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 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