"For enjoyment you said also. That means, we received the palate and appetite of a god, with the food for an animal. That portion of us which is of earth, and creeps on worm-folds, may and can, like the earthworm, be fed and fattened on earth. Exertion, bodily pain, the burning hunger of necessity, and the tumult of our senses exclude and choke the spiritual autumn bloom of humanity in nations and classes. All these conditions of terrestrial existence must be fulfilled ere the soul may claim its due. To the unhappy, therefore, who must be the business men and carriers of their bodily wants, the whole inner world seems but as an imaginary gilt cobweb, like the man who, breathing only the electrical atmosphere, instead of feeling the spark, thinks to grasp an invisible web. But when our necessary animal servitude is over, when the barking inner dog-kennel is fed, and the dog-fight finished, then the inner man demands his nectar and ambrosia, and if he is turned off with earth-food only, he changes to an angel of Death, and a Hellfiend, driving himself to suicide, or makes of him a poison-mixer who destroys all joy.[[26]] The eternal hunger in man, the insatiability of his heart, wants not a richer, but a different food, fruit, not grass. If our wants referred but to the degree, not to the quality, then the imagination, at least, might paint a degree of satiety. But imagination cannot make us happy, by showing us innumerable heaps of treasures, if they be other than Virtue, Truth, and Beauty."
"But the more beautiful soul?" asked Nadine. I answered, "This discrepancy between our wishes and our circumstances, the heart and the earth, will remain, an enigma, if we are immortal, and would be a blasphemy if we decay. Ah! how could the beautiful soul be happy? Strangers, born on mountains and living in lowland places, pine in an incurable homesickness. We belong to a higher place, and therefore an eternal longing consumes us, and every music is our soul's Swiss ranz des vaches. In the morning of life, the joys which hearken to the anxious wishes of our hearts are seen blooming for us in later years. When we have attained these years, we turn on the deceitful spot, and see behind us, pleasure blooming in the strong hopeful youth, and we enjoy instead of our hopes, the recollections of our hopes. Joy in this also resembles the rainbow, which in the morning shines over evening, and in the evening arches over the east. The eye may reach the light, but the arm is short, and holds but the fruit of the soil."
"And this proves?" asked the Chaplain.
"Not that we are unhappy, but that we are immortal, and that the second world in us demands, and proves a second world beyond us. O, how much might not be said of this second life whose commencement is so clearly shown in the first one, and which so strangely doubles us! Why is Virtue too exalted to make us, and, what is more, others (sensually) happy? Why does the incapability of being useful on earth (as the expression is) increase with a certain higher purity of character, as, according to Herschel, there are suns which have no earth? Why is our heart tortured, dried, consumed, and at last broken by a slow burning fever of ceaseless love for an unattainable object, only alleviated by the hope that this consumption, like a physical one, must one day be sheltered and raised by the ice cover of death?"
"No," said Gione, with more emotion in her eye than in her voice, "it is not ice, but lightning. When our heart lies a sacrifice on the altar, fire from heaven consumes it as a proof that the offering is accepted."
I know not why her calm voice so painfully disturbed my whole soul (not only my argument). Even Nadine's eyes, which triumphed over her own sorrows, were suffused with tears by her sister's, and, although she is generally more timid and fastidious than Gione, in passing a little garden, she raised from a projecting hairy potato-stalk, a large moth, and showed it to us with a firm mouth, which should have been softened by a smile.
It was the so-called Death's-head. I stroked the flat, drooping wings, and said, "It come? from Egypt, the land of mummies and graves; it bears a memento mori on its back, and a miserere in its plaintive voice." "In the mean time it is a butterfly, and visits the nectaries, which we day-birds will do also," appropriately observed Wilhelmi; but he took the words out of my mouth.
Gione's countenance again expressed thoughtful calmness, and to me she became immeasurably beautiful and grand by the stillness of her grief. You once said that the female soul, though it be pierced with burning shafts, must never beat its wings convulsively together, else, like other butterflies, it would destroy their beauty. How true is this!
Nadine's eyes seldom shone without at last overflowing, and every sorrowful emotion remained long in her heart, because she tried to guard against it. She resembled those springs which take a temperature opposed to the time of day, and which are warmest in the cool evening. She turned to me and said, putting her hand in her left pocket, "I will show you some poetry which will prove your prose." While she was seeking it, she stood still with her companion Wilhelmi. He guessed before I did, that she intended to give me something from the Souvenir, and when, in its stead, she took the milliped's prison from her pocket, he obligingly said, "If not with my hands yet with my eyes I assisted at the theft, and as accomplice I beg for mercy." The serious apology for this foolishness scarcely suited our earnest tone of mind. I said, "I wished to cause a more useless, than pardonable joke, but I--" She did not allow me to conclude, but mildly and unchanged (except by a reproving and a forgiving smile) she showed me in the aromatic book the noble Karlson's requiem on the death of the exalted Gione. I willingly give you the prosaic echo of it, from my prosaic memory.