and there a black Monday commence; that such a man, who grieves little that dancing music and funeral marches should sound at the same time on the broad national theatre of humanity, should yet hang his head and grow pale, when, in a side scene, this double music sounds in his ears? Is not this as absurd as all his other doings?
Into Karlson's eyes something of this cloud had fallen. It was to him the restirred ashes of a funeral urn. He can withstand all sorrows, but not their recollection. He has replaced his years by lands, and the space he has travelled over must be called his time. But the firm youth changed color when he came to tell that the lover of the pale Corday had torn her folded taper hands asunder, and, on his knees, had dragged them to his burning lips.
He perceived his paleness in the glass; and to explain it, he imparted the last and most secret leaf of his life's Robinsonade to me. You see what an opaque gem this youth is, who follows his friends through all France, without opening to his communicative friend and travelling companion, even a fold or a loophole in his relation to them. Now only from emotion on entering the Campan Vale, he draws the key from the keyhole, which shall become a prompter's hole for you.
That he had accompanied the Baron Wilhelmi and his betrothed Gione, with her sister Nadine, to Lausanne, in order to celebrate their Arcadian marriage in the Campan Vale, you know already; that he had left them suddenly at Lausanne, and returned to the Rhine fall at Shaffhausen, you know also, but not the reason, which will now be related to you by me and by him.
By daily contact Karlson had at last penetrated the thickly-woven veil, magically colored by betrothed love, thrown over the strong, firm, and kindred mind of Gione. Probably others discovered him ere he had discovered himself. His heart became like the so-called world's eye[4] in water, first bright, then varying its colors, then dull and misty, and at last transparent. Not to cloud their beautiful intimacy, he addressed the suspicious part of his attentions to Nadine. He did not explain to me clearly whether he had led her into a beautiful error, without taking a beautiful truth from Gione.
The sword of death seemed likely to separate all these stage knots. Gione, the healthy and calm Gione, was suddenly attacked by a nervous disorder. One evening, Wilhelmi, with his usual poetic ardor, entered Karlson's chamber weeping, and, embracing him, could only sob forth the words, "She is no more."
Karlson said not a word, but in the tumult of his own and others' griefs, departed that night for Shaffhausen, and probably fled at the same time from a beloved and a loving one,--from Gione and from Nadine. By this eternal waterspout of the Rhine, this onward pressing, molten avalanche, this gleaming perpendicular milky-way, his soul was slowly healed; but he was long imprisoned in the dark, cold, serpent's-nest of envenomed pains; they entwined and crawled over him, even to his heart. For he believed, as most world-men among whom he had grown up do,--perhaps, also, too much accustomed to analyzed ideas and opinions by his favorite study, chemistry,--that our last sleep is annihilation, as in the epopee the first man imagined the first sleep to be the first death.
To Wilhelmi he only sent the name of his retreat and a poem, entitled, "Grief-without Hope," which declared his disbelief, for he had never broken the Ambrosia, whose delights a trust in immortality affords. But just that strengthened his enfeebled heart, that the muses led him to Hippocrene's spring of health.
Wilhelmi answered, that he had read his beautiful requiem to the deceased, or the immortal one. A long swoon had occasioned the painful mistake. Gione and he entreated him to follow speedily. Karlson replied: "Fate had separated him from their beautiful feast by the Alpine Wall, but as it would, like the Campan Vale, ever renew its springs, he hoped to lose nothing but time by his delay."
Now that the next world had cast its supernatural light on Gione's countenance, Karlson loved her too much to be capable of assisting at the ceremony of losing her forever. I will give you the opinion I formed of her by listening to his description.
Even by a love and a praise in a person's absence we may be won; how much more, then, if both are thrown to us as farewell kisses after the ascent to Heaven! Therefore the idea of the future funeral procession behind my gay, richly decorated dust, onion and relic box is only another incentive, not only to drug, but also to absolve myself, for when older we are less missed. And even you, who so seldom hang us, or drive us all to the Devil, I mean, how seldom soever the tempest of anger sours the beer-barrel of your breast! Even you have no more efficacious morsel of white chalk, no better oleum tartari per deliquium,[5] with which you can sweeten your internal fluids, than the thought how we shall all turn pale round your death-bed, and be dumb at your grave-mound, and how none will forget you! I cannot possibly believe that there exists one being who, when death draws him into the diving-bell of the grave, will not leave one weeping eye, one bending head behind, and therefore each one can love the soul which will some time weep for him.
When I think now of the convalescent Gione, with her wounded heart, which had received a new sensitiveness in the hot electric atmosphere of the sinking thunderbolt of Death, I need not measure her emotion at Karlson's poem, by the dew and hygrometer, nor with the loadstone of her love. But not Wilhelmi's brilliant riches, nor his still more brilliant conduct, her first choice, her first promise, forbade her even to touch the diamond scales.
When Karlson told me all this, he turned Gione's ring-portrait upwards on his finger, and pressed the hard edge of the ring-finger with his tearful eyes, till the adorned hand was unconsciously touched by the lip's kiss. The bashfulness of his grief moved me so much, that I offered to take another route into the Vale, under the pretence that the dreams of it had lessened the desire for the reality, and that we should disturb the newly-affianced in their first rose-honey days, as they had probably waited for the mild late spring. He divined my intention; but his promise to come to-morrow dragged him by chains. Right gladly would I have missed the new spring-filled Eden, and drawn from my friend's feet the Jacob's ladder from which he might gaze on his former glad heaven, but could not ascend to it. On the other hand, I rejoiced at his firm, promise-keeping character, which opposed its strong nature to the thorns and boring-worms of sorrow; as with the increase of moonlight, tempests decrease. Unperceived, I now added Gione, not only Karlson, to the list of rare beings, who, like Raphael's and Plato's works, uncloud themselves only on earnest contemplation, and who, as both, resemble the Pleiades, which to the naked eye seems only to have seven suns, but with a telescope discloses more than forty.
On the 20th, we started towards the Vale. On the way, I looked too often into Karlson's faithful, heavenly, deep-blue eyes. I descended into his heart, and sought the scene of the day on which the holy church tie would tear the noble Gione forever from out his pure muse and goddess-warmed heart. I confess I can imagine no day on which I regard my friend with deeper emotion that on that never-to-be-forgotten one, on which Fate gives him the brother kiss, the hand-pressure, the land of love and Philadelphia and Vaucluse's spring, united in one female heart.
The day before yesterday, at ten in the evening, we arrived at Wilhelmi's Arcadian dwelling, which pressed its straw roof against a green marble wall. Karlson found it easily from its proximity to the famed Campan Cave, from which he had often broken stalactites. The sky was clouded with colored shadows, and on the green cradle of slumbering children night threw her star-embroidered cradle-cover, fastened to the summits of the Pyrenees. From out Wilhelmi's hermitage advanced some men in black attire, with torches in their hands, who seemed to be waiting for us, and told us the baron was in the Cave. By heaven, under such circumstances, it is easier to imagine the most circumscribed, than the largest and most beautiful Cave! The sable attendants carried the flame before them, and drew the flying smoke-picture from oak-top to oak-top, and led us, stooping, through the catacomb entrance. But how splendidly was arched the high and wide grotto,[6] with its crystal sides, shining like an illumined ice Louvre, a gleaming sub-terrestrial heaven vault. Wilhelmi threw away a handful of gathered spars, and joyfully hastened into his friend's arms. Gione, with her sister, advanced from behind a connected stalactite and stalagmite. The gleaming of the torches
