Jean Paul

“ On the first lovely morning of spring, they entered upon their long journey to the mountain. There is a sacredness, which suffering alone can give and purify; the stream of life becomes snow-white, when dashed against the opposing rocks of adversity. There is an elevation, where among ideas of sublimity, no trifling thought can ever mingle; it is when placed upon an alpine height, we behold the summits of the neighbouring mountains, without observing the valleys that connect them together.—Thou hadst that sacredness Rosamond,—and thou that elevation, Eugenius! ”

“ Come now, angel of rest, come take my heart and carry it to my beloved—angel of rest, leave me not so long with the dead. Is there nothing invisible around me?—Angel of death, thou must be near me, for thou hast even now torn from my embrace, two darling souls, and allowed them to ascend—I am dead too—draw my burning soul from its cold kneeling corpse! ”

“ Human virtue deeply affected him, and he wept from his ceaseless love for man, who, amid the urgent cravings of his own necessities, under the lowering clouds which overshadow and darken the paths of life, turns not away his eye from the high day-star of duty, but stretches forth his generous arm through the darkness, towards every mourning fellow creature, round whom nothing but hope glimmers, like the sun sinking in the old world to rise in the new.—Delight opened his wounds, and his blood (the tears of the soul,) flowed from his heart upon the well-loved grave ”

“ Oh Eugenius, how great must thy soul now become! Earthly life lay at a distance, and in the deep valley before thee, void of all the distortions which we behold in it, from viewing it too near at hand, as the decorative scene when too closely seen is changed from a landscape to a mass of shapeless lines.
The loving pair embraced each other long and tenderly before the Alpine hut, and Eugenius said: "Oh silent eternal heaven, take from us now nothing more!" ”

“ Turn thou away from Rosamond's piercing shriek—her fixed look and petrified features—if thou hast already felt this maternal sorrow,—look not upon the mother, who, with senseless love, presses convulsively to her bosom the corpse which she can no longer hurt, but upon the father, whose struggling heart although concealed in the silence of his breast, is sorrounded by the adder grasp of grief, and poisoned by drops from the serpent tooth of sorrow. ”

“ The innumerable host of angelic beings who live in celestial love, encircled the compassionate angel, and promised to surround him in the moment of his dissolution with their luminous beams, that he might know it was death he had suffered; and his brother, whose kiss opens our stiffened lips, as the breath of morn expands the ice-cold flowers, embraced him, and said: "When I kiss thee again, my brother, then thou shalt have died Earth, and shalt be once more with us in Heaven!" ”

“ The angel of rest cradles you in the morning of life with his plaintive soothing song,—two weeping mortals carry you and your little coffin, and with garlands of flowers let your body with its rosy cheeks, its unwrinkled brow, and its pure hands, slip down into the second cradle, and you have only exchanged one Paradise for another;—but we, alas, we fall down beneath the destroying tempests of life, our hearts are weary, our faces are furrowed with earthly anxiety and earthly sorrow, and yet our souls cling strongly to this clod! ”

“ Tender souls like yours have their joys torn from them by three robbers: by the world,—whose rough grasp bestows nothing on their hearts but scars,—by fate, which takes not away the tear from the lovely eye, beaming with lustre, lest that lustre disappear, as we wipe not the moist diamond that it may not grow pale,—by their own hearts, which require too much, enjoy too little, hope too much, bear too little. ”

“ She returned to the hut cold and comfortless, but breathed nothing more than these words. Every night she visited half an hour later the corpse of her Eugenius, and hit precisely the moment of the rising of the waning moon, and said while her tearless eye rested upon its decaying form, "wherefore can I not die?"
Indeed! wherefore canst thou not die sweet soul, since the cold earth has already sucked from all thy wounds, the hot poison wherewith the human heart is palsied? ”

“ Whilst the angel of the last hour was employed on fields of battle steeped in blood and tears, gathering souls trembling on the brink of life, his compassionate eye melted in sorrow, and he said, "I will for once die like a human being, and experience the last pang, that I may learn to mitigate it, when I release an immortal spirit from the bonds of life. ”

“ The bride of the departed hero observed not that an angel dwelt in the breast of her lover. She loved the noble receptacle of the departed soul, and still affectionately held the band of him who was far removed from her. But the angel returned the feelings of her deluded heart with human affection; proud of his present form, he wished not to die before her, that she taught love him long enough to forgive him one day in heaven, for having caused her to press at once to her bosom an angel and a lover. ”

“ But there are other things about which we might talk; for example, that you would rather admire and look at the good moon and its man there cleaving to it, than learn really to know them, just as you do with men beneath the moon. It is alas, no secret, dearest sister, that thousands of girls, have been both married and burried, who have considered that silver world above, as in reality nothing more than a pretty soup-plate of celestial tin, stamped with the man in the moon, just as the English ware is, with the figure of an angel. ”

“ The body of the ascended hero placed the mild angel amid human hardships—amid human injustice. He was surrounded by the thorny girdle of allied governments,—that girdle which holds in its stinging grasp whole quarters of the globe, and which the mighty and the powerful never cease to tighten. ”

“ Thou art already dead, said the companionate angel of the three affectionate souls, and then stands the earthly globe out of which thou hast come still in darkness!" And the waves of celestial happiness flowed high over the world, while its innocent and joyful inhabitants looked upon our globe which still trembled in gloom. ”

“ The angel quickly discovered the dying warrior, and approaching in the form of his lover, inhaled with a warm kiss the afflicted soul from his gory bosom—he gave the soul to his brother, who kissed him for the second time, and forthwith it smiled above. ”

“ For here amid the gloom of life, man sees the mountains of a future world standing in the golden morn of a sun which never sets; as the inhabitant of the north pole in his long night of darkness, during which that luminary never rises, still beholds at the meridian hour, a golden morning glow upon his highest mountains, and he thinks upon his long summer wherein that rosy light never departs.
↑ The blue colour of the sky must be darker in the Moon since the air is more rarified, both of which may be proved upon a mountain. ”

“ Fair fickle one, our Earth is its moon, and appears to those above, no bigger than a bride's-cake. I add too, for the sake of my story, which is to follow, that we can throw no light up to them, (moonlight or earthlight) when we have none here below ourselves, which is the case in an eclipse of the Sun; consequently the inhabitants of the moon during an eclipse of the Sun, can say nothing else than, "We have an eclipse of the Earth to-day." ”

“ But man is higher than his place: he looks up, and moves the wings of his soul, and when the sixty minutes which we term sixty years have sped their course, then he raises himself, and while ascending catches fire, and the ashes of his feathers fall back, and the unbound spirit mounts alone, and immaterial as a tone into the heavens above. ”

“ We may have our fancies about all that is under the moon, or above it either, provided we do not mistake those fancies for realities,—take a magic lantern for a cabinet of pictures,—or a cabinet of pictures for one of natural objects. The astronomer makes an inventory and valuation of the heavens, and comes within a few pounds of the truth ”

“ Man staunches his wounds and fails a victim to the scar—Woman overcomes her sorrow seldom, and yet outlives it.—"Remain here," said he, with a tremulous voice, "I will lay it at rest before the moon rises." She said nothing, kissed it in silence, crumbled down its garland of flowers,—sank upon the sun-dial, and laid her cold cheek upon her arm that she might not see her child carried away. ”