Hyperion Read online

  In Adamas it rose for you; it also departed with him. In Alabanda its light appeared to you for the second time, but more blazingly and intensely, and that is also why it was like midnight for your soul when he was gone to you.

  Now do you also see why the smallest doubt about Alabanda had to become despair in you? Why you renounced him, only because he was not a god?

  You wanted no men, believe me, you wanted a world. The loss of all golden centuries, as you felt them, compressed into one happy moment, the spirit of all spirits of a better time, the strength of all strengths of heroes – one man should replace these for you? – Do you see now how poor, how rich you are? why you must be so proud and also so downcast? why joy and sorrow alternate so terribly for you?

  Because you have all and nothing, because the phantom of the golden days that shall come belongs to you and yet is not there, because you are a citizen in the regions of justice and beauty, a god among gods in the beautiful dreams that creep up on you in the day, and when you awaken, you stand on modern Greek soil.

  Two times, you say? O in one day you are hurled seventy times from heaven to earth. Shall I say it to you? I fear for you, you scarcely endure the fate of these times. You will still attempt various things, will –

  O god! and your last refuge will be a grave.

  No, Diotima, I cried, no, by heaven, no! So long as one melody still sounds for me, I do not shy from the deathly silence of the wilderness under the stars; so long as the sun only shines, and Diotima, there is no night for me.

  Let the death bell toll for all virtues! I hear you, you, your heart’s song, my love! and find immortal life, while all expires and wilts.

  O Hyperion, she cried, how are you speaking?

  “I speak as I must. I cannot, can no longer hide all the blissfulness and fear and worry – Diotima! – Yes, you know it, must know it, have long since seen it, that I perish when you but give me your hand.”

  She was dismayed, confused.

  And it is I, she cried, to whom Hyperion will hold for support? yes, I wish it, now for the first time I wish to be more than but a mortal maiden. But I am to you what I can be.

  O thus you are all to me, I cried.

  “All? Evil hypocrite! and mankind, the only thing that you love in the end?”

  Mankind? I said; I would like mankind to make Diotima into its watchword and to paint your image onto its banner, and to say: Today the divine shall triumph! Angel of heaven! that would be a day!

  Go, she cried, go, and show heaven your transfiguration! it must not be so near to me.

  You will go, will you not, dear Hyperion?

  I obeyed. Who would not have obeyed? I went. I had never before gone from her thus. O Bellarmin! that was joy, peace of life, divine calm, heavenly, wondrous, unrecognizable joy.

  Words are in vain here, and he who asks for the likes of her has never known her. The only thing that could express such a joy was Diotima’s singing when it hovered in the golden mean between height and depth.

  O you meadows on the banks of the Lethe! you sunset-red paths into the woods of Elysium! you lilies by the streams of the valley! you garlands of roses on the hill! I believe in you in this friendly hour and speak to my heart: There you find her again, and all the joy that you lost.

  HYPERION TO BELLARMIN

  I will tell you more and more of my blissfulness.

  I will subject my breast to the joys of my past until it becomes like steel, I will exercise myself in them until I am invincible.

  Ha! they often fall like the stroke of a sword upon my soul, but I play with the sword until I am accustomed to it, I hold my hand in the fire until I bear it as if it were water.

  I will not hesitate; yes! I will be strong! I will conceal nothing from myself, will conjure from the grave the greatest ecstasy of all ecstasies.

  It is incredible that man should fear the most beautiful; but it is so.

  O I have fled a hundred times from these moments, from this killing bliss of my memories, and have averted my eyes like a child before lightning flashes! and yet in the lush garden of the world grows nothing lovelier than my joys, yet in the heavens and on earth thrives nothing nobler than my joys.

  But only to you, my Bellarmin, only to a pure, free soul like yours do I tell it. I will not be as generous as the sun with its rays; I will not cast my pearls before the inane crowd.

