CHAPTER XXVIII. THE VOYAGE TO BINGEN.--THE SIMPLE INCIDENTS IN THIS TALEEXCUSED.--THE SITUATION AND CHARACTER OF GERTRUDE.--THE CONVERSATION OFTHE LOVERS IN THE TEMPEST.--A FACT CONTRADICTED.--THOUGHTS OCCASIONED BYA MADHOUSE AMONGST THE MOST BEAUTIFUL LANDSCAPES OF THE RHINE.
THE next day they again resumed their voyage, and Gertrude's spiritswere more cheerful than usual. The air seemed to her lighter, and shebreathed with a less painful effort; once more hope entered the breastof Trevylyan; and, as the vessel bounded on, their conversation wassteeped in no sombre hues. When Gertrude's health permitted, no temperwas so gay, yet so gently gay, as hers; and now the _naive_ sportivenessof her remarks called a smile to the placid lip of Vane, and smoothedthe anxious front of Trevylyan himself; as for Du-----e, who had much ofthe boon companion beneath his professional gravity, he broke out everynow and then into snatches of French songs and drinking glees, which hedeclared were the result of the air of Bacharach. Thus conversing, theruins of Furstenberg, and the echoing vale of Rheindeibach, glided pasttheir sail; then the old town of Lorch, on the opposite bank (where thered wine is said first to have been made), with the green island beforeit in the water. Winding round, the stream showed castle upon castlealike in ruins, and built alike upon scarce accessible steeps. Then camethe chapel of St. Clements and the opposing village of Asmannshausen;the lofty Rossell, built at the extremest verge of the cliff; and nowthe tower of Hatto, celebrated by Southey's ballad, and the ancienttown of Bingen. Here they paused a while from their voyage, with theintention of visiting more minutely the Rheingau, or valley of theRhine.
It must occur to every one of my readers, that, in undertaking, as now,in these passages in the history of Trevylyan, scarcely so much a taleas an episode in real life, it is very difficult to offer any interestsave of the most simple and unexciting kind. It is true that toTrevylyan every day, every hour, had its incident; but what are thoseincidents to others? A cloud in the sky; a smile from the lip ofGertrude,--these were to him far more full of events than had been themost varied scenes of his former adventurous career; but the history ofthe heart is not easily translated into language; and the world will notreadily pause from its business to watch the alternations in the cheekof a dying girl.
In the immense sum of human existence what is a single unit? Everysod on which we tread is the grave of some former being; yet is theresomething that softens without enervating the heart in tracing in thelife of another those emotions that all of us have known ourselves. Forwho is there that has not, in his progress through life, felt all itsordinary business arrested, and the varieties of fate commuted into onechronicle of the affections? Who has not watched over the passing awayof some being, more to him at that epoch than all the world? And thisunit, so trivial to the calculation of others, of what inestimable valuewas it not to him? Retracing in another such recollections, shadowed andmellowed down by time, we feel the wonderful sanctity of human life, wefeel what emotions a single being can awake; what a world of hope maybe buried in a single grave! And thus we keep alive within ourselves thesoft springs of that morality which unites us with our kind, and shedsover the harsh scenes and turbulent contests of earth the colouring of acommon love.
There is often, too, in the time of year in which such thoughts arepresented to us, a certain harmony with the feelings they awaken. As Iwrite I hear the last sighs of the departing summer, and the sere andyellow leaf is visible in the green of nature. But when this book goesforth into the world, the year will have passed through a deeper cycleof decay; and the first melancholy signs of winter have breathed intothe Universal Mind that sadness which associates itself readily withthe memory of friends, of feelings, that are no more. The seasons, likeourselves, track their course by something of beauty, or of glory, thatis left behind. As the traveller in the land of Palestine sees tombafter tomb rise before him, the landmarks of his way, and the only signsof the holiness of the soil, thus Memory wanders over the most sacredspots in its various world, and traces them but by the graves of thePast.
It was now that Gertrude began to feel the shock her frame had receivedin the storm upon the Rhine. Cold shiverings frequently seized her; hercough became more hollow, and her form trembled at the slightest breeze.
Vane grew seriously alarmed; he repented that he had yielded toGertrude's wish of substituting the Rhine for the Tiber or the Arno;and would even now have hurried across the Alps to a warmer clime, ifDu-----e had not declared that she could not survive the journey,and that her sole chance of regaining her strength was rest. Gertrudeherself, however, in the continued delusion of her disease, clung tothe belief of recovery, and still supported the hopes of her father, andsoothed, with secret talk of the future, the anguish of her betrothed.The reader may remember that in the most touching passage in theancient tragedians, the most pathetic part of the most pathetic ofhuman poets--the pleading speech of Iphigenia, when imploring forher prolonged life, she impresses you with so soft a picture of itsinnocence and its beauty, and in this Gertrude resembled the Greek'screation--that she felt, on the verge of death, all the flush, the glow,the loveliness of life. Her youth was filled with hope and many-coloureddreams; she loved, and the hues of morning slept upon the yetdisenchanted earth. The heavens to her were not as the common sky;the wave had its peculiar music to her ear, and the rustling leaves apleasantness that none whose heart is not bathed in the love and senseof beauty could discern. Therefore it was, in future years, a thoughtof deep gratitude to Trevylyan that she was so little sensible of herdanger; that the landscape caught not the gloom of the grave; and that,in the Greek phrase, "death found her sleeping amongst flowers."
