A most gracious autograph is the _Tetragrammaton_[78] and means of grace, which works supernatural effects and state-miracles; and the ill.u.s.trious writing-thumb is the magic thief's-thumb,[79] as it were, by which the different wheels of the state-repeating-watch--the lever-wheel, the face-wheel, often merely the hand--is shoved forward or backward, according as it desires an hour earlier or later.

Hence ministers often climb up and cut off for themselves such a thief's-thumb to carry in their pockets.

Sebastian is seized by joy, as by Habakkuk's angel, by the hair of the head, and carried through the garden, and driven with his news to the first he might meet, and that proved to be the Chaplain, who, with a comic face, swore it was all a fib of Victor's; but his restrained jubilation almost burst his compressed veins. Victor had no time for refutation, but hurried off with such a message to the heart to which it rightly belonged,--the mother's. The mother could not shape her mouth to anything but a blessed smile, into which the drops of joy overflowed from her eyes. No joy in nature is so sublimely affecting as the joy of a mother at the good fortune of a child. But the son, in whose soul, such as it was to-day, this sunbeam of fate was really needed, could not, in the surprise, be immediately found.

His Lordship, meanwhile, talked with Clotilda as with a daughter, and gave her a letter from her mother and the intelligence of his approaching departure. His manly kindness, guided by respect and graced by refinement, enn.o.bled her attentiveness to his looks; and as she came forth from the affectionate and low-toned conversation with sparkling eyes, her tall form, which usually stooped a little, was raised by a certain inspiration to a n.o.ble stature, and she stood in the temple of Nature, as a priestess of the temple, infinitely beautiful. His Lordship separated from her. She found Flamin near the tulip-formed letter C, and the G.o.ddess of Fortune appeared to him in the sweetest human incarnation, to deliver to him her gift. We need not say that the news and the news-bearer threw him into equal ecstasy.

Joy had shaken up the whole bee-garden in a swarming-bag and turned it into chaos. The foaming wine-fermentation could not work itself off till it ended in clear, tranquil rapture. His Lordship took himself out of the way of a grat.i.tude swelled by so many ripieno[80] voices and off to his carriage, when the mother with her dumb heart-fulness overtook him; but nothing could she get from her blissfully burdened heart to her lips, save the modest words, that "to-day was his birthday, and his son did not know it, and ought _also_ to have been surprised with a rapture." He tried to escape from her with a grateful smile, and said that he must hasten back to the Prince, who perhaps had taken as kind an interest in this very day as she; but Sebastian, with his friend whom he had found, overtook him at the garden-gate, and the hurrying lord was delayed a little longer by a swift embrace of his son. Not until he was off did the mother, who longed to unburden her love, clasp tenderly Victor's hand, and, forgetting the agreement, asked: "O dearest, why, then, did you not congratulate him on his birthday? For, indeed, _I_ could not." Now for the first time he understood and felt the sudden embrace of his father, and stretched out his arms after him and would fain reciprocate it.

Here the old Parson, also coming out of the garden, struck in and said, as if talking nonsense, "I wish he were Administrative Councillor"; but his wife, without making any reply to that, said to him with overflowing voice and love, "Such a cradle-festival thou hast never yet lived to see as to-day's, Peter!" Agatha looked at her inquiringly and admonishingly. "Just out with it," said she, and enfolded the children and drew them both into the paternal embrace, "and wish your good father length of days and three more blessed children."

The father could not say anything, but stretched his hand toward the mother, to round the group of the loving Eden. Victor's sympathetic blood swelled up in his heart, to dissolve it in love, and he thought the silent prayer: "Never may any misfortune, All-gracious One, tear these entwined arms asunder!" But Flamin soon drew himself out of the concatenation, and said to Victor with a most grateful pressure of the hand, "Thou knowest not how I am always wronging thee." The Chaplain thought he should hide his emotion from all by saying: "I wish I had not deceived you. I have let myself be bled, but it was a stupid thing; if I had only known! only known! It is true; there, see for yourselves!" And finding that this mask was not adequate to cover the whole emotion of his soul, he called, in an overloud tone, to the poor forgotten Apollonia, who was rocking at the house door the awakened Bastian, to "come here!" But the poor girl, whose merely distant partic.i.p.ation in the general mingling of hearts touched our Victor's tenderest feelings, shyly hesitated, till the mother came and indemnified her against any loss by all that for which mothers are never repaid. But not until the Parson's wife held her child in her arms and on her lips, did she feel that the imprisoned flames of her affections found vent, and her heart its alleviation.

