Page:Tales by Musæus, Tieck, Richter, Volume 2.djvu/218

210 dance, like fire-pillars round his soul: every artery became a burning-rod, and the heart drove flaming naphtha-brooks into the brain. All within his soul grew bloody: the blood of his drowned brother united itself with the blood which had once flowed from Thiennette’s arm, into a bloody rain;—he still thought he was in the garden in the night of betrothment, he still kept calling for bandages to stanch blood, and was for hiding his head in the ball of the steeple. Nothing afflicts one more than to see a reasonable moderate man, who has been so even in his passions, raving in the poetic madness of fever. And yet if nothing save this mouldering corruption can soothe the hot brain; and if, while the reek and thick vapour of a boiling nervous-spirit, and the hissing water-spouts of the veins are encircling and eclipsing the stifled soul, a higher Finger presses through the cloud, and suddenly lifts the poor bewildered spirit from amid the smoke to a sun—is it more just to complain, than to reflect that Fate is like the oculist, who, when about to open to a blind eye the world of light, first bandages and darkens the other eye that sees?

But the sorrow does affect me, which I read on Thiennette’s pale lips, though do not hear. It is not the distortion of an excruciating agony, nor the burning of a dried-up eye, nor the loud lamenting or violent movement of a tortured frame that I see in her; but what I am forced to see in her, and what too keenly cuts the sympathising heart, is a pale, still, unmoved, undistorted face, a pale bloodless head, which Sorrow is as it were holding up after the stroke, like a head just severed by the axe of the headsman; for, O! on this form the wounds, from which the three-edged dagger had been drawn, are all fallen firmly together, and the blood is flowing from them in secret into the choking heart. O Thiennette, go away from the sick-bed, and hide that face which is saying to us: “Now do I know that I shall not have any happiness on Earth; now do I give over hoping—would this life were but soon done.”

You will not comprehend my sympathy, if you know not what, some hours ago, the too loud lamenting mother told me. Thiennette, who of old had always trembled for his thirty-second year, had encountered this superstition with a nobler one: she had purposely stood farther back at the marriage-altar, and