Every woman is finer than her station. She gains more by culture than the man. The female angels (but so also the female devils) are kept only in the highest and finest human drawers; they are butterflies, on whom the velvet-wing between two rough man's-fingers becomes a naked, skinny flap; they are tulips, whose colored leaves a single grasp of fate rubs down into a smutty leather.—
I bring forward all this, in order that Herr Kotzebue and the shameless Poets'-corner in Jena[[67]] and the whole romantic crew may not take it ill of my Clotilda that she imitates more her own sex than the aforesaid tribe, and so much the more, as she can allege in her defence, that she has not yet read this.
Through Agatha came very soon an answer from Clotilda, superscribed by Emanuel, which was inwardly sealed in the style of ambassadors, geometrically cut, and calligraphically written, because ladies execute all things that require the attention of the senses better than we, and because they—for hardly four of my acquaintance need I except—are exactly the opposite of men, in that the better they think, the finer they write. Lavater says the handsomest painter produces the handsomest pictures; and I say, fair hands write a fair hand.
Clotilda's letter sets itself with an ornamental belt and a live hedge full of blossoms across our Doctor's path and shuts him off from Maienthal. For it runs thus:—
"Most Worthy Friend,—
"Perhaps no maiden is so happy as a poetess; and I think, here in this charming valley one at last becomes both. You are happy everywhere, for you can be a poet even at a court, as your beautiful poetic epistle shows me. But fancy loves to paint from paint-boxes,—the true Maienthal cannot give yours so much as you know how to put into the three landscape-pictures of it. As often as you and I are obliged to make good the absence of the same things by imagination: only with you is the compensation greater than the sacrifice.
"If I could by persuasion have procured you the pleasure of seeing Herr Emanuel, gladly would I have done it; but I was at last, from conscientious scruples, not eloquent enough to induce him to make the journey, which would expose his weak breast to the danger of bleeding to death. Regard him as a Spring, for which every year one must wait nine months.
"Ah, my anxiety for my unforgettable and irreplaceable teacher casts a shadow over the whole present Spring, as a monument does over a flower-garden. I have never looked upon a Spring so gladly and joyfully as on this.—I can often, even by moonlight, go out along the brooks, and look for a flower which trembles beside the liquid mirror, and around which a moon above and another below fling their lustre, and I represent to myself the floral festival in the East, at which (as they say) a mirror and two lights are placed by night around every garden-flower. And yet I cannot look over to the flower-beds of my teacher, without being too much affected by the thought, Who knows whether his tulips will not stand longer than his crippled form? Has then the whole medical art no remedy that shall frustrate his hope of death?—It seems to me he is gradually attuning me to his melancholy tone, whereby I should make myself ridiculous before any other than the friend of Emanuel; but a still, hidden joy loves to break out even into melancholy. 'Only in the cold, not in the fair season of our destiny,' you once said, 'do the warm drops pain us, which fall from the eyes upon the soul, just as only in winter one must not sprinkle flowers with warm water.' And why should I not disclose to your open heart all the weaknesses of mine? This chamber, wherein my Giulia ended her beautiful life, even this looking-glass which, when I turned away for pain from her dying, showed me once more my pale and fading sister, the windows, from which my eye so many times a day must fall upon a mournful, thornful rose-bush, and on an eternally closed mound, all these may, indeed, cause my heart some sighs more than a happy one should otherwise have. I know not whether you or Emanuel said, 'The thought of death must be only our means of improvement, not our end and aim; if the earth of the grave falls into the heart, just as when it falls into the heart-leaves of a flower, it destroys instead of fructifying it';—but on my leaves fate and Giulia have already thrown some earth.—And I gladly bear it, as I can now, since gaining your friendship, flee for refuge to a heart, before which I may dare to open mine, in order to show it therein all the woes, all the sighs, all the doubts, all the questions of an oppressed soul. O, I thank the All-Gracious, that as much as he threatens to snatch from me in the person of my teacher, so much he gives me again already in advance in the person of his friend.—My friendship will reach after our Emanuel even into the next world, and will accompany his darling through this; and if one day the double stroke of his death should fall on us both, then would we shed more patiently our united tears, and I should perhaps say, Ah! his friend Sebastian has lost more than his friend
Clotilda!"
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