Jean Paul

“ I know not whether you or Emanuel said, 'The thought of death must be only our means of improvement, not our end and aim; if the earth of the grave falls into the heart, just as when it falls into the heart-leaves of a flower, it destroys instead of fructifying it';—but on my leaves fate and Giulia have already thrown some earth.—And I gladly bear it, as I can now, since gaining your friendship, flee for refuge to a heart, before which I may dare to open mine, in order to show it therein all the woes, all the sighs, all the doubts, all the questions of an oppressed soul. ”

“ When Clotilda saw Emanuel's blood on her lover's clothes, she supposed him to have been hit, and laid her handkerchief on the blood and said, "Ah, you have not deserved this of me!"—Emanuel breathed again through his blood, no one could speak any more, no one could think, every one feared to give consolation, the mortally crushed hearts parted with suppressed woe; only Victor, whom the horrible word "scoundrel" at every recollection of it pierced through like a dagger, said to the sister: "I love him no more, but he is unhappier than we; ah! he has lost all and kept nothing but a devil." ”

“ Great heaven,—said every heart,—dost thou belong to the human spirit, dost thou one day receive it, or art thou only like the ceiling-picture of a minster, which hides the limiting walls, and opens out with colors the prospect of a heaven which does not exist?—Ah, every Present makes our soul so small, and only a Future makes it so great.
Victor was beside himself, and said again: "Repose! neither joy nor sorrow can give thee, but only hope. Why is not all at rest within us, as around us?" ”

“ Creation hangs as a veil, woven out of suns and spirits, over the infinite, and the eternities pass by before the veil, and draw it not away from the splendor which it hides.'
"Silently we went hand in hand down the mountain, we perceived not the storm-wind for the voice of our thoughts, and when we entered our cottage, Julius said: 'I shall always think the greatest thought of man, amidst the music of my flute, amidst the roar of the storm, and amidst the falling of the warm rain, and when I weep and when I embrace thee, and when I am dying!'—And thou, my beloved Horion, do so too. ”

“ The verdict of murderous disgust had, for its grounds of decision, the sunset of Emanuel,—Victor's oft-recurring night-thoughts upon this our lucubration of life,—his entire revolution of his social relations,—the corresponding past or future example of his Lordship,—his panting for a deed full of energy,—and, most of all, the death-chill about his forlorn and naked bosom, which once was covered by so many warm hearts. One can do without love and friendship only so long as one has not yet enjoyed them;—but to lose them, and that without hope, this one cannot do without dying. ”

“ The temple of nature, like a Christian temple, was sublimely dimmed. Victor could not make his way up out of the trenches of long valleys, out of the glooms of woods, and out of the mists of meadows with their play of colors, till the midnight hour, when he climbed a mountain like a throne, and there lay down on his back in order to plunge his eyes into the heavens, and cool off from his dreaming and racing. The low-hanging blue of heaven seemed to him to be a thin blue cloud, a sea dashed into blue mists, and one sun after another with its long rays slightly parted this blue flood. ”

“ Julius stopped for sorrow, and Victor said, "Play on the song of rapture, he has only just died."—During the tones Victor shut to the eyes of his beloved, and said with a heart above the earth, "Now close yourselves,—the spirit is above the earth, to which you gave light,—thou pale, hallowed form, thou hallowed heart, the angel within thee is gone out and thou fallest back into the earth."—And here he embraced once more the cold, empty wrappage, and pressed the heart, which beat no more, knew him no longer, to his hot bosom ”

“ I should already be hovering around thee unfettered on the wings of eternity, to look upon thee, and if I could not wipe away thy tears with the ethereal hand, I would console thy heavy heart with a strange rapture! Ay, if man were blinded in the forecourt of the second world, still thy form would remain as an after-shining sun-image before my closed eyes!—O Clotilda, if thou shouldst come! Ah, probably thou wilt not come; and only the Eternal, who numbers the hours of the second life, knows when I shall see thee again, on the second earth, and how great are there the pains of longing. ”

