen in the ink, I make up my mind to gain the good graces of the critics, and to write with my pen as with an icicle. But it is impossible for me,--in the first place, because I am getting into years. With most men, it is true, as with birds, singing ceases when love does; but with those who make their head a hot-house of their ideas, years, i. e. the days of drill therein, give the fancy as well as the _pa.s.sions_ a higher growth. Poets resemble gla.s.s, which, when it is old and breaks, takes on motley colors.--But secondly, though I were just blooming in my twentieth year, still I could not now write frostily, seeing winter is at the door. Rousseau says that in prison he produced the best poem on Liberty,--hence the French, those state's-prisoners, used to write better prose on the subject than the free Britons,--hence Milton poetized in winter. I have often carried out my writing-tablets in summer, and undertaken to press it to this silhouette board, and then take its profile; but fantasy can lay only Past and Future under its copying-paper, and every actual Present limits its creative power,--just as, according to the old naturalists, the water distilled from roses loses its virtue precisely at the time when roses bloom. Therefore I always had to wait till I became unfaithful, before I could go at love with my drawing instruments....

On the contrary, a man who now, towards after-summer, on a Molucca Island, primes and sketches the spring, must, for the foregoing reasons, and for the further one that the flying-summer is the regretful after-echo and silver-wedding of spring, hand it over to the Gallery-inspectors with much too bright sap-colors.--

The gayly-embroidered description of Victor's sojourn in Maienthal may well get to be as long as that of Voltaire's in Paris, with the publisher's compensation for which the lean wag might have cleared the rent of his _chambres garnies_. For just at this moment the dog has actually handed in a fourth Whitsuntide day, and expanded the trinomial root of the given _power_ of joy into a quadrinomial. As in this quadruplicate of joy again, there is no wailing, no murder, no pestilence, but only good, I joyfully catch the remaining images of this spring in my camera-obscura, nor hover in anxious suspense, lest I should have to drag out my hero (Knef has made over to me all the Whitsuntide-days, and is only to send a little supplementary page afterward) somewhat as I did my Gustavus,[104] from the collapsed rubbish of his pleasure-palace and summer-house.--

Emanuel despatched in the forenoon his day's work of writing in his astronomical tables, in order to spend the whole afternoon with his guest at the Abbess's; he also offered him a little collaboratorship at his flowers, namely, to pluck out the rosemary blossoms, and spread the sunshade over the carnation-stand. With Emanuel, even in the prosaic repose of the day, the wings always protruded far out from under the half-wing-sh.e.l.ls. Victor took the requests of his teacher as gifts. As he picked away out there at the rosemary, the rising sun opened the valves of the wind, and then, under its breath, all the registers of the great organ of being began to go, and the tremolo of the brooks rolled its waves on his ear, the flute-work of the birds pealed, and the thirty-two footed pedal-register of the woodland roared. One little parishioner's head after another, as he carried his twelve years together with the same number of Herculean labors of memory to the Holy Sacrament, creeping along behind its father, embroidered and stiffened up with a wreath-k.n.o.b, and generally with gold-spangles, pa.s.sed by before him. What a beautiful second Whitsuntide-day, which is generally full of rain-clouds, have you, ye little folks, to-day!--Victor right gladly indulged the grandees of the village, i. e. the drivers of a full span and the schoolmaster's son, the hair-modeller and queue-preacher Meuseler, who on the second Whitsuntide-day frizzled the neighboring villages, and who with his holy-(powder)-sprinkler effected the last effusion upon the little heads, which the Parson had been moistening these six weeks. Victor's heart beat for joy, as if he had a child, or were himself a child among them, when the motley, powdered, animated chain, with dancing spangles, with long-stemmed nosegays, with black-glistening spiritual _Musen-annuals_, marched in under the commander's staff and shepherd's crook of their two consuls, singing and besung and rung in and trumpeted in through the triumphal gate of the church.--Ah! joy sits still more beautifully on children than on us, just as an unhappy, a begging child, whose first child's-garden fate has trampled down, and before whose eyes, at the first bursting into existence, nothing hangs but black, misshapen morning cloud, afflicts our heart more than his father beside him.--

