Hesperus or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days Volume I Part 15

Suddenly in the east the night grew lighter, because the floating glimmer of the moon darted up on the Alpine ridges that hid the orb, and all at once the unaccountable tones and the leaves and the night-wind grew louder. Then Victor awoke as out of a dream and out of life, and clasped the harmonious, fleeting airs to his languis.h.i.+ng bosom, and, amidst the gus.h.i.+ng tears which, like a rain-cloud, veiled from him the whole landscape, he cried out, beside himself: "Ah, Emanuel, come!--Ah, I thirst for thee--Float no more in sound, thou blessed one; take thy deposed human face, and appear to me, and slay me by a shudder, and keep me in thy arms!" ...

Lo! while the dim tear-drop still stood in his eye, and the moon still lingered behind the Alps, there came up the mountain a white form with closed eyes,--smiling, transfigured, blissful,--turning toward Sirius....

"Emanuel, dost thou appear to me?" cried Horion, trembling, and melted into a new flood of tears. The form opened its eyes,--it spread out its arms. Victor saw not,--heard not; he glowed and trembled. The form flew to meet him, and he gave himself up, saying, "Take me!" They touched each other,--they embraced each other,--the night-wind swept through them,--the strange music sounded nearer,--a star shot down,--the moon flew up over the Alps....

And when with its Eden-light it suffused the cheeks of the unknown apparition, Victor recognized that it was his dear teacher, _Dah.o.r.e_, who had to-day cast his image into the mirror on the island. And Dah.o.r.e said: "Beloved son, dost thou still know thy teacher? I am Emanuel and Dah.o.r.e." Then the embrace grew closer. Horion would fain have compressed his grat.i.tude for a whole childhood into one kiss, and lay dissolved in the arms of the teacher and in the arms of loving ecstasy.

Twine around each other tightly, ye blessed ones; press your full hearts to each other even till you press tears out of them; forget heaven and earth, and prolong the sublime embrace!--Ah! so soon as it is dissolved, then has this frail life henceforward nothing firmer wherewith to knit you together than the beginning of the--second....

At last Emanuel drew himself out of the att.i.tude of love, and, bending aside, gazed like a sun, with large and open look, into Horion's face, and confronted with rapture the enn.o.bled spirit and countenance of his blooming favorite. The latter sank before the look of love involuntarily on his knee, and said, with uplifted face: "O my teacher, my father! O thou angel! dost thou, then, still love me so exceedingly?"--But he wept too much for utterance, and his words were unintelligible, and died in his heart....

Without answering, Emanuel laid his hand on the head of the kneeling pupil, and turned his glorified eye toward the glittering heavens, and said, with solemn voice: "This head, thou Eternal One, dedicates itself now to thee in this great night. Let only thy second world fill this head and this heart, and may the little, dark earth never satisfy them!--O my Horion! here on this mountain, on which, after a year, I go up from the earth, I conjure thee, by the great second world above us, by all the great thoughts wherewith the Eternal at this moment appears in thee,--I conjure thee to be still good, even when I shall have long been dead."

Emanuel knelt down to him, held up the exhausted youth, and bent towards his paling face, and said, in a low and prayerful tone, "My beloved! my beloved! when we both are dead, in the second world may G.o.d never part us,--never part me and thee!"--He wept not, and yet could say no more; their two hearts, knit together, rested on each other, and night veiled silently their mute love and their great thoughts.

14. DOG-POST-DAY.

The Philosophical Arcadia.--Clotilda's Letter.--Victor's Confessions.

