—Here let my curtain fall before all these scenes of death, before Emanuel's grave and Horion's grief!—Thou and I, my reader, will now go forth from another's death-chamber, to look into nearer ones where we ourselves lie prostrate or where our dearest have lain. We will in those chambers behold our death-bed, but let not our eye sink;—the flame of love and of virtue blazes upward above the corruptions,—around the death-bed we see a bier as a couch of rest on which all burdens are laid down, and the broken heart also,—around the deathbed we see a great, unknown form, who breaks off from the image of God the earthly frame.—But if the heart is made great beside our own resting-place, it becomes tender beside another's.—If thou, my reader, and if I now, with this deeply moved soul, look into the chambers where we received the perpetual wounds of earth, then will the pale forms which therein raise their dead men's eyes once more to meet us, agitate and wound us too sorely.—Ah, that may you well do, too, ye loved mutes,—what have we then left to give you, but a tear which pains us, a sigh which oppresses our hearts? Ah, if the mourning-crape on our faces is torn as soon as the funeral veil on yours,—if the marble gravestone with your name must be turned over above your corpses, in order to cover a new one with its new name,—O, if we so easily forget all the eternal love, the eternal remembrance, which we promised you in your last hour,—ah, then, indeed, in these tumultuous days of life a still hour like this is holy and beautiful, in which we lay our ear as it were close to the sunken graves, and, from the depth of the earth, although every day more darkly, hear the voices that we know call up: "Forget us not,—forget me not, my son—my friend—my beloved, forget me not!"
No, and we will not forget you! And, if it makes us ever so sad, still let each one of us at this moment summon the most precious forms before him out of their resting-places, and behold the wasted features, the reopened eyes full of love, which were so long closed, and contemplate full long the dear, uncovered face, till the old remembrances of the fair days of their love break the heart and he can weep no more.
[39. DOG-POST-DAY.]
Great Disclosure.—New Separations.
I will now disclose what in the former chapter I concealed.—When Emanuel on that Elysian morning of the delirium had said to Julius, "Shadow! hence!" he went on: "Conjure not up with thy juggling the blind Son of my Horion [Lord Horion] who takes me still for his father,—fear before God, who has just passed by, and vanish!"—And turning to Victor he said: "Shadow! if thou knowest not who thou art, and knowest not thy father Eymann, then descend to the earth again and into the shadow which my Victor casts there."—And when Victor the next day recalled the dying man to these words, he asked distressfully: "Ah, did I not say it in a delusion, when I dreamed I was in the land beyond earthly oaths?" and he turned mutely his affrighted face to the wall....
He has, then, in the illusion of having passed through death, spoken it out, that Julius is the son of his Lordship, and Victor the son of Pastor Eymann.... But what a bright illumination does not this full moon give to our whole history, on which hitherto only a moon-sickle has shone—
I confess, in the very first chapter it struck me singularly that Victor should be a physician; now it is explained; for the medical doctor's hat was the best Montgolfier[[159]] and Fortunatus's wishing-cap for a citizen-legate of his Lordship, in order thereby the more easily to hover round the throne and work upon the frail January; then, too, Victor, after his future devalvation,[[160]] and after the loss of the feather-hat, could best gather into the medical one his daily bread as a citizen,—his Lordship saw. This was one reason why the latter gave him out as his son. Another is, Victor was best fitted to play the part with the prince by his humor, cleverness, good nature, &c., to which was added as a further recommendation the resemblance he bore in everything, except age, to the fifth and up to this time still lost son, whom January so loved. As, now, a physician in ordinary was to be the favorite, his Lordship could not take any one of the princely sons for his purpose, because they must be jurists, in order to fit into their future offices.—His own son Julius he could not use, because he was blind,—by the way! his Lordship was also blind once, and thus adds his example to the cases of blindness inherited from father to son, but even independently of the blindness he could not possibly, by reason of his disinterested delicacy, let his son reap the advantages of princely favor while he withheld from them January's own sons themselves.
Thou good man without hope! when I compare now thy poetic education of the blind youth with thy cold principles,—when I consider how thou—dead to lyric joys, hardened to the tears of enthusiasm—nevertheless causest the dark soul of thy Julius curtained with eyelids to be filled by his teacher with poetic flower-pieces, with dew-clouds of sensibility, and with the nebulous star of the second life,—then does it enhance quite as much my sorrow as my esteem, that thou findest nothing on the earth which thou canst press to thy starved-out heart, and that thou raisest thine eye withered on empty tear-ducts coldly to heaven, and even there findest nothing but a void waste of blue!—
This painful observation Victor made still sooner than myself.—But to the story! The past portion of it sent a thousand thorns through his heart. We no longer recognize now our once joyous Sebastian,—he has lost four beings, as if to pay off therewith the four days of Whitsuntide: Emanuel has vanished, Flamin has become an enemy, his Lordship a stranger, and Clotilda—a stranger. For he said to himself: "Now, when she is removed so far above me, I will not cost the sufferer, from whom I have already taken so much, absolutely everything, absolutely her father's love and her position,—I will not insist upon the love which, in her ignorance of my connections, she has bestowed upon me.—No, I will cheerfully tear away my soul from the most precious one amidst a thousand wounds of my breast, and then lay myself down and bleed to death." Now this determination was easy for him; for after the death of a friend we love to take a new load of misery on our breast; that shall crush it, for we will die.