Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces; / or, the Wedded Life, Death, and Marriage of Firmian Stanislaus Siebenkaes, Parish Advocate in the Burgh of Kuhschnappel.

by Jean Paul

END OF LEIBGEBER’S TABLE-TALK.

In the afternoon they paid a visit to that verdant, pleasure place, the Hermitage, and the alley leading thither seemed to their happy hearts to be a path cut through some beauteous grove of gladness. That young bird of passage, Spring, was encamped all over the plain around, her unladen floral treasures scattered about the meadows, and floating down the streams, while the birds were drawn up into air upon long sunbeams, and the world of winged creatures hovered all about in intoxication of bliss amid the exquisite scents shed abroad by kind Nature.

Leibgeber determined to pour out his heart and his secret at the Hermitage that day, and (by way of preliminary) a bottle of wine or so to begin with.

He begged and constrained Siebenkæs first of all to deliver a diary-lecture concerning his adventures by land and by water up to the present time. Firmian complied, but with discretion. Over his stomach’s barren year, over his hard times, over the (metaphorical) winter of his life (upon whose snow he had had to make his nest, icebird-like), and over all the bitter northerly wind, which drives a man to BURY himself in the earth (as soldiers do)—over all these he passed lightly and quickly. I myself must approve of him for so doing; firstly, because a man would be none who should shed a bigger tear over wounds of poverty than a young lady drops at the piercing of her ears, for in both cases the wounds become points of suspension for jewels; secondly, because Siebenkæs would not cause his friend the slightest pain on the score of their change of names, the main source of all his hunger-springs. However, his friend knew, and sympathised with him sufficiently to consider that his pale, faded face and his sunken eyes constituted a sufficient almanac month-emblem of his frost-month or winter-picture of the snowed-up tracts of his life-road.

But when Siebenkæs came to speak of the deep and secret wounds of his soul, it was all he could do to keep back the drops of blood-water which pressed to his eyes; I mean the subject of Lenette’s hatred and love. But while he drew a very indulgent picture of her little love for him, and her great love for Stiefel, he used much brighter colours for the historical piece which he painted of her admirable behaviour to the Venner, and of that gentleman’s wickedness in general.

“As soon as you have done,” said Leibgeber, “you must allow yourself to be informed that women are not fallen angels, but FALLING ones. By all the heavens! while we stand patient, like sheep being shorn, they stick the shears oftener into our skins than into our wool. I should think of the fair sex if I were to cross the bridge of St. Angelo at Rome, for there are twelve statues of angels there, holding the implements of the Passion, each a different one; one has the nails, another the reed, another the dice, and similarly each woman has a peculiar torture-instrument of her own to apply to us poor lambs. Whom, think you, for instance now, is the Palladium of yesterday, your unknown beauty, going to tether to her bed-post with the nose-ring of a wedding-ring? But I must tell you about her. She is altogether glorious: she is poetic; full of romantic, enthusiastic admiration for the British, and for intellectual people in general (consequently for me), and lives with an aristocratic English lady, a sort of companion to Lady Craven and the Margrave at Fantaisie yonder. She has nothing, and accepts nothing; is poor and proud, daring to rashness, and pure as the day; and she signs herself ‘Nathalie Aquiliana.’ Do you know who’s going to be her husband? A horrible, burnt-out, used-up wretch—a feeble, puny creature, whose egg-shell was chipped a week or two before its time, and who now goes cheeping about our toes like a chicken with the pip; a fellow who copies Heliogabalus (who put on a new ring every day) in the matter of wedding-rings; a hop-o’-my-thumb whom I could sneeze over the North Pole (and I should like very much to do it), and whom I have the less need to give you any description of, inasmuch as you have just given me one of him yourself: when I tell you his name, you will see that you know him pretty well. This magnificent creature is going to be married to the Venner Rosa von Meyern!”

Firmian fell, not from the clouds, but right into them. To make a long tale short, this Nathalie is the Heimlicher’s niece, of whom Leibgeber wrote some account in our first volume. “But, listen,” continued Leibgeber, “I will let myself be hewn and hacked into crumbs smaller than those of Poland—into clippings not big enough to cover a Hebrew vowel—if this affair comes to anything; for I am going to put a stop to it.”

Since Leibgeber (as we know) was in the habit of talking to the lady every day (his spotless soul and his bold mind having unspeakable attractions for her), all he had to do in order to break the marriage off, was simply to repeat to her what Siebenkæs had told him concerning her bridegroom elect. It was his intimacy with her, and his resemblance to Siebenkæs which had led to her mistaking Firmian for him on the evening of his arrival.

The majority of my readers will urge against me and Leibgeber the same objection which Siebenkæs brought forward—that, Nathalie’s love and marriage for money were quite out of harmony with her character, and her disregard for riches. But, in one word, all she had ever as yet seen of that gaudy flycatcher, Mr. Rosa, was his Esau’s hand, that, is to say, his writing, i. e. his Jacob’s voice; he had only written her a few irreprehensible, sentimental letters of assurance (pin-papers, stuck full of Cupid’s darts and stitching-needles), and so given guarantee of the documentary nobility of his heart.... The Heimlicher, moreover, had written to his niece, saying, on St. Pancrasius’ day (May 12th, that is in four days’ time), the Venner would come and present himself, and if she refused him, let her never call herself his niece again, and starve in her native village for all he cared.

But, speaking as a man of honour, I really have never had above three of Rosa’s letters in my hands for two or three minutes, and in my pocket for about an hour; and they were really not so very bad—far more moral than their author.

Just as Leibgeber said he would assume the office of consistory, and divorce Nathalie from Rosa before their marriage, she came driving up, with one or two lady friends, and got out of the carriage; but instead of going with them to where the company were assembling, she went away alone, by a solitary side walk, to the so-called Temple. In her haste she had not noticed her friend Leibgeber sitting opposite the stables. I ought to explain here that when the Bayreuthians go to the Hermitage they have been in the habit, ever since the days of the Margrave, of sitting in a little wood, all breezes and cool shade, in front of the extensive farm-buildings and stables, but having the loveliest of prospects just at their backs, which they could easily substitute for the blank wall upon which they feast their gaze, by merely getting up and going a little way out of the wood on either side.

Leibgeber told Siebenkæs he could take him to her in a moment, as she would be sure to sit down in the temple (as she usually did) to enjoy the enchanting view of the city towers and the hills, as they lay in the light of the evening sun beyond the shrubberies. He added that, unfortunately, she cared too little about appearances; and would go to the summer-house all by herself, greatly to the distress of the English lady, who, after the manner of her countrywomen, didn’t like going anywhere alone, and wouldn’t trust herself to go near even a gentleman’s clothes cupboard without an Insurance Company and Bible Society of women with her to protect her. He said he had it on good authority that a British lady never permitted the idea of a man to enter her head without at once surrounding it with the number of ideas of women, necessary to bridle and restrain him, should he begin behaving (in the four chambers of her brain) with that amount of freedom which he might employ if at home there.

They found Nathalie in the open temple, with some papers in her hand. “I bring you our author of the ‘Selections from the Devil’s Papers,’” said Leibgeber, “which I see you are just reading; will you allow me to introduce him to you?” After a passing blush at having mistaken Siebenkæs for Leibgeber, in Fantaisie, she said to him, very kindly and pleasantly, “It would take very little to make me mistake you for your friend again, Mr. Siebenkæs; and you seem almost exactly alike in mind, as well as in body. Your satire is often exactly like his; it is only your graver ‘Appendices’ which I was just reading, and which I like very much, that seem to me as if they hadn’t been written by him.”

I have not at present time to make—(for Leibgeber’s unauthorized communication to one friend of the papers of another)—excuses occupying long pages of print to readers who may insist upon extreme delicacy in matters of this description. Suffice it to say that Leibgeber took it for granted that every one who liked him would join with him in liking his friends, and that Siebenkæs (and even Nathalie) would see nothing in his unhesitatingly communicating these papers, but a mere passing on of a friendly circular letter, pre-supposing, as he did, the existence between them of a triple elective affinity.

Nathalie scanned the pair—particularly Leibgeber, whose big dog she was stroking—with a kindly and observant look of comparison, as if she were trying to find out dissimilarities between them; for, in fact, Siebenkæs seemed to her to be scarcely as like his friend as she had thought. He was taller and slighter, and younger in the face; but this was because Leibgeber, whose shoulders and chest were more strongly built, bent his strange, earnest face more forward when he talked, as if he were speaking into the earth. He himself said he never had looked really young, not even at his baptism—as his baptismal certificate would prove—and wasn’t likely to grow much younger now till he arrived at his second childhood. But when Leibgeber straightened his back somewhat, and Siebenkæs bent his a little, they looked very much like one another; however, this is more a hint for the drawer-up of their passports than anything else.

Let us felicitate the Kuhschnappel lawyer on this opportunity of enjoying a few minutes’ conversation with a lady of position, and of such many-sided cultivation as even to be capable of appreciating satires. All he wished was that a phœnix of this sort—such as, hitherto, he had only seen a pinch or so of the ashes of in actual life, or a phœnix-feather or two preserved in a book—might not take wing and disappear instanter; but that he might be lucky enough to listen to a long talk between her and Leibgeber, as well as help to spin it out himself. But suddenly her Bayreuth friends came hurrying up to say that the fountains were just going to play, and there wasn’t a moment to be lost. The whole party, therefore, went towards the waterworks, Siebenkæs’ whole care being to keep as close as he could to the noblest of the spectatresses.

They stood by the basin, and looked at the beautiful water artifices, which, no doubt, have long since played before the reader, either on the spot, or in the pages of the various writers of travels, who have expressed themselves on the subject of them at sufficient length, and in adequate terms of laudation. All kinds of mythologic demigod-ical demibeasts spouted forth streams; and from out this world, peopled with water-gods, there spouted a crystal forest, whose descending branches, liana-like, took root again in the earth. They enjoyed for a long while the sight of this talkative, intercommingling water-world. At length the fluttering, ever-growing water-forms sank down and died; the transparent lily-stems grew shorter and shorter, as they watched them. “Why is it, I wonder?” said Nathalie to Siebenkæs, “that a waterfall lifts up one’s heart; but this dying-down of these springing jets, this visible sinking away of these grand streaming beams of water, always makes me sad and anxious? We never see any such falling in of high things in real life.”

Siebenkæs was thinking out the apt and comprehensive reply to this true and just expression of Nathalie’s feeling, when all at once she jumped into the water to rescue, with as little delay as possible, a child who had fallen in, a few steps away from her; for the water was there about waist-deep. Before the men who were present had so much as thought about it, she had done it; and she was right, for in this case rapidity without reflection was the good and true thing. She lifted the child out, and gave it to the women; but Siebenkæs and Leibgeber took her hands, and lightly raised the fiery creature (all blushes, of body and of soul) on to the bank. “What does it matter?” she said, with a smile, to the alarmed Siebenkæs, “I shall be none the worse,” and hurried away with her friends (who were all shocked into speechlessness), having first begged Leibgeber to come next evening, with his friend, to Fantaisie. “That of course I shall do,” he said; “but first of all, I am coming to see you by myself early in the morning.”

The crying need of our two friends was now to be alone with one another. Leibgeber, under the new excitement, could scarce wait to attain the birch wood, where he meant to continue their previous conversation regarding Siebenkæs’ domestic and conjugal affairs. With respect to Nathalie, he briefly pointed out to his astonished friend that what so much delighted him in her was just the unhesitating, downright straightforwardness which marked all her thoughts and actions, and her manly cheerfulness, athwart which the world, and poverty, and chances and accidents of every kind merely passed floating away, like light, shining summer clouds, never darkening her day. “Now as regards you and your Lenette,” he went on (when they reached the solitude of the little wood), as quietly as if he had been talking continuously up to that instant, “if I were in your place, I should take an alterative, and get rid of the hard gall-stone of matrimony for good and all. You will never really be able to bear the pain of the bonds of wedlock, though you scrape and scratch away at them for years to come with all your finest hair-saws and bone-saws. The Divorce Court will give one grand cut and tear—and there you are, free of one another for ever and ever.”

The idea of a divorce terrified Siebenkæs, although he saw very clearly that it was the only possible breaking-point for the storm-clouds of his life. He was far from grudging to Lenette either her freedom, or the marriage with Stiefel, which would infallibly result; but he felt quite sure that, however much she might wish for it, she never would consent to an enforced separation, on account of her strong regard for appearances,—also that on their road to this parting both she and he would have to pass many a bitter hour of heart-strain and nerve-fever,—and that they could hardly afford to pay for a betrothal, much less for a divorce.

It was likewise an accessory circumstance, that it was more than he could bear to think of the sight of the poor innocent soul, who had shivered at his side through so many a cold storm of life, going away for ever from his home, and from his arms—ay, and with that handkerchief in her hand, too!

All these considerations, with many stronger, and many weaker, he laid before his friend, finishing up with this final one: “I assure you, moreover, that if she went away from me, tag and baggage, and left me by myself in that empty room (as in a grave), and in all the blank, cleared-out spaces, where, when all’s said and done, we have sat together through so many kindly happy hours, and seen the flowers growing green about us—she never could pass by my window (while she bore my name, at all events, though no longer mine), but something within me would bid me throw myself down, and dash myself in pieces at her feet. Would it not be ten times better,” he continued in an altered tone, “to wait till I fall down upstairs in the room (or what does my giddiness mean), and be taken out of the window, and out of the world, in a better fashion? Friend Death would take his long erasing knife, and scrape my name (and other blots into the bargain) out of her marriage-lines.”

Contrary to all expectation, this seemed to make Leibgeber merrier and livelier than ever. “Do so!” he said; “it’s the very thing! Die by all means! The funeral expenses can’t possibly come to anything approaching the costs of the other kind of separation; and besides, you belong to the Burial Society.” Siebenkæs stared at him in astonishment.

He went on in a tone of the utmost indifference: “Only I must tell you it will do neither of us much good, if you dawdle a long time at your saddling and bridling, and take a year or two about your dying. I should think it much more to the purpose were you to be off to Kuhschnappel as soon as ever you can, take to your sick-bed and death-bed directly you get there; and die as quickly as ever you can manage it. And I’ll give you my reasons. For one thing your Lenette’s year of mourning would be out just before Advent, so that she would require no dispensation, if she wanted to marry Peltzstiefel before Christmas. It would suit me very well, too, for I could then disappear in the crowd, and I shouldn’t see you again for some considerable time to come. Besides, it is anything but a matter of indifference to yourself, for of course the sooner you’re appointed Inspector the better.”

“This is the very first of your jokes, dear old Henry,” said Siebenkæs, “of which I don’t understand one single word.”

Leibgeber, with a disturbed countenance, whereon a whole history of the world was legible, and which indicated, as well as gave rise to, the greatest possible anticipation of something of immense importance to come, pulled a letter from his pocket and handed it to Siebenkæs in silence. It was a letter of appointment by the Count von Vaduz, constituting Leibgeber Inspector of the Chief Bailiwick of Vaduz. He next handed him a letter in the count’s handwriting. While Firmian was reading the letter, Leibgeber brought out his pocket-diary, and calmly muttered to himself, “From the quarter-day after Whitsunday, it says, does it not? to the time when I am to enter upon my office; that is to say, from to-day—St. Stanislaus’ Day. Ah! only think of that—how odd it seems—from St. Stanislaus’ day one, two, three, four—four weeks and a half.”

