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Dear Emanuel, that, alas! thou wilt do! The heaven of joy presses downward to thy lips, and amidst breezes, amidst tones, amidst kisses, it drinks up thy flickering breath; for the earthly body which will only graze, not pluck, digests only lowly joys, and chills under the beam of a higher sun!—
With emotion I draw aside from Victor's distracted, irrecognizable face the veil which covers his sorrows. Let us look upon thee, disconsolate man, who art going to meet a spring where thy heart is to lose everything: Emanuel by death, Clotilda by love, Flamin by jealousy, even Joachime by suspicion! Let us look upon thee, impoverished one; I know why thy eye is still dry, and why thou sayst brokenly and with a shake of the head, "No, my dear Emanuel, I shall not come, for indeed I cannot."—What ate most deeply into thy heart was, that thy true Emanuel should be the very one who still believed thou wert loved by his friend.—An undeveloped sorrow is without tears or signs; but when man through fancy draws out of his own bosom a heart full of confluent wounds, and counts the gashes, and then forgets that it is his own, then does he weep sympathetically at that which beats so painfully in his hands, and then he bethinks himself and weeps still more. Victor would fain release as it were by warming his stiff soul from frozen tears, and went to the balcony window and pictured to himself, while the suppressed evening-glow of March burned out of the clouds over the hills of Maienthal, Clotilda's marriage to Julius.—O, in order to make himself right sad, he drew a spring day over the vale, the genius of love flung open, above the nuptial altar, the blue heaven, and bore the sun as bridal torch without cloud-smoke through the pure immensity.—There walked, on that day, Emanuel transfigured, Julius blind, but blissful, Clotilda blushing and long since well again, and every one was happy. Only one unhappy one he saw there standing among the flowers, namely, himself; he saw there, how this afflicted one, chary of words for sorrow, joyous from virtue, more familiar and confidential with the bride from coldness, went round among the rest, so unknown, properly so superfluous; how the guiltless pair, with every sign of love, reckoned up before him all that he had lost, or indeed concealed those signs from forbearance, because they guessed his grief;—this thought darted at him like a blaze;—and how at last, as the heavy-laden past brought all his slain hopes and his withered wishes before him, he turned round, when the beloved pair went from him to the altar and to the eternal covenant, how he turned round inconsolably toward the still, empty fields, to weep infinitely, and how he then remained so alone and dark in the fair region, and said to himself: "In thee, no human being takes an interest to-day,—none presses thy hand, and says, 'Victor, why weepest thou so?'—Oh! this heart is as full of unspeakable love as any other, but it fades unloved and unknown, and its dying and its weeping disturb no one. Nevertheless, nevertheless, O Julius! O Clotilda! I wish you eternal happiness, and only contented days." ... Then he could do no more; he pressed his eyes to his hands and to the window-frame, and gave free play to them, and thought of nothing more; the sorrow, which, like a rattlesnake, had watched with distended jaws him and his charmed and writhing approaches, now seized and swallowed him and crushed him to pieces....
Soft hearts, ye torment yourselves as much on this flinty earth as hard ones do others,—the spark which only makes a burn, ye swing round till it becomes a wheel of fire, and under the blossoms a sharp leaf becomes to you a thorn!... But why, I say to myself, dost thou show that of thy friend and open afresh remote similar wounds in men who have been healed?—O, answer for me, ye who resemble him, could you do without a single tear? And since the woes of fantasy are to be reckoned among the joys of fantasy,—a moist eye and a heavily drawn breath are the least with which we buy a fair hour....
—Pride—the best counterpoise to effeminate tears—wiped away my hero's, and said to him: "Thou art worth as much as they who are more fortunate; and if unhappy love has hitherto made thee bad, how good might not a happy love make thee!" There was stillness in and around him; night stood in heaven; he read Emanuel's letter.
"My Horion!
"Within a few hours Time has reversed its hour-glass, and now the sands of a new year are trickling down.—Uranus strikes for our little earth the centuries, the sun strikes the years, the moon the months; and on this concert clock, constructed out of worlds, human beings come forth as images, that utter cries and tones of joy, when it strikes.
"I too come out gladly under the fair new-year's dawn, which gleams through all the clouds, and flames up the high hemisphere of heaven. In a year I shall look into the sin from another world: O how my heart, for this last time, under the earthly cloud, overflows with love toward the Father of this fair earth, toward his children and my brothers and sisters, toward this flowery cradle, wherein we only once awake, and amidst its rocking in the sun only once fall asleep!
"I shall never live to see another summer-day, therefore will I describe the fairest one, on which, with thy Julius[[3]] I for the first time tremblingly penetrated through luminous clouds, and through harmonies, and fell down with him before a thundering throne, and said to him, 'Overhead, in the immeasurable cloud which they call eternity, He dwells, who has made us and loves us.' This day will I to-day repeat in my soul; and never, too, may it be extinguished in my Julius or my Horion!
"I have often said to my Julius, 'I have not yet given thee the greatest thought of man, which bows down his soul and yet erects it again forever; but I will name it to thee on the day when thy spirit and mine are the purest, or when I die.' Hence he often begged me, when his angel had been with him, or when the flute and the awe-inspiring night or a tempest had exalted him, 'Name to me, Emanuel, the greatest thought of man!'