Hyperion Read online

  But why do I speak of this? As if we still had an inkling of those days! O! Not even a beautiful dream could thrive under the curse that weighs upon us. Like a howling north wind, the present blows over the blossoms of our spirit and scorches them in their bloom. And yet it was a golden day that embraced me on Cynthus! As dawn was still breaking, we already stood on the summit. Now he rose in his eternal youth, the ancient sun-god; contentedly and effortlessly as ever, the immortal Titan soared upward with his own thousand joys, and smiled down upon his desolate land, upon his temples, his pillars, which destiny had thrown down before him like withered rose petals that a passing child thoughtlessly tore from the bush and strewed upon the earth.

  Be as he is! Adamas cried to me, grasping me by the hand and holding it toward the god, and I felt as if the morning winds bore us forth with them, and brought us into the train of the holy being that now rose, friendly and great, to the summit of the heavens, and wondrously filled the world and us with his strength and his spirit.

  My innermost being still mourns and rejoices over every word that Adamas spoke to me then, and I do not comprehend my destitution, when I often feel as he must have felt then. What is loss, when a man thus finds himself in his own world? In us is all. Why should a man worry when a hair falls from his head? Why does he struggle so for servitude, when he could be a god? You will be lonely, my dear boy! Adamas also said to me then, you will be like the crane left behind by its brothers in a harsh season while they seek spring in a distant land.

  And that is it, dear friend! That is what makes us poor amidst all wealth, that we cannot be alone, that so long as we live, the love in us does not expire. Give me my Adamas again, and come with all who belong to me, so that the ancient beautiful world may renew itself among us, so that we may gather together and unite in the arms of our divinity, nature; and see! thus I will know nothing of need.

  But only let no one say that destiny parts us! It is we who do it, we! We find pleasure in flinging ourselves into the night of the unknown, into the cold foreign realm of some other world, and if it were possible, we would leave the domain of the sun, and plunge beyond the bounds of the comet. O! for man’s wild breast, no home is possible; and as the ray of the sun scorches the very plants of the earth that it blooms, so man kills the sweet flowers that thrive in his breast, the joys of kinship and love.

  It seems as if I am angry with my Adamas for forsaking me, but I am not angry with him. O he intended after all to come back!

  In the depths of Asia, a people of rare excellence was said to be hidden; to this place his hope drove him onward.

  I accompanied him as far as Nio. Those were bitter days. I have learned to bear pain, but I have no strength in me for such a parting.

  With each instant that brought us nearer to the final hour, it became more apparent how interwoven this man was with my being. As a dying man holds his fleeing breath, so my soul held him.

  We spent only a few days at Homer’s grave, and for me Nio became the most holy among the islands.

  Finally we tore ourselves away. My heart had struggled until it was weary. I was calmer at the last moment. I was on my knees before him, enclosed him for the last time in these arms; give me a blessing, my father! I cried up softly to him, and he smiled broadly, and his brow widened before the stars of morning and his eye penetrated the spaces of the heavens – Preserve him for me, he cried, you spirits of a better time! and bring him up to your immortality; and all you friendly powers of heaven and earth, be with him!

  There is a god in us, he added more calmly, who guides destiny like streams of water, and all things are his element. Above all, may he be with you!

  So we parted. Farewell, my Bellarmin!

  HYPERION TO BELLARMIN

  Where could I escape from myself, if I did not have the dear days of my youth?

  Like a spirit that finds no repose by the Acheron, I return to the abandoned regions of my life. All grows old and rejuvenates itself. Why are we excepted from the beautiful cycle of nature? Or does it also hold sway for us?

  I would have believed it, were one thing not in us: the monstrous striving to be all, which, like Aetna’s Titan, rages up from the depths of our being.

  And yet, who would not rather feel it in himself, like a seething oil, than confess that he was born for the whip and yoke? A raging war-horse or a nag with hanging ears – which is nobler?

  Dear friend! there was a time when my breast, too, basked in great hopes, when the joy of immortality throbbed in all my pulses, when I strolled among glorious projects as in the wide forest night, when, happy as the fish of the ocean in my boundless future, I pressed farther, ever farther onward.

  How boldly, blessed nature! the youth sprang from your cradle! how he delighted in his untested weapons! His bow was taut, and his arrows rattled in the quiver, and the immortals, the high spirits of antiquity, led him, and his Adamas was in their midst.

  Wherever I went and stood, these glorious figures accompanied me; in my mind the deeds of all times became lost in one another like flames; and as the gigantic forms, the clouds of the heavens, unite in one rejoicing storm, so the hundredfold triumphs of the Olympiads united in me, and became one, infinite triumph.

  Who withstands it, who is not felled like the young woods by a hurricane when the frightening glory of antiquity seizes him as it seized me, and when, like me, he lacks the element in which he might attain a strengthening self-possession?

  O, like a storm, the greatness of the ancients bowed my head, snatched the bloom from my face; and often I lay where no eye observed me, amidst a thousand tears, like a toppled fir that lies by the stream and hides its wilted crown in the current. How gladly would I have purchased with blood an instant from a great man’s life!

  But what was the use? No one wanted me.

