After drawing to himself a vivid picture of the tender, delicate, beautiful, woman whom he had so often invoked, but never met—to whom he would have given and sacrificed—oh! so gladly—so much! not only his heart and his life, but his every wish, his every whim—he went down the hill with streaming eyes, which he strove in vain to dry; but, at all events, any kind womanly heart (among the readers of this tale) which has loved in vain, or to its own detriment, will forgive him these burning tears, knowing, from sad personal experience, how the soul seems to journey on through a desolate wilderness, where the deathly Samiel wind blows ceaselessly, while lifeless forms lie scattered around, dashed to earth by the blast, their arms breaking from their crumbling trunks when the living touches them in act to clasp them to his own warm heart. But ye, in whose clasp so many a heart has grown cold, chilled by inconstancy or by the frost of death—ye should not mourn so bitterly as do those lonely souls who have never lost, because they have never found; who yearn for that immortal and eternal love of which even the mortal and transient reflex has never been vouchsafed to bless them.
Firmian carried with him into his night-quarters a tranquil, though a tender, heart, which healed itself in dreams. When he looked up from his slumbers, the constellations, set in his window as in a picture-frame, twinkled lovingly before his bright and happy eyes, and beamed upon him the astrological prophecy of a happy morrow.
He fluttered, with the earliest lark, up out of the furrow of his bed, with as many trills as he, and quite as much energy. That day, fatigue plucking the bird-of-paradise wings from his fancy, he could not quite get out of the territory of Anspach. The day after, he reached Bamberg, leaving on the right hand Nürnberg—that and its Pays Coutumiers and Pays de Droit écrit. His path led him from one paradise to another. The plain seemed to be one great mosaic of gardens; the hills seemed to crouch closer to the earth, as if to let men the more readily climb up upon their backs and humps. The groves of deciduous trees were like garlands, twined and placed to adorn Nature on some great festal day; and the setting sun often glowed through the trellis-work of some leafy balustrade on a hill-side, like a purple apple in some perforated fruit-vase. In one valley one longed to take one’s mid-day sleep; in another, one’s breakfast; in this stream, to see the moon reflected when she stood in the zenith; to see her rise behind this group of trees; to see the sun rise out of that green trellised bed of trees at the Streitberg.
When he arrived the next day at Streitberg, where all those delights could be indulged in at once, he might easily have seen the top of the spire of Bayreuth put on the blushing tints of the evening Aurora—unless he was a much worse walker than his historian; however, he did not care to do so. He said to himself, “I should be an ass were I to go rushing, all dog-tired and dried up as I am, upon the first hour of a delicious reunion and meeting of this sort; neither he (Leibgeber) nor I would get a wink of sleep; and what should we have time to talk about at this hour in the evening? No, no, better wait, and get there the first thing in the morning, about six o’clock, and so have the whole day before us for our millennium.”
Accordingly he passed the night in Fantaisie, an artificial pleasure, rose, and flower-valley, half a mile from Bayreuth. I find it a very hard and difficult matter to reserve the erection of my paper model of this Seifersdorf miniature valley (which I should so much like to introduce at this point), until I find a roomier place for it than the present; however, I can’t help it, and should I not find such a place, there is sure to be ample space in the blank pages at the end of the book.
Firmian started, then, in company with a body of bats and beetles—the advanced guard of a beautiful bright day—and bringing up the rear (so to speak) of the people of Bayreuth, who had just finished their Sunday and Feast of the Ascension (it was the 7th of May): and he walked so late that the moon, in her first quarter, was casting deep, strong shadows of the blossoms and branches upon the greensward. Thus late in the evening, then, Firmian climbed a height from whence he could look down, with tears of joy, to Bayreuth—where the beloved brother of his soul was waiting for him and thinking of him—as it lay softly veiled in the bridal night of spring, and broidered over with shining flakes of Luna’s radiance. I can affirm in his name with a “Verily” that he nearly did what I should have done myself; that is to say, I, with a heart welling up in such a warm sort of manner as his was, and on a night all so adorned and pranked out with gold and silver, should have made but one bound into the Sun Hotel, and into my Leibgeber’s arms. However, he went back again into his odour-breathing Capua (Fantaisie), and there, in the brief intervening space of time between his return and supper and evening prayer time, he met—beside a dried-up water-basin or fish-pond, peopled by a race of deities transformed into stone—he met with nothing less than an exceedingly charming adventure. I proceed to give an account of it.
