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Monday, December 30, 2019
THE YEAR - by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
JUST FOR YOU - by Kate Summers
Sunday, December 29, 2019
THE NEW YEAR - by Harriet S. Caswell
Another year has just glided away, and it seems but as yesterday that we stood at its threshold, and looked forward over its then seemingly lengthened way, and fancy was busy with many plans and projects for future happiness and delight. We looked forward through the whole border of its months, weeks, days, and hours, and life grew bright with pleased anticipation. The year has now passed away, and how few, very few, of all our bright hopes have been realized. With how many of us have unexpected and unwished for events taken the place of those to which we looked forward with so much delight.
As the hours and moments of the past year have slowly glided into the ocean of the past, they have borne with them the treasures of many a fond heart. The sun shines as brightly as ever, the moon and stars still look placidly down upon the sleeping earth, and life is the same as it has ever been; but for these their work is over, and they have done with time. As I sat watching the fast gathering shadows over the last night of the old year, I fell into a sort of waking dream, and I seemed to hear the slow measured tread of one wearily approaching. Turning my eyes in the direction of the approaching footsteps. I beheld the form of a very aged man; his countenance appeared somewhat familiar, yet it was furrowed by many wrinkles, and on his once high and beautiful forehead were the deep lines of corroding care and anxiety. His step was slow and heavy, and he leaned for support on his now well-nigh failing staff. He bore the marks of extreme feebleness, and gazed forward with a manner of timidity and uncertainty, and on his changeful countenance was expressed all the multitudinous emotions of the human breast. His garments had once been white and shining, but they were now stained and darkened by travel, and portions of them trailed in the dust. As he drew nigh I observed that the carried in his hand a closely written scroll, on which was recorded the events of the past year. As I gazed upon the record, I read of life begun, and of death in every circumstance and condition of mortal being, of happiness and misery, of love and hate, of good and evil, all mingling their different results in that graphic record; and I trembled as my own name met my view, with the long list of opportunities for good unimproved, together with the many sins, both of omission and commission, of which I had been guilty during the past year; but there was nothing left out, the events in the life of every individual member of the human family were there all recorded in legible characters. As the midnight hour struck, the aged, man who typified the old year faded from my view, and, almost before I was aware of the change, youth and beauty, stood smiling before me. The old year gone, the new year had begun. His robes where white and glistening, his voice was mirthful, and his step buoyant; health and vigor braced his limbs. He too, bare in his hand a scroll, but white as the unsullied snow; not a line was yet traced upon its pure surface except the title, Record of 1872. I gazed on its fresh and gladsome visage with mingled emotions of sorrow and joy, and I breathed my prayer for forgiveness, for the follies and sins of the departed year.
THE SHORTEST DAY IN THE YEAR - by Brander Matthews
The snow was still falling steadily, although it had already thickly carpeted the avenue. It was a soft, gentle snow, sifting down calmly and clinging moistly to the bare branches of the feeble trees, which stood out starkly sheathed in white, spectral in the grayness of the late afternoon. Gangs of men were clearing the cross-paths at the corners and shoveling the sodden drifts into carts of various sizes, impressed into sudden service. It was not yet dusk, but the street-lamps had been lighted; and the tall hotel almost opposite was already illuminated here and there by squares of yellow.
Elinor stood at the window of her aunt’s house, gazing out, and yet not seeing the occasional carriages and the frequent automobiles that filled the broad avenue before her. The Christmas wreath that hung just over her head was scarcely more motionless than she was, as she stared straight before her, unconscious of anything but the deadness of her own outlook on life.
She looked very handsome in her large hat and her black furs, which set off the pallor of her face, relieved by the deep eyes, now a little sunken, and with a dark line beneath them. She took no notice of the laborers as they stood aside to allow her aunt’s comfortable carriage to draw up before the door. She did not observe the laughing children at an upper window of the house exactly opposite, highly excited at the vision of a huge Christmas tree which towered aloft in a cart before the door. She was waiting for Aunt Cordelia to take her to a tea, and then to a studio, where her portrait was to be shown to a few of her friends.
