[14. DOG-POST-DAY.]
The Philosophical Arcadia.—Clotilda's Letter.—Victor's Confessions.
I have only two things to explain before going further,—the mysterious music and the shutting of the eyes. The former proceeded from an Æolian harp laid on the weeping-birch. As often as Emanuel came hither by night he let these breathed-out tones intermingle like blossoms with the whispering leaves, in order to exalt himself when he looked alone upon the exalted night. His eyes he often closed before the sun and the moon, whenever his inner man, winged like a cherub, had leave to bury itself in soft fantasies; into the streaming, many-colored waves of light which crowd through the eyelids he would then plunge, as into a zephyr, for a delicious swim, and in this light-bath the higher light-magnet within him drew heavenly light out of earthly light. As there are but few souls that know how far the harmony of outward nature with our own reaches, and in how very great a degree the whole creation is but an Æolian harp, with longer and shorter strings, with slower and swifter vibrations, passive before a divine breath,[[164]]—I demand not that every one should forgive this Emanuel.—
After this finding of each other again, which threw a far gleam over a whole life, the two came home to the blind youth; and his flute carried the heart softly over in dream from the tossings of fevered blood into the tranquil ether of heaven.
As I love so to be about Emanuel, the reader will not begrudge me the pleasure of turning over the leaves of all the hours which we are permitted to spend in his house, and to go along regularly, step by step.
The morning for the first time disclosed to the pupil of Emanuel, as it does to children, what a Christmas present the night had provided for his heart. What a form came before him in the morning-radiance, when the still, childlike, composed face of the teacher, over which storms had once passed, as on the soft, white moon volcanoes have flamed, smiled upon him in such wise that his inner being melted into mute bliss! Especially when beheld in profile did this lofty form appear to stand on the brink of earth, and to look down into the second hemisphere of the heavens, which is hid from us by the gravestone and the rich pasture-ground of this life. His countenance was transfigured when he lifted it to heaven, when he named God or Eternity, when he spoke of the longest day; in its light the leaf-gold of the present paled to the dead-gold of the past, and his spirit hung hovering over the body, as genii bloom out of flowers in arabesques. Never did Victor so easily attune himself, when coming out of a dream, to the new day, as he did this morning with Emanuel's voice, which was, so to speak, the music of the spheres to the blue heaven of his eyes, from which, as from that of Egypt, never a drop fell; from incapacity of the tear-glands, he could never weep; nor did this life any longer agitate his soul.
The pure morning-apartment seemed to make the soul pure and still. He was the greatest bodily Purist; he washed his body quite as often as his clothes; and the uncleanness of medical language, even to the very words,—as, e. g. toothpicks, &c.,—was avoided by his stainless tongue. Even so did his heart remain unsoiled by so much as the images of great sins, and this unconscious innocence, as well as an unacquaintedness with our artful manners, made him, in the eyes of three different classes, either a child—or a maiden—or an angel.
The breakfast of fruits and water, which, in fact, made up his whole bill of fare, called up reprovingly before our Victor the wine and coffee-grounds wherewith he had sometimes had to manure, like earthly ones, the flowers of his spirit. Flower-pots were Dahore's snuff-boxes, and glowed under the linden-green, which, with two tame, and yet free, ground-sparrows skipping through it, was the live, growing ceiling-piece of the apartment. His soul seemed also, like a Brahmin, to live on poetical flowers, and his speech was often, like his manners, Indian,—i. e. poetic. So was there throughout, as with divers magnates of men, a striking pre-established harmony between outward nature and his heart; he readily found in the corporeal the physiognomy of the spiritual, and vice versâ; he said matter, considered as thought, was just as noble and spiritual as any other thought, and that we represented to ourselves in it, after all, only the Divine conceptions of it. For example, during breakfast he lost himself in the glimmering dew-drop on a stock-gillyflower, and, by moving his eye to and fro, played through the gamut of its harpsichord of colors. "There must," said he, "be some harmony or other of accordant sounds between this minute particle of water and my spirit, as between virtue and me, because otherwise neither could so ravish me. And is, then, this accord which man makes with the whole creation (only in different octaves) a mere play of the Eternal, and no resonance of a nearer, greater harmony?" In the same way he would often gaze at a glimmering coal, till in his eyes it had expanded to a flaming meadow, on which, illumined by tender fancies, he roamed up and down....
Have patience, reader, with this flowery soul; we will both think that men can more easily have one religion than one philosophy, and that every system presupposes its peculiar weaving in the heart, and that the heart is the bud of the head.