"Pluck, like a berry, _every_ minute of your first day of triumph, ye good children, and I wish the sermon would be right long, that you might keep on so much longer your handsome dress!" said Victor, and looked round toward the convent, whose windows were full of unrecognizable spectatresses; he proposed to himself, on the return of the juvenile procession, to seek out for himself from among the windows with a pocket spy-gla.s.s the one with the fairest contents.--Just go, kindly man, who lovest fair souls like fair nature, and endurest cold ones like the winter-landscape, and who never revengest, just walk up and down by the brooks, for there is the footpath of the fishers, and because on thy poetic ring-races thou wouldst not harm a peasant by trampling down so much as a forked wagon of hay, such as the children braid out of hazel-rods! Fill the interval between the first heaven and the third, when thou wilt sit down not with Abraham, but with thy Clotilda at the table of the Abbess,--fill it up with a second, namely with the embrace of all nature, which never looks more sweetly into the soul, than when on it, not far from the soul, a beloved dwells!--

A stroll between two brooks that mingled their flashings and between their lackered willows snowed over with foam-worms[105] overspread the whole inner man even to every corner of a dark tear with morning-splendor.--In addition to that Victor kept looking across the meadow up at Emanuel's open window, and letting a smile float down from it like a running wave full of light.--In addition to that, he did not stop there, but went up twice and disturbed him in the midst of his writing with a childlike embrace.--In addition to that, he put seven-leagued boots on his eyes, and ran over the whole landscape, here rising, there sinking, here shining, there shadowing, in order to catch and size even here in antic.i.p.ation a postal and travelling map of the finest places for the afternoon-rambles with Clotilda, because in the afternoon the raptures themselves will perhaps spoil the choice of raptures!--And thus did Nature create over again in his spirit her morning and her spring out of the earth-clod of the first spring, i. e.

out of the hot sun, out of the cool brook, out of the b.u.t.terfly, whom May sh.e.l.led out of his hull, from the motley flies which the prolific earth hatched out of the larva-seed like winged flowers.--Then he closed his eyes amid the din of sparrows and swallows in the village, and amidst the watch-cries of the larks, and against the dazzling waves of the brooks, and let his soul dive down into the ringing sea and into the chiaroscuro painted by the eyelid; but then would his heart have been overwhelmed by creation's flood, which swept over it out of all pipes and beds and mouths of life around him, out of the tangled vein-work of the stream of life, which shoots at once through flower-runnels, through tree-channels, through white flies' veins, through red blood-ca.n.a.ls and through human nerves, ... he would, in the impotence of enjoyment, have been drowned in the deep, broad ocean of life, which life-streams cross and fill, had he not, like every drowning man, heard a peal of bells far down into the waves.

In short--church was out, and he had to go behind a leafy hunter's-screen, in order, when the Panists[106] of the Lord's Supper should march by out of the church, whose organ-music still followed, and under the tower that still trumpeted after them, that then he might see with his pocket-gla.s.s _who_ looked out of the convent. Clotilda's face floated, as if called forth by magic out of the second world, close to the gla.s.s, and he could, without fear of being driven away, close his b.u.t.terfly-wings around this flower; he could freely sink into her great eyes, as into two flower-cups filled with the splendor of dew. Never did he see so pure a snow of the white around the blue heaven's-opening, which went far into the soul, now fairer than ever; and when she cast down her eye toward the garden, the great veiling eyelid with its trembling lashes stood just as beautifully over it as a lily over a fountain. _Love_, like _drawing_ and like the germ of man, begins at the _eye_.--When the children had gone by, then Clotilda slowly and freely turned her face toward Emanuel's cottage, and gazed across with the far-reaching, longing look of love....

And with such a love, beating like a heart in his innermost consciousness, Victor with his two friends arrived up at the convent.

The Abbess (her name is not reported to me at all, not even her pseudonyme) received him with a stately air, which her station had not imparted to her, but had attempered. Her soul was born crowned. The Princess of ----, whose chief governess she was, loved sometimes to play the child (children inversely reciprocate, and represent their representatives): but although she possessed a pride of thirty years, she checked her hobby-horse so soon as the monarchical chief governess appeared, than whom no one in the land (the swans excepted) carried her head back so high. A lady like her, whose looks were throne-insignia, and her words _mandata sacrae caesareae majestatis propria_,[107] had from the hands of Nature herself the allegiance-medals and the throne scaffolding, so as to weigh her imperial apple against young maidens'

apple of beauty,--such a one could rule and mould a Clotilda. Her soul was painted by three masters:--the back-ground by the world,--the foreground by the church,--the middle-ground by Virtue. Her aesthetic parts placed her in a singular manner in a certain elective-affinity with Emanuel's East Indian ones.

