for the Hour of Death.
The New-Year's Night of an Unhappy Man.
The Beauty of Death in the Bloom of Youth.
THE
Campaner Thal;
OR,
DISCOURSES ON THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL.
TRANSLATED BY JULIETTE BAUER.
"Report also, we regret to say, is all that we know of the Campaner Thal, one of Richter's beloved topics, or rather the life of his whole philosophy, glimpses of which look forth on us from almost every one of his writings. He died while engaged, under recent and almost total blindness, in enlarging and remodelling this Campaner Thal. The unfinished manuscript was borne upon his coffin to the burial vault; and Klopstock's hymn, Auferstehen wirst du! 'Thou shalt arise, my soul!' can seldom have been sung with more appropriate application than over the grave of Jean Paul."--From Carlyle's Miscellanies.
In my distilling processes, I frequently precipitated the phlegma of our earthball--its polar deserts, its Russian forests, its icebergs--and from the sediments extracted a beautiful by-earth, a small satellite. If we extract and regulate the charms of this old world, we can form a delightful though minutely condensed world.
For the caves of this miniature or ditto-earth, we will take the caves of Antiparos and of Baumann, for its plains, the Rhine provinces--Hybla, Thabor, and Mont Blanc shall be its mountains--its islands, the Friendly, the Holy, and the Palm isles. Wentworth's park and Daphne's grotto, and some corner-pieces from the Paphian, we have for its forests--for a charming valley, the Seifer's-dorfer and that of Campan. Thus we possess, besides this dirty, weary world, the most beautiful by or after-world--an important dessert service--an Ante-Heaven between Ante-Hells.
I have purposely included this valley of Campan in my extract and decoction, as I know none other in which I would rather awake, or die, or love than in this one; if I had to command, I would not permit my valley to be mixed up or placed beside the vale of Tempe or the Rose Valley, perhaps with Utopia. The reader must have known this valley in his geographical lessons, or in the works of Arthur Young, who praises it even more than I do.[1]
I must take for granted, that in July, 1796, the Goddess of Fortune descended from her throne to our earth, and placed in my hand--not mammon, nor garters, nor golden sheep--nothing but her own, and led me--by this I recognized the goddess--to the Campan vale. Truly, man needs but look into it, and he will have--as I had--more than the Devil offered to Christ and Louis XIV., and gave to the popes.
The test of enjoyment is memory. Only the paradises of the imagination willingly remain, and are never lost, but always conquered. Poetry alone reconciles the past to the future, and is the Orpheus's lyre which commands these two destroying rocks to rest.[2]
As stated, in the year 1796, I made a trip through France, with my friend H. Karlson. He is honorary master of horse in the * * * service. The wise public cares little for true names, it always treats them as fictitious ones, by way of literary taxation; and the existing characters, at least those of any importance, may prefer not to be torn over the wheel of criticism, and dragged piecemeal through libraries and reading-clubs. At almost every milestone, I despatched the best hourly bulletin to my friend Victor: when I had sent him the following valley-piece, he persecuted me until I promised to grant this illuminated portrait of nature, not alone to the letter, but also to the printing-press. Therefore I do it. I know already, my poor Victor sees, that in our days no green branch is left as a spinning-hut for the man-caterpillar, and that inimical divers try to cut our anchor-rope, sunk in the sea of death. Therefore he thinks more of the conversations on immortality, than of the valley in which they took place. I know this, because he calls me the counterpart of Claude Lorraine, who only drew the landscape, while another drew the human beings in it. Truly such a valley deserves that the mining and sabbath-lamp of truth should be lowered into the suffocating air of the grave, in place of our self, merely to see if that self can breathe at such a depth.
I have jokingly divided my letters into stations. I of course omit 500, and commence at the 501st, wherein I appear in the valley.
CAMPANER THAL.
The Diversities of Life.--The Dirge as Billet-Doux.--The Cavern.--The Surprise.
Campan, 23d July.
Here have I been since the day before yesterday. After descent into hell and purgatory, and passage through limbos infantum et patrum, man must at last reach heaven. But I owe you yet our exit from our inn on the 20th. Never can the head have a harder couch than when we hold it in our hands. The reason that this happened to Karlson and myself was, that in the rooms adjoining ours a wedding-dance was taking place, and that below, the youngest daughter of our maître d'hôtel, who had not only the name, but also the charms of Corday, with two white roses on her cheeks, and two red ones in her hair, was being interred, and that human beings with pale faces and heavy hearts waited on happy and blooming ones. When fate harnesses to Psyche's car, the merry and the mourning steed together, the mourning one ever takes the lead; i.e. if the muses of Mirth and Sorrow play on the same stage in the same hour, man does not, like Garrick,[3] follow the former; he does not even remain neuter, but takes the side of the mourning one. Thus we always paint, like Milton, our lost Paradise more glowing than the regained one,--like Dante, hell better than purgatory. In short, the silent corpse made us cold to the warm, joyful influence of the dancers. But is it not absurd, my dear Victor, that a man who, like myself, knows nothing better than that every hour unfolds at once morning bloom and evening clouds; that here an Ash Wednesday