  O it is pitiful to see oneself thus reduced to nothing; and he for whom this is incomprehensible, may he not ask about it, and thank nature, which created him, like the butterflies, for joy, and go, and never again in his life speak of pain and unhappiness.

  I loved my heroes as a fly loves the light; I sought their dangerous nearness and fled and sought it again.

  As a bleeding deer plunges into the river, I often plunged into the whirlpool of joy to cool my burning breast and to bathe away my raging, glorious dreams of fame and greatness, but what was the use?

  And when often at midnight my hot heart drove me down into the garden under the dewy trees, and the lullaby of the wellspring and the lovely air and the moonlight soothed my mind, and the silver clouds so freely and peacefully stirred above me, and from the distance the fading voice of the tide sounded – how amiably they then played with my heart, all the great phantoms of its love!

  Farewell, you heavenly beings! I often said in thought, when the melody of the morning light began to sound softly above me, you glorious dead, farewell! I would like to follow you, would like to shake off what my century gave me and set out into the freer realm of the shades!

  But I languish on the chain and snatch with bitter joy the measly cup that is handed to my thirst.

  HYPERION TO BELLARMIN

  My island had become too cramped for me since Adamas was gone. I had been bored for years already in Tina. I wanted out into the world.

  First go to Smyrna, my father said, learn there the arts of the sea and of war, learn the language of cultivated peoples and their constitutions and views and mores and customs, test everything and choose the best! – Then, as far as I am concerned, you can continue on your way.

  Learn, too, a little patience! added my mother, and I accepted the words with thanks.

  It is enchanting to take the first step out of the confines of childhood; it is as if I were thinking of the day of my birth when I recall my departure from Tina. There was a new sun above me, and I enjoyed land and sea and air as if for the first time.

  The lively activity with which I pursued my cultivation in Smyrna, and my hasty progress, soothed my heart not a little.
From this time I also recall many blessed evenings. How often I walked under the evergreen trees on the bank of the Meles, at the birthplace of my Homer, and gathered flowers as an offering and cast them into the holy river! Then, in my peaceful dreams, I came to the nearby grotto, where, they say, the old man sang his Iliad. I found him. Every sound in me fell silent before his presence. I opened his divine poem, and it was as if I had never known it, so utterly differently did it now come alive in me.

  I also think fondly of my wanderings through the regions of Smyrna. It is a glorious land, and I have wished a thousand times for wings so as to fly once a year to Asia Minor.

  From the plain of Sardis I climbed the rock faces of Tmolus.

  I had spent the night at the foot of the mountain in a hospitable hut among myrtles, among the fragrances of labdanum shrubs, where, in the golden current of the Pactolus, the swans played beside me, where an ancient temple of Cybele gazed out like a shy spirit from the elms into the bright moonlight. Five lovely pillars mourned over the rubble, and a regal portal lay toppled at their feet.

  Through a thousand blooming shrubs my path stretched upwards. Whispering trees leaned from the precipitous slope and poured their soft flakes over my head. I had set out in the morning. By midday I stood on the height of the mountain. I looked joyfully out before me, savored the purer airs of the heavens. Those were blessed hours.

  The land from which I had climbed up lay before me like a sea, youthful, full of living joy; with a heavenly, infinite play of colors, spring greeted my heart, and as the sun of the heavens found itself again in the thousand changes of light that the earth gave back to it, so my spirit recognized itself in the fullness of life that surrounded it, that assailed it from all sides.

  To the left, the river plunged and roared with joy like a giant down into the woods from the marble cliff that hung over me, where the eagle played with its young, where the snowy peaks glistened up into the blue ether; to the right, storm clouds came rolling over the woods of Sipylus; I did not feel the tempest that bore them, I felt only a breeze in my hair, but I heard their thunder as one hears the voice of the future, and I saw their flames like the distant light of a presentiment of the divinity. I turned southward and walked on. There it lay open before me, the whole paradisiacal land, through which the Caystrus flows in so many enticing detours, as if it could not linger long enough in all the copiousness and loveliness that surrounds it. Like the zephyrs, my spirit wandered blissfully from beauty to beauty, from strange, peaceful hamlets that lay deep below at the foot of the mountain onward to where the range of Messogis loomed.

  I returned to Smyrna like a drunken man from a banquet. My heart was too full of pleasure not to lend some of its abundance to mortality. I had taken the beauty of nature into myself too happily not to fill the voids of human life with it. My destitute Smyrna clothed itself in the colors of my enthusiasm and stood there like a bride. The gregarious city dwellers attracted me. The absurdity of their mores amused me like a children’s prank, and since I was by nature above all the established forms and customs, I played with all of them, and put them on and took them off like carnival costumes.

  But what actually seasoned the bland fare of commonplace contact for me were the good faces and figures that compassionate nature still sends here and there, like stars, into our darkness.

  What heartfelt joy I took in them! How devoutly I deciphered those friendly hieroglyphs! But with them I felt almost as I had in the past with the birches in spring. I had heard of the sap of these trees, and thought with wonder what a delicious drink the lovely trunks must provide. But there was not enough strength and spirit in it.

  O! and how hopeless was all the rest of what I heard and saw.

