During this table-talk and house-warming-oration, whereat, however, no drinking-glass was shivered, the white breast of a swallow swooped low across the road, and her bill took up a load of slacked lime for her little garret. The wasp shaved off from the joist-work paper-shavings for the layers of her bulbous sphere. The spider had already knit her spider's house into the larger one. All creatures played the carpenter and mason in building up for themselves their little islands in the infinite sea; but grovelling man looks not over his shoulder, and sees not that all is like him.
Sebastian quitted his wooden inn, his skeleton of a Frankfort Red House, more intoxicated with happiness than he could have gone from a fully-built one. In certain men a dark melancholy diffuses itself,—a shadow of the soul all the greater when the shadows around them are the smallest: I mean about one o'clock of a summer afternoon. When in the afternoon the lawns lie more intensely perfumed, and the woods with drooping leaves stand, more softly sighing and sleeping beneath the brooding sun, and the birds sit on the trees as dumb figurants or supernumeraries,—then in the Eden that lay sweltering under the cloud of blossoms an oppressive yearning seized upon his heart,—then was he wafted by his fancies under the eternally blue sky of the East, and under the wine-palms of Hindustan,—then did he rest himself in those still lands, where, without stinging necessities or scorching passions, he sank dissolved into the dreamy tranquillity of the Brahmin, and where the soul in its elevation holds itself steady and no longer trembles with the trembling earth, like the fixed stars whose gleam trembles not, seen on mountains,—then was he too happy for a German colonist, too poetic for a European, too luxurious for a neighbor of the North Pole.... Every summer morning he feared that in the summer afternoon he should fantasy too effeminately.
Fasting, wine, heaven, and earth had to-day so lavishly filled the chambers of his heart with the sleep-potion of rapture, that they must needs, when anything more was poured in, overflow through the eyes. These now gushed forth; and behind his dimmed eyes, in the overshadowed inner chamber, lined with the green of nature, and darkened, as it were, with curtains of evening redness, a colored night came on, wherein all the little shapes of his childhood rose cloudily before him,—the earliest playthings of life were laid out,—his first May months played like little angels on an evening cloud, and they could not in their wing-clothes fly round the great cloud, and the sun did not scorch them.
Ah! what he had long forgotten,—long lost,—long loved,—songs without sense and tones without words, nameless plays,—buried nurses,—dead servants,—all these came to life again; but before all, and greatest of all, moved the form of his first, his dearest teacher, Dahore, in England, who said to his melted soul, "We were once side by side."—O this eternally loved spirit, who even then saw in our Victor the wings that lift themselves toward the next world,—who even then was more the friend than the master of his so tender, tempestuous, loving, aspiring heart,—this never-to-be-forgotten spirit would not leave him; his form pushed aside the shroud, began to shine and to say, "Horion, my Horion, did I not hold thee by the hand, wast thou not in my heart? But it is long since we loved each other, and my voice is no longer recognizable to thee, scarcely my face; ah, the seasons of life roll not back, but onward, downward, forever." He leaned against a tree and kept drying his eye, which could no longer find the road, and his sight was fixed calmly on the woods which stretch toward St. Luna, and on the hazy hills that separate him from Maienthal and from his second teacher....
Kussewitz burst upon him. But too soon; his soul in its emotion was not ready to go among strangers. He was glad to come upon an overturned trough, out of which sheep were licking salt, and a hedge-pen, which folded them at night, and the hut on two wheels wherein their keeper slept. He had a peculiar curiosity and predilection for little copies of houses; he always walked into or up to every collier's hut, every hunter's and fowler's house, for the sake of saddening and comforting himself with his own confinement, and with the parodies of our little life and with the ground-floor of poverty. He never went blindly by anything small, over which the world's man and business man stalk so scornfully; just as, on the other hand, he never stopped before any pomp of citizenly life. He opened, therefore, a little door to the travelling bed of the shepherd: it looked so poverty-stricken in there, and the straw, which took the place of eider-down and silk pillow-cases, was so lowly and rumpled, that he felt an indescribable longing to enter; he needed now a diving-bell that should separate him from the rushing, crushing, sublime sea around him. I wish one could conceal the fact from the European cabinets, the Imperial Diet, and the Chief Commissary, that he actually laid himself down therein. But now the excitement of his senses, into which the door of his bedchamber admitted only a small section of the blue sky, soon passed over into the exhaustion of slumber, and over the hot eye the lid closed.
[10. DOG-POST-DAY.]
The Bee-Master.—Zeusel's Oscillation.—Arrival of the Princess.
Since the last Post-day our hero has been sleeping. The German Reviewers should do me the favor to start him up.
But they are knaves, these headsmen and partners of the censors; they wake up neither readers nor princes, but only Homeric sleepers. The sun already hangs low, and peers horizontally into his Dr. Graham's-bed, and he still lies there glowing in the face of it....