Hyperion Part 27

Will, if looking well can't move her,

Looking ill prevail?

Pr'ythee why so pale?

'Why so dull and mute, young sinner;

Pr'ythee why so mute?

Will, if speaking well can't win her,

Saying nothing do 't?

Pr'ythee why so mute?

'Quit, quit, for shame! this cannot move,

This cannot take her!

If of herself she do not love,

Nothing will make her!

The devil take her!'

How do you like that?"

"To you I say quit, quit for shame;" replied Flemming. "Why quote the songs of that witty and licentious age? Have you no better consolation to offer me? How many, many times must I tell you, that I bear the lady no ill-will. I do not blame her for not loving me. I desire her happiness, even at the sacrifice of my own."

"That is generous in you, and deserves a better fate. But you are so figurative in all you say, that a stranger would think you had no real feeling,--and only fancied yourself in love."

"Expression of feeling is different with different minds. It is not always simple. Some minds, when excited, naturally speak in figures and similitudes. They do not on that account feel less deeply. This is obvious in our commonest modes of speech. It depends upon the individual."

"Kyrie Eleeson!"

"Well, abuse my figures of speech as much as you please. What I insist upon is, that you shall not abuse the lady. When did you ever hear me breathe a whisper against her?"

"Oho! Now you speak like Launce to his dog!"

Their conversation, which had begun so merrily, was here suddenly interrupted by a rattling peal of thunder, that announced a near-approaching storm. It was late in the afternoon, and the whole heaven black with low, trailing clouds. Still blacker the storm came sailing up majestically from the southwest, with almost unbroken volleys of distant thunder. The wind seemed to be storming a cloud redoubt; and marched onward with dust, and the green banners of the trees flapping in the air, and heavy cannonading, and occasionally an explosion, like the blowing up of a powder-wagon. Mingled with this was the sound of thunder-bells from a village not far off. They were all ringing dolefully to ward off the thunderbolt. At the entrance of the village stood a large wooden crucifix; around which was a crowd of priests and peasants, kneeling in the wet gra.s.s, by the roadside, with their hands and eyes lifted toheaven, and praying for rain. Their prayer was soon answered.

The travellers drove on with the driving wind and rain. They had come from Landeck, and hoped to reach Innsbruck before midnight.

Night closed in, and Flemming fell asleep with the loud storm overhead, and at his feet the roaring Inn, a mountain torrent leaping onward as wild and restless, as when it first sprang from its cradle in the solitudes of Engaddin; meet emblem of himself, thus rus.h.i.+ng through the night. His slumber was long, but broken; and at length he awoke in terror; for he heard a voice p.r.o.nounce in his ear distinctly these words;

"They have brought the dead body."

They were driving by a churchyard at the entrance of a town; and among the tombs a dim lamp was burning before an image of the Virgin. It had a most unearthly appearance. Flemming almost feared to see the congregation of the dead go into the church and sing their midnight ma.s.s. He spoke to Berkley; but received no answer; he was in a deep sleep.

"Then it was only a dream," said he to himself; "yet how distinct the voice was! O, if we had spiritual organs, to see and hear things now invisible and inaudible to us, we should behold the whole air filled with the departing souls of that vast mult.i.tude which every moment dies,--should behold them streaming up like thin vapors heaven-ward, and hear the startling blast of the archangel's trump sounding incessant through the universe and proclaiming the awful judgment day. Truly the soul departs not alone on its last journey, but spirits of its kind attend it, when not ministering angels; and they go in families to the unknown land! Neither in life nor in death are we alone."

He slept again at intervals; and at length, though long after midnight, reached Innsbruck between sleeping and waking; his mind filled with dim recollections of the unspeakably dismal night-journey;--the climbing of hills, and plunging into dark ravines;--the momentary rattling of the wheels over paved streets of towns, and the succeeding hollow rolling and tramping on the wetearth;--the blackness of the night;--the thunder and lightning and rain; the roar of waters, leaping through deep chasms by the road-side, and the wind through the mountain-pa.s.ses, sounding loud and long, like the irrepressible laughter of the G.o.ds.

