Louis Lambert — Honoré de Balzac, trans. Katharine Prescott Wormeley

‘‘T gathered them for you,’’ said Minna, giving the nosegay to the being she adored. ‘‘One of them—this one,”’ said she, picking out a particular blossom, “‘is like the flower we gathered on the Falberg.”’

Seraphitus looked at the blossom and then at Minna.

p. 152

‘“Why do you question me thus? Do you doubt me?’”

‘‘No,’’ said the girl, ‘‘my confidence in you is unbounded. While you are far more beautiful to me than this beautiful scenery, you also seem to me to be superior in intelligence to all the rest of humanity. When I have been with you, I seem to have communed with God. I only wish—”’

““What?’’? asked Seraphitus, with a flashing look that revealed to the girl the vast distance that divided them.

‘*{ wish [ could. suffer in your stead.”’

‘‘This is the most dangerous of Thy creatures,’’ thought Seraphitus. ‘‘Is it a criminal thought, O God, to long to present her to Thee ?—Have you forgotten,’’ he said aloud, ‘tall [ told you up there?’’ and he pointed upward to the peak of the Ice-cap.

‘‘Now heis terrible again!’’ thought Minna with a shudder.

The roar of the Sieg formed an accompaniment to the thoughts of these three beings, who stood together for a few minutes on a projecting slab of rock, parted, as they were, by immeasurable gulfs in the spiritual world.

‘‘Teach me then, Seraphitus,’’ said Minna, in a voice as silvery as a pearl and as gentle as the movements of a sensitive plant. ‘Teach me what I must do to avoid loving you? Who could fail to admire you? And love is the admiration that is never tired.’’

‘‘Poor child!’ said Seraphitus, turning pale, “only one
Being can be loved thus.’’

‘‘Who is that?’’ asked Minna.

‘*You shall know!’’ was the reply in the weak voice of one who lies down to die.

“Help! He is dying!’ cried Minna.

Wilfrid hastened forward, and seeing this being reSERAPHITA 153 clining gracefully on a block of gneiss over which time had thrown its carpet of velvet, its glistening lichens, and dusky mosses, lustrous in the sunshine—

‘She is lovely!’’ he exclaimed.

‘“This is the last glance I may give to nature in travail,’ said Seraphita, collecting all her strength to rise. She went to the edge of the cliff, whence she could see the whole of the sublime landscape, but lately wrapped in*its mantle of snow,’ now full of life, green and flowery.

‘‘Farewell,’’ said she, ‘‘oh, burning hotbed of love! whence everything tends from the centre to the utmost circumference, while the extremities are gathered up, like a woman’s hair, to be spun into the unknown plait by which thou art linked, in the invisible ether, to the Divine Idea!

‘‘Behold him who is bending over the furrow, watered with his sweat, and pausing for an instant to look up to heaven; behold her who gathers the children in to feed them from her breast; him who knots the ropes in the fury of the tempest; her who sits in the niche of a rock awaiting her father; and, again, all those who hold out their hands for help after spending their life in thankless toil! Peace and courage to them all, and to all farewell!

‘‘Do you hear the cry of the soldier who dies unknown, the wrath of the man who laments, disappointed, in the desert? Peace and courage to all, to all farewell! Farewell, you who die for the kings of the earth; but farewell, too, ye races without a native land, and farewell, lands without a people—seeking each other. Farewell, above ail, to thee, sublime exile, who knowest not where to lay thy head! Farewell, dear innocents, dragged away by the hair of your head for having loved too well! Farewell, mothers sitting by your dying sons! Farewell, holy, broken-hearted wives!

p. 154

Farewell, O ye who are poor, young, weak, and suffering, whose woes I have so often made my own! Farewell, all ye who gravitate in the sphere of instinct, suffering there for others!