The Invisible Lodge Part 24

A transparent bal.u.s.trade of forest-trees was now all that remained between us and the Indian Ocean, wherein lay the green Teidor, when our path led through the high gra.s.s which grew in over it, along by a hermitage or an isolated house, which lay too enchantingly in this flowery ocean for it to be possible one should walk or ride by it. We reclined on a spot of mown gra.s.s, on the right side of the house, to the left of a little round garden, which hid itself away in the middle of the meadow. In this poor little garden were and supported themselves (as in a tolerant state) on the same bed, beans and peas and lettuce and cabbages; and yet in this dwarf-garden a child had also his little infusorial garden. In the little red and dazzling bird-house a nimble woman was just carrying on her fragrant field-bakery; and two children's-s.h.i.+rts hung on the garden-hedge and two stood at the house-door, in which latter couple two brown children played and watched us--nothing gave them pleasure this morning but the sun on their hare feet. O Nature! O Blessedness! thou, like benevolence, lovest to seek out poverty and obscurity!

The cleverest thing I have said, or probably shall say, to-day, was certainly the gra.s.s-discourse in the morning beside the little house.

As I stood there and observed the steadfast sky, the lull of wind and leaves, in which the vertical wing of the b.u.t.terfly and the hair of the caterpillar remained unbent, then I said: "We and this little worm stand in and under three almighty seas, the aerial sea, the watery sea and the electric sea; and yet the roaring waves of these oceans, these mile-long waves, that can tear a land to pieces, are so smoothed so tamed, that this Sabbath-day comes forth, in which not a breath of air moves the broad wing of the b.u.t.terfly or plucks from it a particle of feathered dust, and in which the child toys and smiles so peacefully among the elemental leviathans. If no infinite genius had compelled this, if we may not trust this genius with the harmonious ordering of our future world and our future destiny ...

"O infinite genius of the earth! in thy bosom we will bury our childish eyes, when the tempest breaks loose from its chain--on thy almighty heart will we sink back, when iron death puts us to sleep in pa.s.sing by!"

So we sauntered on in innocent contentment, without haste or heat, toward the waves which rippled around Fenk's country-seat. Singular it is, there are days, when we willingly let our still, continuous enjoyment of _outward_ objects suffice us (wherewith we rarely repel genuine stoicism)--still more singular is it, that many a day really does this. What I mean is, a certain gentle, water-level contentedness--not earned by virtue, not won by reflection--is sometimes supplied us by a day, by an hour, when all the miserable trifles and ravelings of which our puny and petty life is sewed together, harmonize with our pulses and do not run contrary to our blood--_e. g_., when (as happened to-day) the sky is cloudless, the wind asleep, the ferryman at hand to carry us over to Teidor, the master of the country-house, Doctor Fenk, ready and waiting for us an hour ago, the water smooth, the boat dry, the landing-haven deep and everything just right.... Verily we are all on such a foolish footing, that among _human pleasures_, upon which the Consistorial Counsellor of Zerbst, _Sintenis_, has composed two volumes, may be reckoned--in Germany (though far less in Italy and Poland)--the catching now and then of one or another flea.... If, then, one would experience such a day of paradise, then must there not so much as a trifle, such as one strides over in hours of stoical energy, lie in the way; just as when one will draw down the sun with a burning-gla.s.s, not the thinnest cloud must intrude before his face.... I am now on fire, and a.s.sure the reader I cannot possibly think of anything more foolish than our life, our earth, and its inhabitants, and our remarking upon this folly....

The Indian Ocean was a noisy market-place, resembling a Chinese river; on every side it was crowded with joy, life and splendor, from its upper surface to its bottom, where the second hemisphere of the heavens with its sun was tremulously reflected. In the country-house the walls were white, because (said Fenk) for a man who comes in from a nature that stands in a blaze of fire and light into a narrow cell, no coloring of this cell can be bright enough to counteract a mournful and confined impression.

Then we rested, changing our position from one shaded gra.s.sy bank of the island to another, fanned by birch-leaves and Indian waves--then we made music--then dined; first, at the table of a host who knows how to be refined and delicate, in a jovial manner; secondly, at the windows which opened to all four points of the compa.s.s, and drew us more than ever into all the vortices of joyous nature, and thirdly, each of us by himself, with a hand that knew how to pluck the soft berry of enjoyment without crus.h.i.+ng it. At evening comes Ottomar--the two maidens have lost themselves among flowers and Gustavus among shadows--the biographer lies here, like the jurist Bartolus, on the tossing gra.s.s depicting it all--Fenk is arranging for the evening. Not till evening does our to-day's joy come out into full light; and I thank heaven that I have now overtaken, with my biographical pen, the actual course of things, and that no one knows more than I report; whereas heretofore I always knew more, and embittered for myself the biographical enjoyment of the happiest scenes by the knowledge of the most mournful. But now, though in the next quarter of an hour the sea might swallow us all up, in the present one we looked out on it with a smile.

