She pressed his hand and said softly: "Oh, how could man and fate wound such a heart? But mine, Victor," she said still more softly, "will never more do it wrong."—They came out from the bower,—heaven, like their hearts had exhausted itself in tears of joy, and was merely serene,—the sun had gone down simultaneously with the great moment. Victor went slowly, as if he were passing along before a wide Elysium, bearing in his heart the received Eden, home to Dahore's quiet dwelling. Dahore, who had sunk to sleep in a sitting posture, swayed softly to and fro, and Victor, although he would gladly have let his heart cease its beatings on a second, congenial bosom, nevertheless denied himself,—and slowly leaned against his swaying teacher. He held for a long time the slumbering head on his tumultuous breast. His tempest of joy cooled itself off into serene sky, and the refreshed flowers of joy opened the incense-cups of memory. Dahore flung his arms around his darling, and then, and not till then, woke up: for he had dreamed he was embracing him, and when he woke, he was delighted that it had not been merely a dream.

Enough!—And you, O ye human beings whom I love, take your rest on the lap of memory or of hope, when, as I do, ye lay down these little leaves!

[35. DOG-POST-DAY.]

THIRD DAY OF WHITSUNTIDE,
OR
BURGUNDY-CHAPTER.

The Englishman.—Meadow-Ball.—Blissful Night.—The Blooming Cave.

With men, as with misers, it never strikes anything but quarters of the happy hour; like a bad clock, it never strikes full the Arcadian hour of our hope. But in respect to the Whitsuntide days this is utterly false,—they are magnificent, and as the outpouring of the Holy Spirit was formerly represented in the old churches by the flinging down of flowers, so do we shadow forth those of Maienthal by throwing out flowers of speech. I have therefore actually unsealed a flask of Burgundy, and set it beside my inkstand, in order, in the first place, by my greater fire in this chapter, to bring over the critics of art and nature to my side, who would rather break the staff over authors than a lance with authors,—and secondly and simply to drink the wine, which of itself is final object and teleology enough. A true Paradise and kingdom of heaven we should have, if the reader also would himself take something spirituous in such chapters. When the author alone gets drunk, half the impression goes to the d—ogs; and it is a misfortune that the reviewers have nothing to nibble and nothing to drink, else they might minister to me as to a star by refracting me through their atmosphere and show me higher and broader than I stand.

Victor had hardly run out into the wet grass of the morning, when he came upon the Englishman with his head under the sprinkling-pots of the water-wheels. He gladly forgave this Cato the elder all his singularities and the idiosyncrasy of his extravagant nature and his comet-course; for he had himself in his eighteenth year been such a hairy star, and so looked upon this man as a comet-medal struck for himself. Although the Briton affected singularity, Victor knew from his own experience that it arose not from vanity, (one can, if one will, extract vanity from all, even the most innocent, actions, as well as air from all bodies,) but it proceeded from humor, for which the enjoyment of an eccentric part, whether we shall read or play it, has full as many charms as it has for the sense of freedom and of inward power. Vain men succumb to the ridiculous, which the whimsical man defies; and the former hate, the latter seek their likenesses. The only thing which Victor had against him was that he would not show others little indulgences, for the simple reason that he never desired any either; and this very war, inseparable from humor, with all the little weaknesses and expectations of men, had given the humane Victor a dislike to this eccentric path. Misfortune, therefore, more easily makes odd men than prosperity.

His delight at the pictures which Cato drew him of Flamin's similar heavenly ascensions and feux de joie inspired him with the thought of earning his Quatraine[[115]] of beautiful days in some other way than by his foregoing gloomy ones,—namely, by making those of others like his own. In short, he concerted with the elder Cato, to whom the idea was most agreeable,—to employ the Prague company for some useful purpose, namely, in giving in the cool of the evening a ball on the green to the Maienthal children. What needed either for this purpose more than—which they immediately did—to thrust their hands into their pockets and their fingers into their purses and give the night watchman loci more than the hay of his great meadow might be worth on St. John's day, which would have to be mowed to-day for a ball-room? Besides, the man gave it with a thousand pleasures, because his son was to-day to be—married. The twenty May-poles which Cato proposed to plant in the hall stood already incarnate there as autochthones. And when they had, further, gone to the parents of the neat village,—generally, however, the poor ploughman resembles the swine, which, according to Ælian,[[116]] invented his ploughing for him,—and unitedly and with the greatest earnestness—for peasants and ladies do not understand singularities—begged and extorted from them the young dancing-partners: then all was right.

The trio of friends found, at the dinner-table of the Abbess, yesterday over again. Victor was immediately at home in all points; he would not continue a guest, so that the other might not continue the host. In general, maidens are seldom found again as one left them, just as their reception is always warmer or colder than their note previous; but in Clotilda's dissolving features an infinite charm announced the memory of yesterday, when she had, for two reasons, surrendered her heart to all his flames consecrated on the altar of nature and of virtue. In the first place, she was warmer yesterday, because she had previously been colder in the little quarrel which only her face had had about the Kussewitz watch affair: nothing makes love sweeter and tenderer than a little previous scolding and freezing, just as the grape-clusters acquire by a frost before vintage thinner skins and better must. Secondly, in a high degree of emotion and love the best girls behave just like—good ones.