Victor slipped away unseen and early out of this niche of removed goddesses, and bore his heart filled with love to the open breast of friendship,—to Emanuel. He saw already the latter's tabernacle of the covenant in the temple of Nature,—when his rapture was delayed by one of earlier date. Julius lay in the blooming grass with its waves rippling over him, and holding a cherry-twig full of open honey-cups in his hand, in order to draw the bees to him, and to delight himself with their murmurous hovering over the blossoms. Victor embraced him, and forgot in the ecstasy to name his name,—"Art thou my angel?" said he.—"I am only thy Victor!"—"O come! O come!" said the blind youth, trembling like a melody, and drew his friend to Emanuel's house; but he led him, behind the cloud of his blindness, the longer way, and, besides, he turned round at every fourth step for a renewed embrace.
When they came to the water-wheel, which loudly emptied its sprinkling-cans on the flower-beds, and whose shivered lightnings flitted against Emanuel's windows and ceiling, then the blind one said, "Embrace me once more right heartily."—But amidst the din of the rain-shower, and amidst the stupefaction of love, they were pressed together by other arms than their own, and the two young hearts were linked to a third, and the East Indian gazed like a god of love from one to the other, and said: "O ye good youths, remain ever thus, and weep on in your blissful love!—Blessings on thee, my Horion, and a welcome in the great spring round about us!"—And when Emanuel and Victor sank on each other's necks, then was it as if all the flower-beds bowed down for rapture, as if all the waves flamed more radiantly under super-earthly lightnings flying over them, as if the zephyrs swelled with sighs of love, as if higher beings must needs whisper in the over-measure of joy: O ye good human beings, verily ye love like us!—
An arm out of a river of Paradise lifted and bore this loving trinity into the leafy rooms, and here, for the first time, Victor saw that the spring was on Dahore's cheeks and the summer in his eyes, as well as twelve May months in his heart. The white mourning-roses on his cheeks, which always seemed to bloom like mural crowns of death against St. John's-day, had given place to the red ones,—in short, Emanuel's face gave the hope that he had been, in regard to his death, a false prophet.—
In this waving apartment, whose golden wall borders were linden-boughs, and whose splendid tapestries were linden blossoms, and over whose door, as door-paintings, flickered the reflection and the mock-suns of the flashing water-wheel, in this four-walled island, surrounded by Nature's roaring sea of joy, through whose open windows the zephyrs flung bees and butterflies over the window-flowers among the lindens, my hero, to whom, besides, the noonday hum of bells appeared like a ringing call to a peace-festival of the earth, felt himself wading through flowers of joy up to his heart.—Emanuel's poesy sounded to him, in this epic intoxication, like prose; he was, as it were, sunk in a thicket of flowers, and, lifting his eyes, saw overhead a healed immortal who bent apart the blooming envelopment,—and still higher up an eternal Whitsuntide sun in the infinite blue,—and nearer above him the sprouting of the flower-leaves, and above this the swarming of bees,—and a golden morning-red, wound as a living frame round about the whole variegated incense-breathing woodland....
—By Heaven! only to lie in a literal flower-wood of this kind were of itself something,—to say nothing of lying actually in a metaphorical one!—Victor was devout with joy, still from overfulness, contented from gratitude. The aspect of their common teacher gave, it is true, to Clotilda's image warmer colors, and to his soul higher flames, but imparted to his wishes no insatiableness and no impatience.
Emanuel immediately began speaking of that beloved pupil of his; not at all as if Clotilda had clearly described to him the third Easter-holiday, or as if Emanuel had guessed it, but this guileless man simply knew not the difference between love and friendship, and he would have said of himself as well as of Victor, that he loved her. And just this childlike naïveté, which, through the open chamber of a woman's heart, watched for no right of transit nor for any breaches, but laid bare his own, and which fished for no confessions, found fault with none, took advantage of none,—this quality must have been just what would bind with the Gordian ganglion of sympathy the shyest female soul to so open a manly one. Nay, I believe Clotilda could more easily have made known her love to her teacher than to her beloved.—As this Emanuel now told him how he had pictured to her all the scenes of his former sojourn here,—and all his raptures,—and his confession of friendship for her,—how he had read to her his letters, and how the second (that disconsolate one on the night of the Stamitz concert) had forced so many tears into her eyes,—and as Victor saw how very much his friend had by his breathing on it drawn her love open like a closing tulip-cup,—all this kindled his love for her, his friendship for him even to devotion, and in a blissful embarrassment he kissed the blind one. By this double love he now explained to himself Clotilda's easy consent to his Whitsuntide journey.
