Day After This Night.--Beata's Leaf.--Something Memorable
I ask pardon of the critics, if I made last night too many metaphors and too much fire and noise: a section of joy (as well as the critique upon it) must content itself with the like, when once the author contents himself with a like over-freight of lemon-juice, tea-blossoms, sugar-cane and arrack, as I did.
I did not lie down again to-day; the birds had already begun to sing again, and when my dreams had hardly reproduced the past spectacle some forty times over before my closed eyes, I opened them again, because the sun was blazing around me.
A night through which one has been awake and enjoying himself leaves behind a morning when in a sweet languor one not so much feels and fantasies, when the nightly tones and dances still sound on in our inner ears, when the persons with whom we spent it float before our inner eyes in a lovely twilight, which charms our hearts. In fact, we never love a woman more than after such a night, in the morning before one has breakfasted.
I have thought a thousand times to-day upon my Gustavus, who before day-break began his five days' journey, and of my Ottomar who goes with him. Would that you might never come upon any thorns but such as are hidden under the rose, might never pass under any cloud except one that leaves you the whole blue sky and takes away merely the blazing disc, and that your joys might want one only, namely, that of being able to relate it to us!
All sunlight merely encircled with a magic spell and overflowed like a lofty moonlight before me all the shaded avenues of Lilienbad: the past night seemed to me to reach over into the present day, and I cannot tell how the moon, which was still sinking with its wiped-out luster, like a snow-flake, low in the west, became so welcome and so dear to me. O, pale friend of need and of night! I still think even now of thy Elysian splendor, of thy cooled off rays, wherewith thou accompanyest us by brooks and in leafy lanes, and wherewith thou transformest the sad night into a day seen afar! Magical scene-painter of the future world for which we mourn and weep, as a dead man becomes beautiful, so dost thou paint the second world upon our earthly one, when with all its flowers and people it sleeps or looks up to thee with silent gaze!
I would give up the most distinguished visit to-day in exchange for it, if I could make one to the happy parties of yesterday, but it is not practicable. Even Beata had one to-day from her mother; and my eyes were not able to get a glimpse of anything about her except the five white fingers with which she turned round a flower-pot at her window out of the shadow of a twig. O if our old life and our walks begin again and all live together again, what things the republic of letters will then get to read!
To-day I deliver into its hands nothing more than Beata's safe conduct to Gustavus, because that I have only to copy off. Then I slip out again into the open air, steer once more by a chart I have in my head yesterday's course and, in gathering up as after-flora the scattered flowers our full hands let fall yesterday, I find the higher ones also. One will pardon Beata some passages in the following composition, when I premise that she, perhaps imposed upon by her heart, as well as by her father, who was only a nominal renegade of Catholicism--believed more of the angels and of their worship, than Nicolai and the Smalcald (mercantile) articles can admit. For weak and so often helpless woman, who dares not soar far above this earth, so loves in the hour of need to lay down her prayers and her sighs before a Mary, a saint, an angel; but more self-reliant man will indulgently forbear to censure a delusion which can be so consoling.
"Wishes for my friend.
"It is no delusion, that angels, in the midst of their joys, watch over threatened children of men, as the mother amidst her joys and labors guards her children. O ye unknown immortals! does a single and separate heaven shut you in? Do you never pity the defenceless son of earth? Can you never have wiped away greater tears than ours? Ah, if the creator has breathed his love into you as into us, then you certainly descend to this earth and console the besieged heart beneath the moon, hover around the oppressed soul, cover with your hand the parching wound and think on poor human creatures!
"And if here below there walks a spirit who will one day be like you, can you forget your brother?--Angel of joy! be with my friend and thine, when the sun comes, and let fair, holy mornings bloom around him! Be with him when the sun mounts higher--and when toil weighs him down!--Oh take the distant sigh of a sister and friend and cool his therewith! Be with him when the sun declines, and direct his eye to the moon as she rises in white morning-dress and to the broad heavens wherein the moon and thou walk!...
"Angel of tears and of patience! Thou that art oftener about men! Oh, forget my heart and my eye and let them bleed--indeed they do so willingly;--but tranquillize, like death, the heart and the eye of my friend, and show them on the earth nothing but the heavens beyond it. Ah, angel of tears and of patience! Thou knowest the eye and the heart, which pours itself out for him, thou wilt bring his soul before them, as one sets out flowers under the summer rain! But do it not, if it makes him too sad! O, angel of patience! I love thee! I know thee! I shall die in thy arms!
"Angel of friendship!--perhaps thou art the former angel?... Oh!... let thy heavenly wing cover his heart and warm it more tenderly than a human being can--ah, thou on another earth and I on this would weep, if his heart should, like the warm hand pressed upon freezing iron, cleave to a cold heart and tear itself away bleeding!... O shield him! but if thou canst not do it, then let me not learn his misery.
"Oh ye ever blessed ones in other worlds' with you nothing dies, you lose nothing and have all! what you love you clasp to an eternal breast, what you have you hold in eternal hands. Can you then feel in your shining heights above there, in your eternal bond of souls, that human beings here below are torn asunder, that we reach our hands to one another only out of coffins, before they sink; ah, that death is not the only, not the most painful thing that parts human beings?--Ere that snatches us from one another, many a colder hand breaks in and severs soul from soul----then indeed does the eye fail and the heart sink in anguish, just as much as if death had divided them, as in a total eclipse of the sun no less than in the longer night the dew falls, the nightingale mourns, the flower closes in death!
"May all that is good, all that is fair, all that blesses and exalts man be with my friend; and all my wishes are summed up in my silent prayer."
* * * * *
In all which I join, not merely for Gustavus, but for every good soul of my acquaintance and for all others too.
Though it is already eleven o'clock at night, still I must report to the reader something of melancholy beauty, which has just gone by. A singing person passed through our valley, concealed, however, by leaves and shadows, because the moon was not yet up. The voice sang more sweetly than any I ever heard before:
---- No one, nowhere, never.
---- The tear that falls.
---- The angel that shines.
---- There is silence.
---- It suffers.
---- It hopes.
---- I and thou.
Evidently half of each line is wanting, and to every answer the question. It has already occurred to me several times that the Genius who educated our friend under the ground, left him at his departure questions and dissonances, whose answers and solutions he took away with him; I think, too, I have said as much to the reader. Would that Gustavus were here. But I have not the courage to conceive what would be our delight if the Genius himself should introduce himself into our garland of joy at Lilienbad! I still forever hear the long drawn flute-tones from that unknown bosom wail behind the blossoms; but they make me sad. Here lie the ever-sleeping flowers, which I collected today on the path of our last night's ramble, beside the unfolded, waking ones which I have just palled up--they too sadden me. There is nothing I and my readers need more than to begin a new section of joy, so that we may continue our old life.
O Lilienbad! thou appearest only once in the world; and if thou still once more becomest visible thy name is B----zka.