And now the moon, by the reflection of the sun wherewith it silvered this children's paradise, gave joy brighter colors, and under the deepened shadows of the May-trees the children's courage grew. All was happy,—all unfettered,—all peaceful,—no poisonous eye flashed lightnings,—not a single roughness disturbed the metrical life,—in melodious march the minutes went sounding onward with silver tone, and sang themselves away, and lingered in the bursting rose-thicket of the evening red.—The bland, fluttering ether of Spring drank its fill of perfume from the blossoms, and bore it like honey into the breast of man.—And as pulses beat fuller, dumb, cooling lightnings played round the clouds of the horizon, and the moon drew vital air[[120]] from the leaves, in order to convey more healthily thereupon the abstracted spirit of their cups.
Victor and the Englishman and Emanuel and Clotilda, together with some of her female friends, stood below as patron gods of joy beside the children, and were intoxicated by the enjoyment of the young people's delight. Our friend had too holy a love to show (especially to so many strangers and to the Englishman), and laid a bridle on his unmanageable, dancing heart. In noble love the sacrifice—and though it were that love itself—is as agreeable as the enjoyment; but still easier is it near an Emanuel, who—that is the gleaming order-cross of the higher men—precisely in the hour of joy lifts his eyes to the higher life and to the truth. This time, moreover, the feeling of his improving health redoubled his pining after the predicted departure. His glorified countenance, his super-earthly wishes, and his still resignation, constituted, as it were, the second and higher moonlight which fell into the more dim; and he disturbed not in the least the growing elysium, when he said, for example: "Mortal man regards himself as eternal here, because the human race is eternal; but the propelled drop is confounded with the inexhaustible stream; and were it not that new human creatures always spring up after us, each one would feel more deeply the fleetingness of his second[[121]] of life";—or when he said: "If man is not immortal, then no higher being is either, and the conclusions are the same; in that case the abiding God would burn solitary out of the struggling and expiring sense, like the sun which, if there were no atmosphere, would blaze out of a black heaven, and pierce, but not illuminate, the vaulted night";—or when he said: "The gait of mankind toward the holy city of God is like the gait of certain pilgrims, who, wayfaring toward Jerusalem, always after three steps forward take one backward";—or, finally, when, upon his Victor's remarking, that amendment only removed the great faults, not the fine stings of remorse, and that a saint got as many reproaches from his conscience as the bad man, when he said to this: "Our distance from virtue, like that from the sun, by exact reckonings we always find only greater; but still, notwithstanding all our changeable calculations, the sun always pours into our faces the same warmth."
Suddenly the Englishman ran to the players and demanded of them—in order to see the pranks and cranks of his ideas set to music—the best adagio, and hastened up to the "Crape-Tent," which Lord Horion had had built of iron arches, over which was stretched black double crape, in order to convert, for his eyes, which were at that time ailing, the sunshine into moonshine. As every heart at the first touch of the adagio must needs dissolve in tears of bliss, the consequence was that the rapture which sought to veil itself broke up the tranquil circle, and all glided away from each other, in order (each under his own arbor) to smile unseen and sigh unheard,—like patients visiting a medicinal spring they parted, met, avoided each other in accidental directions.
