Jean Paul Friedrich Richter

“ Oh! how many of these charming beings there are, who decay unvalued, who, while jesting, despair, and while joking, bleed to death; who hide their merry laughing eyes behind a wall, as behind a fan, to give glad vent to their long-restrained tears; who pay for a merry day by a tearful night, just as an unusually clear, transparent, and fogless air betokens rain. Remember the beautiful N. N., and also her youngest sister. In the mean time, the charming, sun-variegated dew-drop under Nadine's eye was balanced by a wart of half the size, the solitaire among her personal charms. ”

“ Ah, my Victor! nations and men are only the best when they are the gladdest, and deserve Heaven when they enjoy it. The tear of grief is but a diamond of the second water, but the tear of joy of the first. And therefore fatherly fate, thou spreadest the flowers of joy, as nurses do lilies in the nursery of life, that the awakening children may sleep the sounder! O, let philosophy, which grudges our pleasures, and blots them out from the plans of Providence, say by what right did torturing pain enter into our frail life? Have we not already an eternal right to a warm down bed? ”

“ Shall the ablactated soul feel only the blooming, not also the faded body? And if it does, the earth surrounding it must, as our earth does to the superior planets, give it the reflection of our advancing and retrograding. If we shall ever be disembodied, the slow hand of time, that is, ever encroaching age, must do it. If our course is not to be concluded in one world, the gulf between it and the second must always appear to us a grave. The short interruption to our progress by age, and the longer one by death, destroy this progress as little as the shortest interruption by sleep. ”

“ But let the disbeliever of immortality imagine a life of sixty minutes instead of sixty years, and let him try if be can bear to see loved, noble, or wise men only aimless, hour-long air-phantoms, hollow thin shadows which fly towards the light and are consumed by it, and who, without path, trace, or aim, after a short flight, dissolve into their former night. No; even over him steals a supposition of immortality. Else a black cloud would forever hang over his soul, and the earth would quake beneath him when he trod on it, as if he were a Cain. ”

“ But the sounding-board of the body is neither the soul's scale nor its harmony. Grief has no resemblance to a tear,—shame, none to the cheek-imprisoned blood,—wit, none to champagne,—the idea of this valley, none to its portrait on the retina. The inner man, this God, hidden in the statue, is not of marble as it is, but in the stony limbs, the living ones grow and ripen in an unknown life. We do not sufficiently mark how the inner man even tames and forms the outer one ”

“ There is an inner, heart-contained spirit-world, which breaks through the dark clouds of the body-world as a warm sun. I mean the inner universe of virtue, beauty, and truth; three soul-worlds and heavens, which are neither parts, nor shoots, nor cuttings, nor copies of the outer one. We are less astonished at the inexplicable existence of these three transcendent heavens, because they are ever floating before us, and because we foolishly imagine we create them, while we merely recognize them. ”

“ Just then the ecstasy opened his wounds, and blood, the tear of the soul, flowed from his heart upon the cherished knoll,—the dissolving body sank quietly towards his beloved,—tears of rapture broke the sunset light into a rosy, swimming sea,—distant echoing tones, as of the earth passing wide through ringing ether, played in the vaporous lustre. Then a dark cloud or short night shot by the Angel, and was full of sleep; and now a radiant heaven opened and overspread him, and a thousand angels shone around. ”

“ I answered, "This discrepancy between our wishes and our circumstances, the heart and the earth, will remain an enigma, if we are immortal, and would be a blasphemy if we decay. Ah! how could the beautiful soul be happy? Strangers, born on mountains and living in lowland places, pine in an incurable homesickness. We belong to a higher place, and therefore an eternal longing consumes us, and every music is our soul's Swiss ranz des vaches. In the morning of life, the joys which hearken to the anxious wishes of our hearts are seen blooming for us in later years. ”

“ She did not allow me to conclude, but mildly and unchanged (except by a reproving and a forgiving smile) she showed me in the aromatic book the noble Karlson's requiem on the death of the exalted Gione. I willingly give you the prosaic echo of it, from my prosaic memory.
GRIEF WITHOUT HOPE.
WHAT cloud is that, which like the clouds of the tropics, passes from morn to eve, and then sets? It is humanity. Is that the magnet-mountain covered with the nails of wrecked ships? No, it is the great Earth, strewed with the bones of fallen men. ”

“ We took shelter for the night in three Thabor huts,—the ladies in the first, Wilhelmi with the critical philosopher in the second, Karlson and myself in the third,—which the Baron had hired for us. The fatigue of the journey, and even of our feelings, deferred our joys and confidences for another night. But I cannot tell you how nobly sorrow changed into exaltation in my friend's countenance, how grief fell like a cloud from his heaven, and discovered the serene blue beneath. ”

“ I cannot possibly believe that there exists one being who, when death draws him into the diving-bell of the grave, will not leave one weeping eye, one bending head behind, and therefore each one can love the soul which will some time weep for him.
When I think now of the convalescent Gione, with her wounded heart, which had received a new sensitiveness in the hot electric atmosphere of the sinking thunderbolt of Death, I need not measure her emotion at Karlson's poem, by the dew and hygrometer, nor with the loadstone of her love. ”