At the end of a few days, another of those sudden turns, common toher malady, occurred in Gertrude's health; her youth and her happinessrallied against the encroaching tyrant, and for the ensuing fortnightshe seemed once more within the bounds of hope. During this time theymade several excursions into the Rheingau, and finished their tour atthe ancient Heidelberg.
One morning, in these excursions, after threading the wood ofNiederwald, they gained that small and fairy temple, which hanginglightly over the mountain's brow, commands one of the noblest landscapesof earth. There, seated side by side, the lovers looked over thebeautiful world below; far to the left lay the happy islets, in theembrace of the Rhine, as it wound along the low and curving meadows thatstretch away towards Nieder-Ingelheim and Mayence. Glistening in thedistance, the opposite Nah swept by the Mause tower, and the ruins ofKlopp, crowning the ancient Bingen, into the mother tide. There, oneither side the town, were the mountains of St. Roch and Rupert, withsome old monastic ruin saddening in the sun. But nearer, below thetemple, contrasting all the other features of landscape, yawned a darkand rugged gulf, girt by cragged elms and mouldering towers, the veryprototype of the abyss of time,--black and fathomless amidst ruin anddesolation.
"I think sometimes," said Gertrude, "as in scenes like these we sittogether, and rapt from the actual world, see only the enchantment thatdistance lends to our view,--I think sometimes what pleasure it will behereafter to recall these hours. If ever you should love me less, I needonly whisper to you, 'The Rhine,' and will not all the feelings you havenow for me return?"
"Ah, there will never be occasion to recall my love for you,--it cannever decay."
"What a strange thing is life!" said Gertrude; "how unconnected, howdesultory seem all its links! Has this sweet pause from trouble, fromthe ordinary cares of life--has it anything in common with your pastcareer, with your future? You will go into the great world; in a fewyears hence these moments of leisure and musing will be denied to you.The action that you love and court is a jealous sphere,--it allows nowandering, no repose. These moments will then seem to you but as yonderislands that stud the Rhine,--the stream lingers by them for a moment,and then hurries on in its rapid course; they vary, but they do notinterrupt the tide."
"You are fanciful, my Gertrude; but your simile might be juster. Ratherlet these banks be as our lives, and this river the one tho
ught thatflows eternally by both, blessing each with undying freshness."
Gertrude smiled; and, as Trevylyan's arm encircled her, she sank herbeautiful face upon his bosom, he covered it with his kisses, and shethought at the moment, that, even had she passed death, that embracecould have recalled her to life.
They pursued their course to Mayence, partly by land, partly alongthe river. One day, as returning from the vine-clad mountains ofJohannisberg, which commands the whole of the Rheingau, the mostbeautiful valley in the world, they proceeded by water to the town ofEllfeld, Gertrude said,--
"There is a thought in your favourite poet which you have oftenrepeated, and which I cannot think true,--
"'In nature there is nothing melancholy.'
"To me, it seems as if a certain melancholy were inseparable frombeauty; in the sunniest noon there is a sense of solitude and stillnesswhich pervades the landscape, and even in the flush of life inspires uswith a musing and tender sadness. Why is this?"
"I cannot tell," said Trevylyan, mournfully; "but I allow that it istrue."
"It is as if," continued the romantic Gertrude, "the spirit of theworld spoke to us in the silence, and filled us with a sense of ourmortality,--a whisper from the religion that belongs to nature, and isever seeking to unite the earth with the reminiscences of Heaven. Ah,what without a heaven would be even love!--a perpetual terror of theseparation that must one day come! If," she resumed solemnly, after amomentary pause, and a shadow settled on her young face, "if it be true,Albert, that I must leave you soon--"
"It cannot! it cannot!" cried Trevylyan, wildly; "be still, be silent, Ibeseech you."
"Look yonder," said Du-----e, breaking seasonably in upon theconversation of the lovers; "on that hill to the left, what once wasan abbey is now an asylum for the insane. Does it not seem a quiet andserene abode for the unstrung and erring minds that tenant it? Whata mystery is there in our conformation!--those strange and bewilderedfancies which replace our solid reason, what a moral of our humanweakness do they breathe!"
It does indeed induce a dark and singular train of thought, when, in themidst of these lovely scenes, we chance upon this lone retreat for thoseon whose eyes Nature, perhaps, smiles in vain. _Or is it in vain?_ Theylook down upon the broad Rhine, with its tranquil isles: do their wilddelusions endow the river with another name, and people the valleyswith no living shapes? Does the broken mirror within reflect back thecountenance of real things, or shadows and shapes, crossed, mingled, andbewildered,--the phantasma of a sick man's dreams? Yet, perchance, onememory unscathed by the general ruin of the brain can make even thebeautiful Rhine more beautiful than it is to the common eye; can calmit with the hues of departed love, and bids its possessor walk over itsvine-clad mountains with the beings that have ceased to _be_! There,perhaps, the self-made monarch sits upon his throne and claims thevessels as his fleet, the waves and the valleys as his own; there, theenthusiast, blasted by the light of some imaginary creed, beholds theshapes of angels, and watches in the clouds round the setting sunthe pavilions of God; there the victim of forsaken or perished love,mightier than the sorcerers of old, evokes the dead, or recalls thefaithless by the philter of undying fancies. Ah, blessed art thou, thewinged power of Imagination that is within us! conquering even grief,brightening even despair. Thou takest us from the world when reason canno longer bind us to it, and givest to the maniac the inspiration andthe solace of the bard! Thou, the parent of the purer love, lingerestlike love, when even ourself forsakes us, and lightest up the shatteredchambers of the heart with the glory that makes a sanctity of decay.