A SUMMER STORM, AND LOVE
The foregoing conversations with Ottilia and her teacher,
hard as they were for passion to digest, grew luminous
on a relapsing heart. Without apprehending either
their exact purport or the characters of the speakers,
I was transformed by them from a state of craving to
one of intense quietude. I thought neither of
winning her, nor of aiming to win her, but of a foothold
on the heights she gazed at reverently. And if,
sometimes, seeing and hearing her, I thought, Oh, rarest
soul! the wish was, that brother and sisterhood of
spirit might be ours. My other eager thirstful
self I shook off like a thing worn out. Men in
my confidence would have supposed me more rational:
I was simply possessed.
My desire was to go into harness, buried in books,
and for recreation to chase visions of original ideas
for benefiting mankind. A clear-wined friend
at my elbow, my dear Temple, perhaps, could have hit
on the track of all this mental vagueness, but it
is doubtful that he would have pushed me out of the
strange mood, half stupor, half the folding-in of
passion; it was such magical happiness. Not to
be awake, yet vividly sensible; to lie calm and reflect,
and only to reflect; be satisfied with each succeeding
hour and the privations of the hour, and, as if in
the depths of a smooth water, to gather fold over
patient fold of the submerged self, safe from wounds;
the happiness was not noble, but it breathed and was
harmless, and it gave me rest when the alternative
was folly and bitterness.
Visitors were coming to the palace to meet the prince,
on his return with my father from England. I
went back to the University, jealous of the invasion
of my ecstatic calm by new faces, and jealous when
there of the privileges those new faces would enjoy;
and then, how my recent deadness of life cried out
against me as worse than a spendthrift, a destroyer!
a nerveless absorbent of the bliss showered on me—the
light of her morning presence when, just before embracing,
she made her obeisance to the margravine, and kindly
saluted me, and stooped her forehead for the baroness
to kiss it; her gestures and her voice; her figure
on horseback, with old Warhead following, and I meeting
her but once!—her walk with the Professor,
listening to his instructions; I used to see them walking
up and down the cypress path of the villa garden, her
ear given to him wholly as she continued her grave
step, and he shuffling and treading out of his line
across hers, or on the path-borders, and never apologizing,
nor she noticing it. At night she sang, sometimes
mountain ditties to the accompaniment of the zither,
leaning on the table and sweeping the wires between
snatches of talk. Nothing haunted me so much as
those tones of, her zither, which were little louder
than summer gnats when fireflies are at their brightest
and storm impends.
