THE DEATH OF AN ANGEL.
HE tenderest and kindest angel, the Angel of the last hour, whom we harshly call Death, is sent to us, that he may mildly and gently pluck away the sinking heart of man from life, and bear it unhurt in his warm hands out of the cold breast into high, warming Eden. His brother is the Angel of the first hour, who twice kisses man,—once when he begins this life; and again, when he awakes on high, without wounds, and enters smiling upon the other life, as he came weeping into this.
As the Angel of the last hour saw the battle-fields stretched before him, full of blood and tears, and drew the trembling souls away, his mild eyes melted, and he said: "Ah! I will once die like man, that I may enter into his last agony, and soothe it when I dissolve the ties of life!"
The boundless circle of angels, who love each other above, pressed around the sympathetic one, and promised their beloved to surround him with heavenly rays after the instant of his death; thereby he might know that death had been; and his brother, whose kiss opens our cold lips, as the morning light does the chill flowers, gently touched his forehead, and said: "When I kiss thee again, my brother, thou shalt have died upon the earth, and will be again with us."
Loving and moved, the Angel descended to the battle-field, where only one beautiful, ardent Youth still panted, and heaved his shattered breast. Near the hero stood his Betrothed alone. He could no longer feel her hot tears, and her sorrow passed him unrecognized, like a distant battle-cry.—Then the Angel quickly clothed himself in her dear form, rested by him, drew the wounded soul with one hot kiss out of the cloven breast, and gave it to his brother on high, who kissed it for the second time, when suddenly it smiled.
The Angel of the last hour passed like a lightning-flash into the deserted frame, shone through the body, and stirred the warm life-stream again with the strengthened heart. But how was he affected by this new clothing of the body! His clear eye became confused in the whirl of unwonted, nervous life;—his once flying thought waded now slowly through the atmosphere of his brain, — the moist, faint-hued vapor dried away from all objects which formerly hung, autumnal-like, floating over them; now they pierced him out of the hot air with burning, painful spots of color,—all sensations became more gloomy, yet stormier and more nearly allied to self; and they seemed to him to be like instinct, as those of the beasts appear to us. Hunger tore him, thirst consumed him, pain stabbed him. Alas! his breast, torn and bleeding, heaved upward, and his first breath drawn was his first sigh after the heaven he had left! "Is this the death of man?" he thought; but as he did not see the promised token of death, neither angel nor the surrounding heavenly flame, therefore he perceived this to be only the life of man.
In the evening, the earthly strength of the Angel declined, and a crushing globe seemed to revolve about his head. Then Sleep sent his messengers. Images of the mind shifted out of the sunshine into a misty fire; the shadows of the day were thrown upon his brain; they came confused, and colossal, one upon another, and the world of sense reared itself uncontrolled and poured in upon him. Then Dream sent his messengers. Finally the funereal veil of Sleep wrapped itself thickly about him, and, sunk in the vault of night, he lay there lonely and motionless, like us poor mortals. But then, thou, heavenly Dream! didst descend, with thy thousand reflecting-glasses before his soul, and didst show in all of them a circle of angels and a radiant heaven; and the earthly body seemed to fall away from him with all its thorns. "Ah!" said he, in vain rapture, "my sleep was also my death." Yet when he awoke again, with his compressed heart full of heavy human blood, and looked out upon the earth and upon the night, he cried, "I saw the angels and the starry heavens; but it was only the image of Death, and not his presence."
