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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Campaner Thal and Other Writings, by
+Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Campaner Thal and Other Writings
+
+Author: Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
+
+Release Date: April 24, 2011 [EBook #35948]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CAMPANER THAL AND OTHER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Bowen, from page scans provided by Google Books.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Google Books:
+http://books.google.com/books?id=3muLoyVE2ecC&source=gbs_navlinks_s
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ RICHTER'S WRITINGS.
+
+
+TITAN. A Romance. 2 vols. 16mo. $3.00.
+
+FLOWER, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 2 vols. 16mo. $2.75.
+
+LEVANA; Or, The Doctrine of Education. 1 vol. 16mo. $1.50.
+
+THE CAMPANER THAL, and Other Writings. 1 vol. 16mo. $1.50.
+
+HESPERUS. 2 vols. 16mo. _Preparing_.
+
+ _The above volumes are printed in uniform size and style_.
+
+
+ IN PRESS.
+
+LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. By Eliza Buckminster Lee. New Edition, Revised. 1
+volume.
+
+
+ TICKNOR AND FIELDS, Publishers.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ THE
+
+
+ CAMPANER THAL,
+
+
+ AND
+
+
+ OTHER WRITINGS.
+
+
+
+ _From the German of_
+
+ JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER.
+
+
+
+
+
+ BOSTON:
+ TICKNOR AND FIELDS.
+ 1864.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ University Press:
+ Welch, Bigelow, and Company,
+ Cambridge.
+
+
+
+
+
+ CONTENTS.
+
+
+ _THE CAMPANER THAL_.
+
+Introduction.
+
+
+ 501st STATION.
+
+The Diversities of Life.--The Dirge as Billet-Doux.--The Cavern.--The
+Surprise.
+
+
+ 502d STATION.
+
+The Thundering Morning.--The Short Trip after the Long One.--The
+Sofa-Cushions.
+
+
+ 503d STATION.
+
+Lampoon on the Chaplain.--Praise of Him.--The Diamond.--Opinions
+against Immortality.--Eden Jokes.
+
+
+ 504th STATION.
+
+Flower Toying.
+
+
+ 505th STATION.
+
+The Ephemera.--Relative Conclusions.--Doubts of the Length of the Chain
+of Living Beings.--The Wart-Eaters.--The Cure.
+
+
+ 506th STATION.
+
+Objections to Immortality.--The Second Childhood of the Outer and Inner
+Man.
+
+
+ 507th STATION.
+
+The Theft of the Souvenir.--Answers to previous Stations.--On the
+Emigration of the Dead to the Planets.--The Threefold World in
+Man.--Grief without Hope.--The Seal of Immortality.--The
+Country-Seat.--The Balloons.--Ecstasy.
+
+
+
+
+ LIFE OF QUINTUS FIXLEIN.
+
+
+Letter to my Friends, instead of Preface.
+
+
+ FIRST LETTER-BOX.
+
+Dog-Day's' Vacation.--Visits.--An Indigent of Quality.
+
+
+ SECOND LETTER-BOX.
+
+Frau von Aufhammer.--Childhood-Resonance.--Authorcraft.
+
+
+ THIRD LETTER-BOX.
+
+Christmas Recollections.--New Occurrence.
+
+
+ FOURTH LETTER BOX.
+
+Office-Brokage.--Discovery of the promised Secret.--Hans von Füchslein.
+
+
+ FIFTH LETTER-BOX.
+
+Cantata-Sunday.--Two Testaments.--Pontac; Blood; Love.
+
+
+ SIXTH LETTER-BOX.
+
+Office-Impost.--One of the most important of Petitions.
+
+
+ SEVENTH LETTER-BOX.
+
+Sermon.--School Exhibition.--Splendid Mistake.
+
+
+ EIGHTH LETTER-BOX.
+
+Instalment in the Parsonage.
+
+
+ NINTH LETTER-BOX.
+
+Or to the Marriage.
+
+
+ TENTH LETTER BOX.
+
+St. Thomas's-Day and Birthday.
+
+
+ ELEVENTH LETTER BOX.
+
+Spring; Investiture; and Childbirth.
+
+
+ TWELFTH LETTER-BOX.
+
+Steeple-Ball Ascension.--The Toy-Press.
+
+
+ THIRTEENTH LETTER BOX.
+
+Christening.
+
+
+ FOURTEENTH LETTER-BOX.
+
+ CHAPTER LAST.
+
+
+
+
+ _SCHMELZLE'S JOURNEY TO FLÄTZ_.
+
+
+Preface.
+
+Circular Letter of the proposed Catechetical Professor Attila Schmelzel
+to his Friends; containing some Account of a Holidays' Journey to
+Flätz, with an Introduction, touching his Flight, and his Courage as
+former Army-Chaplain.
+
+Journey to Flätz.
+
+First Stage; from Neusattel to Vierstädten.
+
+Second Stage; from Vierstädten to Niederschöna.
+
+Third Stage; from Niederschöna to Flätz.
+
+First Day in Flätz.
+
+First Night in Flätz.
+
+Second Day in Flätz.
+
+
+
+
+ _ANALECTS FROM RICHTER_.
+
+
+The Happy Life of a Parish Priest in Sweden.
+
+Dream upon the Universe.
+
+Complaint of the Bird in a darkened Cage.
+
+On the Death of Young Children.
+
+The prophetic Dew-Drops.
+
+On Death.
+
+Imagination untamed by the coarser Realities of Life.
+
+Satirical Notice of Reviewers.
+
+Female Tongues.
+
+Forgiveness.
+
+The Grandeur of Man in his Littleness.
+
+Night.
+
+The Stars.
+
+Martyrdom.
+
+The Quarrels of Friends.
+
+Dreaming.
+
+Two Divisions of Philosophic Minds.
+
+Dignity of Man in Self-Sacrifice.
+
+Fancy.
+
+
+
+
+ _MISCELLANEOUS PIECES_.
+
+
+Reminiscences of the best Hours of Life for the Hour of Death.
+
+The New-Year's Night of an Unhappy Man.
+
+The Death of an Angel.
+
+A Dream and the Truth.
+
+The Beauty of Death in the Bloom of Youth.
+
+
+
+
+
+ THE
+
+ CAMPANER THAL;
+
+ OR,
+
+ DISCOURSES ON THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL.
+
+ TRANSLATED BY JULIETTE BAUER.
+
+
+
+
+
+"Report also, we regret to say, is all that we know of the _Campaner
+Thal_, one of Richter's beloved topics, or rather the life of his whole
+philosophy, glimpses of which look forth on us from almost every one of
+his writings. He died while engaged, under recent and almost total
+blindness, in enlarging and remodelling this _Campaner Thal_. The
+unfinished manuscript was borne upon his coffin to the burial vault;
+and Klopstock's hymn, _Auferstehen wirst du!_ 'Thou shalt arise, my
+soul!' can seldom have been sung with more appropriate application than
+over the grave of Jean Paul."--From _Carlyle's Miscellanies_.
+
+
+
+
+ INTRODUCTION.
+
+
+In my distilling processes, I frequently precipitated the phlegma
+of our earthball--its polar deserts, its Russian forests, its
+icebergs--and from the sediments extracted a beautiful by-earth, a
+small satellite. If we extract and regulate the charms of this old
+world, we can form a delightful though minutely condensed world.
+
+For the caves of this miniature or ditto-earth, we will take the
+caves of Antiparos and of Baumann, for its plains, the Rhine
+provinces--Hybla, Thabor, and Mont Blanc shall be its mountains--its
+islands, the Friendly, the Holy, and the Palm isles. Wentworth's park
+and Daphne's grotto, and some corner-pieces from the Paphian, we have
+for its forests--for a charming valley, the Seifer's-dorfer and that of
+Campan. Thus we possess, besides this dirty, weary world, the most
+beautiful by or after-world--an important dessert service--an
+Ante-Heaven between Ante-Hells.
+
+I have purposely included this valley of Campan in my extract and
+decoction, as I know none other in which I would rather awake, or die,
+or love than in this one; if I had to command, I would not permit my
+valley to be mixed up or placed beside the vale of Tempe or the Rose
+Valley, perhaps with Utopia. The reader must have known this valley in
+his geographical lessons, or in the works of Arthur Young, who praises
+it even more than I do.[1]
+
+I must take for granted, that in July, 1796, the Goddess of Fortune
+descended from her throne to our earth, and placed in my hand--not
+mammon, nor garters, nor golden sheep--nothing but her own, and led
+me--by this I recognized the goddess--to the Campan vale. Truly, man
+needs but look into it, and he will have--as I had--more than the Devil
+_offered_ to Christ and Louis XIV., and _gave_ to the popes.
+
+The test of enjoyment is memory. Only the paradises of the imagination
+willingly remain, and are never lost, but always conquered. Poetry
+alone reconciles the past to the future, and is the Orpheus's lyre
+which commands these two destroying rocks to rest.[2]
+
+As stated, in the year 1796, I made a trip through France, with my
+friend H. Karlson. He is honorary master of horse in the * * * service.
+The wise public cares little for true names, it always treats them as
+fictitious ones, by way of literary taxation; and the existing
+characters, at least those of any importance, may prefer not to be torn
+over the wheel of criticism, and dragged piecemeal through libraries
+and reading-clubs. At almost every milestone, I despatched the best
+hourly bulletin to my friend Victor: when I had sent him the following
+valley-piece, he persecuted me until I promised to grant this
+illuminated portrait of nature, not alone to the letter, but also to
+the printing-press. Therefore I do it. I know already, my poor Victor
+sees, that in our days no green branch is left as a spinning-hut
+for the man-caterpillar, and that inimical divers try to cut our
+anchor-rope, sunk in the sea of death. Therefore he thinks more of the
+conversations on immortality, than of the valley in which they took
+place. I know this, because he calls me the counterpart of Claude
+Lorraine, who only drew the landscape, while another drew the human
+beings in it. Truly such a valley deserves that the mining and
+sabbath-lamp of truth should be lowered into the suffocating air of the
+grave, in place of our _self_, merely to see if that _self_ can breathe
+at such a depth.
+
+I have jokingly divided my letters into stations. I of course omit 500,
+and commence at the 501st, wherein I appear in the valley.
+
+
+
+
+ CAMPANER THAL.
+
+ 501st STATION.
+
+ The Diversities of Life.--The Dirge as Billet-Doux.--The
+ Cavern.--The Surprise.
+
+
+ _Campan, 23d July_.
+
+Here have I been since the day before yesterday. After descent into
+hell and purgatory, and passage through _limbos infantum et patrum_,
+man must at last reach heaven. But I owe you yet our exit from our inn
+on the 20th. Never can the head have a harder couch than when we hold
+it in our hands. The reason that this happened to Karlson and myself
+was, that in the rooms adjoining ours a wedding-dance was taking place,
+and that below, the youngest daughter of our _maître d'hôtel_, who had
+not only the name, but also the charms of _Corday_, with two white
+roses on her cheeks, and two red ones in her hair, was being interred,
+and that human beings with pale faces and heavy hearts waited on happy
+and blooming ones. When fate harnesses to Psyche's car, the merry and
+the mourning steed together, the mourning one ever takes the lead;
+i. e. if the muses of Mirth and Sorrow play on the same stage in the
+same hour, man does not, like Garrick,[3] follow the former; he does
+not even remain neuter, but takes the side of the mourning one. Thus we
+always paint, like Milton, our lost Paradise more glowing than the
+regained one,--like Dante, hell better than purgatory. In short, the
+silent corpse made us cold to the warm, joyful influence of the
+dancers. But is it not absurd, my dear Victor, that a man who, like
+myself, knows nothing better than that every hour unfolds at once
+morning bloom and evening clouds; that here an Ash Wednesday and there
+a black Monday commence; that such a man, who grieves little that
+dancing music and funeral marches should sound at the same time on the
+broad national theatre of humanity, should yet hang his head and grow
+pale, when, in a side scene, this double music sounds in his ears? Is
+not this as absurd as all his other doings?
+
+Into Karlson's eyes something of this cloud had fallen. It was to him
+the restirred ashes of a funeral urn. He can withstand all sorrows, but
+not their recollection. He has replaced his years by lands, and the
+space he has travelled over must be called his time. But the firm youth
+changed color when he came to tell that the lover of the pale Corday
+had torn her folded taper hands asunder, and, on his knees, had dragged
+them to his burning lips.
+
+He perceived his paleness in the glass; and to explain it, he imparted
+the last and most secret leaf of his life's Robinsonade to me. You see
+what an opaque gem this youth is, who follows his friends through all
+France, without opening to his communicative friend and travelling
+companion, even a fold or a loophole in his relation to them. Now only
+from emotion on entering the Campan Vale, he draws the key from the
+keyhole, which shall become a prompter's hole for you.
+
+That he had accompanied the Baron Wilhelmi and his betrothed Gione,
+with her sister Nadine, to Lausanne, in order to celebrate their
+Arcadian marriage in the Campan Vale, you know already; that he had
+left them suddenly at Lausanne, and returned to the Rhine fall at
+Shaffhausen, you know also, but not the reason, which will now be
+related to you by me and by him.
+
+By daily contact Karlson had at last penetrated the thickly-woven veil,
+magically colored by betrothed love, thrown over the strong, firm, and
+kindred mind of Gione. Probably others discovered him ere he had
+discovered himself. His heart became like the so-called world's eye[4]
+in water, first bright, then varying its colors, then dull and misty,
+and at last transparent. Not to cloud their beautiful intimacy, he
+addressed the suspicious part of his attentions to Nadine. He did not
+explain to me clearly whether he had led her into a beautiful error,
+without taking a beautiful truth from Gione.
+
+The sword of death seemed likely to separate all these stage knots.
+Gione, the healthy and calm Gione, was suddenly attacked by a nervous
+disorder. One evening, Wilhelmi, with his usual poetic ardor, entered
+Karlson's chamber weeping, and, embracing him, could only sob forth the
+words, "She is no more."
+
+Karlson said not a word, but in the tumult of his own and others'
+griefs, departed that night for Shaffhausen, and probably fled at the
+same time from a beloved and a loving one,--from Gione and from Nadine.
+By this eternal waterspout of the Rhine, this onward pressing, molten
+avalanche, this gleaming perpendicular milky-way, his soul was slowly
+healed; but he was long imprisoned in the dark, cold, serpent's-nest of
+envenomed pains; they entwined and crawled over him, even to his
+heart. For he believed, as most world-men among whom he had grown up
+do,--perhaps, also, too much accustomed to analyzed ideas and opinions
+by his favorite study, chemistry,--that our last sleep is annihilation,
+as in the epopee the first man imagined the first sleep to be the first
+death.
+
+To Wilhelmi he only sent the name of his retreat and a poem, entitled,
+"Grief-without Hope," which declared his disbelief, for he had never
+broken the Ambrosia, whose delights a trust in immortality affords. But
+just that strengthened his enfeebled heart, that the muses led him to
+Hippocrene's spring of health.
+
+Wilhelmi answered, that he had read his beautiful requiem to the
+deceased, or the immortal one. A long swoon had occasioned the painful
+mistake. Gione and he entreated him to follow speedily. Karlson
+replied: "Fate had separated him from their beautiful feast by the
+Alpine Wall, but as it would, like the Campan Vale, ever renew its
+springs, he hoped to lose nothing but time by his delay."
+
+Now that the next world had cast its supernatural light on Gione's
+countenance, Karlson loved her too much to be capable of assisting at
+the ceremony of losing her forever. I will give you the opinion I
+formed of her by listening to his description.
+
+Even by a love and a praise in a person's absence we may be won; how
+much more, then, if both are thrown to us as farewell kisses after the
+ascent to Heaven! Therefore the idea of the future funeral procession
+behind my gay, richly decorated dust, onion and relic box is only
+another incentive, not only to drug, but also to absolve myself, for
+when older we are less missed. And even you, who so seldom hang us, or
+drive us all to the Devil, I mean, how seldom soever the tempest of
+anger sours the beer-barrel of your breast! Even you have no more
+efficacious morsel of white chalk, no better _oleum tartari per
+deliquium_,[5] with which you can sweeten your internal fluids, than
+the thought how we shall all turn pale round your death-bed, and be
+dumb at your grave-mound, and how none will forget you! I cannot
+possibly believe that there exists one being who, when death draws him
+into the diving-bell of the grave, will not leave _one_ weeping eye,
+_one_ bending head behind, and therefore each one can love the soul
+which will some time weep for him.
+
+When I think now of the convalescent Gione, with her wounded heart,
+which had received a new sensitiveness in the hot electric atmosphere
+of the sinking thunderbolt of Death, I need not measure her emotion at
+Karlson's poem, by the dew and hygrometer, nor with the loadstone of
+her love. But not Wilhelmi's brilliant riches, nor his still more
+brilliant conduct, her first choice, her first promise, forbade her
+even to touch the diamond scales.
+
+When Karlson told me all this, he turned Gione's ring-portrait upwards
+on his finger, and pressed the hard edge of the ring-finger with his
+tearful eyes, till the adorned hand was unconsciously touched by the
+lip's kiss. The bashfulness of his grief moved me so much, that I
+offered to take another route into the Vale, under the pretence that
+the dreams of it had lessened the desire for the reality, and that we
+should disturb the newly-affianced in their first rose-honey days, as
+they had probably waited for the mild late spring. He divined my
+intention; but his promise to come to-morrow dragged him by chains.
+Right gladly would I have missed the new spring-filled Eden, and drawn
+from my friend's feet the Jacob's ladder from which he might gaze on
+his former glad heaven, but could not ascend to it. On the other hand,
+I rejoiced at his firm, promise-keeping character, which opposed its
+strong nature to the thorns and boring-worms of sorrow; as with the
+increase of moonlight, tempests decrease. Unperceived, I now added
+Gione, not only Karlson, to the list of rare beings, who, like
+Raphael's and Plato's works, uncloud themselves only on earnest
+contemplation, and who, as both, resemble the Pleiades, which to the
+naked eye seems only to have seven suns, but with a telescope discloses
+more than forty.
+
+On the 20th, we started towards the Vale. On the way, I looked too
+often into Karlson's faithful, heavenly, deep-blue eyes. I descended
+into his heart, and sought the scene of the day on which the holy
+church tie would tear the noble Gione forever from out his pure muse
+and goddess-warmed heart. I confess I can imagine no day on which I
+regard my friend with deeper emotion that on that never-to-be-forgotten
+one, on which Fate gives him the brother kiss, the hand-pressure, the
+land of love and Philadelphia and Vaucluse's spring, united in one
+female heart.
+
+The day before yesterday, at ten in the evening, we arrived at
+Wilhelmi's Arcadian dwelling, which pressed its straw roof against a
+green marble wall. Karlson found it easily from its proximity to the
+famed Campan Cave, from which he had often broken stalactites. The sky
+was clouded with colored shadows, and on the green cradle of slumbering
+children night threw her star-embroidered cradle-cover, fastened to the
+summits of the Pyrenees. From out Wilhelmi's hermitage advanced some
+men in _black_ attire, with torches in their hands, who seemed to be
+waiting for us, and told us the baron was in the Cave. By heaven, under
+such circumstances, it is easier to imagine the most circumscribed,
+than the _largest_ and most _beautiful_ Cave! The sable attendants
+carried the flame before them, and drew the flying smoke-picture from
+oak-top to oak-top, and led us, stooping, through the catacomb
+entrance. But how splendidly was arched the high and wide grotto,[6]
+with its crystal sides, shining like an illumined ice Louvre, a
+gleaming sub-terrestrial heaven vault. Wilhelmi threw away a handful of
+gathered spars, and joyfully hastened into his friend's arms. Gione,
+with her sister, advanced from behind a connected stalactite and
+stalagmite. The gleaming of the torches gave her an undecided outline,
+but at length Wilhelmi advanced to her, and said, "Here is our friend."
+Bending low, Karlson kissed the warm living hand, and was dumb with
+emotion. But the firm features of Gione's earnest face, which wanted
+but Nadine's juvenile bloom, changed into a shining joy, greater than
+he dared to return or reward. "We have long expected and missed you in
+this paradise," she said, with unshaken voice; and her clear, calm eye
+opened a view into a richly-gifted, steadfast soul. "Welcome to the
+infernal regions," said Nadine; "you believe in reunion and Elysium
+now?" Though she received him with an assemblage or Flora of wit, or
+was it grace? for they were difficult to distinguish, this cheerfulness
+of character and acquirement seemed not to be the cheerfulness of a
+contented or reposeful mind.
+
+My friend introduced me properly, that no supermember or _hors
+d'[oe]uvre_ should remain in this corporation of friendship.
+
+To all of us--even to me--for around me never before seen beings
+floated in silver reflections--it seemed as if the world had ceased,
+Elysium had opened, and the separated, covered, sub-terrestrial regions
+cradled only tranquil, but happy souls.
+
+There was a certain heartfulness in the joyous interest which this
+affectionate trinity took in Karlson's appearance, which generally
+accompanies the last step before the disclosure of some hidden plan,
+but this plan was concealed. To speak something also to me, Nadine
+said, that there was a critical philosopher and arguer with them, who
+would rejoice to hear any one _for_ or _against_ his opinions,--namely,
+the house-chaplain. When we stepped from the illumined diamond and
+magic cave into the dark night, we saw the cloak of Erebus hang in
+thick cloudy folds over the earth, and pale lightning shot from the
+nightly mist, the flowers breathed from covered calysses, and under the
+fast approaching storm the nightingales raised their melodious voices
+behind their blooming hedges.
+
+Suddenly Gione walked more slowly by Karlson's side, and said, with
+much warmth, but without hesitation: "I heartily love truth, even at
+the expense of stage-like effect: I must, in the name of the Baron,
+discover to you that he and I will to-morrow be forever united. You
+must forgive _your_ friend that he would not celebrate this ceremony
+without _his_."