Her thoughts were not on any of these things; they were far away from wintry New York. Her thoughts were centered on the new-made grave in distant Panama, in which they had buried the man she loved less than a week ago.
And it was just a year ago to-day, on the twenty-second of December, the shortest day in the year, that she had promised to be his wife. Only a year, and it seemed to her that those twelve months had made up most of her life. What were the score of years that had gone before in comparison with the richness of those happy twelve months, when life had at last seemed worth while?
As a girl she had wondered sometimes what life was for, and why men and women had been sent on this earth. What was the purpose of it all? But this question had never arisen again since she had met him; or, rather, it had been answered, once for all. Life was love; that was plain enough to her. At last her life had taken on significance, since she had yielded herself to his first kiss, and since the depth of her own passion had been revealed to her swiftly and unexpectedly.
As she looked back at his unexpected appeal to her, and as she remembered that when he had told her his love and asked her to be his they had met only ten days before and had spoken to each other less than half a dozen times, she realized that it was her fate which had brought them together. Although she did not know it, she had been waiting for him, as he had been waiting for her. She was his mate, and he was hers, chosen out of all others - a choice foreordained through all eternity.
Their wooing was a precious secret, shared by no one else. They knew it themselves, and that was enough; and perhaps the enforced mystery made the compact all the sweeter. Ever since they had plighted their troth she had gone about with joy in her heart and with her head in a heaven of hope, hardly aware that she was touching the earth. All things were glad around her; and a secret song of happiness was forever caroling in her ears.
And yet she knew that it might be years before he could claim her, for he was only now beginning his professional career as an engineer. He had just been appointed to a good place on the canal. His chief was encouraging, and put responsibilities on him; he had felt sure that he would have a chance to show what he could do. And she had been almost angry how any one could ever doubt that he would rise to the head of his profession. She had told him that she would wait seven years, and twice seven years, if need be.
Aunt Cordelia was hoping that she would make a splendid match. Within a week after John Grant had said good-by she had rejected Reggie Eames, whom her aunt had been encouraging for a year or two. She liked Reggie well enough; he was a good fellow. When he had asked her if there was another suitor standing in his way, she had looked him in the face and told him that there was; and Reggie had taken it like a man, and had made a point of being nice to her ever since, whenever they met in society.
As she stood there at the window she gave a slight start and nodded pleasantly to Reggie, who had bowed as he passed the house on the way to the Union Club. And then the avenue, with all its passers-by, its carriages and automobiles, its shoveling laborers and its falling snow, its Christmas greens and its lighted windows, faded again from her vision, as she tried to imagine that unseen grave far away in Panama.
She wished that she could have been with him, that they could have had those last few hours together. She had had so little of him, after all. An unexpected summons had come to him less than a week after they were engaged; and he had gone at once. Of course, he had written by every steamer, but what were letters when she was longing for the clasp of his arms? And every month, on the twenty-second, there had come a bunch of violets, with the single word “Sweetheart.” He had laughed when he told her that the twenty-second of December was the shortest day in the year, which was not very promising if they expected to be “as happy as the day is long"!
The months had gone, one after another; she had not seen him again; and now she would never see him again. He had been hoping for leave of absence early in the spring; and she had been looking forward to it. He had written that he did not know how the work would get along without him, but he did know that he could not get along without her. Hereafter she would have to get along without him; and she had never longed for him so much, wanted him, needed him.
The long years to come stretched out before her vision, as she stood there in the window, lovely in her youthful beauty; and she knew that for her they would be desolate, barren, and empty years. The flame of love burned within her as fiercely as ever; but there was now nothing for it to feed on but a memory; yet the fire was hot in its ashes.
She opened her heavy furs, for she felt as if they were stifling her. She knew that they had been admired by her friends, and even envied by some of them. Aunt Cordelia had given them to her for Christmas, insisting on her wearing them as soon as they came home, since they were so becoming.