I have only two things to explain before going further,--the mysterious music and the shutting of the eyes. The former proceeded from an aeolian harp laid on the weeping-birch. As often as Emanuel came hither by night he let these breathed-out tones intermingle like blossoms with the whispering leaves, in order to exalt himself when he looked alone upon the exalted night. His eyes he often closed before the sun and the moon, whenever his inner man, winged like a cherub, had leave to bury itself in soft fantasies; into the streaming, many-colored waves of light which crowd through the eyelids he would then plunge, as into a zephyr, for a delicious swim, and in this light-bath the higher light-magnet within him drew heavenly light out of earthly light. As there are but few souls that know how far the harmony of outward nature with our own reaches, and in how very great a degree the whole creation is but an aeolian harp, with longer and shorter strings, with slower and swifter vibrations, pa.s.sive before a divine breath,[164]--I demand not that every one should forgive this Emanuel.--

After this finding of each other again, which threw a far gleam over a whole life, the two came home to the blind youth; and his flute carried the heart softly over in dream from the tossings of fevered blood into the tranquil ether of heaven.

As I love so to be about Emanuel, the reader will not begrudge me the pleasure of turning over the leaves of all the hours which we are permitted to spend in his house, and to go along regularly, step by step.

The morning for the first time disclosed to the pupil of Emanuel, as it does to children, what a Christmas present the night had provided for his heart. What a form came before him in the morning-radiance, when the still, childlike, composed face of the teacher, over which storms had once pa.s.sed, as on the soft, white moon volcanoes have flamed, smiled upon him in such wise that his inner being melted into mute bliss! Especially when beheld in _profile_ did this lofty form appear to stand on the brink of earth, and to look down into the _second_ hemisphere of the heavens, which is hid from us by the gravestone and the rich pasture-ground of this life. His countenance was transfigured when he lifted it to heaven, when he named G.o.d or Eternity, when he spoke of the longest day; in its light the leaf-gold of the present paled to the dead-gold of the past, and his spirit hung hovering over the body, as genii bloom out of flowers in arabesques. Never did Victor so easily attune himself, when coming out of a dream, to the new day, as he did this morning with Emanuel's voice, which was, so to speak, the music of the spheres to the blue heaven of his eyes, from which, as from that of Egypt, never a drop fell; from incapacity of the tear-glands, he could never weep; nor did this life any longer agitate his soul.

The pure morning-apartment seemed to make the soul pure and still. He was the greatest bodily Purist; he washed his body quite as often as his clothes; and the uncleanness of medical language, even to the very words,--as, e. g. toothpicks, &c.,--was avoided by his stainless tongue. Even so did his heart remain unsoiled by so much as the images of great sins, and this unconscious innocence, as well as an unacquaintedness with our artful manners, made him, in the eyes of three different cla.s.ses, either a child--or a maiden--or an angel.

The breakfast of fruits and water, which, in fact, made up his whole bill of fare, called up reprovingly before our Victor the wine and coffee-grounds wherewith he had sometimes had to manure, like earthly ones, the flowers of his spirit. Flower-pots were Dah.o.r.e's snuff-boxes, and glowed under the linden-green, which, with two tame, and yet free, ground-sparrows skipping through it, was the live, growing ceiling-piece of the apartment. His soul seemed also, like a Brahmin, to live on poetical flowers, and his speech was often, like his manners, Indian,--i. e. poetic. So was there throughout, as with divers magnates of men, a striking pre-established harmony between outward nature and his heart; he readily found in the corporeal the physiognomy of the spiritual, and _vice versa_; he said matter, considered as thought, was just as n.o.ble and spiritual as any other thought, and that we represented to ourselves in it, after all, only the Divine conceptions of it. For example, during breakfast he lost himself in the glimmering dew-drop on a stock-gillyflower, and, by moving his eye to and fro, played through the gamut of its harpsichord of colors. "There must," said he, "be some harmony or other of accordant sounds between this minute particle of water and my spirit, as between virtue and me, because otherwise neither could so ravish me. And is, then, this accord which man makes with the whole creation (only in different octaves) a mere play of the Eternal, and no resonance of a nearer, greater harmony?" In the same way he would often gaze at a glimmering coal, till in his eyes it had expanded to a flaming meadow, on which, illumined by tender fancies, he roamed up and down....

