I still throw a veil to-day over what Victor asked and what Emanuel disclosed; the new perspective would draw away our eyes too long from the great patient.
The blind one held in one steady and agonized grasp his hot hand, in order not to lose the beloved father; and when Emanuel had for a long time been laying soft consolation concerning his death, like cool leaves around the inflamed temples, he still said nothing except, in a tone of fervent supplication, "Ah, father, if I had only seen thee, only once!"—
Emanuel seemed to be composed; but he deceived himself; his present indifference to the earth was in fact more piercing than that in the night, which was merely a different enjoyment of life mixed with the magic drinks of fantasy. With his remorse for his poetic suicide there seemed almost to mingle joy at its consequences. Hence he said, with a look of touching certainty: "To-day towards evening he should certainly go, and no longer torment his two last and best friends with these delayings of his departure. The genius of the world would forgive him his last fault, and not let their to-day's separation from him, which for him was too long, be followed by any second one yonder."
The longer he spoke, so much the more did the old blooming Eden re-enter into his languid soul.—Now he made a singular, heart-rending request to his friends. As, notoriously, the sense of hearing remains longest with the dying, when all other senses have already closed to earth, Emanuel said to Victor: "So soon as thou seest that a change is about to come over me, then give thy Julius the flute, and thou! play me then the old song of rapture, that I may die upon the tones, as I have already often wished, and continue to play on some minutes after the end."
He began now to reflect how beautifully tones would glide around his last thoughts, like the song of birds around the setting sun; and in his extinguished spirit the old sparks flew up again: "Ah, I shall go hence blissfully,—O my soul could even to-night lay upon this earthly soil a super-earthly adornment, and take it for Eden: ah then, at length; when the soil is fairer and the soul is greater...."
He swooned away again, but the pulse still beat faintly.—And here, in this brooding state, it was that he received from the earth as a last gift the awfully-sweet dream, into which the body infused the feelings of its sickliness, and which, after his resuscitation, he related with a new after-dreaming. It is the last soft triad of our body with our expiring soul, that the former, even in its dissolution (as we know by fainting persons and those apparently dead under the water, &c.), communicates to the latter sweet plays and dreams.—
EMANUEL'S DREAM, THAT ALL SOULS WERE ANNIHILATED BY ONE BLISS.
He reposed in a glorified form in a transparent, dark, and yet colored tulip-cup, which rocked him to and fro, because a gentle earthquake made the tulip-bower sway on its bowed shaft. The flower stood in a magnetic sea, which attracted the blest one more and more strongly; at last he was drawn so far out, that he weighed it down, and fell as a pearl of dew out of the drooping chalice....
What a colored world! A fleecy throng of ethereal forms like his stood hovering over a broad island, about which played a circular balustrade of great flowers in full blow,—above, in mid-heaven, over the island, flew evening suns behind evening suns,—farther in, beside them ran white moons,—near the horizon, stars traced their circles—and as often as a sun or a moon flew downward, they gazed with a heavenly look as of angels' eyes through the great flowers along the shore. The suns were divided from the moons by rainbows, and all the stars ran between two rainbows, and embroidered with silver the variegated ring of the heavenly sphere. One above another rose gay clouds, in which burned a kernel of gold, of silver, of precious stones,—from butterflies' wings clouds of dust were shed, which like flying colors mantled the ground, and out of the cloud flashed rushing floods of light, which were all intertwined in one another....
And in this din of colors a sweet voice went round, saying everywhere, Die more sweetly of light.