The Pilgrims of the Rhine
CHAPTER II. THE LOVERS.
I WISH only for such readers as give themselves heart and soul up tome,--if they begin to cavil I have done with them; their fancy shouldput itself entirely under my management; and, after all, ought they notto be too glad to get out of this hackneyed and melancholy world, to berun away with by an author who promises them something new?
From the heights of Bruges, a Mortal and his betrothed gazed upon thescene below. They saw the sun set slowly amongst purple masses of cloud,and the lover turned to his mistress and sighed deeply; for her cheekwas delicate in its blended roses, beyond the beauty that belongs tothe hues of health; and when he saw the sun sinking from the world, thethought came upon him that _she_ was his sun, and the glory thatshe shed over his life might soon pass away into the bosom of the"ever-during Dark." But against the clouds rose one of the many spiresthat characterize the town of Bruges; and on that spire, tapering intoheaven, rested the eyes of Gertrude Vane. The different objects thatcaught the gaze of each was emblematic both of the different channel oftheir thoughts and the different elements of their nature: he thought ofthe sorrow, she of the consolation; his heart prophesied of the passingaway from earth, hers of the ascension into heaven. The lower part ofthe landscape was wrapped in shade; but just where the bank curved roundin a mimic bay, the waters caught the sun's parting smile, and rippledagainst the herbage that clothed the shore, with a scarcely noticeablewave. There are two of the numerous mills which are so picturesque afeature of that country, standing at a distance from each other on therising banks, their sails perfectly still in the cool silence of theevening, and adding to the rustic tranquillity which breathed around.For to me there is something in the still sails of one of thoseinventions of man's industry peculiarly eloquent of repose: the restseems typical of the repose of our own passions, short and uncertain,contrary to their natural ordination; and doubly impressive from thefeeling which admonishes us how precarious is the stillness, how utterlydependent on every wind rising at any moment and from any quarter ofthe heavens! They saw before them no living forms, save of one or twopeasants yet lingering by the water-side.
Trevylyan drew closer to his Gertrude; for his love was inexpressiblytender, and his vigilant anxiety for her made his stern frame feel thefirst coolness of the evening even before she felt it herself.
"Dearest, let me draw your mantle closer round you."
Gertrude smiled her thanks.
"I feel better than I have done for weeks," said she; "and when once weget into the Rhine, you will see me grow so strong as to shock all yourinterest for me."
"Ah, would to Heaven my interest for you may be put to such an ordeal!"said Trevylyan; and they turned slowly to the inn, where Gertrude'sfather already awaited them.
Trevylyan was of a wild, a resolute, and an active nature. Thrown onthe world at the age of sixteen, he had passed his youth in alternatepleasure, travel, and solitary study. At the age in which manhood isleast susceptible to caprice, and most perhaps to passion, he fell inlove with the loveliest person that ever dawned upon a poet's vision.I say this without exaggeration, for Gertrude Vane's was indeedthe beauty, but the perishable beauty, of a dream. It happened mostsingularly to Trevylyan (but he was a singular man), that beingnaturally one whose affections it was very difficult to excite, heshould have fallen in love at first sight with a person whose disease,already declared, would have deterred any other heart from riskingits treasures on a bark so utterly unfitted for the voyage of life.Consumption, but consumption in its most beautiful shape, had set itsseal upon Gertrude Vane, when Trevylyan first saw her, and at onceloved. He knew the danger of the disease; he did not, except atintervals, deceive himself; he wrestled against the new passion: but,stern as his nature was, he could not conquer it. He loved, he confessedhis love, and Gertrude returned it.
In a love like this, there is something ineffably beautiful,--it isessentially the poetry of passion. Desire grows hallowed by fear,and, scarce permitted to indulge its vent in the common channel ofthe senses, breaks forth into those vague yearnings, those loftyaspirations, which pine for the Bright, the Far, the Unattained. It is"the desire of the moth for the star;" it is the love of the soul!
Gertrude was advised by the faculty to try a southern climate; butGertrude was the daughter of a German mother, and her young fancy hadbeen nursed in all the wild legends and the alluring visions thatbelong to the children of the Rhine. Her imagination, more romantic thanclassic, yearned for the vine-clad hills and haunted forests which areso fertile in their spells to those who have once drunk, even sparingly,of the Literature of the North. Her desire strongly expressed, herdeclared conviction that if any change of scene could yet arrest theprogress of her malady it would be the shores of the river she had solonged to visit, prevailed with her physicians and her father, and theyconsented to that pilgrimage along the Rhine on which Gertrude, herfather, and her lover were now bound.
