of earths, would persuade us that the enlargement of worlds and beings is a sign of their improvement. But over the whole sky there hang only earth and fire-balls, and all things on them, from milk-way to milk-way, are less than the wishes and longings of our hearts. Then why should our earth alone, why not every other also, be progressing? why should they, rather than we, have the start in this inaugural eternity? In short, it may be disputed if in the whole universe there are other angels and archangels than Victor and Jean Paul. It seems scarcely credible to me. But truly the melodious progression to sublime beings has hitherto been merely taken for granted. I believe in a harmonious one, in an eternal ascension, but in no created culmination.
I presume Karlson intended to answer my argument, not on the seraphs, but on ephemera, when Nadine, who had borrowed the fly in order to examine it, held it too near her eyes, and thereby disturbed and extinguished our Mendelssohn-Platonic conversation. For Madame Berlier (such was the noble name of our temporary hostess) stepped up to Nadine, and said: "It is a pity for the pain. You must take the wart-locust, I have proofs," do you understand? It is this. The so-called wart-eater, a locust with light brown spots, takes away a wart in a very short time by a single bite. Dame Berlier, over whom, as over most Southrons, beauty had greater power than self-love and sex, had falsely imagined that Nadine wished to annihilate the only fault in her charming form with the fly. The Chaplain had scarcely heard the wart-eater mentioned, when he vanished among the green, and commenced a hunt for wart-locusts. I was vexed that I had known the remedy as well as Dame Berlier, and never thought of it. For a shabby simile I should have easily recollected it, but not for a useful cure. Fortune permitted him soon to return with the winged wart-operator; this excited my envy. When he gave it to Nadine, the officious Phylax had squeezed, with the letter and paper press of his hands, like in a good calendar-press, the brown spotted vegetable-eater to--death. The animal could bite no more; I immediately darted off in search of another, and soon returned, holding one by the tips of its wings, and said, I would myself hold it over the wart until he would operate on it. While performing the action I praised it. Every great deed, I said, is only accomplished in the soul, at the moment of determination; when it comes outward and is repeated by the body,--which holds the locust,--it disperses into insignificant movements and thirds; but when it is done, as now the operation, it becomes great again, and, ever increasing, flows onward through all time. Thus the Rhine rushes like a giant from its summit, disperses in the fog, falls as rain upon the plain, then it forms itself into clouds, and roams over the sands, and carries suns instead of rainbows.
It need not be concealed from you that it affected me to look into the retina of two such bright and warm, upturned eyes, without mentioning the whole warlike array of curls and lips, and forehead, and the Waterloo landscapes of the cheeks. Nadine's terror at the teeth of the brown little doctor made her more charming, and the danger of my situation greater. After holding it for some time, when I thought the operation was finished, she told me the locust had not yet touched her, as I held it two or three Parisian feet too far from the wart. It is true, I had lost myself in her net skin; but I remarked that the cure could not be accomplished, if I did not rest the ball of my right hand slightly on her cheek, in order to hold the wart-eater more firmly over the wart. Now he bit the required wound, and propelled into it as much of his corrosive fluid as he carried with him. I artfully diverted Nadine's pain, which resembled that of a pin pricking, by philosophizing. Man, I said, finds the stoic theory true and forcible for all pain, only not for the present. And when he bleeds from cut wounds, he imagines bruises heal more easily. He therefore defers his practice of the stoic-school until his own schooling is over. O, but then he stands by a running stream, waiting until the waters shall have passed. True firmness bears the bite of a locust, and rejoices at the trial!
Now the operation was happily accomplished, which could easily excite an illness in me. It is true that her countenance had inflicted a deeper wound on me than the wart-eater upon it,--I should fear and examine whether mine, which was just as near to hers, had done as much damage; but Nadine is exceedingly--young. The hearts of young girls, like new waterbutts, at first let everything drop through, until in time, the vessels swell and thus retain their contents.
Objections To Immortality.--The Second Childhood of the Outer and Inner Man.
We broke up and proceeded. On high, light feathers floated through the sky, like the loose-flowing hair of the sun, which could not veil it. The day became hotter and stiller. But our path lay beneath a green roof, and each branch spread over us a parasol of broad fresh leaves.
Gione asked, "Can we not continue our conversation in walking?" O, your Clotilde should know her; she has, excepting her charms, half her soul. No discord exists between her outer and inner harmony; her earnest, generous soul resembles the palm-tree, which has neither bark nor branches, but which bears broad foliage and buds on its summit. "Gione," said Nadine, "these arguments unsettle our minds, instead of removing our doubts." "No one," she replied, "has yet given his opinion; if we even have the firmest convictions, still by their beautiful conformity with another's convictions our own become more beautiful and firm." "Just as water-plants, surrounded by their water, are yet as much refreshed by rain as land plants are," said Myrtil (I am Myrtil).
Wilhelmi said, just as we were passing through the Midsummer's-day night of a grotto cooled by oakshade and cascades: "Our conversation would better suit a total eclipse of the sun. I would that I could see one, when the moon hangs beauteously before the midday sun, when the noisy day is suddenly hushed, when the nightingales sing, the flowers fade, and when nightly mists and shuddering cold and dew fall." Phylax had now let slip his sofa-cushion into a murmuring spring; Nadine saw it, and, not to confuse him in the act of drawing it out, she, with charming zeal, drove us back to our conversation. Her intercourse with the world had given her a playful, light, ever-joyous exterior. But Gione's style, like the highest Grecian, is, artistically speaking, somewhat meagre and spare,--and the ball-rooms had made her, as mahogany presses make dresses, more agreeable. But her exterior charms did not contradict or injure her interior beauty.
I said to Karlson, "Pray, prove to us the spiritual mortality, this soul's death." "M. Karlson needs not do that," answered the stupid Phylax, vexed at the wet cushion, "only the assertor must prove."
"Very well," I said, "I call proofs objections, but I shall certainly give you only two;--firstly, the proof or objection: the simultaneous decay and destruction of the body and of the soul; secondly, the absolute impossibility of ascertaining the mode of life of a future existence, or as the Chaplain would say, to see into the spiritual world from the sensuous one. Now, M. Karlson, throw your two bombs into the greatest possible angles, which, according to Hennert, is 40 degrees, but according to Bezout, 43 degrees."
He aimed well. He showed how the spiritual Dryad flowered, burst and dispersed with the corporeal bark, how the noblest impulses are chained to the lead--earth, revolving wheel of the body; how memory, imagination, and madness only feed on the egg-yolk of the brain,--how bravery and mildness stand in as opposite degree to blood as leeches and Jews;[16] how, in age, the inner and outer man together bend towards the grave, together petrify, together, like metal compositions, slowly cool, and at last together die!
He then asked why, with the continual experience that every bodily down-bending digs a spiritual wound, and with this unceasing parallel of body and soul, we give to the latter, after death, everything which we have seen annihilated in the former. He said, and I believe it, that neither Bonnet's underbody, nor the incorporated soul corsets of Plattner (the "second soul organ") can diminish the difficulty of the question, for as both soul's under-garments or night-gowns and pinafores, always share, in life, the good and bad fate of the coarse, corporeal coat and martyr-cloak,
