The fourth and last carriage contained a young Pole and the president of a society, which numbered among its members many foreigners and formed the largest portion of the audience to Edwin's lectures. They followed the body solely from regard for their teacher, as they had never known Balder, and instantly drew down the curtains in order to beguile the long ride by discussing theatrical matters, the latest news, and smoking paper cigarettes.
From an upper window, a weeping girl wrapped in a thick shawl, gazed after the slowly moving carriages. It was Reginchen, who for two days had not made her appearance and steadily refused even to see her lover.
The procession moved through the Oranienburg Gate and traversed the suburbs for some distance, ere it reached the cemetery. The air was mild, as if a thaw were about to set in, and the snow over which they walked to the grave, yielded noiselessly under their feet. Beside the fresh mound of earth stood the clergyman, and behind him a throng of dark figures, the workmen to whom the printer had said that he had lost his dearest friend. The clergyman, whom Edwin only greeted with a formal wave of the hand, now read aloud the prayer for the burial of the dead and then approached the edge of the grave, into which the coffin was already lowered.
He began: "'In the midst of life we are in death.' But they who turn from the light of eternal truth, bear the gloom of death within their souls. They live as if they thought never to die, and die as though they were never to live again. What grief and terror will overwhelm them on the day when the graves open and the dead come forth to receive the crown of glory or the sentence of eternal condemnation. How the words of the Judge will thunder in their ears: 'I offered you salvation and ye rejected it with scorn and turned a deaf ear unto my message.' In your vain self-righteousness you chose to be your own deliverers, and have pronounced your own doom. Then will your pride bow before the throne of the Highest, and defiance be crushed before the majesty of the Son of Man. Then lips will sue for mercy, which on earth overflowed with blasphemy, denying with Peter and saying: 'I know not this man.' But we, who stand around this sad grave, will unite in silent prayer to God, and implore him not to enter into judgment with this our brother, to suffer a ray of his eternal mercy to transfigure and cleanse from sin the frail erring life, which too early reached its end!"
An unbroken silence followed these words. The clergyman had folded his hands over his book and closed his eyes in prayer. Suddenly Franzelius' suppressed voice was heard amid the group of friends who were standing at the foot of the grave:
"Let me speak, for I cannot be silent, I should despise myself, I should be a miserable coward, if I could hear such words spoken over his grave, without uttering a protest in the name of those who have known and loved him. What is that I hear? 'let there be no scandal?' Say that to those, who have not hesitated to carry the strife of opinions into the stillness of the churchyard, where even the bitterest enemies lie in death quietly side by side. No, my friends," he continued in a loud voice, springing upon one of the snow covered mounds, "we at least have not assembled around this grave, to stammer an abject petition for a poor sinner who, unless justice be tempered by mercy, is forever lost. This dead man will never be lost to us, and as by the might of his love and intellect, he has indeed redeemed himself from the curse of frail mortality, the terrors of blind delusion and the bonds of selfishness, his memory will help us to free ourselves also and to become more worthy of the joy of having been loved by him. For yes, he has loved you too, my friends who never saw his face or heard his voice. His great heart beat for all his brothers, for all who were poor and miserable, for all the children of this world, who come they know not whence and go they know not whither, and yet are too honest to console themselves with fantastic tales and be lulled to rest by idle dreams. What can be called sacred, if his grave is not? For do you know whom we are burying here? A laborer, my friends, who was ever sharing his last shilling with some poor man; a poet who never desecrated his genius for fame or gold; a hero, whose last act was a deed of sacrifice for those he loved. And is this life to be swallowed up in gloom? Should this grave be called a 'sad' one over which penitent sighs and pharasaical petitions for mercy must resound? Oh! my Balder, I know you would submit to even this error of a gloomy, intolerant formalist, with the quiet smile which was your only weapon against all assaults. But we, your friends, are not yet at peace, but in the midst of warfare. We must struggle for the weak who allow themselves to be intimidated by formulas preferring to leave their free souls in imprisonment than to shake themselves free from the hands of their tyrants, to learn to know and love this earth instead of despising its beauty in view of an imaginary world to come. Despise an earth, which has contained you, my Balder, a sky to which your noble eyes have been raised? no, a thousand times no! such a world is no vale of tears, and even in the bitterest woe beside your grave, we still have a feeling of triumph--we have possessed you, and all the calamities of life are richly compensated for, by the certainty that your great heart lives on in ours--Balder--my friend--my brother--"
His voice suddenly failed, he pressed his clenched hand to his eyes and turned away, but the next instant regained his composure and motioned to the singers, who stood in a dense mass behind him. Instantly a quartette choir, whose voices at first low and unsteady from agitation, became gradually clearer and more powerful, began a song, which Mohr had composed to the air of Integer vitae:
Brother, ere in the dust thy form we lay,
We'll to thy worth a loving tribute pay;
Thy virtues rare, and kindly heart, which were