In the beautiful summer evening, I could not refrain from stealthily approaching the house, through the orchard, to ascertain whether the good old man had ended his Bible and his life together. On the way, I found the torn envelope of a letter sealed with a black seal, and over me the white storks were speeding their way to a warmer country. I was not much encouraged when I heard all the birds singing in his orchard; for their ancestors had done the same when his father died. A towering cloud, full of the latest twilight, spread itself before my short-sighted vision, like a far-off, blooming, foreign landscape; and I could not comprehend how it was that I had never before noticed this strange-looking, reddish land; so much the more easily did it occur to me that this might be his Orient, whither God was leading the weary one. I had become so confused, as actually to mistake red bean-blossoms for a bit of fallen sunset. Presently, I heard a man singing to the accompaniment of an organ. It was the aged man singing his evening hymn:
“Lord of my life, another day
Once more hath sped away.”
The birds in the room, and those on the distant branches also, chimed in with his song. The bees, too, joined in with their humming, as in the warm summer evening they dived into the cups of the linden-blossoms. My joy kindled into a flame. He was alive! But I would not disturb his holy evening. I would let him remain with Him who had surrounded him with gifts and with years, and not call upon him to think of any man here below. I listened to the last verse of his hymn, that I might be still more certain of the actual continuance of his life, and then tardily I slipped away. To my joy, I still found, in the eternal youth of Nature, beautiful references to his lengthened age; from the everlasting rippling of the brook in the meadow, to a late swarm of bees, which had settled themselves on a linden-tree, probably in the forenoon, before two o’clock, as if, by taking their lodging with him, he was to be their bee-father, and continue to live. Every star twinkled to me a hope.
I went to the orchard very early in the morning, wishing to look upon the aged man in sleep; death’s ancient prelude, the warm dream of cold death. But he was reading, and had read, in his large-printed Bible, far beyond the Deluge, as I could see by the engravings. I held it to be a duty not to interrupt his solitude long. I told him I was going away, and gave him a little farewell billet, instead of farewell words. I was much moved, though silent. It was not the kind of emotion with which we take leave of a friend, or a youth, or an old man; it was like parting from a remote stranger-being, who scarcely glances at us from the high, cold clouds which hold him between the earth and the sun. There is a stillness of soul which resembles the stillness of bodies on a frozen sea, or on high mountains; every loud tone is an interruption too prosaically harsh, as in the softest adagio. Even those words, “for the last time,” the old man had long since left behind him. Yet he hastily presented to me my favorite flower, a blue Spanish vetch, in an earthen pot. This butterfly-flower is the sweeter, inasmuch as it so easily exhales its perfume and dies. He said he had not yet sung the usual morning-hymn, which followed the survival of his death-evening; and he begged me not to take it amiss that he did not accompany me, or even once look after me, especially as he could not see very well. He then added, almost with emotion, “O friend, may you live virtuously! We shall meet again, where my departed relatives will be present, and also that great preacher, whose name I have forgotten. We meet again.”
He turned immediately, quite tranquilly, to his organ. I parted from him, as from a life. He played on his organ beneath the trees, and his face was turned toward me; but to his dim eyes I knew that I should soon become as a motionless cloud. So I remained until he began his morning hymn, from old Neander:
“The Lord still leaves me living,
I hasten Him to praise;
My joyful spirit giving,
He hears my early lays.”