As I am so quiet and care not to go to walk, I will talk about taking walks--a thing which so often occurs in my work--and not without keenness. A man of understanding and logic would, in my opinion, distribute all walkers, like the East Indians, into four castes.

In the first caste trot along the most miserable ones, who do it from vanity or fas.h.i.+on, and want to show either their feeling or their clothes or their gait.

In the second caste run the fat and the scholarly, who do it for the sake of getting a _motion_, and not so much to enjoy as to digest what they have enjoyed already; into this innocent, pa.s.sive department they are also to be thrown, who do it without reason and without enjoyment, or as companions, or from an animal satisfaction with fine weather.

The third caste comprise those in whose heads are the eyes of the landscape-painter, whose hearts are penetrated by the grand outlines of the universe, and whose eyes trace the immeasurable line of beauty which flows with ivy-tendrils around all created things--which rounds the sun and the drop of blood and the pea, and cuts out all leaves and fruits into circles. Oh, how few such eyes rest on the mountains and on the setting sun and the closing flower!

A fourth and better caste, one would think, could hardly be produced after the third; but there are persons who look upon creation not merely with an artistic but with a holy eye--who transplant into this blooming world the world to come, among the creatures find the Creator--who kneel down amidst the rustling and roaring of the thousand-twigged, thickly-leaved tree of life, and are fain to speak with the genius whose presence pervades it, they themselves being only leaves that tremble thereon--who use the profound temple of Nature--not as a villa full of pictures and statues, but as a holy place of wors.h.i.+p--in snort, who go to walk not merely with the eye, but with the heart....

I know no greater praise than being able to glide over easily from such persons to our loving couple--their love is such a walk; the life of high-minded persons is also such a walk. I will only add, before rising from the crushed gra.s.s, the single remark, that Gustavus's love quite fits the practical definition of it which is to be made in a rapturous summer-midnight. The n.o.blest love (as one may define it) is simply the tenderest, deepest, most substantial respect, revealed less by what is done than by what is left undone, which is divined by both parties mutually, which stretches across both souls (in an astonis.h.i.+ng degree) the same chords, which exalts the n.o.blest feelings with a new glow, which will always sacrifice, never gain, which takes away nothing from love for the whole s.e.x, but gives all through the individual; this love is a respect, in which the pressure of hand and lips are not indispensable const.i.tuents and good actions are quite essential; in short, a respect which must be laughed to scorn by the majority of men and profoundly honored by the smallest part. Such a heart-exalting respect was the love of Gustavus, which not only endured, but even gladdened and warmed n.o.ble eye-witnesses, because it was without that innocently-sensuous toying with lips and hands, in which the spectator can take no more interest than in the artificial, theatrical viands of the players. A sign of virtuous esteem or love is this, when the spectator takes the more interest in it, the greater it is. Gustavus's love had--since his Peter's-fall, and still more since the forgiveness of this fall (for many faults one feels most deeply, only when they are pardoned)--gained such an access of tenderness, of reserve, and sense of another's worth, that he won more hearts than the tenderest one, and ruled other eyes than the fairest, those of Beata, before which his glances fell, like snow-flakes in the blue under the cloudless sun, pure, sparkling, trembling and melting away.

All have just arrived, Ottomar and the rest.

My clock strikes two in the morning, and still the birthday festival of Beata and of paradise is not yet closed; for I am just come over to this position to describe it; that is to say, if I remain in my chair and do not sally forth again into the blue vault, which throws over the so great mult.i.tude of to-day's joys its starry rays.

Towards evening Ottomar flew hither over the water. He always looks like a man who is thinking of something distant, who is just now only resting, who plucks the flower of joy that hangs over his path, because his flying gondola hurries him along by it, not because he is thinking of it at all. He still retains his sublimely-low voice and that eye of his which has seen death. He is still as much of a Zahouri[96] as ever, who sees through all flower-beds and gra.s.s-plots of the earth and down to the motionless dead, who sleep beneath it. So soft and stormy, so humorous and melancholy, so obliging and unconstrained and free! He a.s.serted that most vices were owing to the flying from vices--for fear of acting badly we did nothing and had no longer courage for anything great--we all had so much love for man that we had no longer any honor--out of humane tolerance and love we had no sincerity, no uprightness, we could not hurl down a traitor, a tyrant or the like.