Ah, that man should receive the fairest love precisely at the time when he does not yet understand it!--alas that not until late in life's year, as he contemplates with a sigh the love of other parents and children, he should say hopefully to himself, "Ah, thus did mine certainly love me too!"--alas that then the bosom to which thou wouldst hasten with thy thanks for half of a life, for a thousand unappreciated anxieties, for an inexpressible, never returning love, is already lying crushed under an old grave, and has lost the warm heart which so long loved thee!...

In domestic happiness the calm, cosey pleasures driven in between four narrow walls are only the most accidental const.i.tuent; its nervous and vital fluid is the blazing fire-fountains of love which spring out of kindred hearts into each other. The involuntary surprise had disconcerted the intentional ones. But the flood of joy had swept all parties together; and they still remained in the same confidential closeness to each other, when it had abated again. They sat down to the entertainment in the summer-house. Seldom are banquets spiced as this one was, by two extraordinary advantages,--want of food and want of room. Nothing whets the appet.i.te so much as the fear of its not finding enough to satisfy it. It had been contrived by Sebastian, that for each guest only his favorite dish should be provided; for the Parson, stuffed crabs and potato cheese; for Flamin, ham; for the Hero, good Harry's beans. But in this case every one wanted another's favorite dish, and set his own up at auction.[81] Even the ladies, who generally eat and do not eat, like fishes, nibbled a little. The second intoxicating ingredient which they had, thrown into their cup of joy, was the table, together with the garden-house, of which the former would not hold the food nor the latter the feeders. Sebastian had betaken himself, with Agatha, to an affiliated table which had been adjoined outside to the window of the banquet-hall, merely for the purpose of screaming in from out there and whining, more than eating.

This caprice was, at bottom, a covered modesty which feared being honored inside at the expense of the other guests, on his Lordship's account. His own solitude--perhaps in a painful sense--pictured to him the shy Appel, who, as vestal of the hearth, ate only the drawback toll of returning dishes, merely to try how they had tasted to others. He could not longer endure the thought of this separation, but took wine and the best of the dessert, and carried it in to her in her kitchen winter quarters. As, in doing so, he displayed upon his face, instead of his gayety towards girls, of which she might have made a too humble interpretation, the greatest seriousness of courtesy; he was so happy as to have given to a soul pinched up by nature itself--with no other flower-pot here to send its roots round in than a cooking-pot, and only the kitchen for its concert-hall and the spit for its music of the spheres--a golden evening and a long memory of pleasure. Let no one maliciously thrust his fist in the way of such a good snail-soul, and laugh to see how she wriggles over it; and let him who stands upright willingly stoop and gently lift her along over her little stone.

As to Clotilda, before dinner things went very well, but after dinner very ill. I speak of Sebastian, who, after the handing in of the pet.i.tion to his Lordship, was happier and more light-hearted, and actually talked as frankly with Clotilda as if she were--a bride. For he had already said in Hanover, that "there was not a more tedious and holy thing than a bride, particularly if it were a friend's; sooner would he fritter away his time about the musty Pandects in Florence, or a holy body in a gla.s.s shrine at Vienna, than about her." In fact, it was hard to fall in love with Clotilda; I know the reader would not have done it, but would have gone coldly away again. "Her Grecian lose under the almost manly breadth of forehead," he would have said, "this sister-nose to all Madonnas and this frontier wild-game[82] so rare on German faces, her still but bright eyes, which seek nothing beyond themselves, this British gravity, this harmonious thoughtful soul, raise her above the rights of love. And even if this majestic form should incline to love, who could ever be so selfish as to pocket the present of a whole heaven, or so proud as to shoot his heart into hers like a smoke-ball, and becloud thereby this still, pensive serenity?"

