Part 23

Such words concerning God, uttered by a tongue one hundred and twenty-five years old, had great weight and consolation; and I at once felt their beautiful attraction. On mentioning animals, the old man turned again to his own; and, as though indifferent to him who had come in a coach-and-six, he began again to play with his menagerie, the hare, the spaniel, the silky poodle, the starling, and a couple of turtle-doves on his bosom; a pleasant bee-colony in the orchard also gave heed to him; with one whistle he sent the bees away, and with another summoned them into the ring of creatures, which surrounded him like a court-circle.

At last, he said: “No one need be surprised that a very old man, who has forgotten everything, and whom no one but the dear God knows or cares for, should give himself wholly to the dear animals. To whom can such an old man be of much use? I wander about in the villages, as in cities, wholly strange. If I see children, they come before me like my own remote childhood. If I meet old men, they seem like my past hoary years. I do not quite know where I now belong. I hang between heaven and earth. Yet God ever looks upon me bright and lovingly, with his two eyes, the sun and the moon. Moreover, animals lead into no sin, but rather to devotion. When my turtle-doves brood over their young and feed them, it seems to me just as if I saw God himself doing a great deal; for they derive their love and instinct toward their young, as a gift from him.”

The old man became silent, and looked pensively before him, as was his wont. A ringing of christening bells sounded from Bienenroda among the trees in the garden. He wept a little. I know not how I could have been so simple, after the beautiful words he had uttered, as to have mistaken his tears for a sign of weakness in his eyes. “I do not hear well, on account of my great age,” said he; “and it seems to me as if the baptismal bell from the distant sanctuary sounded up here very faintly. The old years of my childhood, more than a hundred years ago, ascend from the ancient depths of time, and gaze on me in wonder, while I and they know not whether we ought to weep or laugh.” Then, addressing his silky poodle, he called out, “Ho! ho! come here old fellow!”

The allusion to his childhood brought me to the purpose of my visit. “Excellent sir,” said I, “I am preparing the biography of the deceased Master Gotthelf Fibel, author of the famous Spelling-Book; and all I now need to complete it is the account of his death.” The old man smiled, and made a low bow. I continued, “No one is more likely to know the particulars of his decease than yourself; and you are the only person who can enrich me with the rare traits of his childhood; because every incident inscribed on a child’s brain grows deeper with years, like names cut into a gourd, while later inscriptions disappear. Tell me, I pray you, all that you know concerning the departed man; for I am to publish his Life at the Michaelmas Fair.”

He murmured, “Excellent genius; scholar; man of letters; author most famous; these and other fine titles I learned by heart and applied to myself, while I was that vain, blinded Fibel, who wrote and published the ordinary Spelling-Book in question.”

So then, this old man was the blessed Fibel himself! A hundred and twenty-five notes of admiration, ay, eighteen hundred and eleven notes in a row, would but feebly express my astonishment.

The old man went into his little garden-house, and I followed him. He whistled, and instantly his black squirrel came down from a tree, whither it had gone more for pleasure than for food. Nightingales, thrushes, starlings, and other birds, flew back into the open window from the tops of the trees. A bulfinch, whose color had been changed by age from red to black, strutted about the room, uttering droll sounds, which it could not make distinct. The hare pattered about in the twilight, sometimes on his hind feet, sometimes on all fours. Every dog in the house bounded forward in glad, loving, human glee. But the most joyful of all was the poodle; for he knew he was to have a box with compartments fastened to his neck, containing a list of the articles wanted for supper, which it was his business to bring from the inn in Bienenroda. He was Fibel’s victualler, or provision-wagon. Children, who ran back and forth, were the only other ones who ministered to his wants.

In allusion to his pets, he said: “We ought to assist the circumscribed faculties of animals, by educating them, as far as we can, since we stand toward them, in a certain degree, as their Lord God; and we ought to train them to good morals, too; for very possibly they may continue to live after death. God and the animals are always good; but not so with man.”

Aged men impart spiritual things, as they give material things, with a shaking hand, which drops half. In the effort to gather up his recollections, he permitted me to quicken his memory with my own; and thus I obtained a connected account of some particulars in his experience. He said he might have been about a hundred years old, when he cut a new set of teeth, the pain of which disturbed him with wild dreams. One night he seemed to be holding in his hands a large sieve, and it was his task to pull the meshes apart, one by one. The close net-work, and the fastening to the wooden rim, gave him indescribable trouble. But as his dream went on, he seemed to hold in his hand the great bright sun, which flamed up into his face. He woke with a new-born feeling, and slumbered again, as if on waving tulips. He dreamed again that he was a hundred years old, and that he died as an innocent yearling child, without any of the sin or woe of earth; that he found his parents on high, who brought before him a long procession of his children, who had remained invisible to him while he was in this world, because they were transparent, like the angels. He rose from his bed with new teeth and new ideas. The old Fibel was consumed, and a true Phœnix stood in his place, sunning its colored wings. He had risen glorified out of no other grave than his own body. The world retreated; heaven came down.