He wondered at Beata, who took not the customary constrained, but a heightening interest in our talk: for he has a notion that one may talk with a woman about heaven and h.e.l.l, G.o.d and the Fatherland, and yet she will be thinking of nothing all the while she listens, but her figure, her att.i.tude, her dress. "I except," said Fenk, "in the first place, everything, and secondly, physiognomy also; to this they all listen, because they can all immediately apply it."

The magic evening drove more and more shadows before it; at last it took up all creatures into its rocking lap and clasped them to its bosom, in order to make them tranquil, tender and glad. We five islanders became so, too. We went out in a body up to a little artificial eminence that we might escort the sun even to the last stairway, before he sailed across the ocean to America. Suddenly, over in another island, five Alpine horns pealed forth, and went on rising and falling with their simple strains. One's condition has more influence on music, than music on one's condition. In our situation and where one's ear places him already at the Alpine fountain, and his eye on the evening-gilded glacier-peak, and around the hut of the herdsman, lie Arcadia and Tempe and youth's pastures, and when we let these fancies fly before the sinking sun and after the fairest day--in such a case the heart follows an Alp-horn with intenser throbs than a concert hall full of gaily bedizened hearers. Oh the admission ticket to joy is a good, and then a tranquil heart! The dark, cloudy, dimly gleaming _ideas_, which the universal philosopher demands of all sensations, must glide slowly over the soul or stand perfectly still, if it is to enjoy itself; just as clouds that move slowly betoken fair weather, while flying ones indicate foul. "There are," said Beata, "virtuous days when one pardons everything and has all power over one's self, when joy seems to kneel down in the heart and pray that it may remain there longer, and when all is cleared up and illumined within us;--then when one weeps over it for joy this grows so great that all is gone by again."

"I," said Ottomar, "love better to throw myself into the rocking arms of the tempest. We enjoy only glancing, glowing moments; this coal must be violently whirled round, that the burning circle of rapture may appear."

"And yet," said he, "I am to-day so glad in thy presence, setting sun!... The gladder I have been in any hour, or week, so much the stormier was the next. Like flowers is man: the more violent the tempest is going to be, so much the more perfume do they exhale." "You must not invite us any more, Herr Doctor," said Beata smiling, but her eye swam, however, in something more than joy.

Amidst the deepening red of the heavens the sun stepped upon his last stair, environed with tinted clouds. He and the Alpine horns vanished in the same instant. One cloud paled after another and the highest still hung transfused with the evening-glow. Beata and my sister talked playfully, after the manner of maidens, about what these illuminated clouds might be--the one resolved them into Christmas lambs with rosy-red ribbons, or a red heavenly scarf--the other into fiery eyes or cheeks under a veil--red and white cloud-roses--a red sun-hat, etc....

Punch, I think, was brought at last for the gentlemen, one of whom took it in such moderation that he can even now, at 2 o'clock, compose this section. Then we sauntered round under the rustling and refres.h.i.+ng tree of night, whose blossoms are suns and its fruits worlds. Our enjoyment now led us apart, now brought us together again, and each was equally capable of enjoying himself greatly, with or without company. Beata and Gustavus forgot their own peculiar love and joy out of respect and sympathy for that of others, and where all were friends became simply friends to each other. O, preach out of the world, I pray, the sadness which makes the heart as thick as blood, but not the joy, which in its dance of ecstasy, stretches out its arms not merely after a partner, but also after a tottering unfortunate, and which, as it flies by, takes the tear from the eye of the weeping spectator! To-day we would fain pardon each other everything, although we found nothing to pardon.

There was nothing there to forgive, I say; for as one star after another welled out from the depth of shadow, and when Ottomar and I had turned about before a warbling nightingale in order to hear her wails, softened by distance, and when we stood alone together, encompa.s.sed by nothing but tones and shapes of love, and when I could no longer contain myself, but, under the great present and future heavens, opened my heart to him, whose own I had long ago seen and loved; then was such a frame of spirit no forgiveness and reconciliation, but.... of that, day after to-morrow....