Firmian, much pleased, was handing him back the letter, but he wouldn’t take it, but pressed it back to him, saying, “I read it long ago, long before you did. Put it in your pocket.”

And here Heinrich, in a burst of solemn, impassioned, humoristic enthusiasm, knelt down in the middle of a long narrow path, which looked between the trees of the thick grove like some subterranean passage (the weathercock of the distant steeple ended off the perspective of it as if with a turnstile)—knelt down facing the west, and gazed through the long green hollow way upon the evening sun, sinking earthward like some brilliant meteor, its broad beams darting down upon the long green path, like forest-water gilt by the spring; he gazed fixedly at it, and his eyes all blinded (and lighted up) by its sheen, he began to speak as follows:—

“If there be a good spirit near me, or a guardian angel of mine or of his, or if thy spirit surviveth still thine ashes, oh! my old, kind, loving father, so deep in thy grave, then draw near, oh! thou dim and ancient shade, and grant to thy stupid, silly son (still limping about here in this fluttering, ragged shirt of a body) this one, one favour, the first and the last, and enter into Firmian’s heart, and (while giving it a good sound shaking) address it as follows: ‘Die, Firmian, for my son’s sake, though it be but in jest and in appearance only. Throw away your own name, go in his (which was yours before) to Vaduz as Inspector, and give yourself out to be him. My poor son here (like that Joujou de Normandie whereon he is sticking, which circles round the sun upon strings of sunbeams) would fain go whirling about upon said Joujou himself for a little while longer. Before all you parrots the ring of eternity is still hanging, and you can hop on to it and rock upon it if you will. But he does not see the ring; don’t deprive the poor Poll-parrot of the pleasure of hopping about on the perch of this earth till, when he has wound his life’s thread some sixty times about its reels, the reel gives a ring and a snap, the thread breaks, and all his fun is over and done!’ Oh! kind spirit of my father, stir up my friend’s heart this day, and guide his tongue, that it may not say ‘No,’ when I ask him, ‘Will you do all this.’” Blinded by the evening sun, he felt for Firmian’s hand, crying, “Where’s your hand, dear friend? and do not say ‘No.’”

But Firmian, quite carried away by emotion (for this sudden outburst of Leibgeber’s long pent-up excitement was most contagious), speechless, and all in tears, like an evening shade, knelt down before his friend and fell on his breast, and said in a low tone (for he could do no otherwise), “I am ready to die for you a thousand deaths, any death you please: only say what death I can die for you. All I ask is, tell me plainly what you would have me do. I swear to you beforehand that I will do whatever you tell me; I swear it by your dear father’s soul. I will gladly give my life for you, and you know I have nothing but that to give.” Heinrich said, in a most unusually subdued voice, “Let’s get away in among the Bayreuthians. I certainly have an attack of hydrothorax this afternoon, or else a hot mineral spring inside my waistcoat; ’pon my word, any ordinary heart ought to have a swimming-belt on, or a scaphander, in a vapour-bath of this kind.” But up at the table under the trees, among the people come to keep the Whitsuntide fair, the great holiday and festival of spring—up there among people all happy and enjoying themselves, emotion was easier to conquer. Here Heinrich quickly unrolled the ground-plans and elevations of his castle in the air, the building grants of his Tower of Babel. To the Count von Vaduz (whose ears and heart opened and expanded to him hungrily) he had given his sacred word of honour that he would return to him as Inspector. But his idea was that his dear coadjutor and substitute, cum spe succedendi, Firmian, should take his place and personate him: Firmian, who was such a tautology of him in mind and body, that both the count, and the theory of distinctive differences itself, would have been puzzled to tell one of them from the other. Even in the worst of years the Inspectorship brought in an income of 1200 thalers; that is to say, the exact amount of Firmian’s whole inheritance (now sealed up with the law’s leaden signet); so that when Siebenkæs re-assumed his old name of Leibgeber, he would regain just what he had lost by changing it. “For,” said Leibgeber, “now that I have read your ‘Devil’s Papers,’ I can’t endure or swallow the notion of your lying fallow any longer in Kuhschnappel; sitting there in solitude, like a pelican (or an unicorn, or an unknown hermit) in the wilderness. Now, will it take you as long to think about the matter as it takes the Chief Clerk of the Chancellery there to shake the ashes out of his pipe, when I tell you that, though you are a fellow who could fill any and every office in the world splendidly, there’s only one calling I can follow—that of a Grazioso; for though I know more than most people, I can’t put my knowledge to any practical use except satirising, and my language is a parti-coloured Lingua Franca, my head a Proteus, and I myself a delightful compilation of the devil and his grandmother. Besides, if I could do anything else, I wouldn’t. What, am I, in the very flower of my days, to stamp and neigh, like a state draught-horse, a government prisoner in the donjon-keep, the shoeing travis of some miserable office counting-house, with nothing to look at but my saddle and bridle hanging on the stable-wall, and the loveliest Parnassuses and Tempe valleys wooing the free feet of the sons of the Muses just outside! In the very years when my milk of life is inclined to throw out a little cream—(and the years when a fellow sours and turns to curds and whey come on so fast)—shall I go and throw the rennet of an appointment into my morning milk? Now, as for you, you have a different song to sing altogether; you are half a man of office already, and you are married into the bargain. Ah! it will beat all ‘Bremish Contributions to the Pleasures of Wit and Understanding;’ it will be a business far beyond every existing comic opera, and every funny novel that ever was written, when I go back to Kuhschnappel with you, and you make your will and depart this life. And then when, after we have paid you the last honours, you jump up again (in a good deal of a hurry) and take yourself off to receive greater honours still; not to enter into the bliss of the departed so much as to become a bonâ fide live Inspector; not to appear before a tribunal, but to take your seat upon one yourself. Joke upon joke wherever we turn! I can’t quite see all the consequences of it yet, or only in a very half-and-half sort of way; the burial club will have to pay your afflicted widow (you can pay them back again when you’re in cash). Death will fop off your ring-finger, all swollen with the betrothal ring. Your widow will be able to marry anybody she pleases (yourself if she likes), and so will you.”

Here, all of a sudden, Leibgeber slapped his leg forty times running, and cried, “Ey! Ey! Ey! Ey! Ey! I can hardly wait till you’re fairly dead and off the hooks; only think of this, your death may make two women widows instead of one. I will persuade Nathalie to insure herself a pension of 200 dollars a year, payable on your death, in the Royal Prussian Provident Widows’ Fund[^[63]] (you can pay them it back again as soon as you get your money). When your widow that is to be gives the Venner the sack, you must privately provide her with a sack of breadfruit. And supposing you really could never pay them back, and were to die in sober earnest, I should take care that their treasury was none the worse for it as soon as I was in funds again.” For Leibgeber lived in a constant mysterious state of intermittent fever between riches and poverty (which he has never explained), or, to use his own expression, between the inspiration and expiration of that breath of life (Aura Vitalis) called money. Any other but this man, who played his game of life with such a dashing boldness, whose blazing fire for the true, the right, and the unselfish, had gleamed upon the advocate for so many a year as if from a lighthouse-tower, would have startled Siebenkæs, particularly in his capacity of lawyer, or have made him very angry, instead of over-persuading him. But Leibgeber thoroughly saturated him, nay, burnt him through and through with the etherial playfulness of his humour, and hurried him resistlessly on to the commission of a mimic deception, which had no aim of selfish untruthfulness or deceit.

Firmian, however, notwithstanding his intoxication of mind, retained sufficient control over himself to think, at least, of the risk which Leibgeber would run in this transaction. “Suppose,” said he, “anybody should come across my dear real Heinrich (whose name I steal) in the vicinity of me, a coiner of false names, what then?

“Nobody ever will,” said Heinrich, “for as soon as you have re-assumed your own canonical name of Leibgeber, and given up ‘Firmian Stanislaus,’ which was conferred upon me at such a stormy baptismal font (and Heaven grant you may do so!), I shall, under names altogether unheard of—(perhaps, indeed, that I may have the gratification of being able to keep 365 name-days in the course of the year, I shall take every name in the calendar, one after the other)—I shall throw myself off the dry land (under these names or some of them) into the great ocean, and propel myself with my dorsal, ventral, and caudal fins (and any others I may have besides), through the waves and the billows of life towards the thick, muddy sea of death; so that ’twill probably be many a day before we meet again.”

He gazed fixedly towards the sun, then sinking in glory beyond Bayreuth; his motionless eyes shone with a moister sheen, and he continued, more slowly, thus: “Firmian, the Almanac says this is St. Stanislaus’ Day; it is your name-day, and mine, and the death-day of that wandering, migratory name, because you will have to give it up after your mock death. I, poor devil as I am, would fain be serious to-day—for the first time this many a long year. Go you home, alone, through the village of Johannes; I shall go by the alley; we’ll meet again at the inn. By Heaven! everything is so beautiful here, and so rose-coloured, that one would think the Hermitage was a piece of the sun. Don’t be very long, though!”

But a sharp pang of pain shot, with swelling folds, athwart Heinrich’s face, and he averted that image of sorrow and his blinded eyes—(which were full of radiance, and of water, too)—and marched rapidly off past the spectators, looking as if at something very far away with a face of apparent attention.

Firmian, alone, with tearful eyes, fronted the gentle sunlight dissolving into varied tints over the face of the green-hued world. Close beneath the sun-fire the deep gold-mine of an evening cloud was falling in drops upon the hill-tops which lay under it; the wandering shifting gold of the evening sky lay, all transparently, upon the yellow-green buds and red and white hill-tops, whilst a great, grand, immeasurable smoke, as if of an altar, cast a strange, magic reflection—all shifting, distant, translucent hues—athwart the hills. The hills and the happy earth, reflecting the sun as it sank, seemed to be receiving him in their arms, and taking him into their embrace. But at the moment when the sun dipped wholly beneath the earth, there came (as it were) the angel of a higher light into this gleaming world (which seemed, to Firmian’s tearful eyes, to tremble like some flickering fiery meteor of the air); this angel advanced, flashing like day, into the midst of the night-torch-dance of the living, who, at his coming, turned pale, and halted still. But, as Firmian dried his eyes, the sun set, the earth grew stiller and paler yet, and night, dewy and wintry, came forth from the woods.

But that melted heart of his longed for its fellows, and for all whom it knew and loved; it throbbed insatiate in this lonely prison-cell, our life; it yearned to love all humanity. Ah! the soul which has had to give up much, or has lost much, is too, too wretched on such an evening as this.

In a blissful, tranced reverie, Firmian went his way through the blossomy fragrance, among the American flowers which open to the sky of our night, through the closed meadows (chambers of sleep), and under dew-dropping flowers. The moon stood on the pinnacle of the heavenly temple in the midday effulgence which the sun cast up to her from the deeps beneath the earth and her evening-blushes. As Firmian passed through the leaf-hidden village of Johannes (where the houses were all scattered about in a great orchard), the evening bells from the distant hamlets were lulling the slumbering spring to sleep with cradle-songs. Æolian harps, breathed on by zephyrs, seemed to be sending forth their tones from out the evening-red, their melodies flowed softly on into the wide realm of sleep, and there took the form of dreams. Firmian’s heart, moved to its very centre, yearned for love—and for very longing he felt impelled to press his flowers into the white hands of a pretty child in Johannes—just that he might touch a human hand.

Go, dear Firmian, with that softened heart of yours, to your deeply-moved friend, whose inner being, too, stretches its arms out towards its likeness; for, to-day, you are nowhere so happy as together. When Firmian entered their common chamber (which, was dark save for the glow of the red twilight in the west), Heinrich turned to meet him; they fell silently into each other’s arms and forgot all the tears which burned within them, even those of joy. Their embrace ended, but their silence did not. Heinrich threw himself on his bed, in his clothes, and covered himself up. Firmian sank upon the other bed and wept there, with closed lids. After an hour or two of excited fancy, heated by visions and by pangs of pain, a soft light fell upon his burning eyelids; he opened them, and there hung the pale, glowing moon over against his window. He rose up; but when he saw his friend standing pale and motionless, like a shadow cast by the moon upon the wall—and suddenly there came up from a neighbouring garden (like a nightingale’s voice awaking), Rust’s melody to the words—

“’Tis not for this earthly land
That Friendship weaves her holy band”—

he fell back under the load of bitter memory; an emotion, too great to bear, a spasm, closed his sad eyes, and he said, in hollow accents,

“Heinrich! oh believe in immortality. How can we love, if we perish!”

“Peace, peace!” said Heinrich. “To-day I am keeping my name-day, and that is enough; for man, certainly, has no birth-day, and, consequently, no death-day either.”

CHAPTER XIII.

A CLOCK OF HUMAN BEINGS—A COLD SHOULDER—THE VENNER.

When, in my last chapter, I spoke of ladies who were given to brevity of sleep, and awoke six hours before their sisters at the Antipodes, I think I did well not to cram into my twelfth chapter (among the numerous events so tightly packed there) a model of a certain clock, composed of men and women, which I invented a considerable time ago, but to reserve it for this thirteenth chapter, where I shall now introduce it, and set it up. I believe this humanity clock of mine was suggested to me by Linnæus’ flower clock at Upsal, whose wheels were the earth and the sun, and the figures on its dial were flowers, whereof one always awoke and opened later than another. I was living at the time in Scheerau, in the middle of the market-place, and had two rooms. From the front room I was able to see all the market-place and the palace buildings, while my back room looked into the Botanical Gardens. Whoever may be living in these rooms now is in possession of a delightful, ready-tuned harmony between the flower clock in the garden and the mankind clock in the market-place.

At 3 A.M. the yellow meadow goatsbeard awakes—also brides—and then, too, the stable-boy begins rattling and feeding the horses under the lodger. At 4 (on Sundays) awake the little hawksweed, and ladies who are going to the Holy Communion (chiming clocks these may be called) and the bakers. At 5, kitchen-maids and dairy-maids awake, and buttercups; at 6, sowthistles and cooks. By 7, a good many of the wardrobe women of the palace, and the salad in the Botanical Gardens, are awake, as well as several tradeswomen. At 8, all their daughters and the little yellow mouse-ear—all the colleges and the leaves of flowers, piecrust, and law-papers, are open. At 9, the female aristocracy begin to stir, and the marygolds, to say nothing of a number of young ladies from the country, in town on a visit, glance out of their windows. At 10 and 11, the Court ladies, the whole staff of lords of the bedchamber, the green colewort and pippau of the Alps, and the Princesses’ reader, arouse themselves from their morning slumber; and (so brightly is the morning sun breaking in through the many-tinted silken curtains) the whole Court curtails a morsel or so of its sleep. At 12, the Prince; at 1, his consort, and the carnation in her flower-vase—have their eyes open. What gets up at later hours in the afternoon—about 4 o’clock, say—is nothing but the red hawksweed and the night, watchman (a cuckoo clock), and these two are but evening dials, or moon clocks. From the hot eyes of the poor devil who opens them only at 5 (with the jalap), we turn our own away in sorrow; he is a sick man, who has taken some of it (the jalap), and only passes from fever-fancies of being griped with hot pincers to genuine, waking spasms.