+
+I think that now, in Karlson's heart, the cooled lava immediately
+became fluid and glowing. Suddenly lightning flashed from a cloud
+around the rising moon, and illumined the rain-drops, intended for
+darkness, in Gione's and in Karlson's eyes. Wilhelmi asked, "Can you
+not forgive me?" Karlson pressed him warmly and lovingly to his
+grateful heart: this lofty confidence of friendship, and this
+affectionate proof of it, raised his strengthened soul above all
+desires, and another's virtue spread in his breast the calm
+tranquillity of his own. We took shelter for the night in three Thabor
+huts,--the ladies in the first, Wilhelmi with the critical philosopher
+in the second, Karlson and myself in the third,--which the Baron had
+hired for us. The fatigue of the journey, and even of our feelings,
+deferred our joys and confidences for another night. But I cannot tell
+you how nobly sorrow changed into exaltation in my friend's
+countenance, how grief fell like a cloud from his heaven, and
+discovered the serene blue beneath. The sacrifices and virtues of our
+beloved ones belong to the inexpressible joys which the soul at least
+can count and appreciate; which it can imitate.
+
+His and my eyes overflowed with holy gladness from a singularly elysian
+mood of harmony in anticipation of the coming day. Ah, my Victor!
+nations and men are only the _best_ when they are the gladdest, and
+deserve Heaven when they enjoy it. The tear of grief is but a diamond
+of the second water, but the tear of joy of the first. And therefore
+fatherly fate, thou spreadest the flowers of joy, as nurses do lilies
+in the nursery of life, that the awakening children may sleep the
+sounder! O, let philosophy, which grudges our _pleasures_, and blots
+them out from the plans of Providence, say by what right did torturing
+_pain_ enter into our frail life? Have we not already an eternal right
+to a warm down bed? I think not now of the deepest mattress in the
+earth, because we are so pierced with stigmas of the past, so covered
+with its wounds.
+
+You once said to me: "In your early years, you have been drawn and
+driven from the stoic philosophy by Sorites; for if the sensation of
+pleasure be as little as the stoics pretend, it were wiser to convert
+than to benefit your neighbor,--wiser to preach morality from pulpit
+and desk than to practise it in the work-rooms,--wiser to turn towards
+your neighbor the dirt-balls and _soap-pills_ of moral philosophy, than
+the enlarged marble _soap-bubbles_ of joy. Further, that it is a
+mistake to assert that virtue makes more worthy of happiness, if
+happiness possessed not an eternal, independent value in itself; for
+else it might be maintained that virtue would make the possessor of a
+straw, &c. worthy--"
+
+You said this once. Do you believe it yet?--I do.
+
+
+
+
+ 502d STATION.
+
+ The Thundering Morning.--The Short Trip after the
+ Long One.--The Sofa-cushions.
+
+
+Through the whole night, a half-lost thundering was heard, as though it
+murmured in its sleep. In the morning, before sunrise, Karlson and
+myself stepped out into the wide cloud-tapestried bridal-chamber of
+nature. The moon approached the double moment of its waning and its
+fulness. The sun, standing on America as on a burning altar, drove the
+cloudy incense of its _feu de joie_ high and red into the air; but a
+morning tempest boiled angrily above it, and darted its fierce
+lightnings to meet his ascending rays. The oppressive heat of nature
+drew longer and louder plaints from the nightingales, and evanescent
+aroma from the long flower-meads. Heavy warm drops were pressed from
+the clouds, and beat loudly on the stream and on the foliage. Only the
+Mittagshorn, the pinnacle of the Pyrenees, stood brightly and clearly
+in the heavenly blue. Now a gust of wind from the waning moon dispersed
+the raging storm, and the sun stood victoriously under a triumphal arch
+of lightnings. The wind restored the heaven's blue, and dashed the rain
+behind the earth, and around the dazzling sun-diamond there lay only
+the silvered fringes of the once threatening clouds.
+
+O my Victor, what a new-born day was now on earth, encamped in the
+glorious valley. The nightingales and the larks loudly sung its
+welcome, the rosechafers rustled round its lily garlands, and the
+eagle, riding on the highest cloud, surveyed it from mountain
+to mountain. How rurally all things surrounded the serpentine
+field-embracing Adour. The marble walls, not raised by human skill,
+surround its flower-beds like large vases, and the Pyrenees, with their
+high tops, watch over and protect the lowly scattered shepherd huts.
+Tranquil Tempe! May a storm never disturb thy gardens and thy murmuring
+Adour. May a stronger one never visit thee, than would gently rock the
+cradle of nature, or dash a bee from the honey-dew of the wheat-sheaf,
+or force but a single drop from the waterfall upon the flowers of thy
+shores.
+
+You must not think that I am placing my paintbrushes at my side to copy
+the heavenly rounded valley by the measure of art for you; I will let
+you peep into this picture-book of nature as chance shall turn each
+succeeding page. My stations will lead you through its different
+chambers, in which the rich dowry of Spring, like that of a king's
+daughter, is placed for show. But truly it is a more glorious thing to
+see the whole dowry disposed over the person of the royal bride
+herself.
+
+A servant seeking the chaplain, roused us both from our reverie. We saw
+him advance towards a gentleman standing on the banks of the Adour, who
+slowly turned down his rolled-up shirt-sleeves. It was the chaplain,
+who had been catching crabs during the storm, and had subsequently
+fished. As I knew that his hairy hand had worked for the food of the
+critical, as well as his own philosophy, with trowel and mortar, with
+pen and ink, I boldly advanced towards him, and told him what I was
+writing. But the coarse, obstinate, yet timid free-mason, coldly
+welcomed me in a language as broad as his own frosty visage.
+
+He despises biographers; for the windows of a philosophical audience
+are too high,--perhaps, as in ancient temples, in the roof,--so that
+they cannot see into the streets of real life, as, according to
+Winkelmann, the Roman windows were architecturally as high. Lord
+Rochester is said to have been continually drunk during a whole
+quintennium; but such a chaplain is capable of being _sober_ for an
+entire decennium. A man like this bites the buds of all powerful
+truths, experiences, and fictions, as ants bite the buds from
+corn-seeds, that they may not fructify, but wither and die and form
+building materials.
+
+When the Chaplain left me to join the Baron, as consecrator of the
+marriage sacrament, I found Karlson in the dustrain of a near cascade.
+Round him, almost close to our windows, the hermitages of the farmers
+waded in green foliage, with the fresh harvest wreath roofed by faded
+ones; and inside, there bloomed families, outside, elms. He showed me
+Gione's card, which, he said, she had given him before her marriage.
+But it was not so; he had found it on the moss near the cascade. It
+represented a Roman landscape, and beside the living fountain was the
+pictured one of Tivoli, and on a stone in the foreground Gione's name
+was written. Such a printed trifle, a beloved name shortly before its
+sublunar annihilation, moves the whole heart with a succession of
+pleasing reflections.
+
+Karlson went to the ceremony. I remained alone under the splendid blue
+heaven, and rejoiced that all the inhabitants of Campan wore its
+livery, the blue, which we had yesterday mistaken for black.
+
+I will not hide from you that during the coupling, softened by the many
+beauties of spring, I lost myself in Nadine's equally charming ones,
+which were an undiscovered Central Africa for me, while I wished she
+were as warm. After eight or ten dreams, I saw the beautiful couples
+cross my path. How earnestly glad and serene we all stood under the
+spring music of flutes and pipes, and harps and warbling, which were
+living around us, with and without wings. Gione and Karlson concealed
+an equal emotion, as at an almost equal fate. Wilhelmi, who is, as a
+comet, sometimes in the burning, sometimes in the freezing point of a
+sun, requires no joys than those of others to make him happy. But a
+tear stood in Nadine's bright eye, which could not be smiled or looked
+away. Her heart seemed to me to resemble the earth, whose exterior is
+cold, but which carries in its centre a latent heat. And yesterday her
+whole being seemed so mirthful and so gay!
+
+We never make more erroneous conclusions in our opinions on any subject
+than on woman's cheerfulness. Oh! how many of these charming beings
+there are, who decay unvalued, who, while jesting, despair, and while
+joking, bleed to death; who hide their merry laughing eyes behind a
+wall, as behind a fan, to give glad vent to their long-restrained
+tears; who pay for a merry day by a tearful night, just as an unusually
+clear, transparent, and fogless air betokens rain. Remember the
+beautiful N. N., and also her youngest sister. In the mean time, the
+charming, sun-variegated dew-drop under Nadine's eye was balanced by a
+wart of half the size, the solitaire among her personal charms.
+
+Wilhelmi's lyric and dithyrambic head was filled with projects for
+pleasure, and with the eagerness of delight, he demanded a hasty
+determination concerning the proper use and enjoyment of the day. "O
+yes," said I, quickly and impertinently, "life flies to-day on a
+minute-hand, like an alarum it winds off; but how shall we form a plan,
+a good plan?" Nadine, who had arranged everything beforehand with the
+bridegroom, replied: "I think we need none for such a delightful day,
+and such a charming valley. We will pilgrimize carelessly along the
+banks of the Adour, the length of the Vale, and rest at every new
+flower, and at every bud, and in the evening we will sail back by
+moonlight! That would be quite Arcadian and shepherd-like in this
+Arcadia. Will you all? You certainly will, dearest sister?" "O yes,"
+said Gione, "for I think we are as yet all strangers to the charms of
+this paradise." The Baron seemed to hesitate before giving his consent,
+and said: "It depends whether the ladies can walk two and a quarter
+miles in one day."[7] I was mad with joy, and cried, "Charming!" Such a
+long horizontal heaven-journey, such a melodious Arpeggio through the
+chords of delight was an old innate wish of my youth. I imparted my
+delight to the Chaplain, to whose feelings this _voyage pitturesque_
+was as repugnant as a Good Friday procession, and to whom, instead of
+this heaven-way, that of Höfer[8] would have been more acceptable,
+because he would rather have remained at home to read, and because he
+did not enjoy the Epopee of nature as a man, nor scan it as a
+naturalist, but like an usher, separated and divided it, for practice
+in building up again. I said to him: "If we two will be shepherds,
+representing the old Myrtil and Phylax, it would be interesting. You
+know best that whims should be ten times less bold before ladies and
+refined ears than on print, and that for such people it has to be
+filtered through so many filtering-papers and strainers, that I would
+not give a proof-sheet for it after the process."
+
+A hired country-house, at the end of the valley, was the architectural
+Eden with which Wilhelmi intended to surprise and delight his bride in
+this botanic one. But Nadine alone knew it.
+
+In as many moments as a swan would take to spread his wings and rise,
+we were all ready. I do not blame man for making preparations for the
+examination for death, but for no (shorter) journey. The long _hunt_
+destroys the game of enjoyment. I, for my part, never think of starting
+until I am on the road.
+
+Wilhelmi loaded himself with his bride's guitar; Karlson carried a
+portable ice-cellar. The ladies had their parasols; the Chaplain and I
+had nothing. I whispered to the shallow Phylax,--so I can now call him,
+and myself the old Myrtil,--"Sir Chaplain, we rebel against all good
+manners if we follow empty-handed." He immediately offered himself to
+Gione, as pack-horse, wagon, and carrier for her--parasol. But clever
+genius prompted me to return to Karlson's chamber, and bring two
+cushions from the sofa, and I returned with these twins in my arms;
+nothing could have been more appropriate, as the ladies sat down a
+thousand times on the way, and could not have dipped their silken
+elbows in the juicy paint of the flowers. To his vexation, Phylax was
+obliged to carry the soft block in his arms; I hung the other one, like
+a stick, to my thumb. At last we started.
+
+We advanced towards the Pyrenees. Corn-fields, waterfalls, shepherd
+huts, marble blocks, woods and grottoes, animated by the vascular
+system of the many-branched Adour, passed beautifully before our eyes,
+and we were forced to leave them behind, like the bright years of youth
+changed into dreams by the stern hand of Time.
+
+Ah, Victor, travelling alone is life, as life, on the contrary, is only
+a journey. And if, like certain shell-fish, I could only push myself on
+with one foot, or, like sea-nettles and women, I could only progress
+six lines in a quarter of an hour, or if I lived under Fritz II. or
+Fritz I. (Lycurgus), who both forbade a long journey, I would make a
+short one, that I might not perish like the loach, which languishes in
+every vessel, if not shaken.
+
+How spirited, how poetical, how inventive can we not be while we run
+onwards. As Montaigne, Rousseau, and the sea-nettle only shine when
+they move on. By Heaven! it is no wonder that man rises and will go on;
+for does not the sun follow the pedestrian from tree to tree? does not
+its reflected likeness swim after him in the water? do not landscapes,
+mountains, hills, men, rapidly changing, come and go? and does not
+Freedom's breath blow on the ever-varying Eden, when, released from the
+neck and heart-breaking chains of narrow circumstances, we fly freely
+and gladly, as in dreams, over ever-new scenes.
+
+For unfortunately the bell-glass over men and melons, which at first is
+covered by a broken bottle, must always be raised higher and higher,
+and at last removed entirely. At first, a man will go into the next
+town, then to the university, then to an important residency, then--if
+he has only written twenty lines--to Weimar, and finally, to Italy or
+to heaven. And if the planets were stringed together on a cord, and
+near each other, or if the rays of light were roads, and the atoms of
+light bridges, then surely would post-houses be erected in Uranus, and
+the insatiable inner man--for the outer one is so very satiable--would
+go longing and roaming from planet to planet.----
+
+Therefore, my Victor, nothing is confined in so many prison-walls as is
+this our human self. And our cages are enclosed, onion-like, one in the
+other. Tour and my _self_ are imprisoned not only on this earth, but in
+this King's Bench are the town walls; in these our four walls surround
+us; in the four walls, the arm-chair or the bed; in this again, the
+shirt or the coat, or both; and lastly, the body. And, to be minute
+(according to Sömmering), in the brain crevices, the duck's
+pond.---- Start at the fatal many-sided suite of houses of correction
+which surround thy_self_?----
+
+
+
+
+ 503d STATION.
+
+ Lampoon on the Chaplain.--Praise of Him.--The Diamond.--Opinions
+ against Immortality.--Eden Jokes.
+
+
+We two fellow-carriers formed the rear-guard. I wished to enter into
+discourse, but Phylax had a very poor opinion of me; at most he thought
+me a fickle sentimentalist who only portrays feelings. Yet feelings are
+the sponge of atmospheric air, which the poet, on his high Parnassus,
+as well as the philosophical diver in his depths, _must_ hold in his
+mouth, and yet poetry has cast an earlier light on many obscure works
+of nature than philosophy, as the dark _new moon_ borrows light from
+_Venus_.
+
+But the philosopher sins against poets more than you sin against the
+followers of Kant, from whom you seem to expect that they shall write
+pleasingly. Your arguments are ideas, not reasonings, when you say that
+philosophy's attendants are like those of Turkish ladies, mute, black,
+and deformed; that the philosophical market-place is a _forium
+morionum_,[9] and that beauty is forbidden to philosophers, as it was
+to the Helots, who were killed for possessing it. Is it not evident
+that a certain barbarous, un-German, far-fetched language is more an
+ornament than a detriment to it. Oracles despise grace, _vox dei
+sol[oe]cismus_, i. e. a Kantist cannot be read,--he must be studied.
+Further, it is not beneath a philosopher to enrich the language instead
+of the science. For some other may seek the ideas for the terms, and
+find them, as animals were found for the Ammonites. Therefore the
+Greeks have the same term for _word_ and _knowledge_, which combination
+was at last deified. The philosopher should always write over his door
+_pour l'oudalgie_,[10] instead of "here lives a dentist." This is the
+best reason, except a second one, why the philosopher, especially the
+Kantist, as I saw in Phylax, needs not books, nor men, nor experience,
+nor chemistry, botany, the fine arts, nor natural history. He can and
+must decipher the positive, the material, the given number, the unknown
+X. He creates the term, and sucks, as children often do,--it may
+suffocate them,--his own blistered tongue.
+
+I must return to the company! As the Chaplain carried his
+walking-stick, or rather walking-tree of a cushion, with the greatest
+indifference towards me, I wished to prejudice him for me by a
+panegyric at the expense of Kant. I said to him: "It surprised me that
+the philosophers should have suffered Kant to have made so great a
+distinction between them and artists, and only allowed the merit of
+genius to the latter. He says, in § 47 of his 'Kritik der
+Urtheilkraft,' 'In sciences, the greatest inventor is only
+distinguished from the most labored imitator and apprentice by
+gradation; but from, those whom nature has gifted for beautiful nature,
+he is specifically distinguished.' This is derogatory, Sir Chaplain,
+and besides, not true. Why can Kant, then, only make Kantists, but no
+Kants?[11] Are new systems discovered by syllogisms, yet they are
+proved and tried by them? Can, then, the connection of a new
+philosophical idea with the old one better explain or facilitate its
+comprehension than the same connection which each new poetic one must
+have with old ones, which are the means of its creation. Sir Chaplain,
+I know not whom Kant has most sinned against, Truth, himself, or his
+school. Leibnitz's 'Monadology,' _harmonia præstabilita_, &c., are as
+much pure, brilliant emanations of genius, as any beaming form in
+Shakespeare or Homer. Besides, Leibnitz is a genial almighty Demiurg in
+the philosophical world, its greatest and first circumnavigator, and
+who, happier than Archimedes, found in his genius the standing-point
+from which he might move the philosophical _universa_, and play with
+worlds. He was an extraordinary spirit, he threw new chains on the
+earth, but he himself bore none: I think you agree with me, Sir
+Chaplain!" He replied, He did not, that the critical philosophy knew
+what to make of Leibnitz's experiments, his immaterial world, the
+asserted approximation of the definite to the indefinite line, and how
+to honor genius. In short, I had rather angered than conquered him.
+
+Karlson, whom even Amor's torch could not blind to the philosophical
+one, took as much interest in our war as could be taken with the ears.
+Fortunately we all stood still. A small diamond had fallen from
+Nadine's necklace, and she sought for the silver petrified spark in the
+grass. Strange that a man always hopes to find a thing on the spot
+where he perceives his loss. Nadine looked for her hardened dew-drop on
+the sparkling, spangled mead. As a bright diamond of the first water,
+it was so easily mistaken for a dew-drop, that I remarked, seeing one
+in Nadine's breast-rose, "Everything is covered with soft diamonds, and
+who will find the hard one? The dew in your rose sparkles as brightly
+as the lost stone." She looked down, and in the rose-cup lay the
+sought-for gem! It was thought I had been clever, and I was angry with
+myself for having been so stupid. But Nadine liked me no less for it,
+and that was reward enough.
+
+As the Adour bent, not an arm, but a finger, around this gay moss-bank
+and bees' sugar-field, the whole company sat among the bees and the
+flowers, and the cushion-bearers laid down their burdens. Nadine said,
+playfully, "If flowers have souls, the bees, whose nurses they are,
+must seem to them like dear sucking children." "They have," said
+Karlson, "souls like frozen window flowers, or like the tree of
+Petit,[12] which I once showed to you, or like pyramids of alum." "O,
+you always destroy, sir," said Gione. "Nadine and I once painted to
+ourselves an elysium for the souls of faded flowers." "I believe in a
+middle path for flowers after their death," said Wilhelmi, seriously;
+"the souls of lilies probably go into woman's forehead; hyacinth and
+forget-me-not souls into woman's eyes, and rose souls into lips and
+cheeks." I added, "It is a fortunate coincidence for this hypothesis,
+that a girl has perceptibly more color from the departing soul at the
+moment when she breaks or kills a rose."
+
+Joyfully and affectionately we continued our journey. Only into my
+carrier-companion the souls of thistles and sloes seemed to have
+entered. This play of ideas and this politeness in argument provoked
+him. Only Karlson pleased him.
+
+At last the Chaplain said to me: "No immortality but that of moral
+beings can be discussed, and with them it is a postulate or
+apprenticeship of practical sense. For as a full conformity of the
+human will to the moral law, with which the just Creator never can
+dispense, is quite unattainable by a finite being, an eternally
+continuing progress, i. e. an unceasing duration, must contain and
+prove this conformity in God's eyes, who overlooks the everlasting
+course. Therefore our immortality is necessary."
+
+Karlson stood still at Gione's side, that we might approach, and said:
+"Dear philosopher, pray take from this proof the boldness or the
+indistinctness which it has for laymen. How can we imagine the
+supervision, i. e. the termination, of an infinite, a never-ending
+course? or how will you make the eternity of time harmonize with the
+eternity of the moral requirements. How can a righteousness, scattered
+and dispersed over an interminable period of time, satisfy Divine
+Justice, which must require this righteousness in each portion of the
+period. And has the constant approximation of man towards this state of
+purity been proved? And will not the number, if not the grossness of
+faults, in this infinite space, increase with the number of virtues?
+And what comparison will the list of faults bear to that of the virtues
+at the examination? But let us leave that also. Will, in the sight of
+the Divine eye, the moral purity of two different beings--for instance,
+a seraph and a man, or of two different men, as Robespierre and
+Socrates--be equally contained in two equally long, i. e. eternal,
+courses of time? If on comparing the two, a difference appear, then one
+of them cannot have attained the so-called perfection, and must still
+be mortal."
+
+The Chaplain answered: "But Kant does not intend to demonstrate
+immortality by this argument. He says even, that it has been left so
+uncertain in order that free, pure will, and no selfish views, shall
+prompt our aspirations to immortality." "Strange," said Karlson. "But
+as we have now discovered this intention, its object would be defeated.
+Philosophers ought then to imitate me, and attack immortality to the
+advantage of virtue. It is a strange axiom to presuppose the truth of
+an opinion from its indemonstrability. Either immortality can be
+proved, then one half of your argument is right, or it cannot, then the
+whole of it is wrong. Besides, if the belief in immortality makes
+virtue selfish, the experience of it in the next world would make it
+more so. Does the belief in it deter the common man from doing what his
+confessor forbids, and forgives him? As little as the first stroke of
+apoplexy deters the drunkard from rushing to the second."