“ As we paint Devils more easily than Gods, Furies than Venus Urania, Hell than Heaven, we can more easily believe in the former than in the latter,—in the greatest misfortune than in the greatest happiness. Must not our spirit, used to misgivings and earth chains, be startled at a Utopia against which earth will be shipwrecked, that the lilies of it, like the Guernsey lilies, [22] may find the shore to bloom on, which saves and satisfies, elevates and makes blessed, our much tormented humanity. ”

“ By Heaven! it is no wonder that man rises and will go on; for does not the sun follow the pedestrian from tree to tree? does not its reflected likeness swim after him in the water? do not landscapes, mountains, hills, men, rapidly changing, come and go? and does not Freedom's breath blow on the ever-varying Eden, when, released from the neck and heart-breaking chains of narrow circumstances, we fly freely and gladly, as in dreams, over ever-new scenes. ”

“ The longest shell is the finest one, as light and the attractive power. The beauteous covering elongates and rarefies itself from iron bands to pearl ties, from flower-chains to rainbows and milky-ways."
"Will we not now descend from the milky-way," said Karlson, "for we cannot ascend it. It is precisely this uniformity of the universe which forbids the rambling of emigrants from the earth. Every planet already has its own crew; more dense ones, as for instance Mercury, may be peopled with real sailors."
"Precisely as Kant supposes!" said Phylax. ”

“ I would that I could see one, when the moon hangs beauteously before the midday sun, when the noisy day is suddenly hushed, when the nightingales sing, the flowers fade, and when nightly mists and shuddering cold and dew fall." Phylax had now let slip his sofa-cushion into a murmuring spring; Nadine saw it, and, not to confuse him in the act of drawing it out, she, with charming zeal, drove us back to our conversation. Her intercourse with the world had given her a playful, light, ever-joyous exterior. ”

“ Yes, if all forests of this earth were pleasure grottoes, all valleys Campan, all islands holy, all fields Elysian, and all eyes sparkling, yes, then—no, even then the Eternal One would have given to our souls the promise of a future life, even in the blessedness of the present one. But now, God! when so many houses are mourning ones, so many fields battle-fields, so many cheeks pale, and when we pass so many sunken, red, torn, closed eyes,—O, can death be but the last destroying whirlwind? ”

“ Exertion, bodily pain, the burning hunger of necessity, and the tumult of our senses exclude and choke the spiritual autumn bloom of humanity in nations and classes. All these conditions of terrestrial existence must be fulfilled ere the soul may claim its due. To the unhappy, therefore, who must be the business men and carriers of their bodily wants, the whole inner world seems but as an imaginary gilt cobweb, like the man who, breathing only the electrical atmosphere, instead of feeling the spark, thinks to grasp an invisible web. ”

“ He showed, and not badly, what an immense leap beyond all terrestrial analogies and experiences it is, to hope for, i. e. to create, a world, a transcendent Arcadia, a world of which we know neither copy nor original, which wants no less than a form and a name, map and globe, another Vespucius Americus, of which, neither chemistry nor astronomy can give us the compounds or the quarters; a universe of air, on which, from the leaf-stripped, faded soul, a new body will bud forth, i. e. a nothing on which nothing is to embody itself.
O, my good Karlson! ”

“ Wilhelmi said, that, to rise into Eden or Arcadia, he would need no larger wings than the four of a butterfly. What a poetical, paradisaical existence, like the papilio, to roam without stomach or hunger, among buds and flowers, to suffer no long night, no winter, and no storm, to toy away one's life in a delightful chase for another papilio, or to nestle, like the flower-colored bird of paradise, among lemon-blossoms, to float round blooming honey-cups, and to be rocked in silken cradles! ”

“ Deeply touched by human virtue, he wept out of his boundless love for men, who, amid the craving of their own needs, under low-hung clouds, behind mists which stream over the sharp-cutting paths of life, never turn away from the lofty star of duty, but in their darkness stretch out loving arms towards every suffering breast they encounter, while around them nothing glimmers but the hope of setting like the sun in the old world, in order to arise in the new. ”

“ He showed how the spiritual Dryad flowered, burst and dispersed with the corporeal bark, how the noblest impulses are chained to the lead—earth, revolving wheel of the body; how memory, imagination, and madness only feed on the egg-yolk of the brain,—how bravery and mildness stand in as opposite degree to blood as leeches and Jews; [16] how, in age, the inner and outer man together bend towards the grave, together petrify, together, like metal compositions, slowly cool, and at last together die! ”

“ Karlson found it easily from its proximity to the famed Campan Cave, from which he had often broken stalactites. The sky waa clouded with colored shadows, and on the green cradle of slumbering children night thsrew her star-embroidered, fastened to the summits of the Pyranees. From out Wilhelmi's hermitage advanced some men in black attire, with torches in their hands, who seemed to be waiting for us, and told us the baron was in the Cave. By heaven, under such circumstances, it is easier to imagine the most circumscribed, than the largest and most beautiful Cave! ”

“ The eternal hunger in man, the insatiability of his heart, wants not a richer, but a different food, fruit, not grass. If our wants referred but to the degree, not to the quality, then the imagination, at least, might paint a degree of satiety. But imagination cannot make us happy, by showing us innumerable heaps of treasures, if they be other than Virtue, Truth, and Beauty."
"But the more beautiful soul?" asked Nadine. ”