"Die, then, great soul," said Victor, "and take thy way up yonder; but break with thy death my little heart also, and keep by thee the poor one who cannot forsake thee nor do without thee."
The flute had ceased; the two friends had sunk into each other's arms to end their farewell. "Dear, beloved, never-to-be-forgotten one," said Emanuel, "thou movest me too deeply; but when, a year hence, I go up from this mountain, then shalt thou stand by me, and see how man is released from his bonds. Thy tears will be my last earthly pangs; but I shall say, what I say now, We part by night, but we meet again by day." And so he went.
Victor had gently disengaged himself from the childlike lips,—he sought not to follow him on his night-track,—slowly he went along by one vast sleep.—Often he turned round and followed with eyes full of falling tears the falling stars over Maienthal; and at four of the morning he arrived with a heavenly soul at St. Luna, and entered the garden full of old scenes, and laid down in the familiar arbor his glowing head and his subdued heart in the dew of the morning for a cooling repose.
O rest thou, rest thou!—ah! sleep only, either on the earth or under the earth, can still the ever-agitated bosom of man....[[178]]
[16. DOG-POST-DAY.]
The Potato-form-Cutter.—Drag-chains in St. Luna.—Wax Embossments.—Chess according to the Regula Falsi.—The Thistle of Hope.—Escort to Flachsenfingen.
One would certainly want to sleep in one's clothes, like old Fritz, so soon as ever one came to understand that in his shirt he is beset and attacked, as Victor and I sometimes are, by the vampires of midnight melancholy. They stay away when one sits up and has all his clothes on; especially do boots and hat retain for us the feeling of day in the greatest degree.—
A warm hand lifted up Victor's bedewed head from the sleeping-board,[[179]] and directed it towards the whole surging flood of morning-light. His eyes opened (as always) with indescribable mildness, and without night-clouds, before Agatha, and beamed on her with full radiance. But she hurried him away with his radiance out of the leafy bedchamber; for he must look himself up a dressing-comb and a morning-blessing, and, secondly, the table-couch was to be a tea-table for Clotilda, who liked to take warm drinks in cool places.
—And so he stands out there between parsonage and palace in mid-morning. All seemed to him to have been just built and painted during his journey; for all that dwelt therein seemed to have changed and made him melancholy. "The parents in there," he said to himself, "have no son, my friend has no sweetheart, and I—no tranquil heart." And now, when at last he entered the house, and became once more a bright triumphal arch of the loving family-circle,—when he was compelled to contemplate with sympathetic and yet enlightened eyes the tender illusions of the parents, the groundless hopes of his friend, and the coming up of stormy days,—then stood one fixed tear for the future in his eye; and it grew not less when his adoptive mother would justify it by tender glances.... Partly, however, this veil was wafted over his soul merely from the preceding night, whose glimmering scenes were separated from him only by a short interval of sleep; for a night spent in the watches of emotion always ends with a melancholy forenoon.