heart-contained spirit-world, which breaks through the dark clouds of the body-world as a warm sun. I mean the inner universe of virtue, beauty, and truth; three soul-worlds and heavens, which are neither parts, nor shoots, nor cuttings, nor copies of the outer one. We are less astonished at the inexplicable existence of these three transcendent heavens, because they are ever floating before us, and because we foolishly imagine we create them, while we merely recognize them. After which copy, with what plastic material, and of what, could we create and insert in ourselves[24] this same spirit-world? Let the atheist ask himself how he conceived the giant ideal of a God, which he either denies or embodies? An idea which has not been built upon comparative greatness and degrees, for it is the contrary of every measure and of every created greatness. In short, the atheist denies the great original of the copy.[25]
"As there are idealists of the outer world who believe that perception makes objects, instead of that objects cause perception, so there are idealists of the inner world, who deduct the being from the seeming, the sound from the echo, the fact from its appearance; instead of, on the contrary, the seeming from the being, our consciousness from the objects of it. We mistake our power of analyzing our inner world, for its preformation, i.e. the genealogist thinks himself both originator and founder.
"This inner universe, which is still more glorious and admirable than the outer one, needs another heaven than the one above us, and a higher world than one a sun now shines upon. Therefore we rightly say, not a second earth or globe, but a second world,--another beyond the universe."
Gione already interrupted me: "And every virtuous and wise being is in himself a proof of immortality." "And every one," added Nadine, quickly, "who suffers innocently."
"Yes, it is that," said I, with emotion, "which extends our line of life through countless ages. The chord of Virtue, Truth, and Beauty, taken from the music of the spheres, calls us from this dark oppressive earth, and announces to us the nearness of a more melodious existence. Why, and from whence were these super-earthly wants and longings created in us, if only, like swallowed diamonds, slowly to cut through our earthy shell. Why was a being endowed with wings of light chained to this dirty clump of earth, if it were to rot in its birth-clod, without ever being freed from it by means of its ethereal wings?"
Wilhelmi said, "I also like to dream the dream of a second life in the sleep of this first one. But may not our beautiful spiritual powers have been given to us for the enjoyment and preservation of the present life?"
"For its preservation?" I said. "Then an angel has been locked in the body to be the mute servant and fire-lighter, butler, cook, and porter of the stomach? Would not brutish souls have sufficed to drive man-bodies to the fruit-tree and the spring? Shall the pure ethereal flame only dry and bake the bodily patent stove with life-warmth, while it now slakes and dissolves it? For every tree of knowledge is the poison-tree of the body, and every mental refinement a slow-poison chalice. But, on the contrary, want is the iron key of freedom, the stomach is the manure-filled hot-house or manufactory of human blood, and the various animal instincts are but the earthy, soiled steps to the Grecian temple of our spiritual elevation.
"For enjoyment you said also. That means, we received the palate and appetite of a god, with the food for an animal. That portion of us which is of earth, and creeps on worm-folds, may and can, like the earthworm, be fed and fattened on earth. Exertion, bodily pain, the burning hunger of necessity, and the tumult of our senses exclude and choke the spiritual autumn bloom of humanity in nations and classes. All these conditions of terrestrial existence must be fulfilled ere the soul may claim its due. To the unhappy, therefore, who must be the business men and carriers of their bodily wants, the whole inner world seems but as an imaginary gilt cobweb, like the man who, breathing only the electrical atmosphere, instead of feeling the spark, thinks to grasp an invisible web. But when our necessary animal servitude is over, when the barking inner dog-kennel is fed, and the dog-fight finished, then the inner man demands his nectar and ambrosia, and if he is turned off with earth-food only, he changes to an angel of Death, and a Hellfiend, driving himself to suicide, or makes of him a poison-mixer who destroys all joy.[26] The eternal hunger in man, the insatiability of his heart, wants not a richer, but a different food, fruit, not grass. If our wants referred but to the degree, not to the quality, then the imagination, at least, might paint a degree of satiety. But imagination cannot make us happy, by showing us innumerable heaps of treasures, if they be other than Virtue, Truth, and Beauty."
"But the more beautiful soul?" asked Nadine. I answered, "This discrepancy between our wishes and our circumstances, the heart and the earth, will remain, an enigma, if we are immortal, and would be a blasphemy if we decay. Ah! how could the beautiful soul be happy? Strangers, born on mountains and living in lowland places, pine in an incurable homesickness. We belong to a higher place, and therefore an eternal longing consumes us, and every music is our soul's Swiss ranz des vaches. In the morning of life, the joys which hearken to the anxious wishes of our hearts are seen blooming for us in later years. When we have attained these years, we turn on the deceitful spot, and see behind us, pleasure blooming in the strong hopeful youth, and we enjoy instead of our hopes, the recollections of our hopes. Joy in this also resembles the rainbow, which in the morning shines over evening, and in the evening arches over the east. The eye may reach the light, but the arm is short, and holds but the fruit of the soil."
"And this proves?" asked the Chaplain.
"Not that we are unhappy, but that we are immortal, and that the second world in us demands, and proves a second world beyond us. O, how much might not be said of this second life whose commencement is so clearly shown in the first one, and which so strangely doubles us! Why is Virtue too exalted to make us, and, what is more, others (sensually) happy? Why does the incapability of being useful on earth (as the expression is) increase with a certain higher purity of character, as, according to Herschel, there are suns which have no earth? Why is our heart tortured, dried, consumed, and at last broken by a slow burning fever of ceaseless love for an unattainable object, only alleviated by the hope that this consumption, like a physical one, must one day be sheltered and raised by the ice cover of death?"
"No," said Gione, with more emotion in her eye than in her voice, "it is not ice, but lightning. When our heart lies a sacrifice on the altar, fire from heaven consumes it as a proof that the offering is accepted."
I know not why her calm voice so painfully disturbed my whole soul (not only my argument). Even Nadine's eyes, which triumphed over her own sorrows, were suffused with tears by her sister's, and, although she is generally more timid and fastidious than Gione, in passing a little garden, she raised from a projecting hairy potato-stalk, a large moth, and showed it to us with a firm mouth, which should have been softened by a smile.
It was the so-called Death's-head. I stroked the flat, drooping wings, and said, "It come? from Egypt, the land of mummies and graves; it bears a memento mori on its back, and a miserere in its plaintive voice." "In the mean time it is a butterfly, and visits the nectaries, which we day-birds will do also," appropriately observed Wilhelmi; but he took the words out of my mouth.
Gione's countenance again expressed thoughtful calmness, and to me she became immeasurably beautiful and grand by the stillness of her grief. You once said that the female soul, though it be pierced with burning shafts, must never beat its wings convulsively together, else, like other butterflies, it would destroy their beauty. How true is this!
Nadine's eyes seldom shone without at last overflowing, and every sorrowful emotion remained long in her heart, because she tried to guard against it. She resembled those springs which take a temperature opposed to the time of day, and which are warmest in the cool evening. She turned to me and said, putting her hand in her left pocket, "I will show
