Verily, a man has almost as much to reproach himself with, if he is discontented, as if he had committed a crime; and inasmuch as it depends upon his ocean of thoughts, whether he will raise out of it as an island an Otaheite-Arcadia or the lowest hell, he deserves all that he creates....
Nevertheless, the third opinion is the true one, and at the same time it is mine: his Lordship, how much soever he may seem to be an indeclinable man, who has no object, but is a verb in mi, has nevertheless the following paradigm (and so inversely we find in the most ordinary man a short plan for the most singular one): he is one of the unhappy great ones who have too much genius, too much wealth, and too little repose and knowledge, to be habitually happy; they hunt pleasure instead of virtue, and miss both, and cry out at last over every bitter drop which is given them in a sugar-loaf; like silver-plate, precisely at the point of melting in the fire of pleasure are they the most inclined to overspread themselves with a dark skin; their ambition; which otherwise hides with plans the emptiness of high life, is not strong enough for their heart, which in this emptiness withers; they do good from pride, but without the love of doing it; they play with the empty shell of life as with a ringlet, and deem it not even worth the while to shorten it; and yet they do deem it worth the while, when they, who stand through this night-frost of the soul, outwardly smiling and cold, inwardly all in a fever, without hope, fear, or faith, renouncing all, making light of everything, and shut up in themselves,—when they feel a stroke of death, a great sorrow clutch at their unhappy hearts.—Ah the poor lord! can thy heart then find no rest till it finds it under the lid of black marble?
"Ah the poor lord!" his son incessantly repeated, as with oppressed soul he went toward Maienthal. The outward heaven around him was still; a great cloud completely overspread it, but rested on a blue rim along the whole circle of the horizon. In Victor's breast, on the contrary, streams of air rushed against each other and whirled together into a hurricane, drinking up brooks and tearing up trees. His father's image hung pale in this tempest. Victor's future days were hurled to and fro.—His future life was compressed into a narrow, veiled image, and it distressed him just as much to think that he must live it as how he must.
What saddened him most was the mere external and trifling circumstance that his father had remained alone and concealed in the depths of the island. Once the conjecture came over him, whether the greater part of what he had witnessed had not been mere dramatic machinery which his father (who in his youth had been a tragic poet) had employed to give more firmness to his vow of silence; but he was immediately disgusted at his own heart. Why are the purest souls tormented with a multitude of disgusting, poisonous thoughts, which like spiders crawl up on the shining walls, and which they only have the trouble of crushing to death? Ah, our victories are not wholly distinguishable from our defeats!
It is singular that the perspective thought of Clotilda's blood-relationship to Flamin was the one which he followed out least of all.
When man can obtain from reason no balsamic relief, he begs it at the hands of Hope and Illusion; and they two then willingly share his sorrow. Just as the blue sky of to-day by little and little peered through light seams in the clouds, and the sea of mist collected into hanging lakes, so also did the dark thoughts break asunder in Victor's soul.—And when the swollen masses of cloud in the broad blue passed into fleece, till at last the blue sea swallowed up all banks of vapor, and bore nothing on its infinite expanse but the blazing sun, then did Victor's soul also cleanse itself from vapors, and the sun-image of Emanuel, whom he was to-day to reach, shone soft and warm and cloudless into all his wounds.... The form of his loved Dahore, the form of his loved father, the form of his hidden mother, and all beloved images, reposed like moons in a mournful group over his head; and this sadness, and the sacred oath to keep himself virtuous and obey all his father's wishes, breathed upon his inflamed bosom some solace in regard to his father's fate.
He could even to-day see the sun go down behind the church-tower of Maienthal.
The broad cleared-up sky made him more tender, the thought of falling to-day upon the heart of a noble man, whose soul dwelt above this blue atmosphere, made him more exalted, the hope of being consoled by this man for his whole life made him more tranquil.—
He hastened, and, his haste drew out the saddest lute-stop of his soul. For he seemed not to be going over the summer fields, but they seemed rather to be hurrying along before him; landscape after landscape, theatres of woods, theatres of grain-fields, flew by; new hills rose with other lights, and lifted up their woods, and others with theirs dropped down; long, shadowy steppes ran backward before the flood of yellow sunlight; now valleys full of flowers billowed around him, now bare, hot hill-shores carried him upward; the stream murmured close to his ear, and suddenly its windings glistened from far away across poppy-fields; white roads and green paths met him, and fled from him, and led round the broad earth; full villages, with gleaming windows, swept by, and gardens with undressed children; the declining sun was now lifted up, now lost again, and now withdrawn to the summits of the hills.—
This fleeting of Nature's dissolving views bedimmed his moistened eye, and brightened the inner world; but the steady abiding of an incessant music, the constant choir of larks above him, whose contending cries melted to one in his soul, this distant hum from air and woods and bushes, this harmonica of Nature, moved him to say to himself: "Why do I in this solitude hold back every drop that would fall? No; besides, I am too sensitive to-day, and I will exhaust myself before I see the beloved man."