I could never tell when it was 2 o’clock, because I, and a thousand other stout gentlemen and the yellow mouse-ear, were always asleep at that hour; though I awoke, with the regularity of an accurate repeater, at 3 in the afternoon and at 3 in the morning.

Thus may we human creatures serve as flower clocks to higher intelligences when our petals close upon our last bed, or as sand-glasses when our sands of life are run so far out that they are turned over into the other world. On such occasions, when seventy of man’s years have ended and passed away, these higher intelligences may say, “Another hour already! Good God! how time flies!”

And this digression reminds me that it really does fly! Firmian and Heinrich lived on in great cheerfulness of spirit towards the jocund morning which was so close at hand, though the former could by no means take root upon any chair or room-floor all the forenoon; for, in his mind’s eye, the curtain kept always rising upon the opera buffa e seria of his mock death, and displaying its burlesque situations. And at present (as was always the case, indeed) the presence and example of Leibgeber heightened his sense of humour and power of expressing the same. Leibgeber, who had gone through all the stage-business and scene-shifting of the sham death in an exhaustive manner weeks ago (in fancy), was thinking little about it now. The problem occupying him at present was how to extract the wick (that is to say, the bride) out of Rosa’s wedding-torch, all painted and moulded as it was. Heinrich was at all times forcible, free, and bold, furious and implacable as regards anything unjust; and his righteous indignation often had much the appearance of vengeance, as here in Rosa’s case, and in that of Blaise. Firmian was more kindly; he spared and pardoned, often, indeed, at the (apparent) expense of honour. He could never have plucked Nathalie’s epistolary lover out of her bleeding heart with Leibgeber’s forceps and knife. His friend, at leaving for Fantaisie that day, had to promise the gentlest of behaviour, and, for a time, silence on the subject of the Royal Prussian Widows’ Fund. It would, of course, have made a terrific, bleeding wound in Nathalie’s feeling of rectitude had the most distant hint been uttered of such a matter as metallic compensation for a spiritual loss such as that involved in her separation on moral grounds from the immoral Venner. She deserved to conquer (and was well able to do so), with the prospect of her victory reducing her to poverty.

Heinrich did not come back till it was somewhat late, and his face was a little troubled, though it was a happy face too. Rosa was discarded, and Nathalie pained. The English lady was at Anspach with Lady Craven, eating her butter—(for she made butter as well as books). When he had read out to Nathalie all that was written on Rosa’s black board and sin-register (which he did gravely, but perhaps louder than was necessary, and with scrupulous truth), she rose up with that grand grace which is a characteristic of enthusiasm of self-sacrifice: “If you are yourself deceived in this as little as you are capable of deceiving, and if I may believe your friend as I do you, I give you my sacred word that I will not allow myself to be persuaded, or constrained, to anything. But the subject of this conversation will be here himself in a few days, and I owe it to him as well as to my own honour, to hear him, as I have given my letters into his hands. Oh! it is hard to have to speak so coldly!” As the moments passed, the rose red of her cheek paled to rose-white. She leant it on her hand, and as her eyes grew fuller, and tears dropped at last, she said, strongly and firmly, “Be in no anxiety, I shall keep my word; and then, cost what it may, I will tear myself from my friend, and go back to my poor people in Schraplau. I have lived quite long enough in the great world, though not too long.”

Heinrich’s unusual seriousness had overpowered her. Her confidence in his truth was immovable, and that (strange reason!) just because he had never seemed to fall in love with her, or to pass beyond the condition of friendship, and so did not measure her affection by his own. Perhaps she would have been angry with her bridegroom’s married attorney (i. e. Firmian), had he not had three or four of the best possible excuses; to wit, his general mental resemblance to Leibgeber, and his physiognomical resemblance to him (which his paleness purified and refined at this juncture).

Her yesterday’s request to Leibgeber to bring Siebenkæs with him in the evening was now repeated (to the former’s joy), though her heart was aching in every corner. But let none take umbrage at her half-mourning for the Venner (now setting and near the horizon), or her erroneous estimate of him; for we all know that women (Heaven bless them!) often think sentiment and integrity, letters and actions, tears and honest warm blood, to be equivalent one to another.

In the afternoon Leibgeber took Siebenkæs to her as a sort of syllogistic figure in support of his argument, or set of rationes decidendi (for the Venner was a collection of rationes dubitandi). Aquiliana received Siebenkæs with a blush, which came and went in an instant; and then with the least dash of hauteur (result of modesty!), yet with all the kindness and good-will which she owed to his interest in her future. She lived in the English lady’s rooms. The flowery valley lay without, like a world before its sun. One advantage connected with a rich pleasure-garden of this sort is that a stranger advocate finds that he can attach the floating spider-threads of his talk to the branches of it, until they have been woven into the finished art-work of a glittering web, which can float in the free air. Firmian could never emulate these clever men of the world, who only need a listener to be able to begin spinning a conversation; who, like the tree-frogs, can cling firmly to anything they chance to hop on to, however smooth, and polished it may be; yea, who can even keep afloat in a space devoid of air, and all objects whatever (which a tree-frog cannot). A man of Siebenkæs’ free and independent soul cannot, however, long remain embarrassed by his unfamiliarity with his surroundings; he must speedily recover his freedom by virtue of his innate superiority to chance, external circumstances; and his unassumed and unassuming simpleness soon amply compensates for his lack of the great world’s artificial and assuming simplicity.

Yesterday he had seen this Nathalie in the happy exercise and enjoyment of all her powers, and of nature and friendship, smiling and enchanting, and crowning the delightful evening with an act of brave self-devotion. Alas! how little remained to-day of all these joys, so tender and so bright. In no hour is a lovely face lovelier than at that immediately succeeding the bitter one, when tears for the loss of a heart have passed over it; for the sight of the loveliness in its sorrow, during that hour itself, would be too sad to bear. For this beautiful creature, who hid the sacrificial knife deep in her heart, where it had been plunged, and gladly let it smart there, that but the wound’s bleeding might be delayed, Siebenkæs would gladly have died—in a way more serious than had been intended—could it have been of any service to her. Is it a thing so strange that the bond between them grew closer and stronger as the sand run down in the hourglass, when we consider that, swayed by an unwonted three-sided seriousness (for even Leibgeber was overtaken by this feeling), their hearts, at sight of the gala-beauty of the spring, were filled with tender, longing wishes?—that Siebenkæs, with his pale face, worn, and stamped with all the traces and marks and signs of recent, bygone, trouble and pain, shone, this day, with a soft and pleasing sheen, as of evening sunlight, on her sight, all weakened by her tears?—that she thought with pleasure on his (rather singular) merit of having, at all events, embittered some of her faithless suitor’s infidelities—and that every note he touched was in the minor mode of his tender nature, because he was seeking to atone for, and cast into shade, the circumstance that it had fallen to his lot to lay waste at one fell stroke so many of this innocent, unknown creature’s hopes and joys—that even his greater share of modest, respectful reserve, became him, and set him off by contrast with his counterpart, the bolder and more outspoken Heinrich? With all these charms of accidental circumstance (which win the female world far sooner than charms of a bodily kind), Firmian was endowed in Nathalie’s eyes. In his eyes she had attractions greater still, and altogether new to him: her cultivation and acquirements; her manly enthusiasm, her delicate refinement; her (most flattering) way of treating him—(none of her sex had ever before glorified him with anything like it, and this particular species of charm plunges many a man who is unused to female companionship, not only into rapture, but into matrimony),—and (two crowning delights) the facts that the whole affair was fortuitous and out of the common, and that Lenette was the exact antipodes of her in each and every respect.

Alas! poor starved, hungering Firmian. There are always a gallows, and a notice-board marked “No thoroughfare,” on the banks of the streamlet of your life, even now that it has become a pearl-bearing brook. Your marriage ring must have pinched you a good deal, and felt very tight in a warm, temperature like this, as, indeed all rings feel tight in a warm bath, and loose in a cold one.

But either some naiad of a diabolical turn of mind, or some ocean god who loved a jest, took always the greatest delight in perturbing and disturbing the sea of Firmian’s life, and stirring up the sand at the bottom of it just when its waters were sparkling and glowing enchantingly with phosphorescent sea creatures, or some electric matter or other, and his ship leaving a long shining wake behind her in it. For just as the glory and the beauty of the garden outside were growing moment by moment, and embarrassment vanishing away with equal rapidity, the painful memory of the late bereavement fading out of remembrance; just when the pianoforte (or, say, the pianissimo fortissimo), and the songs, duets, and trios were being opened and got ready; in fine, just as the honey-cells of their orangery of happiness, their permitted flesh-pots of Egypt, and deep communion cup of love were all ready to their lips, who came with a pop into the room but a certain bluebottle fly on two legs, who had often flown into Firmian’s cup of joy before now.

The Venner, Rosa von Meyern, made his appearance on the scene, lovelily attired in saffron silk, to pay his bride his privileged ambassadorial visit.

Never in all his career did this young gentleman arrive otherwise than too soon or too late; just as he was never serious, but either lachrymose or jocular. The three faces were now each a long duodecimo edition of themselves; Leibgeber’s was the only one which was not stretched on the wire-drawing press, but it was dyed a fine red by his inborn detestation of fops and maiden-hawks of every kind. Everard had come primed with one idea (taken from Stolberg’s ‘Homer’), which was, to ask Nathalie, on his entrance, whether she were a goddess or a mortal (in the manner of Homer’s heroes), since he could only pretend to contend with the latter race. But at sight of the masculine pair whom the Devil levelled at his head like a double-barrelled gun, everything inside it turned to cheese and curd, immobile; twenty kisses wouldn’t have enabled him to get his great idea a-flow again. It was five days before he got what little there was inside the bones of his head into such a fair way of recovery as to make shift to deliver himself of this idea to a distant relation of my own (how else should I have known anything about it?) in a tolerable degree of preservation. At all times nothing so paralysed him in female society as the presence of a man; he would have stormed an entire convent of women sooner than have laid siege to a single couple of novices (to say nothing of a canoness), had but a single wretched man been alongside them.

A standing troupe of players, such as I now see before my pencil, never performed in Fantaisie. Nathalie was lost in amazement (little polite), and in a quiet comparison of this original edition with her epistolary ideal. The Venner, who took for granted that the result of her observations was just the opposite of what it really was, would have been delighted had he had it in his power to be a manifest contradiction, an antipodes to himself. I mean, he would fain have shown himself both cold and angry at finding her in the society of this couple, and also confidential and tender, so that this beggarly pair might be filled with envy and vexation at the sight of his harvest and vintage. And inasmuch as he was quite as greatly (only much more agreeably) struck with, and surprised at her appearance, as she with his, and as he had time enough before him for revenge and punishment, he chose rather to adopt the line of bragging and vaunting with the view of seasoning and blessing the visit of these two lawyer fellows with a good spice of envy. Moreover, he had the advantage of them in possessing a light horse-artillery body, and he could mobilise his army of physical charms quicker than they could. Siebenkæs was thinking of nothing nearer at hand than—his wife. Before Rosa’s arrival he had been browsing on the idea of her as on a meadow of bitter herbs, for the rough, chapped bark of the conjugal hand was by no means capable of touching his self-love with the delicate, etherial, gentle, snail-antennæ touch of this unmated beauty’s eiderdown fingers. But now the idea of Lenette became a pasture of sweet and succulent verdure; for his jealousy of Rosa (domiciled in two different quarters) was less awakened by Lenette’s behaviour to him than by Nathalie’s relations with him. The grimness of Heinrich’s glances increased amain; they wandered up and down over Rosa’s summer hare-skin of yellow silk with a jaundiced glare. In an irritable impulse to be doing something or other, he fumbled in his waistcoat pocket, and got hold of the profile of Herr von Blaise which he had clipped out (as we may remember) on the occasion when he stamped the glass wig to pieces (and with respect to which profile the only thing which had been distressing him for a twelvemonth past was that it was in his pocket, and not affixed to the gallows, where he could have stuck it with a hairpin the evening he went away). He pulled it out, and tousling it between his fingers, he glided nimbly backwards and forwards between Nathalie and Rosa, murmuring to Siebenkæs (with his eyes fixed on the Venner), “À la silhouette.”[^[64]]

Everard’s self-love divined these flattering (and involuntary) sacrifices of the self-love of the other two, and he went on firing off at the embarrassed girl (with ever-growing superciliousness, directed to Siebenkæs’s address) fragments from the story of his travels, messages from his friends, and questions concerning the arrival of his letters. The brethren, Siebenkæs and Leibgeber, sounded a retreat, but did so like true males; for they were the least bit annoyed with poor, innocent Nathalie, just as though she could have marched up to this sponsus and letter bridegroom of hers the moment he came into the room, with a salutation such as, “Sir, you can never be lord of mine, even were you nothing worse than a scoundrel, idiot, fright, prig, man-milliner,” &c. But must we not, all of us (for I don’t consider myself an exception), smite upon our bony, sinful breasts, and confess that we spit fire the moment modest girls refrain from spitting it instantly at those whom we may have nigrified or excommunicated in their presence; that further we insist upon their discarding wicked squires instantaneously, although they may not be in such a hurry to receive them that they should care as little what forced marches and honourable retreats their cottiers and dependents may have to make, as we fief-holders do ourselves; and that we are offended with them when they have an innocent opportunity of being false; even when they do not avail themselves of it? May Heaven improve the class of persons of whom I have just been treating.

Firmian and Heinrich roamed for an hour or two about the enchanted valley; it was full of magic flutes, magic zithers, and magic mirrors. But they had neither ears nor eyes. What they found to say concerning events heated their heads to the temperature of balloon furnaces, and Leibgeber blew a fanfare of mere satiric insults out of the reverse end of Fame’s trumpet at every female Bayreuthian he met taking her evening walk. He announced it as his opinion that women were the unsafest ships in winch a man could embark on the great open ocean of life—slaveships in fact, or bucentaurs (or shuttles[^[65]] which the Devil weaves his nets and gins with)—and the more so that, like other ships of war, they are so often and so scrupulously washed, sheathed on the outside with poisonous copper, and have about the same amount of bunting and tarry tackle (ribbons) flying about them. Heinrich had gone to Nathalie’s, indulging the (highly improbable) anticipation that she would at once unhesitatingly accept and act upon his friend’s deposition of evidence in his capacity of an eye- and ear-witness concerning Rosa’s canonical impedimenta (or ecclesiastical marriage disabilities), and it was his disappointment on this score which was so gnawing upon his mind.

But just as Firmian was discussing and expatiating upon the Venner’s lisping and indistinct mode of speaking (his words seemed to curl about the top of his tongue with no power of expression in them), Heinrich cried out, “Hallo! there the dirt-fly goes!” It was the Venner, floundering as a pike does in the net he has been brought to market in. As the woodpecker (naturalists call most gaudy-plumaged birds woodpeckers) winged his flight closer by them, they saw, as he passed them, that his face was a-glow with anger. Doubtless the cement which had attached him to Nathalie was broken and dissolved.