Have patience, reader, with this flowery soul; we will both think that men can more easily have one religion than one philosophy, and that every system presupposes its peculiar weaving in the heart, and that the heart is the bud of the head.

The only circ.u.mstance that pained the blessed Victor this morning was, that he could not embrace the fair blind youth, and ask, "Have we not already once lived together, and is not my voice as familiar to thee as thine is to me?" For he looked upon him (as I do too), for several reasons, as the concealed son of Pastor Eymann. But as Dah.o.r.e kept silent on the subject,--into whose clear, bright heaven one could otherwise look down even to the least nebulous star,--he feared before these holy ears he should be speaking too near to the verge of his oath of silence, though he should only disclose his inquiring conjectures about the blind one. This Julius seemed to have only two root-fibres in his nature, of which the one went to his flute, and the other to his teacher. On his white face, whereon the rapture of the musical genius and the abstractedness of the blind dreamer were blended with an almost womanly beauty, lay the reflection of his teacher, and its fibres had, like lute-strings, stirred only to harmonious movements. The poor blind one, who looked upon his Dah.o.r.e as his father, was turned about, like down, by his lightest breath. Victor often drew the head of the dear blind one close to his face, in order to inspect the disordered eyes, and judge whether they might be restored. But though he saw with pain that the unhappy one must remain incurable on the full, radiant earth, nevertheless he kept on repeating his minute investigation, merely for the sake of having the dear, enchanting form nearer to his eye and his soul.

In the morning Emanuel, as cicerone of Nature, led his guest through the ruins and antiques of the earth: for every tree is an eternal antique. How different is a walk with a religious[165] man from one with a vulgar, worldly soul! The earth appeared to him holy, just fallen from the hands of the Creator; it was to him as if he were walking in a planet hanging over us and clothed with flowers. Emanuel showed him G.o.d and love everywhere mirrored, but everywhere transformed,--in the light, in--colors, in the scale of living creatures, in the blossom and in human beauty, in the pleasures of animals, in the thoughts of men and in the circles of worlds; for either everything or nothing is his shadow. So the sun paints its image on all creatures,--great in the ocean, many-colored in the dew-drop, small on the human retina, as mock-sun on the cloud, red on the apple, silvery on the stream, seven-colored in the falling rain, and gleaming over the whole moon and over all its other worlds.

Victor felt to-day, for the first time, the enlargement and transfiguration of his conscious being before a spirit which, _like_ his, but _excelling_ his, like a spherical concave mirror reflected all the features of his n.o.bler part in colossal size. The whole vulgar portion of his nature crept away when the higher, painted by Dah.o.r.e on a large scale, erected itself above the low impulses. A man whom the perihelion of a great man does not set on fire and beside himself is nothing worth. He was hardly willing to speak, so that he might only hear _him_ all the time, although he had it in mind to stay here a good many days. As before a higher being and before the woman of his love, in whose presence one will neither show his head nor his tongue, so had he, renouncing self, sunk into pure truth and love. All the varnish of the little relations of place and citizenly respectability had cracked so clean off, and they all stood before him there so moss-grown, that he would not so much as name the names of Gottingen, of Flachsenfingen, or empty incidents of life, or strange personalities. In fact, Victor had a slight contempt for men who care more for the directions to the bookbinder than for the book, and more for the review of an author than for his system, and to whom the earth is no deciphering chancery of the book of nature, but a parlor (a talking-room), a news-office of wretched personalities, which they care neither to profit by, nor to retain, nor to estimate, but merely to tell; and he was disgusted with the German societies, in which there is so little philosophizing.--Oh, how blest he was, for once to think a whole day in company with another, and, what is still finer, to be permitted to poetize with him!