Aunt Cordelia meant to be kind; she had always meant to be kind, ever since Elinor had come to her as an orphan of ten. Her kindness was a little exacting at times; and her narrow matrimonial ambitions Elinor could not help despising. What did it profit a girl to make a splendid match, if she did not marry the one man she was destined to love?
The furs were beautiful, and they were costly. Were they the price of her freedom? Was it due to these expensive things she did not really want that she had not been able to take John Grant for her husband a month or a week after he had asked her?
Everything in this world had to be paid for; and perhaps she had sold her liberty too cheap. If it had not been for the furs, and for all the other things that her aunt had accustomed her to, she might have gone with him to Panama and nursed him when he fell ill. She felt sure that she could have saved him. She would have tried so hard! She would have put her soul into it. Her soul? She felt as if the sorrow of the past week had made her acquainted with her own soul for the first time. And she confessed herself to be useless and feeble and weak.
That was what made it all so strange. Why could she not have died in his place? Why could not she have died for him? She had lived, really lived, only since she had known him; and it was only since he had gone that she had known herself. She had meant to help him, not that he needed any assistance from anybody. Now she could help no one in all the wide world. She was useless again, a girl, ignorant and helpless.
Why could she not have been taken, and why could not he have been spared? He had a career before him; he would have been able to do things, strong things, brave things, noble things, delicate things. And he was gone before he had been able to do anything, with all his possibilities of honor and fame, with all his high hope of honest, hard work in the years of his manly youth, with everything cut short, just as if a candle had been blown out by a chance wind.
She marveled how it was that she had been able to live through the long days since she had read the brief announcement of his death. She did not see how it was that she had not cried out, how it was that she had not shouted aloud the news of her bereavement. She supposed it must be because she had inherited self-control, because she had been trained to keep her feelings to herself, and never to make a scene.
Fortunately she was alone when she learned that he was dead. She had been up late at a ball the night before, and, as usual, Aunt Cordelia had insisted on her staying in bed all the morning to rest. When she had finished her chocolate, Aunt Cordelia had brought in the morning paper, and had raised the window-shade for her to read, before going down for a long talk with the lawyer who managed their affairs.
Elinor had glanced over the society reporter’s account of the ball and his description of her own gown; she had read the announcement of the engagement of a girl she knew to a foreign count; and then she was putting the paper down carelessly when her eye caught the word “Panama” at the top of a paragraph. Then, at a flash, she had read the inconspicuous paragraph which told how John Grant, a very promising young engineer in charge of a section of the work on the canal, had died suddenly of pneumonia, after only two days’ illness, to the great grief of all his associates, especially of the chief, who had thought very highly of him.
The words danced before her eyes in letters of fire; and she felt as if an icy hand had clutched her heart. She was as stunned as if the end of the world had come; and it was the end of her world.
She did not recall how long she had held the paper clutched in her hand; and she did not know why she had not wept. It seemed to her as if her tears would be a profanation of her grief, too deep to be washed away by weeping. She had not cried once. Perhaps it would have been a relief if she could have had a good cry, petty and pitiful as it would be.
When Aunt Cordelia had called her, at last, to get ready for luncheon, she had arisen as if she had been somebody else. She had dressed and gone down-stairs and sat opposite her aunt and chatted about the ball. She recalled that her aunt had said that there was nothing in the paper that morning except the account of the ball. Nothing in the paper! She had kept her peace, and made no confession. It seemed to her that it could not have been herself who sat there calmly and listened and responded. It seemed as if she was not herself, but another girl, a girl she did not know before.
So the days had gone, one after another, and so they would continue to go in the future. She was young, and she came of a sturdy stock; she might live to be three-score and ten.
As she stood there at the window, staring straight before her, she saw herself slowly changing into an old maid like Aunt Cordelia, well meaning and a little fidgety, a little fussy, and quite useless. She recoiled as she surveyed the long vista of time, with no husband to take her into his arms, and with no children for her to hold up to him when he came back from his work. And she knew that she was fit to be a wife and a mother; and now she would never be either.