+
+
+
+
+ 504th STATION.
+
+ Flower Toying.
+
+
+Karlson joined the others in conversation, and Phylax was enraged that
+he could not triumph,--not even dispute. I said to him, that my
+opinions agreed with his, though not on the same grounds, and that,
+uniting, we would subsequently together issue forth and attack Karlson.
+
+I then went with my silken club to Nadine, and on a rose-bush showed
+her the flying light-magnets, the shining will-o'-the-wisps of night,
+the brown glowworms which she had never seen by day. I colonized a box
+with them for a living firework in the evening. Chance had romantically
+bent a bright rose-bush between graceful bluebells, on a green marble
+boundary stone; its foliage had the appearance of being seamed with
+black glowworms;[13] the lily-chafer hung like gold embroidery on the
+pale, ripe roses; long-legged, shining gnats ran glittering over the
+thorns; the flower-divers and nectary treasure-diggers, the bees,
+covered the rose-cups with new thorns; the butterflies, like moving
+tints, like Epicurean colors, gently floated round the branch's gay
+world. I cannot tell you how this glance, turned from the vast whole on
+to a beautiful small portion, gave a warmer glow to our hearts and to
+nature. Instead of the hand, we could only hold, like children, the
+fingers of the great mother of life, and reverently kiss them. By the
+creation, God became human for men, as therefore for angels an
+angel,--like the sun whose bright immensity the painter gently divides
+into the beauties of a human face.
+
+Wilhelmi said, that, to rise into Eden or Arcadia, he would need no
+larger wings than the four of a butterfly. What a poetical,
+paradisaical existence, like the papilio, to roam without stomach or
+hunger, among buds and flowers, to suffer no long night, no winter, and
+no storm, to toy away one's life in a delightful chase for another
+papilio, or to nestle, like the flower-colored bird of paradise, among
+lemon-blossoms, to float round blooming honey-cups, and to be rocked in
+silken cradles!
+
+Blissfully we proceeded on our way, and each new step drove an exciting
+blood-drop to our warmed hearts. I said to the Chaplain, that the
+temple of nature had been changed into a concert-hall for me, and every
+vocal into instrumental music. Victor! should not philosophy and the
+philosophers imitate electric bodies, which not only enlighten, but
+also attract? The soul's wine will indeed ever taste of the bodily
+barrel-hoops, but the soul is scarcely spirit-like enough only to serve
+as a body to another soul.
+
+
+
+
+ 505th STATION.
+
+ The Ephemera.--Relative Conclusions.--Doubts of the Length of the
+ Chain of Living Beings.--The Wart-Eaters.--The Cure.
+
+
+The sun and the valley surrounded us with their burning-glasses, and it
+was pleasant to sit down in a shady spot, and eat; and as just opposite
+to us was a marble-quarry, and close to the iron rock-wall a sap-green
+meadow, and beside us a group of elms and a little shining solitary
+white house, we asked at it for as much food as a roaming, contented
+quintet requires. The mistress of the house was alone, the husband was
+at work (as most Campanians are, in Spain), four children waited on us;
+our ice-cellar was opened, and with its contents the soul was warmed
+and the body cooled. The white glowing keystone of the heaven arch
+awoke with its flames the noonday wind, which slept on the cold summit
+of the Pyrenees.
+
+Little or nothing would taste well to poor Phylax, to whom it was more
+important to prove that he would be eternal. Fortunately, the French
+wine armed him more with French customs, and he asked the Baron
+politely: "I believe I owe M. Karlson some proofs of our immortality.
+Might I be allowed to give them?" Wilhelmi sent him to Gione, saying,
+"Ask there." Gione willingly granted his request, and said, "Why should
+not recollections of immortality ornament our joys as much as monuments
+do English gardens?" Nadine threw in the question, "But if men quarrel
+about the hopes of humanity, what remains for women?" "Her heart and
+its hopes, Nadine," said Gione. Wilhelmi said, smiling: "The owl of
+Minerva, as all other owls, is said to forebode destruction to a
+household, by settling on its roof. But I hope it is not so." I added,
+"The lives of all our beloved ones are tied to the obelisk of
+immortality, as to that of Rameses,[14] that the danger may double our
+strength; for they will be destroyed if it rebound."
+
+In the mean time, Karlson had taken an ephemeral fly from a neighboring
+elm, to which it had clung, in order to cast off its super body before
+death. The ephemera should not be an embodiment of our immortality,[15]
+but of our unfolding; for, unlike other insects, after all its
+transformations, and when already furnished with wings, it changes its
+shape once more before death. He held it before us, and said: "In my
+opinion, a philosophical ephemera would argue thus. What! I should have
+uselessly accomplished all my various changes, and the Creator had no
+other intention in calling me from the egg to the grub, then to a
+chrysalis, and at last to a flying being, whose wings must burst
+another covering before death, with this long range of spiritual and
+corporeal developments, he should have had no other aim than a six
+hours' existence, and the grave must be the only goal of so long a long
+a course?" The Chaplain opportunely answered, "Your argument proves
+against yourself, for it is _petitio principii_ to presuppose mortality
+amongst ephemera."
+
+I confess I am an enemy to these relative conclusions, because they
+take as much from truth as they give to eloquence, for contrary
+opinions can be proved by them. To one whose eyes are hurt by a grain
+of sand, I can prove that he is comparatively happy, as there are many
+in the world who suffer from sand-blisters and gravel; and also that he
+is unfortunate, as Sultanic eyes are never pressed by anything harder
+than Circassian eyelids--or two rosy lips. Thus I can make the world
+immense in comparison to bullets, grains of poison, or round puddings,
+or minute, if placed beside Jupiter, the sun, or the milky-way. If the
+ephemera on the ladder of existence would turn its back on the
+brilliant development of the beings above it, and only count the
+important ones on the steps beneath it, it would increase in its own
+importance. In short, our oratorical fantasy continually mistakes the
+distinction between more and less for that of something or nothing; but
+every relative conclusion must be based on something positive, which
+only eternal eyes, which can measure the whole range of innumerable
+degrees, can truly weigh. Indeed, there must be some bodily substance,
+and were it even the earth; for every comparison, every measurement,
+presupposes a fixed, unchanging standard. Therefore, the ephemeral
+development is a true one, and the conclusions on it are the same as on
+a seraphic one. The difference in the degrees can only bring forth
+_relative_, not _opposite_ conclusions. And here, in this letter--for
+in print I would not dare to do it--I will acknowledge a doubt. No one
+has ever _seen_ the steps of the ladder of beings above us,--no one has
+_counted_ those beneath us. What if the former were less, the latter
+greater, than we have hitherto imagined. The eternal promotion of souls
+from angels to archangels, in short, the nine philosophical hierarchies
+have only been asserted, but not proved. The common opinion, that the
+immense difference between man and the Eternal must be filled up by a
+chain of spiritual giants, is false; as no chain can shorten the
+distance, much less fill it, for it will ever retain the same width;
+and the seraph, i. e. the highest finite being according to human
+thoughts, must imagine just as many, if not more, beings above him, as
+I do beneath me. Astronomy, this sawing machine of suns, this ship's
+wharf and laboratory of earths, would persuade us that the
+_enlargement_ of worlds and beings is a sign of their improvement. But
+over the whole sky there hang only earth and fire-balls, and all things
+on them, from milk-way to milk-way, are less than the wishes and
+longings of our hearts. Then why should our earth alone, why not every
+other also, be progressing? why should they, rather than we, have the
+start in this inaugural eternity? In short, it may be disputed if in
+the whole universe there are other angels and archangels than Victor
+and Jean Paul. It seems scarcely credible to me. But truly the
+_melodious_ progression to sublime beings has hitherto been merely
+taken for granted. I believe in a _harmonious_ one, in an eternal
+ascension, but in no created culmination.
+
+I presume Karlson intended to answer my argument, not on the seraphs,
+but on ephemera, when Nadine, who had borrowed the fly in order to
+examine it, held it too near her eyes, and thereby disturbed and
+extinguished our Mendelssohn-Platonic conversation. For Madame Berlier
+(such was the noble name of our temporary hostess) stepped up to
+Nadine, and said: "It is a pity for the pain. You must take the
+wart-locust, I have proofs," do you understand? It is this. The
+so-called wart-eater, a locust with light brown spots, takes away a
+wart in a very short time by a single bite. Dame Berlier, over whom, as
+over most Southrons, beauty had greater power than self-love and sex,
+had falsely imagined that Nadine wished to annihilate the only fault in
+her charming form with the fly. The Chaplain had scarcely heard the
+wart-eater mentioned, when he vanished among the green, and commenced a
+hunt for wart-locusts. I was vexed that I had known the remedy as well
+as Dame Berlier, and never thought of it. For a shabby simile I should
+have easily recollected it, but not for a useful cure. Fortune
+permitted him soon to return with the winged wart-operator; this
+excited my envy. When he gave it to Nadine, the officious Phylax had
+squeezed, with the letter and paper press of his hands, like in a good
+calendar-press, the brown spotted vegetable-eater to--death. The animal
+could bite no more; I immediately darted off in search of another, and
+soon returned, holding one by the tips of its wings, and said, I would
+myself hold it over the wart until he would operate on it. While
+performing the action I praised it. Every great deed, I said, is only
+accomplished in the soul, at the moment of determination; when it comes
+outward and is repeated by the body,--which holds the locust,--it
+disperses into insignificant movements and thirds; but when it is done,
+as now the operation, it becomes great again, and, ever increasing,
+flows onward through all time. Thus the Rhine rushes like a giant from
+its summit, disperses in the fog, falls as rain upon the plain, then it
+forms itself into clouds, and roams over the sands, and carries suns
+instead of rainbows.
+
+It need not be concealed from you that it affected me to look into the
+retina of two such bright and warm, upturned eyes, without mentioning
+the whole warlike array of curls and lips, and forehead, and the
+Waterloo landscapes of the cheeks. Nadine's terror at the teeth of the
+brown little doctor made her more charming, and the danger of my
+situation greater. After holding it for some time, when I thought the
+operation was finished, she told me the locust had not yet touched her,
+as I held it two or three Parisian feet too far from the wart. It is
+true, I had lost myself in her net skin; but I remarked that the cure
+could not be accomplished, if I did not rest the ball of my right hand
+slightly on her cheek, in order to hold the wart-eater more firmly over
+the wart. Now he bit the required wound, and propelled into it as much
+of his corrosive fluid as he carried with him. I artfully diverted
+Nadine's pain, which resembled that of a pin pricking, by
+philosophizing. Man, I said, finds the stoic theory true and forcible
+for all pain, only not for the present. And when he bleeds from cut
+wounds, he imagines bruises heal more easily. He therefore defers his
+practice of the stoic-school until his own schooling is over. O, but
+then he stands by a running stream, waiting until the waters shall have
+passed. True firmness bears the bite of a locust, and rejoices at the
+trial!
+
+Now the operation was happily accomplished, which could easily excite
+an illness in me. It is true that her countenance had inflicted a
+deeper wound on me than the wart-eater upon it,--I should fear and
+examine whether mine, which was just as near to hers, had done as much
+damage; but Nadine is exceedingly--young. The hearts of young girls,
+like new waterbutts, at first let everything drop through, until in
+time, the vessels swell and thus retain their contents.
+
+
+
+
+ 506th STATION.
+
+ Objections To Immortality.--The Second Childhood of the
+ Outer and Inner Man.
+
+
+We broke up and proceeded. On high, light feathers floated through the
+sky, like the loose-flowing hair of the sun, which could not veil it.
+The day became hotter and stiller. But our path lay beneath a green
+roof, and each branch spread over us a parasol of broad fresh leaves.
+
+Gione asked, "Can we not continue our conversation in walking?" O, your
+Clotilde should know her; she has, excepting her charms, half her soul.
+No discord exists between her outer and inner harmony; her earnest,
+generous soul resembles the palm-tree, which has neither bark nor
+branches, but which bears broad foliage and buds on its summit.
+"Gione," said Nadine, "these arguments unsettle our minds, instead of
+removing our doubts." "No one," she replied, "has yet given his
+opinion; if we even have the firmest convictions, still by their
+beautiful conformity with another's convictions our own become more
+beautiful and firm." "Just as water-plants, surrounded by their water,
+are yet as much refreshed by rain as land plants are," said Myrtil (I
+am Myrtil).
+
+Wilhelmi said, just as we were passing through the Midsummer's-day
+night of a grotto cooled by oakshade and cascades: "Our conversation
+would better suit a total eclipse of the sun. I would that I could see
+one, when the moon hangs beauteously before the midday sun, when the
+noisy day is suddenly hushed, when the nightingales sing, the flowers
+fade, and when nightly mists and shuddering cold and dew fall." Phylax
+had now let slip his sofa-cushion into a murmuring spring; Nadine saw
+it, and, not to confuse him in the act of drawing it out, she, with
+charming zeal, drove us back to our conversation. Her intercourse with
+the world had given her a playful, light, ever-joyous exterior. But
+Gione's style, like the highest Grecian, is, artistically speaking,
+somewhat meagre and spare,--and the ball-rooms had made her, as
+mahogany presses make dresses, more agreeable. But her exterior charms
+did not contradict or injure her interior beauty.
+
+I said to Karlson, "Pray, prove to us the spiritual mortality, this
+soul's death." "M. Karlson needs not do that," answered the stupid
+Phylax, vexed at the wet cushion, "only the assertor must prove."
+
+"Very well," I said, "I call proofs objections, but I shall certainly
+give you only two;--firstly, the proof or objection: the simultaneous
+decay and destruction of the body and of the soul; secondly, the
+absolute impossibility of ascertaining the mode of life of a future
+existence, or as the Chaplain would say, to see into the spiritual
+world from the sensuous one. Now, M. Karlson, throw your two bombs into
+the greatest possible angles, which, according to Hennert, is 40
+degrees, but according to Bezout, 43 degrees."
+
+He aimed well. He showed how the spiritual Dryad flowered, burst and
+dispersed with the corporeal bark, how the noblest impulses are chained
+to the lead--earth, revolving wheel of the body; how memory,
+imagination, and madness only feed on the egg-yolk of the brain,--how
+bravery and mildness stand in as opposite degree to blood as leeches
+and Jews;[16] how, in age, the inner and outer man together bend
+towards the grave, together petrify, together, like metal compositions,
+_slowly_ cool, and at last together die!
+
+He then asked why, with the continual experience that every bodily
+down-bending digs a spiritual wound, and with this unceasing parallel
+of body and soul, we give to the latter, after death, everything which
+we have seen annihilated in the former. He said, and I believe it, that
+neither Bonnet's underbody, nor the incorporated soul corsets of
+Plattner (the "second soul organ") can diminish the difficulty of the
+question, for as both soul's under-garments or night-gowns and
+pinafores, always share, in life, the good and bad fate of the coarse,
+corporeal coat and martyr-cloak, and as in us double-cased English
+watches, the works, and the first and second cases (Bonnet's and
+Plattner's) always suffered and gained together, it would be absurd to
+seek the Iliad of the future world in the narrow hazel-nut shell of the
+_revived_ little body which has first stood and fallen with the coarse
+outward one.
+
+I then asked him to aim his second ball in the angle of forty degrees
+also. I added, that "I would have begged leave to give a long
+parliamentary speech on it, but that long speeches have a life and
+reproducing power, as, according to Reaumür, long animals more easily
+re-form themselves, when cut, than short ones." Though certainly it
+occurs to me, that Unzer says, tall persons do not live as long as
+short ones. But Karlson needed little time or power to prove the
+uncertainty of the next world. The Sun-land behind the hillocks of the
+God's acre, behind the pest-cloud of Death, is covered by a complete,
+an impenetrable darkness of twelve inches, or of as many holy nights.
+He showed, and not badly, what an immense leap beyond all terrestrial
+analogies and experiences it is, to hope for, i. e. to create, a world,
+a transcendent Arcadia, a world of which we know neither copy nor
+original, which wants no less than a form and a name, map and globe,
+another Vespucius Americus, of which neither chemistry nor astronomy
+can give us the compounds or the quarters; a universe of air, on which,
+from the leaf-stripped, faded soul, a new body will bud forth, i. e. a
+nothing on which nothing is to embody itself.
+
+O, my good Karlson! how could your noble soul omit a second world which
+is already contained in this physical first one, like bright crystals
+in dark earth, namely, the sun-world of _Virtue_, _Truth_, and
+_Beauty_,[17] glowing in our souls, whose golden vein inexplicably
+extends its ramification through the dark, dirty clump of the sensuous
+world.
+
+It was now my turn to answer: "I will lessen your two difficulties, and
+then I will give my innumerable proofs. You are no materialist,[18] you
+therefore take for granted that bodily and mental activity only
+accompany and mutually excite each other. Yes, the body represents the
+keys of the inner Harmonica through all its scales. Hitherto only the
+corporeal outward signs have been called feelings, as the swelling
+heart and the slowly-beating pulse--longing; the outpouring of gall,
+anger, and so on. But the net-like texture, the anastomy between the
+inner and outer man, is so life-full, so warm, that to every _picture_,
+every _thought_,--a nerve, a fibre must move. We should also observe,
+and put into the notes of speech all the bodily after sounds of
+poetic, algebraic, artistic, numismatic, and anatomic ideas. But the
+sounding-board of the body is neither the soul's scale nor its
+harmony. Grief has no resemblance to a tear,--shame, none to the
+cheek-imprisoned blood,--wit, none to champagne,--the idea of this
+valley, none to its portrait on the retina. The inner man, this God,
+hidden in the statue, is not of marble as it is, but in the stony
+limbs, the living ones grow and ripen in an unknown life. We do not
+sufficiently mark how the inner man even tames and forms the outer one;
+how, for example, the passionate body which, according to physiology,
+should ever increase in heat, is gradually cooled and extinguished by
+principles,--how terror, anger, holds the dividing texture of the body
+in a spiritual grasp. When the whole brain is paralyzed, every nerve
+rusty and exhausted, and the soul carrying leaden weights, man needs
+but to _will_ (which he can do every moment), he needs only a letter, a
+striking idea, and the fibre-work of the soul's mechanism proceeds
+again without help from the body."
+
+Wilhelmi said, "Then the soul is but a watch which winds itself."
+"There must always be some _perpetuum mobile_," I said, "for all things
+have moved for an eternity already. The question is, either the soul
+never winds off, or it is its own watchmaker. I return to the subject.
+If a ruptured life-vein in the fourth brain-chamber of a Socrates place
+the whole land of his ideas and moral tendencies in a blood-bath, these
+ideas and moral tendencies will surely be covered with blood-water, but
+not spoilt by it; because not the drowned brains were virtuous and
+wise, but his _self_ was, and because the dependence of a watch on its
+case for protection from dust, &c. does not prove the identity of the
+two, or that the watch consists only of cases. As spiritual exertions
+are not bodily ones, but only _precede_ or _follow_ them; and as every
+spiritual activity leaves traces, not only in the soul, but also in the
+body; must, then, if apoplexy or age destroy corporeal activity,--must
+the soul's fire be therefore quenched? Is there no difference between
+the soul of a _childish_ old man, and that of a _child_? Must the soul
+of Socrates, imprisoned in Borgia's body as in a mud-bath, lose its
+moral powers, and does it suddenly change its virtuous qualities for
+vicious ones? Or shall in left-handed wedlock (which has no common
+property of body and soul) the one conjugal half only share the gains,
+not also the losses of the other? Shall the ablactated soul feel only
+the blooming, not also the faded body? And if it does, the earth
+surrounding it must, as our earth does to the superior planets, give it
+the reflection of our advancing and retrograding. If we shall ever be
+disembodied, the slow hand of time, that is, ever encroaching age, must
+do it. If our course is not to be concluded in one world, the gulf
+between it and the second must always appear to us a grave. The _short_
+interruption to our progress by age, and the _longer_ one by death,
+destroy this progress as little as the _shortest_ interruption by
+sleep. We anxiously suppose--as the first man did--the _total_
+sun-eclipse of sleep to be the _night_ of death, and this again the
+_doomsday_ of the world."
+
+"That must yet be proved, although I believe it," replied Phylax.
+
+New beauties prevented my answering, and closed the 506th Station.
+
+(P. S.--I have been told the Chaplain has declared that he had
+purposely not replied to several of my arguments, but he hoped he could
+see them in print, and then he would publish his opinions. But he will
+scarcely live until this letter is printed, and he will answer it.)
+
+
+
+
+ 507th STATION.
+
+ The Theft of the Souvenir.--Answers to Previous Stations.--On the
+ Emigration of the Dead to the Planets.--The Threefold World in
+ Man.--Grief without Hope.--The Seal of Immortality.--The
+ Country-seat.--The Balloons.--Ecstasy.
+
+
+When it is three o'clock, and a wandering Arcadian council is very well
+but somewhat warm, when the narrowing Adour, which has its source at
+the end of the Valley, flows round a projecting tongue of land, and
+draws its silver gauze cover over the pale moon reposing on its
+breast,[19] when round this slip of earth, this flowery anchoring
+place, half water scene, half bowling green, a broadleaved oak arcade
+grows, beneath which trembles a sun-gilt shadow, gliding from between
+the branches of the trees, on to the grass, embroidered by the
+restless, roving, gay-colored sand, on the book of nature--its insects,
+when the hammering in the shining marble blocks, the living Alp-horns,
+the bleating pasture-sheep, and the murmuring of waves fill the heart
+to its topmost branches and up to the brim with life-balsam, and the
+head with life-spirit; and when so many beauties are heard and
+seen,--living beauties who walk are inclined to sit down on the slip of
+earth, after the cushion-carriers have placed their burdens as
+resting-places for their arms.