His doubts upon the greatest matters which can weigh down our minds and lift up our hearts grew to-day to questions; the questions, to hopes; the hopes, to presentiments. There are truths of which one hopes that great men will be more strongly convinced than one can be one's self; and one will therefore by their conviction confirm and complete his own. Dah.o.r.e held the two great truths (G.o.d and immortality) which, like two pillars, bear up the universe, firmly to his heart; but, like the rarer men to whom the truth is not merely the _shew-bread_ of vanity and the dessert of the head, but a _holy supper_ and _love-feast_ full of the _spirit of life_ for their weary heart, he cared little, if he could make no proselytes. Victor felt that _he_ understood handling the artillery-train and the electric pistols and batteries of the art of disputation better than Emanuel; he would have abhorred his own tongue if he had directed its readiness against this fair soul. He was silent for two reasons. "Undertake," said he, "to give a molten image, an altar-piece, of a great, s.h.i.+ning truth that embraces thy whole being,--to do this on the flying second-hand whereon one stands in transient conversation, with the few dry paints wherewith human ideas are to be colored, and with the clumsy human tongue wherewith you must daub on these grains of color,--I tell you, a _silhouette_, a transparent asterism, will be all you can produce." The light heaven of certain simple-hearted men of deep feeling veils, like the outer one, all its suns, except the warmest, under the sheen of a void blue; but the unclean heaven of others full of wit and logic is bedizened with _mock-suns_, bows, northern lights, clouds, and redness.

The second, better reason why he scorned the honor of opposition was his heart, which contained in itself more than the head could throw light upon. Certain views cannot be detached so easily as wall-pictures in Italy, and transferred from one head into another. The _light_ which another can give thee _shows_, but _constructs_ not, the house-furniture of thy interior, and what the light really _creates_ with some is meteorological appearance, optical illusion, but no substance.[166]--Hence all turns not upon the showing and seeing of a truth, i. e. of an object, but upon the effects which it works through thy whole inner being. For how is it that there are men who, as Socrates did Aristides, make us better merely by our being with them?--How do great authors bring it about, that their invisible spirit in their works seizes and holds us fast, without our being able to quote the words and pa.s.sages whereby they do it, as a thickly leaved forest always murmurs, though not a single branch stirs?--Why did Emanuel overmaster his beloved Horion--more than by broad thesis-formulas, _rationes decidendi_ and _sententiae magistrales_--merely by the transfiguration in his countenance, by the low echo-tone of his voice, by the radiance of his look, and by the devotion in his breast, when he spoke solemnly truths which were old to speech and new to the heart, like the following?--

Man goes, like the earth, from _west_ to _east_; but it seems to him as if he went, with it, from east to west, from life to the grave.

What is highest and n.o.blest in man conceals itself, and is without use for the practical world, (as the highest mountains bear no herbage,) and out of the chain of fine _thoughts_ only some members can be detached as actions.[167]

Our aimless activity, our clutchings at the air, must appear to higher beings like the clutching of dying men at the bed-clothes.

The spirit awakes and will awake when the light of the senses goes out, just as sleepers awake when the night-light is extinguished.

Why did these thoughts linger like things of awe in the soul?--Because Horion felt something higher than language, which is invented only for every-day sensations, can ever represent; because, even in his childhood, he hated systems which thrust out of sight all that is inexplicable; and because the human spirit feels itself as much oppressed in the explicable and finite as it is in a mine, or in the thought of the heavenly s.p.a.ce overhead being somewhere or other boarded up.