The travellers on the morrow lingered not long in Innsbruck. They did not fail, however, to visit the tomb of Maximilian in the Franciscan Church of the Holy Cross, and gaze with some admiration upon the twenty-eight gigantic bronze statues of G.o.dfrey of Bouillon, and King Arthur and Ernest the Iron-man, and Frederick of the Empty Pockets, kings and heroes, and others, which stand leaning on their swords between the columns of the church, as if guarding the tomb of the dead. These statues reminded Flemming of the bronze giants, which strike the hours on the belfry of San Ba.s.so, in Venice, and of the flail-armed monsters, that guarded the gateway of Angulaffer's castle in Oberon. After gazing awhile at these motionless sentinels, they went forth, and strolled throughthe public gardens, with the jagged mountains right over their heads, and all around them tall, melancholy pines, like Tyrolese peasants, with s.h.a.ggy hair; and at their feet the mad torrent of the Inn, sweeping with turbid waves through the midst of the town. In the afternoon they drove on towards Salzburg through the magnificent mountain-pa.s.ses of Waidering and Unken.

CHAPTER III. SHADOWS ON THE WALL.

On the following morning Flemming awoke in a chamber of the Golden s.h.i.+p at Salzburg, just as the clock in the Dome-church opposite was striking ten. The window-shutters were closed, and the room nearly dark. He was lying on his back, with his hands crossed upon his breast, and his eyes looking up at the white curtains overhead. He thought them the white marble canopy of a tomb, and himself the marble statue, lying beneath. When the clock ceased striking, the eight and twenty gigantic bronze statues from the Church of Holy Rood in Innsbruck stalked into the chamber, and arranged themselves along the walls, which spread into dimly-lighted aisles and arches. On the painted windows he saw Interlachen, withits Franciscan cloister, and the Square Tower of the ruins. In a pendent, overhead, stood the German student, as Saint Vitus; and on a lavatory, or basin of holy-water, below, sat a cherub, with the form and features of Berkley. Then the organ-pipes began to blow, and he heard the voices of an invisible choir chanting. And anon the gilded gates in the bronze screen before the chancel opened, and a bridal procession pa.s.sed through. The bride was clothed in the garb of the Middle Ages; and held a book in her hand, with velvet covers, and golden clasps. It was Mary Ashburton. She looked at him as she pa.s.sed. Her face was pale; and there were tears in her sweet eyes.

Then the gates closed again; and one of the oaken poppy-heads over a carved stall, in the shape of an owl, flapped its broad wings, and hooted, "Towhit! to-whoo!" Then the whole scene changed; and he thought himself a monk's-head on a gutterspout; and it rained dismally; and Berkley was standing under with an umbrella, laughing!

In other words, Flemming was in a ragingfever, and delirious. He remained in this state for a week. The first thing he was conscious of was hearing the doctor say to Berkley;

"The crisis is pa.s.sed. I now consider him out of danger."

He then fell into a sweet sleep; the wild fever had swept away like an angry, red cloud, and the refres.h.i.+ng summer rain began to fall like dew upon the parched earth. Still another week; and Flemming was, "sitting clothed, and in his right mind." Berkley had been reading to him; and still held the book in his hand, with his fore-finger between the leaves. It was a volume of Hoffmann's writings.

"How very strange it is," said he, "that you can hardly open the biography of any German author, but you will find it begin with an account of his grandfather. It will tell you how the venerable old man walked up and down the garden among the gay flowers, wrapped in his morning gown, which is likewise covered with flowers, and perhaps wearing on his head a little velvet cap. Oryou will find him sitting by the chimney-corner in the great chair, smoking his ancestral pipe, with s.h.a.ggy eyebrows and eyes like birdsnests under the eaves of a house, and a mouth like a Nuremberg nutcracker's. The future poet climbs upon the old man's knees. His genius is not recognised yet. He is thought for the most part a dull boy. His father is an austere man, or perhaps dead. But the mother is still there, a sickly, saint-like woman, with knitting-work, and an elder sister, who has already been in love, and wears rings on her fingers;--

'Death's heads, and such mementos,

Her grandmother and worm-eaten aunts left to her,

To tell her what her beauty must arrive at.'"

