I have only taken three coffee-cups of Burgundy, because I shall not perhaps need any more for the carnation and red crayon drawing of the afternoon—but O heavens! the night!—It is not my fault if it does not get to the ears of posterity, that most persons in the afternoon, on account of the heat, stayed out of the garden. But they see from the chambers the meadow, the timber-yard of a beautiful evening, where the children were already running round beforehand, carrying off the grass, and opening the feast of trumpets with horn-blowers on beer-siphons. It would be too trifling, if I should remark that several youngsters were stretched out dead by having red caps or crowns shot at them, because they represented hares, the cap-shooter the hunter, and the rest greyhounds; one can, however, take it metaphorically, and then it becomes satirical and edifying enough.
The joy of tender natures is bashful; they would sooner show their wounds than their raptures, because they do not think to deserve either, or they stow both behind the veil of a tear. So was it with Victor, and in every joy he looked with a sigh to the west; I know not whether he thought of the setting of stars and of men, or of the blacks whose chains clank across even to our hemisphere, or on the nearer whites whose sundered chains they resolder with blood.—But this looking towards his Keblah[[117]] constrained him to earn his rapture. That of yesterday and of to-day was so great, that he said with emotion to the genius of the earth: "Such greatness my feeble virtue cannot attain."—It availed him naught, that he sought to magnify himself to his conscience, and represented to it how many fair moments and happy pulsations he here in this Valley of Seifersdorf imparts to his friends and to her, his friend, who through him regains her health, and to the children whom he sees already skipping about and who at evening will do so still more,—it had some effect on his conscience, but still not enough, when he asked it whether, then, he should stop his ears to the sphere-music of these days; whether he had not conquered his passions, and whether the enlargement of a man's sphere and the increase of his activity were not simply in proportion to the greater number of passions he had mastered; so that, accordingly, a maid of honor, nay, even a king, possessed no smaller circle of efficiency than the most useful citizen; and whether man, like very small children, had not been sent into the school of earth to learn to be still,—but the sacramental religious war between the old and the new Adam was ended merely by a delight, namely, by the determination, so soon as his father should release him from the manacles and ankle-fetters of the court, to do more cures than the city and country physicians and all gratis and mostly among the poor.—
Only one word, reader! Virtue cannot make one worthy of felicity, but only worthier, because existence of itself with us as with the non-moral creatures gives a right to joy,—because Virtue and Joy are incommensurable qualities, and one knows not whether a happy century is earned by a virtuous decade or the latter by the former,—because the years of pleasure forerun the years of virtue, so that the virtuous man, instead of the future, would have first to deserve the past,—instead of heaven, would have first to deserve the earth.
The afternoon glided away like a bright rill, over motley trifles as over golden sand, over little joys and over great hopes, over delicate attentions and over the flower-dust of benevolent refinements which is the best sticking-powder of the heart. Victor felt that a mistress who has much intelligence imparts to love a peculiar piquant taste; she herself felt, that the heart which one has plucked with soft, covered hands, and not with rough clutchings, keeps better, just as Borsdorf apples keep longer which one has picked only with gloves on. Although, according to my tables, love stands the highest precisely on the day after the first kiss, that is at 112° Fahrenh. or 10° De l'Isle: with Victor's love, however, his reverence had risen at the same rate,—and love exalts, when the favors which are shown therein make one not bolder but shyer!—
Our friend felt how happy in joy self-continence makes one, and how much the foaming beaker of joy is cleared up and improved by throwing in a few knife-points of sedative-powder. After an afternoon when the whole hours were charming, without one's being able to single out into prominence any extraordinary minutes,—as the feathers of the pheasant shine not singly, but in whole bunches,—after such an afternoon all went into the garden, but Emanuel first. The East Indian, like ground-sparrows, could not endure the confinement of a room, and was silent therein or only read, and that too merely—which does not surprise me—the tragedies of Shakespeare....