The two friends waited a little while longer in the shady walk, hoping that they might meet her; but at length they made their way back to town, meeting, as they went, a maid of hers, who was taking the following letter to Leibgeber:—

“You and your friend were, alas! quite right, and all is now at an end. Please to let me rest, and reflect for a time in solitude over the ruins of my little future. When people’s lips are wounded and stitched, they are not allowed to talk, although it is not my lips but my heart that bleeds, and that for your sex. Ah! I blush when I think of all the letters I have written, which it has been such happiness to me to write—and, alas! under such a delusion!—yet I have no real reason to do so after all. You have yourself said that innocent pleasures should give us as little cause to be ashamed as blackberries, although, when the enjoyment is past, there may be a black stain on the lips. But, at all events, I thank you from my heart. As I must have been disenchanted one day, it was kind that it was not done by the wicked sorcerer himself, but by you and your most honest and truthful friend, to whom please to offer my very kind regards and remembrances.

“Yours,

“A. Nathalie.”

Heinrich had expected the letter to be one of invitation, “for” (said he) “her empty heart must feel a cold void, like a finger with its nail cut too short.” Firmian, whom matrimony had taught, and furnished with barometer scales and meteorological tables for observance of women, knew enough to be of opinion that a woman must, in the very hour when she had dismissed one lover (on purely moral grounds) be a little over-cool towards the person who has persuaded her thereto, even were he her second lover. And (I take leave here to add, myself) for the very same reasons she will exceed in warmth towards this second immediately afterwards.

“Ah! poor Nathalie!” Firmian wished unceasingly “May the flowers and blossoms be court-plaister for the wounds of your heart; may the soft æther of spring be a milk-cure for your oppressed panting bosom.” It seemed unspeakably sad to him that an innocent creature like this should be thus tried and punished, as though she were guilty, and be compelled to draw the purifying air of her life from poison plants, and not from wholesome ones.

The next day all Siebenkæs did was to write a letter (in which he signed himself Leibgeber), informing the Count von Vaduz that he was unwell and as grey and yellow as a Swiss cheese. Heinrich had left him no peace until he did this. “The count,” said he, “is accustomed, in my person, to a fine, blooming, sturdy Inspector; but, if he is properly prepared for the thing by a letter, he will really believe you to be me. Luckily we are neither of us men who would be asked to unbutton in any custom-house; nobody would fancy there was anything inside our waistcoats but skin and bone.”[^[66]]

On the Thursday Siebenkæs, standing at the hotel-door, saw the Venner, in an Electoral habit, with a full-dress parade head, and a whole Barth’s vineyard in his face, driving to the Hermitage between two young ladies. When he carried this news upstairs, Leibgeber swore—(and also cursed)—to the effect that the scoundrel wasn’t worthy of the society of any young lady, unless her head was a Golgotha and her heart a gorge (or cul) de Paris. He was quite bent on going to see Nathalie then and there, and telling her the news, but Firmian prevented him by main force.

On the Friday she herself wrote to Heinrich as follows:—

“I have mustered up courage to revoke my prohibition, and beg that you and your friend will come to-morrow to beautiful Fantaisie, when (it being Saturday) it will lie depopulated. I keep my arms about Nature and Friendship; there is no room in them for anything besides. Do you know, I dreamt last night that I saw you both in one coffin there was a white butterfly fluttering above you, and it grew larger and larger till its wings were like great white shrouds; and then it covered you both over and hid you with them, and there was no motion beneath. My dear, dear friend arrives the day after to-morrow—and to-morrow, you. And then, I must bid you all adieu.

“N. A.”

The Saturday in question occupies the whole of the next chapter, and I can form some sort of idea of the reader’s eagerness to be at it from my own; and all the better, seeing that I have read (to say nothing about writing) the said chapter already, which he has not.

CHAPTER XIV.

A LOVER’S DISMISSAL—FANTAISIE—THE CHILD WITH THE BOUQUET—THE EDEN OF THE NIGHT, AND THE ANGEL AT THE GATE OF PARADISE.

It was not the deeper blue of the sky (which, on the Saturday, was as rich and pure as in winter, or by night)—nor the thought of actually standing in the very presence of the sorrowing soul whom he had driven from Paradise with the Sodom apple of the serpent (Venner)—nor his own feeble health—nor memories of his own domestic life;—it was none of these matters taken singly, but the combination of all these semitones and minor intervals together which attuned our Firmian to a melting maestoso, and gave to his looks and thoughts (for his afternoon visit) much such a kind and degree of tenderness as he expected he should find in Nathalie’s.

What he did find was precisely the reverse. In and about Nathalie there reigned such a noble cold, serene gladsomeness as you may find upon the loftiest mountain peaks; the cloud and the storm are beneath, while around there rests a purer, colder air, but a deeper blue, too, and a paler sunlight.

It cannot, of course, surprise me that you are on the tenter-hooks of anxiety to hear the account she is going to give of her rupture with Everard. But her account of it was so brief—it might have been written round a Prussian dollar—so that I must supplement it with mine, which I have taken from Rosa’s own written record of it. The fact is, the Venner, five years afterwards, wrote a very passable novel (if we may credit the praise bestowed upon it in the ‘Universal German Library’), into which he artfully built the whole of the rupture with Nathalie—(that severance between soul and body); at all events, this is the conclusion to which sundry hints of Nathalie’s would point us. The said novel, accordingly, is my fountain of Vaucluse. Emasculate intelligences, such as Rosa’s, can only reproduce experiences; their poetic fœtuses are nothing but adopted children of the actual.

To be brief, what took place was as follows. Scarce were Firmian and Heinrich gone out among the trees, when the Venner brought up his reserve of vengeance, and asked Nathalie, in a tetchy manner, how it was that she could tolerate visitors of such a poor and plebeian sort. The haste and the coldness of the departed pair had already set Nathalie on fire, and this address made her blaze forth in a flame upon her yellow-silken questioner. “A question such as that,” she answered, “is very little short of an insult;” and she immediately added one of her own—for she was too warm and too proud to dissemble in the slightest, or to hold other than the straightest course with him. “You call at Mr. Siebenkæs’s pretty often yourself, do you not?” “Oh!” said this empty braggart, “I call on his wife (to speak the simple truth); he is merely my pretext.” “Really,” said she, making her syllables last as long as her look of scorn. Meyern, amazed at this behaviour, so very unlike the tone of the antecedent epistolary correspondence (he gave the twin cronies the credit of it)—Meyern, whom her beauty, his own money, and her poverty and dependence upon Blaise (to say nothing of his position of betrothed bridegroom), had now inspired with the utmost audacity—Meyern, this brave and courageous lion, undertook, without a moment’s hesitation, a task which nobody else would have ventured upon, namely, that of humiliating and bringing to her proper senses this irate Aphrodite, by reading to her the catalogue of his Cicisbean appointments, and, in general terms, unfolding before her the long perspective of the hundreds of gynæcœa and jointure-houses open to him. “It is such an easy matter to worship false goddesses and open their temple doors, that I am charmed to be restored to the worship of the true feminine godhead, through my Babylonish captivity to you.”

All her crushed heart sighed forth, “Ah! then it is all true—he is a wicked wretch, and I am miserable indeed.” But she kept silence, outwardly, and went and looked out of the window, in anger. Her soul was one of those whose seats are the knight’s upper dais of womankind; it was ever eager to do rare, heroic acts of self-devotion and self-sacrifice; indeed, a fondness for remarkable and out-of-the-way greatness was the only littleness about it. And now, when the Venner tried to make amends for his braggadocio by a sudden jump into a light and sportive tone (a tone which, in minor warfares with the ordinary fair sex, heals breaches much quicker and better than a more serious one)—and proposed a walk in the pretty park to her, as being a spot better adapted for a reconciliation—this noble soul of hers spread wide its pure white pinions and soared away from out the foul heart of this crooked pike with his silver scales for ever! And she drew near to him and said (all a-glow, but dry-eyed wholly), “Mr. von Meyern, I have quite decided—we are parted for ever. We have never known each other, and our acquaintance is at an end. I will send you back your letters to-morrow, and you will have the goodness to return mine to me.” Had he employed a more serious tone, he might have kept hold of this strong soul for some days—perhaps weeks—longer. Without looking at him anymore, she opened a casket and began arranging letters. He tried, in a hundred speeches, to flatter and pacify her; she answered never a word. His heart boiled within him, for he gave the two advocates the blame for all this. At length he thought he would humble this deaf mute (as well as make her alter her determination), by saying, as he now did, “I don’t know what your uncle in Kuhschnappel will say to all this. He appears to me to set a much greater value upon my sentiments towards you than you do yourself; indeed, he seems to consider our marriage as essential to your happiness as I think it to mine.” This was a burden heavier than her back, so sore bent down by Fate, could bear. She shut up the casket hurriedly, sat down, and rested her bewildered head upon her trembling arms, shedding burning tears, which her hands strove in vain to hide. A reproach of our poverty uttered by lips we have loved, darts like red-hot iron into the heart, and scorches it dry with fire. Rosa, whose vengeance, now wreaked, gave place to the most eager love, (in hopes that her feelings were of the same selfish type as his own), threw himself on his knees before her, crying, “Oh! forget it all! What are we breaking with one another for, if we come really to think about it? Your precious tear-drops wash it all away. I mingle mine with them in rich abundance.”

She arose with haughty port, leaving him on his knees. “My tears,” she said, “have not the smallest reference to anything connected with you. I am poor, and I would not be rich. After the base, ignoble insult you have put upon me, you shall not stay and see me weep. Have the goodness to leave the room.” So that he retired; and—when one considers the weight of the sacks he had to carry—sacks of every kind (including one full of muzzles)—he really did it in a surprisingly brisk and lively manner, holding his head pretty high. His command of his temper and his apparent good humour strike one the more (for I may give him what praise he deserves), that he retained them and took them home with him, and this on an afternoon when, with the two finest and longest levers in all his collection he had utterly failed in touching the smallest point in Nathalie’s heart, or the auricles thereof. One of these levers was his old one, which he had tried upon Lenette—that of gradually twisting himself in, corkscrew fashion, in spiral serpentine lines of petty advances, approaches, attentions and illusions; but Nathalie was neither weak nor light enough to be penetrated thus. The other lever was one from which something might really have been expected in the way of effect—though it actually had less than even the first. It consisted in showing his old scars (like an old warrior), and rejuvenating them into wounds; in this manner he bared his suffering heart, pierced by so many a false love, and which (like a dollar with a hole in it), had hung as a votive offering upon so many a shrine. His soul put on Court mourning (of sorrow) of all degrees, whole and half, in hopes of being, like a widow, more enchanting in black. The friend of a Leibgeber, however, could be softened by manly sorrows only—the womanly sort could but harden her.

Meanwhile (as we have said), he left, his fiancée without any pity for her self-sacrifice indeed, and equally without the slightest indignation at her refusal of him. He merely thought, “She may go to the devil;” and he could scarce sufficiently congratulate himself that he had so easily escaped the incalculable annoyance of having to endure life with a creature of the kind from one year’s end to another, and to pay her the necessary respect throughout an infernal, long matrimonial life. On the other hand, his bile was mightily stirred against Leibgeber, but more particularly against Siebenkæs (whom he suspected of being the real judge of his Divorce Court), and he laid the foundation of several gall-stones in his gall-bladder, and of a slight bilious yellow tint in his eyes, with hating the advocate, which he could not do enough.

We return to the Saturday. Nathalie derived her calmness and serenity partly from her own strength of mind, but also in good measure from the pair of horses (and of rose maidens) with whom Rosa had been seen driving to the Hermitage. A woman’s jealousy is always a day or two older than her love. Moreover, I know of no excellence, no weakness, shortcoming, virtue, womanliness, manliness, in a woman which does not tend rather to enkindle than to appease jealousy.

Not only Siebenkæs, but even Leibgeber (anxious to breathe some warmth upon her freezing soul, all stripped of its warm plumage), was this afternoon serious and cordial, not (as he usually did) dressing his rewards and punishments up in irony. Perhaps, too, her gratifying (and flattering) readiness to obey him tamed him down to some extent. Firmian had, in addition to the reasons above set forth, the more powerful ones—that the English lady was expected home the next day but one, and her coming would put a stop to all this garden pleasure, or interfere with it at all events—that he who knew well, from his own experience, what the wounds of a lost love were, had a boundless compassion for hers, and would gladly have given his own heart’s blood to make up for the loss of hers—moreover, accustomed all his life to bare, mean and empty rooms, he felt a keen enjoyment in being in the richly-furnished, bright and tasteful chamber he was now in, and naturally carried over a portion of this to the account of their inhabitant and hermit.

The maid-servant, whom we have seen this week already, came in just then, with tears in her eyes, faltering out that she was going to confession, and hoped she had done nothing to displease her, &c., &c. “Anything to displease me?” cried Nathalie; “most certainly not—and I know I can say the same in your mistress’s name;” and went out of the room with her and kissed her, unseen, like some good genius. How beautiful are pity and kindness to distress, in a soul which has just risen up in might to resist oppression.

Leibgeber took a volume of ‘Tristram Shandy’ from the English lady’s library, and lay down with it on the lawn under the nearest tree, with the view of making over to his friend the undivided fruition of this anise, marchpane and honeycomb of an afternoon of talk, which to him was merely so much every-day household fare. Moreover, all that day when he made any sign of jesting, Nathalie’s eyes would implore him, “Please do not, for just this one day. Do not take pains to point out every pock-pit which Fate has left upon my inner soul to him—spare me for this once.” And lastly (which was his principal reason), it would be much easier for Firmian to tell this sensitive Nathalie (now upon one-eighth pay) all his project of making her his appanaged widow, his heiress in jest—to tell it to her wrapped in a triple shroud, written in distorted characters.

Siebenkæs looked upon this undertaking as a sort of day’s work at fortification making, a journey across the Alps—round the globe—into the grotto of Antiparos, a discovery of the longitude; he had not the slightest notion how even to begin to set about it. Indeed, he had previously told Leibgeber that, if his death were but a real one, nobody would be more ready to talk to her about it, but that for a sham death, he really could not sadden her; so that she would have to consent, altogether by some chance, and unconditionally, to become his widow. “And is my death a thing so very improbable after all?” he said. “Of course it is,” answered Leibgeber. “If it were not, what would become of our death in jest. The lady will e’en have to make the best of it.” It would appear that he dealt with women’s hearts in a fashion somewhat colder and harder than Siebenkæs, in whose opinion (hermit connoisseur as he was of rarities in the shape of strong female souls) a delicate, suffering one like this could not be too tenderly treated. However, I do not set up to judge between the two friends.

When Leibgeber had gone out with Yorick, Siebenkæs went and stood before a fresco representing the said Yorick, and poor Maria with her flute and her goat. For the chambers of the great are picture-bibles, and an orbis pictus,—they sit, eat and walk in picture exhibitions, which makes it all the harder a matter for them that two, at least, of the greatest expanses in nature—the sky and the sea—cannot be painted over for them. Nathalie went up to him, and at once cried out, “What is there to see in that to-day? Away from it!” She was just as open and unconstrained in her manner with him as he could not manage to be with her. She displayed the warmth and beauty of her soul in that wherein we (unconsciously) unveil, or unmask (as the case may be), ourselves more completely than in anything—namely, her mode of bestowing praise. The illuminated triumphal arch which she erected over the head of her English lady-friend, elevated her own soul so that she stood at that gate of honour as conqueror, in laurel wreath, and glittering collar of the Order of Goodness and Worth. Her praises were the double chorus and echo of the other’s excellence; she was so warm and so earnest! Ah! maidens, fairer are ye a thousand times when ye twine bridal-wreaths and laurel garlands for your companions than when ye plait them crowns of straw, and bend them collars of iron.