The reader will be glad to read his own words.

But after dinner things went differently. Under Victor's cerebral membrane, some hobgoblin had so thrown into pi all the letters of his ideas in the inner letter-case, that he was up to this time gay, but unsatisfied. He had tried to tie and untie Agatha's hair, to separate her double-bows into unequal, and for that very reason into equal halves again; but the operation had not pleased him as usual,--to-day's interludes of domestic love had put his mirthful spirit wholly out of joint,--and it seemed to him as if, withdrawn from the present joy, he should be happier, at least for a few minutes, in some quiet corner, and he particularly longed to see the sun set.

Add to all this the sight of Clotilda's increased love towards Agatha,--the sight of his friend, who, by the deepening silence of his tenderness, his mildening voice, and by a devotedness so irresistible in impa.s.sioned natures, commanded every heart, "Love me,"--and, finally, the spectacle of night....

He had already been long sad, when he seemed still gay. Now the mother took the little hero of the forenoon out under the bland evening heaven.

They all stood outside of the garden-tabernacle-of-the-covenant, in the first temple of man's devotion. The evening-blood of the sinking sun flowed into the clouds, as into the sea sinks the blood of its giants dying in its depths. The porous cloud did not avail to hide the heavens; it swam round about the moon, and let her pale silver glisten from amidst the slags.

The red clouds painted the infant. Every one took lightly his soft hands, which had already burst from the bud of pillows and the chrysalis of swaddling-bands. Clotilda--instead of lavishing on the little one carnally coquettish caresses, as many girls do _before_ or _for_ men--poured down a steadily streaming look full of hearty love on the new man, untied his too tight and cutting shirt-sleeve, screened from him the moon at which he was squinting, and said, playfully, "Smile this way and love me, _Sebastian_!" She could not possibly have meant to charge this line with metaphorical _ricochet_-shots; besides, the elder, unswaddled Sebastian knew full well that she could have antic.i.p.ated no double sense; nay, he knew the rule, that the very anxiety wherewith some people banish certain subjects from their talk betrays the presence of the same in their thoughts. And yet, for all that, he had not the courage to smile like the rest, or to take the little hand which she had touched in his. She turned to him, and said, "But how does the child learn _our language, unless it has already a language it can master_?"

... I have, out of mere regard to the philosophers, had this printed in italics.

"Then it follows," he answered, "that the language of pantomime must signify just as much as articulate speech. As often as I see a deaf and dumb man go to sacrament, I think of this,--that all the instruction you can give imports nothing into man, but only indicates and arranges what is already there. The child's soul is its own drawing-master, the teacher is simply its colorist."

"What if this lovely evening," she continued, "should one day come up again to the memory of this little one? Why does the sixth year look more beautiful in remembrance than the twelfth, and the third still more beautiful?" A beautiful woman one cannot interrupt so easily as an ex-Dean; and so she was permitted to recur to this reminiscence: "Herr Emanuel once said, one should relate to children every year the story of their past years, in order that they might one day look back through all their years, even into the haze of the second." It is as if I heard the above-mentioned maid of honor[83] personally speaking, under whose thin lace cap there lay more philosophy than under many a doctor's beaver, as quicksilver sticks in c.r.a.pe, and runs through leather.

Victor answered, with the usual sympathy of his good heart: "Emanuel stands near to man, and knows him. Two scene-painters lead man, beset by magic, through the whole stage,--_Memory_ and _Hope_; in the present he is uncomfortable; enjoyment is poured out for him, as for Gulliver, only into a thousand Liliputian moments; how shall that intoxicate or satisfy? When we picture to ourselves a happy day, we compress it into a single happy thought; when we come upon it, this thought is diluted through: the twenty-four hours."

"I think of that," she replied, "as often as I walk through meadows; in the distance are flowers upon flowers, but, near at hand, they are all scattered apart, and separated by the gra.s.s. But yet, after all, _memory is enjoyed only in the present_."

Victor continued to think only of the flowers, and said, abstractedly, "And in the _night_ the flowers themselves look like gra.s.s,"--when it began suddenly to sprinkle.