In alternating groups--now the two maidens alone, now with a third person, now all together--we walked over the gra.s.s-embosomed flowers and pa.s.sed along between two rival nightingales, the one of which sang the praises and inspired the air of the one island, aim the other of the neighboring one. In this musical _pot-pourri_ the leaves of the flowers had covered the fragrant _pot-pourris_, but all the birch-leaves had put on their own and we separated from one another on purpose, so as not to be able to embark hurriedly from an enchanting Otaheite.

At last we met by chance under a silver-poplar, whose snow-white leaves had by their gleam through the dark gathered us around it. "It is high time we took our leave!" said Beata. Only just as we were, or should have been, on the eve of doing it, the moon came up; behind a latticed fan of flowers she opened so modestly her cloudy eyelids, as she silently floated across the blind night, and her eye streamed, and she looked upon us like sincerity itself, and sincerity looked upon her too. "If we would only tarry," said Ottomar, in whose hot hand of friends.h.i.+p we would willingly dispense with every female hand--"till it grows lighter on the water and the moon can s.h.i.+ne in upon the vales--who knows when we can have things so again?" At length he added: "Besides, Gustavus and I start on our journey early to-morrow morning, and this weather cannot last long." He referred to the unknown seven-weeks' journey, in regard to which I here gladly take back all those conjectures which have hitherto represented it as so weighty and mysterious.

We again postponed our departure; the conversation grew monosyllabic, our thoughts polysyllabic, and our hearts too full, just as the waning moon on the threshold of its rising appeared to us _full_ also. When a company that has once had its hand on the door-latch, draws it away again, this delay excites the expectation of greater enjoyments, and this expectation excites embarra.s.sment; but we were merely more silent about each other, and concealed our sighs over the falcon-flight of joyous hours, and perhaps many an averted eye presented to the moon the offering which the saddest or the gladdest soul finds it so hard to refuse.

Just at this moment I made my way out into its rays and came back again to my writing table, and thank the veil of night, which stretches double around the Universe, that it also folds itself over the greatest sorrows and joys of men.... We were, therefore, on our island as sadly silent as at the gate of a joyous eternity; the land-embracing spring, with its majesty--with its warm, sunken moon--with its twinkling star of Venus--with its sublime midnight-red--with its heavenly nightingales--swept by before five human beings; it flung and heaped up in these five too happy ones, its buds and its blossoms, and its dimly gleaming outlooks and hopes, and its thousand heavens, and took nothing away from them for it, but their _speech_. O spring! O thou earth of G.o.d! O thou boundless sky! O that to-day, in all dwellers upon thee, the heart heaved in joyous throbbings, till we all fell down beside each other beneath the stars, and poured out our hot breath in one jubilant voice and all our joys in prayers, and lifted our aspiring hearts to the lofty blue of heaven, and in our ecstasy sent up sighs, not of sorrow, but of bliss, whose way to heaven was as long as ours to the grave!... O bitter thought! of being often the one happy among none but the unhappy! sweeter thought, of being among only happy ones the sole afflicted!

At last the dark slags floated away from before the silvery glance of the rising moon; she stood like an ineffable rapture higher in the night of the heavens, painted out of the background into the foreground. The frogs pierced the night like a mill, and their continuous, many-voiced din had the effect of a silence. O what man whom death had changed into an angel flying over the earth, would not have fallen down upon it, and under the earthly foliage and on the earthly ground, silvered over by the moon (as by the sun it is gilded over), and thought upon the heaven he had left behind and upon his old human pastures, his old spring-times down below here, and of his former hopes among the blossoms?

Ye reviewers! forgive me this once and let me go on! At last we stepped into a gondola as into a Charon's bark, and rapturously and reluctantly cleared the bushy sh.o.r.e and the reflection streaming from the water upon its leaves. The greatest enjoyment, the highest grat.i.tude, send, not _horizontally_ but _vertically_, their hidden and grasping roots into the heart; we could not therefore say much to Fenk, who was not to go away to-night from the scene of joy. Thou friend! dearer to me than all others, perhaps when all is more quiet and the moon is higher and purer, and the night more eternal, toward morning, thou wilt begin to weep over both--what the earth has given thee and what it has taken away. Beloved! if thou doest it now, at this moment--then I shall surely do so too!...