She told him how fond she was of British men and women, both in and out of print, although she had never seen any until the previous winter. “Unless,” she said, with a smile, “our friend outside may be considered one.”

Leibgeber, out on his grass mattress, raised his head and saw the couple looking down at him with faces of regard; and the shimmer of love shone forth in three pairs of eyes. One single moment of time thus clasped three sister souls together in one tender embrace.

The maid coming back from confession about this juncture in her white dress—(’twas heavy-wing cases rather than light butterfly wings to her)—with a trifle of pretty-tinted ribbon about it here and there; Firmian looked at this absolved one for a minute or two, and then took up her black and gold hymn-book, which she had laid down in her haste, finding inside it a whole pattern-card of silks, besides peacock’s feathers. Nathalie, who saw a satirical expression dawning on his face, drove it away in an instant. “Your sex attaches just as much value to adornment as ours. Look at your Court dresses, the Coronation robes at Frankfort, and uniforms and official costumes of all kinds. Then, the peacock was the bird of the old knights and poets, and if you make vows upon his feathers, or wear garlands of them, we may surely wear them, or at all events mark (if not reward) songs with them.” Every now and then a barely polite expression of astonishment at what she knew escaped the advocate in spite of himself. He turned over the leaves of the festival hymns, and came upon gilt figures of Our Lady, and found a picture wherein were two parti-coloured blotches (supposed to represent two lovers), and a phosphorescent heart, which the male blotch was offering to the female with the words:

“And is to thee my fond love all unknown!
How my heart burns is here full plainly shown”

—the whole surrounded by a tracery of leafwork. Firmian loved family and society miniature pictures when (as in this case) they were exceedingly poor as works of art. Nathalie saw and read this; she took the book in haste, snapped the clasp to, and then, when she had done so, said, “You have no objection, have you?”

Courage towards women is not inborn, but acquired. Firmian had had familiar experience of very few; wherefore this natural awe made him look upon every feminine body—particularly if of any standing in society—as a kind of sacred Ark of the Covenant whereon no finger might be laid; (for though it is proper to rise superior to considerations of rank where men are concerned, it is otherwise with women), and upon every female foot as that on which a Queen of Spain stands, and every female finger as a Franklin point emitting electric sparks. If in love with him, I might have likened her to an electrified person, feeling all the sparks and mock pains she emitted. At the same time, nothing could be more natural than that his reverent timidity should diminish as time went on, and that at length, (at a moment when she was looking the other way) he should take courage to deftly snatch hold of the end of one of the ribbons in her hair between his fingers—and she never be aware of it. It may have been by way of preliminary studies towards the execution of this feat that he had previously once or twice tried the effect of taking up into his hands things which had been a good deal in hers—such as her English scissors, a broken pincushion, and a pencil-case.

Taking heart of grace hereupon, he thought he would venture to take up a bunch of wax grapes (which he imagined to be made of stone, like those upon butter-boats). He gripped them, accordingly, in his fist as in a wine-press, crushed two or three of them to pieces, and then proffered as many petitions for mercy and pardon as if he had knocked over and broken the porcelain Pagoda of Nanking. “There’s no harm done,” she said, laughing. “We all find plenty such berries in life—with fine ripe skins—no intoxicating juice—and as easily broken—or easier.”

He was in terrible dread lest this glorious, many-tinted rainbow of happiness of his should melt away into evening dew, and it disconcerted him that he no longer saw Leibgeber reading upon the flowery turf. Outside, the world was brightened into a land of the sun—every tree was a rich, firm-rooted joy-flower—the valley a condensed universe, ringing with music of the spheres. Nevertheless he had not the courage to proffer his arm to this Venus for a stroll through the sun, i. e. the sunny Fantaisie; the Venner’s fate, and the fact that there was a late harvest of a few visitors still walking about the gardens, rendered him bashful and mute. Of a sudden Leibgeber knocked at the window with the agate-head of his stick, crying, “Come over to dinner. My stick-head is the Vienna lantern.[^[67]] We are sure not to get home before midnight.” He had ordered a dinner in the café. Presently he cried out, “There is a pretty child here asking for you.” Siebenkæs hurried out, and found it was the very child into whose hand he had pressed his flowers on the evening when, after the great feast-eve at the Hermitage, he had been soaring along on the wings of fancy through the village of Johannis. “Where is your wife, sir?” asked the child; “the lady who took me out of the water the day before yesterday? I have some beautiful flowers here that my godpapa sent me to give her. Mother will come and give her best thanks, too, as soon as she can, but just now she’s in bed very unwell.”

Nathalie, who had heard what the child said, came down, and said, with a blush, “Is it I, darling? Give me your flowers, then.” The child, recognising her, kissed her hand, the hem of her dress, and, lastly, her lips, and would have recommenced this round of kisses, when Nathalie, in turning the flowers over, came upon three silken counterfeits amidst its living forget-me-nots and red and white roses. To Nathalie’s questions as to whence these costly flowers came, the child answered, “Give me a kreuzer or two, and I’ll tell you.” This was done, and she added, “I got them from my godpapa, and he is a very, very grand gentleman;” then ran away among the bushes.

This bouquet was a veritable Turkish Selam-and-Flower riddle to them all. Leibgeber accounted with ease for the child’s sudden marriage of Nathalie and Siebenkæs, by the circumstance that the advocate had been standing beside her at the water-side, and people, who had seen no one so constantly with her as himself, had been misled by the bodily likeness between them.

Siebenkæs’s mind, however, ran more on the machine-master, Rosa (so fond of setting his patchwork life-scenes for every woman to play her part before), and the resemblance these silk flowers bare to those which the Venner had once redeemed from pawn for Lenette in Kuhschnappel struck him at once; yet how could he sadden this gladsome time, and spoil the pleasure of receiving these votive flowers, by giving words to his suspicions? Nathalie insisted upon a distribution of this floral inheritance, inasmuch as each of the three had taken part in the rescue, and Siebenkæs and Leibgeber had, at all events, rescued the rescuer. She kept the white silk roses for herself, allotted the red ones to Leibgeber (who would not have them, but asked for a proper, real, living rose instead, which he immediately put in his mouth); to Siebenkæs she gave the silken forget-me-nots, and one or two living, perfume-breathing ones as well (souls, as it were, of the artificial ones). He took them with rapture, and said the tender real ones should never wither for him. Nathalie here took a brief temporary leave of the pair, but Firmian could not find words to express all his gratitude to his friend for the means he had adopted to prolong this little day of grace which orbed his whole life round with a new heaven and a new earth.

No King of Spain ever took as little out of some six, or so (at the outside), of the hundred dishes which, by the laws of the realm, are daily served at his table, than Siebenkæs did that day out of one. Historians, worthy of credence, inform us, however, that he managed to drink a very little—a little wine it was—and that in a considerable hurry for he could not be happy enough that day to satisfy Leibgeber. The latter, not apt to be easily swayed by heart and feeling, was all the more delighted that his beloved Firmian should at last have a pole star of happiness shining in the zenith point of the heavens above his head, beaming down genial warmth upon the blossoming time of his few scattered flowers.

The rapid rate at which his duplex enjoyment kept on moving enabled him to steal a march upon the sun, and he arrived once more at the villa, whose walls were now tinted red by his beams, while the glory of evening was gilding its windows into fire. Nathalie, on the balcony, was like some sunlit soul, just ready to take wing after the departing sun, hanging with her great eyes upon the shining, quivering world rotunda all full of church-music—and on the sun flying downward from this temple, like some angel—and at the holy, luminous tomb of night into which earth was sinking.

When they came under the balcony (Nathalie beckoning them to come up to her) Heinrich handed him his stick, saying, “Keep that for me. I have enough to carry without it—if you want me, blow the whistle.” As regarded his morale and physique, our good Henry had the kindest and softest of human hearts within his shaggy, Bruin breast.

Ah! happy Firmian, happy in spite of all your troubles. When now you pass through the door of glass and on to the floor of iron, the sun confronts you, and sets for a second time. Earth closes her great eye, like some dying goddess! Then the hills smoke like altars—choruses call from the woods—shadows, the veils of day, float about the enkindled, translucent tree-tops and rest upon their many-tinted breast-pins (of flowers), and the gold-leaf of the evening sky throws a dead-gilt gleam towards the east, and touches with a rosy ray the vibrating breast of the hovering lark, far up evening bell of Nature. Ah! happy Firmian, should some glorious spirit from realms afar wing its flight athwart earth and her spring tide, and, as he passes, a thousand lovely evenings be concentrated into one burning one—it would not be more Elysian than this, whereof the glow is now dying out around you as the moments fly.

When the flames of the windows paled, and the moon was rising heavily behind the earth, they both went back into the twilight room, silent, and with full hearts. Firmian opened the pianoforte and, in music, went through his evening once more. The trembling strings were as tongues of fire to his full heart; the flower-ashes of his youth were blown away, and two or three youthful minutes bloomed back into life.

But as the music poured its warm life-balsam upon Nathalie’s swollen heart in all its constraint (for its wounds were only closed, not healed), it melted and gave way, the heavy tears which had been burning within it flowed forth, and it grew weak and tender, but light. Firmian, who saw she was passing once more through the gate of sacrifice towards the sacrificial knife, stopped the sacrificial music, and tried to lead her away from the altar. Just then the first beam of the moon alighted, like a swan’s wing, upon the waxen grapes. He asked her to come out into the silent, misty, after-summer of the day, the moonlit evening. She placed her arm in his without saying yes.

What a sparkling, gleaming world! Through the branches, through the fountains, over the hills and over the woodlands, the flashing molten silver was flowing, which the moon was fining from out the dross of night. Swiftly shot her glance of silver athwart the rippling wavelet, and the glossy, shining, gently-trembling apple-leaves, pausing to rest upon the marble pillars and birch-tree stems. Nathalie and Firmian paused upon the threshold of the magic valley (it gleamed like some enchanted cavern, where night and light were playing, and all the founts of being—which by day cast up sweet odour, melody of songs and voices, feathery wings, translucent pinions—seemed sunk in voiceless slumber deep into some silent chasm). They looked up to the mountain, the Sophienberg, with its summit flattened as by the weight of years; a great mist Colossus was veiling all its Alp-like peak; next at the pale-green world, lying asleep beneath the shimmering radiance of the far-off silent suns, gleaming depths of silver star-dust, flowing faint and far before the ever-brightening rising moon; and then at one another, with hearts full to the brim of holy friendship, such a gaze as only two blest angels, new created, free and gladsome, bend in rapture on each other. “Are you as happy as I?” he asked. “No,” she answered, involuntarily pressing his arm, “that I am not; for, on a night like this should follow, not a day, but something far lovelier and richer—something that should satisfy the heart’s thirst, and staunch its bleeding for ever.” “And what should that be?” he asked. “Death,” was her answer. She lifted her streaming eyes to his and said, “You think so, too, do you not? Death for me.” “No, no,” he added quickly, “for me, if you will, not for you.” To break the course of this overpowering moment, she added hurriedly, “Shall we go down to the place where we first met, and where, two days too soon, I became your friend;[^[68]] and yet it was not too soon. Shall we?”

He obeyed her; but his soul was still a-swim among his precious thoughts, and as they went down the long, hollow, gravel-way, besprent with the shadows of the shrubs, and moonlight rippling over its white bed (flecked with shadows for stones), he said, “Yes, in an hour like this, when death and sleep send forth their brothers to us, a soul like yours may think of death.[^[69]] But I have more cause than you, for I am happier. Oh! of all guests at Joy’s festival-banquet, Death is the one whom she loves best to see; for he is himself a joy, the last and highest rapture upon earth. None but the common herd can associate humanity’s lofty flight of migration into the distant land of spring with ghosts and corpses here below on earth; as when they hear the owls’ voices when they are going away to warmer countries they take them for the cries of goblins. But, oh! dear, dear, Nathalie, I cannot and will not bear to think of what you say as in any shape connected with you. No, no, so rich a soul must come into full bloom in a far nearer, earlier spring than that beyond this life! Oh, God! it must!” They had reached a wall of rock over which a broad cascade of moonlight was falling; against it leant a trellis of roses, whence Natalie gathered a spray, all green and tender, with two young rose-buds just beginning to swell, and, saying “You will never blow,” she placed it on her heart, and said (looking at him with a strange expression), “While they are young they scarcely prick at all.”

And when they got down to the stone water-basin—the sacred spot where they first met—and could as yet find no words to utter what was in their hearts, they saw some one come up out of the dry basin. Though they smiled, it was a smile full of emotion—in all three cases—for this was their Leibgeber, who had been lying in wait for them in hiding, with a bottle of wine, among the imaged water-gods. A certain something there had been in his troubled eyes, but it had been poured out by way of libation to this spring night from our cup of joy. “This port and haven of your first landing here,” said he, “must be properly consecrated, and you (to Nathalie) must join in the pledge. I swear by Heaven that there is more fruit hanging on its blue dome to-night within reach than ever hung on any green one.” They took three glasses, pledged one another, and said (some of them, I imagine, in somewhat subdued tones). “To friendship! may it live for ever! may the spot where it commenced be always green! May every place blossom where it has grown, and, though all its flowers may fade, and its leaves fall and wither, may it live on for ever and for evermore!” Nathalie was obliged to turn her eyes away. Heinrich laid a hand upon the agate head of his stick (but only because his friend’s hand which was holding it was over the top of it, that he might give the latter a warm and hearty pressure), and said, “Give it me; you shall have no clouds in your hand to-night;” for nature had graven cloud-streaks on the agate in her subterranean studio. Any heart—not Nathalie’s only—must have been touched by this bashful cloaking of the warm token of friendship. “Are you not going to stay with us?” she asked somewhat faintly, as he was leaving them. “I’m going up to the landlord,” he said, “to see if I can get hold of a flute or a horn, and if I do I shall come out and musicise over the valley, and play the springtime in.”

When he was gone his friend felt as if his youth had gone with him. Suddenly he saw, high above the whirling may-beetles and the breeze-born night-butterflies, and their arrow-swift pursuers, the bats, a great train of birds of passage winging their way through the blue, like some broken cloud, coming back to our spring. Then flashed upon his open heart the memory of his lodgings in the market-town, and the time when he saw a similar flight of (earlier) birds of passage, and thought that his life would soon be at an end. These recollections, with all their tears, brought back the belief that he was soon to die; and this he must tell Nathalie. He saw the wide expanse of night stretched over the world like some great corpse but her shadowy limbs quiver under the moonlit-branches at the first touches of the morning breeze awaking in the east. She rises towards the coming sun as a dissolving vapour, an all-embracing cloud, and man says “It is day.” Two crape-covered thoughts, like hideous spectres, fought within Firmian’s soul. The one said, “He is going to die of apoplexy, so he never can see her more.” And the other said, “He is going through the farce of a pretended death, and then he never must see her more.” Overborne by the past as well as by the present, he took Nathalie’s hand, and said, “You must pardon my being so deeply moved to-night. I shall never see you more. You are the noblest of your sex that I have ever met, but we shall never meet again. Very soon you must hear that I am dead, or that my name, from one cause or other has passed away, but my heart will still be yours, be thine. Oh! that the present, with its mountain-chains of grave-hillocks, but lay behind me, and the future were come, with all its open graves, and I stood on the brink of my own! For I would look once more on thee, then throw myself into it in bliss.”

