Hesperus or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days Volume II Part 16

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

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

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

--Thou, that readest me here, deny not G.o.d, when thou steppest out into the morning or under the starry heavens, or when thou art good or when thou art happy!--

--But, unhappy Emanuel!

Thou beheldest five sporting black b.u.t.terflies, and thoughtest the fair creatures blessed Psyches.--Thou heardest behind thy hill a hewing into the earth, as if men were making a grave.--Thou lookedst upon thy good blind darling, and yet saidst, "Shadow! retire.... Tremble before G.o.d, who just pa.s.sed by, and vanis.h.!.+"--But thou saidst, before that, something else which I to-day do not disclose.--

My heart trembles before the coming line!--

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

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

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

THE SOFT EVENING.

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

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

They came in this way upon the subject of _recognitions_ on the other side of this stage of being. Victor said, he could not decry, as many a philosopher had done, conjectures reaching out beyond the earth; for after all we _must_ guess about what was beyond this world, whether we a.s.serted or denied. "Without the continuance of memory," said he, "the continuance of my conscious self is no more than that of my knowledge of another's, i. e. nothing at all; so soon as I forget my present self, then surely might any other one instead of me be immortal.

Nor does the destruction of my memory follow from its earthly dependence on my body; for this dependence all the spiritual powers have in common with it, and in that case the destruction of the others would follow from this dependence; and what then would be left for immortality?"--Emanuel said: the thought of recognition, however much it presupposed of the sensuous, was so sweet and transporting, that, if men could make themselves _sure_ of it, no one would be willing to tarry here an hour, particularly if one painted out to himself the heavenly thought of finding all great and n.o.ble men at once. "I have often," said he, "pictured out the future recollection after the a.n.a.logy of the present, and always had to leave off for rapture when I thought to myself how in that remembrance the earth would shrink up to a dim morning-meadow, and our life to a far-removed day illumined with moonlight.--Oh, if we now, dissolve at the image even of a few years of childhood, how tenderly will the image of _all_ childish years one day look upon us!"--Victor waived off these deathly raptures, and after saying, by way of transition, "_one_ connection, at all events, this world must have with the second," he came upon something else, which had struck him so much among the incidents of this night....

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What a colored world! A fleecy throng of ethereal forms like his stood hovering over a broad island, about which played a circular bal.u.s.trade of great flowers in full blow,--above, in mid-heaven, over the island, flew evening suns behind evening suns,--farther in, beside them ran white moons,--near the horizon, stars traced their circles--and as often as a sun or a moon flew downward, they gazed with a heavenly look as of angels' eyes through the great flowers along the sh.o.r.e. The suns were divided from the moons by rainbows, and all the stars ran between two rainbows, and embroidered with silver the variegated ring of the heavenly sphere. One above another rose gay clouds, in which burned a kernel of gold, of silver, of precious stones,--from b.u.t.terflies' wings clouds of dust were shed, which like flying colors mantled the ground, and out of the cloud flashed rus.h.i.+ng floods of light, which were all intertwined in one another....

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At last the Angel of the end said softly, _They have died most sweetly of their beloved_.--

And he crushed weeping the little cloud of time.--

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

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

Evening came. Emanuel grew stiller and his eye more rigid, and it seemed to see the fantasies of his busy brain in the apartment, until the gold strip of the far-sinking sun, which a looking-gla.s.s directed towards him, darted like a lightning-flash through his world of dream.

Softly, but with altered voice, he said, "Into the sun!"--They understood him, and moved his bed and his head toward the evening-rain of the setting sun, to which he had of old so often unfolded his susceptible heart. Victor started, when he saw that his eyes stood, undazzled and immovable, open to the sun.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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