“ I am as good as thou, I am as proud as thou,—before God my soul is pure"—But Flamin's blood on the sloe-bush repressed Victor's indignant exaltation, and he merely lifted a sympathetic eye full of the tears of friendship to the brighter, softer heaven.—"Only marriage, forsooth, dost thou not forswear?—Good, good, thou hast strangled me,—my heart hast thou trampled on, and my whole happiness.—I had none but thee, thou wast my only friend, now will I go to the Devil without one.—Thou dost not swear?—Oh, I tear myself away from thee bloody and wretched, and as thy foe—we part—only go—away! ”

“ Emanuel peered into Eternity, it looked like a long night.
He looked round him to see whether he cast a shadow,—a shadow casts no shadow.
Ah! a mute lays man in the cradle, a mute stretches him out in the grave.—When he has a joy, it looks as if a sleeper smiled,—when he weeps and wails, it looks like weeping in one's sleep.—We all look up to heaven and pray for solace; but overhead in the endless blue there is no voice for our heart,—nothing appears, nothing consoles us, nothing answers us.—
And so we die.... ”

“ O when two loving ones meet each other in the selfsame emotion, then and not till then do they respect the human heart and its love and its bliss!—Hide not, Clotilda, with any blossoms the tears under which thy cheeks blush, because they should fall only before solitude! Tremble, but only for joy, as the sun trembles, when he comes out of a cloud on the horizon! Cast not down yet thy eye curtained with flowers, which for the first time falls so calmly opened and with such a stream of love on the man who deserves thy fair heart, and who rewards all thy virtues with his own!... ”

“ Julius, didst thou feel nothing, while I spoke? Ah, the white dove was perhaps thy angel, and therefore thy heart melted when he was so near thee to-day. The dove does not fly up, but clouds of dew, with a silver border, like fragments torn from summer-nights, glide across the church-yard, and overspread the blooming graves with colored shadows.... Now, one such shadow falling from heaven swims towards us and bathes our mountain. Melt, melt, fleeting night, emblem of life, and hide not long from me the sinking sun!... Our little cloud moves on into the flames of the sun.... ”

“ The dark heaven above him finally put into his head Emanuel's last communication, and he could relate to her out of that the blind youth's initiation into the highest thought of man. Clotilda listened to him with delight, and at last said: "No one is more fortunate than a pupil of such a teacher: but he must never go into the world,—there he will be so no longer. His teacher has given him too soft a heart; and a soft heart, as you yourself say, hangs, like soft, fruit, so low down, that every one can reach and wound it; the hard fruits hang higher." ”

“ So glistening fall the joys of men from heaven, and dissolve even while they fall! So does everything melt away! Ah, what air-castles I saw shine around me on this eminence, and how they gleamed in the evening red! Alas! all are buried under the snow and under the darkness of night!" He looked down into Clotilda's garden, in whose dark bowers, now whitened with snow, he had found and lost again the Eden of his heart. "The tones which flowed over this garden are dried up, but not the tears which streamed after them," thought he. ”

“ Victor led the beloved blind one softly to his place of slumber, where dream restored his disordered eyes and arrayed the little landscapes, of his childhood, with morning hues, more brightly around him.—He then laid himself down without undressing himself, opposite to the moon which hung low above the horizon, and sank to sleep on the building-ground of our fairer air-castles, on the sounding-board of childhood, where morning-dreams lead consecrated man out of the wilderness of day to the mount of Moses, and let him look over into the dark, promised land of Eternity.... ”

“ Exultingly Flamin hastened with his savior to St. Luna, to embrace gratefully and apologetically the true sister in the untrue mistress.—Ah! as the high observatory rose upon his sight, with pain and bleeding did the covering fall from them like scales, which had hitherto obscured the innocence of his best friend, Victor! "Ah, how will he hate me! O that I had trusted him more!" he sighed, and nothing any longer gladdened him; for the grief of a good man who has been unjust, even under the notion of the fullest justice, nothing can console, nothing but many, many sacrifices. ”

