"I turned eastward in the direction of the new palace and of Auenthal. Behind the Auenthal woods swept roaring through a ragged arch of rain-cloud a precipitous ocean. I stood here alone in a wide silence. I turned toward the sunken sun; I reflected that I had once taken it for God, and it fell heavily upon my heart to-day, I had so seldom thought on Him who was God. 'O Thou! Thou!' my whole being cried out to Him who was now so near me--but all languages and all hearts and all emotions lose their tongue before Him and prayer is profound silence, not merely of the lips, but of the thoughts.... But the Great Spirit, who knows the weakness of good-hearted man, has sent down to him brother-companions, that man may open his heart before man, and complete before them the prayer in which he was struck dumb.
"O friend of my fairest years! thou that hast implanted gratitude and humility in my innermost being, both of these I felt, when on the mountain of the hermitage I felt myself exalted in my loneliness above the created worms and felt what man feels, but only he upon earth--when I could kneel in solitude with human eyes before the great mirror stretching out into nothingness, at which the insect dashes his feelers, before the mirror out of which flames the infinite giant, the sun.... No! in earthly colors and on a canvas of animal-skins and on all that lies before me, is merely the image of the arch-genius; but in man is not His image, nay, it is Himself....
"Half of the sun still blazed above the rim of the earth, which cut it asunder; but I saw it no more through my dissolving eye,--smothered, silenced, sunk, extinguished as I was, in the sweeping, flaming, rushing shoreless sea around me....
"The sun has carried the enraptured day down with him; and now that diamond of the ether which night sets in black--the moon--stands above these veiled scenes and radiates, like other diamonds, the borrowed brilliancy.... O thou still midnight sun! Thou beamest and man reposes; thy rays appease the earthly turmoil, thy falling shower of sparks, like a shimmering brook, lulls reclining man to slumber, and sleep then covers, like a grave-mound, the resting heart, the drying eye and the painless face.... Fare thee well and may the white disk of Luna show thee all Paradises of thy past and all Paradises of thy future youth.
"Gustavus."
* * * * *
So far had he gone, when Oefel's servant came into his chamber with a parcel which more effectually than the coldest night-air or the warmest letter arrested and cooled off the emotions of his soul. It contained a letter from the Doctor with the intelligence that Madam von Röper had transmitted to him in Maussenbach the enclosed portrait, which her daughter had taken for the one she had lost, on the back of which, however, stood the name of Falkenberg, which refuted all remaining correspondences. Much as he prized the portrait, just in that degree did it vex him, as it was a fresh proof of his supposition that mother and daughter hated him on account of the exposure in the grain affair. The spider of hatred, that in every man hangs its web over a corner of the heart chamber--only in many a one great cankers (or crab-spiders) spin over all four chambers with their five teats--ran out on its threads which Amandus had agitated, in quest of prey: in a word, the cold dyer's-hand touched his heart and made it a little colder toward his Amandus, whose own the returning portrait had made warmer. Not disturbed, but only happy love makes the best man better.
In seven minutes all was over, for in the spiritual man the same admirable arrangement holds as in the physical, namely, that around a sharp, bitter idea other ideas flow in as milder juices until they have thinned and drowned out its sharpness. The portrait was now the finding of a second rose; it had a new life and rose-fragrance breathed over it by the fairest eyes and lips. And now, for some time he no longer saw Beata in the garden, but instead the Prince, with and without the Resident Lady. Go, both of you out of the Still Land into your noisy one! You enjoy fair nature, after all, only as a larger landscape, which hangs in your picture-gallery or on the curtain of your opera-house, or as a merely broader table-and-chimney ornament, in which the rocks appear to you as formed of pumice-stone and the trees of moss, or at most as the largest English park, which is to be found at any court of modern times in all Europe.--In all session-chambers, on account of the dog-day vacation, there was a lull of labor--in winter, on account of the cold, one could allow frost-holidays, and give opportunity for a winter-sleep of business as well as for a summer siesta, just as the well-known animals must on account of both extremes stay at home from dread of their hydrophobia--consequently the minister could more easily get away with the Prince and both remained here longer. But for me the reader would never learn how the presence of the Prince came to be the occasion of Beata's exchanging the Still Land for her still chamber. It was thus: Our prince is, to be sure, a little hard, a little avaricious, and tends his flock oftener with the shepherd's staff than with the shepherd's pipe; but he loves quite as well to be a shepherd in a finer sense, and gladly goes down from the throne, where his subjects adore him, to any one of its steps in order to adore a fair one--he can bear, indeed, to hear the people sigh, but not a single beauty; he is more eager to avert a social embarrassment than a famine; he would rather be in debt to the estates than to a rival player, and has no care to build up a burned town, but takes great pains to repair a torn head-dress. In short, the sovereign and the man-of-society are, in his heart's-chambers, next-door neighbors, but deadly foes. This man-of-society subdivided himself again into two lovers, the short and the long. His long or perennially blooming love consists in a cold, contemptuous gallantry, and in enjoying the refinement, the wit, and the grace wherewith he and the beloved object know how to adorn their reciprocal conquests. His short love consists in his enjoyment of these victories, in so far as they have not those decorations. In order that this innocent pasquil upon one may not be taken for a satire upon most of the great, I will proceed as follows:
Long love he cherished for the Resident Lady, of whose testimonials of affection one could not say, this is the most innocent--the first--the last. Such an immovable [or real estate] love he interwove simultaneously with a hundred cursory marriages of a second or amours, and over the creeping month-hand of the long fixed love or marriage the flying third-hand of the abbreviated marriages whirled round innumerable times.
Against this the Resident Lady had nothing to say--she could carry on the same kind of interweaving--against that he had nothing to say.