+
+My dear Victor! all this came to pass.
+
+While sitting, long speeches were not as practicable as while walking.
+Even before, when we, from some distance, were choosing this spot for a
+resting-place, they had suffered considerably. I remained on the shore
+near Nadine, whose cheeks, reflected in the shadow-painted waves,
+appeared a charming pale red, as though a cochineal had bled to death
+on them. The walk and her red parasol had been too great colorists.
+
+My dear brother, I am preparing to fall in love. The operation on the
+wart was unimportant as a corner-piece of vexation, as negative
+electricity; but warts have their good points.
+
+Nadine plucked roses and other flowers. I drew an empty jewel-box from
+my pocket,--it was empty, like the 9th Kurstuhl, the Elias chair,[20]
+or the _limbus patrum_,--and held it under them, begging her to shake
+the flowers, that I might catch the millipeds,[21] which, like tallow
+candles, are more suitable for the eye than the nose. I caught a whole
+germanic diet of these creatures from the fragrant flower-cups, and
+imprisoned them in the box.
+
+During the flower-toying, which brought us nearer to each other, a
+small cockchafer fell on my skin. I looked round for the flowers and
+could find nothing till I saw, protruding from Nadine's left pocket, a
+souvenir, filled with sweet-smelling herbs. To steal from a beautiful
+woman is often nothing else than to give to her. I thought it
+fit, secretly to take the scented pocket-book in order to make a
+scent-bottle, and a joke of it in future. I so arranged the theft, that
+the Baron perceived my hand, holding the book, retreating from the
+pocket.
+
+The souvenir, thought I, may occasion some scene; meanwhile I can smell
+at it. I indemnified her for the loss of the scent-bag by the
+millipeds, whose prison I immediately insinuated into her pocket. The
+Baron was witness.
+
+Wilhelmi said, when we rose: "In the evening we shall be separated and
+deafened by the carriages. If something has yet to be decided--"
+
+"Something?" replied Phylax,--"everything has to be decided. M. Jean
+Paul, you have yet to raise M. Karlson's second difficulty." "Raise?" I
+asked, "I am to raise the cover of the whole future world? I am but
+going _towards_ it, not coming _from_ it. But this dissimilarity
+between the present and the future world, its inconceivable magnitude,
+has made many apostates. Not the bursting of our bodily doll-skin in
+death, but the wide disparity between the present autumn and the future
+spring, raises such overwhelming doubts in our poor, timid breasts.
+This is shown by the savages, who consider the future life merely as
+the second volume, the new testament of the first, and make no greater
+distinction between the first and second life than between youth and
+age: they easily believe in all their hopes; your _first_ difficulty,
+the bursting and fading of the bodily polish, does not deprive the
+savage of the hope to bud anew in another flower-vase. But your second
+difficulty daily increases itself, and its advocates, for by the
+increasing proofs and apparatus of chemistry and physiology, the future
+world is daily more effectually annihilated and dispersed, as it cannot
+be brought within play of a sun-microscope or of a chemical furnace. In
+fact, not only the reality, but also the theory of the body, not only
+the practised measurement of its longings, but also the pure moral
+philosophy of its spirit-world, must darken and make difficult the
+prospect on the inner world from the outer one. Only the moralist, the
+physiologist, the poet, and the artist more readily comprehend our
+inner world; but the chemist, the physician, and the mathematician want
+both seeing and hearing faculties for it, and in time, even eyes and
+ears.
+
+"On the whole, I find fewer men than one would imagine who decidedly
+believe in, or deny, the existence of a future world. Few dare to deny
+it, as for them this life would then lose all unity, form, peace, and
+hope;--few dare to believe it, for they are startled at their own
+purification and at the destruction of the lessened earth. The
+majority, according to the promptness of alternating feelings, waver
+poetically between both beliefs.
+
+"As we paint Devils more easily than Gods, Furies than Venus Urania,
+Hell than Heaven, we can more easily believe in the former than in the
+latter,--in the greatest misfortune than in the greatest happiness.
+Must not our spirit, used to misgivings and earth chains, be startled
+at a Utopia against which earth will be shipwrecked, that the lilies of
+it, like the Guernsey lilies,[22] may find the shore to bloom on, which
+saves and satisfies, elevates and makes blessed, our much tormented
+humanity.
+
+"I now come to your difficulty. I imagine, if even we were to take the
+grave to be merely the moat of communication between allied globes, our
+ignorance concerning the second world should not terrify us, and we
+need not take for granted that the mountain ridge of humanity does not
+continue under the Dead Sea, merely because we cannot see through its
+waters, for do not all mountain ridges continue on the bottom of the
+ocean? What! man will guess at _worlds_, when he cannot even guess
+_world-quarters_! Would the Greenlander paint a Negro, a Dane, a Greek,
+in his mind's eye, without ever having seen one? Can the political
+genius divine the inner versifications of the poetic one, without
+experience? Can the Abderite imagine the architecture of the sage?
+Would we have guessed the existence of but one of the animal creations
+of Anthropomorphism which copy the human figure in all animals, and yet
+change it? Or could a bodiless self, placed in a vacuum, with all
+existing logic and metaphysic, ever have conceived but a single vein of
+its present embodification and humanification?"
+
+"But what are you asserting or denying?" asked Wilhelmi.
+
+"I only assert that a second life on another planet cannot be denied,
+merely because we are unable to map out the planet, and portray its
+inhabitants. But we need no other planet."
+
+The Baron said: "O, I have often dreamed delicious dreams of this
+'_grande tour_' through the stars! It seemed the progression of a
+student from one class to another,--the classes being worlds."
+
+"But," replied Karlson, "to all these worlds, as upon our own, you will
+be refused admittance if you arrive without a body. By what miracle
+will you obtain one?"
+
+"_By a repeated one_," I answered. "For by a miracle we have our
+present body. But we can say in favor of this planet wandering, that
+our eyes too widely separate the worlds of which each one is but an
+_element_ of the infinite _integral whole_. The different worlds
+and their satellites above and around us, are only far removed
+world-quarters. The moon is but a smaller, more distant America, and
+space is the ocean."
+
+Nadine said: "One day I so pictured the inhabitants of a lemon-tree to
+myself. The worm on the leaf may think it is on the green earth, the
+second worm on the white bud is on the moon, and the one on the lemon
+believes itself to be upon the sun."
+
+"And yet this," said I, "is but a tree of immeasurable life. As around
+the earth-kernel cling wider and finer covers,--the earth, the seas,
+the air and space,--so the giant of one world is surrounded by
+increasingly large ones, with ever larger arms. The longest shell is
+the finest one, as light and the attractive power. The beauteous
+covering elongates and rarefies itself from iron bands to pearl ties,
+from flower-chains to rainbows and milky-ways."
+
+"Will we not now descend from the milky-way," said Karlson, "for we
+cannot ascend it. It is precisely this uniformity of the universe which
+forbids the rambling of emigrants from the earth. Every planet already
+has its own crew; more dense ones, as for instance Mercury, may be
+peopled with real sailors."
+
+"Precisely as Kant supposes!" said Phylax.
+
+"Finer, less solid ones, as e. g. Uranus, only with the most tender
+beings, perhaps only with women and nuns who love not the sun. He who
+intends to rectify the so-called soul or spirit by distilling it from
+one planet to the other, may with as much justice assert, that the
+spirits of the slacked Mercury receive their dephlegmation in a
+distilling process through our earth,--in short, that the earth is the
+second world for Mercury and Venus. The dead of the arctic zones could
+even pass into the temperate ones (it would be _distillatio per
+latus_), for on all planets there can be no other than coarser or finer
+_human beings_[23] like ourselves."
+
+Karlson waited for an answer and a contradiction, but I said his
+opinion was also mine. "I have still a stronger reason," I continued,
+"against emigration to, and voyage picturesque through, the planets,
+because we carry and lock up a heaven of starry light in our own
+breasts, for which no dirty earth-ball is clean or large enough. But on
+this subject I must have permission to speak uninterruptedly, at least
+until we have passed all these cornfields."
+
+Our pleasure-trip now was an alley of magic gardens, our passage
+through a golden sea of corn-blades, was accompanied and surrounded on
+all sides by a promised land, in which solitary houses reposed beneath
+picturesquely grouped leaf groves, as in Italy sleepers take their
+siestas on shaded meads. I was permitted to speak.
+
+"There is an inner, heart-contained spirit-world, which breaks through
+the dark clouds of the body-world as a warm sun. I mean the inner
+universe of _virtue_, _beauty_, and _truth_; three soul-worlds and
+heavens, which are neither parts, nor shoots, nor cuttings, nor copies
+of the outer one. We are less astonished at the inexplicable existence
+of these three transcendent heavens, because they are ever floating
+before us, and because we foolishly imagine we _create_ them, while we
+merely _recognize_ them. After which copy, with what plastic material,
+and of what, could we create and insert in ourselves[24] this same
+spirit-world? Let the atheist ask himself how he conceived the giant
+ideal of a God, which he either denies or embodies? An idea which has
+not been built upon comparative greatness and degrees, for it is the
+contrary of every measure and of every created greatness. In short, the
+atheist denies the great _original_ of the _copy_.[25]
+
+"As there are idealists of the outer world who believe that perception
+makes objects, instead of that objects cause perception, so there are
+idealists of the inner world, who deduct the _being_ from the
+_seeming_, the _sound_ from the _echo_, the _fact_ from its
+_appearance_; instead of, on the contrary, the seeming from the being,
+our consciousness from the objects of it. We mistake our power of
+analyzing our inner world, for its preformation, i. e. the genealogist
+thinks himself both originator and founder.
+
+"This inner universe, which is still more glorious and admirable than
+the outer one, needs another heaven than the one above us, and a higher
+world than one a sun now shines upon. Therefore we rightly say, not a
+second earth or globe, but a second _world_,--another beyond the
+universe."
+
+Gione already interrupted me: "And every virtuous and wise being is in
+himself a proof of immortality." "And every one," added Nadine,
+quickly, "who suffers innocently."
+
+"Yes, it is that," said I, with emotion, "which extends our line of
+life through countless ages. The chord of _Virtue_, _Truth_, and
+_Beauty_, taken from the music of the spheres, calls us from this dark
+oppressive earth, and announces to us the nearness of a more melodious
+existence. _Why_, and _from whence_ were these _super-earthly_ wants
+and longings created in us, if only, like swallowed diamonds, slowly to
+cut through our earthy shell. Why was a being endowed with wings of
+light chained to this dirty clump of earth, if it were to rot in its
+birth-clod, without ever being freed from it by means of its ethereal
+wings?"
+
+Wilhelmi said, "I also like to dream the dream of a second life in the
+sleep of this first one. But may not our beautiful spiritual powers
+have been given to us for the _enjoyment_ and _preservation_ of the
+present life?"
+
+"For its preservation?" I said. "Then an angel has been locked in the
+body to be the mute servant and fire-lighter, butler, cook, and porter
+of the stomach? Would not brutish souls have sufficed to drive
+man-bodies to the fruit-tree and the spring? Shall the pure ethereal
+flame only dry and bake the bodily patent stove with life-warmth, while
+it now slakes and dissolves it? For every tree of knowledge is the
+poison-tree of the body, and every mental refinement a slow-poison
+chalice. But, on the contrary, want is the iron key of freedom, the
+stomach is the manure-filled hot-house or manufactory of human blood,
+and the various animal instincts are but the earthy, soiled steps to
+the Grecian temple of our spiritual elevation.
+
+"For _enjoyment_ you said also. That means, we received the palate and
+appetite of a god, with the food for an animal. That portion of us
+which is of earth, and creeps on worm-folds, may and can, like the
+earthworm, be fed and fattened on earth. Exertion, bodily pain, the
+burning hunger of necessity, and the tumult of our senses exclude and
+choke the spiritual autumn bloom of humanity in nations and classes.
+All these conditions of terrestrial existence must be fulfilled ere the
+soul may claim its due. To the unhappy, therefore, who must be the
+business men and carriers of their bodily wants, the whole inner world
+seems but as an imaginary gilt cobweb, like the man who, breathing only
+the electrical _atmosphere_, instead of feeling the spark, thinks to
+grasp an invisible web. But when our necessary _animal servitude_ is
+over, when the barking inner dog-kennel is fed, and the dog-fight
+finished, then the inner man demands his nectar and ambrosia, and if he
+is turned off with earth-food only, he changes to an angel of Death,
+and a Hellfiend, driving himself to suicide, or makes of him a
+poison-mixer who destroys all joy.[26] The eternal hunger _in_ man, the
+insatiability of his heart, wants not a _richer_, but a _different_
+food, fruit, not grass. If our wants referred but to the degree, not to
+the quality, then the imagination, at least, might paint a _degree of
+satiety_. But imagination cannot make us happy, by showing us
+innumerable heaps of treasures, if they be other than _Virtue_,
+_Truth_, and _Beauty_."
+
+"But the more beautiful soul?" asked Nadine. I answered, "This
+discrepancy between our wishes and our circumstances, the heart and the
+earth, will remain, an _enigma_, if we are immortal, and would be a
+blasphemy if we decay. Ah! how could the beautiful soul be happy?
+Strangers, born on mountains and living in lowland places, pine in an
+incurable homesickness. We belong to a higher place, and therefore an
+eternal longing consumes us, and every music is our soul's Swiss _ranz
+des vaches_. In the morning of life, the joys which hearken to the
+anxious wishes of our hearts are seen blooming for us in later years.
+When we have attained these years, we turn on the deceitful spot, and
+see behind us, pleasure blooming in the strong hopeful youth, and we
+enjoy instead of our _hopes_, the _recollections of our hopes_. Joy in
+this also resembles the rainbow, which in the morning shines over
+evening, and in the evening arches over the east. The _eye_ may reach
+the _light_, but the arm is short, and holds but the fruit of the
+soil."
+
+"And this proves?" asked the Chaplain.
+
+"Not that we are unhappy, but that we are immortal, and that the second
+world in us demands, and proves a second world beyond us. O, how much
+might not be said of this second life whose commencement is so clearly
+shown in the first one, and which so strangely doubles us! Why is
+Virtue too exalted to make us, and, what is more, others (sensually)
+happy? Why does the incapability of being useful on earth (as the
+expression is) increase with a certain higher purity of character, as,
+according to Herschel, there are suns which have no earth? Why is our
+heart tortured, dried, consumed, and at last broken by a slow burning
+fever of ceaseless love for an unattainable object, only alleviated by
+the hope that this _consumption_, like a physical one, must one day be
+sheltered and raised by the _ice cover_ of death?"
+
+"No," said Gione, with more emotion in her eye than in her voice, "it
+is not ice, but lightning. When our heart lies a sacrifice on the
+altar, fire from heaven consumes it as a proof that the offering is
+accepted."
+
+I know not why her calm voice so painfully disturbed my whole soul (not
+only my argument). Even Nadine's eyes, which triumphed over her own
+sorrows, were suffused with tears by her sister's, and, although she is
+generally more timid and fastidious than Gione, in passing a little
+garden, she raised from a projecting hairy potato-stalk, a large moth,
+and showed it to us with a firm mouth, which should have been softened
+by a smile.
+
+It was the so-called Death's-head. I stroked the flat, drooping wings,
+and said, "It come? from Egypt, the land of mummies and graves; it
+bears a _memento mori_ on its back, and a _miserere_ in its plaintive
+voice." "In the mean time it is a butterfly, and visits the nectaries,
+which we day-birds will do also," appropriately observed Wilhelmi; but
+he took the words out of my mouth.
+
+Gione's countenance again expressed thoughtful calmness, and to me she
+became immeasurably beautiful and grand by the stillness of her grief.
+You once said that the female soul, though it be pierced with burning
+shafts, must never beat its wings convulsively together, else, like
+other butterflies, it would destroy their beauty. How true is this!
+
+Nadine's eyes seldom shone without at last overflowing, and every
+sorrowful emotion remained long in her heart, because she tried to
+guard against it. She resembled those springs which take a temperature
+opposed to the time of day, and which are warmest in the cool evening.
+She turned to me and said, putting her hand in her left pocket, "I will
+show you some poetry which will prove your prose." While she was
+seeking it, she stood still with her companion Wilhelmi. He guessed
+before I did, that she intended to give me something from the Souvenir,
+and when, in its stead, she took the milliped's prison from her pocket,
+he obligingly said, "If not with my hands yet with my eyes I assisted
+at the theft, and as accomplice I beg for mercy." The serious apology
+for this foolishness scarcely suited our earnest tone of mind. I said,
+"I wished to cause a more useless, than pardonable joke, but I--" She
+did not allow me to conclude, but mildly and unchanged (except by a
+reproving and a forgiving smile) she showed me in the aromatic book the
+noble Karlson's requiem on the death of the exalted Gione. I willingly
+give you the prosaic echo of it, from my prosaic memory.
+
+
+ GRIEF WITHOUT HOPE.
+
+What cloud is that, which like the clouds of the tropics, passes from
+morn to eve, and then sets? It is humanity. Is that the magnet-mountain
+covered with the nails of wrecked ships? No, it is the great Earth,
+strewed with the bones of fallen men.
+
+Ah! why did I love? I had not then lost so much!
+
+Nadine, give me thy grief, for it contains hope. Thou standest by thy
+crushed sister, who dissolves even beneath the winding-sheet, and
+lookest upwards to the trembling stars, and thinkest: Above, O dearest
+one, thou dost reside, and on the suns we find again our hearts, and
+the small tears of life will be over.
+
+But mine remain, and burn in the dim eye. My cypress alley is not open,
+and discloses no heaven. Human blood paints the fluid figure called man
+on the monument, as oil on marble forms forests; Death wipes away the
+man, and leaves the stone. O Gione! I would have some consolation, if
+thou wert but far away from us all, on a clouded forest, in a cave of
+the Earth, or on the most distant world in space. But thou art gone,
+thy soul is dead, not only thy life and thy body.
+
+See, Nadine, on the judgment-seat of Time lies the crushed angel, with
+the death color of the spirit-world. Gione has lost all her virtues,
+her love, her patience, her strength, her all-embracing heart, and her
+rich mind: the thunderbolt of Death has destroyed the diamond, and now
+the wax statue of the body slowly melts beneath the soil.
+
+Serpent of Eternity, quickly take away the beautiful form, as the
+larger serpent first poisons and then devours man. But I, Gione, stand
+beside your ruins with unalleviated pain, with undestroyed soul; and
+grieving, think of you until I also dissolve. And my grief is noble and
+deep, for I have no hope! May thy invisible shadow-picture, like the
+new moon with the sun,[27] arise to heaven in my soul! And may the
+creative wheel of Time, which raises innumerable hearts, and fills them
+with blood, only to pour them again into the grave, and let them die,
+pour out my life slowly, for long time would I mourn for thee, thou
+lost one!
+
+
+I cannot tell you, dearest Victor, how horrible and fearful the eternal
+snow of annihilating death seemed to me, placed beside the noble form
+it should have covered; how frightful the thought: if Karlson is right,
+the last day has torn this never happy, innocent soul from the prisons
+upon the earth to the closer ones beneath it: man too often carries his
+errors as his truths only as word arguments, not as feelings. But let
+the disbeliever of immortality imagine a life of sixty minutes instead
+of sixty years, and let him try if he can bear to see loved, noble, or
+wise men only aimless, hour-long air-phantoms, hollow thin shadows
+which fly towards the light and are consumed by it, and who, without
+path, trace, or aim, after a short flight, dissolve into their former
+night. No; even over him steals a supposition of immortality. Else a
+black cloud would forever hang over his soul, and the earth would quake
+beneath him when he trod on it, as if he were a Cain.
+
+I continued, but all arguments were poetized into feelings. "Yes, if
+all forests of this earth were pleasure grottoes, all valleys Campan,
+all islands holy, all fields Elysian, and all eyes sparkling, yes,
+then--no, even then the Eternal One would have given to our souls the
+promise of a future life, even in the blessedness of the present one.
+But now, O God! when so many houses are mourning ones, so many fields
+battle-fields, so many cheeks pale, and when we pass so many sunken,
+red, torn, closed eyes,--O, can death be but the last destroying
+whirlwind? And when at last, after thousand, thousand years, our earth
+is dried up by the sun's heat, and every living sound on its surface
+silenced, will an immortal spirit look down on the silent globe, and,
+gazing on the empty hearse moving slowly on, say: 'There the churchyard
+of humanity flies into the crater of the sun; on that burning heap many
+shadows, and dreamers, and wax-figures, have wept and bled, but now
+they are all melted and consumed: Fly into the sun, which will also
+dissolve thee, thou silent desert with thy swallowed tears, with thy
+dried-up blood!' No, the crushed worm dares raise himself to his
+Creator, and say: 'Thou canst not have made me only to suffer.'"
+
+"And who gives the worm the right to this demand?" asked Karlson.
+
+Gione answered, gently, "The Eternal One himself, who gives us charity
+and who speaks in all our souls to calm us, and who alone has created
+in us our demands to Him and our hope in Him."
+
+This good sweet word could still not calm all the waves of my excited
+soul. From a distant house, turtle-doves sent after us trembling,
+soul-felt plaints. About my tear-filled inward eye assembled all those
+forms whose hearts were without guilt and without joy,[28] who attained
+no single wish here below, and who, sinking under the frost and
+snow-storm of fate, only longed, like persons freezing to death, to
+sleep; and all those forms who have loved too deeply, and lost too
+much, and whose wounds were never cured until death had widened them,
+like a cracked bell which retains its hollow sound until the crevice is
+made larger, and the beings nearest me, and many other female ones,
+whose exquisitely tender souls fate most consecrates to torture, as
+Narcissus is consecrated to the God of Hell. I also remembered your
+true remark, that you had never pronounced the words _pain_ and _the
+past_ before a woman, without hearing an almost inaudible sigh at the
+union of the two words, from the suffering heart; for woman on the
+narrower stage of her plans, with idealized wishes and desires built on
+others' worth, rather than on her own, has a thousand times more
+disappointments to suffer than we men.
