Part 36 (2/2)
He let the head fall, and buried his face in his hands.
He turned reproachfully, to gaze on that cloudless Heaven, where the moon, and the brilliant stars, and the falling meteor, seemed to hold a bright and giddy festival.
He clasped his hands in mute agony. For a brief moment--his dark eye seeming to invite His wrath--he dared to arraign the mercy of G.o.d, who had taken what he had made.
It was but for a moment he thus thought.
He had watched that light of life, until its existence was almost identified with his own. He had seen it flicker--had viewed it reillumed--blaze with increased brilliancy--fade--glimmer--and fade. Now!
where was it?
A bitter cry escaped! his limbs trembled convulsively, and could no longer support him.
He fell senseless beside his brother.
Chapter XI
The Student
”What is my being? _thou_ hast ceased to be.”
Carl Obers was as enthusiastic a being as ever Germany sent forth. Brought up in a lone recess in the Hartz mountains, with neither superiors nor equals to commune with, he first entered the miniature world, as a student at Heidelberg.
His education had been miserably neglected. He had read much; but his reading had been without order and without system.
The deepest metaphysics, and the wildest romances had been devoured in succession; until the young man hardly knew which was the real, or which was the visionary world:--the one he actually lived in, or the one he was always brooding over:--where souls are bound together by mysterious and hidden links, and where men sell themselves to Satan;--the penalty merely being:--to walk through life, and throw no shadow.
Enrolled amongst a select corps of bruschen, warm and true; his ear was caught by the imposing jargon of patriotism; and his imagination dwelt on those high sounding words, ”the rights of man;”--until he became the staunch advocate and unflinching votary of a state of things, which, for aught we know, _may_ exist in one of the planets, but which never can, and which never will exist on this earth of ours.
”What!” would exclaim our enthusiast, ”have we not all our bodily and our mental, energies? Doth not dame Nature, in our birth, as in our death, deal out impartial justice? She may endow me with stronger limbs, than another:--our feelings as we grow up, may not be chained down to one servile monotony;--the lip of the precocious cynic”--this was addressed to a young matter of fact Englishman--”who sneers at my present animation, may not curl with a smile as often as my own; but let our powers of acting be equal,--our prerogatives the same.”
Carl Obers, with his youth and his vivacity, carried his auditors--a little knot of beer drinking liberty-mongers--_with_ him, and _for_ him, in all he said; and the orator would look round, with conscious power, and considerable satisfaction; and flatter himself, that his specious arguments were as unanswerable, as they were then unanswered.
Many of our generation may remember the unparalleled enthusiasm, which, like an electric flash, spread over the civilised world; as Greece armed herself, to shake off her Moslem ruler.
It was one that few could help sharing.
To almost all, is Greece a magic word. Her romantic history--the legacies she has left us--our early recollections, identifying with her existence as a nation, all that is good and glorious;--no wonder these things should have shed a bright halo around her,--and have made each breast deeply sympathise with her in her unwonted struggle for freedom.
Carl Obers did not hear of this struggle with indifference. He at once determined to give Greece the benefit of his co-operation, and the aid of his slender means. He immediately commenced an active canva.s.s amongst his personal friends, in order to form a band of volunteers, who might be efficient, and worthy of the cause on which his heart was set.
He now first read an useful lesson from life's unrolled volume.
Many a voice, that had rung triumphantly the changes on liberty, was silent now, or deprecated the active attempt to establish it.
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