Ah, what must we not all already have lost, if the pictures of blissful days win from us nothing but sighs! O tranquillity, tranquillity, thou evening of the soul, thou still Hesper of the weary heart, which always abides beside the sun of virtue, if at thy very name our inner being is dissolved into tears, ah, is not that a sign that we seek thee, but have thee not?
Victor owed the siesta of his heart to the sciences,[[87]] particularly Poetry and Philosophy, which two move, as do comets and planets, around the same sun (that of Truth), and differ only in the shape of their orbits, as comets and poets have the greater ellipse. His training and talents had accustomed him to the vital air and oxygen of the study, which is also the only dormitory of our passions, and that only cloister and haven of bliss for men who would escape the broad whirlpool of the senses and fashions. The sciences are, more than virtue, their own reward, and they make one a partaker of happiness,—she only makes him worthy of it; and the prize-medals, pensions, and positive rewards, and the patent which many scholars would fain get for their studying, belong at most to the literary apprentice-brethren, who make it a penance and a torture, but not to the masters of the chair, who make it a pleasure and a delight. A scholar has no ennui; only a throne-incumbent has to prescribe for himself, against this nervous consumption, a hundred court-festivals, cavaliers of honor, whole countries, and human blood!
Good heavens! a reader who, in Victor's Sabbatical weeks, should have taken a ladder and climbed up to his window,—would he have espied anything there but a jubilant thing, that went gliding about over the fields of learning as among islands of the blest?—a thing which, in its ecstasy, knew not whether it should think or compose or read, and particularly what or whom, out of the whole high nobility of books ranged before it. In this bridal chamber of the mind (such are our study-chambers), in this concert-hall of the finest voices gathered from all times and places, the æsthetic and philosophical enjoyments almost overpowered his faculty of choice. Reading hurried him into writing, writing to reading, thinking to sentiment, and the latter to the former.
I could go on with more satisfaction in this description, if I had previously written how he studied; namely, that he never wrote without having read himself full[[88]] on the subject, and the reverse, that he never read without having first thought himself hungry. One should, he said, without an intense occasion and impulse from without, i. e. from within, not only not make verses, but even a philosophical paragraph; nor should any one set himself down and say: "Now, at three o'clock on this Bartholomew's day, I will go at it, and cleverly prove the following proposition." I can now proceed.
Now when, in this mental laboratory, which served less for analytic chemistry than for synthetic science, he ascended from the turmaline which attracts grains of ashes to the sun which attracts worlds, and even to the unknown sun toward which solar systems fly; or when the anatomical charts were to him the perspective sketch of a divine architecture, and the dissecting-knife became the gnomon of his favorite truth: that, in order to believe in a God, there was need of nothing more than two men, of whom the one might be dead, too, that the living one could study him, and turn over his leaves[[89]]; or when Poetry, as a second nature, as a second music, wafted him upward softly on her invisible ether, and he chose undecidedly between the pen and the keys, when he wanted to communicate aloft; ... when, in short, in his heavenly sphere, supported on a human cervical-vertebra, the nebula of ideas gradually resolved itself into bright and dark parts, and beneath an unseen sun filled itself more and more with ether,—when one cloud became conductor to another,—when at last the gleaming mass of cloud came together,—then did the inner heaven (as the outer one often does), by eleven o'clock in the forenoon, grow from all the flashes into one sun, from all the drops into one flood, and the whole heaven of the upper faculties came down to the earth of the lower ones, and ... some blue patches of the second world were for a flying moment open.
We cannot delineate our inner states more philosophically and clearly than by metaphors, i. e. by the colors of related states. The narrow defamers of metaphors, who, instead of the brush, would rather give us the black-lead, ascribe to the coloring the unrecognizableness of the drawing; but they ought to charge it merely on their non-acquaintance with the original subject. Verily, nonsense plays hide-and-seek more easily in the roomy, abstract, artificial words of the philosophers—since words, like Chinese shadows, increase with their circumference at once the obscurity and the emptiness of their contents—than in the narrow green hulls of the poets. From the Stoa and the Portico of thought one must have an outlook into the Epicurean gardens of poetry.