  After the last conversation of our souls, I knew myself less with each day. I felt that there was a holy secret between me and Diotima.

  I marveled, dreamed. As if a blessed spirit had appeared to me at midnight and chosen me to accompany it, thus I felt in my soul.

  O it is a strange mixture of blissfulness and melancholy when it is revealed that we are forever outside of ordinary existence.

  After that I never managed to see Diotima alone. A third person always had to disturb us, separate us, and the world lay between her and me like an infinite emptiness. Thus passed six days of mortal fear during which I knew nothing of Diotima. It was as if the others around us lamed my senses, killed my whole outward life so that my confined soul had no way to reach her.

  If I sought her with my eye, night fell before me; if I turned to her with a word, it choked in my throat.

  O! the holy nameless longing often nearly tore my breast asunder, and often the mighty love raged in me like an imprisoned Titan. My spirit had never before struggled so profoundly, so unyieldingly against the chains that fate forged for it, against the iron, inexorable law that decreed it must be separate, must not be one soul with its lovable half.

  The star-bright night had now become my element. Then, when it was as still as in the depths of the earth where gold secretly grows, then the more beautiful life of my love commenced.

  Then the heart exercised its right to poetize. Then it told me how Hyperion’s spirit played with its fair Diotima in Elysium before it came down to earth in divine childhood, by the melodious tones of the wellspring and under branches that were like the branches of the earth when we see them gleaming, beautified, from the golden river.

  And, like the past, the gates of the future opened in me.

  Then we flew, Diotima and I, then we migrated, like swallows, from one springtime of the world to another, through the sun’s wide domain and beyond, to the other islands of the heavens, to the golden coasts of Sirius, into Arcturus’s valley of spirits –

  O it is indeed desirable thus to drink the bliss of the world from one chalice with the beloved!

  Intoxicated by the blissful lullaby that I sang to myself, I fell asleep in the midst of the glorious phantoms.

  But as the ray of the morning light ignited the life of the earth again, I looked upward and sought the dreams of the night. They had disappeared like the beautiful stars, and only the joy of melancholy bore witness to them in my soul.

  I mourned; but I believe that one also mourns thus among the blessed. It was the messenger of joy, this mourning, it was the graying dawn in which countless roses of daybreak bloom. –

  The glowing summer day had now driven everything into the dark shadows. Around Diotima’s house, too, all was still and empty, and the envious curtains on all the windows stood in my way.

  I lived in thoughts of her. Where are you, I thought, where may my lonely spirit find you, sweet maiden? Do you gaze before you and reflect? Have you laid your work aside and rested your arm on your knee and your head on your little hand and yielded yourself to lovely thoughts?

  May nothing disturb my peaceful one when she refreshes her heart with sweet fantasies, may nothing touch this bunch of grapes and graze the invigorating dew from the tender berries!

  So I dreamed. But while my thoughts peered after her between the walls of the house, my feet sought her elsewhere, and before I was aware of it I was walking under the arcades of the holy forest behind Diotima’s garden, where I had seen her for the first time. What was this? I had meanwhile so often spent time with these trees, had become more intimate with them, more calm under
them; now a power seized me as if I stepped into Diana’s shadow to die in the presence of the divinity.

  Meanwhile I walked onward. With each step the feeling in me grew more wondrous. I would have liked to fly, thus my heart drove me forward; but it was as if I had lead in my soles. My soul had hastened ahead and abandoned my earthly limbs. I heard no longer, and all shapes dimmed and swayed before my eyes. My spirit was already with Diotima; the crown of the tree played in the morning light, while the lower branches still felt the cold dawn.

  O! my Hyperion! a voice now called to me; I plunged toward it; “my Diotima! O my Diotima!” beyond that I had no word and no breath, no consciousness.

  Vanish, vanish, mortal life, destitute business in which the solitary spirit regards and counts again and again the pennies that it has gathered! we are all called to the joy of the divinity!