“ O Horion, does the earth still abide under us, drawing its circle of death-hills round the breadth of life? Do these tones tremble in an earthly air? O Music! thou that bringest the Past and the Future with their flying flames so near to our wounds, art thou the evening-breath of this life, or the morning air of the life to come? Ay, thy sounds are echoes, which angels snatch from the second world's tones of gladness, to convey down into our mute hearts, into our dreary night the faint spring-melodies of heavens flying far above us! And thou, dying harmonica-tone! ”

“ For he now felt, after all, that the resolve of a parting for life was too hard, and only that of doing so by death was easy.—O right easy and sweet it is, he felt, to close the wet eye in the presence of the loved one, then to see nothing more on the earth; but with the high flames of the heart, and with the dear image pressed to the bosom, like the encoffined mother with the dead darling, to step blindfold to the brink of this world, and throw one's self headlong into the still, deep, dark, cold sea of the dead.... ”

“ Now art thou, Horion, wafted by a wave of harmony out of the mist-rain of life over into the light of eternity! Hear, what tones murmur round the broad fields of Eden! Do not the strains, dissipated into breaths, reverberate from distant flowers, and float, swollen by echo, round the swan-bosom, which, blissfully dissolving, swims on pinions, and draw it on from flood to flood of melody, and sink with it in the distant flowers, which a cloud of fragrances fills, and does not in the fragrant dusk the soul glow again like a ruddy evening, ere it sets in bliss? ”

“ If our Horion was not happy, then, of course, it may well be a comfort to him, if he is permitted even in the noonday of life to take his siesta, if he is permitted to die, and released from the hotly-beating heart, hushed by the death-angel, to lay himself down so early under the long shroud, which the genius of humanity draws over whole peoples, as the gardener draws the cover over the flower-bed to shield it from sun and rain,—against the glow of our joys, against the gush of our sorrow.... ”

“ The Regency-Councillor had arrived, but unfortunately had run out into the fields again till dinner-time,—Agatha's face had been crystallized into a rock-cellar by the coldness of her brother towards Victor,—only the parson's wife was the parson's wife; not merely one mother-country, but one breath of love linked her heart to his, and it was impossible for her to be angry with him. She loved a maiden, if he praised her; had she been without a husband, she would have been either his love-letter-writer or his letter-carrier.
—Thus do women love—without measure! ”

“ Victor dared not disturb his poetic hopes by any reasons; much rather was he himself from hour to hour drawn deeper into the belief of his death; at least he feared that to-day's storm of rapture might rend asunder the frail dwelling of this fair heart and of its sighs, and that death would creep about the noble soul till by its very wings, as it rose in its ecstasy, he could pluck it away from life, as children go round and round the butterfly till at last it lifts its wings folded on one another into their predatory fingers. ”

“ Emanuel opened his eyes at that, sent them through the foliage over to the churchyard that overlooked the village and said, with a convulsion of his being, "Horion, wake up; Giulia has left eternity and is standing on her grave."—Victor cast a feverish glance up thither; and all the warm thoughts and nerves of life grew hard and stiff in a cutting ice-cold shudder, as he saw up there a white, veiled form resting on the grave. Emanuel snatched himself up, and his pupil, and said: "We will go up to the theatre of the spirits; perhaps the dead one will lay hold on my soul and take me with her." ”

“ O beloved, when all is love, all harmony, all loves and is loved, all meadows one intoxicating blossom-chalice, then indeed in man also does the lofty spirit stretch out its arms, and long to embrace with them a spirit, and then, when it folds its arms only around shadows, then it grows very sad for infinite, inexpressible longing after love.'
"'Emanuel, I am sad too,' said my Julius.
"'Lo, the sun goes down, the earth veils itself: let me still see all and tell it to thee. Now a white dove flies dazzling, like a great snow-flake, across the deep blue.... ”

“ O could he glance at the Luna footpath or at the Parsonage, which covered the stages of buried friendship, without turning away his overflowing eye, without thinking how much vainer is the loving than the life of men, how fate employs precisely the warmest hearts for the destruction of the best (just as one uses only burning-lenses for the calcining of precious stones) , and how many a silent breast is nothing but the sunken coffin of a beloved and faded image?—It is a nameless feeling to wish to love a friend for memory's sake, and be obliged to shun him from honor. ”