He would have held it all Angel's- and a Peter's-fall from friendship, not to propose directly the question to Emanuel, when he might see this beloved—of Virtue.—"Now!" said the latter, who, despite his respectful East-Indian gentleness toward women, knew not the nose-rings, binding-keys, and dampers of our Harem-decency. But Victor acted otherwise and yet thought just so. He had already asked when abroad: "Why do they suffer the wretched police-regulation to stand for maidens, that they, e. g., must never walk out singly, but always, like Nuremberg Jews, under the escort of an old crone, or like the monks, in pairs?" Not as if this would in any manner embarrass me, if I acted a romance, but that it would, if I wrote one, where I should have to keep to the female rules-of-march at the expense of the critical, and trail round with me a convoy of auxiliary-women through the whole book as an abattis to my heroine. Should I not be obliged, if I would so much as get her out beyond the house door-steps, to march along beside her with a crown-guard of female keepers of the seal? Should I not be obliged by this confounded co-investiture and trading in company with Virtue—there would be no such thing as doing business on one's own account—to foist female friends on my heroine contrary to all probability? I should think hard, to be sure, of a Spanish maiden if she showed me her foot, and of a Turkish, if she showed me her face, and of a German, if she went alone to see the best young man; but just because the most fanatical blue laws, which surely are blue vapor on blue Mondays, become a real moral law for them, therefore am I vexed at this deplorable pusillanimity, and wish to see nothing forbidden but—waltzing and falling!... He has here, perhaps, satire in petto; for, to speak seriously of the matter, this sanitary-ordinance, that maidens must with us, as petitions with princes, always present themselves in duplicates, has manifestly the design of accustoming them all to one another, because they must have each other's friendship for visits;—secondly, brothers and sisters must be out of each other's hair, because they do not know whether they shall need each other as collateral securities of their virtue and second exchange-bills of love;—thirdly, these human ordinances give to female virtue by the minor moral-service (because great temptations are too rare) daily exercise in religion, and higher importance, and bear the same relation as the articles of the Talmud do to the Bible, although a right Jew would sooner transgress the Bible than the Talmud;—fourthly, we owe to these symbolic books of propriety the earlier culture of that female acuteness for which we unhappily furnish no other opportunities of attention than the oath they swear on those books affords.
Victor at once blamed and followed, like a good girl, the female rules of the order; court life had made him more courageous, but also more refined, and, like the court itself, he was, among women, reconciled to the writing-lines of the ceremonial. Therefore he purposed not until the second day of Whitsuntide to make his regular diplomatic appearance at the Abbess's, since to-day it was too late for anything, and besides that he would not fly into the sweet, holy emotions over yonder like a comet. And then too, his contentment told him, indeed, how little the neighborhood of a loved heart differs from its presence, which, besides, is nothing but a nearer neighborhood.
Meanwhile he mastered himself at least so far as to go out with his twin-brothers of the heart into the Colosseum of Nature, although he did not conceal from himself that he should be in dread out there of meeting Clotilda. And Emanuel lessened this fear but poorly, when he confessed to him that she had hitherto with her wounded life gone every day round the ponds as around magnetic healing-tubs, and through the lawn as through field-apothecaries'-shops.—Hasten forth at last, ye three good souls, into the Jubilee of Spring, which the Earth celebrates yearly in memory of Creation. Haste, ere the minutes of your life, like the broad waves on the two brooks, now still fleeting, and flashing, and sounding, fly to pieces and extinguish themselves on a weeping-willow,—haste, ere the flowers of your days and the flowers of the meadow are veiled by evening, when instead of the vital oxygen they shall exhale only poisonous air,—and enjoy the first day of Whitsuntide ere it trickles away!
—And it has trickled away, and a summer already lies upon it to-night as a grave; but the three dear hearts have hastened and enjoyed it, before it faded.... They sauntered on among the zephyrs, those sowing-machines of the flowers, as they came fluttering out of all the bushes,—they came before the five pocket-mirrors of the sun, the ponds, (the rivers being pier-mirrors and the gay shores the pier-tables,)—they saw how Nature, like Christ, conceals her miracles, but they saw also the bridal torch of the marriage-making May, the sun, and a bridal chamber in every singing tree-top, and a bridal bed in every flower-cup,—they, the wedding guests of the earth, turned not away the bee, who drunk with honey revelled around them, nor did they scare up the food-bringing mother, before whom the young bird with trembling wings melted into invisibleness,—and when they had climbed all the earthly steps of the eternal temple, whose columns are milky-ways, the sun sank, like the thoughts of men, to meet another world....