In three minutes I shall come back to my story. Victor said, he must have mountain-, garden-, and swamp-meadows, because he possessed three different whimsical souls, which he must drive to pasture on three sorts of grounds. He meant by that, not, as the scholastics do, the vegetative, animal, and intellectual souls, nor, as the fanatics do, the three parts of man, but something very like,—his humorous, sentimental, and philosophical souls. Whoever should take away from him one of these, he said, might as well strip him of the remaining ones. Nay, sometimes, when the humorous soul happened at the moment to be sitting uppermost on the revolving cross-bench, he carried his levity so far as to express the wish that a joke might be made even in Abraham's bosom, and that he might with his three souls sit down at once on the twelve thrones.
His afternoons he gave up now to a streaming humor which did not even find its proper hearers,—now to the people of the parsonage,—now to all the school-going youth of St. Luna, whose stomachs (to the vexation of every good schoolmaster) he provisioned more than their heads, because he thought that, in the short years when the bib expands to a napkin, enjoyment must find its way over the children's serviette, and had no other entrance than the mouth. He never went out without a whole military-chest full of small change in his waistcoat pocket. "I scatter it without thinking," said he; "but if from this metallic seed sowed broadcast whole evenings of joy spring up for the poor devils, and if just the innocent ones so seldom have them, why shall not one do something for the saved virtue and for pleasure at once?"
He said he had heard moral lectures, and desired for his extra-judicial donations and merciful endowments nothing but forgiveness. His Flamin, who pronounced him a careless sowing-machine on rocks, spent his little holidays before approaching the session-table in ardent hopes of being serviceable there, and in preparations for being able to be so; often, when the higher patriotism, with saintly halo and Moses'-glory, broke out on the beloved Flamin's face, tears of friendly gladness stood in Victor's eyes, and in the moment of a lyric philanthropy both swore on their hearts for the future a mutual support in well-doing and joint sacrifices for mankind. The difference between them was merely reciprocal exaggeration,—Flamin treated vice too intolerantly, Victor too tolerantly; the former, as administrative counsellor, rejected, like the Anabaptists, all festivals, and, like the first Christians, all flowers (in every sense); the latter, like the Greeks, loved both too much;—the former would have sacrificed to honor human victims; the latter knew no robber of honor but his own heart: he overleaped at the tea-table the paper half-nobility of our miserable points of honor, and, mocking at mockery, submitted himself only to the high nobility of virtue....
Victor sucked, with the feet of a green-frog, on every flower-leaf of joy,—at children, animals, village-Lupercalia, lessons; but dearest of all to him was Saturday. Then he made excursions through the glad unrest of the village, along by servant-men, hammering at their scythes, not to magnetize, but to sharpen them, and before the shop-door of the schoolmaster, at which his eye, like a Swiss, often stood for half an hour. For he could very well study the state of St. Luna's commerce in the little great-adventure-trade of the schoolmaster, who knew no smaller merchants' exchange than the one in his breeches' pocket. From this East India House he saw at a late hour people procuring the cheap pleasures of Sunday,—the wholesale dealer (the schoolmaster is meant), supported by his negro slaves, made the Sunday morning of St. Luna sweet with his syrup and hot with his coffee; and as well by the tobacco-culture of Germany was this tradesman enabled with spiral cables of pigtail to furnish the heads of the pipes, as through the silk culture the daughter's heads with Sabbath-streamers out of his Auerbach's court.... Our hero all knew. From every kennel a dog came wagging his tail to meet him to whom he had thrown in bread; from every window children screamed after him, whom he had bantered; and many boys, whom he passed, counted themselves happy if they had a cap on,—for then they could take it off before their master. For his first growing up in St. Luna was the history of St. Luna, which must have been drawn from the oral blue-books of the historic persons, and from the Imperial Postilion, the Parson's wife. This last, as a Mrs. Plutarch, always held up two characters, like pieces of cloth, side by side; and her husband read to him according to the best of his science and conscience upon the Church- and Reformation-history of his diocese. Victor devoted himself to this microcosmic world-history from two motives: first, in order—which is the object of professional students with the larger history—to dismiss it again clean from memory; secondly, in order to be as much at home in the village as the constable or the midwife, whence he hoped to derive the advantage of being grieved if a St. Lunite should die, and glad if he had previously married.