At last he ascended the broad mountain that stations itself with its scattered columns of trees and gray cubes of rock before Maienthal, which lies in greenness at its foot.... Then the earth, tuned by the Creator, rang with a thousand strings; the same harmony stirred the stream, divided into gold and gloom, the humming flower-cup, the peopled air, and the waving bush; the reddened east and the reddened west stood stretched out like the two rose-taffeta wings of a harpsichord, and a tremulous sea gushed from the open heavens and the open earth....
He burst into a mingling flood of tears at once of joy and sorrow, and the past and the future simultaneously stirred his heart. The sun with ever-increasing swiftness dropped down the heavens, and the more swiftly did he climb the mountain, the quicker to follow its flight with his eye. And there he looked down into the village of Maienthal, that glimmered among moist shadows....
At his feet, and on this mountain, lay, stretched like a crowned giant, like a transplanted spring-island, an English park. This mountain toward the south and one toward the north met and formed a cradle in which the peaceful village rested, and over which the morning and the evening sun spun and spread out their golden veil. In five gleaming ponds trembled five duskier evening heavens, and every wave that leaped up painted itself to a ruby in the hovering fire of the sun. Two brooks waded, in shifting distances, darkened by roses and willows, over the long meadow-land, and a watering fire-wheel,[[163]] like a pulsating heart, forced the sunset-reddened water through all the green flower-vases. Everywhere nodded flowers, those butterflies of the vegetable world, on every moss-grown brook-stone, from every tender stalk, round every window, a flower rocked in its fragrance, and scarlet lupines traced their blue and red veins over a garden without a hedge. A transparent wood of gold-green birches climbed, in the high grass over there, the sides of the northern mountain, on whose summit five tall fir-trees, as ruins of a prostrated forest, held their eyrie.
Emanuel's small house stood at the end of the village, in a tangled growth of honeysuckle, and in the embrace of a linden-tree which grew through it.—His heart gushed up within him: "Blessings on thee, quiet haven! hallowed by a soul which here looks up to heaven, and waits to launch into the sea of eternity!"—Suddenly the windows of the abbey where Clotilda had been educated flung upon him the flames of the evening-redness,—and the sun went, softly as a Penn, toward America,—and the thin night spread itself over nature,—and the green hermitage of Emanuel wrapped itself in obscurity.... Then he knelt there alone on the mountain, on that throne-step, and looked into the glowing west, and over the whole still earth, and into the heavens, and expanded his spirit to think on God.... As he knelt, all was so sublime and so mild,—worlds and suns came up from the east, and the little insect, with his play of colors, nestled down into his mealy flower-cup,—the evening-wind flapped its immeasurable wing, and the little naked lark rested warmly under the soft-feathered breast of the mother,—a man stood on the mountain-ridge, and a golden-chafer on the stamens; ... and the Eternal loved his whole world.
His spirit was now made up to take in a great man, and he yearned for the voice of a brother.
He staggered, without following any path, down into the village, with the pewit in its great circles, and the may-chafer in its little ones, sweeping around him. At the foot of the mountain the hybrid day grew darker,—in the starry heaven the curtain rose,—the vapor of evening, which had gone up hot, fell cold, as men do, back to the earth: one more loud lark went circling upward, as the last echo of day, over the mountain.
At last he neared Emanuel's linden. He would rather have embraced him under the great heavens than under the close ceiling of a room. Through the window he saw an uncommonly beautiful youth standing and playing on a flute. The player drew out of its heavenly gates a fugitive and floating elysium. Victor listened to him for a long time, in order to still his beating heart; at last, with tearful eyes, he went round the house, and would fain have fallen speechlessly and blindly on the necks of the youth and of Emanuel. As he passed along before the window, the youth did not return his greeting; as he opened the house-door, a soft chime of bells began to make music. Then the youth came out immediately, and asked him, in a friendly tone, who was there; for he was blind. Victor stepped into a Holy of Holies when he entered the apartment lined with linden-leaves, which was the nest of the winged man, who at this moment was out of it, under the great night of God. Emanuel was to return toward midnight. The room was open and clean; some leaves of fruits which had been eaten lay on the table; flowers glowed around all the windows; a telescope leaned against the wall; remains of an Oriental wardrobe bespoke the East Indian....
The voice of the beautiful youth had in his ear something inexpressibly touching, because it seemed like one he knew; it went deep into his heart, like the melody of a song that sounds up from childhood. He could rest freely with the steady gaze of love upon that face, that looked out into an eternal night; he wanted to kiss those childish lips full of melodies, and still he hesitated. But as he went out of the house again in quest of Emanuel, and when the bells began to chime again,—for they sounded whenever the door opened, to announce to the blind one every arrival,—then he could no longer restrain himself amidst the lovely music, but he touched the mouth of the blind one, as he leaned at the open window, with a kiss as soft as a breath. "Ah, angel! art thou, then, come down again from heaven?" said the blind one, confounding him with some well-known being or other.
How good was it to be out of doors! The evening-bell of the village sounded its call over the slumbering fields, and a distant soul was inclining its ear, perhaps, to catch the dying echoes of its broken tones. The evening wind, rustling through twigs full of green fruits, joined in. The evening star—the moon of our twilight—rested kindly on the road of the sun and of the moon, and sent its solace in the interval during the absence of both.—"Where mayst thou be at this moment, my Emanuel? Art thou resting, perhaps, in the sight of the evening-red,—or gazing into the starry sea?—art thou in the ecstasy we call a prayer,—or ..."
At this moment, all at once the thought flashed up in him, that, as to-night St. John's day began, his Emanuel might have expired in the enjoyment of the evening.... The more eagerly did he seek after him with his eyes under every tree, in every deeper shadow; he looked up to the hills, as if he might see him there, and to the stars, as if even there he might venture to seek him.—He went round the village, whose circular wall was a festoon of cherry-trees which silvered the green circumference with a milky-way of blossoms long since fallen, and hurried over the ruins of the houses which the children had built during the day, towards the fading windows of the abbey, which rose on the southern mountain down whose slope he had entered the village; for the blind one had told him that this mountain was Emanuel's observatory, and that he went thither every night. The green stairway, which made its successive landings of terraces and moss-banks, and on which a balustrade of bush-work ran upward, led him to a mountain which terminated sublimely in the ether with a tall weeping-birch. With every grass-plot, as from a bath, new limbs of dark Nature lifted themselves; he went on, as if from one planet to another. Across the ascending, darkling fields streamed the night-wind, and lonesomely swept on from wood to wood, and its ruffling fingers played with the plumage of the sleeping bird and the down of the whirring night-butterfly. Victor looked over toward the evening-red which Night had taken as a rose to wear on the bosom whereon suns repose. The sea of eternity lay in the form of night on the silver-sand of worlds and suns, and from the bottom of that sea the grains of sand glistened far up through the deep.