+
+The sun sank deeper behind the mountains, and giant shadows, like
+mighty birds of prey, came coldly down upon us from the eternal snow. I
+took Karlson's hand in mine, and looked with tearful eyes into his
+manly, beautiful countenance, and said, "O Karlson! on what a blooming,
+grand world you throw an immeasurable gravestone, which no time can
+lift! Are two difficulties,[29] based too on the _necessary ignorance_
+of man, sufficient to overthrow a belief, which explains thousand
+greater difficulties, without which our existence is without aim, our
+sufferings without explanation, and the holy Trinity in our breast
+three furies, and three terrible contradictions? A tending God's hand,
+leading and feeding the inner man (the child of the outer one),
+teaching him to go and to speak, educating, refining him, is shown in
+all things, from the shapeless earthworm to the brilliant human face,
+from the chaotic nations of the primitive ages to the present century,
+from the first faint pulsation of the invisible heart to its full,
+bold, throbbing pulse in manhood,--and why? That when man stands
+upright and exalted, a beautiful demi-god, even amid the ruins of his
+old body temple, the club of Death may annihilate the demi-god forever?
+And on the eternal sea, on which the least drop throws immeasurable
+rings, on this sea a life-long rising and a life-long falling of the
+soul should have the same termination, namely, the end of all
+things,--annihilation?[30] And as, from the same cause, the souls of
+all other worlds must fall and die with ours, and of this shroud and
+crape-veiled immeasurability nothing remain but the ever-sowing and
+never-reaping solitary world-spirit, who sees one eternity mourn for
+another, there can be no aim and no object in the whole spiritual
+universum, for the purpose of the development of succeeding or
+successive ephemera is no progress for the vanished ephemera, scarcely
+even for the last one which can never exist.[31] And you take for
+granted all these enigmas and contradictions by which all the strings
+of creation, not only its harmony, are torn, because two difficulties
+present themselves to you, which _cannot any better_ explain mortality
+... Dearest Karlson, you would bring your eternally jarring discord
+into this harmony of the spheres! See how calmly the day goes, how
+grandly the night sets in; did you not think that our spirit will rise
+one day from its grave of ashes, when you saw the mild pale moon rise
+grandly from the crater of Vesuvius?" ... The sun stood on the
+mountains, about to plunge into the sea and swim to the new world.
+Nadine embraced her sister with emotion, and said, "O, we love each
+other forever and immortally, dearest sister." Karlson accidentally
+touched the chords of the lyre which he carried: Gione took it from him
+with one hand, gave him the other, and said, "You are the only one
+among us who is tormented by this melancholy belief,--and you deserve
+to have one so beautiful!"
+
+This word of concealed love overpowered his long-filled heart, and two
+burning drops fell from the blinded eyes, and the sun gilded the holy
+tears, and he said, looking towards the mountains: "I can bear no
+annihilation but my own,--my whole heart is of your opinion, and my
+head must slowly follow."
+
+I will not again mention a man whom I have blamed so often.
+
+We now stood before a mansion, the windows of which were silvered, and,
+when it was darker, gilt by girandoles. Aloft over its Italian balcony
+hung two balloons, one at its eastern, the other at its western
+extremity. Without those beautiful globes, the counterpart, as it were,
+of the two glorious ones in heaven, the sun and the moon, I should have
+scarcely paid heed to the scene on earth, in the splendor of the one on
+high.
+
+Dearest friend, how beautiful was the place and the time. Around us,
+in their majesty, reposed the Pyrenees, half robed in night and half
+in day, not stooping, like man, beneath the load of years, but
+erect--forever; and I felt why the great ancients had thought the
+mountains were a breed of giants. On the mountain heads hung wreaths of
+roses cloud-woven; but each time that a star appeared upon the clear,
+deep sea of ether and sparkled on its azure waves, a rose from the
+mountain's chaplet faded and dropped away. The Mittaghorn, alone, like
+a higher spirit, gazed long after the sinking lonely sun, and glowed
+with ecstasy. Down beneath us an amphitheatre of lemon-trees, by its
+perfumes, brought us back to the veiled earth, and made a dusky
+paradise of it. And Gione, in calm rapture, struck the chords of her
+guitar, and softly did Nadine's voice accompany the gliding tones. The
+nightingale in the rose-hedges by the lake awoke, and the plaintive
+tones from its tiny heart pierced deep into the great heart of man; and
+shining glowworms flew from rose-bush to rose-bush, but in the mirror
+of the lake they were but as golden sparks, floating over pale yellow
+flowers. But when we looked again towards the heavens, lo! all its
+stars were gleaming, and in place of rose-woven wreaths, the mountains
+were clad in extinguished rainbows, and the giant of the Pyrenees was
+crowned with stars instead of roses. O my beloved Victor! in this
+moment it was with each of our enraptured souls as if from its
+oppressed heart earth's load had dropped away; as if from her mother's
+arms, the earth were giving us, matured in the Father arms of the
+infinite Creator; as if our little life were over! To ourselves, we
+seemed the immortal, the exalted. We fancied that our speech of man's
+immortality had been the prophecy of our own, as with two great and
+noble men.[32] But though we entered the brilliant rooms, the storm of
+new joys could not destroy the old ones. We were not yet able to be
+without the great night around us, and we ascended the platform, that
+from this little throne we might better contemplate the higher throne
+of creation beneath the eternal canopy; although kneeling would have
+been a higher ascension for the moved soul.
+
+There were night-violets in a glass box, which traced Gione's name in
+blooming colors. I remembered the glowworms and millipeds. I let the
+former fly down upon the rose-bushes in confused star-pictures; with
+the latter I fired Gione's beautiful flower namesake.
+
+Gione looked longingly towards the eastern Mongolfière. Wilhelmi
+understood her. Her soul was as bold as it was calm, she had already
+visited many of the magic caves of earth, and had ascended to the
+summits of the highest Alps; she wished now to rise in the air, and to
+float in the heavens above this beautiful country, and on this
+beauteous night; but the enjoyment of the prospect was not her only
+motive. Wilhelmi asked who should be her companion. Solitude was her
+chief desire. The breadth and depth of the boat under the globe, a
+chair in it, and the cords by which she would be raised and lowered,
+secured the trip from all danger.
+
+Like a celestial being she rose beneath the stars,--the night and the
+height threw a mist over her rising form. A slight zephyr rocked the
+blooming Aurora, and crowned the moving goddess with alternate
+constellations. Now her countenance appeared surrounded by pale
+supernatural rays. It seemed bright as an angel rising towards its
+kindred stars through the rich dark blue space. An unusual tremor
+seized on Wilhelmi and Karlson; it was as if they saw their beloved one
+again carried from them on the wings of the angel of Death.
+
+When she returned to us her eyes were red with weeping; she had
+ascended, that she might in an unseen moment, shed her old heavy tears
+near the stars. O the Celestial one! She smiled strangely in the
+slumber of this life at higher joys than earthly ones, as sleeping
+children smile when they see Angels.
+
+It was now impossible to repress my longing for the stars, and my
+petition to be allowed to ascend. Permission to use the western
+Mongolfière was willingly bestowed. Nadine, emboldened by the safe
+return of her sister, and by the companion in the danger, skipped into
+the boat, with her usual impulsive warmth, to refresh her thirsting
+soul with the majestic immeasurability of night.
+
+And now the suns raised us. The heavy earth sank down as the past;
+wings such as man has in happy dreams bore us upwards.
+
+The mighty vacancy and silence of space lay stretched before us even up
+into the stars;--as we rose higher, the dark forests seemed but clouds,
+and snow-girt mountaintops like snow-flakes. The ascending globe bore
+us nearer to the harmless, silent lightning of the moon, in whose
+bright satellite we seemed cradled, and which stood as a calm Elysium
+beneath the heavens, and high above the thick fog air, the light heart
+beating more quickly, seemed to pant with ethereal gladness to have
+left the earth with out discarding its shell covering. Our ascent was
+suddenly arrested--we looked down into the valley, half concealed by
+distance and the darkness of the night. Only the lights from the
+mansion were visible to us,--a western cloud hung like a white fog
+before us, and a black eagle flew like an angel of death from the east
+through the cloud pillar, seeking its summit, and a cool breeze
+playfully drew us towards the mist-island. The evening red had already
+passed the earth at midnight, and wandered over charming France as its
+future Aurora. O, how the soul was raised towards the stars, and how
+lightly did our hearts beat above the earth!
+
+But now from the bright mansion arose sweet harmony, and the subdued
+echo of the voices of our beloved ones calling upon us. And when Nadine
+looked down, her lonely heart broke with longing after those dear ones;
+and when she glanced into the silvered valley, over which the moon had
+risen, and where the trembling waterfalls danced beside the flowing
+archings of the stream and the green marble caves, and the white paths
+between poplars and wheat-ears, and the whole enchanting path of our
+day's journey lay silvered beneath her inconstant rays,--bright,
+shining tears flowed unrestrained from her mild eyes, and she looked
+imploringly to me, as if begging for consideration and secrecy, and
+said expressively, "We are yet so far from the cruel earth."
+
+When our little globe was drawn back to the shining meadows and the
+merry music, she looked inquiringly at me, to ask if the traces of
+tears yet remained in her eyes. She dried them more quickly, but in
+vain. Silently we descended; I took her burning hand in mine, and
+looked into her weeping eyes, but could not speak.... --And how could I
+speak better now, dearest friend!
+
+
+
+
+
+ LIFE
+
+ OF
+
+ QUINTUS FIXLEIN.
+
+ EXTRACTED FROM
+
+ FIFTEEN LETTER-BOXES.
+
+ TRANSLATED BY THOMAS CARLYLE.
+
+
+
+
+ LETTER TO MY FRIENDS,
+ INSTEAD OF PREFACE.
+
+
+Merchants, Authors, young Ladies, and Quakers, call all persons, with
+whom they have any business, Friends; and my readers accordingly are my
+table and college Friends. Now, at this time, I am about presenting so
+many hundred Friends with just as many hundred gratis copies; and my
+Bookseller has orders to supply each on request, after the Fair, with
+his copy--in return for a trifling consideration and _don gratuit_ to
+printers, pressmen, and other such persons. But as I could not, like
+the French authors, send the whole Edition to the binder, the blank
+leaf in front was necessarily wanting; and thus to write a
+complimentary word or two upon it was out of my power. I have therefore
+caused a few white leaves to be inserted directly after the title-page;
+on these we are now printing.
+
+My Book contains the Life of a Schoolmaster, extracted and compiled
+from various public and private documents. With this Biography, dear
+Friends, it is the purpose of the Author not so much to procure you a
+pleasure as to teach you how to enjoy one. In truth, King Xerxes should
+have offered his prize-medals, not for the invention of new pleasures,
+but for a good methodology and directory to use the old ones.
+
+Of ways for becoming happier (not happy) I could never inquire out more
+than three. The first, rather an elevated road, is this: to soar away
+so far above the clouds of life, that you see the whole external world,
+with its wolf-dens, charnel-houses, and thunder-rods, lying far down
+beneath you, shrunk into a little child's garden. The second is: simply
+to sink down into this little garden; and there to nestle yourself so
+snugly, so homewise, in some furrow, that, in looking out from your
+warm lark-nest, you likewise can discern no wolf-dens, charnel-houses,
+or thunder-rods, but only blades and ears, every one of which, for the
+nest-bird, is a tree, and a sun-screen, and a rain-screen. The third,
+finally, which I look upon as the hardest and cunningest, is that of
+alternating between the other two.
+
+This I shall now satisfactorily expound to men at large.
+
+The Hero, the Reformer, your Brutus, your Howard, your Republican, he
+whom civic storm, or genius poetic storm, impels; in short, every
+mortal with a great Purpose, or even a perennial Passion (were it but
+that of writing the largest folios); all these men fence themselves in
+by their internal world against the frosts and heats of the external,
+as the madman in a worse sense does; every _fixed_ idea, such as rules
+every genius, every enthusiast, at least periodically, separates and
+elevates a man above the bed and board of this Earth, above its
+Dog's-grottoes, buckthorns, and Devil's-walls; like the Bird of
+Paradise, he slumbers flying; and, on his outspread pinions, oversleeps
+unconsciously the earthquakes and conflagrations of Life, in his long,
+fair dream of his ideal Mother-land.--Alas! To few is this dream
+granted; and these few are so often awakened by Flying Dogs![33]
+
+This skyward track, however, is fit only for the winged portion of the
+human species, for the smallest. What can it profit poor quill-driving
+brethren, whose souls have not even wing-shells, to say nothing of
+wings? Or these tethered persons with the best back, breast, and
+neck-fins, who float motionless in the wicker Fish-box of the State,
+and are not allowed to swim, because the Box or State, long ago tied to
+the shore, itself swims in the name of the Fishes? To the whole
+standing and writing host of heavy-laden State-domestics, Purveyors,
+Clerks of all departments, and all the lobsters packed together heels
+over head into the Lobster-basket of the Government office-rooms, and
+for refreshments, sprinkled over with a few nettles; to these persons,
+what way of becoming happy _here_ can I possibly point out?
+
+My _second_ merely; and that is as follows: to take a compound
+microscope, and with it to discover, and convince themselves, that
+their drop of Burgundy is properly a Red Sea, that butterfly-dust is
+peacock-feathers, mouldiness a flowery-field, and sand a heap of
+jewels. These microscopic recreations are more lasting than all
+costly watering-place recreations.--But I must explain these metaphors
+by new ones. The purpose for which I have sent _Fixlein's Life_
+into the Messrs. Lübeks' Warehouse, is simply that in this same
+_Life_--therefore in this Preface it is less needful--I may show to the
+whole Earth that we ought to value little joys more than great ones, the
+night-gown more than the dress-coat; that Plutus's heaps are worth less
+than his handfuls, the plum than the penny for a rainy day; and that
+not great, but little good-haps can make us happy.--Can I accomplish
+this, I shall, through means of my Book, bring up for Posterity a race
+of men finding refreshment in all things; in the warmth of their rooms
+and of their night-caps; in their pillows; in the three High Festivals;
+in mere Apostles' days; in the Evening Moral Tales of their wives, when
+these gentle persons have been forth as ambassadresses visiting some
+Dowager Residence, whither the husband could not be persuaded; in the
+bloodletting-day of these their newsbringers; in the day of
+slaughtering, salting, potting against the rigor of grim winter; and in
+all such days. You perceive, my drift is, that man must become a little
+Tailor-bird, which, not amid the crashing boughs of the storm-tost,
+roaring, immeasurable tree of Life, but on one of its leaves, sews
+itself a nest together, and there lies snug. The most essential sermon
+one could preach to our century were a sermon on the duty of staying at
+home.
+
+The _third_ skyward road is the alternation between the other two. The
+foregoing _second_ way is not good enough for man, who here on Earth
+should take into his hand not the Sickle only, but also the Plough. The
+_first_ is too good for him. He has not always the force, like
+Rugendas, in the midst of the Battle to compose Battle-pieces; and,
+like Backhuisen in the Shipwreck, to clutch at no board but the
+drawing-board to paint it on. And then his pains are not less lasting
+than his _fatigues_. Still oftener is Strength denied its Arena; it is
+but the smallest portion of life that, to a working soul, offers Alps,
+Revolutions, Rhine-falls, Worms Diets, and Wars with Xerxes; and for
+the whole it is better so; the longer portion of life is a field beaten
+flat as a threshing-floor, without lofty Gothard Mountains; often it is
+a tedious ice-field, without a single glacier tinged with dawn.
+
+But even by walking, a man rests and recovers himself for climbing; by
+little joys and duties, for great. The victorious Dictator must
+contrive to plough down his battle Mars-field into a flax and carrot
+field; to transform his theatre of war into a parlor theatre, on which
+his children may enact some good pieces from the _Children's Friend_.
+Can he accomplish this, can he turn so softly from the path of poetical
+happiness into that of household happiness,--then is he little
+different from myself, who even now, though modesty might forbid me to
+disclose it--who even now, I say, amid the creation of this Letter,
+have been enabled to reflect, that, when it is done, so also will the
+Roses and Elder-berries of pastry be done, which a sure hand is
+seething in butter for the Author of this Work.
+
+As I purpose appending to this Letter a Postscript (at the end of the
+Book), I reserve somewhat which I had to say about the Third[34]
+half-satirical, half-philosophical part of the Work till that
+opportunity.
+
+Here, out of respect for the rights of a Letter, the Author drops his
+half anonymity,[35] and for the first time subscribes himself with his
+whole true name,
+
+ Jean Paul Friedrich Richter.
+
+_Hof in Voigtland, 29th June_, 1795.
+
+
+
+
+
+ LIFE OF QUINTUS FIXLEIN,
+ DOWN TO OUR OWN TIMES.
+ IN FIFTEEN LETTER-BOXES.
+
+
+ FIRST LETTER-BOX.
+
+ Dog-days' Vacation.--Visits.--An Indigent of Quality.
+
+
+Egidius Zebedäus Fixlein had just for eight days been Quintus,[36] and
+fairly commenced teaching duties, when Fortune tabled out for him four
+refreshing courses and collations, besprinkled with flowers and sugar.
+These were the four canicular weeks. I could find in my heart, at this
+hour, to pat the cranium of that good man who invented the Dog-days'
+Vacation. I never go to walk in that season, without thinking how a
+thousand down-pressed pedagogic persons are now erecting themselves in
+the open air; and the stiff knapsack is lying unbuckled at their feet,
+and they can seek whatsoever their soul desires; butterflies,--or roots
+of numbers,--or roots of words,--or herbs,--or their native villages.
+
+The last did our Fixlein. He moved not, however, till Sunday,--for you
+like to know how holidays taste in the city; and then, in company with
+his Shock and a Quintaner, or Fifth-Form boy, who carried his Green
+nightgown, he issued through the gate in the morning. The dew was still
+lying; and as he reached the back of the gardens, the children of the
+Orphan Hospital were uplifting with clear voices their morning hymn.
+The city was Flachsenfingen, the village Hukelum, the dog Schil, and
+the year of Grace 1791.
+
+"Manikin," said he, to the Quintaner, for he liked to speak, as Love,
+children, and the people of Vienna do, in diminutives, "Manikin, give
+me the bundle to the village; run about, and seek thee a little
+bird, as thou art thyself, and so have something to pet too in
+vacation-time." For the manikin was at once his page, lackey,
+room-comrade, train-bearer, and gentleman in waiting; and the Shock
+also was his manikin.
+
+He stept slowly along, through the crisped cole-beds, overlaid with
+colored beads of dew; and looked at the bushes, out of which, when the
+morning wind bent them asunder, there seemed to start a flight of
+jewel-colibri, so brightly did they glitter. From time to time he
+drew the bell-rope of his--whistle, that the manikin might, not skip
+away too far; and he shortened his league and half of road, by
+measuring it not in leagues, but in villages. It is more pleasant for
+pedestrians--for geographers it is not--to count by wersts than by
+miles. In walking, our Quintus furthermore got by heart the few fields
+on which the grain was already reaped.
+
+But now roam slower, Fixlein, through His Lordship's garden of Hukelum;
+not, indeed, lest thy coat sweep away any tulip-stamina, but that thy
+good mother may have time to lay her Cupid's-band of black taffeta
+about her smooth brow. I am grieved to think my fair readers take it
+ill of her, that she means first to iron this same band; they cannot
+know that she has no maid; and that to-day the whole Preceptorial
+dinner--the money purveyances the guest has made over to her three days
+before--is to be arranged and prepared by herself, without the aid of
+any Mistress of the Household whatever; for indeed she belongs to the
+_Tiers État_, being neither more nor less than a gardener's widow.
+
+You can figure how this true, warm-hearted mother may have lain in wait
+all morning for her Schoolman, whom she loved as the apple of her eye;
+since, on the whole populous Earth, she had not (her first son, as well
+as her husband, was dead) any other for her soul, which indeed
+overflowed with love; not any other but her Zebedäus. Could she ever
+tell you aught about him, I mean aught joyful, without ten times wiping
+her eyes? Nay, did she not once divide her solitary Kirmes (or
+Churchale) cake between two mendicant students, because she thought
+Heaven would punish her for so feasting, while her boy in Leipzig had
+nothing to feast on, and must pass the cake-garden like other gardens,
+merely smelling at it?
+
+"Dickens! Thou already, Zebedäus!" said the mother, giving an
+embarrassed smile, to keep from weeping, as the son, who had ducked
+past the window, and crossed the grassy threshold without knocking,
+suddenly entered. For joy she forgot to put the heater into the
+smoothing-iron, as her illustrious scholar, amid the loud boiling of
+the soup, tenderly kissed her brow, and even said Mamma; a name
+which lighted on her breast like downy silk. All the windows were open;
+and the garden, with its flower-essences, and bird-music, and
+butterfly-collections, was almost half within the room. But I
+suppose I have not yet mentioned that the little garden-house, rather a
+chamber than a house, was situated on the western cape of the Castle
+garden. The owner had graciously allowed the widow to retain this
+dowager-mansion; as indeed the mansion would otherwise have stood
+empty, for he now kept no gardener.
+
+But Fixlein, in spite of his joy, could not stay long with her; being
+bound for the Church, which, to his spiritual appetite, was at all
+times a king's kitchen; a mother's. A sermon pleased him simply because
+it was a sermon, and because he himself had once preached one. The
+mother was contented he should go; these good women think they enjoy
+their guests, if they can only give them aught to enjoy.