When he had related these things, he at once bade me good night. Without waiting for the return of his ministering poodle, and with hands folded for prayer, he showed me the road. I withdrew, but I rambled a long time round the orchard, which had sprung entirely from seed of his own planting. Indeed he seldom ate a cherry without smuggling the stone and burying it in the ground for a resurrection. This habit often annoyed the neighboring peasants, who did not want high things growing on their boundaries. “But,” said he, “I cannot destroy a fruit-stone. If the peasants pull up the tree it produces, it will still have lived a little while, and die as a child dies.”

While loitering in the orchard, I heard an evening hymn played and sung. I returned near Fibel’s window, and saw him slowly turning a hand-organ, and accompanying the tune by softly singing an evening hymn. This organ, aided by his fragment of a voice, sufficed, in its monotonous uniformity, for his domestic devotion. I went away repeating the song.

Beautiful was the orchard when I returned the next morning. And the hoar-frost of age seemed thawed and fluid, and to glisten only as morning dew on Fibel’s after-blossom. The affection of his animals toward him rendered the morning still more beautiful, in an orchard every tree of which had for its mother the stone of some fruit that he had enjoyed. His animals were an inheritance from his parents; though, of course they were the great, great, great grandchildren of those which had belonged to them. The trees were full of brooding birds, and by a slight whistle he could lure down to his shoulders this tame posterity of his father’s singing-school. It was refreshing to the heart to see how quickly the tender flutterers surrounded him.

With the infantine satisfaction of a gray-headed child, he was accustomed to hang up on sticks, or in the trees, wherever the rays of the sun could best shine upon them, little balls of colored glass; and he took indescribable delight in this accordion of silver, gold, and jewel hues. These parti-colored sun-balls, varying the green with many flaming tints, were like crystal tulip-beds. Some of the red ones seemed like ripe apples among the branches. But what charmed the old man most were reflections of the landscape from these little world-spheres. They resembled the moving prospects shadowed forth in a diminishing mirror. “Ah,” said he, “when I contemplate the colors produced by the sunshine, which God gives to this dark world, it seems to me as if I had departed, and were already with God. And yet, since He is in us, we are always with God.”

I asked him how it happened that, at his age, he spoke German almost purer than that used even by our best writers. Counting his birth from the end of his century [the new birth described in his dream], he replied: “I was somewhere about two years old, when I happened to hear a holy, spiritual minister, who spoke German with such an angel tongue, that he would not have needed a better in heaven. I heard him every Sabbath during several years.” He could not tell me the preacher’s name, but he vividly described his manner in the pulpit. He told how he spoke with no superfluity of words, airs, or gestures; how he uttered, in mild tones, things the most beautiful and forcible; how, like the Apostle John, with his resting-place close to heaven, this man spoke to the world, laying his hands calmly on the pulpit-desk, as an arm-case; how his every tone was a heart, and his every look a blessing; how the energy of this disciple of Christ was embedded in love, as the firm diamond is encased in ductile gold; how the pulpit was to him a Mount Tabor, whereon he transfigured both himself and his hearers; and how, of all clergymen, he best performed that which is the most difficult,--the praying worthily.

My feelings grew constantly warmer toward this time-worn man, while I did not require a full return of affection from him any more than I should from a little child. But I remembered that I ought not to disturb the evening of his days with things of the world, and that I ought to depart. I would have him preserve undisturbed that sublime position of old age, where man lives, as it were, at the pole; where no star rises or sets; where the whole firmament is motionless and clear, while the Pole-Star of another world shines fixedly overhead. I therefore said to him, that I would return in the evening, and take my leave. To my surprise, he replied, that perhaps he should himself take leave of the whole world at evening, and that he wished not to be disturbed when dying. He said that he should that evening read to the end of the Revelation of St. John, and perhaps it might be the end with him also. I ought to have mentioned previously that he read continually, and read nothing but the Bible, regularly through from the beginning to the end; and he had a fixed impression that he should depart on concluding the twentieth and twenty-first verses of the twenty-second chapter of the Revelation of John: “He which testifieth of these things saith, Surely I come quickly: Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen.” In consequence of this belief, he was in the habit of reading the last books of the Bible faster.

