Page:The English Review vol 7 Mar-Jun 1847 FGgaAQAAIAAJ.pdf/304

Rh moral difficulties of the most formidable nature. He is sustained throughout by Clotilda, under whose influence he is brought not only by their common possession of Lord Horion's secrets, but by the ties of the most ardent and mutual love. Without that support it is evident throughout that his character would be unequal to his position; and as the hero of the tale, which he is intended to be, he must be pronounced a failure.

Emmanuel stands aloof altogether from the plot and progress of the novel. He is an Englishman by birth, and having been employed by Lord Horion as the tutor of Clotilda, Victor, and several other persons involved in the story, is also in the secret; but he takes no active part. He is a visionary enthusiast, full of years, and rapidly approaching his death, of which he has a mysterious presentiment: he is introduced into the story as an impersonation of what was, to Jean Paul's conception, the highest and purest faith, great depth of religious sentiment, interwoven with a few scattered rays, and no more, of Christian truth, consuming itself in efforts to emancipate the soul from the trammels of earth, by the apprehension of a higher and a perfect state beyond the grave; for which, however, he has recourse, not to the volume of revealed truth, but to bold flights of imagination. Feelings, once morbid, drawn from the deepest depths of the human heart, and soarings, often presumptuous, of poetic fancy to the utmost boundaries of human thought, such are the ingredients of the religion which Emmanuel preaches and practises in his ascetic solitude, and the flame of which he keeps alive in the hearts of those under his influence, especially of Victor and Clotilda, the latter of whom alone, being a communicant of the Church, holds her high faith in a Christian form, and under the Christian name.

"I cannot," exclaim Emmanuel, in one of his ecstasies, "any more adapt myself to the earth; the water-drop of life has become flat and shallow; I can move in it no longer, and my heart longs to be among the great men who have escaped from the drop. O my beloved, listen to this hard heaving of my breath; look upon this shattered body, this heavy shroud which infolds my spirit, and obstructs its step.

"Behold here below both thy spirit and mine adhere to the ice-clod which congeals them, and yonder all the heavens that rest one behind another are discovered by the night. There in the blue and sparkling abyss dwells every great spirit that has stripped off its earthly garment, whatever of truth we guess at, whatever of goodness we love.

"Behold how tranquil all is yonder in infinitude! —how silently those worlds are whirling through their orbits, how gently those suns are beaming! The great eternal reposes in the midst of them, a deep fountain in the overflowing and infinite love, and gives to all rest and