  Here there is a gap in my existence. I died, and when I awakened, I lay upon the heart of the heavenly maiden.

  O life of love! how you rose in her in full, lovely bloom! as if sung into light slumber by blessed Genii, her enticing little head lay upon my shoulder, smiled sweet peace and opened its ethereal eyes, which looked at me in joyful, inexperienced astonishment, as if they just now gazed for the first time into the world.

  We long stood thus in lovely, self-oblivious contemplation, and neither knew what befell us, until finally too much joy accumulated in me, and in tears and sounds of enchantment my lost speech returned and reawakened my silent, inspired maiden fully into existence.

  Finally we looked about us again.

  O my old friendly trees! cried Diotima, as if she had not seen them for a long time, and the remembrance of her earlier, solitary days played about her joys, as lovely as the shadows playing on the virgin snow when it reddens and glows in the joyful evening radiance.

  Angel of heaven! I cried, who can grasp you? who can say he has wholly comprehended you?

  Are you surprised, she replied, that I am so fond of you? Dear man! proud, humble man! Am I, then, also among those who cannot believe in you, have I not fathomed you, have I not recognized the genius in his clouds? Veil yourself all you want and do not see yourself; I will conjure you forth, I will –

  But he is here, he has emerged like a star; he has broken through the husk and stands there like a springtime; like a crystal wellspring from the gloomy grotto, he has emerged; this is not the dark Hyperion, this is no longer the wild mourning – O my dear, my glorious boy!

  This was all like a dream to me. Could I believe in this miracle of love? could I? the joy would have killed me.

  Divine maiden! I cried, do you speak to me? Can you deny yourself so, blessed self-sufficient being! can you take such joy in me? O I see it now, I know now what I often suspected, man is a garment that a god often wraps around himself, a chalice into which heaven pours its nectar so as to give its children a taste of the best.

  Yes, yes! she broke in, rapturously smiling, your namesake, the glorious Hyperion of the heavens, is in you.

  Let me, I cried, let me be yours, let me forget myself, let all life in me and all spirit fly only to you; only to you, in blessed, endless contemplation! O Diotima! thus I also once stood before the dim divine image that my love created for itself, before the idol of my solitary dreams; I nourished it faithfully; with my life I animated it, with the hopes of my heart I refreshed, warmed it, but it gave me nothing but what I had given, and when I was impoverished, it left me poor, and now! now I have you in my arms, and feel the breath of your breast and feel your eye in my eye, your beautiful presence trickles into all my senses, and I bear it, thus I have what is most glorious and tremble no longer – yes! I am truly not who I once was, Diotima! I have become like you, and divine now plays with divine as children play together. –

  But you must be somewhat calmer for me, she said.

  You are right, you lovable creature! I cried joyfully, otherwise the Graces do not appear to me; otherwise I do not see the soft, lovely movements in the sea of beauty. O I will yet learn to overlook nothing about you. Only give me time!

  Flatterer! she cried, but for today we have finished, dear flatterer! the golden evening cloud has admonished me. O mourn not! Preserve for yourself and for me the pure joy! Let it resound in you until tomorrow and do not kill it with discontent! – the flowers of the heart need friendly care. Their roots are everywhere, but they themselves thrive only in bright weather. Farewell, Hyperion!

  She freed herself. My whole being flamed up in me when she disappeared before me in her glowing beauty.

  O you! – I cried and rushed after her and gave my soul into her hand in infinite kisses.

  God! she cried, what will become of this henceforth!

  That struck me. Forgive me, heavenly being! I said; I will go. Good night, Diotima! think of me a little!

  I will, she cried, good night!

  And now not one more word, Bellarmin! It would be too much for my patient heart. I feel shaken. But I will go out among the plants and trees and lay down among them and pray that nature brings me to such repose.