Nathalie answered not a word. She faltered suddenly in her walk, her arm trembled, her breath came thick and fast. She stopped, and, with a face as pale as death, said, in trembling accents, “Stay here on this spot; let me sit alone for a minute on that turf-bank. Ah! I am so headlong!” He saw her move trembling away. She sank, as if overwhelmed with some burden, down upon a bank of turf. She fixed her blinded eyes upon the moon (the blue sky around it seemed a night, the earth a vapour); her arm lay rigid on her lap; she did not move, except that a spasm, distantly resembling a smile, played about her lip; her eyes were tearless. But to her friend, life at that moment seemed a realm of shadows, whose outlines were floating and blending in endless changes of confusion; a tract all hollow, sunken mine-shafts full of mists in the likeness of mountain-spirits, with but one single opening of outlet to the heavens, the free air, the spring, the light of day; and that outlet so narrow, so remote, and far above his head.

There sat Nathalie in the white crystal shimmer, like some angel upon an infant’s grave; and, suddenly, the tones of Heinrich’s music broke in, like bells pealing in a storm, upon their souls as they paused, all stunned (like Nature before the thunder breaks), and the warm river of melody bore away their hearts, dissolving them the while. Nathalie made an affirmative sign with her head, as if she had come to some conclusion: she rose and came forward from the green, flowery grave like some enfranchised, glorified spirit; she opened her arms wide, and came towards him. Tear after tear came coursing down her blushing face, but as yet her heart could find no words; sinking under the WORLD which was in her heart, she could totter no further, and he flew to meet her. She held him back that she might speak the first, her tears flowing faster and faster, but when she had cried, “My first friend, and my last—for the first and last time,” she grew breathless and dumb, and, overburdened with sorrow, sank into his arms, upon his lips, upon his heart.

“No! no!” she murmured; “Oh! Heaven, give me but the power to speak. Firmian! my Firmian! Take all my happiness away with you—all that I have on earth. But never, by all you hold most sacred, never see me more in this world. Now” (she added very softly), “you must swear this to me.” She drew her head back, and the tones of Heinrich’s music flowed between and around them like the voice of sorrow. She gazed at him, and his pale care-worn face wrung her heart with agony; with eyes dim with tears, she implored him to swear that he would never see her more.

“Yes, noble, glorious soul,” he answered, in trembling tones; “yes, then, I swear to thee I will never see thee more.” Mute and motionless, as if smitten by the hand of death, she sank with drooping head upon his breast; and once again, like one dying, he said, “I will never see thee more.” Then, beaming like some angel, she raised her face, worn with emotion to him, saying, “All is over now; take the death kiss, and speak no more.” He took it, and she gently disengaged herself from his arms. But as she turned away, she put back her hand and gave him the green rosebuds with the tender thorns, and saying, “Think of to-night,” went resolutely away (trembling, nevertheless), and was soon lost in the dark-green alleys, where but few beams of light struck through.

And the end of this night every soul that has loved can picture for itself without the aid of any words of mine.

---

FIRST FRUIT PIECE.

LETTER OF DR. VICTOR TO CATO THE ELDER, ON THE CONVERSION OF I INTO THOU, HE, SHE, YE, AND THEY; OR, THE FEAST OF KINDNESS OF THE 20TH MARCH.

Flachsenfingen, 1st April, 1795.

My dear Cato the Elder,

A breaker of his word like you—who made such a solemn promise to come to my feast, and yet did not come—will have to be punished by having his mouth—not stitched up (which is what savages do to word-breakers,) for that would be a loss only to your hearers—but made to water. When I shall have painted a full and faithful picture of our peace-festival of the soul for you, I shall stop both my ears against the curses which you will pour out on your evil genius. At this feast we all philosophised, and we were all converted, except me, who could not be reckoned a convert, inasmuch as I was myself the converter of the heathen.

Our flotilla of three boats—(the third we were obliged to take in deference to the timidity of the ladies)—got under way about one o’clock in the afternoon of the 20th of March, ran into the stream, gained the open water, and soon after one we were well in sight of the very anther-filaments and spider’s-webs on the island. At a quarter-past two we landed—the professor, his wife, and a girl and boy—Melchior—Jean Paul—the Government Counsellor,—Flamin—the lovely Luna—(off goes the first of your curses here!)—the undersigned, and his wife.

Some Burgundy was then disembarked. At the commencement of spring (which was to take place that day at 38 minutes past 3 o’clock) we meant to enter upon a “stream of life,” coloured and sweetened after a most superlative sort. With the island, Cato, many of us were quite enraptured, and nearly all of us wished we had paid a visit to this beautiful bowling-green in the Rhine—thin pleasure camp amid the waves—long before. Luna, elder Cato—if I mistake not thou hast seen, certainly once at the very least, that tender soul, which ought to dwell in (and heighten the tint of) a white rose in place of a body—Luna shed tears, half of delight (for they were half of sorrow for everybody who was not there), half of delight not so much at the families of alders upon the rounded bank, or the Lombardy poplars lying trembling in intoxication of bliss in the gentle air which breathed about them, or the sunny green paths, as at all this together (in the first place), and at the spring sky and the Rhine (which was showing that sky a picture, as it were, of its antipodean sky somewhere over America), and at the peace and gladness of her soul—but (above all) at the Alp in the centre of the island.

The Alp will be sketched, if an opportunity offers, in this letter. I at once asked Luna where you were. She said, “At the Frankfort Fair.” Was she right?

When a party arrives at a place it is not, like the Anguis Fragilis, to be broken into ten twitching fragments by every touch of chance. Even the ladies kept with us, for I had deprived them of all opportunity of doing anything in the shape of household labour, by the arrangements I had made for the dinner. This Barataria Island was going to be an intellectual Place d’Armes and theatre of war that day. I love disputation. Intellectual bickerings further and heighten the happiness of congenial society, just as lovers’ quarrels are a renewal of love, and fisticuffs a necessity of Marionette operas. Certain people are like the Moravians, among whom the confessor and penitent change places, each laying a picture of his soul before the other, his own police-notice of an absconded criminal—his own advertisement in the “Hue and Cry”; and I am like them. Any blemish or shortcoming which I discover in myself or other people I immediately publish over half the town in a universal German gazette, as ladies do the witnesses’ depositions of evidence concerning strangers. For the last three weeks, dear Cato, my soul has been glowing in the brightest sunlight of peace and love, cast upon me by the deceased chief Piqueur (a man who had not a trace of either the one or the other about him)—and now I cannot rest till I entail this precious legacy upon all of you.

As Lieutenant de Police of the island, I possessed the power of issuing police regulations with respect to the conversation permissible thereon, and I directed the thread of our talk towards the Piqueur in question. But the wasps came buzzing out of their nests; the first of them being your brother, Melchior, who drove his sting into the Piqueur’s avarice, saying that people who didn’t bestow their plunder upon the poor till they were in their own coffins, were like pikes who eject their (swallowed) prey when caught themselves; they should rather do as Judas Iscariot did—cast their pieces of silver into the church before their hanging. The next wasp was your second brother, Jean Paul, who said, “Misers are the only people who haven’t had enough of life when they die. Even when they are in the very grip of Death’s hand, they would fain grasp hold of money with their own. Like cap-mushrooms, when they are broken off, they cling terribly to the earth’s surface with, their bleeding moiety.”

“Ah!” said I, “everyone is a thorough miser as regards something or other, I am sorry to say. I cannot now be so hard upon a man who confines himself to mortifying and chastening himself as I used to be. Where is the extraordinary difference between one of your learned antiquary mint-assayers who distils, evaporates, and injects all the pleasures of his life into the rust of a collection of coins—and a miser who counts and weighs the specimens in his cabinet like so many votes at an election? Not, in reality, so great a difference as there is between our opinions of the two.” I thought I had a fine chance of turning deftly to the subject of the Piqueur at this point, but the entire company called out to me to tell them what o’clock it was. In my capacity of Viceroy, I had disarmed all the islanders of their watches at the landing-place (as if they had been so many swords), that they might pass their day in a blissful eternity, where time was not. The only one allowed to keep his was Paul—and this was because it was one of the new Geneva sort, whose hands always point to 12 o’clock, only telling the real time when one touches a spring.

It was now past three. In thirty-eight minutes, spring, that pre-heaven upon earth—that second paradise—would make her grand processional progress over the ruins of the first. Already the clouds were all cleared away from the sky, spring breezes played coolingly about the sun, burning in the blue; on a vine-clad hill by the Rhine shore, a solo-singer from the great choir of spring—a nightingale—sent on in advance of her—was pouring out her song in a smooth-grown thicket of pruned cherry-trees; through the open trellis-work of the boughs we could see the notes vibrate in the feathers of her throat.

We climbed up the artificial Mount St. Gothard. It was set round with turf-banks and leafy niches; an oak stood on its summit by way of crown. Man (day-fly, as he is, playing above a ripple of time) cannot do without watches and date-indicators on the banks of the time-stream. Although every day is a birthday and a new year’s day, he must have one of his own into the bargain. Thirty-eight minutes struck in us. And down from the waves of throbbing blue above us came floating a broad breath of breeze, rocking the swelling grapes and the bare grafts, the delicate young branchlets, and the strong, sharp-pointed winter-corn, and lifting the soaring pigeons higher in their flight. The sun, above Switzerland, looked, in blissful intoxication, at his own face reflected in the sublime glittering ice-mirror of Mont Blanc, parting (unaware) day and night into equal halves, as if with two arms of fate, and throwing down equal portions to every land and every eye. We sang Goethe’s “Hymn to the Spring.” The sun sent us down (like dew) from the hill-top to the valley—the earth swelling loose fell rustling at our feet; and wine (Lethe of life) hid from our sight the misty bunks within which it rolled its way—mirroring only heaven and flowers. Clotilda said (not to us, but to her Luna)—(and here, dear Cato, I am drank with remembering; and I beg, accordingly, to invite you, at once, for the 10th of April), “Ah! dearest, how beautiful the world is sometimes. We ought not to think so poorly of it. Are we not like Orestes in the ‘Iphigenia’—fancying we are in exile, though we really are in our own native land.”

With every downward step from the hill we sank back into the workaday marsh-meadow of life. “What the better are we,” cried Melchior, quite angrily, “for all this splendour in and around us, when to-morrow a single passionate earthquake may hurl down an avalanche of snow-masses upon all that is warm and blooming in us? it is the April of the human heart—not the April of the universe—that causes me such vexation. We are always at our hardest just after an attendrissement—and moved to tears just after some murderous rage—as earthquakes set warm springs flowing. Now I know quite well that, to-morrow, at the sitting of the council, I shall attack and oppose everybody and everything. Pitiable! pitiable! And you are not a whit better, Flamin.”

“Not a whit,” said Flamin, with touching candour. Luna and my wife took the Professor’s wife between them (each taking one of her children in her lap), and sat down upon the green nether slope of the hill, on the sunny side of the nightingale. We, however, were too restless to sit down. “Alas!” (said Jean Paul, walking up and down, with his hands folded and hanging, and his hat thrown away, so that his eyes, at all events, might be higher and freer). “Alas! is any one a whit better? We take a vow of universal love to our fellow men whenever we are deeply touched—when we have buried some one, or have been thoroughly happy, or have committed some grand transgression, or looked long and closely at Nature, or are intoxicated with love, or some earthly form of intoxication: but we are really only perjurers, not philanthropists, as we fancy ourselves. We long and thirst for the love of others—but it is like mercury, it feels and looks like fountain water, and flows and glitters like it—but it is cold, dry, and heavy in reality. It is just those very people upon whom Nature has bestowed most gifts (and who, consequently, should not covet other people’s, but be content with distributing their own), who, like princes, demand the more from their fellow men the more they have to give them, and the less they do give them. Dissensions are the more bitterly painful, the more alike the souls are between whom they take place, just as discords are harsher the nearer they approach the unison. We forgive without reason because we have found fault without reason, for a rightful and righteous anger must, of necessity, be everlasting. Nothing is a stronger evidence of the miserable subordination of our reason to our ruling passion than the fact that we place such a flat every-day matter as time among the cures for hate, grief, love, &c.; our impulses are to forget to conquer, or to grow tired of doing so—our wounds are to be sanded over with the Margrave’s sympathetic powder of drift-sand out of Time’s sand-glass! Too miserable a business altogether! But can anything make a better of it? Certainly, least of all my complaints of it!”

“The fact is,” said the serene, gentle, Professor (who only uses a very few pedantic tints in his style of painting), “feelings of love to our fellow men[^[70]] are useless without reasons.” “So are reasons without feelings,” said Paul.

“Consequently,” continued the Professor (for I could not manage to get my Piqueur brought to bear anyhow, but had to keep him idly in reserve), “the two have to be combined like genius and criticism—of which the former can produce only master-pieces and scholar-pieces, the latter only something of an everyday sort between the two. What I think is, that our lack of love arises, not from our coldness, but from a conviction that others do not deserve it. The coldest of men would acquire a greater warmth of feeling for their fellows if they acquired a higher opinion of them.”

“But,” asked Clotilda, “must we not forgive even the wrong done by our enemies? The right is not matter for forgiveness.”

“Of course it is not,” he answered, but would let himself be no further diverted from his point. “The only ugliness and hatefulness which we can truly experience hatred for is that of a moral sort.”

“In opposition to that view of the question,” said Jean Paul, “I might adduce the fierce combats of animals, and nurseries in a state of war; for in neither of these cases is there any idea of immorality of the enemy, although hatred of him exists. But were I to adduce these cases, I could answer myself—at least, so so. If we directed our hatred against things other than the immoral, we should be just as angry with the hanging branch which strikes us in the face as with the person who broke it so that it should be so placed as to do so. The rage of a chastised child is quite a different thing from the alarmed instinct of self-conservancy—the feeling of avoidance of nitric acid, or of bodily hurt. The former has in it a duplex sense of dislike, the two components of which are most dissimilar—the one referring to the cause, the other to the effect. We must distinguish between beings which are capable of morality, and such as are not, in kind—not in degree; those incapable of morality can never be made capable of it by the mere lapse of time, or step by step. Whence, if children at any period of their age were utterly non-moral beings, it would follow that they could never, at any period, begin to become moral beings. In brief, their anger is nothing other than a dim sense of other people’s injustice. As to the animals, I don’t know what else to say than that there must be in them something analogous to our moral sense. Those who (like us) believe them to have immortal souls, must, as a matter of course, concede them some beginnings some pre-existent germs of morality—although these may be overpowered and kept in the background by their animal natures even to a greater extent than (for instance) conscience is in sleep, drunkenness, or insanity. But alas! all this is night within night! And I hope this obscurity will be considered some excuse, Professor, for the manner in which I have obstructed and built out your light.”

“Now,” he went on, “since hatred only concerns itself with moral defects, how strange it is that we never hate ourselves, even for the gravest moral defects.”