They all stepped, in solemn mood, into the summerhouse, on whose roof the rain pattered down, while through the open windows the alternately shutting and opening moon's eye threw in like a glacier its snow-glances,--the tepid blossom-breath of the whole glistening landscape stole with healing balm on every human sigh, every burdened bosom. In this confined circle, separated from nature by the alternation of night and moonshine, one must needs take refuge in something near and familiar, in the old harpsichord. Clotilda's voice might make a flute-accompaniment to the whispering rain without. The Parson's wife begged--her to favor them, and with her favorite _aria_ from Benda's Romeo,--"Perchance, my lost repose! perchance one day in the grave I may find thee!" &c.,--a song whose tones like fine dissolving perfumes penetrate the heart through a thousand entrances, and tremble there, and tremble more and more intensely, till at last they shiver it to atoms, and leave nothing of it behind in the harmonious annihilation but tears.

Clotilda without any hesitating vanity consented to sing. But for Sebastian, in whom all tones came in contact with naked, quivering feelers, and who could work himself into sadness at the very songs of the herdsmen in the fields--this, on such an evening, was too much for his heart; under cover of the general musical attentiveness, he had to steal out of the door....

But here, under the great night-heaven, amidst higher drops, his own can fall unseen. What a night! Here a splendor overwhelms him, which links night and sky and earth all together; magic Nature rushes with streams into his heart, and forcibly enlarges it. Overhead, Luna fills the floating cloud-fleeces with liquid silver, and the soaked silver-wool quivers downward, and glittering pearls trickle over smooth foliage, and are caught in blossoms, and the heavenly field pearls and glimmers. Through this Eden, over which a double snow-shower of sparks and of drops played and whirled through a misty rain of blossom-fragrances, and wherein Clotilda's tones, like angels that had got lost, went flying about, now sinking and now soaring through this magic-maze, Victor staggered, dazzled, overwhelmed, trembling and weeping, and sank down exhausted into the arbor where he had to-day fallen on his father's heart. He thought over the wintry life of that good father amidst mere strangers to the heart, and his solitary, sad celebration of today's festival, and the cold, empty room in the paternal bosom, which once the lost form of the beloved one had inhabited, and he yearned painfully for the heart of his invisible mother. He lifted his leaning head into the rain, and from the large open eyes fell not strange drops alone. He glowed through his whole being, and night-clouds must cool it. His finger-tips hung down, lightly folded in one another. Clotilda's tones dropped now like molten silver-points on his bosom, now they flowed like stray echoes from distant groves into this still garden. He spoke no name, he thought no thought, he neither acquitted himself nor accused himself; he saw it all as in a dream, when now a thick night glided across the garden, and now a sea of light swept after it.

But it seemed to him as if his bosom would burst, as if he should be blest could he at this moment embrace beloved persons, and crush in the closeness of that embrace in a blissful frenzy his bosom and his heart.

It was to him as if he should be over-blessed, could he now before some being, before a mere shadow of the mind, pour out all his blood, his life, his being. It was to him as if he must scream into the midst of Clotilda's tones, and fold his arms around a rock, only to stifle the painful yearning.

He heard the leaves drip, and took it for a continuing rain. But the _Staub-bach_ of the heavens had scattered itself in spray, and only Luna's fall of light any longer besprinkled the landscape. The sky was deep-blue. Agatha had been seeking him during the rain, and had only just found him. He woke up, obediently and silently went out with her, and met only cleared-up heavenly faces,--then all his nerves quivered, and he was compelled with a mute obeisance to take his painful and friendly leave. Each one had his own thoughts on the subject. But the Parson's wife told the company, he loved to hear music at a distance, only it always made him too melancholy.

Ah, when he reached his chamber, a happy and consoling thought embraced his soul. Clotilda's dirge, and all, fixed before his sight the form of the exalted Emanuel,--and it seemed to say: "In a year I shall be already under the ground, only come to me, poor child, I will love thee till I die!" Without desiring a light, he wrote with streaming eyes, which no light could have helped, this letter to Emanuel:--

"EMANUEL!

