Sinking from the arms of his last remaining loved friend, Victor went reeling back in the confused twilight of inspired sadness through the avenue pierced by moonlight, as it were dropping with rays, in order to recline, in the blossom-cave, where he had here first found Clotilda, his dreaming head on a pillow of blossom-cups.... And as he slowly and alone and with Elysian remembrances and hopes staggered along through the arbor which had grown into the avenue, between the lulling rivulets, low waves of the departed melody still swam more into his fancy than into his ears, and only the nightingale reigned aloud over the inspired night. Then, unspeakably blest and burdened with ecstasy, the last man of this night glided from the five steps of his heavenly bed through the lattice of twigs into the dark thicket of blossoms.—Bedewed leaves fell, cooling, on his fevered brow, he laid his two outstretched arms on two supports of dwarf-trees, and closed in rapture his burning eyelids, and the continuing tones of the nightingale and of the five fountains around him wafted him some spaces onward into the glimmering illusion of dreams,—but the nightingale, screaming out in the jubilee of joy, warbled through his dream, and when he opened his eyes, drifted away into half-dreams, the glimpses of the moon shot through the white shrubbery,—nevertheless, satisfied with the previous scenes, he only smiled half beside himself, and closed his eyes again and sank completely into the harmonious slumber ... only a few broken tones he still sang to himself,—only a few times more he stirred his prostrate arms for embraces ... and in the euthanasia of slumber and rapture only obscurely stammered once more, Beloved!...
And so sweetly, great All-gracious One, let the rest of us mortals sink to sleep in the last night as Victor does in this, and let our last word also be, Beloved!—
[36. DOG-POST-DAY.]
FOURTH AND LAST DAY OF WHITSUNTIDE.
Hyacinth.—The Voice of Emanuel's Father.—Letter from the Angel.—Flute on the Grave.—Second Nightingale.—Farewell.— Pistols.—Ghostly Apparition.
The appendix to the fourth day of joy has just come in.—Pausing only to breathe the sigh wherewith one usually says, on the day after festal days, that he is burying them, I come back again before the blooming bed of my friend, and open the living-green curtain; not till toward nine o'clock did a ground-sparrow twittering close to his hands draw him with difficulty out of a deep sea of dream. But the shadowy shapes, which the concave mirror of dream had erected in the air, were all forgotten; only the tears, which they had wrung from them, still stood in his eyes, and he could no longer remember why he had shed them. To-day was Ember-day, which, like other changes of moon and weather, makes the echo of our dreams louder and more polysyllabic.—In a singular lassitude he opened his eyes before the white twilight of the canopy of apple-blossoms, before the maze of the green web,—his hand chased the ground-sparrow through the bushes,—it was sultry around this shade, the tree-tops were mute and all the flowers erect,—bees bent down from grains of sand into the springs around him and sipped water,—white flocks dropped from the willows, and all the smelling-bottles of the blossoms and the censers of the flowers diffused over his place of slumber a sweet, sultry steam....
He raises his right hand to his moist eye and sees therein, to his astonishment, a white hyacinth, which some one must have placed there.... He suspected Clotilda; and she it had really been. Half an hour before she had stepped up to this bed of flowers,—had gently let the bushes immediately close again,—but then, however, drawn them apart again, because she saw the tears of the forgotten dream run down the face of the glowing sleeper,—her whole soul became now a tender look and blessing of love, and she could not refrain from laying the memorial of her morning-visit, the flower, on his hand,—and then hastened softly back to her chamber.
He stepped hastily into the beaming day, to overtake the giver, whose morning-offering he unhappily, for fear of destroying it, could no more press to his heart than he could herself. O how it saddened him, when he stood in the open air before the Moravian churchyard of the heavenly night which had gone home, before the reposing garden, and when he looked upon the bald, close-shaven, trodden-down dancing-floor, and on the silent nightingale's-bush, and on the hills where the children were tending sheep, disrobed of yesterday's finery! Then the forgotten dream again appeared and said: Weep once more, for the rose-feast of thy life concludes to-day, and the last of the four rivers of Paradise in a few hours will utterly dry up!—"O ye fair days," said Victor, "ye deserve that I should leave you with a tenderness that knows no measure and with unnumbered tears!"—He fled from the too harsh daylight into the cell of crape, that it might recolor the brilliant foreground of the day into a dim back-ground, overspread with the moonshine of yesterday; and under this pall of the pale dead night he proposed to himself to indulge his heart, so soon to be impoverished, with its last joy, namely, its yearning, in utter overmeasure. He stepped out of the tent, but the nocturnal moonshine faded not from the lawn; he looked up into the blue heaven, which touches us with one long flame, but the veiled stars of the wintry night sent little outwelling rays to the eclipsed soul; he said to himself, indeed, "The ice-mountain on which hitherto my reason has delivered half sermons-on-the-mount, has shrunk up under the glow of joy to a mole-hill," but he added, "To-day I care for nothing."