Beside the wall which surrounded the little lake in question, there was a lady standing; she was dressed all in black except her veil, which was white; she had a bouquet of faded flowers in her hand, and was turning it over with her fingers. She was looking towards the west, that is to say, away from him, and seemed to be contemplating partly the confused mass of stone Suisseries, and the coral-reef of sea-horses, tritons, and so on, and partly a temple, in artificial ruins, which was close by. As he passed slowly on he saw, by a side glance, that she threw a flower, not so much at as over him, as if this sign of exclamation were meant to rouse a pre-occupied person from his reverie. He looked round a little, just to show that he was really awake and observant, and went up to the glass-door of the artificially-ruined temple, in order to linger a little longer in the vicinity of this enigma. Inside the temple, facing him, there was a mirrored pillar, which reflected all the foreground and middle distance (including the fair unknown) in the green perspective of a long background. Firmian saw, in the mirror, the lady throw her bouquet at him bodily, and then roll an orange (which would not fly so far as the flowers) towards his feet. He turned round with a smile. A soft voice cried in an eager, hasty way, “Don’t you know me?” He said, “No;” and ere he had added, more slowly, “I am a stranger,” the unknown Lady Abbess had drawn near to him, and lifted the Moses veil rapidly from her face, and asked, in a louder tone, “Don’t you, now?” And a female head which might have been sawn from the shoulders of the Vatican Apollo (only softened by some eight or ten feminine traits, and a narrower brow) glowed upon him like some bust illumined by the flare of a torch. But, on his repeating that he was a stranger, and when she examined him more closely, and without her veil, and let her gauze portcullis down again (which movements took altogether about as long as one beat of the pendulum of an astronomical clock), she turned away saying, “I beg your pardon,” in a tone which expressed more womanly annoyance than embarrassment.
A very little thing would have set him off to follow her in a mechanical sort of manner. He immediately set about adorning all Fantaisie with plaster-casts of her head (instead of the stone goddesses)—of her head, which had but three pleonasms in the face of it—too much colour in the cheeks, too much curve in the nose, and too much wild fire (or rather material for kindling it) in the eyes. “That is the sort of head,” he thought, “which would be well in its place in an opera-box, beside the sparkling one of some royal bride (ay, and hold its own there), and might contain all the wisdom it might deprive—other people of.”
One carries a magic adventure such as this into one’s dreams with one, for it is like a dream itself. The month of May now stuck in little flower-sticks to all Firmian’s drooping, trembling, joy-flowers (as she had done to Nature’s), and lightly bound them to them. Ah! with what brightness do even little joys beam upon the soul when it stands on some spot all darkened by clouds of sorrow—as stars shine out in the empty sky when we look up at it from a cellar or deep well.
On the exquisite morning which followed, the earth rose with the sun. Siebenkæs had his friend of all time in his head and heart more than the unknown of yesterday; although, at the same time, he took care that his path should lead him by the ocean, and the shell out of which that Venus had arisen—for mere curiosity’s sake—which led to no result. And so he waded away through the moist radiance and cloudy vapour of the glittering silver-mine, tearing down in his passage the gossamer-wreaths all behung with seed-pearls of dew which hung upon the flowers; brushing (in his eagerness to reach his Olympus of yesterday) the chilled butterflies and dew-drops from off the branches, all a-flutter with the insect swarms (the key-board of a harmonica framed in flowers). He climbed to his place in the great “Auditorium” all delight at length. Bayreuth lay behind a glowing drop-curtain of mist. The sun (in his character of “king” of this drama) stood on a hill-top, and looked down at this many-tinted curtain, which took fire and blazed, while the morning breezes caught and bore away its fluttering, sparkling, tinder fragments, and scattered them over the gardens and the flowers. And soon nothing save the sun was shining; nothing round him now except the sky. Amid this radiance Siebenkæs made his entry into his dear friend’s camp of recreation and head-quarter city, whereof all the buildings looked as if they were a glittering, solider sort of air-and-magic castles fallen down from the æther. It was strange, but, on noticing certain window-curtains drawn in (which the street breeze had been toying with), he could scarcely help feeling certain that it was the “Unknown” of yesterday who was doing it, although at that time of the morning (it was barely eight o’clock) a Bayreuth lady would have as little got through her flower-sleep as the red mouse-ear, or the Alpine hawksbeard.[[62]] His heart beat quicker at every street. It was quite a pleasure to him to lose his way a little, as to some extent delaying and adding to his happiness. At length he attained his perihelion—that is to say—reached the Sun (Hotel), where was the metallic sun which had attracted to it his comet, as the astronomical sun does comets in general. He inquired the number of Leibgeber’s room; they said it was number 8, at the back of the house, but that he had gone that day on a trip into Swabia, unless he was still upstairs. Fortunately there just then came in from the street an individual who testified to the correctness of the latter hypothesis, and wagged his tail at sight of Siebenkæs—Leibgeber’s dog to wit.