+
+In the choir, this Free-haven and Ethnic Forecourt of stranger
+church-goers, he smiled on all parishioners; and, as in his childhood,
+standing under the wooden wing of an archangel, he looked down on the
+coifed _parterre_. His young years now enclosed him like children in
+their smiling circle; and a long garland wound itself in rings among
+them, and by fits they plucked flowers from it, and threw them in his
+face. Was it not old Senior Astman that stood there on the pulpit
+Parnassus, the man by whom he had been so often flogged, while
+acquiring Greek with him from a grammar written in Latin, which he
+could not explain, yet was forced to walk by the light of? Stood there
+not behind the pulpit-stairs the sacristy-cabin, and in this was there
+not a church-library of consequence--no school-boy could have buckled
+it wholly in his book-strap--lying under the minever cover of pastil
+dust? And did it not consist of the Polyglot in folio, which he,
+spurred on by Pfeiffer's _Critica Sacra_, had turned up leaf by leaf,
+in his early years, excerpting therefrom the _literæ inversæ majusculæ
+minusculæ_, and so forth, with an immensity of toil? And could he not
+at present, the sooner the more readily, have wished to cast this
+alphabetic soft-fodder into the Hebrew letter-trough, whereto your
+Oriental Rhizophagi (Rooteaters) are tied, especially as here they get
+so little vowel hard-fodder to keep them in heart?--Stood there not
+close by him the organ-stool, the throne to which, every Apostle-day,
+the Schoolmaster had by three nods elevated him, thence to fetch down
+the sacred hyssop, the sprinkler of the Church?
+
+My readers themselves will gather spirits when they now hear that our
+Quintus, during the outshaking of the poor-bag, was invited by the
+Senior to come over in the afternoon; and to them it will be little
+less gratifying than if he had invited themselves. But what will they
+say, when they get home with him to mother and dinner-table, both
+already clad in their white Sunday dress; and behold the large cake
+which Fräulein Thiennette (Stephanie) has rolled from her peel? In the
+first place, however, they will wish to know who _she_ is.
+
+She is,--for if (according to Lessing), in the very excellence of the
+Iliad, we neglect the personalities of its author; the same thing will
+apply to the fate of several authors, for instance, to my own; but an
+authoress of cakes must not be forgotten in the excellence of her
+baking,--Thiennette is a poor, indigent, insolvent young lady; has not
+much, except years, of which she counts five-and-twenty; no near
+relations living now; no acquirements (for in literature she does not
+even know _Werter_) except economical; reads no books, not even mine;
+inhabits, that is, watches like a wardeness, quite alone, the thirteen
+void, disfurnished chambers of the Castle of Hukelum, which belongs to
+the Dragoon Rittmeister Aufhammer, at present resident in his other
+mansion of Schadeck; on occasion, she commands and feeds his soccagers
+and handmaids; and can write herself By the grace of God--which, in the
+thirteenth century, the country nobles did as well as princes,--for she
+lives by the grace of man, at least of woman, the Lady Rittmeisterinn
+Aufhammer's grace, who, at all times, blesses those vassals whom her
+husband curses. But, in the breast of the orphaned Thiennette, lay a
+sugared marchpane heart, which, for very love, you could have devoured;
+her fate was hard, but her soul was soft; she was modest, courteous,
+and timid, but too much so;--cheerfully and coldly she received the
+most cutting humiliations in Schadeck, and felt no pain, and not till
+some days after did she see it all clearly, and then these cuts began
+sharply to bleed, and she wept in her loneliness over her lot.
+
+It is hard for me to give a light tone, after this deep one, and to
+add, that Fixlein had been almost brought up beside her, and that she,
+his school-moiety over with the Senior, while the latter was training
+him for the dignities of the Third Form, had learned the _Verba
+Anomala_ along with him.
+
+The Achilles'-shield of the cake, jagged and embossed with carved work
+of brown scales, was whirling round in the Quintus like a swing-wheel
+of hungry and thankful ideas. Of that philosophy which despises eating,
+and of that high breeding which wastes it, he had not so much about him
+as belongs to the ungratefulness of such cultivated persons; but for
+his platter of meat, for his dinner of herbs, he could never give
+thanks enough.
+
+Innocent and contented, the quadruple dinner-party--for the Shock with
+his cover under the stove cannot be omitted--now began their Feast of
+Sweet Bread, their Feast of Honor for Thiennette, their Grove-feast in
+the garden. It may truly be a subject of wonder how a man who has not,
+like the King of France, four hundred and forty-eight persons (the
+hundred and sixty-one _Garçons de la Maisonbouche_ I do not reckon) in
+his kitchen, nor a _Fruiterie_ of thirty-one human bipeds, nor a
+Pastry-cookery of three-and-twenty, nor a daily expenditure of 387
+Livres 21 Sous,--how such a man, I say, can eat with any satisfaction.
+Nevertheless, to me, a cooking mother is as dear as a whole royal
+cooking household, given rather to feed upon me than to feed me.--The
+most precious fragments which the Biographer and the World can
+gather from this meal consist of here and there an edifying piece of
+table-talk. The mother had much to tell. Thiennette is this night, she
+mentions, for the first time, to put on her morning promenade-dress of
+white muslin, as also a satin girdle and steel buckle; but, adds she,
+it will not sit her; as the Rittmeisterinn (for this lady used to hang
+her cast clothes on Thiennette, as Catholics do their cast crutches and
+sores on their patron Saints) was much thicker. Good women grudge each
+other nothing save only clothes, husbands, and flax. In the fancy of
+the Quintus, by virtue of this apparel, a pair of angel pinions were
+sprouting forth from the shoulder-blades of Thiennette; for him a
+garment was a sort of hollow half-man, to whom only the nobler parts
+and the first principles were wanting; he honored these wrappages and
+hulls of our interior, not as an Elegant, or a Critic of Beauty, but
+because it was not possible for him to despise aught which he saw
+others honoring. Further, the good mother read to him, as it were, the
+monumental inscription of his father, who had sunk into the arms of
+Death in the thirty-second year of his age, from a cause which I
+explain not here, but in a future Letter-box, having too much affection
+for the reader. Our Quintus could not sate himself with hearing of his
+father.
+
+The fairest piece of news was, that Fräulein Thiennette had sent word
+to-day, "he might visit Her Ladyship to-morrow, as My Lord, his
+godfather, was to be absent in town." This, however, I must explain.
+Old Aufhammer was called _Egidius_, and was Fixlein's godfather; but
+he--though the Rittmeisterinn duly covered the cradle of the child with
+nightly offerings, with flesh-tithes and grain-tithes--had frugally
+made him no christening present, except that of his name, which
+proved to be the very balefullest. For, our _Egidius_ Fixlein, with his
+Shock, which, by reason of the French convulsions, had, in company with
+other emigrants, run off from Nantes, was but lately returned from
+college--when he and his dog, as ill-luck would have it, went to walk
+in the Hukelum wood. Now, as the Quintus was ever and anon crying out
+to his attendant: "Coosh, Schil" (_Couche Gilles_), it must apparently
+have been the Devil that had just then planted the Lord of Aufhammer
+among the trees and bushes in such a way, that this whole travestying
+and docking of his name--for Gilles means Egidius--must fall directly
+into his ear. Fixlein could neither speak French, nor any offence to
+mortal; he knew not head or tail of what _couche_ signified; a word,
+which, in Paris, even the plebeian dogs are now in the habit of saying
+to their _valets de chiens_. But there were three things which Von
+Aufhammer never recalled,--his error, his anger, and his word. The
+provokee, therefore, determined that the plebeian provoker and
+honor-stealer should never more speak to him, or--get a doit from him.
+
+I return. After dinner he gazed out of the little window into the
+garden, and saw his path of life dividing into four branches, leading
+towards just as many skyward Ascensions; towards the Ascension into the
+Parsonage, and that into the Castle to Thiennette, for this day; and
+towards the third into Schadeck for the morrow; and lastly, into every
+house in Hukelum as the fourth. And now, when the mother had long
+enough kept cheerfully gliding about on tiptoe, "not to disturb him in
+studying his Latin Bible" (the _Vulgata_), that is, in reading the
+_Litteraturzeitung_, he at last rose to his own feet; and the humble
+joy of the mother ran long after the courageous son, who dared to go
+forth and speak to a Senior, quite unappalled. Yet it was not without
+reverence that he entered the dwelling of his old, rather gray than
+bald-headed, teacher, who was not only Virtue itself, but also Hunger,
+eating frequently, and with the appetite of Pharaoh's lean kine. A
+schoolman that expects to become a professor will scarcely deign to
+cast an eye on a pastor; but one who is himself looking up to a
+parsonage as to his working-house and breeding-house, knows how to
+value such a character. The new parsonage--as if it had, like a _Casa
+Santa_, come flying out of Erlang, or the Berlin Friedrichs-strasse,
+and alighted in Hukelum--was for the Quintus a Temple of the Sun, and
+the Senior a Priest of the Sun. To be Parson there himself was a
+thought overlaid with virgin honey; such a thought as occurs but one
+other time in History, namely, in the head of Hannibal, when he
+projected stepping over the Alps, that is to say, over the threshold of
+Rome.
+
+The landlord and his guest formed an excellent _bureau d'esprit_;
+people of office, especially of the same office, have more to tell each
+other, namely, their own history, than your idle May-chafers and
+Court-celestials, who must speak only of other people's.--The Senior
+made a soft transition from his iron-ware (in the stable furniture), to
+the golden age of his Academic life, of which such people like as much
+to think, as poets do of their childhood. So good as he was, he still
+half joyfully recollected that he had once been less so; but joyful
+remembrances of wrong actions are their half repetition, as repentant
+remembrances of good ones are their half abolishment.
+
+Courteously and kindly did Zebedäus (who could not even enter in his
+Notebook the name of a person of quality without writing an H. for Herr
+before it) listen to the Academic Saturnalia of the old gentleman, who
+in Wittenberg had toped as well as written, and thirsted not more for
+the Hippocrene than for Gukguk.[37]
+
+Herr Jerusalem has observed that the barbarism, which often springs up
+close on the brightest efflorescence of the sciences, is a sort of
+strengthening mud-bath, good for averting the over-refinement wherewith
+such efflorescence always threatens us. I believe that a man who
+considers how high the sciences have mounted with our upper
+classes,--for instance with every Patrician's son in Nürnberg, to whom
+the public must present 1000 florins for studying with,--I believe that
+such a man will not grudge the Son of the Muses a certain barbarous
+Middle-age (the Burschen or Student Life, as it is called), which may
+again so case-harden him that his refinement shall not go beyond the
+limits. The Senior, while in Wittenberg, had protected the one hundred
+and eighty Academic Freedoms--so many of them has Petrus Rebuffus
+summed up[38]--against prescription, and lost none except his moral
+one, of which truly a man, even in a convent, can seldom make much.
+This gave our Quintus courage to relate certain pleasant somersets of
+his own, which at Leipzig, under the Incubus-pressure of poverty, he
+had contrived to execute. Let us hear him. His landlord, who was at the
+same time Professor and Miser, maintained in his enclosed court a whole
+community of hens. Fixlein, in company with three room-mates, without
+difficulty mastered the rent of a chamber, or closet. In general their
+main equipments, like Ph[oe]nixes, existed but in the singular number:
+one bed, in which always the one pair slept before midnight, the other
+after midnight, like nocturnal watchmen; one coat, in which one after
+the other they appeared in public, and which, like a watch-coat, was
+the national uniform of the company; and several other _ones_,
+Unities both of Interest and Place. Nowhere can you collect the
+stress-memorials and siege-medals of Poverty more pleasantly and
+philosophically than at College; the Academic burgher exhibits to us
+how many humorists and Diogeneses Germany has in it. Our Unitarians had
+just one thing four times, and that was hunger. The Quintus related,
+perhaps with a too pleasurable enjoyment of the recollection, how one
+of this famishing _coro_ invented means of appropriating the
+Professor's hens as just tribute, or subsidies. He said (he was a
+Jurist), they must once for all borrow a legal fiction from the Feudal
+code, and look on the Professor as the soccage tenant, to whom the
+usufruct of the hen-yard and hen-house belonged; but on themselves as
+the feudal superiors of the same, to whom accordingly the vassal was
+bound to pay his feudal dues. And now, that the Fiction might follow
+Nature, continued he--"_fictio sequitur naturam_,"--it behooved them to
+lay hold of said Yule-hens, by direct personal distraint. But into the
+court-yard there was no getting. The feudalist, therefore, prepared a
+fishing-line; stuck a bread-pill on the hook, and lowered his
+fishing-tackle, anglewise, down into the court. In a few seconds the
+barb stuck in a hen's throat, and the hen, now communicating with its
+feudal superior, could silently, like ships by Archimedes, be heaved
+aloft to the hungry air-fishing society, where, according to
+circumstances, the proper feudal name and title of possession failed
+not to be awaiting her; for the updrawn fowls were now denominated
+Christmas-fowls, now Forest-hens, Bailiff-hens, Pentecost and
+Summer-hens. "I begin," said the angling lord of the manor, "with
+taking _Rutcher-dues_, for so we call the triple and quintuple of the
+original quitrent, when the vassal, as is the case here, has long
+neglected payment." The Professor, like any other prince, observed with
+sorrow the decreasing population of his hen-yard, for his subjects,
+like the Hebrews, were dying by enumeration. At last he had the
+happiness, while reading his lecture--he was just come to the subject
+of _Forest Salt and Coin Regalities_--to descry through the window of
+his auditorium a quitrent hen suspended, like Ignatius Loyola in
+prayer, or Juno in her punishment, in middle-air. He followed the
+incomprehensible direct ascension of the aeronautic animal, and
+at last descried at the upper window the attracting artist, and
+animal-magnetizer, who had drawn his lot for dinner from the hen-yard
+below. Contrary to all expectation, he terminated this fowling sport
+sooner than his Lecture on Regalities.
+
+Fixlein walked home, amid the vesperal melodies of the steeple
+sounding-holes; and by the road courteously took off his hat before the
+empty windows of the Castle. Houses of quality were to him like persons
+of quality, as in India the Pagoda at once represents the temple and
+the god. To the mother he brought feigned compliments, which she repaid
+with authentic ones; for this afternoon she had been over, with
+her historical tongue and nature-interrogating eye, visiting the
+white-muslin Thiennette. The mother was wont to show her every
+spare-penny which he dropped into her large empty purse, and so raise
+him in the good graces of the Fräulein; for women feel their hearts
+much more attracted towards a son, who tenderly reserves for a mother
+some of their benefits, than we do to a daughter anxiously caring for
+her father; perhaps from a hundred causes, and this among the rest,
+that in their experience of sons and husbands they are more used to
+find these persons mere six-feet thunder-clouds, forked waterspouts, or
+even reposing tornadoes.
+
+Blessed Quintus! on whose Life this other distinction, like an order of
+nobility, does also shine, that thou canst tell it over to thy mother;
+as, for example, this past afternoon in the parsonage. Thy joy flows
+into another heart, and streams back from it, redoubled, into thy own.
+There is a closer approximating of hearts, and also of sounds, than
+that of the _Echo_; the highest approximation melts Tone and Echo into
+_Resonance_ together.
+
+It is historically certain that both of them supped this evening; and
+that instead of the whole dinner fragments which to-morrow might
+themselves represent a dinner, nothing but the cake-offering or pudding
+was laid upon the altar of the table. The mother, who for her own child
+would willingly have neglected not herself only, but all other people,
+now made a motion that to the Quintaner, who was sporting out of doors
+and baiting a bird instead of himself, there should no crumb of the
+precious pastry be given, but only table-bread without the crust. But
+the Schoolman had a Christian disposition, and said that it was Sunday,
+and the young man liked something delicate to eat as well as he.
+Fixlein--the counterpart of great men and geniuses--was inclined to
+treat, to gift, to gratify a serving housemate, rather than a man who
+is for the first time passing through the gate, and at the next
+post-stage will forget both his hospitable landlord and the last
+postmaster. On the whole, our Quintus had a touch of honor in him, and
+notwithstanding his thrift and sacred regard for money, he willingly
+gave it away in cases of honor, and unwillingly in cases of
+overpowering sympathy, which too painfully filled the cavities of his
+heart, and emptied those of his purse. Whilst the Quintaner was
+exercising the _jus compascui_ on the cake, and six arms were
+peacefully resting on Thiennette's free-table, Fixlein read to himself
+and the company the Flachsenfingen Address-calendar; any higher thing,
+except Meusel's _Gelehrtes Deutschland_,[39] he could not figure; the
+Kammerherrs and Raths of the Calendar went tickling over his tongue
+like the raisins of the cake; and of the more rich church-livings he,
+by reading, as it were levied a tithe.
+
+He purposely remained his own Edition in Sunday Wove-paper; I mean, he
+did not lay away his Sunday coat, even when the Prayer-bell tolled; for
+he had still much to do.
+
+After supper he was just about visiting the Fräulein, when he descried
+her in person, like a lily dipped in the red twilight, in the Castle
+garden, whose western limit his house constituted, the southern one
+being the Chinese wall of the Castle.... By the way, how I got to the
+knowledge of all this, what Letter-boxes are, whether I myself was ever
+there, &c., &c.--the whole of this shall, upon my life, be soon and
+faithfully communicated to the reader, and that too in the present
+Book.
+
+Fixlein hopped forth like a Will-o'-wisp into the garden, whose
+flower-perfume was mingling with his supper-perfume. No one bowed
+lower to a nobleman than he, not out of plebeian servility, nor of
+self-interested cringing, but because he thought "a nobleman was a
+nobleman." But in this case his bow, instead of falling forwards, fell
+obliquely to the right, as it were after his hat; for he had not risked
+taking a stick with him; and hat and stick were his proppage and
+balance-wheel, in short, his bowing-gear, without which it was out of
+his power to produce any courtly bow, had you offered him the High
+Church of Hamburg for so doing. Thiennette's mirthfulness soon unfolded
+his crumpled soul into straight form, and into the proper tone. He
+delivered her a long, neat Thanksgiving and Harvest sermon for the
+scaly cake; which appeared to her at once kind and tedious. Young women
+without the polish of high life reckon tedious pedantry, merely like
+snuffing, one of the necessary ingredients of a man; they reverence us
+infinitely; and as Lambert could never speak to the King of Prussia, by
+reason of his sun-eyes, except in the dark, so they, I believe, often
+like better--also by reason of our sublime air--if they can catch us in
+the dark too. _Him_ Thiennette edified by the Imperial History of Herr
+von Aufhammer and Her Ladyship his spouse, who meant to put him, the
+Quintus, in her will; _her_ he edified by his Literary History, as
+relating to himself and the Subrector; how, for instance, he was at
+present vicariating in the Second Form, and ruling over scholars as
+long in stature as himself. And thus did the two in happiness, among
+red bean-blossoms, red May-chafers, before the red of the twilight
+burning lower and lower on the horizon, walk to and fro in the garden;
+and turn always with a smile as they approached the head of the ancient
+gardeneress, standing like a window-bust through the little lattice,
+which opened in the bottom of a larger one.
+
+To me it is incomprehensible he did not fall in love. I know his
+reasons, indeed. In the first place, she had nothing; secondly, he had
+nothing, and school-debts to boot; thirdly, her genealogical tree was a
+boundary tree and warning-post; fourthly, his hands were tied up by
+another nobler thought, which, for good cause, is yet reserved from the
+reader. Nevertheless--Fixlein! I durst not have been in thy place!
+I should have looked at her, and remembered her virtues and our
+school-years, and then have drawn forth my too fusible heart, and
+presented it to her as a bill of exchange, or insinuated it as a
+summons. For I should have considered that she resembled a nun in two
+senses, in her good heart and in her good pastry; that, in spite of her
+intercourse with male vassals, she was no Charles Genevieve Louise
+Auguste Timothé Eon de Beaumont,[40] but a smooth, fair-haired,
+white-capped dove; that she sought more to please her own sex than
+ours; that she showed a melting heart, not previously borrowed from the
+Circulating Library, in tears, for which in her innocence she rather
+took shame than credit.--At the very first cheapening, I should, on
+these grounds, have been out with my heart.--Had I fully reflected,
+Quintus! that I knew her as myself; that her hands and mine (to wit,
+had I been thou) had both been guided by the same Senior to Latin
+penmanship; that we two, when little children, had kissed each other
+before the glass, to see whether the two image-children would do it
+likewise in the mirror; that often we had put hands of both sexes into
+the same muff, and there played with them in secret; had I, lastly,
+considered that we were here standing before the glass-house, now
+splendent in the enamel of twilight, and that on the cold panes of this
+glass-house we two (she within, I without) had often pressed our warm
+cheeks together, parted only by the thickness of the glass,--then had I
+taken this poor gentle soul, pressed asunder by Fate, and seeing, amid
+her thunder-clouds, no higher elevation to part them and protect her
+than the grave, and had drawn her to my own soul, and warmed her on my
+heart, and encompassed her about with my eyes.
+
+In truth, the Quintus would have done so too, had not the
+above-mentioned nobler thought, which I yet disclose not, kept him
+back. Softened, without knowing the cause,--(accordingly he gave his
+mother a kiss,)--and blessed without having had a literary
+conversation; and dismissed with a freight of humble compliments, which
+he was to disload on the morrow before the Dragoon Rittmeisterinn, he
+returned to his little cottage, and looked yet a long while out of its
+dark windows, at the light ones of the Castle. And then, when the first
+quarter of the moon was setting, that is, about midnight, he again, in
+the cool sigh of a mild, fanning, moist, and directly heart-addressing
+night-breeze, opened the eyelids of a sight already sunk in
+dreaming....
+
+Sleep, for to-day thou hast done naught ill! I, whilst the drooping,
+shut flower-bell of thy spirit sinks on thy pillow, will look into the
+breezy night over thy morning footpath, which, through the translucent
+little wood, is to lead thee to Schadeck, to thy patroness. All
+prosperity attend thee, thou foolish Quintus!--
+
+
+
+
+ SECOND LETTER-BOX.