How should he have had the heart or the occasion on such a day to ask Emanuel about his dying-day, or about Clotilda? Victor had that poetry of fellow-feeling which easily puts itself into the place of the most unlike persons, of women and philosophers. In the evening Dah.o.r.e went to the abbey to teach astronomy, his most beloved science. During the astronomical school-hour the open face of Julius became an open heaven; he told his Victor everything, as if he were a second father. Now he related to him frankly that the year before an angel had again and again come to him, who grasped his hand, gave him flowers, spoke to him kindly, and at last vanished from him into heaven, but had left him a letter, which he was permitted to have read to him a year after, at Whitsuntide, by Clotilda,--yes, and that this good angel had yesterday flown by him with a kiss. Victor smiled with delight, but concealed his conjecture that _he_ looked upon the angel to be a shy, loving maiden from the boarding-school.--"But yesterday," said Victor, "I only was the angel that kissed thee _thus_!" and repeated it. Julius knew no fairer gift to make to those he loved than the picture of his father,--the portraiture of his exalted love, which forgot no human being, because it was based, not upon the superiorities, but upon the necessities, of men,--further, of his indulgence, of his disinterestedness, since a long virtue spared him the battle against his heart, and now he did nothing but what he wished to, and since the next world, hanging low down before him, preached a peculiar independence upon necessities. Five hundred thousand fixed stars of the first magnitude, according to Lambert, hardly give a light equal to that of the nearer full moon,--and so the present always outs.h.i.+nes our inner world; but soar nearer to the fixed star of the next world, then does it grow to a sun, which transforms the moon of time and of the present into a petty nebula.--As to this Emanuel, all Maienthalers loved him (even the Parson, although he was a non-Catholic, non-Lutheran, and non-Calvinist); and he loved to be dependent on something, on others' love.[168]--During this description Victor yearned for him again with as much emotion as if they had been separated a year; accordingly, in the flush of evening he laid himself down under the birch-leaves opposite the school, in order immediately, with ardent arms, to take him prisoner.

And as Victor lifted his soul on the tall, white columns of the park planned by his Lords.h.i.+p, on the sublime sculpture which wrote out a great thought that looked like a tempest, and just as he had carried a bee that had dropped down, his wings being glued up with honey, to the beehive sill,--just then Dah.o.r.e, with a friendly manner, came up. The latter entered, himself,--for Victor would have held the covert starting of a subject as a sin,--on that of Clotilda, and said this used to be her favorite spot, and the resting-bench of her quiet soul.

The place was not grand, but, what is more, it was opposite to something grand (even physical greatness, e. g. a mountain, needs distance as a pedestal); it lay in the deepest part of the dell, encircled with Emanuel's flower-chains, which he often laid out without enclosure, because all Maienthalers respected his little joys,--breathed upon by great clover-fields,--overspread by the moon, which in spring, only after reaching the mountain-top, beamed down this deep valley with a mournful medley of birch-shadows, water-glistenings, and bright spots,--and, finally, adorned with a gra.s.sy bench, which I should not have mentioned had it not been planted at both ends with great, drooping flowers, which, with a tender feeling, no one crushed who sat down between them. How was Victor surprised or enraptured when Emanuel asked about this Clotilda! Like jewels of dew, like tears of joy, all the words of his teacher fell into his languis.h.i.+ng heart, because they were eulogies upon her tender soul, which leads its own tears only into those of _others_, and hides them before dry hearts; upon her fine ambition, which men's criticism misconstrues into _coldness_ and women's into _pride_; and on her warmth of love, which one would not have looked for in a heart like hers, fast closed as a bud, which now confounds inanimate with animated nature, in order by the former to learn to love the latter. It touched Victor even to tears when Emanuel so warmly praised his pupil, now withdrawn from this Eden; and when he actually went on to beg, in all simplicity, that he would be the friend of _his_ friend, and now especially because he was going to die, and because she would never come back again,--for she had been here the last time merely for the purpose--on Whitsuntide, where her parents could not smile at it--of publicly taking the sacrament with the boarding-school girls,--that he would now take _his_ place towards this starward-soaring eye, this heart aspiring to eternity,--then could he have fallen at the feet of his friend and _his_ maiden friend for emotion and love.... From such lips praise bestowed upon its object always gives to love an extraordinary growth, because that sentiment always seems a pretext,[169] and ripens at once, so soon as it has found it.