What was there left for her to do in life? She could not go into a convent, and she could not study to be a trained nurse. There she was at twenty-one, a broken piece of driftwood washed up on an unknown island. She had no hope any more; the light of her life had gone out.
She asked herself whether she had any duty toward others, duty which would make life worth living once more. She wished that there was something for her to do; but she saw nothing. She set her teeth and resolved that she would go through life, whatever it might bring, and master it for his sake, as he would have expected her to do. He was dead, and lying alone in that distant, lonely grave; and she would have to live on and on but at least she would live as he would approve.
But whatever her life might be, it would not be easy without him. She had lived on his letters; and she had taken a new breath of life every month when his violets came. And now nothing would come any more, no message, no little words of love, nothing to cheer her and to sustain her. Never before had she longed so much for a message from him, a line only, a single word of farewell.
It was again the shortest day of the year, and it was to her the longest of all her life. But all the days would be long hereafter, and the nights would be long, and life would be long; and all would be empty, since he would never again be able to communicate with her. If only she believed in spiritualism, if only she could have even the dimmest hope that some day, somehow, some sort of communication might come to her from him, from the shadowy realm where he had gone, and where she could not go until the summons came to join him!
So intent was she upon her own thoughts that she did not hear the ring of the door-bell; and a minute later she started when the butler entered the room with a small parcel in his hand.
“What is it, Dexter ?” she asked, mechanically.
“This has just come for you, Miss,” he answered, handing her the parcel.
She held it without looking at it until Dexter had left the room. Probably it was a Christmas present from one of her friends; and she loosened the strings listlessly.
It was a box from a florist; and she wondered who could have sent her any flowers on the day sacred to him. It might be Reggie, of course; but he had not done that for nearly a year now.
She opened the box carelessly, and found a bunch of violets. There was a card with it.
She took it nearer to the window, to read it in the fading light. It bore the single word, “Sweetheart.”
She stood for a moment, silent and trembling.
“John !” she cried aloud. “From you !”
She sank into a chair, with the violets pressed against her heart, sobbing; and the tears came at last, plentifully.
Then she heard footsteps on the stairs; and in a moment more her aunt was standing at the door and calling:
“Elinor, are you ready ? We are late.”
HOPE KEEPS US GOING - by Kate Summers
AS YOU TRAVEL THROUGH LIFE - Poet Unknown
Saturday, December 28, 2019
Friday, December 27, 2019
CONTENTMENT - by Greta Zwaan
Thursday, December 26, 2019
THE MOON - by Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
When, Oh Eugenius and Rosamond, you, whom I may no longer designate by your right names, I was first about to tell your short history, my friends and I walked into an English garden. We went by a new-painted coffin, on the foot-board of which was written: "I pass away." Above the verdant garden rose a white obelisk, with which two sister-princesses had marked the spot where they now met and embraced, and the inscription on which was: "Here we have found each other again." The point of the obelisk was glittering in the full moon, and here I told my simple story. But do thou, gentle reader, draw - which is as much as coffin and obelisk - draw, I say, the inscription on the coffin into the ashes of oblivion, and write the letters of the obelisk with pure human heart's blood in thy inmost self.
Many souls drop from heaven like flowers; but, with their white buds, they are trodden down into the mud, and lie soiled and crushed in the print of a hoof. You also were crushed, Eugenius and Rosamond. Tender souls like yours are attacked by three robbers of their joys, the mob, whose rough gripe gives to such soft hearts nothing but scars; destiny, which does not wipe away the tear from a fair soul full of brilliancy, but the lustre should perish also, as we do not wipe a wet diamond, lest it should grow dim; your own hearts which rejoice too much, and enjoy too little, have too much hope, and too little power of endurance. Rosamond was a bright pearl, pierced by anguish, parted from all that belonged to her, she only quivered in her sorrows like a detached twig of the sensitive plant at the approach of night, her life was a quiet warm rain and that of her husband was a bright lost sunshine. In his presence she averted her eyes, when they had just been fixed on her sick child, that was only two years old, and was in this life a wavering thin-winged butterfly, beneath a pelting shower. The imagination of Eugenius, with its too large wings shattered his slight, delicate frame; the lily bell of his tender body could not contain his mighty soul; the place whence sighs originate, his breast, was destroyed like his happiness. He had nothing left in the world but his affectionate heart, and for that heart there were but two human beings.