  Here and there it truly seemed to me that human nature had dissolved into the manifoldness of the animal kingdom when I went about among these cultivated people. As everywhere, so too here, the men were especially depraved and corrupted.

  Certain animals howl when they hear music. My better-bred people, however, laughed when there was talk about beauty of the spirit and youth of the heart. Wolves run away when someone strikes fire. When these men saw a spark of reason, they turned their backs like thieves.

  And if I spoke a warm word about ancient Greece, they yawned and declared that one had to live in the present; and another added with an air of significance that still today, good taste had not vanished.

  This was then demonstrated. One quipped like a sailor and another puffed out his cheeks and preached maxims.

  One even acted enlightened, snapped his fingers at the heavens and cried that he had never worried about the birds in the bush, he preferred the birds in the hand! Yet when one spoke to him of death, he at once folded his hands and, in the course of the conversation, eventually came up with how it was dangerous that our priests no longer carried any weight.

  The only people from whom I at times benefited were the storytellers, the living registers of names of foreign cities and lands, the talking peep boxes in which one can see potentates on horses and church towers and markets.

  Finally I was tired of squandering myself, searching for grapes in the desert and flowers upon the ice field.

  I now lived more resolutely alone, and the gentle spirit of my youth had almost completely vanished from my soul. The incurability of the century became apparent to me from so much of what I recount and do not recount, and the beautiful solace of finding my world in one soul and embracing my generation in one friendly form – that, too, I lacked.

  Dear friend! What would life be without hope? A spark that leaps from the coal and goes out; and as one hears a gust of wind in the dreary season that roars for an instant and then dies away – would it be so with us?

  The swallow, too, seeks a congenial land in winter, the wild beasts run about in the heat of the day and their eyes seek the wellspring. Who tells the child that the mother will not deny it her breast? And see! it seeks it nonetheless.

  Nothing would live if it did not hope. My heart now closed up its treasures, but only to conserve them for a better time, for the unique, holy, faithful spirit that surely, in some period of my existence, would encounter my thirsting soul.

  How blissfully I often clung to it when, in hours of presentiment, softly as the moonlight, it played about my calmed brow? Even then I already knew you, even then you gazed at me from clouds like a Genius, you – she who once, in the peace of beauty, rose out of the murky waves of the world! Then this heart struggled and burned no more.

  As a lily sways in the silent air, so my being stirred in its element, in enchanting dreams of her.

  HYPERION TO BELLARMIN

  Smyrna was now spoiled for me. On the whole, my heart had gradually grown wearier. At times, the wish could arise in me to roam around the world or enter some war, or to seek out my Adamas and burn my discontent away in his fire, but that was as far as it went, and my meaningless, wilted life no longer sought to refresh itself.

  Now the summer would soon be at an end; I felt already in anticipation the gloomy days of rain, and the whistling of the wind, and the roaring of the rain-fed streams; and nature, which surged up into all the plants and trees like a foaming fountain, now stood already before my darkened senses fading and closed and turned in upon itself, as I was.

  I still wanted to take with me what I could of all this fleeing life; all outward things of which I had grown fond I wanted to safeguard within myself, for I knew well that the returning year would not find me under these trees and mountains, and so now I walked and rode more than usual around the whole region.

  But what especially drove me out was the secret longing to see a man whom for some time I had encountered every day when I passed under the trees before the gate.

  Like a young Titan, the glorious stranger strode among the race of dwarves, which reveled in his beauty with joyful awe, measured his height and his strength, and with furtive glances regaled itself on his glowing, bronzed Roman head as on forbidden fruit, and it was a
glorious moment each time the eye of this man, for whose gaze the open ether appeared too cramped, having laid pride aside, searched and strove until it felt itself in my eye and, blushing, we gazed at each other and passed.

  One day I had ridden deep into the woods of Mimas and did not turn back until late evening. I had dismounted and led my horse down a steep, wild path over tree roots and stones and, as I thus wound my way through the shrubs into the cave below that now opened before me, a pair of robbers native to Karabournu suddenly descended upon me and for a moment I had trouble holding off the two drawn sabers; but they were already weary from other work, and so I managed. I calmly mounted my horse again and rode down.

  At the foot of the mountain, between the woods and the piled-up cliffs, a little meadow opened before me. It grew bright. The moon had just risen over the dark trees. At some distance I saw horses stretched out upon the ground and men beside them in the grass.

  Who are you? I cried.

  That is Hyperion! cried the voice of a hero, joyfully surprised. You know me, the voice went on; I encounter you every day under the trees at the gate.

  My horse flew to him like an arrow. The moonlight shone brightly in his face. I knew him; I sprang down.

  Good evening! cried the dear sprightly man, gazed at me with tender, wild glances, and with his sinewy hand squeezed mine, so that my innermost being felt the significance of it.

  O now my meaningless life was at an end!

  Alabanda, for such was the stranger’s name, told me now that he and his servant had been ambushed by robbers, that the two upon whom I stumbled had been sent forth by him, that he had lost the path out of the woods and thus it had been necessary to stay where he was until I came. I have lost a friend in this, he added, and pointed to his dead horse.