+
+ Frau von Aufhammer.--Childhood-resonance.--Authorcraft.
+
+
+The early piping which the little thrush, last night adopted by the
+Quintaner from its nest, started for victual about two o'clock,
+soon drove our Quintus into his clothes; whose calender-press and
+parallel-ruler the hands of his careful mother had been, for she would
+not send him to the Rittmeisterinn "like a runagate dog." The Shock was
+incarcerated, the Quintaner taken with him, as likewise many wholesome
+rules from Mother Fixlein, how to conduct himself towards the
+Rittmeisterinn. But the son answered: "Mamma, when a man has been in
+company, like me, with high people, with a Fräulein Thiennette, he soon
+knows whom he is speaking to, and what polished manners and Saver di
+veaver (_Savoir vivre_) require."
+
+He arrived with the Quintaner, and green fingers (dyed with the leaves
+he had plucked on the path), and with a half-nibbled rose between his
+teeth, in presence of the sleek lackeys of Schadeck. If women are
+flowers--though as often silk and Italian and gum-flowers as botanical
+ones--then was Frau von Aufhammer a ripe flower, with (adipose)
+neck-bulb, and tuberosity (of lard). Already, in the half of her body,
+cut away from life by the apoplexy, she lay upon her lard-pillow but as
+on a softer grave; nevertheless, the portion of her that remained was
+at once lively, pious, and proud. Her heart was a flowing cornucopia to
+all men, yet this not from philanthropy, but from rigid devotion; the
+lower classes she assisted, cherished, and despised, regarding nothing
+in them, except it were their piety. She received the bowing Quintus
+with the back-bowing air of a patroness; yet she brightened into a look
+of kindliness at his disloading of the compliments from Thiennette.
+
+She began the conversation, and long continued it alone, and said,--yet
+without losing the inflation of pride from her countenance,--"She
+should soon die; but the godchildren of her husband she would remember
+in her will." Further, she told him directly in the face, which stood
+there all over-written with the Fourth Commandment before her, that "he
+must not build upon a settlement in Hukelum; but to the Flachsenfingen
+Conrectorate (to which the Burgermeister and Council had the right of
+nomination) she hoped to promote him, as it was from the then
+Burgermeister that she bought her coffee, and from the Town-Syndic (he
+drove a considerable wholesale and retail trade in Hamburg candles)
+that she bought both her wax and tallow lights."
+
+And now by degrees he arrived at his humble petition, when she asked
+him sick-news of Senior Astmann, who guided himself more by Luther's
+Catechism than by the Catechism of Health. She was Astmann's patroness
+in a stricter than ecclesiastical sense; and she even confessed that
+she would soon follow this true shepherd of souls, when she heard, here
+at Schadeck, the sound of his funeral-bell. Such strange chemical
+affinities exist between our dross and our silver veins; as, for
+example, here between Pride and Love; and I could wish that we would
+pardon this hypostatic union in all persons, as we do it in the
+fair, who, with all their faults, are nevertheless by us--as, according
+to Du Fay, iron, though mixed with any other metal, is by the
+magnet--attracted and held fast.
+
+Supposing even that the Devil _had_, in some idle minute, sown a
+handful or two of the seeds of Envy in our Quintus's soul, yet they had
+not sprouted; and to-day especially they did not, when he heard the
+praises of a man who had been his teacher, and who--what he reckoned a
+Titulado of the Earth, not from vanity, but from piety--was a
+clergyman. So much, however, is, according to History, not to be
+denied; that he now straightway came forth with his petition to the
+noble lady, signifying that "indeed he would cheerfully content himself
+for a few years in the school; but yet in the end he longed to be in
+some small quiet priestly office." To her question, "But was he
+orthodox?" he answered, that "he hoped so; he had, in Leipzig, not only
+attended all the public lectures of Dr. Burscher, but also had taken
+private instructions from several sound teachers of the faith, well
+knowing that the Consistorium, in its examinations as to purity of
+doctrine, was now more strict than formerly."
+
+The sick lady required him to make a proof-shot, namely, to administer
+to her a sick-bed exhortation. By Heaven! he administered to her one of
+the best. Her pride of birth now crouched before his pride of office
+and priesthood; for though he could not, with the Dominican monk,
+Alanus de Rupe, believe that a priest was greater than God, inasmuch as
+the latter could only make a World, but the former a God (in the mass);
+yet he could not but fall in with Hostiensis, who shows that the
+priestly dignity is seven thousand six hundred and forty-four times
+greater than the kingly, the Sun being just so many times greater than
+the Moon. But a Rittmeisterinn--_she_ shrinks into absolute nothing
+before a parson.
+
+In the servants' hall he applied to the lackeys for the last annual
+series of the _Hamburg Political Journal_; perceiving that with these
+historical documents of the time they were scandalously papering the
+buttons of travelling raiment. In gloomy harvest evenings, he could now
+sit down and read for himself what good news were transpiring in the
+political world--twelve months ago.
+
+On a Triumphal Car, full-laden with laurel, and to which Hopes alone
+were yoked, he drove home at night, and by the road advised the
+Quintaner not to be puffed up with any earthly honor, but silently to
+thank God, as himself was now doing.
+
+
+The thickset blooming grove of his four canicular weeks, and the flying
+tumult of blossoms therein, are already painted on three of the sides.
+I will now clutch blindfold into his days, and bring out one of them;
+one smiles and sends forth its perfumes like another.
+
+Let us take, for instance, the Saint's day of his mother, _Clara_, the
+twelfth of August. In the morning, he had perennial, fire-proof joys,
+that is to say, Employments. For he was writing, as I am doing. Truly,
+if Xerxes proposed a prize for the invention of a new pleasure, any man
+who had sat down to write his thoughts on the prize-question had the
+new pleasure already among his fingers. I know only one thing sweeter
+than making a book, and that is, to project one. Fixlein used to write
+little works, of the twelfth part of an alphabet in size, which in
+their manuscript state he got bound by the bookbinder in gilt boards,
+and betitled with printed letters, and then inserted them among the
+literary ranks of his book-board. Every one thought they were novelties
+printed in writing types. He had labored--I shall omit his less
+interesting performances--at a _Collection of Errors of the Press_, in
+German writings; he compared _Errata_ with each other; showed which
+occurred most frequently; observed that important results were to be
+drawn from this, and advised the reader to draw them.
+
+Moreover, he took his place among the German _Masorites_. He observes
+with great justice in his Preface: "The Jews had their _Masora_ to
+show, which told them how often every letter was to be found in their
+Bible; for example, the Aleph (the A) 42,377 times; how many verses
+there are in which all the consonants appear (there are 26 verses), or
+only eighty (there are 3); how many verses we have into which 42 words
+and 160 consonants enter (there is just one, Jeremiah xxi. 7); which is
+the middle letter in certain books (in the Pentateuch, it is in
+Leviticus xi. 42, the noble V[41]), or in the whole Bible itself. But
+where have we Christians any similar Masora for Luther's Bible to show?
+Has it been accurately investigated which is the middle word, or the
+middle letter here, which vowel appears seldomest, and how often each
+vowel? Thousands of Bible-Christians go out of the world, without ever
+knowing that the German A occurs 323,015 times (therefore above 7 times
+oftener than the Hebrew one) in their Bible."
+
+I could wish that inquirers into Biblical Literature among our
+Reviewers would publicly let me know if, on a more accurate summation,
+they find this number incorrect.[42]
+
+Much also did the Quintus _collect_; he had a fine _Almanack
+Collection_, a _Catechism_ and _Pamphlet Collection_; also, a
+_Collection of Advertisements_, which he began, is not so incomplete as
+you most frequently see such things. He puts high value on his
+_Alphabetical Lexicon of German Subscribers for Books_, where my name
+also occurs among the Js.
+
+But what he liked best to produce were Schemes of Books. Accordingly,
+he sewed together a large work, wherein he merely advised the Learned
+of things they ought to introduce in Literary History, which History he
+rated some ells higher than Universal or Imperial History. In his
+Prolegomena to this performance, he transiently submitted to the
+Literary republic that Hommel had given a register of Jurists who were
+sons of wh--, of others who had become Saints; that Baillet enumerates
+the Learned who _meant_ to write something; and Ancillon those who
+wrote nothing at all; and the Lübeck Superintendent Götze, those who
+were shoemakers, those who were drowned; and Bernhard those whose
+fortunes and history before birth were interesting. This (he could now
+continue) should, as it seems, have excited us to similar muster-rolls
+and matriculations of other kinds of Learned; whereof he proposed a
+few; for example, of the Learned who were unlearned; of those who were
+entire rascals; of such as wore their own hair,--of cue-preachers,
+cue-psalmists, cue-annalists, and so forth; of the Learned who
+had worn black leather breeches, of others who had worn rapiers;
+of the Learned who had died in their eleventh year,--in their
+twentieth,--twenty-first, &c.,--in their hundred and fiftieth, of which
+he knew no instance, unless the Beggar Thomas Parr might be adduced; of
+the Learned who wrote a more abominable hand than the other Learned
+(whereof we know only Rolfinken and his letters, which were as long as
+his hands[43]); or of the Learned who had clipt nothing from each other
+but the beard (whereof no instance is known, save that of Philelphus
+and Timotheus[44]).
+
+Such by-studies did he carry on along with his official labors; but I
+think the State in viewing these matters is actually mad: it compares
+the man who is great in Philosophy and Belles-Lettres at the expense of
+his jog-trot officialities, to _concert-clocks_, which, though striking
+their hours in flute-melodies, are worse time-keepers than your gross,
+stupid steeple-clocks.
+
+To return to St. Clara's day. Fixlein, after such mental exertions,
+bolted out under the music-bushes and rustling trees; and returned not
+again out of warm Nature, till plate and chair were already placed at
+the table. In the course of the repast, something occurred which a
+Biographer must not omit; for his mother had, by request, been wont to
+map out for him, during the process of mastication, the chart of his
+child's-world, relating all the traits which in any way prefigured what
+he had now grown to. This perspective sketch of his early Past he
+committed to certain little leaves which merit our undivided attention.
+For such leaves exclusively, containing scenes, acts, plays of his
+childhood, he used chronologically to file and arrange in separate
+drawers in a little child's-desk of his; and thus to divide his
+Biography, as Moser did his Publicistic Materials, into separate
+_letter-boxes_. He had boxes or drawers for memorial-letters of his
+twelfth, of his thirteenth, fourteenth, &c., of his twenty-first year,
+and so on. Whenever he chose to conclude a day of pedagogic drudgery by
+an evening of peculiar rest, he simply pulled out a letter-drawer, a
+register-bar in his Life-hand-organ, and recollected the whole.
+
+And here must I, in reference to these reviewing Mutes, who may be for
+casting the noose of strangulation round my neck, most particularly
+beg, that, before doing so on account of my Chapters being called
+Letter-boxes, they would have the goodness to look whose blame it was,
+and to think whether I could possibly help it, seeing the Quintus had
+divided his Biography into such Boxes himself: they have Christian
+bowels.
+
+But about his elder brother he put no saddening question to his mother;
+this poor boy a peculiar Fate had laid hold of, and with all his genial
+endowment dashed to pieces on the iceberg of Death. For he chanced to
+leap on an ice-board that had jammed itself among several others; but
+these recoiled, and his shot forth with him; melted away as it floated
+under his feet, and so sunk his heart of fire amid the ice and waves.
+It grieved his mother that he was not found, that her heart had not
+been harrowed by the look of the swoln corpse.--O good mother, rather
+thank God for it!--
+
+After breakfast, to fortify himself with new vigor for his desk,
+he for some time strolled idly over the house, and, like a Police
+Fire-inspector, visited all the nooks of his cottage, to gather from
+them here and there a live ember from the ash-covered rejoicing-fire of
+his childhood. He mounted to the garret, to the empty bird-coops of his
+father, who in winter had been a birder; and he transiently reviewed
+the lumber of his old playthings, which were lying in the netted
+enclosure of a large canary breeding-cage. In the minds of children, it
+is regular _little_ forms, such as those of balls and dies, that
+impress and express themselves most forcibly. From this may the reader
+explain to himself Fixlein's delight in the red acorn-blockhouse,
+in the sparwork glued together out of white chips and husks of
+potato-plums, in the cheerful glasshouse of a cube-shaped lantern, and
+other the like products of his early architecture. The following,
+however, I explain quite differently; he had ventured, without leave
+given from any lord of the manor, to build a clay house; not for
+cottagers, but for flies; and which, therefore, you could readily
+enough have put in your pocket. This fly-hospital had its glass
+windows, and a red coat of coloring, and very many alcoves, and three
+balconies; balconies, as a sort of house within a house, he had loved
+from of old so much, that he could scarcely have liked Jerusalem well,
+where (according to Lightfoot) no such thing is permitted to be
+built. From the glistening eyes with which the architect had viewed
+his tenantry creeping about the windows, or feeding out of the
+sugar-trough,--for, like the Count St. Germain, they ate nothing but
+sugar,--from this joy an adept in the art of education might easily
+have prophesied his turn for household contraction; to his fancy, in
+those times, even gardeners'-huts were like large waste Arks and Halls,
+and nothing bigger than such a fly-Louvre seemed a true, snug
+citizen's-house. He now felt and handled his old high child's-stool,
+which had in former days resembled the _Sedes Exploratoria_ of the
+Pope; he gave his child's-coach a tug and made it run; but he could not
+understand what balsam and holiness so much distinguished it from all
+other child's-coaches. He wondered that the real sports of children
+should not so delight him as the emblems of these sports, when the
+child that had carried them on was standing grown up to manhood in his
+presence.
+
+Before one article in the house he stood heart-melted and sad; before a
+little angular clothes-press, which was no higher than my table, and
+which had belonged to his poor drowned brother. When the boy with the
+key of it was swallowed by the waves, the excruciated mother had made a
+vow that this toy-press of his should never be broken up by violence.
+Most probably there is nothing in it but the poor soul's playthings.
+Let us look away from this bloody urn.----
+
+Bacon reckons the remembrances of childhood among wholesome, medicinal
+things; naturally enough, therefore, they acted like a salutary
+digestive on the Quintus. He could now again betake him with new heart
+to his desk, and produce something quite peculiar,--petitions for
+church livings. He took the Address-calendar, and, for every country
+parish that he found in it, got a petition in readiness; which he then
+laid aside, till such time as the present incumbent should decease. For
+Hukelum alone he did not solicit.--It is a pretty custom in
+Flachsenfingen, that, for every office which is vacant, you are
+required, if you want it, to sue. As the higher use of Prayer consists,
+not in its fulfilment, but in its accustoming you to pray; so likewise
+petitionary papers ought to be given in, not indeed that you may get
+the office,--this nothing but your money can do,--but that you may
+learn to write petitions. In truth, if, among the Calmucks, the turning
+of a calabash[45] stands in place of Prayer, a slight movement of the
+purse may be as much as if you supplicated in words.
+
+Towards evening--it was Sunday--he went out roving over the village; he
+pilgrimed to his old sporting-places, and to the common where he had so
+often driven his snails to pasture; visited the peasant who, from
+school-times upwards, had been wont, to the amazement of the rest, to
+_thou_[46] him; went, an Academic Tutor, to the Schoolmaster; then to
+the Senior; then to the Episcopal-barn or church. This last no mortal
+understands, till I explain it. The case was this. Some three-and-forty
+years ago a fire had destroyed the church (not the steeple), the
+parsonage, and, what was not to be replaced, the church-records. (For
+this reason it was only the smallest portion of the Hukelum people that
+knew exactly how old they were; and the memory of our Quintus himself
+vibrated between adopting the thirty-third year and the thirty-second.)
+In consequence, the preaching had now to be carried on where formerly
+there had been threshing; and the seed of the divine word to be
+turned over on the same threshing-floor with natural corn-seed. The
+Chanter and the School-boys took up the threshing-floor; the female
+mother-church-people stood on the one sheaves-loft, the Schadeck
+womankind on the other; and their husbands clustered pyramidically,
+like groschen and farthing-gallery men; about the barn-stairs; and far
+up on the straw-loft, mixed souls stood listening. A little flute was
+their organ, an upturned beer-cask their altar, round which they had to
+walk. I confess, I myself could have preached in such a place, not
+without humor. The Senior (at that time still a Junior), while the
+parsonage was building, dwelt and taught in the Castle; it was here,
+accordingly, that Fixlein had learned the _Irregular Verbs_ with
+Thiennette.
+
+These voyages of discovery completed, our Hukelum voyager could still,
+after evening prayers, pick leaf-insects, with Thiennette, from the
+roses; worms from the beds, and a Heaven of joy from every minute.
+Every dew-drop was colored as with oil of cloves and oil of gladness;
+every star was a sparkle from the sun of happiness; and in the closed
+heart of the maiden, there lay near to him, behind a little wall of
+separation, (as near to the Righteous man behind the thin wall of
+Life,) an outstretched blooming Paradise.... I mean, she loved him a
+little.
+
+He might have known it, perhaps. But to his compressed delight he gave
+freer vent, as he went to bed, by early recollections on the stair. For
+in his childhood he had been accustomed, by way of evening-prayer, to
+go over, under his coverlet, as it were, a rosary, including fourteen
+Bible Proverbs, the first verse of the Psalm, "All people that on
+Earth," the Tenth Commandment, and, lastly, a long blessing. To get the
+sooner done with it, he had used to begin his devotion, not only on the
+stair, but before leaving that place where Alexander studied men, and
+Semler stupid books. Moored in the haven of the down-waves, he was
+already over with his evening supplication; and could now, without
+further exertion, shut his eyes and plump into sleep.----Thus does
+there lurk, in the smallest _homunculus_, the model of--the Catholic
+Church.
+
+So far the Dog-days of Quintus Zebedäus Egidius Fixlein.--I, for the
+second time, close a Chapter of this _Life_, as Life itself is closed,
+with a sleep.
+
+
+
+
+ THIRD LETTER-BOX.
+
+ Christmas Recollections.--New Occurrence.
+
+
+For all of us the passage to the grave is, alas! a string of empty,
+insipid days, as of glass pearls, only here and there divided by an
+orient one of price. But you die murmuring, unless, like the Quintus,
+you regard your existence as a drum; this has only one single _tone_,
+but variety of _time_ gives the sound of it cheerfulness enough. Our
+Quintus taught in the Fourth Class; vicariated in the Second; wrote at
+his desk by night; and so lived on the usual monotonous fashion--all
+the time from the Holidays--till Christmas eve, 1791; and nothing was
+remarkable in his history except this same eve, which I am now about to
+paint.
+
+But I shall still have time to paint it, after, in the first place,
+explaining shortly how, like birds of passage, he had contrived to soar
+away over the dim, cloudy Harvest. The secret was, he set upon the
+_Hamburg Political Journal_, with which the lackeys of Schadeck had
+been for papering their buttons. He could now calmly, with his back at
+the stove, accompany the winter campaigns of the foregoing year; and
+fly after every battle, as the ravens did after that of Pharsalia. On
+the printed paper he could still, with joy and admiration, walk round
+our German triumphal arches and scaffoldings for fireworks; while to
+the people in the town, who got only the newest newspapers, the very
+fragments of these our trophies, maliciously torn down by the French,
+were scarcely discernible; nay, with old plans he could drive back and
+discomfit the enemy, while later readers in vain tried to resist them
+with new ones.
+
+Moreover, not only did the facility of conquering the French prepossess
+him in favor of this journal; but also the circumstance that it--cost
+him nothing. His attachment to gratis reading was decided. And does not
+this throw light on the fact that he, as Morhof advised, was wont
+sedulously to collect the separate leaves of wastepaper books as they
+came from the grocer, and to rake among the same, as Virgil did in
+Ennius? Nay, for him the grocer was a Fortius (the scholar), or a
+Frederick (the king), both which persons were in the habit of simply
+cutting from complete books such leaves as contained anything. It was
+also this respect for all waste-paper that inspired him with such
+esteem for the aprons of French cooks, which it is well known consist
+of printed paper; and he often wished some German would translate these
+aprons; indeed, I am willing to believe that a good version of more
+than one of such paper aprons might contribute to elevate our
+Literature (this Muse _à belles fesses_), and serve her in place of
+drivel-bib.--On many things a man puts a _pretium affectionis_, simply
+because he hopes he may have half stolen them; on this principle,
+combined with the former, our Quintus adopted into his belief anything
+he could snap away from an open Lecture, or as a visitor in
+class-rooms; opinions only for which the Professor must be paid, he
+rigorously examined.--I return to the Christmas eve.
+
+At the very first, Egidius was glad, because out of doors millers and
+bakers were at fisticuffs (as we say of drifting snow in large flakes),
+and the ice-flowers of the window were blossoming; for external frost,
+with a snug warm room, was what he liked. He could now put fir wood
+into his stove, and Mocha coffee into his stomach; and shove his right
+foot (not into the slipper, but) under the warm side of his Shock, and
+also on the left keep swinging his pet Starling, which was pecking at
+the snout of old Schil; and then with the right hand--with the left he
+was holding his pipe--proceed, so undisturbed, so intrenched, so
+cloud-capt, without the smallest breath of frost, to the highest
+enterprise which a Quintus can attempt,--to writing the Class-prodromus
+of the Flachsenfingen Gymnasium, namely, the eighth part thereof. I
+hold the _first printing_ in the history of a literary man to be more
+important than the _first printing_ in the history of Letters. Fixlein
+could not sate himself with specifying what he purposed, God willing,
+in the following year, to treat of; and accordingly, more for the sake
+of printing than of use, he further inserted three or four pedagogic
+glances at the plan of operations to be followed by his schoolmaster
+colleagues as a body.