With our first step into the boat the Alp-horns (probably under Fenk's direction) again pierced the night; every tone rang through it like a past, every chord like a sigh for a spring-time of the other world; the night-mist played and smoked over woods and mountains and drew itself out, like the boundary lines of men, like morning-clouds of the future world, around our spring-awakened earth. The Alp-horns died away, like the voice of first love, in our ears and grew louder in our souls; the rudder and boat cut the water in two into a gleaming milky way; every wave was a trembling star; the fluctuating water reflected tremulously the moon, which we would rather have multiplied a thousand-fold than doubled, and whose soft lily-face bloomed still paler and more sweetly under the waves. Encircled with four heavens--the one in the blue above, on the earth, in the water and within us--we sailed on through the swimming blossoms. Beata sat at one end of the boat, facing the other, the moon, and the friend of her tender soul--her glance glided easily up and down between the moon and him--he was thinking of his morrow's journey and of his longer tour as amba.s.sador, and begged us all for written souvenirs, that he might always have a good abiding among us as now, and reminded Beata of her promise to give him one also. She had already written it and gave it to him to-day at their parting. The happy day, the happy evening, the heavenly night filled her eyes with a thousand souls and with two tears that lingered there.

She covered and dried one eye with her white handkerchief and looked upon Gustavus with the other, with a glance as pure and calm as an image in a mirror.... Thou fanciedst, thou good soul, that thou wast also hiding thy open eye!

At last--O thou everlasting, unceasing At Last!--our silvery course through the waves broke also upon its sh.o.r.e. The opposite one lay there deserted and overshadowed. Ottomar tore himself away in the most melancholy inspiration and amidst the dying echoes of the Swiss tones my renewed friend said: "It is all over again--all tones die away--all waves sink to rest--the fairest hours strike their last and the sands of life run out. There is surely and absolutely nothing, thou vast heaven above us, that can fill or bless us! Farewell! I shall take leave of you all along my way."

The Alpine echoes sounded back far into the night and sank to a murmuring breath, which resembled a memory, not out of youth, but out of the depths of childhood. We reeled, filled full of enjoyment, through dew-dripping bushes and through drooping, drowsy and dew-drunken meadows, from which we plucked slumbering flowers, in order to see on the morrow their folded form in sleep. We thought upon the sunless paths of this day's morning; we pa.s.sed along without a sound before the little Lilliputian house and garden, and the children and the bread-baking housewife were clasped and entwined in the deathlike arms of slumber. The hours had rolled the moon, like a stone of Sysiphus, up the steep of heaven, and let it roll down again.[97] In the east stars rose, in the west stars set, in mid-heaven little starlets sent off from the earth exploded into fragments--but eternity stood dumb and great beside G.o.d, and all pa.s.sed away before it and all arose before its face. The field of life and of infinity hung down near and low above us, like _one_ flash, and all that is great, all that is immortal, all the dead and all angels lifted the human spirits into their blue circle and sank to meet it....

At last, I taking the hand of my sister and Gustavus that of Beata, we entered our little Lilienbad stiller, fuller, holier, than we had left it in the morning. Gustavus took leave of me first, saying: "In five days we meet again." He led Beata to her cottage, which blazed in Luna's silver flames. The white summit of the pyramid on the hermitage mount glimmered across out of the depth of its seclusion over the long green avenue to the vale and through the darkness of the night. Beside this pyramid the two happy ones had first given each other their hearts, beside it a friend rested from the toil of life, and its white peak pointed to the place where blooms a fairer spring. They heard the leaves of the terrace whisper, and the Tree of Life under which after set of sun, they had for the second time given their souls to each other.... O ye two good and over-happy beings! at this moment a good seraph is drawing up for you a silvery minute out of the sea of joy which lies in a fairer earth--on this fleeting drop glances the whole perspective of the Eden wherein the angel is; the minute will run down to you, but ah! so soon will it pa.s.s by!

Beata gave Gustavus, as a hint for departure, the desired leaf--he pressed the hand from which it came to his mute lips--he could not speak either thanks or farewell--he took her other hand and all within him cried and repeated: "She is truly once more thine and remains so forever," and he must needs weep over his bliss. Beata looked into his overflowing heart, and hers ran over into a tear and yet she knew it not: but when the tear of the holiest eye trickled down the rosy cheek and hung on that rose-leaf with trembling glimmer--when his locking and her locked hands could not wipe it away--when with his flaming face, with his too blissful, bursting heart, he was about to wipe the tear, and bent toward the fairest object on earth like a rapture bending toward virtue, and touched her face with his--then did the angel who loves the earth draw the two purest lips together into an inextinguishable kiss--then did all trees sink out of sight, all suns pa.s.sed away, all heavens fled, and Gustavus held heaven and earth in a single heart clasped to his breast;--then didst thou, seraph, pa.s.s into the beating hearts and gavest them the flames of the immortal love--and thou heardst the breathed sounds fly from the hot lips of Gustavus: "O thou dear! thou undeserved one! and so good! so good!"