"Say not to me, I know thee not! How can man, on this little grain of sun-dust called the earth, on which he warms himself, and during the swift moments which he counts off on his pulse between the flash of life and the stroke of death, still make a distinction between acquaintances and non-acquaintances? Why do not these little creatures, who have wounds of the same kind, and for whose coffins Time takes the same measure, fall without hesitation into each other's arms, and sigh, 'Ah, we are doubtless like each other and acquainted!' Why must first these fleshly statues into which our spirits are chained move towards and touch each other, before the beings disguised therein can imagine and love each other? And yet it is so human and so true a thought: what then does Death take from us except fleshly statues, what from our eyes but the loved countenance, what from our ears but the dear voice, and the warm bosom from our own? Ah, Emanuel! be to me no dead man! Accept me! Give me thy heart! I will love it!

"I am not very happy, my Emanuel! When my great teacher, Dah.o.r.e,--that shining Swan of heaven, who, fastened to life by his broken wing-joint, looked up wistfully at other Swans, as they winged their way toward the warmer lat.i.tudes of the second life,--ceased to write to me, he did it in these words: 'Seek my duplicate! Thy breast will continue to bleed, until thou coverest its scar with another, and the earth will agitate thee more and more violently, if thou standest alone,--and only around the solitary do ghosts creep.'

"Emanuel, art thou not tranquil and gentle and indulgent? Does not thy soul yearn to love all men, and is not a single heart too narrow for it to shut itself up therein with its love, as a bee is shut up in a tulip when it folds itself to sleep? Hast thou not had enough of the repeating-work of our merry bells and mourning-bells, and art thou not weary of the family likeness of all evenings and times? Dost thou not look, out from this fleeting earth over the long way above thee, that thou mayst not grow nauseous and giddy, as one for the same reason looks out of a carriage into the road? Believest thou not in men around whom floats the mountain air of a higher position, and who up on their height stand in the midst of a still heaven, and look down into the thunders and rainbows near the earth? Believest thou not in a G.o.d, and seekest thou not his thoughts in the lineaments of nature, and his eternal love in thy breast? If thou art and thinkest all this, then thou art mine; for thou art better than I, and my soul would fain lift itself to a higher friend. Tree of the higher life, I embrace thee, I twine around thee with a thousand faculties and tendrils, that I may mount up out of the trampled mire around me! Ah, a great man might heal, tranquillize, quicken, exalt me,--me, poor creature, only rich in wishes, distracted by the war between my dreams and my senses,--flung sorely to and fro between systems, tears, and follies,--disgusted at the earth, which I cannot replace for myself, laughing merely from anguish at the tearful comedy, the most contradictory, saddest, and merriest shadow among all the shadows in the wide night.... O fair, good soul, love me!

"HORION."

Leaning his head on his hand, he let his tears flow, without thinking or looking, till nature was spent. Then he went to the harpsichord, and sang over to its accompaniment the most pa.s.sionate pa.s.sages of his letter; what strongly moved him always impelled him to singing, especially the emotion of longing. What can it matter to us that it was prose?

At the last line of his epistolary song the door slowly opened.

"Is it thou?" said a voice.

"Ah, come in, Flamin!" he answered.

"I only wanted to see whether you had come back," said Flamin, and went away.

I think it is necessary that I should here insert at least the following, namely, that Victor possessed too much fancy, humor, and thoughtfulness not to give out, when these three strings were violently struck at once, pure dissonances, which, with more harmonious intervals between these faculties,[84] would not have appeared; that he had, therefore, more _leaning_ to enthusiasms and enthusiasts than _disposition_ that way; that his negative-electrical philosophy had always to contend with his positive-electrical enthusiasm for the balance of power, and that from the effervescing of these two spirits came nothing but humor; that he wanted to have all his carnations of joy on the same bed, although one adulterated the colors of the rest (e. g. refinement and enthusiasm, exaltation above the world and familiarity with the tone of the world); that from all this, beside irony and the highest tolerance, must also result a heavy, immovable feeling of the nothingness of our inner moods, so fleeting and sketched with such a contrariety of colors; and that he, whom the bad man regards as two-sided and the well-disposed one as changeable, needs nothing, for the gracing and rounding off of his Adam or Palladium buried up in so much wood, but the scythe of Time. Time then be it.

