Memories: A Story of German Love

One warm spring day she was brought into our room. She looked exceedingly pale; but her eyes were deeper and brighter than ever, and she sat upon her couch and called us to her. "It is my birth-day," said she, "and I was confirmed early this morning. Now, it is possible," she continued as she looked upon her father with a smile, "that God may soon call me to him, although I would gladly remain with you much longer. But if I am to leave you, I desire that you should not wholly forget me; and, therefore, I have brought a ring for each of you, which you must now place upon the fore-finger. As you grow older you can continue to change it until it fits the little finger; but you must wear it for your lifetime."

With these words she took the five rings she wore upon her fingers, which she drew off, one after the other, with a look so sad and yet so affectionate, that I pressed my eyes closely to keep from weeping. She gave the first ring to her eldest brother and kissed him, the second and third to the two princesses, and the fourth to the youngest prince, and kissed them all as she gave them the rings. I stood near by, and, looking fixedly at her white hand, saw that she still had a ring upon her finger; but she leaned back and appeared wearied. My eyes met hers, and as the eyes of a child speak so loudly, she must have easily known my thoughts, I would rather not have had the last ring, for I felt that I was a stranger; that I did not belong to her, and that she was not as affectionate to me as to her brothers and sisters. Then came a sharp pain in my breast as if a vein had burst or a nerve had been severed, and I knew not which way to turn to conceal my anguish.

She soon raised herself again, placed her hand upon my forehead and looked down into my heart so deeply that I felt I had not a thought invisible to her. She slowly drew the last ring from her finger, gave it to me and said; "I intended to have taken this with me, when I went from you, but it is better you should wear it and think of me when I am no longer with you. Read the words engraved upon the ring: 'As God wills.' You have a passionate heart, easily moved. May life subdue but not harden it." Then she kissed me as she had her brothers and gave me the ring.

All my feelings I do not truly know. I had then grown up to boyhood, and the mild beauty of the suffering angel could not linger in my young heart without alluring it. I loved her as only a boy can love, and boys love with an intensity and truth and purity which few preserve in their youth and manhood; but I believed she belonged to the "strange people" to whom you are not allowed to speak of love. I scarcely understood the earnest words she spoke to me. I only felt that her soul was as near to mine as one human soul can be to another. All bitterness was gone from my heart. I felt myself no longer alone, no longer a stranger, no longer shut out. I was by her, with her and in her. I thought it might be a sacrifice for her to give me the ring, and that she might have preferred to take it to the grave with her, and a feeling arose in my soul which overshadowed all other feelings, and I said with quivering voice: "Thou must keep the ring if thou dost not wish to give it to me; for what is thine is mine." She looked at me a moment surprised and thoughtfully. Then she took the ring, placed it on her finger, kissed me once more on the forehead, and said gently to me: "Thou knowest not what thou sayest. Learn to understand thyself. Then shall thou be happy and make many others happy."

FOURTH MEMORY

Every life has its years in which one progresses as on a tedious and dusty street of poplars, without caring to know where he is. Of these years nought remains in memory but the sad feeling that we have advanced and only grown older. While the river of life glides along smoothly, it remains the same river; only the landscape on either bank seems to change. But then come the cataracts of life. They are firmly fixed in memory, and even when we are past them and far away, and draw nearer and nearer to the silent sea of eternity, even then it seems as if we heard from afar their rush and roar. We feel that the life-force which yet remains and impels us onward still has its source and supply from those cataracts.

School time was ended, the first fleeting years of university life were over, and many beautiful life-dreams were over also. But one of them still remained: Faith in God and man. Otherwise life would have been circumscribed within one's narrow brain. Instead of that, a nobler consecration had preserved all, and even the painful and incomprehensible events of life became a proof to me of the omnipresence of the divine in the earthly. "The least important thing does not happen except as God wills it." This was the brief life-wisdom I had accumulated.

During the summer holidays I returned to my little native city. What joy in these meetings again! No one has explained it, but in this seeing and finding again, and in these self-memories, lie the real secrets of all joy and pleasure. What we see, hear or taste for the first time may be beautiful, grand and agreeable, but it is too new. It overpowers, but gives no repose, and the fatigue of enjoying is greater than the enjoyment itself. To hear again, years afterward, an old melody, every note of which we supposed we had forgotten, and yet to recognize it as an old acquaintance; or, after the lapse of many years, to stand once more before the Sistine Madonna at Dresden, and experience afresh all the emotions which the infinite look of the child aroused in us for years; or to smell a flower or taste a dish again which we have not thought of since childhood—all these produce such an intense charm that we do not know which we enjoy most, the actual pleasure or the old memory. So when we return again, after long absence, to our birth-place, the soul floats unconsciously in a sea of memories, and the dancing waves dreamily toss themselves upon the shores of times long passed. The belfry clock strikes and we fear we shall be late to school, and recovering from this fear feel relieved that our anxiety is over. The same dog runs along the street on whose account we used to go far out of our way. Here sits the old huckster whose apples often led us into temptation, and even now, we fancy they must taste better than all other apples in the world, notwithstanding the dust on them. There one has torn down a house and built a new one. Here the old music-teacher lived. He is dead—and yet how beautiful it seemed as we stood and listened on summer evenings under the window while the True Soul, when the hours of the day were over, indulged in his own enjoyment and played fantasies, like the roaring and hissing engine letting off the steam which has accumulated during the day. Here in this little leafy lane, which seemed at that time so much larger, as I was coming home late one evening, I met our neighbor's beautiful daughter. At that time I had never ventured to look at or address her, but we school-children often spoke of her and called her "the Beautiful Maiden," and whenever I saw her passing along the street at a distance I was so happy that I could only think of the time when I should meet her nearer. Here in this leafy walk which leads to the church-yard, I met her one evening and she took me by the arm, although we had never spoken together before, and asked me to go home with her. I believe neither of us spoke a word the whole way; but I was so happy that even now, after all these years, I wish it were that evening, and that I could go home again, silently and blissfully, with "the Beautiful Maiden."

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