Emanuel led them, as their guiding star, to his dear mountains, those front boxes of the earth,—only from his mountain with the weeping birch he kindly turned them aside for unknown reasons,—and his easy climbing gave them joy over the restoration of his breathing. At last they came out upon the throne of the region, on the mountain where Victor, on the morning after the night spent in travelling, had looked down upon Maienthal. O how the living plain of God, the foreground of a sun and of an Eden, stretched far away in such untamable, blooming, breathing, undulating masses! How did heaven hang full of mountains of incense, full of ice-fields of light! And a gentle morning-wind stole out from the eastern gate overhung with cloud-bloom and played with heaven and earth, with the yellow floweret and with the broad cloud above them, with the eyelash under a tear and with the cornfields it searched through!—How the eye dilates, when chased night-pieces of cloud-shadows cut through the bright sunshine of the earth! how the heart enlarges, when the morning-wind hurls the winged shadows now over mountains, now into ponds of splendor, now into bowed grain-fields!—But round upon the woods still ice-mountains of clouds had settled themselves.—Ah, this field flecked with day and night, this wall of nebulous glaciers, put Victor's heart into the old dream again, in which he saw Clotilda on an ice-mountain with outspread arms!—Ah, on this rocky peak rising above the southern mountain he could see the Isle of Union, lying darkly with its tree-tops and its white temple, and the thirsty heart staggered full of the mingled draught of yearning and melancholy and love.—
Then he was glad to tell her that he had seen her that morning when he gave the blind youth the note to Emanuel, and yet that he had denied himself a visit to her,—only give him, Clotilda, a great, warm, thankful look for his sparing of thy brother, for the nobleness of his loving, and for his hiding of that love with a veil! She looked on him, and when her eye grew warm with a tear, heaven bowed itself and came down to them on a sunny cloud and touched the kindred beings with hot, fluttering drops.—O thou good earth! thou good Nature! thou sympathizest oftener (and always) with good men, than good men do themselves!—Before him the dream passed in which Clotilda's tears resolved the ground into an uplifting cloudlet....
But the approach of evening and the little shattered pearl-strings of rain-drops rattling down called the fair group back to the cottage. The girls; who with the blind one had not even quite climbed the mountain, went no farther, but turned about and took the advance. Emanuel withdrew himself to his hill of mourning, in order there to uncover his flowers to the rain. When our loving couple reached the smoking vale below, how heavenly was the evening and the earth!—In the great evening-heaven above them waved tulip-beds of red clouds, between which ran blue strips like dark brooks.—Behind them stood under the sun mountains like Vesuviuses in flames, and the woodland like a burning bush, and the prairie-fire running over the flowers caught the cloud-shadows.—And all the larks hung with their [[114]]ripieno-voices of Nature near the red ceiling-piece of evening, and every deeper sunbeam held a humming chain-of-being made of happy insects.—And in the sheepfold on the mountain a hundred mothers at once called lovingly to a hundred children, and every sheep hastened bleating to its thirsty kneeling lamb.—
Great evening! only in the Vale of Tempe thou still bloomest and dost not fade; but in a few minutes, reader, all its blossoms for the first time will open magnificently!—
Clotilda and Victor went along more closely and warmly, linked together under the small sun-shade, which walled both in from the transient shower. And with hearts which beat more and more strongly, and, instead of blood, sent round as it were devout tears of joy, they reached the park; the warm tones of the nightingale came to meet them, the tones wafted away from the musical retinue wherewith the Englishman was just passing across the mountains floated after them like perfumes exhaled from flowers.—But lo! while the earth still wore its gilding in the fire of the sun, while the evening-fountain still blazed up like a torch, when in a great oak-tree of the garden, in which motley glass globes had been grafted instead of fruit, twenty red suns sparkled out of the leaves,—then a warmed cloud melted asunder and came all down in drops into the fire of evening and on the gleaming water-column....
The nuns who were nearer to the trees flew under the foliage; but Clotilda, who deemed a slow gait more beautiful and becoming for a female soul, went without haste to the neighboring "Evening-bower," which, raised above the garden, nowhere opens its thick leaf-work except to the setting sun.—No, it was an angel, it was Clotilda's sister, Giulia, who reposed on the tender cloud and let fall through it her tears of joy, in order to compel her friend, whose arm rested on her lover's as in a bandage, to the glimmering bower, where two blessed hearts were to be most blest. Clotilda still lingered under the rain of pearls and golden sand, and resembled the still doves around her, who on all the roofs flung open their pure wings like variegated umbrellas and held them under the bath,—and before entering Victor drew her back, who said, oppressed with bliss, "Thou all-gracious one!" and looked over to Emanuel's bower, on which the gate of Paradise built up of mosaic stones, the rainbow, abutted itself and arched across through heaven over the evening-bower and enclosed in its heavenly magic circle the three loving souls.
And when they stepped into the dark bower which had only a small opening toward the sun that blazed in through the rain, there lay before the opening the evening-field, with the swaying fiery columns, between which dashed the golden flood of the molten sun, and with the lawns which stood even to the flowers in a sea of luminous globules.—And fallen rainbows lay with their ruins on the blossoming trees.—And little airs fanned the running-fire in the meadow flowers and threw sparks out of the blossoms.—And the heart of man was swept onward by the stream of rapture and swam burning in its own tears.
Like a transfigured saint Clotilda looked into the sun, and her countenance was exalted at once by the sun and by her soul. And her friend disturbed not the fair soul; but he took the white handkerchief out of her hand and softly wiped away the colored particles dropping from the foliage, encircled with flower-dust, and she gave him voluntarily her hand. When she turned her eyes full of tears upon him, he let the tears stand; but she herself removed them, and looked upon him with a love over which soon the old ones glided, and said with a smile that flowed forth blissfully: "My whole heart is inexpressibly moved; pardon it, dearest friend, to-day everything in which it has hitherto not been like yours!" ...
—Lo, then was the warm cloud emptied into the garden as if it were a whole river of Paradise and on the streams angels playfully floated down, ... and when bliss could no more weep and love could no more stammer, and when the birds screamed for joy, and the nightingale warbled through the rain, and when the heavens, weeping for joy, fell with cloud-arms on the earth, aye, then two inspired souls met trembling and rushed breathless on each other with quivering lips and cheek pressed to cheek in glowing, trembling ecstasy,—then at last gushed forth, like life-blood out of the swollen heart, great tears of bliss out of the loving eyes over into the loved ones.—The heart measured the eternity of its heaven with great throbs heavy with bliss,—the whole visible universe, the sun itself had sunk away, and only two souls throbbed against each other alone in the emptied, glimmering immensity, dazzled with the glistening of tears and the splendor of sunshine, stunned with the roar of the heavens and the echo of Philomel, and sustained by God in dying of rapture.
Clotilda bent her head aside, to dry her eyes; and her mute darling sank down and knelt before her, and pressed his face upon her hand, and stammered: "O thou heart out of my heart, O thou for ever and ever beloved one,—ah, that I could bleed, could die for thee!"—Suddenly he rose, as if lifted by an immeasurable inspiration, and said in a lower tone, looking upon her: "Clotilda, I love thee, God, and virtue forever."