8. DOG-POST-DAY.

Examinatorium and Dehortatorium of Conscience.--The Studious Honeymoon of a Scholar.--The Cabinet of Natural History.--Answer from Emanuel.--The Packed-up Chin.--Arrival of the Prince.--First Intercalary Day.

I wish the story were done, so that I might get it printed; for I have already too many subscribers to it among the common folk. An author in our days accepts advance payment for his book from the lowest fellow,--the tailor makes his pre-payment in clothes, the hair-dresser in powder, the landlord in rooms.

Every morning Victor gave himself a curtain lecture under the bed-quilt for the evening previous; the bed is a good confessional and audience-hall of conscience. He wished that yesterday's garden-club would take him for a veritable fool instead of a lover. "Ah, if Flamin himself should torment himself with jealousy, and if our hearts, once so long parted, should already come to be so again!" Here the bed-box, from a confessional, grew to be a fiery oven. But an angel laid himself in beside him, and blew away the blaze. "But what, then, have I done?

Have I not with a thousand-fold pleasure spoken, acted, kept silence for his sake? Not a look, not a word, can be charged against me,--what else then?" The angel of light or fire had now to blow terribly against the shooting flame. "What else? Thoughts, perhaps, which however, like field-mice of the soul, leap under the feet, and stick like adders. But could the disciples of Kant impute to me then, that I took the little image of the loveliest and best form, which I hitherto vainly summoned up in the lands of three lords, and threw such a Raphael's head, such an antique of Paradise, out of the window of the _villa_ of my brain, like apple-parings and plum-stones? I should wonder at the Kantians, if they did. And if it must stay there, am I to be an ox, ye Catechists, and coldly glower[85] at it? Not I. Nay, I will trust myself, and demand of the fairest heart even friendship, and yet leave to it its love!" Dear reader, during this whole summary process before the judicial commission of conscience, I have said to myself, over thirty times, "Neither of you, you nor the reader, is a hair more honest with your conscience!"

He drew himself slowly by the bed-cord out of the bed, which he used to quit with a spring; some wheel of his ideas stuck within him. He read his yesterday's letter, and found it too stormy. "That is just our insignificance," said he, "that everything which man holds to be eternal freezes over night; not across our face do the most vehement gales pa.s.s more swift and traceless than across our heart. Why then am I not to-day what I was yesterday, and perhaps shall be to-morrow? What does man gain by this boiling up and down? And what has he then within himself to build upon?"

Meanwhile, the fire-wheel of our earthly time, the sun, had whirled up its revolving streams, and burned on the sh.o.r.e of the earth. He flung.

up the window, and was fain to bathe his naked breast in the fresh morning wind, and his hot eye in the Red Sea of Aurora; but something within him interposed itself like an after-taste between him and the enjoyment of the morning-land. The remorse of conscience for _future_ actions spoils a good man utterly for enjoyment.

There rose slowly within him an overmastering emotion,--the former night pa.s.sed by again before him with its flashing rain, and brought back to him his pa.s.sionate heart and Emanuel's shadow,--he ran more and more vehemently, and in fact transversely, through the chamber,--tied his night-gown tighter, shook something from his eye, gave a perpendicular jump, jerked out a "No!" and said, with an inexpressibly serene smile, "No! I will not cheat my Flamin! I will neither seek nor shun her, nor will I desire her friendship till the time of his highest happiness. As I look upon thee[86] yonder, so will I upon her glorious, heavenly bust, without desiring that it take on warmth, and turn on me its cold plaster eye. But thou, my friend, be happy and all blessed, and never mayst thou once remark my conflict!"

Now, for the first time, did the church-attire of morning gladden him, and the morning air flowed like a cool necklace over his hot bosom, and threw back the playing hair and shirt-frill. He felt that now he was worthy to have written to Emanuel, and to have looked up at the heavens....