Enough--the lofty moment has flown by--the earthly day sends up already its morning-redness into the heavens--let my heart return to its rest and every other heart likewise!

FIFTY-FOURTH, OR SIXTH JOY, SECTION.

Day After This Night.--Beata's Leaf.--Something Memorable.

I ask pardon of the critics, if I made last night too many metaphors and too much fire and noise: a section of joy (as well as the critique upon it) must content itself with the like, when once the author contents himself with a like over-freight of lemon-juice, tea-blossoms, sugar-cane and arrack, as I did.

I did not lie down again to-day; the birds had already begun to sing again, and when my dreams had hardly reproduced the past spectacle some forty times over before my closed eyes, I opened them again, because the sun was blazing around me.

A night through which one has been awake and enjoying himself leaves behind a morning when in a sweet languor one not so much feels and fantasies, when the nightly tones and dances still sound on in our inner ears, when the persons with whom we spent it float before our inner eyes in a lovely twilight, which charms our hearts. In fact, we never love a woman more than after such a night, in the morning before one has breakfasted.

I have thought a thousand times to-day upon my Gustavus, who before day-break began his five days' journey, and of my Ottomar who goes with him. Would that you might never come upon any thorns but such as are hidden under the rose, might never pa.s.s under any cloud except one that leaves you the whole blue sky and takes away merely the blazing disc, and that your joys might want one only, namely, that of being able to relate it to us!

All sunlight merely encircled with a magic spell and overflowed like a lofty moonlight before me all the shaded avenues of Lilienbad: the past night seemed to me to reach over into the present day, and I cannot tell how the moon, which was still sinking with its wiped-out l.u.s.ter, like a snow-flake, low in the west, became so welcome and so dear to me. O, pale friend of need and of night! I still think even now of thy Elysian splendor, of thy cooled off rays, wherewith thou accompanyest us by brooks and in leafy lanes, and wherewith thou transformest the sad night into a day seen afar! Magical scene-painter of the future world for which we mourn and weep, as a dead man becomes beautiful, so dost thou paint the second world upon our earthly one, when with all its flowers and people it sleeps or looks up to thee with silent gaze!

I would give up the most distinguished visit to-day in exchange for it, if I could make one to the happy parties of yesterday, but it is not practicable. Even Beata had one to-day from her mother; and my eyes were not able to get a glimpse of anything about her except the five white fingers with which she turned round a flower-pot at her window out of the shadow of a twig. O if our old life and our walks begin again and all live together again, what things the republic of letters will then get to read!

To-day I deliver into its hands nothing more than Beata's safe conduct to Gustavus, because that I have only to copy off. Then I slip out again into the open air, steer once more by a chart I have in my head yesterday's course and, in gathering up as after-flora the scattered flowers our full hands let fall yesterday, I find the higher ones also.

One will pardon Beata some pa.s.sages in the following composition, when I premise that she, perhaps imposed upon by her heart, as well as by her father, who was only a nominal renegade of Catholicism--believed more of the angels and of their wors.h.i.+p, than Nicolai and the Smalcald (mercantile) articles can admit. For weak and so often helpless woman, who dares not soar far above this earth, so loves in the hour of need to lay down her prayers and her sighs before a Mary, a saint, an angel; but more self-reliant man will indulgently forbear to censure a delusion which can be so consoling.

"_Wishes for my friend_.

"It is no delusion, that angels, in the midst of their joys, watch over threatened children of men, as the mother amidst her joys and labors guards her children. O ye unknown immortals! does a single and separate heaven shut you in? Do you never pity the defenceless son of earth? Can you never have wiped away greater tears than ours? Ah, if the creator has breathed his love into you as into us, then you certainly descend to this earth and console the besieged heart beneath the moon, hover around the oppressed soul, cover with your hand the parching wound and think on poor human creatures!

"And if here below there walks a spirit who will one day be like you, can you forget your brother?--Angel of joy! be with my friend and thine, when the sun comes, and let fair, holy mornings bloom around him! Be with him when the sun mounts higher--and when toil weighs him down!--Oh take the distant sigh of a sister and friend and cool his therewith! Be with him when the sun declines, and direct his eye to the moon as she rises in white morning-dress and to the broad heavens wherein the moon and thou walk!...