I know nothing more touching and beautiful than a woman's obeisance when it springs from that deep respect with which alone good maidens venture to speak their love.--Happy Victor! thy Clotilda received thee with as much reverence as her teacher. Only the coquette is made by love more dictatorial[108] (a silicious juristic word!); but the proud one it makes modest and gentle. Never did he take a meal more delightedly than in this bright pleasure-villa, before whose open windows reposed a blue horizon and nearer at hand murmuring avenues, filled with music, than in this decorated orangery of blooming girls,--(whereas a gymnasium is a menagerie and a house of sisters an aviary.)--Victor, who understood how to manage women even better than men, felt himself as well in the busy ant-hill of these lively maidens, as in an ant-bath,[109] and he was a second Bee-father Wildau, who constructed for himself out of the swarm of bees now a beard and now a m.u.f.f. More manly sense is required for a certain refined gallantry, than they have who in their satires confound it with the insipid kind; just as only mountains afford the sweetest honey. Earnest must be the groundwork of jest; respect and kindliness, of praise. Victor could more easily before two than before thirty-two female eyes fall into embarra.s.sment, which, by the way, is the grossest blunder and Germanism in female grammar. He had long since learned to combine the volatile salts of woman's wit with the fixed ones of man's, as well as the art, in great circles, of setting every soul, every caterpillar, on the right leaf for its nourishment.

To him who had once said, "I wish I had to converse at least four times a year with ladies, with whom one should have to apply so much _tournture_,[110] that one actually would not know what he wanted, and who were fine even to nonsense,"--to him a high lady like the Abbess, whom, since the laying down of her high governess-ship, one could confound a very, very little with a _precieuse_,[111] was a true refreshment; for he could sketch her at least the physiognomical fragments of the court with a thousand turns, i. e. a full face with _five_ dots. But he had in this the still n.o.bler design to draw off his adoring attention, his heart that sometimes started in the shape of a tear to his eye, from his beloved Clotilda, in order to spare her a wholly different attention from his own. In a singular manner his satirical feeling, precisely, always drew off the Moses' veil from his serious feelings, from his softened soul,--that is to say, he was not ashamed of a tear, simply because he knew that his humor could protect him against the suspicion of exaggeration and against the mocker; just as, on the other hand and inversely, his playing and flashing of wit under tears, like phosphorus under water, conserved and nourished its light.--

Fortunately, at this point, Emanuel, who in the midst of dinner had gone out into the garden, came back and proposed taking a walk. For in his soul great ideas were all that remained standing of life, as of old Egypt only temples were left behind, no houses; and his ignorance in little things must be ridiculous to _little things_.[112]--The Abbess had taken Clotilda beside her on the throne as under-queen of the fiery nuns. Victor represented in his single person the board of wards of the Electorate of Brandenburg among these fluttering graces.

Clotilda gave over the blind one just to a whole dove-flock of the liveliest way-guides, because they all sued for the boatman's and forefinger's-office with the blind youth; they all loved him on account of his heavenly beauty, but (as he could not see theirs) only in the same way as they would caress a beautiful boy of five years.... At another time Victor would certainly have looked round and made the fine allusion that _beauty_ was leading _blindness_; but to-day he only looked round for other reasons.