These persons wished, in the spring time, to quit the whirlpool of mankind, which beat so hardly and so coldly against their hearts. They had a quiet cottage prepared for them on one of the high Alps opposite to the silver chain of the Staubbach. On the first fine spring morning they went the long road to the high mountain. There is a holiness which sorrow alone can give in its purity; the stream of life becomes white as snow when it is dashed against rocks. There is an elevation where little thoughts no more intrude between sublime ones, as when upon a mountain one sees the summits close to each other without their connection in the depth below. Thou hadst that holiness, Rosamond, and thou that elevation, Eugenius.
A morning mist was gathered round the foot of the mountain, and in that three fluttering forms were suspended. These were the reflections of the three travellers, and the timid Rosamond started, thinking she saw herself. Eugenius thought, "That which the immortal spirit hath around it is, after all, but a denser mist." And the child snatched at the cloud, and wished to play with its little misty brother. One single invisible angel of the future accompanied them through life and up this mountain. They were so good and like each other that one angel was all they needed.
As they ascended the angel opened the book of fate, one leaf of which contained the sketch of a three-fold life - every line was a day - and when the angel had read the line that belonged to this day, he wept and closed the book for ever.
The travellers, in their delicate condition, required nearly a day to arrive at the desired spot. The earth crept back into the valleys, the sky rested itself on the mountains. The waving, glimmering sun seemed to our Eugenius a mirror of the moon, and he said to his beloved, when the icy summits had already cast their flames upon the earth: "I feel so weary, and yet so well. Will it not be as if we left two dreams - the dream of life and the dream of death - if we enter the cloudless moon as the first shore beyond the hurricanes of life ?"
"It will be still better," replied Rosamond, "for in the moon, as thou hast taught me, dwell the little children of this earth, and their parents remain with them till they themselves become as mild and tranquil as children." Then they proceed further.
"Ay, from heaven to heaven, from world to world!" said Eugenius, ecstatically.
They ascended as the sun declined; when they climbed more slowly, the mountain summits like rising, loosened branches, concealed them from the luminary. They hastened on into the evening glimmer, which was already advancing, but when they had reached the mountain where their cottage stood, the eternal mountains stepped before the sun; the earth then veiled her graces and her cities, adoring heaven, before it looked upon her with all its star-eyes, while the waterfalls laid aside their rainbows, and the earth spread higher for heaven, which was bending over her with out-stretched cloud-arms, a gauze of golden exhalations, and hung it from one mountain to another, and the icebergs were set on fire, so that they glared even to midnight, while opposite to them on the grave of the sun was raised a towering funeral pile of clouds, forming the evening glow and the evening ashes. But through the glimmering veil kind heaven let its evening tears fall deep into the earth, even upon the humblest grass and the smallest flower.
Oh, Eugenius, how great then did thy soul become! The life of earth lay at a distance and far below thee, free from all the distortions which we see in it, because we stand too near it, as the decorations of shorter scenes change from landscapes to mis-shapen strokes when we look at them closely.
The two living ones embraced each other with a long and gentle embrace, as they stood before the cottage, and Eugenius said: "Oh, thou quiet, eternal heaven, take nothing more from us!" But his pale child with its snapped lily-head was before him; he looked at the mother, and she lay with her moistened eye reaching into heaven, and said softly: "O take us all at once!"
The angel of futurity, whom I will call the angel of rest, wept as he smiled, and his wings swept away the sighs of the parents with an evening breeze, that they might not sadden each other.