The Betrothed of the translated hero did not mark that an angel only dwelt in the breast of her beloved; yet she loved the purified aspect of the wounded soul, and still gladly held the hand of him who had past so far away. But the Angel loved her deceived heart with the love of a man's soul in return; jealous of his own nature, he wished that he might not die before her, but love her so long that she might forgive him, when they met again in heaven, for having clasped together upon her breast an angel and a lover. Yet she died sooner; the late sorrow had bowed the head of this flower too low, and it lay broken upon the grave. She sank before the weeping Angel, not like the sun, who before all-beholding Nature casts himself so gorgeous into the sea that its red waves strike the very heaven, but like the tranquil moon, who, in the midnight, silvers the vaporous air, and sinks down unseen behind its dim veil. Death sent his gentler sister Unconsciousness before; she touched the heart of the Betrothed, and chilled the warm countenance; the flowers of her cheek withered; the pale snow of winter, under which the spring of eternity grows green, clothed her forehead and her hands. Then a burning tear broke from the swelling eye of the Angel, and, while he thought his heart loosed itself in the form of a tear as a pearl from the brittle shell, his Betrothed, awaked to the last delirium, moved her eyes once again, drew him close to her heart, and died as she kissed him, and said, "Now I am with thee, my brother!" Then the Angel believed his heavenly brother had given him the sign of the kiss and death. Yet no radiant heaven surrounded him, nor aught but funereal darkness, and he sighed because this was not his death, only the anguish of man over the death of another.
"O ye afflicted mortals!" he cried, "how can ye weary ones survive this! How can ye become old when the circle of youthful forms breaks and lies at length altogether scattered around,—when the graves of your friends lead down like steps to your own,—and when age becomes like the silent, blank evening hour of a cold battle-field! ye poor mortals! how can your hearts endure it?"
The body of the translated hero-soul placed the gentle Angel among hard men, their injustice, and the distortions of Vice and of Passion; about his figure, also, was laid the thorny girdle of sceptres bound together, which compresses the hemispheres with its stings, and which is always laced more tightly by the great; he saw the claws of crowned and emblazoned beasts fasten themselves on their displumed prey, and heard it panting with enfeebled beating of the wings; he saw the whole terrestrial globe encircled in the winding swarthy folds of the giant-serpent, Vice, plunging and concealing its poisonous head deep in the breast of man. Then the hot sting of enmity was made to shoot through that tender heart, which, during a long eternity, had lain in the warmth of angelic love, and the holy love-fed spirit was forced to shudder over an inward dissolution. "Ah!" said he, "the death of man is full of woe!" Yet this was not death; for no angel appeared.
Thus in a few days he became weary of this life which we bear for half a hundred years, and he longed to go back. The evening sun attracted his kindred spirit. The wounds of his shattered breast exhausted him with pain. He went out with the evening glow upon his pale cheeks to "God's Acre," that green background of our life, where the forms which he had once stripped of all their beautiful souls were now crumbling away. He placed himself with sorrowful longing upon the bare grave of his unspeakably beloved and departed bride, and looked towards the fading evening sun. Seated on this dear knoll, he regarded his suffering body, and thought: Thou also, tender breast, wouldst be lying here in decay, and wouldst give no more pain, did I not support thee. Then he reflected upon the grievous life of man, and the throbs of the wounded breast showed him the pangs with which mortals purchase their virtue and their death, and which he had joyfully spared the noble soul of this body. Deeply touched by human virtue, he wept out of his boundless love for men, who, amid the craving of their own needs, under low-hung clouds, behind mists which stream over the sharp-cutting paths of life, never turn away from the lofty star of duty, but in their darkness stretch out loving arms towards every suffering breast they encounter, while around them nothing glimmers but the hope of setting like the sun in the old world, in order to arise in the new.
Just then the ecstasy opened his wounds, and blood, the tear of the soul, flowed from his heart upon the cherished knoll,—the dissolving body sank quietly towards his beloved,—tears of rapture broke the sunset light into a rosy, swimming sea,—distant echoing tones, as of the earth passing wide through ringing ether, played in the vaporous lustre. Then a dark cloud or short night shot by the Angel, and was full of sleep; and now a radiant heaven opened and overspread him, and a thousand angels shone around. "Art thou again here, thou deceiving dream?" he said. But the Angel of the first hour stepped through the rays to him, and gave the sign of the kiss, and said: "That was death, thou immortal brother and heavenly friend!"
And the Youth and his beloved softly repeated the words.
