Gustavus hastened up to him, but Ottomar held him back. "It is only wax," said he, not with the cold tone of one embittered against destiny, but in a tone of resignation. "All that in my lifetime has given me love and joy, stands and stays in this chamber--to any one who has died I give black flowers--in the case of my lost child, I am still uncertain, and his clothes lie out in the garden. Oh, he into whose bosom God has breathed peace, that it may enfold his naked heart and assuage its spasms,--he is as well off as those he mourns--softly and steadily he opens his eyes, when fate sends him fair forms, and when they go again and ugly ones come, he calmly closes them again."
O Ottomar! that canst thou not, before the heaving sea of thy powers has broken on the shore of age! open thy heart wider, as thou wilt, for three days, to rest and tranquillity; on the fourth the cramp of joy or sorrow shall contract and crush it to death.
Many people cannot see wax figures without shuddering, and Gustavus was one of them; he took Ottomar's hand, as if to cling to life against so many plays and apings of it.... Suddenly something tramped through the silent palace ... up the stairs into the chamber, .... and fell on Ottomar's neck.... It was Fenk, who was clasping him here for the first time since his resurrection from the dead, and to whom, under the close embrace, no distance from him, between whom and himself lands and years and death had lain, could now be small enough. Gustavus, whom Ottomar still held by the hand, was drawn also into the bond of love, and had Death himself passed by he could not have run his cold sickle through three closely, warmly, and speechlessly entwined hearts. "Speak, Ottomar," said the Doctor, "the last time thou wast dumb." Ottomar's tranquillity was now broken up: "They, too [the wax figures], are forever silent," he said with subdued voice,--"they are not even with us--we ourselves are not with each other--fleshy and bony gratings stand between the souls of men, and yet can man dream that there is an embracing on the earth, when only gratings come in mutual contact, and behind them the one soul only thinks the other?"
All were silent--the voice of the evening bell sounded away over the deepening hush of the village, and the tones went wailing up and down. Ottomar had again what he calls his terrible moment of annihilation; he stepped up to the waxen woman and took the black death-bouquet and placed it over his heart; he surveyed himself and his two friends and said coldly and monotonously: "So then we three are living--this is the so-called existence, what we are now doing--how still it is here, everywhere, all around the earth--an utterly dumb night hangs round about the earth and up among the fixed stars, it will not at any coming time be lighter." Fortunately at that moment the Prince came trotting and trumpeting by through the village with his hunting-retinue, and scared away the night out of the three men; so much do we depend upon our hearing, so much does the outer world give light and colors to our inner.[[81]]
Of all that they afterward did in other chambers I have nothing memorable to insert here, and of all they saw there only three things, viz., that Ottomar had hardly any but children for servants; had only quite young creatures and only flowers around him; for vehement characters have a peculiar fondness for what is gentle.
The little schoolmaster, Wutz, has just stepped into my chamber and says: for his part he has never written so much on any St. Andrew's day in all his life before. Well, then, it is time we stopped.
THIRTY-SIXTH, OR II ADVENT, SECTION.
Conic Sections of the Bodies of Eminent Persons.--Birthday-Drama.-- Rendezvous (or, as Campe Expresses it, "Make Your Appearance") in the Looking-glass.
In the causeway to the new palace Beata feared she should find there her Gustavus; in the palace itself she wished the contrary, so soon as she heard he was in the Place of Rest. Her mother, while with her assistance she partly cut down, partly over-completed regiments of robes, mantles, etc., had meantime proved to her this much, that Beata was deceived by her own feelings and that the paradise of her most innocent love was, according to her maternal feeling, desperately bad, and, in fact, a Pontine marsh--the blossoming trees thereon were upas trees--the flower-carpet consisted partly of poisonous copper, partly of false porcelain flowers--on the grass banks therein one caught cold by sitting, and the gentle rocking of the enchanted ground was an earthquake. This forewarning against the oath after the oath of love might yet be heard; but when she went on to object Beata's youth--the most common, most simple, most ineffectual, and most exasperating objection to a live feeling--this began to weaken the slight impression of her week-day sermon, which the practical application entirely washed away; namely, that her father had already half and half chosen for her the object of her affections.... My manor-lady was very clever; but when she undertook to please my manor-lord, she was also very stupid.
Beata therefore brought with her over the causeway to Gustavus a heart which this dissection had made extremely soft and tender, and he, too, came with one of those wounded ones, on which not a trace of a callus longer remains. Ottomar's sermons-of-Solomon upon and against life had filled his veins and arteries with an infinite longing to love poor perishable human beings, and with his two arms, before they fell to the earth, to draw and press the fairest heart to his bosom, ere it sank under the earthly clods. Love fastens its parasitical roots to all other feelings.