"I cover my blushing cheeks with the funeral veil. My secret lies hidden in my heart, and will be laid with it under the grave-stone. But after a year it will force its way out of the mouldered heart. O, then let it rest forever in thine, Clotilda!—and forever in thine, Julius!—Julius, was not a silent form often about thee that called itself thy angel? Did it not once, as the death-bell tolled for the burial of a blooming maiden, lay a white hyacinth in thy hand, and say, Angels pluck such white flowers? Did not a mute form once take thy hand and wipe away its tears therewith, and it could not tell why it wept? Did not a low voice once say, Farewell, I shall no more appear to thee, I go back to heaven? That form was I, O Julius; for I have loved thee and even unto death. Lo! here I stand on the shore of the second world, but I look not over into its infinite fields, but I turn my face, while I am still sinking, back to thee, to thee, and my eye grows dim over thy image.—Now I have told thee all.—Now come, quieting death, crush slowly the white hyacinth, and rend the heart asunder speedily, that Julius may see the love enclosed therein.—Ah, wilt thou then take a dead one into thy soul? Wilt thou weep, when thou hearest this read? Ah, when my covered, sunken dust can no more touch thee, will my remote spirit be loved by thine?—But I conjure thee, O ever-remembered one, go, on the day when this tearful leaf is read to thee, then go, at sundown, up to my grave and offer to the pale face below, which the old mound is already crushing asunder, and to the dissolved heart that can beat for nothing more, then present to the poor heart that has loved thee so much, and on thy account has hid itself under the earth, thy funeral offering,—bring to it on thy flute the tones of my loved song, 'The grave is deep and silent.'—Sing it softly to the accompaniment, Clotilda, and thou too visit me.—Ah, poor Giulia, lift up thy soul, and sink not now, as thou imaginest thy Julius on thy grave!—When thou bringest thy offering to the dead, my spirit will, it is true, already have gone up higher; I shall have lived a year beyond the earth, I shall already have forgotten the earth,—but nevertheless, but, O God, if Thou shouldst let the tones above my grave penetrate into Elysium, then should I sink down and shed hot tears and stretch out my arms and cry: Yes! here in eternity I love him still,—may it fare well with him on the earth, may his soft heart repose softly and long on life below there!—No, not long! Come up hither, mortal, to the Immortals, that thine eye may be healed, and see the friend who died for thee!
"Giulia."
* * * * *
"I will go,"—said Julius hesitatingly, but with quiverings in his face,—"although the sun is not down. My father shall console me till sundown, that my heart may not beat so violently against my breast, when I stand at the grave and make the offering to the dead."—Let me say nothing, reader, of the choking heart with which I proceed,—nor of this too sensitive Giulia, who like a morning sun-dial was ere noon in shade and coolness, who, like a dove, unfolded her wings to the rain and to tears,—nor of her soul's-sisters, who in the second decade of life hang, the skeleton of death all over with flowers, that they may not be able to see its limbs, and who rest their white arm merely on a myrtle-twig of love as upon a bleeding-support, and watch calmly the bleeding to death of its severed veins!—
I could not have said even this, if Victor had not thought it, whose heart was mortally distraught by an infinite grief and an infinite love; for ah! how far on the way was not his irreplaceable Clotilda already, to follow her friend and hide her unloved heart in the earth, as they lay down carnations in the frost?
The sun sank lower, the moon mounted higher,—Victor saw Clotilda, like an ethereally embodied angel, reclining in a niche that opened towards the west,—the little girl mentioned yesterday played, in her lap, with a new doll,—it seemed to him as if he saw her soaring toward heaven, and when she lifted her great eyelids, weighed down with tears for the departed friend, whose secret she had long since guessed and concealed, towards him, who to-day increased them by his departure; and when she saw his face also melted in emotion; then did like sorrowful thoughts drown in both even the first sounds of welcome, and both turned away their faces, because they wept for the parting.—"Have you," said Clotilda, at least with a composed voice, "just spoken with Julius?"—Victor did not answer, but his eyes said yes, in the simple fact that they streamed more passionately and looked on her fixedly. She cast hers down with a slight blush for Giulia. The little child took the falling of the eyelids over the great drops for a sign of sleepiness, and drew the little hay-stuffed pillow away from the doll, spread it out for Clotilda, and said innocently, "There, lie down on it and go to sleep!" A shudder thrilled through her friend, as she answered, "Not to-day, dear; on pillows of hay only the dead sleep." He shuddered, as he saw a snow-white pink, in the centre of which there was a great dark-red point, like a bloody drop, trembling on her agitated bosom. The fearful pink seemed to him to be the lily which superstition formerly found in the choir-seat of the priest, whose death was said thereby to be predicted.
She fixed her gaze painfully on, the low sun and the churchyard, behind which in the May days it sank like a mortal. "Leave this prospect, dearest," he said, though without a hope of obedience,—"a tender integument is most easily destroyed by a tender soul,—your tears make you too sad." But she replied: "Only in earlier years—but long ago it ceased to be so—did they make my eye-sockets burn and benumb my brain."—Suddenly, as the thought of the beclouded perspective of her eyes exhausted with weeping wrung his heart out of his bosom, the sunlight died upon her cheeks,—streams of tears broke violently from her eyes,—he turned round,—over on the churchyard the veiled youth had prostrated himself on the grave-mound of the veiled one beneath,—the sun was already below the earth, but the flute had as yet no voice, sorrow has only sighs,—no tones.... At last the beautiful blind one raised himself erect, amidst convulsive sorrows, for the funeral-offering, and the wailings of the flute went up from the closed grave into the evening-redness,—three hearts melted away like the tones, like the fourth heart that was buried below. But Clotilda lifted herself up by force out of her dumb woe, and sang low as an offering to the dead the heavenly song, for which the departed one had entreated her and which I give with inexpressible emotion:—
The grave is deep and dismal,—
How solemn there to stand!
Below, in gloom abysmal,