The transparent evening flowed round the red mountain like a bright lake, and washed it with the circles of cool evening waves. The more the evening and earth grew, still the more did the two souls feel that they were in the right place. They had no tears too many, none too few, and their bliss needed no other increase than its repetition. Eugenius sent the first harmonious tones floating like swans through the pure Alpine sky. The weary child, twined in a flowery wreath, leaned against a sundial, and played with the flowers which it drew around it, to entwine them in its circle. The mother at last awoke from her harmonious transport; her eye fell on the large eyes of her child, which opened wide upon her; singing and smiling, and, with overflowing motherly love, she stepped to the little angel, which was cold and dead. For its life, which had descended from heaven, had, like other tones, been dissipated in the atmosphere of earth; death had breathed upon the butterfly, and it had ascended from the rushing streams of air to the ever-refining ether; from the flowers of earth to the flowers of paradise.
Oh, ever flutter away, ye blessed children! The angel of rest wakes you in the morning-hour of life with cradle songs, two arms bear you and your little coffin, and your body, with the two red cheeks, the forehead free from the print of grief, and the white hands, glide down by a chain of flowers to the second cradle, and you have only exchanged one paradise for another. But we, oh, we are crushed by the storm-winds of life; our heart is weary, our face is deeply marked with earthly care, and our soul stiffened, still clings to the earthy clod.
Turn away thine eye from Rosamond's piercing shriek, fixed glance, and petrifying features, if thou art a mother, and hast already felt this pain! look not upon the mother, who, with senseless hand, squeezes against her the corpse which she now cannot stifle; but look at the father, who, with his breast, silently covers his struggling heart, although black grief has twined around it with an adder's folds, and poisoned it with an adder's teeth. Ah, when he at last had conquered the pain, his heart was envenomed and riven. A man bears the pain of the wound, but sinks under the scar: a woman seldom combats her grief, but yet she survives it. "Remain here," he said, with a suppressed voice, "I will lay it to rest before the moon rises." She said nothing, kissed the child in silence, broke up its wreath of flowers, sunk down upon the sun-dial, and laid her cold face upon her arm, that she might not see it carried away.
On the way the dawning light of the moon shone upon the shaking body of the infant, and the father said: "Burst forth, oh moon! that I may see the land wherein He dwells. Rise, oh Elysium! that I may think the soul of the corse is within thee. Oh child, child, dost thou know me, dost thou hear me ? Hast thou above so fair a face as this one, so sweet a mouth ? Oh thou heavenly mouth, thou heavenly eye, no more spirit visits thee!" He laid the child beneath flowers which supplied the place of all that we are generally laid upon for the last time; but his heart was breaking when he covered the pale lips, the open eyes, with flowers and earth, and streams of tears fell first into the grave. When with the verdant coating of the clods he had built a little mound, he felt that he was weary of his journey and of life; that his weakly chest could not endure the thin mountain air, and that the ice of death had settled in his heart. He cast a longing glance at the bereaved mother, who had long stood trembling behind him, and they fell silent into each other's arms, and their eyes could scarcely weep more.
At last, from behind a glacier that was glimmering out, the glorious moon flowed forth in loveliness on the two silent unhappy ones, and showed them its white peaceful meadows, and the gentle light with which it softens man. "Mother, look up," said Eugenius; "yonder is thy son! See there, the white flowery groves, in which our child will play, are passing over the moon." Now a burning fire filled his inmost self with consuming power, the moon made his eye blind to all that was not light; sublime forms rolled before him in the light stream, and he heard in his soul, new thoughts which are not indigenous in man, and are too great for memory; just as in a dream small melodies may come to the man who can make none when awake. Death and pleasure press upon his heavy tongue. "Rosamond, why sayest thou nothing? Dost thou see thy child? I look beyond the long earth, even to where the moon begins. There is my son flying between angels. Full flowers cradle him, the spring of earth waves over him, children lead him, angels instruct him, God loves him. Oh ! thou dear one, thou art smiling; the silver light of paradise flows with heavenly radiance about thy little mouth, and thou hearest me, and callest thy parents. Rosamond, give me thy hand; we will go and die!"