Under the great evening-sky, which no cloud limited, their souls opened like night-violets. Emanuel was the cicerone and gallery-inspector of this picturesque garden. He led his friend and the others to his little flower-garden, which lay highest in the park. That is to say, the park ran down the mountain with five landings and stories slid out as it were from the latter in the manner of drawers. These five plains, these cut-in green steps, bore just so many different gardens, orchards, and shrubbery-gardens, &c.,—hence with every new point of view, as by a kaleidoscope, a new garden was put together out of the old one. The sloping park was enclosed on both sides by two serpentine walks of tall, flaunting, flaming flowers, like two balustrades flowing downward, and behind each flowery serpentine line curled down from the mountain above silvery veins of bright, thin water leaping up and down,[[118]] which in the evening sun became a gold-snake or artery of ichor lying there in upright sinuosities. On the last and uppermost terrace stood the evening- and the morning-arbors, like the poles of the garden, opposite to each other, and the evening-fountain gleamed up over the former, and the morning-fountain over the latter, and the two looked across at each other like sun and moon.
And just at the evening-fountain Emanuel had his middle-garden. For he loved, as an East Indian, physical flowers as he did poetic ones, and to him in December a book of flowers was a gently waving flowery lawn, and a catalogus of carnation leaves was to him the hull and chrysalid of summer. He conducted his loved ones over the flowery region of the mountain away through the innocent flowers, which, like good maidens, take neither sun nor soil from another's life for their own,—along by the gold tassel of the tulip,—by the miniature-colors of the forget-me-not,—by the many-colored bells, which are also, like those that sound, cast in the moulds of the earth,—by the ear-roses[[119]] of August, namely, the roses,—by the Cato, not the jolly Englishman, but an auricula that does not flame, (to be had of Herr Klefeker in Hamburg,)—by the beloved Agatha, which reminded one of the other in St. Luna, and which is a beautiful cowslip....
At last they arrived at the evening-bower and at Emanuel's flowers, namely, at the snow-white hyacinths, in whose shadow the irradiated evening-fountain tinged a pale red. O, how sweetly, how sweetly, there, breathed the warmth of the evening sun and the coolness of the evening wind!—But why droop thy eye and head, Clotilda, so sadly here toward the flowers? Is it because the water-column is extinguished, because the sun goes down?—No; but because the white hyacinths, in the language of the florists, mean Julia,—O because the churchyard looks over hither, whose tall, swaying wildflowers stand with their roots over two beloved eyes, over the eyes of the pale hyacinth Giulia, who has not lived to see to-day's festival.—But Clotilda concealed herself, so as to disturb nothing.
The last sparkling gold of the water-columns and the evening-blaze flung back from all the windows, turned all eyes toward the sun, who sank behind his stage.—But a rolling fire-wheel of the allegro, with which the harmonists on the meadow accompanied the retiring sun, brought down the eyes to the level of the ears, and below on the veiled meadow there rose a new theatre of joy with new players.... Two roses were planted in heaven, the red, the sun, which unfolded its buds over the second hemisphere, and the white, the moon, which hung low in ours; but sun-gold and lunar silver and evening-slags were as yet absorbed by a smoking magic-haze, and one could not separate the shadows from the silver ground of the moonlight, and blossoms fluttering downward were still confounded with night-butterflies.
The happy party went down through the chestnut avenue to the younger happy ones, the children, who, made more bold by the presence of their mothers, encircled and girdled twenty liberty-trees in changeable groups, and waited only for deeper shadows to dance more briskly. The Englishman was welcomed by Clotilda as a friend of her two friends. The bridal pair, to whom the meadow belonged as an inheritance, had exchanged their own music for this, and their feast of the covenant in its solemnity brought nearer to our hero the joyous day when he too should be able to call his Clotilda a bride; but he had not the courage to turn his blushing face towards her, because he thought she was thinking the same thing, and was red also. Only a lover can sympathize with the inspiration of a bridal pair; and never did fairer wishes go up for one than ascended for this one in two souls full of love. A four-years-old sister of the bride attached herself to Clotilda,—the former was the little Luna of this Venus in her walks,—and the latter gladly discharged her love into the little hand which gave hers the preference over a dancing partner.