If thy heart, my friend, does not beat quickly and intensely enough for another's,--although, in my opinion, it already pulsates at the fever-point, namely, a hundred and eleven times in a minute,--then just go, in order to transform thy cold fever into a warm one, thy quartan ague into a quotidian, to other particularly respected people, and let them praise her, the good soul, or only name her often before thee,--mortally sick, and provided with thy good hundred and forty pulsations to the minute, thou wilt go thy way, and have the desired fever.

The innocent Emanuel, who did not guess Victor's warmth, thought he must do still more by way of giving him the sevenfold consecration as priest of friends.h.i.+p for Clotilda, and gave him a--letter from her.

_Thou_ couldst do it, East Indian, since thou art here a child that has been made into an angel in the _limbus infantum_ (the children's heaven), since thou hast no mysteries, excepting the mystery of the three children (hence his Lords.h.i.+p did not make thee the reader of his letters), and since thou dost not at all dream that the giving away of another's letter is anything wrong. Still thy scholar should not have read it.

But he did read it. He cannot defend himself by anything except by my reader, who here holds in his hand this very same letter of another who never wrote it for him, and nevertheless reads it through word for word in his chair. I, for my part, read nothing, but only copy off what the dog brings me.--It is a beautiful coincidence that this letter should have been written by her on that very same raining, melodious night of the garden-feast when he wrote his first to Emanuel.

"St. Luna, May 4, 179*.

"You will not, perhaps, expect any excuse from me, revered teacher, that, when I have hardly left Maienthal, I come back in the form of a letter. In fact, I meant to write it even while on the road, then the second day, and finally yesterday. This Maienthal will spoil for me many other valleys; all music will sound to me like an Alpine horn, making me sad, and bringing to my heart the remembrance of the Alpine life under the weeping-birch tree.

"In this mood I should not have been able to deny my heart the pleasure of opening itself and pouring itself out before yours in the warmest thanks for the most beautiful and instructive days of my life, had I not formed the resolve after some days to be in Maienthal again; after my second return home, my heart must have its will, and way.

"In our house I found nothing changed,[170] nor anything in our neighbor's; and I found in all souls the same old love with which we had parted from each other,--only my Agatha, to be sure, is merry, but yet less so than she used to be. The only change in Herr Eymann's house is a guest whom every one calls by a different name,--Victor, Horion, Sebastian, young Lord, Doctor. This last name he fully deserves by his first action and first joy in St. Luna, which was the healing of the blind Lord Horion. What a piece of happiness for the saved and for his saviour!--May this youth one day only pa.s.s through your Eden, and meet with your good Julius, so as to repeat upon him the beautiful art--Oh!

as often as I think upon it, that the male s.e.x is blest with the means of the greatest, G.o.dlike benefactions,--that they, like a G.o.d, can distribute eyes, life, justice, science,--whereas my s.e.x must confine its heart, so yearning to do good, to lesser services,--to the drying away of a tear for another, to the concealing of its own, to the exercise of a secret patience with happy and unhappy;--then the wish rises, O that that s.e.x which has the highest benefits in its hands would vouchsafe to us the greatest,--that of imitating itself, and getting into our hands good things which should bless us by our distribution of them!---At present, a woman can have nothing in her soul to make her great, except only wishes.

"I have just come in out of the open air from a little garden-feast at my Agatha's; and never is any fair bit of deep-blue sky exactly right to me, if it does not stand over your weeping-birch, where your eye counts up all its treasures and suns, and shows my heart all the tokens of Infinite Power and Love. To-day, in the garden, I thought with almost too sad a longing on your Maienthal; Herr Sebastian reminded me of it still oftener, because he seems to have had a teacher who resembled mine.[171] He talked very well to-day, and seemed to be made up of two halves,--a British and a French. Some of his fine observations have not gone from me,--e. g., 'Sorrows are like thunder-clouds: in the distance they look black, over our heads hardly gray.--As sad dreams betoken a glad future, so may it be with the so-often-tormenting dream of life when it is over.--All our strong feelings, like ghosts, hold sway only up to a certain hour; and if a man would always say to himself, This pa.s.sion, this grief, this rapture, will in three days certainly be gone from this soul,--then would he become more and more tranquil and composed.' I report all this to you so exactly, in order, as it were, to punish myself for a too hasty judgment which I pa.s.sed some days since (though within myself) on his propensity to satire.--Satire, also, seems to be merely for the stronger s.e.x; I have never yet found one of my own who had found in the works of Swift or Cervantes or Tristram anything to her taste.--