The slight corporeal chains grew longer. His advancing spirit fluttered higher on the borders of life. With convulsive power he seized the paralysed Rosamond, and blind and sinking, stammered forth, "Rosamond, where art thou ? I fly ! I die ! We remain together !"
His heart burst, his spirit fled; but Rosamond did not remain with him, for fate snatched her from his dying hand, and cast her back upon earth, living. She felt if his hand had the coldness of death, and since it had, she placed it softly against her heart, sunk slowly upon her failing knees, and raised her face, which had become inexpressibly serene, towards the starry power. Her eyes, from their tearless sockets, pressed forth dry, large, and happy, into the sky, and therein calmly sought a supernatural form, which should descend and bear her up. She almost fancied she was dying then, and prayed thus: "Come, thou angel of rest, come and take my heart, and bear it to my beloved. Angel of rest! leave me not so long alone among the corses. Oh, God! is there then nought invisible about me? Angel of death! thou must be here, thou hast already snatched away two souls close by me, and hast made them ascend. I, too, am dead, draw forth my glowing soul from its cold kneeling corse."
With mad disquiet, she looked about in the vacant sky. Suddenly, in that still desert, a star shone forth, and wound its way towards the earth. She spread her arms in transport, and thought the angel of rest was rushing towards her. Alas! the star passed away, but she did not. "Not yet? Do I not die yet, All merciful One ?" sighed poor Rosamond.
In the east a cloud arose, it passed over the moon, sailed in loneliness across the clear sky, and stood over the most agonised heart upon earth. She threw back her head, so as to face the cloud, and said to the lightning, "Strike this head, and release my heart !" But the cloud passed darkly over the head that was thrown back for it, and flying down the sky, sunk behind the mountains. Then, with a thousand tears, she cried, "Can I not die ? Can I not die ?"
Poor Rosamond! How did pain roll itself together, give an angry serpent-spring at thy heart, and fix in it all its poisonous teeth. But a weeping spirit poured the opium of insensibility into thine heart, and the bursts of agony flowed away in a soft convulsion.
She awoke in the morning, but her mind was unsettled. She saw the sun and the dead man, but her eye had lost all tears, and her burst heart had, like a broken bell, lost all tone; she merely murmured, "Why can I not die?" She went back cold into her hut, and said nothing but these words. Every night she went half an hour later to the corpse, and every time she met the rising moon, which was now broken, and said, while she turned her mourning, tearless eye towards its gleaming meadows, "Why cannot I die?"
Ay, why canst thou not, good soul ? for the cold earth would have sucked out of all thy wounds the last venom with which the human heart is laid beneath its surface, just as the hand when buried in earth recovers from the sting of a bee. But I turn mine eye away from thy pain, and look up at the glimmering moon, where Eugenius opens his eyes among smiling children, and his own child, now with wings, falls upon his heart. How quiet is every thing in the dimly lit portico of the second world, a misty rain of light silvers o'er the bright fields of the first heaven, and beads of light instead of sparkling dew hang upon flowers and summits, the blue of heaven is darker over the lily plains, all the melodies in the thinner air are but a dispersed echo, only night-flowers exhale their scents, and dazzle waving around calmer glances here the waving plains rock as in a cradle the crushed souls, and the lofty billows of life fall gliding apartth en the heart sleeps, the eye becomes dry, the wish becomes silent. Children flutter like the hum of bees around the heart which is sunk in earth, and is still palpitating, and the dream after death represents the earthly life, as a dream here represents childhood here, magically, soothingly, softly, and free from care.