The beautiful blind youth was reclining above not far from the nightingale, as it were at the fountain-head of the streams of harmony, and Clotilda looked upon him pityingly, as often as she passed by him, and thought: "Poor overshadowed soul, the sighs of music distend thy yearning heart, and thou never seest whom thou lovest and who loves thee."—Emanuel went up slowly the long way to his mountain with the weeping birch and back.—Victor roamed about the whole garden; he passed along before veiled obelisks, columns and cubes which better filled the place of stone Fauns; he stepped into the dark evening-bower shaded only by the evening-red, where he was yesterday too happy for a mortal, and too susceptible for an immortal; he pushed through a ring of bushes, out of which and above which towered a gleaming fountain, and closed his eyes to the dazzling light, when he saw therein in artificially embowered pier mirrors a water-bow saturated with lunar silver, arched over a million times in receding and paling curves, and reduced from white rainbows to moon-sickles, and at last to shadows.—
Oh, how often in the dreams of his childhood, in his landscape-pictures which he sketched to himself of the days of Paradise, had he not seen this night and hardly wished for it, because he never hoped to live to see it on the rough earth; and now did this Eden-night, with all blossoms and stars hanging round it, stand out created before him?—And who of us has not in some magically illumined spot or other of his fancy and his hope set up just so grand a night-piece of a future vernal night, when, as in this one, he is made happy with all friends at once (not always alone),—when, as in this one, the night is only thrown as a transparent veil over the day, when the red girdle which the sun laid down on stepping into the sea remains lying till morning glowing on the margin of the earth,—when the long, soul-like tones of the nightingale float aloud through the adagio that melts asunder, and start up out of the echo,—when we meet none but friendly souls, and look on them with rapture, and ask by our smiles, "O thou too art surely as happy as I?" and when the other's smile answers in the affirmative,—a night, O God, when thou hast made our hearts full and yet tranquil, when we neither doubt nor hate nor fear, when all thy children repose on thy bosom in thy arms, and hold each other's hands as brothers and sisters, and slumber only with half-closed eyes, in order to smile on each other?—Ah, inasmuch as the sigh wherewith I write and you read this reminds us how seldom such spring nights fall upon our earth, take it not ill of me that I only slowly execute the voluptuous picture of this night that so I may some time in my old days refresh myself by the painted hour of the present inspiration,[[122]] and may haply be able to say: Ah, thou knewest then, perhaps, that thou shouldst never live to experience such a night, and for that reason wast thou so copious. And what else than petrified blossoms of a clime which is not on our earth, do we dig up out of our fantasy, just as in our North they exhume fossil palms?...
Victor went to the still Julius at the hedge of the nightingale and laid night violets in his hand, and kissed him on the curtained eye, which could not see, yet could weep for joy,—and neighbor nightingale paused not during the kiss. He came up the garden, as Emanuel came down; they looked on each other near the morning fountain, and Emanuel's face gleamed in the reflection of the waves, as if he were standing before the angel of death and dissolving, to die, and he said: "The Infinite One clasps us to-day to himself,—why can I not weep as I am so happy?"—and when they had separated again, he called back to his Victor and said: "See, how blooming-red the evening goes forth toward the morning like a dying man, as if the tones moved it onward,—see, the stars, like blossoms, hang down out of eternity into our earth,—behold the great deep, how many springs bloom to-night on so many thousand earths wheeling therein!"—
The maidens, after short walks, had soon seated themselves on the grassy banks of the terraces in pairs or in the number of the Graces. Clotilda, who had strolled alone, at last did the same, and seated herself beside a solitary friend on the fourth terrace, near the gay solar rainbow of flowers, behind which the lunar rainbow of water glistened. This friend appealed to Victor, approaching, as umpire of a virtuous quarrel: "We have been disputing," said the friend, "which is sweeter to good souls, to forgive or to be forgiven. I absolutely assert, forgiving is the sweeter."—"And to me it appears," said Clotilda with a touched voice, which betrayed all the affectionate thoughts of her indulgent heart, all her grateful remembrances of their last variance and of his beautiful forgiveness, "that it is more beautiful to receive forgiveness, because love toward the forgiving soul is made by its own lowliness purer, and by the other's goodness greater." Never, perhaps, was anything lovelier said to our Victor. His emotion and his gratitude made the decision hard for him; but Clotilda prompted or corrected his dreams by this turn: "I have reminded my good Charlotte already of day before yesterday, but she sticks to her opinion." She meant the day of confession and communion, when the fair hearts all asked and received forgiveness of each other. Victor finally answered at once truly, significantly, and delicately: "You both, I think, suppose impossible cases; no human being is either all right or all wrong; and whoever forgives is at the same time forgiven, and the reverse;—thus two beings who are reconciled always share the joy of forgiveness and the joy of purified and increased love with each other."—
