How gladsomely the green smiles forth on me,
Like hope from out the blue eternity.—Page 124.
Green, among the northern nations, is regarded as the colour of
hope. The whole of this passage, like many others in Oehlenschläger's
writings, was suggested by an incident in his own life,
when in Germany in 1806. ‘In order to enjoy Goethe's society
for other eight days,’ he writes, ‘I went to Jena, where he passed
some time previously to making his usual summer trip to
Carlsbad. It was a sultry day when I walked from Weimar to
Jena; I was warm, and slaked my thirst hurriedly at an ice-cold
spring by the wayside. When I reached Jena, I felt a contraction
at the chest, which at first caused me some uneasiness, and I
thought,—‘How if you should have done yourself harm by the
draught of cold water when you were over-heated?’ I was along
with Goethe in the house of Fromman, the bookseller, but the
spasms were so violent that I could not fully enjoy his society.
Still I did not mention to any one what I was suffering. Looking
out of the window, I beheld a large brilliant rainbow, in which the
line of green, the colour of hope, was particularly bright. As I
gazed upon it, my alarm vanished; and two days afterwards my
pain was gone. But the feeling of that day and the image of the
rainbow hovered before my mind's eye, when, three years afterwards,
I composed the fifth act of Correggio.’—
Meine Lebens-Erinnerungen,
Vol. ii., p. 62.