--At last the Island of the Blest, which had already gleamed far, far out through the mist of his childhood's dreams, was now the ground under his feet, and he made the voyages of discovery through his heaven;--he and Clotilda were silent for some minutes, because their hearts began to be softly agitated with joy, that they were at last alone together and stood before the great esplanade of spring. Amidst the blissful smiles, the dumb alphabet of rapture, and amidst trembling respirations, that holy sanscrit of love, they had already arrived at the first pond, over whose crystal mirror a bridge winds like gilded foliage-work.--They stopped dazzled in the midst of this moon-disk and looking-gla.s.s, because the parasol could not screen from two suns at once, reckoning the one in the water; they turned half round, and sought with their eyes in the picturing water the deeper heaven's-blue, and two still, blissful forms, that looked at each other with their moist eyes. O, his eye rested warmly in her reflected one, like the sun upon the subterranean sun, and his trembling look was the long tremolo and continuance of a single tone; for the G.o.ddess dwelling in the water sank with her eyes to meet his soul, because she would fain avail herself of the doubled distance of his form, which amounted to ten feet.--To conclude at last the overmastering rapture, he withdrew his eyes from this gla.s.s-painting and directed them (i. e. he merely redoubled it) to the archetype itself; and the mutual inflowing of glances, the trembling together of souls, threw into the short moment the fields of a long heaven.--And they saw that they had found each other, and that they had loved each other, and that they deserved each other. As they went on, Victor could only say, "O that you might be to-day as inexpressibly happy as I am."--And she answered softly, softly as a zephyr exhaled from among tender, leafless blossoms, "I am so indeed." ... Ah, I have often pictured to myself, if we all loved one another as two lovers do, if the emotions of all souls, as these are, were _tied_ notes, if Nature drew from us all at once, the resonance of her strings stretching even beyond the stars, instead of moving only a loving couple as a double harpsichord,--then should we see that a human heart full of love contains an immeasurable Eden, and that Deity itself created a world in order to love one.

But I will write again, as Clotilda spoke, who manifested the poetic spirit only by actions, not by words, like players who know how in speaking to evade the rhyme and metre of their poet.

The village, or rather the inn, gave their Jacob's ladder a _fourth_ round, the fourth Whitsuntide-day.--The Englishman, Cato the elder, who had run away from Kussewitz and from his club with a travelling orchestra of virtuosos from Prague, came out to see Maienthal also. He could never in his life wait for anything. He told Victor he was coming to see him to-morrow, to-day he should survey the cultivated prospects and he was waiting with the overture of the Prague musicians only for the close of the vesper-sermon. At last he told him that Flamin and Matthieu were going a journey day after to-morrow, and were going back again to Kussewitz, and consequently would stay there longer than they had intended. This presence of the Englishman and the delayed return of the jealous one settled all at once in Victor his last will, to stretch the fourth Whitsuntide-day also as the fourth string on this tetrachord of joy. And as on this fourth day the riddle about the angel running through all the parts of this book is brought into the deciphering-office of time, because Julius delivers the letter of the said angel to Clotilda to read, he could make believe to himself he stayed merely for that reason, and say to himself: "For the novelty's sake surely one should tarry, to see what the state of the case is about the angel."--Good hero! thou confoundest every angel with thine, nor do I know why thou shouldst not!...

Now a shadow of a cloud flitted over them, a sort of forerunner of a darker one which was seeking their souls. For Victor, who before a fair heart could never shut up his own, who in the consecration of love scorned all dissimulation, related to Clotilda, with that heartiness which so easily marries itself to refinement, the reasons of Matthieu's journey, namely, his own little folly in Kussewitz, when he played into the Princess's hands the little billet-doux. He would at any rate have been obliged, too, to make this disclosure, by way of obviating the extraneous one of an accuser. But he presupposed too hastily on the part of Clotilda a calculation of the chronology of his little annual registers, and did not remark that he had written the billet before he knew that Clotilda was not Flamin's _sweetheart_, but only his _sister_.[113] She was silent for some time. He feared this pantomime of anger, and did not dare to convince himself of it by looking into her face. At length, on her favorite green spot, where in the greatest depth the vale's green shadow rocks its painted twigs in the sheen of sun and water, there she begged him with a voice neither cold nor proud, but almost a voice of emotion, to let her rest a little on her favorite gra.s.s-bench, whose arms were great flowers. As he stood before her, he saw with alarm in her animated face--not a resentment wrestling with courtesy, but--the touching struggle against the destiny which darkened for her the darling of her soul, the unselfish grief at the closed scar, which she wished away from his virtue. She felt, he felt, as if the former year lifted itself up again from its death-pillow of flowers of joy, which it had trampled on for both; they were right sad,--Clotilda had hardly the mastery of her eyes or Victor of his tongue,--till at last upon the latter the misunderstanding dawned. He therefore said softly to her and in English: "Had his father made all his disclosures to him earlier, he would have spared him more than one conflict, more than one dark hour, and first of all the foregoing folly."