It was by the green curve of the banks which the lovers saw from theheights of Bruges that our fairy travellers met. They were reclining onthe water-side, playing at dominos with eye-bright and the black specksof the trefoil; namely, Pipalee, Nip, Trip, and the lord treasurer(for that was all the party selected by the queen for her travelling_cortege_), and waiting for her Majesty, who, being a curious littleelf, had gone round the town to reconnoitre.
"Bless me!" said the lord treasurer; "what a mad freak is this! Crossingthat immense pond of water! And was there ever such bad grass as this?One may see that the fairies thrive ill here."
"You are always discontented, my lord," said Pipalee; "but then you aresomewhat too old to travel,--at least, unless you go in your nutshelland four."
The lord treasurer did not like this remark, so he muttered a peevishpshaw, and took a pinch of honeysuckle dust to console himself for beingforced to put up with so much frivolity.
At this moment, ere the moon was yet at her middest height, Nymphalinjoined her subjects.
"I have just returned," said she, with a melancholy expression on hercountenance, "from a scene that has almost renewed in me thatsympathy with human beings which of late years our race has well-nighrelinquished.
"I hurried through the town without noticing much food for adventure.I paused for a moment on a fat citizen's pillow, and bade him dream oflove. He woke in a fright, and ran down to see that his cheeseswere safe. I swept with a light wing over a politician's eyes, andstraightway he dreamed of theatres and music. I caught an undertaker inhis first nap, and I have left him whirled into a waltz. For what wouldbe sleep if it did not contrast life? Then I came to a solitary chamber,in which a girl, in her tenderest youth, knelt by the bedside in prayer,and I saw that the death-spirit had passed over her, and the blight wason the leaves of the rose. The room was still and hushed, the angel ofPurity kept watch there. Her heart was full of love, and yet of holythoughts, and I bade her dream of the long life denied to her,--of ahappy home, of the kisses of her young lover, of eternal faith, andunwaning tenderness. Let her at least enjoy in dreams what Fatehas refused to Truth! And, passing from the room, I found her loverstretched in his cloak beside the door; for he reads with a feverish anddesperate prophecy the doom that waits her; and so loves he the veryair she breathes, the very ground she treads, that when she has lefthis sight he creeps, silently and unknown to her, to the nearest spothallowed by her presence, anxious that while yet she is on earth not anhour, not a moment, should be wasted upon other thoughts than those thatbelong to her; and feeling a security, a fearful joy, in lessening thedistance that _now_ only momentarily divides them. And that love seemedto me not as the love of the common world, and I stayed my wingsand looked upon it as a thing that centuries might pass and bring noparallel to, in its beauty and its melancholy truth. But I kept away thesleep from the lover's eyes, for well I knew that sleep was a tyrant,that shortened the brief time of waking tenderness for the living, yetspared him; and one sad, anxious thought of her was sweeter, in spite ofits sorrow, than the brightest of fairy dreams. So
I left him awake,and watching there through the long night, and felt that the childrenof earth have still something that unites them to the spirits of a finerrace, so long as they retain amongst them the presence of real love!"
And oh! is there not a truth also in our fictions of the Unseen World?Are there not yet bright lingerers by the forest and the stream? Do themoon and the soft stars look out on no delicate and winged forms bathingin their light? Are the fairies and the invisible hosts but the childrenof our dreams, and not their inspiration? Is that all a delusion whichspeaks from the golden page? And is the world only given to harsh andanxious travellers that walk to and fro in pursuit of no gentle shadows?Are the chimeras of the passions the sole spirits of the universe? No!while my remembrance treasures in its deepest cell the image of one nomore,--one who was "not of the earth, earthy;" one in whom love was theessence of thoughts divine; one whose shape and mould, whose heart andgenius, would, had Poesy never before dreamed it, have called forththe first notion of spirits resembling mortals, but not of them,--no,Gertrude! while I remember you, the faith, the trust in brighter shapesand fairer natures than the world knows of, comes clinging to my heart;and still will I think that Fairies might have watched over your sleepand Spirits have ministered to your dreams.