Little as I believed in so sudden a withering of his protracted after-blossom, I obeyed his latest-formed wish. Whenever a right wish is expressed by any man, we should do well to remember that it may be his last. I took my leave, requesting him to intrust me with his testamentary commissions for the village. He said they had been taken charge of long ago, and the children knew them. He cut a twig from a Christmas-tree, coeval with his childhood, and presented me with it as a keepsake.

In the beautiful summer evening, I could not refrain from stealthily approaching the house, through the orchard, to ascertain whether the good old man had ended his Bible and his life together. On the way, I found the torn envelope of a letter sealed with a black seal, and over me the white storks were speeding their way to a warmer country. I was not much encouraged when I heard all the birds singing in his orchard; for their ancestors had done the same when his father died. A towering cloud, full of the latest twilight, spread itself before my short-sighted vision, like a far-off, blooming, foreign landscape; and I could not comprehend how it was that I had never before noticed this strange-looking, reddish land; so much the more easily did it occur to me that this might be his Orient, whither God was leading the weary one. I had become so confused, as actually to mistake red bean-blossoms for a bit of fallen sunset. Presently, I heard a man singing to the accompaniment of an organ. It was the aged man singing his evening hymn:

“Lord of my life, another day Once more hath sped away.”

The birds in the room, and those on the distant branches also, chimed in with his song. The bees, too, joined in with their humming, as in the warm summer evening they dived into the cups of the linden-blossoms. My joy kindled into a flame. He was alive! But I would not disturb his holy evening. I would let him remain with Him who had surrounded him with gifts and with years, and not call upon him to think of any man here below. I listened to the last verse of his hymn, that I might be still more certain of the actual continuance of his life, and then tardily I slipped away. To my joy, I still found, in the eternal youth of Nature, beautiful references to his lengthened age; from the everlasting rippling of the brook in the meadow, to a late swarm of bees, which had settled themselves on a linden-tree, probably in the forenoon, before two o’clock, as if, by taking their lodging with him, he was to be their bee-father, and continue to live. Every star twinkled to me a hope.

I went to the orchard very early in the morning, wishing to look upon the aged man in sleep; death’s ancient prelude, the warm dream of cold death. But he was reading, and had read, in his large-printed Bible, far beyond the Deluge, as I could see by the engravings. I held it to be a duty not to interrupt his solitude long. I told him I was going away, and gave him a little farewell billet, instead of farewell words. I was much moved, though silent. It was not the kind of emotion with which we take leave of a friend, or a youth, or an old man; it was like parting from a remote stranger-being, who scarcely glances at us from the high, cold clouds which hold him between the earth and the sun. There is a stillness of soul which resembles the stillness of bodies on a frozen sea, or on high mountains; every loud tone is an interruption too prosaically harsh, as in the softest adagio. Even those words, “for the last time,” the old man had long since left behind him. Yet he hastily presented to me my favorite flower, a blue Spanish vetch, in an earthen pot. This butterfly-flower is the sweeter, inasmuch as it so easily exhales its perfume and dies. He said he had not yet sung the usual morning-hymn, which followed the survival of his death-evening; and he begged me not to take it amiss that he did not accompany me, or even once look after me, especially as he could not see very well. He then added, almost with emotion, “O friend, may you live virtuously! We shall meet again, where my departed relatives will be present, and also that great preacher, whose name I have forgotten. We meet again.”

He turned immediately, quite tranquilly, to his organ. I parted from him, as from a life. He played on his organ beneath the trees, and his face was turned toward me; but to his dim eyes I knew that I should soon become as a motionless cloud. So I remained until he began his morning hymn, from old Neander:

“The Lord still leaves me living, I hasten Him to praise; My joyful spirit giving, He hears my early lays.”

While he was singing, the birds flew round him; the dogs accustomed to the music, were silent; and it even wafted the swarm of bees into their hive. Bowed down as he was by age, his figure was so tall, that from the distance where I stood he looked sufficiently erect. I remained until the old man had sung the twelfth and last verse of his morning hymn:

“Ready my course to finish, And come, O God, to Thee; A conscience pure I cherish, Till death shall summon me.”

* * * * *

Nothing of God’s making can a man love rightly, without being the surer of God’s loving himself; neither the moon, nor the stars, nor a rock, nor a tree, nor a flower, nor a bird. Not the least grateful of my thanksgivings have been hymns that have come to my lips while I have been listening to the birds of an evening. Only let us love what God loves, and then His love of ourselves will feel certain, and the sight of his face we shall be sure of; and immortality, and heaven, and the freedom of the universe, will be as easy for us to believe in, as a father’s giving good gifts to his children.--MOUNTFORD.

MILTON’S HYMN OF PATIENCE.

BY ELIZABETH LLOYD HOWELL.