[34. DOG-POST-DAY.]
SECOND DAY OF WHITSUNTIDE.
Morning.—The Abbess.—The Water-Mirror.—Dumb Action for Libel.—The Rain and the Open Heaven.
At two o'clock the morning-wind swept in more loudly and coolly through Victor's open chamber, and shook already dew-drops from shiny foliage, and the near whisper of leaves murmured through his ears into his dreams. The lark, as the overture of the day, flung herself high up into the gray of heaven, and rang in the morning's feast of trumpets. This alarmist became in his dreaming the hovering after-echo which blended with the morning; amidst the soft in-fall of the neighboring sounds he slowly opened his eyes and dreamed on, and closed them again, and was more awake, and sleep did not pass off like a thick shroud made of night, but floated upward like a veil of morning perfume; and his soul, without making a single movement of the body, opened with the still awaking of a flower-cup in the presence of the morning....
—Now I am again already at boiling and blazing point,—and yet, as often as I dip my pen in the ink, I make up my mind to gain the good graces of the critics, and to write with my pen as with an icicle. But it is impossible for me,—in the first place, because I am getting into years. With most men, it is true, as with birds, singing ceases when love does; but with those who make their head a hot-house of their ideas, years, i. e. the days of drill therein, give the fancy as well as the passions a higher growth. Poets resemble glass, which, when it is old and breaks, takes on motley colors.—But secondly, though I were just blooming in my twentieth year, still I could not now write frostily, seeing winter is at the door. Rousseau says that in prison he produced the best poem on Liberty,—hence the French, those state's-prisoners, used to write better prose on the subject than the free Britons,—hence Milton poetized in winter. I have often carried out my writing-tablets in summer, and undertaken to press it to this silhouette board, and then take its profile; but fantasy can lay only Past and Future under its copying-paper, and every actual Present limits its creative power,—just as, according to the old naturalists, the water distilled from roses loses its virtue precisely at the time when roses bloom. Therefore I always had to wait till I became unfaithful, before I could go at love with my drawing instruments.... On the contrary, a man who now, towards after-summer, on a Molucca Island, primes and sketches the spring, must, for the foregoing reasons, and for the further one that the flying-summer is the regretful after-echo and silver-wedding of spring, hand it over to the Gallery-inspectors with much too bright sap-colors.—
The gayly-embroidered description of Victor's sojourn in Maienthal may well get to be as long as that of Voltaire's in Paris, with the publisher's compensation for which the lean wag might have cleared the rent of his chambres garnies. For just at this moment the dog has actually handed in a fourth Whitsuntide day, and expanded the trinomial root of the given power of joy into a quadrinomial. As in this quadruplicate of joy again, there is no wailing, no murder, no pestilence, but only good, I joyfully catch the remaining images of this spring in my camera-obscura, nor hover in anxious suspense, lest I should have to drag out my hero (Knef has made over to me all the Whitsuntide-days, and is only to send a little supplementary page afterward) somewhat as I did my Gustavus,[[104]] from the collapsed rubbish of his pleasure-palace and summer-house.—
Emanuel despatched in the forenoon his day's work of writing in his astronomical tables, in order to spend the whole afternoon with his guest at the Abbess's; he also offered him a little collaboratorship at his flowers, namely, to pluck out the rosemary blossoms, and spread the sunshade over the carnation-stand. With Emanuel, even in the prosaic repose of the day, the wings always protruded far out from under the half-wing-shells. Victor took the requests of his teacher as gifts. As he picked away out there at the rosemary, the rising sun opened the valves of the wind, and then, under its breath, all the registers of the great organ of being began to go, and the tremolo of the brooks rolled its waves on his ear, the flute-work of the birds pealed, and the thirty-two footed pedal-register of the woodland roared. One little parishioner's head after another, as he carried his twelve years together with the same number of Herculean labors of memory to the Holy Sacrament, creeping along behind its father, embroidered and stiffened up with a wreath-knob, and generally with gold-spangles, passed by before him. What a beautiful second Whitsuntide-day, which is generally full of rain-clouds, have you, ye little folks, to-day!—Victor right gladly indulged the grandees of the village, i. e. the drivers of a full span and the schoolmaster's son, the hair-modeller and queue-preacher Meuseler, who on the second Whitsuntide-day frizzled the neighboring villages, and who with his holy-(powder)-sprinkler effected the last effusion upon the little heads, which the Parson had been moistening these six weeks. Victor's heart beat for joy, as if he had a child, or were himself a child among them, when the motley, powdered, animated chain, with dancing spangles, with long-stemmed nosegays, with black-glistening spiritual Musen-annuals, marched in under the commander's staff and shepherd's crook of their two consuls, singing and besung and rung in and trumpeted in through the triumphal gate of the church.—Ah! joy sits still more beautifully on children than on us, just as an unhappy, a begging child, whose first child's-garden fate has trampled down, and before whose eyes, at the first bursting into existence, nothing hangs but black, misshapen morning cloud, afflicts our heart more than his father beside him.—
"Pluck, like a berry, every minute of your first day of triumph, ye good children, and I wish the sermon would be right long, that you might keep on so much longer your handsome dress!" said Victor, and looked round toward the convent, whose windows were full of unrecognizable spectatresses; he proposed to himself, on the return of the juvenile procession, to seek out for himself from among the windows with a pocket spy-glass the one with the fairest contents.—Just go, kindly man, who lovest fair souls like fair nature, and endurest cold ones like the winter-landscape, and who never revengest, just walk up and down by the brooks, for there is the footpath of the fishers, and because on thy poetic ring-races thou wouldst not harm a peasant by trampling down so much as a forked wagon of hay, such as the children braid out of hazel-rods! Fill the interval between the first heaven and the third, when thou wilt sit down not with Abraham, but with thy Clotilda at the table of the Abbess,—fill it up with a second, namely with the embrace of all nature, which never looks more sweetly into the soul, than when on it, not far from the soul, a beloved dwells!—
A stroll between two brooks that mingled their flashings and between their lackered willows snowed over with foam-worms[[105]] overspread the whole inner man even to every corner of a dark tear with morning-splendor.—In addition to that Victor kept looking across the meadow up at Emanuel's open window, and letting a smile float down from it like a running wave full of light.—In addition to that, he did not stop there, but went up twice and disturbed him in the midst of his writing with a childlike embrace.—In addition to that, he put seven-leagued boots on his eyes, and ran over the whole landscape, here rising, there sinking, here shining, there shadowing, in order to catch and size even here in anticipation a postal and travelling map of the finest places for the afternoon-rambles with Clotilda, because in the afternoon the raptures themselves will perhaps spoil the choice of raptures!—And thus did Nature create over again in his spirit her morning and her spring out of the earth-clod of the first spring, i. e. out of the hot sun, out of the cool brook, out of the butterfly, whom May shelled out of his hull, from the motley flies which the prolific earth hatched out of the larva-seed like winged flowers.—Then he closed his eyes amid the din of sparrows and swallows in the village, and amidst the watch-cries of the larks, and against the dazzling waves of the brooks, and let his soul dive down into the ringing sea and into the chiaroscuro painted by the eyelid; but then would his heart have been overwhelmed by creation's flood, which swept over it out of all pipes and beds and mouths of life around him, out of the tangled vein-work of the stream of life, which shoots at once through flower-runnels, through tree-channels, through white flies' veins, through red blood-canals and through human nerves, ... he would, in the impotence of enjoyment, have been drowned in the deep, broad ocean of life, which life-streams cross and fill, had he not, like every drowning man, heard a peal of bells far down into the waves.