"_Two days later_.--I and my letter are still here; but to-day it starts four days in advance of me. I cannot help thinking, This last time every flower in Maienthal, and every word my best teacher says to me, will give me still greater and deeper joy than ever, because I journey thither right from the turmoil of visiting, and with such a melancholy heart. The morning after that lovely night of the church-going festival I sat alone in an arbor near the great pond, and made myself sadder with all that I saw and thought; for during that whole morning, by reason of a dream I had had, my faded friend[172]

stood before my soul,--her grave lay transparent above her, and I looked down through it, and saw that lily of heaven lying within there pale and still,--I reflected, indeed, as the gardener buried flowers with their pots in the earth, that the body in which we are planted must, in like manner, go down into the earth for future blooming, but, nevertheless, I could no longer control my tears.--In vain did I look upon the sparkling spring, which draws every day new colors, new insects, new flowers out of the earth,--I only grew sadder, since it rejuvenates everything, but not man.[173]--And when I saw Herr von Schleunes with a frog-bow approaching the pond, I was obliged, as he could see my eyes at a great distance as he pa.s.sed by, to make believe asleep, in order not to betray them.... But before my dearest teacher I would have opened them as now, because he forgives me my weaknesses.

"CLOTILDA v. L. B."

Victor had kept his left hand, with which he held the letter, too near to his heart, and his arm and letter began to tremble with the thumping heart, and he could hardly read and comprehend it for emotion. "Such a teacher! such a pupil!"--beyond that his looks could say nothing more.

There was a struggle within him whether he should tell his friend his love for Clotilda. In _favor_ of the confession was Emanuel's request to seek her society,--that eye of his beholding, as if out of fixed stars, all trifles of earth,--Victor's grateful desire to repay one secret with another, and, most of all, oh! this love for his teacher, this love of his teacher for him.... And this, too, conquered, however much there was otherwise to be said _per contra_. For if Victor's whole nature glowed in the fire of friends.h.i.+p, so did his heart mount higher and higher, and burn to lay itself open,--he still wrestled with it, and still it was silent,--it loved boundlessly,--it lifted itself up as if by an invisible power,--at last it burst asunder,--his bosom opened wide as before G.o.d,--and now, beloved, look in, but forgive him all!

He was still in this inward conflict, when the moon, which had gone up behind their backs, projected their two shadowy knee-pieces before them.--He was reminded, by Emanuel's outstretched shadow, of a pa.s.sage in his letter,[174] and of his sickly life and early pa.s.sing away....

This clove open his inner being; he gently turned his Emanuel round toward the moon, now pouring down its radiance, and told him and showed him everything,--not merely his love, however, but his whole history, his whole soul, all his faults, all his follies,--everything; he was, at this moment, as eloquent as an angel, and full as great; his heart undulated in the melting glow of love; and the more he said, the more he wanted to have to say.

No sublimer and more blessed hour strikes on this earth than that in which a man erects himself, exalted by virtue, softened by love, and despises all dangers, and shows a friend how it is with his heart. This trembling, this dissolving, this exaltation, is more precious than the itching of vanity to disguise itself in idle refinings. But perfect sincerity comports only with virtue. Let the man in whom suspicion and darkness dwell by all means apply to his bosom night-screws and night-bolts,--let the bad man spare us his opening of coffins,--and whoso has no heaven's door about him to open, let him keep the h.e.l.l-gate shut!

Emanuel felt the divine or motherly joy which a friend experiences at the virtue and improvement of a friend, and forgot in his joy the different occasions of it.