Hesperus; or, Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days: A Biography. Vol. II.Jean Paul
General
Hesperus; or, Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days: A Biography. Vol. II.
Jean Paul
Fiction
At last they arrived at the evening-bower and at Emanuel's flowers,
namely, at the snow-white hyacinths, in whose shadow the irradiated
evening-fountain tinged a pale red. O, how sweetly, how sweetly, there,
breathed the warmth of the evening sun and the coolness of the evening
wind!--But why droop thy eye and head, Clotilda, so sadly here toward
the flowers? Is it because the water-column is extinguished, because
the sun goes down?--No; but because the white hyacinths, in the
language of the florists, mean _Julia_,--O because the churchyard looks
over hither, whose tall, swaying wildflowers stand with their roots
over two beloved eyes, over the eyes of the pale hyacinth Giulia, who
has not lived to see to-day's festival.----But Clotilda concealed
herself, so as to disturb nothing.
The last sparkling gold of the water-columns and the evening-blaze
flung back from all the windows, turned all eyes toward the sun, who
sank behind his stage.--But a rolling fire-wheel of the allegro, with
which the harmonists on the meadow accompanied the retiring sun,
brought down the eyes to the level of the ears, and below on the veiled
meadow there rose a new theatre of joy with new players.... Two roses
were planted in heaven, the red, the sun, which unfolded its buds over
the second hemisphere, and the white, the moon, which hung low in ours;
but sun-gold and lunar silver and evening-slags were as yet absorbed by
a smoking magic-haze, and one could not separate the shadows from the
silver ground of the moonlight, and blossoms fluttering downward were
still confounded with night-butterflies.
The happy party went down through the chestnut avenue to the younger
happy ones, the children, who, made more bold by the presence of their
mothers, encircled and girdled twenty liberty-trees in changeable
groups, and waited only for deeper shadows to dance more briskly. The
Englishman was welcomed by Clotilda as a friend of her two friends. The
bridal pair, to whom the meadow belonged as an inheritance, had
exchanged their own music for this, and their feast of the covenant in
its solemnity brought nearer to our hero the joyous day when he too
should be able to call his Clotilda a bride; but he had not the courage
to turn his blushing face towards her, because he thought she was
thinking the same thing, and was red also. Only a lover can sympathize
with the inspiration of a bridal pair; and never did fairer wishes go
up for one than ascended for this one in two souls full of love. A
four-years-old sister of the bride attached herself to Clotilda,--the
former was the little Luna of this Venus in her walks,--and the latter
gladly discharged her love into the little hand which gave hers the
preference over a dancing partner.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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