Ah, if he could have plunged up into the clouds, so as to sweep thereon through the undulating heavens over the boundless earth!—ah, if he could have floated with the flower-fragrance over the flowers,—could have streamed with the wind over the summits, through the woods!—O now would he rather have fallen on the heart of a great man, and sunk, enraptured and weeping, into his bosom, to stammer out, "How happy is man!"
He must needs weep, without knowing why; he sang words without sense, but their tone went to his heart—he ran, he stopped—he dipped his glowing face into the cloud of blossoming bushes, and would fain lose himself in the humming world between the leaves; he pressed the scratched face into the deep, cooling grass, and hung delirious on the breast of the immortal mother of Spring.
Whoever saw him from a distance took him for a madman; perhaps many a one does so still, who has never himself experienced how, through the cleared-up, blissful breast, as through the serenest sky, storm-winds may sweep, which in both dissolve in rain.
In this hour of his regeneration-day, his genius gave his heart the fiery baptism of a love, which clasped all men and all creatures into its flames. There are certain precious minutes of rapture—ah, why not years?—when an inexpressible love towards all human creatures flows through thy whole life, and opens thy arms softly to every brother. The least that Victor could do, whose heart was on the sunny side of love, was, if any one met him near a mountain, to turn out for him toward the steep side,—not to pass by any one who was fishing, for fear of throwing a frightening shadow on the water,—to wander slowly through a flock of sheep, and, if a child was shy of him, to make a long circuit aside. Nothing could surpass the soft voice with which he wished every pilgrim more than this good morning; nothing the look of anticipating emotion with which in every village he sought to spy out any poor body whose calluses and scars and gashes required a sponge or pain-killing drops. "Ah, I know as well as an amanuensis[[111]] to a Professor of Morals," he said to himself, "that it is no virtue, but only a luxury, to take away the crown of thorns from a lacerated brow, the prickly girdle from sore nerves; but this innocent pleasure will still be begrudged me, and when on so many roads mangled men are lying, why on mine does no one stretch out his hand that I might place in it some compensation for this undeserved heaven in my breast?"
He would fain carry his joy to another's heart to be tasted, as the bee delivers its mouthful of honey to the lips of another bee. At length two children came puffing along, one of whom was tackled as pulling beast of burden to a wheelbarrow, and the other harnessed on in front as pushing driver. The barrow was freighted with six porous bags full of pine-cones which the poor span were hauling to feed a consumptive fire. The two frequently exchanged places, so as to hold out; and the driver always wanted presently to be the horse again. "My good children! can't your father push, then?"—"The tree has broken both his legs short off."—"Then certainly your big brother could go to the wood?"—"He has to plough over yonder."—Victor stood on the fallow-field beside a waistcoat with full as many colors as holes, and near a dirty bread-sack, both which belonged to the brother, who at a distance was ploughing on the stage of this scene with half a post-team of lean cows. The emptying of a full hand into the lap of misery lightened Victor's heavy soul, as did the outgushing, which followed, of the full eye; his conscience, not his selfishness, was his objector to the greatness of his gift—he gave it, however, but in coins of small denominations—the children left their merchandise, and while one of them ran across the field to the plough, the other ran down to the village to his mother. The ploughman in the distance pulled off his hat—would fain have uttered loud thanks, but could only blow his nose—went on ploughing without his hat; but when at length he called out his thanks after the youth, the latter had already escaped far beyond earshot....
Do not, dear reader, wish this or the succeeding interlude of human sorrow left out of the great scenes of happy nature; and may thy heart, like Victor, by giving deserve to receive!
In his good-hearted haste he soon overtook a journeyman blacksmith sick with fever, whose travelling-trunk or portmanteau was a filled handkerchief; he also carried on a stick a wretched, faded pair of boots, which he had to spare, because the other which he dragged along on other sticks, namely, on his legs, was still wretcheder and less without color than without soles. When he had tenderly greeted the feverish man and made him a present, he looked into his pale, livid face, and he could not deny him some smart-money.... Ah, the whole smart-money for this life is not paid out till we reach a higher! When he had civilly questioned him and informed himself about his hungry journeyings, about his correction-house fare, about his flights from one country to another, and about his thin viaticum which the mistress denied him when the master was out,—then was he ashamed, before the All-gracious One, of his flower-field of rapture, which he no more deserved "than that poor devil there," and he made him an additional present; and when he again waited for him to speak, and learned that he was fifty years old without any prospects, and when the distress overmastered him which he always felt at the sight of old but undeveloped men, gray apprentices, old clerks, old dispensers, old amanuenses, then was he somewhat excusable for running back again and silently giving the astonished old man the new signs of his overflowing, benignant soul; and when, at this renewed parting, he felt his heart, which was dissolved into love, and only floated, as it were, round his soul, thirst more and more for doing good, and felt an incomprehensible inclination for fresh giving, and a longing to pour out upon somebody to-day everything, everything, then for the first time did he perceive that he was now too tender and too happy and too giddy and too weak.
So soon as the people in the village had in hand the certain intelligence of this transit-toll of generosity, in the afternoon about fifteen children stationed themselves on different posts along the way, manned the narrow passes, and distributed sentries and enfans perdus to prevent evasion of the revenue-laws....
A man who, like Victor, construed three straight leagues into seven crooked ones, is often hungry, but certainly more so than he;—he took merely a Leibnitz's monad-meal out of his pocket, biscuit and wine, and appeased therewith the stomach which hung and drew upon his spirit, in order not to darken and foul, by throwing in any pieces of flesh, the clear lake of his inner being, with its reflected arch of heavenly blue and heavenly red. In fact, he hated gormandizers as men of too gross selfishness, as well as all living larders, where layers of fat crush in the spirit, as masses of snow do a house. The soul, he said, takes an odor from the contents of the body, just as wine does from the fruit which is near it in the cellar, and in the mephitic vapor in which the souls of the Flachsenfingenites bob up and down over the brew-kettles which seethe their potatoes and beer, the poor birds must surely fall down tipsy and stifled into this dead sea.
He broke his biscuit not in any house, but in the skeleton, i. e. framework of a house, which had just come from the hands and axes of the carpenters into the sight of the village. As he looked through all the divisions and subdivisions of this architectural skeleton, and saw at once through sitting-room, kitchen, stable, and loft, he thought to himself: "Another play-house for a poor, little human troupe, who are here to play out their benefit comedy, their Gay's Beggars'-opera, with no voice to cry from the stage-box, Encore! Ah! before these beams have blackened to ebony by the winter smoke, many an eye-socket will have grown red with grief; many a northwester of life will blow through the window upon trembling hearts, and into these nooks, which are yet to be darkly walled up, will many a back, sore with bruises from the warfare of common life, creep away to wipe off sweat or blood. But joy (he went on soliloquizing as he looked at the place for stove and table) will also set a gilliflower-tree or two before the window for your inmates, and drive up before your house-door, which is yet to be hung, and unload its freight of the three holy feasts, and the church fair, and the child's baptism.—Heavens! how foolish that I should prefer thinking all this in the mere ribs of a house to seeing it yonder in the walled-up houses of the village!"