“I think,” said Flamin, “that one does sometimes feel the deadliest hatred of one’s self, for over-haste.”

“And then,” said Jean Paul, “your argument would apply just as well to love—at least it would half apply. Come, let’s hear what you’ve got to say to that?”

“We never hate ourselves,” I said. “We despise and pity ourselves, when we have done wrong. Although—I must add this—we hate all men, our ownselves excepted, for vices. Can this be right?” “Self-hatred,” went on the Professor, “is not possible, for hatred is nothing but the wishing of evil to the object of it—i. e., a desire to punish, not for bettering’s sake, but for punishing’s. But the most repentant of sinners never can wish himself made the subject of a chastening of this kind; and even if he could, such a wish would be merely a disguised desire for bettering—i. e., for greater happiness. But to a transgressor other than ourselves we hardly can concede rapidity of conversion, not, at all events, until he has gone through a proper expiation. What distinguishes our feeling concerning other people’s errors from our feeling concerning our own is a sham self-love. The very minutest particle of hatred desires the unhappiness of its object; that is what I have got to prove now.”

His own wife here interrupted him with the words, “My heart tells me, as plainly as possible, that I could never wish any serious misfortune to happen to my bitterest enemy—such as money troubles, or anything about her children. I could not bear even the idea of a tear being brought to her eyes on my account.”

“No, I suppose not,” he went on. “The better nature within us never wishes its antipode a broken leg, would not leave him without a strip of lint, or a wish for his recovery. But I know that that same ‘better nature’ does take a delight in his minor skin-wounds—his being put to confusion, his sleigh slipping down hill backwards, his losing his hair. The gentlest of souls hides, at the back of its tender sympathy with great troubles, its untender satisfaction with small ones, such as call for condolence (a smaller thing than sympathy). The tenderest of people, people incapable of indicting the smallest wound imaginable on their enemy’s skin, are delighted to make a thousand deep ones in his heart.” “Ah!” said Luna, “how can that be possible?” “I don’t think it would be possible,” Clotilda answered her, “if the pain of the soul had as definite a physiognomy, and as real tears, as that of the body.”

“Exactly,” said the Professor; “that is just where it is. To make ourselves feel more gently towards the wicked we have only to think of them as delivered wholly over into our hands. For what harm would one do them then? The moment they acknowledged their fault we would stay the rack, and bid the torture cease. What redoubles our indignation, and renders it everlasting, is the very impossibility of inflicting any punishment.”

“Yes, that is quite true,” said Melchior. “The oftener I read of these two live guillotines of their age, Alba and Philip (whose lips were shears of the Parcæ), or of those two other mowers of mankind, Marat and Robespierre, the deeper does the aquafortis of anger etch their condemnation into my heart, although death has drawn up their Acts of Amnesty.”

“And yet, after all,” I put in (leaving the Piqueur in the rear for the present), “if anybody would deliver over the King and the Duke to you and me here this afternoon, and a couple of caldrons of boiling oil into the bargain, I feel quite certain I couldn’t throw one of them in—at any rate till the oil had stood a long time in the cold. I should let them off with a good flogging—say 100 lashes, or so. Ah! what a cast-iron sort of fellow were he who should not soothe, and comfort with cooling, healing touch (had he the power) a heart breaking with anguish, a face whereon the worm of suffering was ploughing its tortuous track! At the same time (I continued, rapidly; for I was determined to bring in my Piqueur somehow or other), where emotion is concerned, the memory of past errors is not the smallest safeguard against new ones.”

“You see, you won’t allow me to speak,” the Professor broke in. “I still owe you a tremendous number of proofs, and I am most anxious to acquit the debt. Our hatred, being an emotion, always turns every action into a whole life; every attribute into a personality (or, to speak more accurately, because our only mode of seeing any personality is by its reflection in the mirror of its attributes) converts one attribute into the sum of them. It is only in the case of liking—of friendship—that we find it easy to separate the attribute from the personality. Hatred can not do it. Nay, in the case of liking, the converse transformation takes place—that of the personality into the attribute. We hate as if the object of our hatred had never possessed any virtues, or inclination to them—neither pity nor truthfulness, love of the young, one single good hour, anything whatever. In brief, since it is with the individuality of the person whose punishment we are decreeing that we are angry (not with its characteristic of the moment), we make him out to be a wholly wicked being. Yet such a being is not conceivable. The voice of conscience speaking in that being would be of itself one goodness in him, even though it spoke in vain; the pain of that conscience would be another; each joy and each impulse of his life another.”

“Ah! how delightful,” said Luna, “that there is nobody so utterly bad; nobody whom one would have to hate altogether.”

“You see,” he continued, “it cannot be the me of a person that we hate; for the me is still the same me when it improves, and wins our regard.”

In the warmth of our discussion we were losing sight altogether of one of the two concave mirrors which distort other people’s moral distortions for us even more wildly than they are distorted to begin with—I mean, our own egotism. Often, when I have seen and heard women squabbling in the market-place (women of whom one was just as good as the other, and with just as good an opinion of herself), and one hurling her invectives with delight, like a red-hot stone, at the other’s head, which seethed and swelled in waves of anger around that stone, while a third woman kept calm and cool in the midway-path between, I have been ashamed of the human race—ashamed that the self-same reproach, or immorality, which ought to produce exactly the same effect upon all the three, should make too strong an impression on the one, too weak a one on the other, none whatever on the third.

Paul pointed to the second of these distorting mirrors—our bodily senses. For these render the vinegar of hatred doubly bitter by throwing into its fermenting-vat these parts of the enemy which they take cognizance of—his clothes, movements, gestures, tones, &c.

Here we reached the Gordian knot which only I could cut with the Piqueur. “Who is to save us from these bodily senses?” I inquired (with a certain amount of hopeful expectancy). Melchior answered, “I do not allow them to influence my philanthropy, at all events. They are the straw which feeds the flame under that ascending windbag balloon, the heart.”

Jean Paul thrust me back from the Gordian knot. “I,” he said, “have an admirable sweetener at all times in readiness to apply when a sinner embitters my senses. I take him, and (like a victorious enemy) strip all the clothes off him, not leaving him so much as his hat or his wig. When once I’ve got him standing there before me, cold and wretched as any corpse (I mean, of course, in imagination), I begin to feel sorry for the scoundrel. But this is not enough. I have got to sweeten myself a good deal more than this; so I proceed to slit him up with a long, slicing cut from top to bottom into three cavities (as if he were a carp), so that I can see his heart and brain pulsating. The mere sight of a red human heart (Danaid’s bucket for happiness—safe storehouse of so many a sorrow) makes my own soft and heavy; and I have often not forgiven a street robber till the Professor has been shewing us his heart and brain in the anatomical theatre. ‘Thou unhappy, sorrowful heart,’ I have always found myself thinking, with deep, sympathetic emotion, ‘how many a blood-billow has gone surging through thee, glowing and freezing in the same moment.’ But if all this process failed to have its effect, I should proceed to extremities, and smite my enemy dead; then take the naked, fluttering, trembling soul—like an evening moth—out of its brain-chamber chrysalis, and, holding up the quivering night-creature between my forefinger and thumb, gaze at it without a trace of rancour left in me.”

“To picture one’s enemy to one’s self as unclothed, or disembodied,” said I, “so as to be able to put up with him, as though he were dead (perhaps that is the chief reason why we love the dead), is just the operation I perform too. I often try to soften the unpleasant effect which some repulsive physiognomy produces upon me by thinking of it as scalped, and with its skin folded back.”

And now I determined, seriously and in earnest, that the sceptre and throne insignia of the conversation, should no more depart from my hands. Wherefore I commenced as follows: “But who is to provide us with the time and the power, not only to remember, but to act upon, this precious and reliable principle, or rule of conduct, right in the thick of this world’s Pyrrhic war-dance, and the rapid evolutions of our emotions? Who is to stoke the æther-flame of philanthropy with a sufficient supply of combustible matter, seeing that there are such hosts of people continually drowning it out, smothering it up, and building it in! Who is to make up to us for the lack of a gentle, quiet temperament? Who, or what?”

Just as I was going to fix the Piqueur on to this lance-shaft by way of point, the cold dinner was brought, and the Professor’s wife went to fetch her children. For the dinner had to be over before sunset; because, like a fresh supply of green firewood, it would drown out the flame of enthusiasm for a time, and break the unity of its vertical, purple fire pyramid. The company, therefore, waited in vain for me to go on with what I had to say. I shook my head, expressing, by nods, that I should do so when we were all together again, and sitting down.

While we were at dinner I was able to set up my speaking machine, and set it a-going at my ease.

“I asked you once or twice before dinner,” I commenced, “who can invigorate and quicken our principles of love to our fellows, and set them fully to work? I answer, the chief Piqueur can; only I’m afraid I’ve made so many false starts, and baulked in so many of my runs before making this grand jump of mine, that I have led you to entertain far greater expectations concerning it than it (or I) may be able to fulfil. A day or two before the stump-end of the chief Piqueur’s life-candle fell down and went guttering out in its candlestick-socket, he sent for me to the side of his bed of suffering and begged me—not to prescribe for him, but—to make a thorough inspection of his house. He drew my head down close to his wretched pillow, and said, ‘You see, doctor, Death has got his hunting-knife at my throat. But I’m not sorry to go, and what little I leave behind me in the shape of worldly gear goes all to the poor. It’s but little that I have ever thought of scraping together for myself, and that is a comfort to think on now. It’s for the poor that I have screwed and saved, pinched and pared; and when a man has done that it’s a pleasure to him to make his will; he knows it will be paid back again elsewhere. But there’s one hard stone at my heart still. You see I have neither chick nor child belonging to me, and when the breath is out of my body, the old woman who keeps my room in order will be in the house by herself. She’s an honest body enough, but as poor as a church mouse, and pretty sure to help herself to something before the seals are put on my effects. Now, doctor, you are a man who are just as good to the poor as I am myself; you often prescribe for them gratis; I want to ask you to go through the house with the notary (I don’t trust him a bit more than I do the old woman), take an inventory of what there is, and have a regular notarial instrument drawn up concerning my property. I’ve left the whole of it to the Poor-house and the Institution for Destitute Gamekeepers. The notary must begin with my breeches under the pillow here, because my purse is there.’

“A man whose stubble Death is in the very act of turning up with his plough, has, upon me, a more powerful claim than that of the first request—that of the last. I came the next day, bringing with me the notary, and also my dislike to the dying man and his distrustful suspicions. With gay indifference I helped to protocol the effects in the sick-room—his shooting-jacket, worn into shining patches by his old game-bag—his old guns and knives—even such matters as a leather over-shoe for his thumb, and a long mummy bandage for his nose, which he had worn on occasions when he had hurt himself in these members with his gun.

“As we went through the other silent chambers—empty snail-shells of his shrivelled, dried-up life—my frozen blood began to thaw within me, and to move in warm, light mercury-globules. But when I came to the lumber-room, with the notary, and tuned over the rag-fair of his old night-shirts—(caterpillar cases and blood-shirts of his feverish nights, in which I seemed still to see him groaning and thirsting)—and his Pathebrief,[^[71]] and his name copied from thence with all its flourishes on to his pointer’s collar—and the picture of his pretty mother with him as a smiling infant in her lap—and his wife’s bridal garland of wire, covered with green silk—(Oh! for goodness’ sake do not interrupt me with talk—I’ve had enough of that, Heaven knows). When I took in my hands these opera-costumes, these theatrical properties, in which the sick player down-stairs had performed his probe-rolle[^[72]] of a Harpaxus for the benefit of the poor—not only did the poor fellow’s moral emptiness of treasury, and miserable rate of monthly salary, strike me with pain, but, moreover, I wished him no heavier suffering, no severer punishment, than he would wish for himself, were he really to repent in good earnest before his plunge into the depths of the soil. No, not so much, for the matter of that. Therefore, my dislike to him was gone. For I put myself in his place—not outwardly only, as people generally do, fancying themselves in another person’s physical place with their own souls, their own wishes, habitudes, &c.—but inwardly—in his mind, his youth, wishes, sufferings, thoughts.

“‘Poor Piqueur,’ I said, as I went down-stairs; ‘I have no more satiric pleasure now over your gnawing suspicion, your errors, your self-shooting covetousness, your hungry avarice. You have got to live through a long eternity with that self, that “me” of yours, the best way you can, just as I have with mine. You have got to rise with that self of yours at the Resurrection, and go about with it, and look after it, and care for its welfare. And, of course, you can’t but be fond of yourself, just as I am of myself, and put up with all that self’s defects and shortcomings whether you will or not. Go in peace then into the other world, where the broken glasses of your harmonica of life will be replaced with fresh-tuned ones—in the great home of all the spirits!’

“The old woman met us on the stairs crying out that the man was dying. I went to his bed-side, looked upon his cold, yellow, senseless form, and saw that he would very soon throw off his last stage-dress, his body. Next day the tolling bell announced that, he had returned to the dust—gone back into the ground—that, stage dressing-room of souls and flowers. (And we are rung off and on to that stage, as well as others.)

“Meanwhile I made an experiment with my modified and mildened system of treatment, upon the poor notary devil; the day after I tried it on the jurists who came from the college. (Jean Paul! communicate your idea to us by-and-bye—do not interrupt me just now)—I did this, I say, and found that I was able to establish a heart-peace even with the plebeians among them—who dishonour their calling—the only really free one in all the body politic. For in the cases of these lawyers, and those of my own medical colleagues from whose breasts I have been so often in such a hurry to cut off, and melt down, the medals of honour which they have cast for themselves, I have had merely to take away the roof from over their heads, lift the rafters from their walls, and bare their houses to the four winds of heaven. Then I could look in and see everything there—their housekeeping, their unoffending wives, their sleep (i. e., mock-death), sicknesses, sorrows, birth-days, and funeral-days, and this reconciled me to them! Of a truth, to love a man, I have only to think of his children, his parents—the love he feels and inspires. One can easily perform this philanthropic transmigration of soul at any moment, without help of the balloon of phantasy, or the diving-bell of profound reflection. Good heavens! it does seem hard (and a shame and disgrace into the bargain) that it should have taken me thirty years of my life to understand properly what it is that self-love is really driving at—my own and everybody else’s—what it wants is, to be surrounded with mere repetitions of its own ‘me.’ It insists upon every infant on earth being a parson’s son (as I am)—that everybody shall have lost, and gained, noble friends—that everybody shall be an M.D., and have studied at Göttingen—that his name shall be Sebastian, and that he shall be an overseer of mines, and write his life in forty-five dog-post-days—in brief, that this world shall contain a thousand million Victors instead of one. I beg that everybody may send spies into his soul, to look carefully about them and see whether it be not the case that there are thousands of instances in which what we hate a man for is, either that he is as fat as a prize pig, or as lean as a stick of vermicelli—or that he is a district secretary, or a Roman Catholic watchman in Augspurg, and wears a coat white on the one side, and green on the other—or that he eats his veal with melted butter;[^[73]] (or, at all events, hate them more for these reasons; for when we are indifferent to people, all their external characteristics, beautiful or ugly, merely increase our indifference). People are so deep sunk in their dear selves that everybody yawns at the menu of everybody else’s favourite dishes, but expects them to be interested when he reads out his to them.”

