O if thou love me yet, by heavenly laws
Condemn me not! I am a man and mourn,—
Support me though unseen!
And he foretells that, even in distant ages,—"in times perhaps more virtuous than ours," his grief would be remembered, and the name of his Meta revered. And shall it not be so?—it must—it will:—as long as truth, virtue, tenderness, dwell in woman's breast—so long shall Meta be dear to her sex; for she has honoured us among men on earth, and among saints in Heaven!
And now, how shall I fill up this sketch? Let us pause for a moment, and suppose the fate of Meta and Klopstock reversed, and that she had been called, according to her own tender and unselfish wish, to be the survivor. Under such a terrible dispensation, her angelic meekness and sublime faith would at first have supported her; she would have rejoiced in the certainty of her husband's blessedness, and in the yearning of her heart she would have tried to fancy him ever present with her in spirit; she would have collected together his works, and have occupied herself in transmitting his glory as a poet, without a blemish, to the admiration of posterity; she would have gone about all her feminine duties with a quiet patience—for it would have been his will; and would have smiled—and her smile would have been like the moonlight on a winter lake: and with all her thoughts loosened from the earth, to her there would never more have been good or evil, or grief, or fear, or joy: space and time would only have existed to her, as they separated her from him. Thus she would have lived on dyingly from day to day, and then have perished, less through regret, than through the intense longing to realize the vision of her heart, and rejoin him, without whom all concerns of life were vain, and less than nothing. And this, I am well convinced,—as far as one human being may dare to reason on the probable result of certain feelings and impulses in another,—would have been the lot of Meta, if left on the earth alone, and desolate.
If Klopstock acted differently, let him not be too severely arraigned; he was but a man, and differently constituted. With great sensibility, he possessed, by nature, an elasticity of spirit which could rebound, as it were, from the very depths of grief: his sorrow, intense at first, found many outward resources:—he could speak, he could write; his vivacity of imagination pictured to him Meta happy; and his habitual religious feeling made him acquiesce in his own privation; he could please himself with visiting her grave, and every year he planted it with white lilies, "because the lily was the most exalted among flowers, and she was the most exalted among women."[78] He had many friends, to whom the confiding simplicity of his character had endeared him: all his life he seems to have clung to friendship as a child clings to the breast of the mother; he was accustomed to seek and find relief in sympathy; and sympathy, deeply felt and strongly expressed, was all around him. With his high intellect and profound feeling, there was ever a child-like buoyancy in the mind of Klopstock, which gained him the title of der ewigen jungling—"The ever young, or the youth for ever."[79] His mind never fell into "the sear and yellow leaf," it was a perpetual spring: the flowers grew and withered, and blossomed again,—a never-failing succession of fragrance and beauty; when the rose wounded him, he gathered the lily; when the lily died on his bosom, he cherished the myrtle. And he was most happy in such a character, for in him it was allied to the highest virtue and genius, and equally remote from weakness and selfishness.
About four years after the death of Meta, he became extremely attached to a young girl of Blackenburg, whose name was Dona; she loved and admired him in return, but naturally felt some distrust in the warmth of his attachment; and he addressed to her a little poem, in which, tenderly alluding to Meta, he assures Dona that she is not less dear to him or less necessary to his happiness[80]—
And such is man's fidelity!
This intended marriage never took place.
Twenty-five years afterwards, when Klopstock was in his sixtieth year, he married Johanna von Wentham, a near relation of his Meta; an excellent and amiable woman, whose affectionate attention cheered the remaining years of his life.
Klopstock died at Hamburg in 1813, at the age of eighty: his remains were attended to the grave by all the magistrates, the diplomatic corps, the clergy, foreign generals, and a concourse of about fifty thousand persons. His sacred poems were placed on his coffin, and in the intervals of the chanting, the ministering clergyman took up the book, and read aloud the fine passage in the Messiah, describing the death of the righteous.—Happy are they who have so consecrated their genius to the honour of Him who bestowed it, that the productions of their early youth may be placed without profanation on their tomb!
He was buried under a lime-tree in the churchyard of Ottensen, by the side of his Meta and her infant,—