Here is one such mournful leaf.
"O thou angel! Were it not that it would affect thee too sadly, I would go to thee, and before thy eyes fill my heart with tears, with images of the fairer time, with the bitterest sorrows, until it broke and sank,—or I would slay myself in thy presence. Ah! it were sweet to pierce my heart with lead, as it leaned on thy bosom, and to let my blood and life flow out on thy breast.—But, O God! no, no! Smiling will I go to thee, good soul, when thou comest back again, as if it were merely for joy at thy return,—only the pink with the red drop will I beg of thee, that my heart, adorned with it, may moulder under the last flower of life. I will, indeed, bleed so near thee, heavenly murderess, as the corpse does before its murderess, but yet only inwardly; and every drop of blood will fall merely from one thought to another.—Then, at last, will I be silent for a long time, and go, and that forever, only saying this and no more: 'Think of me, beloved, but be happier than heretofore.'—Whither then will I go, after an hour? I shall take the dumb, dreary road to the poisonous Buo-upas-tree,[[176]] to where death stands solitary, and there die all alone, all alone.—The dead are mutes, they have bells, and in the blue a mute will hover, and toll the death-bell.... Clotilda, Clotilda! then our love on earth is over!"
Dost thou, reader, still recognize the voice which, in his inner being, always, amidst the weeping of music, rang in the cadence of verse? Here it rings again.—But his hurricane of resolve soon gave place to gentler deeds and hours, just as the equinoctial storm of autumn dissolved into still after-summer days. The thought, "In a few weeks thou wilt fly to the land beyond the grave," made him a free-born creature and an angel. He forgave everybody, even the Evangelist. He filled his little sphere with virtues as with an after-bloom of life, and devoted his short hours, not to sweet fantasies, but to needy patients. He denied himself every expenditure, in order to leave to Julius his paternal property unimpaired. He was neither vain nor proud. He spoke frankly about and against the state;—for what is there to fear so near to the storm- and weather-shed of the coffin-lid?—But for the very reason that he felt only love for what is good, and no passions and no cowardice in his inner man, therefore he resisted gently and quietly; for when once man is convinced for himself that he has laid up courage for a day of need, he no longer seeks to make a show of it before others. The thought of death used to incline him to humorous follies, but now only to good actions. He was so happy, men and scenes around him appeared to him in the mild, soothing evening-light, wherein he always beheld both in the sicknesses of his childhood. It seemed as if he wanted (and he succeeded in it) to bribe his conscience by this piety to a legible indorsement of his autographic sentence of death. To him, as to the departed Emanuel, men appeared as children, the light of earth as evening-light, everything seemed softer, everything a little smaller; he had no anxiety or hankering; the earth was his moon; now for the first time he understood the soul of his Dahore....
—And thou, my reader, dost thou not feel that thou, too, so near to the cloister-gate of death, wouldst improve just so? But thou and I are in fact already standing before it. Is not our death as certain as Victor's, although the certainty ranges through a longer interval? O, if every one only had a fixed belief that after fifty years, on an appointed day, Nature would lead him to her place of execution, he would be a different man; but we all banish the image of death out of our souls, as the Silesians on Lætare-Sunday cast it out of the cities. The thought and the expectation of death improve us as much as the certainty and the choice of it.
And now the fair, blue after-summer days of this year's October floated on tender butterfly-wings of spider-webs across the heavens. Victor said to himself, "Fair earthly heaven, I will take one more walk beneath thee! Good mother-land, I will look out upon thee once more, with thy woods and mountains, and fix thy image in the immortal soul, ere thy yellow green grows over my heart, and strikes its roots therein. I will see thee, St. Luna of my childhood, and you, my fair Whitsuntide paths, and thee, thou blessed Maienthal, and thee, thou good old Bee-father,[[177]] and will give back to thee thy watch that counts the hours of joy—and then I shall have lived long enough."
He asked himself, "Am I, then, ripe for the granary of the churchyard?—But then is any man ripe? Is he not in his ninetieth year still incomplete as in his twentieth?"—Yes, indeed! Death takes off children and Patagonians; man is summer fruit, which Heaven must pluck before it matures. The other world is no uniform alley and orangery, but the tree-nursery of our present seed-nursery.
Before Victor left the blind one, with tears and kisses, he sent for poor Marie the evening previous to come to the cabinet, and commended to her (as well as to the Italian servant) the care of the dependent youth. But his design was to give and announce beforehand to the crushed and powerless soul the hope of some hundred florins; for so much he could already expect as inheritance from his well-circumstanced father, Eymann. The selfishness of this humiliated creature, which would have made others cold, was precisely what moved his innermost being. Long since he had said, "One should not have compassion on any man who thought philosophically or loftily, least of all on a learned man,—with such a one the wasp-stings of fate hardly went through the stocking,—on the contrary, with the poor vulgar soul he suffered and wept infinitely, which knew nothing greater than the goods of earth, and which, without principles, without consolation, pale, helpless, convulsed, and rigid, sank at the sight of the ruin of its goods."—It therefore only redoubled his pity when this Marie in wild gratitude passed in his presence from abrupt utterances of thanks, ejaculations, gushes of joy, to kissing of the coat, silly laughing, and kneeling.
When he went the next morning,—first to St. Luna,—and passed along before the convent of Mary, where once the adopted daughter of the Italian Tostato would have offered a sixth finger, Marie was just coming out of a limb-shop,[[178]] where she had bought two wax hearts. Victor drew out from her by long and ingenious questioning that she was going to hang one of them, which represented hers, on the holy Mary, because hers no longer pained her so much nor was so much oppressed as it had been the week before.—As to the second, she would not for a long time let anything out; at last she confessed: it was Victor's own, which she was going to offer to the Holy Mother of God, because she thought it must pain him also right sorely, as he looked so pale and sighed so often.—"Give it to me, love," he said, too deeply moved, "I will offer my heart myself."
"Ay," he repeated out under the still heaven, "the heart behind the wall of the breast will I offer,—that, too, is of wax,—and to mother Earth will I give it, that it may heal,—heal." ...
Let him weep freely, my friends, now that he beholds smiling the still, pale earth, even up to its hazy mountains.—For softness of sensibility loves to ally itself with petrifying processes and the art[[179]] of Passau against the calamities of fate. Let him weep freely, as he looks upon this flowerless earth, spinning itself, as it were, into the silk of the fugitive summer, and feels as if he must fall down and kiss the cold meadow as a mother, and say, "Bloom again sooner than I; thou hast given me enough of joys and flowers!"—The silent dissolution of nature, on whose corpse the full-blooming daisy stood as if it were a death-garland, softly unnerved his powers by this loosening friction,—he was exhausted and stilled,—nature reposed around him and he in it,—the exhaustion overflowed almost into a sweet, tickling faintness,—the tear-gland swelled and pressed no more before it ran over; but its water trickled down like dew out of flowers, easily and without stopping, as the blood flowed through his breast.