Eugenius looked from the moon towards the earth, which for a long moon-day - equal to two earthweeks - floated like a thin white cloud across the blue sky; but he did not recognise his old motherland. At last the sun set to the moon, and our earth rested, large, glimmering, and immoveable, on the pure horizon of Elysium, scattering, like a water-wheel upon a meadow, the flowing beams upon the waving Elysian garden. He then recognised the earth, upon which he had left a heart so troubled, in a breast so beloved; and his soul, which reposed in pleasure, became full of melancholy, and of an infinite longing after the beloved of his former life, who was suffering below. "Oh, my Rosamond! why dost thou not leave a sphere, where nothing more loves thee?" And he cast a supplicating look at the angel of rest, and said: "Beloved one, take me down from the land of quiet, and lead me to the faithful soul, that I may see her, and again feel pain, so that she may not pine alone."
Then his heart began suddenly, as it were, to float without any bounds; breezes fluttered around him, as though they raised him flying, wafted him away as they swelled, and veiled him in floods; he sank through the red evening twilights as through roses, and through the night as through bowers, and through a damp atmosphere which filled his eye with drops. Then it seemed as though old dreams of childhood had returned, then there arose a complaint from the distance, which re-opened all his closed wounds; the complaint, as it drew nearer, became Rosamond's voice, at last she herself was before him, unrecognisable, alone, without solace, without a tear, without colour.
And Rosamond dreamed upon the earth, and it was to her as though the sun took wings, and became an angel. This angel, she dreamed, drew down towards her the moon, which became a gentle face. Beneath this face, as it approached her, a heart at last formed itself. It was Eugenius, and his beloved arose to meet him. But as she exclaimed, with transport, "Now I am dead!" the two dreams, both hers and his, vanished, and the two were again severed.
Eugenius waked above, the glimmering earth still stood in the sky, his heart was oppressed, and his eye beamed with a tear which had not fallen on the moon. Rosamond waked below, and a large warm dew-drop hung in one of the flowers of her bosom. Then did the last mist of her soul shower down in a light rain of tears, her soul became light and sun-clear, and her eye hung gently on the dawning sky; the earth was indeed strange to her, but no longer hateful; and her hands moved as though they were leading those who had died.
The angel of rest looked upon the moon, and looked upon the earth, and he was softened by the sighs from both. On the morning-earth he perceived an eclipse of the sun, and a bereft one; he saw Rosamond during this transient night sink upon the flowers that slept in the darkness, and into the cold evening-dew which fell upon the morning-dew, and stretching forth her hands towards the shaded heaven, which was full of nightbirds, look up towards the moon with inexpressible longing, as it floated trembling in the sun. The angel looked upon the moon, and near him wept the departed one, who saw the earth swimming deep below, a flood of shade, fitted into a ring of fire, and from whom the mourning form that dwelt upon it, took all the happiness of heaven. Then was the heavenly heart of the angel of peace broken, he seized the hand of Eugenius and that of his child, drew both through the second world, and bore them down to the dark earth. Rosamond saw three forms wandering through the obscurity, the gleam from whom reached the starry heaven, and went along hovering over them. Her beloved and her child flew like spring-days to her heart, and said, "Oh, thou dear one, come with us!" Her maternal heart broke with maternal love, the circulation of earth-blood was stopped, her life was ended; and happily, happily, did she stammer forth to the two beloved hearts, "Can I not then die?" "Thou hast died already," said the angel of the three fond ones, weeping with joy, "Yonder thou seest the sphere of earth, whence thou comest, still in shade." And the waves of joy closed on high over the blessed world, and all the happy and all children looked upon our sphere which still trembled in the shade.
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Yea, indeed, is it in shade ! But man is higher than his place. He looks up and spreads the wings of his soul, and when the sixty minutes, which we call sixty years, have finished striking, he then lifts himself up, and kindles himself as he rises, and the ashes of his plumage fall back, and the unveiled soul rises alone, free from earth, and pure as a musical tone. But here, in the midst of dark life, he sees the mountains of the future world standing in the morning gold of a sun that does not arise here. Thus, the inhabitant of the North Pole in the long night, when the sun has ceased to rise, discerns at twelve o'clock, a dawn gilding the highest mountains, and he thinks of his long summer, when it will set no more.
Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, 1763 – 1825,
was a German Romantic writer, best known for his humorous novels and stories.
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