I could not well avoid recording the foolish trick of the Professor's, because, two days after, it conjured up around Gustavus, on the eve of his departure, the following scene, which might full as well have crushed as cheered his heart.
In the interval before his departure he carried his heavy heart and heavy eye to all places which he loved and was leaving, to the holy sepulchre of his childhood, under every tree which had shut out from him the sun, up every hill which had shown it to him--he went on through nothing but ruins of his tender child life; over his whole youthful Paradise the past lay like a flood; before him, behind him, stretched the marsh land and land of tillage, into which fate so soon drives man.
... This was the moment when, before the sun, which, like him, was going hence, and before the whole of great nature, which, with invisible hands lifts blind man into vast, pure, unknown regions, I pressed the likeness of his Guido,[52] which I had hitherto withheld from him, to my beloved scholar's heart; at such moments words are unnecessary, but every word one does speak has an almighty hand: "Here, Gustavus," said I, "here, before Heaven and Earth, and before all that is invisible around man, here I make over to thee from my guardian hands into thine five great things--I deliver to thee thy innocent heart--I deliver to thee thy honor--the thought of the Infinite--thy Destiny--and thy form, which also encloses Guido's soul. Not on the earth do the great hours stand, which will ask thee whether thou hast kept or lost these five great things--but they will one day compare thy future soul with thy present. Ah! let me not think of myself, if thou shalt have lost all!" ...
I went away without embracing him; the best feelings keep a firmer hold when one does not allow them to express themselves. He remained where he was, and his feelings turned toward the picture of Guido; but that had no power to remind him of his own form--for a man may have come to his twentieth year without knowing his own teeth, and to his twenty-fifth remain unacquainted with his own eyelashes, whereas a maiden shall know all about hers before her confirmation--but the picture woke to life again all of memory and love towards his Genius, his first educator, that slumbered within him; nay, he found in the likeness nothing but resemblances to his friend who had fled from him and saw his form in the painted nothing as in a concave mirror.