In the higher love anger is only sorrow over the object. Clotilda continued, however, the solar-eclipse of her fair features; but it proceeded not from the continuance of the previous sigh, nor from the usual inability to carry over at once a reconciled soul into an angry face, but her discontent with her own hastiness always looked like that which has another's for its object. She rose up therefore to give him back her arm, and, as it were, the heart which lay near it. Victor did not allow himself to break the doubled-voiced silence.--Emanuel came after, and then Clotilda said with emotion, as if she were just answering what had been said before: "Ah, I am only too closely related to my brother on the side of my faults."--Did she mean Flamin's jealousy, or suspecting nature, or more probably his temperament?--Victor turned to her, as if to beg her pardon for what she had said,--and her eyes said, "O, I ought not to have misunderstood thee,"--and his said, "I ought not, even though unknown, to have denied thee,"--and their hearts made peace, and the olive-branch twining among the old flowers of joy bound their souls to each other.

Emanuel led them, as their guiding star, to his dear mountains, those front boxes of the earth,--only from his mountain with the weeping birch he kindly turned them aside for unknown reasons,--and his easy climbing gave them joy over the restoration of his breathing. At last they came out upon the throne of the region, on the mountain where Victor, on the morning after the night spent in travelling, had looked down upon Maienthal. O how the living plain of G.o.d, the foreground of a sun and of an Eden, stretched far away in such untamable, blooming, breathing, undulating ma.s.ses! How did heaven hang full of mountains of incense, full of ice-fields of light! And a gentle morning-wind stole out from the eastern gate overhung with cloud-bloom and played with heaven and earth, with the yellow floweret and with the broad cloud above them, with the eyelash under a tear and with the cornfields it searched through!--How the eye dilates, when chased night-pieces of cloud-shadows cut through the bright sunshine of the earth! how the heart enlarges, when the morning-wind hurls the winged shadows now over mountains, now into ponds of splendor, now into bowed grain-fields!--But round upon the woods still ice-mountains of clouds had settled themselves.--Ah, this field flecked with day and night, this wall of nebulous glaciers, put Victor's heart into the old dream again, in which he saw Clotilda on an ice-mountain with outspread arms!--Ah, on this rocky peak rising above the southern mountain he could see the _Isle of Union_, lying darkly with its tree-tops and its white temple, and the thirsty heart staggered full of the mingled draught of yearning and melancholy and love.--

Then he was glad to tell her that he had seen her that morning when he gave the blind youth the note to Emanuel, and yet that he had denied himself a visit to her,--only give him, Clotilda, a great, warm, thankful look for his sparing of thy brother, for the n.o.bleness of his loving, and for his hiding of that love with a veil! She looked on him, and when her eye grew warm with a tear, heaven bowed itself and came down to them on a sunny cloud and touched the kindred beings with hot, fluttering drops.--O thou good earth! thou good Nature! thou sympathizest oftener (and always) with good men, than good men do themselves!--Before him the dream pa.s.sed in which Clotilda's tears resolved the ground into an uplifting cloudlet....

But the approach of evening and the little shattered pearl-strings of rain-drops rattling down called the fair group back to the cottage. The girls; who with the blind one had not even quite climbed the mountain, went no farther, but turned about and took the advance. Emanuel withdrew himself to his hill of mourning, in order there to uncover his flowers to the rain. When our loving couple reached the smoking vale below, how heavenly was the evening and the earth!--In the great evening-heaven above them waved tulip-beds of red clouds, between which ran blue strips like dark brooks.--Behind them stood under the sun mountains like Vesuviuses in flames, and the woodland like a burning bush, and the prairie-fire running over the flowers caught the cloud-shadows.--And all the larks hung with their [114]_ripieno_-voices of Nature near the red ceiling-piece of evening, and every deeper sunbeam held a humming chain-of-being made of happy insects.--And in the sheepfold on the mountain a hundred mothers at once called lovingly to a hundred children, and every sheep hastened bleating to its thirsty kneeling lamb.----

Great evening! only in the Vale of Tempe thou still bloomest and dost not fade; but in a few minutes, reader, all its blossoms for the first time will open magnificently!--