  HYPERION TO BELLARMIN

  Our souls now lived ever more freely and beautifully together, and everything in and around us united in golden peace. It appeared as if the old world had died, and a new one began with us, so spiritual and strong and loving and light had everything become, and we and all beings hovered, blissfully united, like a chorus of a thousand inseparable tones, through the infinite ether.

  Our conversations glided away like a heavenly blue stream from which the gold sand now and again gleams, and our silence was like the silence of the mountain summit, the glorious, lonely height far above the realm of storms, where only the divine air rushes through the hair of the bold wayfarer.

  And the wondrous, holy mourning when the hour of parting sounded in the midst of our enthusiasm, when I often cried: Now we are again mortal, Diotima! and she said to me: Mortality is appearance, is like the colors that tremble before our eyes when they long gaze into the sun!

  O! and all the wonderful games of love! the flatteries, the concerns, the sensitivities, the stringency and leniency.

  And the omniscience with which we saw through each other, and the infinite faith with which we glorified each other!

  Yes! man is a sun, all-seeing, all-illuminating when he loves, and when he loves not, he is a dark dwelling in which a smoking little lamp burns.

  I should fall silent, should forget and fall silent.

  But the enticing flame tempts me until I fling myself wholly into it and, like the fly, expire.

  In the midst of all the blessed, unrestrained giving and taking I felt one day that Diotima was becoming quieter and quieter.

  I inquired and implored; but that appeared only to drive her farther away, finally she implored me to inquire no longer, to go, and when I returned, to speak of something else. This plunged me, too, into a painful silence to which I did not know how to reconcile myself.

  I felt as if an inconceivably sudden fate had sworn death to our love and all life was gone, out of me and all else.

  I was, admittedly, ashamed of this; I knew for certain that chance did not rule Diotima’s heart. But she always remained a wonder to me, and my spoiled, disconsolate soul always wanted manifest, present love; closed treasures were lost treasures for it. O! in my happiness I had forgotten how to hope; back then I was still like the impatient children who weep for the apple on the tree as if it were not there at all if it does not kiss their mouths. I had no peace, I implored again, with impetuosity and with humility, tenderly and ragingly, love armed me with its whole all-powerful, humble eloquence and now – O my Diotima! now I had it, the delightful confession, now I have it and hold it, until the surge of love brings me, too, with all that is in me, back into the ancient home, into the bosom of nature.

  The innocent creature! she did not yet know the powerful fullness of her heart, and sweetly frightened by the wealth in her, she buried it in the depths of her breast – and when she now
confessed with holy simplicity, when she confessed with tears that she loved too much, and when she took leave of all that she once cradled to her heart, O when she cried: I have forsaken May and summer and autumn and heed not the day and the night as I once did, belong no longer to heaven and earth, belong only to one, to one, but the bloom of May and the flame of summer and the ripeness of autumn, the clarity of the day and the somberness of the night, and earth and heaven are united for me in this one! thus I love! – and when she now regarded me in full heart’s content, when, in bold, holy joy, she took me into her beautiful arms and kissed my brow and my mouth, ha! when the divine head, dying in bliss, sank down to my naked throat and the sweet lips rested on my pounding breast and the lovely breath wafted to my soul – O Bellarmin! my senses expire and my spirit flees.

  I see, I see how this must end. The rudder has fallen into the surge, and the ship, like a child grasped by the feet, is seized and hurled against the rocks.

  HYPERION TO BELLARMIN

  There are great hours in life. We gaze up at them as at the colossal figures of the future and of antiquity, we fight a glorious battle with them, and if we persevere against them, they become like sisters and do not abandon us.

  We sat once together on our mountain, on a stone of the ancient city of this island, and spoke of how the lion Demosthenes here found his end, how with holy, self-chosen death, he delivered himself from the Macedonian chains and daggers to freedom – The glorious spirit departed the world joking, someone cried; why not? I said; he had nothing more to seek here; Athens had become Alexander’s whore, and the world, like a deer, was hounded to death by the great hunter.