Clotilda without any hesitating vanity consented to sing. But for Sebastian, in whom all tones came in contact with naked, quivering feelers, and who could work himself into sadness at the very songs of the herdsmen in the fields—this, on such an evening, was too much for his heart; under cover of the general musical attentiveness, he had to steal out of the door....
But here, under the great night-heaven, amidst higher drops, his own can fall unseen. What a night! Here a splendor overwhelms him, which links night and sky and earth all together; magic Nature rushes with streams into his heart, and forcibly enlarges it. Overhead, Luna fills the floating cloud-fleeces with liquid silver, and the soaked silver-wool quivers downward, and glittering pearls trickle over smooth foliage, and are caught in blossoms, and the heavenly field pearls and glimmers. Through this Eden, over which a double snow-shower of sparks and of drops played and whirled through a misty rain of blossom-fragrances, and wherein Clotilda's tones, like angels that had got lost, went flying about, now sinking and now soaring through this magic-maze, Victor staggered, dazzled, overwhelmed, trembling and weeping, and sank down exhausted into the arbor where he had to-day fallen on his father's heart. He thought over the wintry life of that good father amidst mere strangers to the heart, and his solitary, sad celebration of today's festival, and the cold, empty room in the paternal bosom, which once the lost form of the beloved one had inhabited, and he yearned painfully for the heart of his invisible mother. He lifted his leaning head into the rain, and from the large open eyes fell not strange drops alone. He glowed through his whole being, and night-clouds must cool it. His finger-tips hung down, lightly folded in one another. Clotilda's tones dropped now like molten silver-points on his bosom, now they flowed like stray echoes from distant groves into this still garden. He spoke no name, he thought no thought, he neither acquitted himself nor accused himself; he saw it all as in a dream, when now a thick night glided across the garden, and now a sea of light swept after it.
But it seemed to him as if his bosom would burst, as if he should be blest could he at this moment embrace beloved persons, and crush in the closeness of that embrace in a blissful frenzy his bosom and his heart. It was to him as if he should be over-blessed, could he now before some being, before a mere shadow of the mind, pour out all his blood, his life, his being. It was to him as if he must scream into the midst of Clotilda's tones, and fold his arms around a rock, only to stifle the painful yearning.
He heard the leaves drip, and took it for a continuing rain. But the Staub-bach of the heavens had scattered itself in spray, and only Luna's fall of light any longer besprinkled the landscape. The sky was deep-blue. Agatha had been seeking him during the rain, and had only just found him. He woke up, obediently and silently went out with her, and met only cleared-up heavenly faces,—then all his nerves quivered, and he was compelled with a mute obeisance to take his painful and friendly leave. Each one had his own thoughts on the subject. But the Parson's wife told the company, he loved to hear music at a distance, only it always made him too melancholy.
Ah, when he reached his chamber, a happy and consoling thought embraced his soul. Clotilda's dirge, and all, fixed before his sight the form of the exalted Emanuel,—and it seemed to say: "In a year I shall be already under the ground, only come to me, poor child, I will love thee till I die!" Without desiring a light, he wrote with streaming eyes, which no light could have helped, this letter to Emanuel:—
"Emanuel!
"Say not to me, I know thee not! How can man, on this little grain of sun-dust called the earth, on which he warms himself, and during the swift moments which he counts off on his pulse between the flash of life and the stroke of death, still make a distinction between acquaintances and non-acquaintances? Why do not these little creatures, who have wounds of the same kind, and for whose coffins Time takes the same measure, fall without hesitation into each other's arms, and sigh, 'Ah, we are doubtless like each other and acquainted!' Why must first these fleshly statues into which our spirits are chained move towards and touch each other, before the beings disguised therein can imagine and love each other? And yet it is so human and so true a thought: what then does Death take from us except fleshly statues, what from our eyes but the loved countenance, what from our ears but the dear voice, and the warm bosom from our own? Ah, Emanuel! be to me no dead man! Accept me! Give me thy heart! I will love it!
"I am not very happy, my Emanuel! When my great teacher, Dahore,—that shining Swan of heaven, who, fastened to life by his broken wing-joint, looked up wistfully at other Swans, as they winged their way toward the warmer latitudes of the second life,—ceased to write to me, he did it in these words: 'Seek my duplicate! Thy breast will continue to bleed, until thou coverest its scar with another, and the earth will agitate thee more and more violently, if thou standest alone,—and only around the solitary do ghosts creep.'
"Emanuel, art thou not tranquil and gentle and indulgent? Does not thy soul yearn to love all men, and is not a single heart too narrow for it to shut itself up therein with its love, as a bee is shut up in a tulip when it folds itself to sleep? Hast thou not had enough of the repeating-work of our merry bells and mourning-bells, and art thou not weary of the family likeness of all evenings and times? Dost thou not look, out from this fleeting earth over the long way above thee, that thou mayst not grow nauseous and giddy, as one for the same reason looks out of a carriage into the road? Believest thou not in men around whom floats the mountain air of a higher position, and who up on their height stand in the midst of a still heaven, and look down into the thunders and rainbows near the earth? Believest thou not in a God, and seekest thou not his thoughts in the lineaments of nature, and his eternal love in thy breast? If thou art and thinkest all this, then thou art mine; for thou art better than I, and my soul would fain lift itself to a higher friend. Tree of the higher life, I embrace thee, I twine around thee with a thousand faculties and tendrils, that I may mount up out of the trampled mire around me! Ah, a great man might heal, tranquillize, quicken, exalt me,—me, poor creature, only rich in wishes, distracted by the war between my dreams and my senses,—flung sorely to and fro between systems, tears, and follies,—disgusted at the earth, which I cannot replace for myself, laughing merely from anguish at the tearful comedy, the most contradictory, saddest, and merriest shadow among all the shadows in the wide night.... O fair, good soul, love me!
"Horion."