Victor went off, in order to conceal an emotion through which he too much heightened another's. But on his far and near ways among tones and blossoms, feelings clung to him which doubled and glorified his love; he felt that the strongest expression of love takes not so firm and deep a hold of the soul as the finest. But as he passed along by the sun-dial, which with its measuring-rod of shadow counted out for us other shadows our narrow fortunate islands, and as the moon weighed out on the scale with her shadowy beam in equipoise the last minutes of this glad hour, because she pointed toward midnight, as if she wrote, It will presently be over,—just then the Englishman passed out alone slowly and with downcast eyes from the crape-tent, and went in among the tones, to lead them away with, the whole heaven around them. Victor, who in the still sea of the deepest joy no longer steered for countries, but contentedly tossed or rested upon it, and desired nothing in the future but the present, only paced now to and fro on the long terraces, instead of ascending and descending the garden,—he stood just on the uppermost, on the flower-terrace, at the morning-fountain, and looked along the glimmering way over to the evening-fountain, and the fallen snow of the moon lay deeper and whiter down along the blissful slope, and this blooming sugar-field appeared to his dreaming heart like a point of land with which the island of the blest stretched over into this earth, and he saw on all this enchanted field nothing but blessed ones walking, reposing, dancing, here alone, there in pairs, yonder in groups, and innocent men, quiet children, gentle, virtuous maidens, and he looked up to the starry heaven and his tearful eye said to the All-gracious, O give my good father and my good Flamin also such a sight!—when all on a sudden he perceived that the tones were wafted away, and saw the Briton moving on with the children, and the swan-song of a Maëstoso was borne along before the fleeing youth....
Victor went up with the tones that swam away, and the stars seemed to swim with them, and the whole region to go with them;—all at once he stopped at the end of the terrace of flowers, before the emblems of Giulia, the white hyacinths, before the friend of Giulia, before—Clotilda ... O moment! repeated only in eternity, wear not too strong a lustre, that I may be able to endure it! move not my heart too intensely, so that I may be able to describe thee!—Ah, move it only as thou dost the two hearts to which thou appearedst; thou wilt meet none of us any more ... And Clotilda and Victor stood innocent before God, and God said, Weep and love as in the second world with me!—And they looked on each other speechless in the transfiguration of night, in the transfiguration of love, in the transfiguration of emotion, and tears of bliss closed their eyes, and behind the illuminated tears transfigured worlds rose around them out of the dark earth, and the evening-fountain spread itself gleaming like a milky-way above them, and the starry heaven closed sparkling over them, and the receding and dying sounds washed their uplifted souls away from the shore of earth.... Lo! then a little breath of air brought the escaping sounds more warmly and closely to their hearts, and they wiped the tears from their eyes; and as they looked round in the actual scene, the melodious waving agitated all the blossoms in the garden, and the great night, which with giant limbs slept in the moonshine on the earth, stirred for rapture its wreaths of shadowed tree-tops, and the two beings smiled trembling in unison, and simultaneously cast down their eyes and simultaneously raised them without knowing it. And Victor at last was able to say: "O may the noblest heart that I know be as unspeakably blessed as I, and still more blessed! I have not deserved so much!"—And Clotilda said in a soft tone: "I have remained the whole evening mostly alone, merely for the sake of weeping for joy, but it is too beautiful for me and for the future...."—Her companions turning round came up the garden, and the two had to part; and when Victor added with stifled sounds, "Rest well, thou noble soul,—may such tears of joy have always to stand in thy eyes, may such melodious tones be destined always to float around thy days!—Rest well, thou heavenly soul!"—and when a look full of new love and an eye full of fresh tears thanked him; and when he bowed himself low, low before the saintly, still, modest one, and from reverence did not so much as kiss her hand;—then in the invisibleness did her genius embrace his genius for delight, that their two children were so happy and so virtuous.
O what comfort did his overwhelmed soul now find in his beloved Dahore, whom he followed under the loud chestnut-trees, and on whose neck he could fall with all his tears of ecstasy, with all his caresses of a raptured heart: "My Emanuel, rest softly! I stay to-night under this good, warm sky round about us."—"Aye, stay, good heart," said Emanuel, "such a night will never pass through any spring again.... Hear'st thou," he continued, as the tones receding into immensity, like evening stars, as it were, of the sunken glory, like autumnal voices of the departing summer-song, sent their call into the yearning soul, "hear'st thou the sweet dying away of the strains? Lo, even thus may my soul die away on the longest day, even so may thy heart lie on mine and say as now, Rest well!" ...