Clotilda and Victor went along more closely and warmly, linked together under the small sun-shade, which walled _both_ in from the transient shower. And with hearts which beat more and more strongly, and, instead of blood, sent round as it were devout tears of joy, they reached the park; the warm tones of the nightingale came to meet them, the tones wafted away from the musical retinue wherewith the Englishman was just pa.s.sing across the mountains floated after them like perfumes exhaled from flowers.----But lo! while the earth still wore its gilding in the fire of the sun, while the evening-fountain still blazed up like a torch, when in a great oak-tree of the garden, in which motley gla.s.s globes had been grafted instead of fruit, twenty red suns sparkled out of the leaves,--then a warmed cloud melted asunder and came all down in drops into the fire of evening and on the gleaming water-column....

The nuns who were nearer to the trees flew under the foliage; but Clotilda, who deemed a slow gait more beautiful and becoming for a female soul, went without haste to the neighboring "Evening-bower,"

which, raised above the garden, nowhere opens its thick leaf-work except to the setting sun.--No, it was an angel, it was Clotilda's sister, Giulia, who reposed on the tender cloud and let fall through it her tears of joy, in order to compel her friend, whose arm rested on her lover's as in a bandage, to the glimmering bower, where two blessed hearts were to be most blest. Clotilda still lingered under the rain of pearls and golden sand, and resembled the still doves around her, who on all the roofs flung open their pure wings like variegated umbrellas and held them under the bath,--and before entering Victor drew her back, who said, oppressed with bliss, "Thou all-gracious one!" and looked over to Emanuel's bower, on which the gate of Paradise built up of mosaic stones, the rainbow, ab.u.t.ted itself and arched across through heaven over the evening-bower and enclosed in its heavenly magic circle the three loving souls.

And when they stepped into the dark bower which had only a small opening toward the sun that blazed in through the rain, there lay before the opening the evening-field, with the swaying fiery columns, between which dashed the golden flood of the molten sun, and with the lawns which stood even to the flowers in a sea of luminous globules.--And fallen rainbows lay with their ruins on the blossoming trees.--And little airs fanned the running-fire in the meadow flowers and threw sparks out of the blossoms.--And the heart of man was swept onward by the stream of rapture and swam burning in its own tears.

Like a transfigured saint Clotilda looked into the sun, and her countenance was exalted at once by the sun and by her soul. And her friend disturbed not the fair soul; but he took the white handkerchief out of her hand and softly wiped away the colored particles dropping from the foliage, encircled with flower-dust, and she gave him voluntarily her hand. When she turned her eyes full of tears upon him, he let the tears stand; but she herself removed them, and looked upon him with a love over which soon the old ones glided, and said with a smile that flowed forth blissfully: "My whole heart is inexpressibly moved; pardon it, dearest friend, to-day everything in which it has. .h.i.therto not been like yours!" ...

--Lo, then was the warm cloud emptied into the garden as if it were a whole river of Paradise and on the streams angels playfully floated down, ... and when bliss could no more weep and love could no more stammer, and when the birds screamed for joy, and the nightingale warbled through the rain, and when the heavens, weeping for joy, fell with cloud-arms on the earth, aye, then two inspired souls met trembling and rushed breathless on each other with quivering lips and cheek pressed to cheek in glowing, trembling ecstasy,--then at last gushed forth, like life-blood out of the swollen heart, great tears of bliss out of the loving eyes over into the loved ones.--The heart measured the eternity of its heaven with great throbs heavy with bliss,--the whole visible universe, the sun itself had sunk away, and only two souls throbbed against each other alone in the emptied, glimmering immensity, dazzled with the glistening of tears and the splendor of sunshine, stunned with the roar of the heavens and the echo of Philomel, and sustained by G.o.d in dying of rapture.

Clotilda bent her head aside, to dry her eyes; and her mute darling sank down and knelt before her, and pressed his face upon her hand, and stammered: "O thou heart out of my heart, O thou for ever and ever beloved one,--ah, that I could bleed, could die for thee!"--Suddenly he rose, as if lifted by an immeasurable inspiration, and said in a lower tone, looking upon her: "Clotilda, I love thee, G.o.d, and virtue forever."