My heart trembles before the coming line!—
Howling with pain, grinning with exultant fury, the crazy skeleton sprang forth from behind the hill into the blessed plain, bearing in its right hand a bloody hand that had been hewed off, and shook from the left stump, from which its madness had hacked it off, trickling fountain-curves of blood, and pressed to itself with the right arm a spade, designed for the burying of the hand, and screamed with a grin of exultation and agony: "Death grabbed me by it, but I snapped it off,—and when he sees the grave of the fist, he will be so stupid as to think it is I lying there ... Ah, thou there! Lay thyself, prithee, to bed in the coffin; he has bored out thy eyes and clogged thy maw with mould.... Brr!"
"O All-gracious One, thou hast damned me!" stammered Emanuel; the driven blood broke from his crushed lung, and the disconsolate one staggered and sank dying on the blood-stained flowers of his lost heaven....
Thus does one day rob another of its heaven, and ere bereaved man enters yonder into the last paradise, he has lost too many here below!—Ah, we bear into every spring-air of this life and into the ether of the second a breast yawning with wounds; and it must first be closed, before it can fill itself!...
THE SOFT EVENING.
Towards noon he opened his weary eyes, but only to let them fall into the grave, which death had opened beside him during his sleep. However, one madman had been the God of Medicine to the other; his dream of Elysium was dreamed out, shortly before it seemed about to be fulfilled, and he was rational again. Victor saw by all signs, that toward sundown at least death with his fruit-gatherer would pluck this white fruit from its stem; but he saw it more calmly than yesterday. As he had already rehearsed the part of disconsolateness, the instruments of grief sawed no fissure into his heart, but only moved bloodily to and fro in the old one. Whoever after years deposits for the second time in the coffin one who has been once awakened therein, scarcely mourns with so much intensity as the first time.
With what altered eyes did Emanuel awake in the evening hour, when he yesterday had shed the first tears for joy! His soul, like the mourning tree of Goa,[[158]] let fall by day the nightly load of blossoms; to his chilled head the earth turned no longer the meadow-side of poesy, but the light side of cold reason. He confessed now that he had nourished into fulness of blood the nobler parts of his inner man at the expense of the lower,—that his hope of death had been too great as well as his poetic wing-feathers,—that he had contemplated the earth not from the earth, but too much from Jupiter, seen from whose observatory it must needs dwindle to a fiery spark, and that he had therefore lost the earth without getting Jupiter instead. Vainly did Victor oppose him with the true proposition, that the higher man, as the painters do with water-colors, always begins his life-piece with the background and with the sky, which the painters in oil and inferior men make last; his answer was the complaint that he unfortunately had not completed his picture so far as the foreground. At last he reproached himself with having made too much ado about so slight a separation as death was, at least for him who goes, since the other separations on the earth were after all longer, more bitter and two-sided.
They came in this way upon the subject of recognitions on the other side of this stage of being. Victor said, he could not decry, as many a philosopher had done, conjectures reaching out beyond the earth; for after all we must guess about what was beyond this world, whether we asserted or denied. "Without the continuance of memory," said he, "the continuance of my conscious self is no more than that of my knowledge of another's, i. e. nothing at all; so soon as I forget my present self, then surely might any other one instead of me be immortal. Nor does the destruction of my memory follow from its earthly dependence on my body; for this dependence all the spiritual powers have in common with it, and in that case the destruction of the others would follow from this dependence; and what then would be left for immortality?"—Emanuel said: the thought of recognition, however much it presupposed of the sensuous, was so sweet and transporting, that, if men could make themselves sure of it, no one would be willing to tarry here an hour, particularly if one painted out to himself the heavenly thought of finding all great and noble men at once. "I have often," said he, "pictured out the future recollection after the analogy of the present, and always had to leave off for rapture when I thought to myself how in that remembrance the earth would shrink up to a dim morning-meadow, and our life to a far-removed day illumined with moonlight.—Oh, if we now, dissolve at the image even of a few years of childhood, how tenderly will the image of all childish years one day look upon us!"—Victor waived off these deathly raptures, and after saying, by way of transition, "one connection, at all events, this world must have with the second," he came upon something else, which had struck him so much among the incidents of this night....
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