"But this is not the case with the life of Hoffmann, if I recollect right."

"No, not precisely. Instead of the grandfather we have the grandmother, a stately dame, who has long since shaken hands with the vanities of life. The mother, separated from her husband, is sick in mind and body, and flits to and fro, like a shadow. Then there is an affectionate maiden aunt; and an uncle, a retired judge, the terror of little boys,--the Giant Despair of this Doubting Castle in Koenigsberg; and occasionally the benign countenance of a venerable grand-uncle, whom Lamotte Fouque called a hero of the olden time in morning gown and slippers, looks in at the door and smiles. In the upper story of the same house lived a poor boy with his mother, who was so far crazed as to believe herself to be the Virgin Mary, and her son the Saviour of the world. Wild fancies, likewise, were to sweep through the brain of that child. He was to meet Hoffmann elsewhere and be his friend in after years, though as yet they knew nothing of each other. This was Werner, who has made some noise in German literature as the author of many wild Destiny-Dramas."

"Hoffmann died, I believe, in Berlin."

"Yes. He left Koenigsberg at twenty years of age, and pa.s.sed the next eight years of his life in the Prussian-Polish Provinces, where he held some petty office under government; and took to himselfmany bad habits and a Polish wife. After this he was Music-Director at various German theatres, and led a wandering, wretched life for ten years. He then went to Berlin as Clerk of the Exchange, and there remained till his death, which took place some seven or eight years afterward."

"Did you ever see him?"

"I was in Berlin during his lifetime, and saw him frequently. I shall never forget the first time. It was at one of the aesthetic Teas, given by a literary lady Unter den Linden, where the lions were fed with convenient food, from tea and bread and b.u.t.ter, up to oysters and Rhine-wine. During the evening my attention was arrested by the entrance of a strange little figure, with a wild head of brown hair. His eyes were bright gray; and his thin lips closely pressed together with an expression of not unpleasing irony. This strangelooking personage began to bow his way through the crowd, with quick, nervous, hinge-like motions, much resembling those of a marionette. He had a hoa.r.s.e voice, and such a rapid utterance, that although I understood German well enough for ordinary purposes, I could not understand one half he said. Ere long he had seated himself at the piano-forte, and was improvising such wild, sweet fancies, that the music of one's dreams is not more sweet and wild.

Then suddenly some painful thought seemed to pa.s.s over his mind, as if he imagined, that he was there to amuse the company. He rose from the piano-forte, and seated himself in another part of the room; where he began to make grimaces, and talk loud while others were singing. Finally he disappeared, like a hobgoblin, laughing, 'Ho!

ho! ho!' I asked a person beside me who this strange being was.

'That was Hoffmann,' was the answer. 'The Devil!' said I. 'Yes,'

continued my informant; 'and if you should follow him now, you would see him plunge into an obscure and unfrequented wine-cellar, and there, amid boon companions, with wine and tobacco-smoke, and quirks and quibbles, and quaint, witty sayings, turn the dim night into glorious day.'"

"What a strange being!"

"I once saw him at one of his night-carouses. He was sitting in his glory, at the head of the table; not stupidly drunk, but warmed with wine, which made him madly eloquent, as the Devil's Elixir did the Monk Medardus. There, in the full tide of witty discourse, or, if silent, his gray, hawk eye flas.h.i.+ng from beneath his matted hair, and taking note of all that was grotesque in the company round him, sat this unfortunate genius, till the day began to dawn. Then he found his way homeward, having, like the souls of the envious in Purgatory, his eyelids sewed together with iron wire;--though his was from champagne bottles. At such hours he wrote his wild, fantastic tales. To his excited fancy everything a.s.sumed a spectral look. The shadows of familiar things about him stalked like ghosts through the haunted chambers of his soul; and the old portraits on the walls winked at him, and seemed stepping down from their frames; till, aghast at the spectral throng about him, he would call his wife from her bed, to sit by him while he wrote."

"No wonder he died in the prime of life!"