Translations from the German · Thomas Carlyle
FIFTH LETTER-BOX.
How deeply now, before the infinite Eternity's-countenance of Night, did the cutting of this thought pass through Fixlein's warm soul: "O thou forsaken one beside me! No happy accident, no twilight hast thou, like that now glimmering in the heavens, to point to the prospect of a sunny day: without parents art thou, without brother, without friend; here alone on a disblossomed, emptied corner of the Earth; and thou, left Harvest-flower, must wave lonely and frozen over the withered stubble of the Past." That was the meaning of his thoughts, whose internal words were: "Poor young lady! Not so much as a half-cousin left; no nobleman will seek her, and she grows old so forgotten, and she is so good from the very heart--Me she has made happy--Ah, had I the presentation to the parish of Hukelum in my pocket, I should make a trial.".... Their mutual lives, which a straitcutting bond of Destiny was binding so closely together, now rose before him overhung with sable,--and he forthwith conducted his friend (for a bashful man may in an hour and a half be transformed into the boldest, and then continues so) back to the last flask, that all these upsprouting thistles and passion-flowers of sorrow might therewith be swept away. I remark, in passing, that this was stupid: the torn vine is full of water-veins as well as grapes; and a soft oppressed heart the beverage of joy can melt only into tears.
If any man disagree with me, I shall desire him to look at the Conrector, who demonstrates my experimental maxim like a very syllogism.--One might arrive at some philosophic views, if one traced out the causes, why liquors--that is to say, in the long-run, more plentiful secretion of the nervous spirits--make men at once pious, soft and poetical. The Poet, like Apollo his father, is _forever a youth_; and is, what other men are only once, namely in love,--or only after Pontac, namely intoxicated,--all his life long. Fixlein, who had been no poet in the morning, now became one at night: wine made him pious and soft; the Harmonica-bells in man, which sound to the tones of a higher world, must, like the glass Harmonica-bells, if they are to act, be kept _moist_. He was now standing with her again beside the wavering pond, in which the second blue hemisphere of heaven, with dancing stars and amid quivering trees, was playing; over the green hills ran the white crooked footpaths dimly along; on the one mountain was the twilight sinking together, on the other was the mist of night rising up; and over all these vapours of life, hung motionless and flaming the thousand-armed lustre of the starry heaven, and every arm held in it a burning galaxy.... It now struck eleven.... Amid such scenes, an unknown hand stretches itself out in man, and writes in foreign language on his heart, a dread _Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin_. "Perhaps by twelve I am dead," thought our friend, in whose soul the Cantata-Sunday, with all its black funeral piles, was mounting up.
The whole future Crucifixion-path of his friend lay prickly and bethorned before him; and he saw every bloody trace from which she lifted her foot,--she who had made his own way soft with flowers and leaves. He could no longer restrain himself; trembling in his whole frame, and with a trembling voice, he solemnly said to her: "If the Lord this night call me away, let the half of my fortune be yours; for it is your goodness I must thank that I am free of debts, as few Teachers are." Thiennette, unacquainted with our sex, naturally mistook this speech for a proposal of marriage; and the fingers of her wounded arm, tonight for the first time, pressed suddenly against the arm in which they lay; the only living mortal's arm, by which Joy, Love and the Earth, were still united with her bosom. The Conrector, rapturously terrified at the first pressure of a female hand, bent over his right to take hold of her left; and Thiennette, observing his unsuccessful movement, lifted her fingers, and laid her whole wounded arm in his, and her whole left hand in his right. Two lovers dwell in the Whispering-gallery,[48] where the faintest breath bodies itself forth into a sound. The good Conrector received and returned this blissful love-pressure, wherewith our poor powerless soul, stammering, hemmed in, longing, distracted, seeks for a warmer language, which exists not: he was overpowered; he had not the courage to look at her; but he looked into the gleam of the twilight, and said (and here for unspeakable love the tears were running warm over his cheeks): "Ah, I will give you all; fortune, life and all that I have, my heart and my hand."
When it was over, she looked up to him; pale, languid, but her eyes were two glistening fountains of an unspeakable love, full of sorrow and full of gratitude.--The exhausting loss of blood was spreading her soul asunder in sighs. Thiennette was dissolved into inexpressible softness; and the heart, lacerated by so many years, by so many arrows, was plunging with all its wounds in warm streams of tears, to be healed; as chapped flutes close together by lying in water, and get back their tones.--Before such a magic form, before such a pure heavenly love, her sympathising friend was melted between the flames of joy and grief; and sank, with stifled voice, and bent down by love and rapture, on the pale angelic face, the lips of which he timidly pressed, but did not kiss, till all-powerful Love bound its girdles round them, and drew the two closer and closer together, and their two souls, like two tears, melted into one. O now, when it struck twelve, the hour of death, did not the lover fancy that her lips were drawing his soul away, and all the fibres and all the nerves of his life closed spasmodically round the last heart in this world, round the last rapture of existence?... Yes, happy man, thou didst express thy love; for in thy love thou thoughtest to die....
However, he did not die. After midnight, there floated a balmy morning air through the shaken flowers, and the whole spring was breathing. The blissful lover, setting bounds even to his sea of joy, reminded his delicate beloved, who was now his bride, of the dangers from night-cold; and himself of the longer night-cold of Death, which was now for long years passed over.--Innocent and blessed, they rose from the grove of their betrothment, from its dusk broken by white acacia-flowers and straggling moonbeams. And without, they felt as if a whole wide Past had sunk away in a convulsion of the world; all was new, light and young. The sky stood full of glittering dewdrops from the everlasting Morning; and the stars quivered joyfully asunder, and sank, resolved into beams, down into the hearts of men.--The Moon, with her fountain of light, had overspread and kindled all the garden; and was hanging above in a starless Blue, as if she had consumed the nearest stars; and she seemed like a smaller wandering Spring, like a Christ's-face smiling in love of man.-- Under this light they looked at one another for the first time, after the first words of love; and the sky gleamed magically down on the disordered features with which the first rapture of love was still standing written on their faces.... Dream, ye beloved, as ye wake, happy as in Paradise, innocent as in Paradise!
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.