That feathered echo, the nightingale, was singing to us phrases of the music of the spheres, to us inaudible until thus repeated to us by her. But I had my rapid descent from my Mont Cenis to finish, and could but give utterance to my applause (of the bird and her music) by a hasty nod. “Heavenly! Elysian! I’ve been hearing it every now and then. But, one thing more. Since my sentimental journey in other people’s souls, I have been happier and fatter than I used to be, in ball-rooms, anterooms, and large assemblages (hot lark-spits which roasted all the fat out of a Swift). This enduring of transgressors includes a greater enduring still of fools and dunces, although the great world makes war on these three tolerated sects in just the contrary ratio.

“The amnesty thus granted to humanity makes the duty of loving more easy to perform; moreover, it renders the deep blissfulness of friendship and love more justifiable; for the glow, the fire of the latter often vitrifies and calcines the heart towards the rest of mankind. And this is the reason why the last and best fruit....”

Clotilda looked inquiringly here, as if begging to be allowed one word of remonstrance with me for forgetting to put myself in the place of those whose transformation I was thus extolling. I reddened, and paused. “This,” observed Jean Paul, “is the reason why a concert-room audience cries out the loudest against noise or disturbance just during the loveliest adagios—when people are most deeply touched—and swear and weep at the same time.”

“I cannot help being ashamed of an experience of my own,” said Clotilda. “The other day I cried so at reading Silly’s letters (in Allwill’s Papers) that I was obliged to put the book down. Then I went to the casino with my head full of what I had been reading—and I dare not tell you what hard opinions I entertained, several times that very evening, of several people of my acquaintance. I expected of them that they should all be in exactly the same mood of mind as myself—although, of course, they had not just come from reading Silly’s letters.”

“That is exactly what I was coming to,” concluded I. “The last and best fruit, which ripens late in a soul ever warm, is tenderness towards the hard—patience with the impatient—kindly feeling for the selfish—and philanthropy towards the misanthropic.”

It is a very odd thing, beloved Cato, but Jean Paul has just come and told me a murder-tale of human iniquity, which goes hissing through my heart like a red-hot iron. All my theories stand bright and clear as stars around my soul, but I can do nothing save look inactively down upon the billows in which my blood is foaming, heated by this subterranean earth-fire, and wait until they cool down and subside. Alas! we poor, poor mortals! Jean Paul, who knew the story the day before yesterday, and had consequently all that time to put the cooling process in practice in advance of me, is going to take charge of the picture exhibition of our insular flower-pieces in my stead, and add a postscript to this. Which is well, for to-day I really could not do it. By the 10th of April the air will have cooled; then you are sure to be coming, as the French election meetings begin then. We must keep the “settling weeks” of your great feast and fairtide here. Alas! in what a disquiet condition have I to stop writing to you. You will go on reading, but not

Your

Victor.

---

POSTSCRIPT BY JEAN PAUL.

DEAR BROTHER.

Our Victor’s virtuous indignation will soon be over and past. The reason why he, and I too, now, have made a written confession of the cure of our disposition to censure our fellows, is, that we may be compelled to be excessively ashamed of ourselves if ever we chide for more than a minute, or hate for more than a moment. This all embracing love demands a sacrifice, which is made with greater hesitation than one would expect—the sacrifice of the pleasure of being satisfied with one’s self—which anger adds to the contemplation of other people’s faults (and satire to the contemplation of other people’s follies)—by way of a sweetening ingredient, and whose place is taken by a pure and unalloyed regret at the frequency with which the disease shifts its seat, and at the chronicity of the bleeding of the wounds and scars of helpless man.

However, for the present, what I would fain do is to steer our floating island, and its blessed twilight, close up to your view.

The sun was sinking towards the cloud Alps, and glowing white over France in the west as if it should shortly drop down on its plains as a gleaming shield of freedom, or fall into its billowy ocean as a wedding-ring between heaven and earth. The shades of evening were already overflowing the first two steps of the hill, and the darkening Rhine seemed to be passing an arm of night around the earth. We ascended our little steps as the sun descended his great ones, seeming, as we ascended, to rise from his burning grave with the face of a saint at the Resurrection. The hill lifted up our eyes and our souls. Remembering my shortcomings I took Victor’s hand, and said, “Ah! dear Victor! could it but come to pass that one could make a treaty of peace with all mankind, and with one’s own self—if one’s shattered heart could absorb and retain, from out the leaven of the hating and hated world, nothing but the sweet, mild, life-sap of love—as the oyster, amid mud and slime, takes nothing save bright pure water into his house. Ah! if one but knew that such an event were about to come to pass of a truth, an evening of happiness such as this would refresh and fill one’s thirsting breast, (all cracked with thirst and dryness)—would still the everlasting sigh.” Victor answered (not looking round, but keeping his glowing and beglowed face—which his loving heart suffused with a brighter tint—turned to the sun, now burning half sunk in the earth), “Perhaps,” he said, “that time may come; a time when we shall all be happy when a human being smiles—even should he not deserve it—when we shall speak kindly to every one—not by way of a mere sacrifice to the laws of polite society, but for very love—and there will be no difficulties, no complications, for hearts which will no longer have any inward annoyance to conceal. To-day the spring sun rests upon the world like the eye of a mother, and shines warm upon every heart, the wicked as well as the good. Yes, thou Eternal One, we here now give our hands and our hearts to thy whole creation, and no longer hate anything which thou hast made.” We were overpowered, and we embraced with tears, and no words, in the first darkening of the night. Over the sun’s burial place stood the zodiacal light, a red grave pyramid, flaming unmoved up into the silent deep of blue.

The City of God which hangs displayed on high above our earth, built on the arch of the Milky Way, appeared from out the endless distances with all its shining sun-lights.

We came down from the hill—each spot of earth was a hill just then; an unseen hand lifted our souls on high above the dark vapour-circle, and they looked down as if from alps, seeing nothing save gleaming peaks of other mountain ranges—for all the mean, all that was not the high, all graves, petty goals, and life careers of humanity, were veiled in heavy mist.

We lost each other amongst the paths, but in our hearts we were all together. We met again, but the silence in our souls was not broken, for each heart beat just as did all the others, and there was no difference, save the being alone, between a prayer and an embrace.

The scattered flames of our emotion had gradually merged into one glowing sun sphere, as the ancients believed that the fluttering after-midnight fires thickened ere morning into a sun.[^[74]]

But I, a stranger, alas! in this paradise stood beneath the leafless branches, sad, and alone, beside the dark-blue Rhine stream where the stars were mirrored—it glided, with gently heaving wavelets, over the German soil, binding two great republics[^[75]] together, like some heavenly band; and to me it seemed as though the thirst, the fire, of a breast no broader even than mine could be quenched with nothing less than the waters of this great river. Alas! we are all like this. In the transient clasp of our little grandeurs and blisses, we long to rest, and die, upon something great. We long to cast ourselves into the depths of the heavens when we see them glitter and sparkle above us—or down upon the many-tinted earth, when her flowers and grasses wave—or into the endless river, flowing as if from out the past onwards into the future.

Our ladies and the children had gone away—departing in silence from this anchorage of hours so happy—I saw them as they floated over the wavelets, singing like swans, and dropping spring flowers into the ripples, that they might float back as souvenirs to us upon our island shore. The children were sleeping softly in their arms, between the glories of the heaven and of the earth, lulled by the arms, the songs, and the ripples.

When it was 12 o’clock, and the first morning of spring was come, Victor summoned us all to the hill, we knew not wherefore. All around and beneath us was the music of the rush of the Rhine, and through it, came gliding clear the bright spring-melody of the nightingale; the stars of the twelfth hour sank, drop by drop, into the darkened grave of the sun, and went paling out among the grey ashes of the western clouds. Suddenly a straight, beautiful flame shot up in the west, and music came palpitating through the darkness.

“Do you not think of your France,” said Victor, “the first hour of day is breaking for her this 21st of March—the day when the six thousand primary assemblies form themselves, like stars, into one constellation, that one law may burst into being from out a million hearts.”

As I looked up to the sky, the Milky Way struck me as being the beam of the balance of hidden destiny, in whose weighing-pans (which are worlds) the broken, shattered, bleeding nations are weighed out for eternity. These destiny scales waver up and down as yet, because it was only a century or two ago that the weights were put into them.

We drew closer together, and (inspired by the night and the music) said, “Thou, poor country! may thy sun and thy day rise higher ere long, and cast away the blood-shirt of its morning red. May the higher genius wipe away the blood from thy hands, and the tears from thine eyes! Oh! may that genius build, support, and guard for ever the Grand Freedom Temple which is vaulted over thee like a second heaven: but also comfort every mother and every father, every child and every wife—and dry all eyes which weep for the beloved, crushed hearts which have bled and fallen, and now lie under that temple as basement stones.”

What I am going to say now can only be said to my brother, for nobody else would pardon it. Victor and I got into a boat, which was made fast with a rope to the bank, and which was drifting about with the current. We worked ourselves back to the bank, and then let the boat drift northwards again upon the ripples. In our souls (as in the world without us) sadness and exaltation were strangely blent: the music on the bank came and went—tones and stars rose and fell. The vault of heaven showed in the Rhine like some shattered bell, and up above us the dome of the temple wherein dwelleth Eternity lay in calm and motionless rest, with all its unchanging suns. From the eastward the spring breathed upon us, and the tree skeletons in the churchyard of the winter felt the presage of a near resurrection. Of a sudden Victor said—“It feels to me as though the river here were the stream of Time—our fluctuating life is carried along upon the waves of both towards the midnight.” Here my brother called to me from the island, “Brother, come into harbour and sleep; it is between one and two o’clock.”

This fraternal voice, coming to me athwart the music of the wavelets, suddenly brought a new world—perhaps the under-world—into my open soul. For a lightning flash of memory gleamed in a moment over all my dim being, reminding me that it was on this very night two-and-thirty years ago that I had made my entry upon this overclouded earth, shrouded with daily nights—and that this hour, between one and two o’clock, in which my brother was calling me into haven and to sleep, was the hour of my birth (which so often deprives man of both).

There come to us moments of twilight in which it seems as though day and night were in the act of dividing—as if we were in the very process of being created or annihilated; the stage of life and the spectators fly back out of view, our part is played out, we stand far off, in darkness and alone, but we have still got on our theatre dress, and we look at ourselves in it, and ask, “What is it that thou art, now, my me!” When we thus ask ourselves this, there is, beyond ourselves, nothing of great or of firm—everything has turned to an endless cloud of night (with rare and feeble gleams within it), which keeps falling lower and lower, and heavier with drops. Only high up above the cloud shines a resplendence—and that is God; and far beneath it a minute speck of light—and that is a human “Me”!

The heart is made of heavy earth, and therefore it cannot long endure such moments. I passed on to those sweeter seasons in which the full, tear-intoxicated heart neither can, nor will, do aught but simply weep. I had not the courage to drag my dear Victor down from the sublime region in which he was to my trifling pettinesses—but I asked him to remain beside me for a little time in this stillness which lay so silently upon the dark stream as it went flowing toward midnight and the south. Then I leant and pressed myself fondly to his side—and my little tears fell unseen into the great river—as though it had been the great stream of Time itself, into which all eyes drop their tears, and so many thousand hearts their blood-drops—for all which it neither swells nor flows the faster.

I thought as I gazed at the Rhine, “And thus, too, the dancing, billowy current of Life goes flowing on its course from out its source—hidden like the Nile’s. How little, as yet, have I done, or enjoyed! Our deserts, and our enjoyments, what petty things they are! Our metamorphoses are greater; our heads and our hearts go into the ground irrecognisable—altered a thousandfold—like the head of the man with the iron mask.[^[76]] Ay! and did we but change! but we change so little in the earth, or even in ourselves. Every moment is to us the goal of all that have come before it. We take the seed of life for the harvest of it—the honey-dew on the ears for the sweet fruit—and we chew the flowers, like cattle! Ah! thou great GOD! what a night lieth around our sleep! we fall and rise with closed eyelids, and fly about blind, and in a deep slumber.”[^[77]]

My hand was hanging into the water, and the cool ripples buoyed it up and down. I thought, “How straight and immovable the little light within us burns, amid the blasts of Nature’s storm! Everything around me contends and clashes together with gigantic might. The stream seizes upon the islands and the cliffs—the night-wind comes upon the river, and stalks across it, thrusting its wavelets back, and wages its strife with the forests—even up there in the tranquil blue, worlds are working against worlds—the eternal, endless mights flowing and rushing, like rivers, one against another, they come together in whirl and roar—and on the face of that eternal whirl the little worlds float eddying round the sun-vortex; nay, those shimmering constellations themselves rising zenithwards with that grand and gentle peace and calm—what are they but mountain ranges of raging sun-volcanoes, stretching into infinity beyond the reach of mind to follow. And yet the human spirit lies at rest amid this storm, peaceful as a quiet moon above a windy night. In me, at this moment, all is gentle peace. I see my own little life-brook running by me, falling, with all the rest, into the river of Time. The clear-eyed soul looks through the raging blood-rivers which are flowing round it, and through the storms which darken and obscure it, and sees, beyond them all, quiet meadows, gentle, peaceful waters, moon-shimmer, and a lovely, beautiful, tranquil, placid, peaceful angel slowly wandering there.” Yes, yes; within my soul there was a quiet Good Friday—wind-still, rain-free, and mild—neither cold nor over-warm—though shrouded in a tender cloud.

But a clear consciousness of rest is speedily the undoing thereof. I saw, floating near the island, three hyacinths which Clotilda had dropped into the wavelets as she went away. “Now, in this, thy birth-hour,” I said to myself, “the ocean of eternity is washing thousands of little hearts on to the stony shore of this world; how will it be with them one day when their birthday feast comes round? And what are your countless brothers who, with you, came thirty-two years ago into this vapour-ball, thinking now? Perhaps some terrible sorrow makes them think with bitterness of their first hour. Perhaps they sleep now—as I have slept—and must again—only deeper, deeper.” And then all my younger and older friends, now sleeping that deeper sleep, fell heavy upon my broken breast.

“I know, I think,” my Victor said, “what you are reflecting on so silently, and regretting so mutely.” I answered “No,” and then I told him all.

Then we went quickly back, and I put my arms about my other brother, and my heart went out in longing towards thee. At length we took our departure from this building-place of a more peaceful system of doctrine for our hearts—this quiet island; and the lofty hill—grand pedestal of the vases of our joy-flowers, chancel of the great temple, light-house tower in our haven of rest—seemed to gaze long after us, the hanging garden of our souls lying upon it in starry light.

And as we came to the shore, Hesperus, as star of the morning (spark which springs and shines so near the sun), rose up above the morning mists, and earlier than even the Aurora of morning, proclaimed his sire’s approach. And as we thought that he shines, too, as the star of evening upon our nights here below, and yet adorns the east, and the after-midnight hours with the first of the glittering pearls of dew, each said to his gladsome heart, “And so shall all the evening stars of this our life shine upon us as stars of morning at a future day.”

Think thou, too, of morning, my brother, when thou art looking upon the even; and when a sun is setting for thee, turn thee about and thou mayest see a moon rising in the east. The moon gives warrant that the sun is shining still—as Hope says, there still is happiness. But come now soon to thy Victor—and to

Thy Brother,

J. P.