+
+He lastly introduced a few dashes, by way of hooking his thoughts
+together; and then laid aside the _Opus_, and would no longer look at
+it, that so, when printed, he might stand astonished at his own
+thoughts. And now he could take the Leipzig Fair Catalogue, which he
+purchased yearly, instead of the books therein, and open it without a
+sigh; he too was in print, as well as I am.
+
+The happy fool, while writing, had shaken his head, rubbed his hands,
+hitched about on his chair, puckered his face, and sucked the end of
+his cue.--He could now spring up about five o'clock in the evening to
+recreate himself; and across the magic vapor of his pipe, like a
+new-caught bird, move up and down in his cage. On the warm smoke the
+long galaxy of street-lamps was gleaming; and red on his bed-curtains
+lay the fitful reflection of the blazing windows and illuminated trees
+in the neighborhood. And now he shook away the snow of Time from the
+winter-green of Memory; and beheld the fair years of his childhood,
+uncovered, fresh, green, and balmy, standing afar off before him. From
+his distance of twenty years, he looked into the quiet cottage of his
+parents, where his father and his brother had not yet been reaped away
+by the sickle of Death. He said to himself: "I will go through the
+whole Christmas eve, from the very dawn, as I had it of old."
+
+At his very rising he finds spangles on the table; sacred spangles from
+the gold-leaf and silver-leaf with which the Christ-child[47] has been
+emblazoning and coating his apples and nuts, the presents of the
+night.--On the mint-balance of joy, this metallic foam pulls heavier
+than the golden cars, and golden Pythagoras-legs, and golden
+Philistine-mice of wealthier capitalists.--Then came his mother,
+bringing him both Christianity and clothes; for in drawing on his
+trousers, she easily recapitulated the Ten Commandments, and in tying
+his garters, the Apostles' Creed. So soon as candle-light was over,
+and daylight come, he clambers to the arm of the settle, and
+then measures the nocturnal growth of the yellow wiry grove of
+Christmas-Birch; and devotes far less attention than usual to the
+little white winter-flowerage, which the seeds shaken from the
+bird-cage are sending forth in the wet joints of the window-panes.--I
+nowise grudge J. J. Rousseau his _Flora Petrinsularis_;[48] but let him
+also allow our Quintus his _Window-flora_.--There was no such thing as
+school all day; so he had time enough to seek his Flescher (his
+brother), and commence (when could there be finer frost for it?) the
+slaughtering of their winter-meat. Some days before, the brother,
+at the peril of his life and of a cudgelling, had caught their
+stalled-beast--so they called the sparrow--under a window-sill in the
+Castle. Their slaughtering wants not an axe (of wood), nor puddings,
+nor potted meat.--About three o'clock the old Gardener, whom neighbors
+must call the Professor of Gardening, takes his place on his large
+chair, with his Cologne tobacco-pipe; and after this no mortal
+shall work a stroke. He tells nothing but lies; of the aeronautic
+Christ-child, and the jingling Ruprecht with his bells. In the dusk,
+our little Quintus takes an apple; divides it into all the figures of
+stereometry, and spreads the fragments in two heaps on the table; then
+as the lighted candle enters, he starts up in amazement at the
+unexpected present, and says to his brother, "Look what the good
+Christ-child has given thee and me; and I saw one of his wings
+glittering." And for this same glittering he himself lies in wait the
+whole evening.
+
+About eight o'clock--here he walks chiefly by the chronicle of his
+letter-drawer--both of them, with necks almost excoriated with washing,
+and in clean linen, and in universal anxiety lest the Holy Christ-child
+find them up, are put to bed. What a magic night! What tumult of
+dreaming hopes!--The populous, motley, glittering cave of Fancy opens
+itself, in the length of the night, and in the exhaustion of dreamy
+effort, still darker and darker, fuller and more grotesque; but the
+awakening gives back to the thirsty heart its hopes. All accidental
+tones, the cries of animals, of watchmen, are, for the timidly devout
+Fancy, sounds out of Heaven; singing voices of Angels in the air,
+church-music of the morning worship.--
+
+Ah! it was not the mere Lubberland of sweetmeats and playthings, which
+then, with its perspective, stormed like a river of joy against the
+chambers of our hearts; and which yet in the moonlight of memory, with
+its dusky landscapes, melts our souls in sweetness. Ah! this was it,
+that then for our boundless wishes there were still boundless hopes;
+but now reality is round us, and the wishes are all that we have left!
+
+At last came rapid lights from the neighborhood playing through the
+window on the walls, and the Christmas trumpets, and the crowing from
+the steeple, hurries both the boys from their bed. With their clothes
+in their hands, without fear for the darkness, without feeling for the
+morning-frost, rushing, intoxicated, shouting, they hurry down-stairs
+into the dark room. Fancy riots in the pastry and fruit perfume of the
+still eclipsed treasures, and paints her air-castles by the glimmering
+of the Hesperides-fruit with which the Birch-tree is loaded. While
+their mother strikes a light, the falling sparks sportfully open and
+shroud the dainties on the table, and the many-colored grove on the
+wall; and a single atom of that fire bears on it a hanging garden of
+Eden.----
+
+--On a sudden all grew light; and the Quintus got--the Conrectorship,
+and a table-clock.
+
+
+
+
+ FOURTH LETTER-BOX.
+
+ Office-brokage.--Discovery of the Promised Secret.--Hans
+ von Füchslein.
+
+
+For while the Quintus, in his vapory chamber was thus running over the
+sounding-board of his early years, the Rathsdiener, or City-officer,
+entered with a lantern and the Presentation; and behind him the courier
+of the Frau von Aufhammer with a note and a table-clock. The
+Rittmeisterinn had transformed her payment for the Dog-days sick-bed
+exhortation into a Christmas present; which consisted, _first_, of a
+table-clock, with a wooden ape thereon, starting out when the hour
+struck, and drumming along with every stroke; _secondly_, of the
+Conrectorate, which she had procured for him.
+
+As in the public this appointment from the private Flachsenfingen
+Council has not been judged of as it deserved, I consider it my duty to
+offer a defence for the body corporate; and that rather here than in
+the _Reichsanzeiger_, or _Imperial Indicator_.--I have already
+mentioned, in the Second Letter-Box, that the Town-Syndic drove a trade
+in Hamburg candles; and the then Burgermeister in coffee-beans, which
+he sold as well whole as ground. Their joint traffic, however, which
+they carried on exclusively, was in the eight School-offices of
+Flachsenfingen; the other members of the Council acting only as
+bale-wrappers, shopmen, and accountants in the Council wareroom. A
+Council-house, indeed, is like an India-house, where not only
+resolutions or appointments, but also shoes and cloth, are exposed to
+sale. Properly speaking, the Councillor derives his freedom of
+office-trading from that principle of the Roman law, _Cui jus est
+donandi, eidem et vendendi jus est_; that is to say, He who has the
+right of giving anything away has also a right to dispose of it for
+money, if he can. Now as the Council-members have palpably the right of
+conferring offices gratis, the right of selling them must follow of
+course.
+
+
+ _Short Extra-word on Appointment-brokers in general_.
+
+My chief anxiety is lest the Academy-product-sale-Commission[49] of the
+State carry on its office-trade too slackly. And what but the
+commonweal must suffer in the long run, if important posts are
+distributed, not according to the current cash which is laid down for
+them, but according to connections, relationships, party
+recommendations, and bowings and cringings? Is it not a contradiction,
+to charge titulary offices dearer than real ones? Should one not rather
+expect that the real Hofrath would pay higher by the _alterum tantum_
+than the mere titulary Hofrath?--Money, among European nations, is now
+the equivalent and representative of value in all things, and
+consequently in understanding; the rather as a _head_ is stamped on it;
+to pay down the purchase-money of an office is therefore neither more
+nor less than to stand an _examen rigorosum_, which is held by a good
+_schema examinandi_. To invert this, to pretend exhibiting your
+qualifications, in place of these their surrogates, and assignates, and
+_monnoie de confiance_, is simply to resemble the crazy philosophers in
+_Gulliver's Travels_, who, for social converse, instead of names of
+things, brought the things themselves tied up in a bag; it is, indeed,
+plainly as much as trying to fall back into the barbarous times of
+trade by barter, when the Romans, instead of the figured cattle on
+their leather money, drove forth the beeves themselves.
+
+From all such injudicious notions I myself am so far removed, that
+often, when I used to read that the King of France was devising new
+offices, to stand and sell them under the booth of his Baldaquin, I
+have set myself to do something of the like. This I shall now at least
+calmly propose; not vexing my heart whether Governments choose to adopt
+it or not. As our Sovereign will not allow us to multiply offices
+purely for sale, nay, on the contrary, is day and night (like managers
+of strolling companies) meditating how to give more parts to one
+State-actor; and thus to the Three Stage Unities to add a Fourth, that
+of Players; as the above French method, therefore, will not apply, could
+we not at least contrive to invent some Virtues harmonizing with the
+offices, along with which they might be sold as titles? Might we not,
+for instance, with the office of a Referendary, put off at the same
+time a titular Incorruptibility, for a fair consideration; and so that
+this virtue, as not belonging to the office, must be separately paid
+for by the candidate? Such a market-title and patent of nobility could
+not but be ornamental to a Referendary. We forget that in former times
+such high titles were appended to all posts whatsoever. The scholastic
+Professor then wrote himself (besides his official designation) "The
+Seraphic," "The Incontrovertible," "The Penetrating"; the King wrote
+himself, "The Great," "The Bald," "The Bold," and so also did the
+Rabbins. Could it be unpleasant to gentlemen in the higher stations of
+Justice, if the titles of Impartiality, Rapidity, &c., might be
+conferred on them by sale, as well as the posts themselves? Thus with
+the appointment of a Kammerrath, or Councillor of Revenue, the virtue
+of Patriotism might fitly be conjoined; and I believe few Advocates
+would grudge purchasing the title of Integrity (as well as their common
+one of Government-advocacy), were it to be had in the market. If,
+however, any candidate chose to take his post without the virtues, then
+it would stand with himself to do so, and in the adoption of this
+reflex morality Government should not constrain him.
+
+It might be that, as, according to Tristram Shandy, clothes, according
+to Walter Shandy and Lavater, proper names, exert an influence on men,
+appellatives would do so still more; since, on us, as on testaceous
+animals, _the foam so often hardens into shell_; but such internal
+morality is not a thing the State can have an eye to; for, as in the
+fine arts, it is not this, but the _representation_ of it, which forms
+her true aim.
+
+I have found it rather difficult to devise for our different offices
+different verbal-virtues; but I should think there might many such
+divisions of Virtue (at this moment, Love of Freedom, Public-spirit,
+Sincerity, and Uprightness occur to me) be hunted out; were but some
+well-disposed minister of state to appoint a Virtue-board or Moral
+Address Department, with some half-dozen secretaries, who, for a small
+salary, might devise various virtues for the various posts. Were I in
+their place, I should hold a good prism before the white ray of Virtue,
+and divide it completely. Pity that it were not crimes we wanted--their
+subdivision I mean;--our country Judges might then be selected for this
+purpose. For in their tribunals, where only inferior jurisdiction, and
+no penalty above five florins Frankish, is admitted, they have a daily
+training how out of every mischief to make several small ones, none of
+which they ever punish to a greater amount than their five florins.
+This is a precious moral _Rolfinkenism_, which our Jurists have learned
+from the great Sin-cutters, St. Augustin and his Sorbonne, who together
+have carved more sins on Adam's Sin-apple than ever Rolfinken did faces
+on a cherry-stone. How different one of our Judges from a Papal
+Casuist, who, by side-scrapings, will rasp you down the best deadly sin
+into a venial!--
+
+School-offices (to come to these) are a small branch of traffic
+certainly; yet still they are monarchies,--school-monarchies, to
+wit,--resembling the Polish crown, which, according to Pope's verse, is
+twice exposed to sale in the century; a statement, I need hardly say,
+arithmetically false, Newton having settled the average duration of a
+reign at twenty-two years. For the rest, whether the city Council bring
+the young of the community a Hamel's _Rat_-and-Child-_catcher_; or a
+Weissen's _Child's-friend_,--this to the Council can make no
+difference; seeing the Schoolmaster is not a horse, for whose secret
+defects the horse-dealer is to be responsible. It is enough if
+Town-Syndic and Co. cannot reproach themselves with having picked out
+any fellow of genius; for a genius, as he is useless to the State,
+except for recreation and ornament, would at the very least exclude the
+duller, cooler head, who properly forms the true care and profit of the
+State; as your costly carat-pearl is good for show alone, but coarse
+grain-pearls for medicine. On the whole, if a schoolmaster be adequate
+to flog his scholars, it should suffice; and I cannot but blame our
+Commission of Inspectors, when they go examining schools, that they do
+not make the schoolmaster go through the duty of firking one or two
+young persons of his class in their presence, by way of trial, to see
+what is in him.
+
+
+ _End of the Extra-word on Appointment-brokers in general_.
+
+Now again to our history! The Councillor Heads of the Firm had
+conferred the Conrectorate on my hero, not only with a view to the
+continued consumpt of candles and beans, but also on the strength of a
+quite mad notion: they believed the Quintus would very soon die.
+
+--And here I have reached a most important circumstance in this
+History, and one into which I have yet let no mortal look; now,
+however, it no longer depends on my will whether I shall shove aside
+the folding-screen from it or not; but I must positively lay it open,
+nay, hang a reverberating-lamp over it.
+
+In medical history, it is a well-known fact, that in certain families
+the people all die precisely at the same age, just as in these families
+they are all born at the same age (of nine months); nay, from Voltaire,
+I recollect one family, the members of which at the same age all killed
+themselves. Now, in the Fixleinic lineage, it was the custom that the
+male ascendants uniformly on Cantata-Sunday, in their thirty-second
+year, took to bed and died; every one of my readers would do well to
+insert in his copy of the _Thirty Years' War_, Schiller having entirely
+omitted it, the fact, that, in the course thereof, one Fixlein died of
+the plague, another of hunger, another of a musket-bullet; all in their
+thirty-second year. True Philosophy explains the matter thus: "The
+first two or three times, it happened purely by accident; and the other
+times, the people died of sheer fright: if not so, the whole fact is
+rather to be questioned."
+
+But what did Fixlein make of the affair? Little or nothing; the only
+thing he did was, that he took little or no pains to fall in love with
+Thiennette; that so no other might have cause for fear on his account.
+He himself, however, for five reasons, minded it so little, that he
+hoped to be older than Senior Astmann before he died. First, because
+three Gypsies, in three different places, and at three different times,
+had each shown him the same long vista of years in her magic mirror.
+Secondly, because he had a sound constitution. Thirdly, because his own
+brother had formed an exception, and perished before the thirties.
+Fourthly, on this ground: When a boy he had fallen sick of sorrow, on
+the very Cantata-Sunday when his father was lying in the winding-sheet,
+and only been saved from death by his playthings; and with this
+Cantata-sickness, he conceived that he had given the murderous Genius
+of his race the slip. Fifthly, the church-books being destroyed, and
+with them the certainty of his age, he could never fall into a right
+definite deadly fear: "It may be," said he, "that I have got whisked
+away over this whoreson year, and no one the wiser." I will not deny
+that last year he had fancied he was two-and-thirty; "however," said
+he, "if I am not to be so till, God willing, the next (1792), it may
+run away as smoothly as the last; am I not always in _His_ keeping? And
+were it unjust if the pretty years that were broken off from the life
+of my brother should be added to mine?" Thus, under the cold snow of
+the Present, does poor man strive to warm himself, or to mould out of
+it a fair snow-man.
+
+The Councillor Oligarchy, however, built upon the opposite opinion;
+and, like a Divinity, elevated our Quintus all at once from the
+Quintusship to the Conrectorate; swearing to themselves that he would
+soon vacate it again. Properly speaking, by school-seniority, this holy
+chair should have belonged to the Subrector Hans von Füchslein; but he
+wished it not; being minded to become Hukelum Parson; especially, as
+Astmann's Death-angel, according to sure intelligence, was opening more
+and more widely the door of this spiritual sheepfold. "If the fellow
+weather another year, 't is more than I expect," said Hans.
+
+This Hans was such a churl, that it is pity he had not been a
+Hanoverian Post-boy; that so, by the Mandate of the Hanoverian
+Government, enjoining on all its Post-officers an elegant style of
+manners, he might have somewhat refined himself. To our poor Quintus,
+whom no mortal disliked, and who again could hate no mortal, he alone
+bore a grudge; simply because _Fixlein_ did not write himself
+_Füchslein_, and had not chosen along with him to purchase a Patent of
+Nobility. The Subrector, on this his Patent triumphal chariot, drawn by
+a team of four specified ancestors, was obliged to see the Quintus, who
+was related to him, clutching by the lackey-straps behind the carriage;
+and to hear him, in the most despicable raiment, saying to the train:
+"He that rides there is my cousin, and a mortal, and I always remind
+him of it." The mild, compliant Quintus never noticed this large
+wasp-poison-bag in the Subrector, but took it for a honey-bag; nay, by
+his brotherly warmness, which the nobleman regarded as mere show, he
+concreted these venomous juices into still feller consistency. The
+Quintus, in his simplicity, took Füchslein's contempt for envy of his
+pedagogic talents.
+
+A Catherinenhof, an Annenhof, an Elizabethhof, Stralenhof, and
+Petershof, all these Russian pleasure palaces, a man can dispense with
+(if not despise), who has a room, in which on Christmas eve he walks
+about with a Presentation in his hand. The new Conrector now longed for
+nothing but--daylight; joys always (cares never) nibbled from him, like
+sparrows, his sleep-grains; and to-night, moreover, the registrator of
+his glad time, the clock-ape, drummed out every hour to him, which,
+accordingly, he spent in gay dreaming, rather than in sound snoring.
+
+On Christmas morn he looked at his Class-prodromus, and thought but
+little of it; he scarcely knew what to make of his last night's foolish
+inflation about his Quintusship. "The Quintus-post," said he to
+himself, "is not to be named in the same day with the Conrectorate; I
+wonder how I could parade so last night before my promotion; at
+present, I had more reason." To-day he eat, as on all Sundays and
+holidays, with the Master-Butcher Steinberger, his former Guardian. To
+this man Fixlein was, what common people are _always_, but polished,
+philosophical, and sentimental people very _seldom_ are,--_thankful_; a
+man thanks you the less for presents, the more inclined he is to give
+presents of his own; and the beneficent is rarely a grateful person.
+Meister Steinberger, in the character of storemaster, had introduced
+into the wire-cage of a garret, where Fixlein, while a Student
+at Leipzig, was suspended, many a well-filled trough with good
+canary-meat, of hung-beef, of household bread, and _Sauerkraut_. Money
+indeed was never to be wrung from him; it is well known that he often
+sent the best calf-skins gratis to the tanner, to be boots for our
+Quintus; but the tanning-charges the Ward himself had to bear.--On
+Fixlein's entrance, as was at all times customary, a smaller damask
+table-cloth was laid upon the large coarser one; the arm-chair, silver
+implements, and a wine-soup were handed him; mere waste, which, as the
+Guardian used to say, suited well enough for a Scholar; but for a
+Flescher not at all. Fixlein first took his victuals, and then
+signified that he was made Conrector. "Ward," said Steinberger, "if you
+are made that, it is well.--Seest thou, Eva, I cannot buy a tail of thy
+cows now; I must have smelt it beforehand." He was hereby informing his
+daughter that the cash set apart for the fatted cattle must now be
+applied to the Conrectorate; for he was in the habit of advancing all
+instalment-dues to his Ward, at an interest of four and a half per
+cent. Fifty gulden he had already lent the Quintus on his advancement
+to the Quintusship; of these the interest had to be duly paid; yet, on
+the day of payment, the Quintus always got some abatement; being wont
+every Sunday after dinner to instruct his guardian's daughter in
+arithmetic, writing, and geography. Steinberger with justice required
+of his own grown-up daughter that she should know all the towns where
+he in his wanderings as a journeyman had slain fat oxen; and if she
+slipped, or wrote crookedly, or subtracted wrong, he himself, as
+Academical Senate and Justiciary, was standing behind her chair, ready,
+so to speak, with the forge-hammer of his fist to beat out the dross
+from her brain, and at a few strokes hammer it into right ductility.
+The soft Quintus, for his part, had never struck her. On this account
+she had perhaps, with a few glances, appointed him executor and
+assignee of her heart. The old Flescher--simply because his wife was
+dead--had constantly been in the habit of searching with mine-lamps and
+pokers into all the corners of Eva's heart; and had in consequence long
+ago observed--what the Quintus never did--that she had a mind for the
+said Quintus. Young women conceal their sorrows more easily than their
+joys; to-day, at the mention of this Conrectorate, Eva had become
+unusually _red_.
+
+When she went after breakfast to bring in coffee, which the Ward had to
+drink down to the grounds: "I beat Eva to death if she but look at
+him," said he. Then addressing Fixlein: "Hear you, Ward, did you never
+cast an eye on my Eva? She can suffer you, and if you want her, you get
+her; but _we_ have done with one another; for a learned man needs quite
+another sort of thing."
+
+"Herr Regiments-Quartermaster," said Fixlein, (for this post
+Steinberger filled in the Provincial Militia,) "such a match were far
+too rich, at any rate, for a Schoolman." The Quartermaster nodded fifty
+times; and then said to Eva, as she returned,--at the same time taking
+down from the shelf a wooden crook, on which he used to rack out and
+suspend his slain calves: "Stop!--Hark, dost wish the present Herr
+Conrector here for thy husband?"
+
+"Ah, good Heaven!" said Eva.
+
+"Mayst wish him or not," continued the Flescher; "with this crook thy
+father knocks thy brains out, if thou but think of a learned man. Now
+make his coffee." And so by the dissevering stroke of this wooden crook
+was a love easily smitten asunder, which in a higher rank, by such
+cutting through it with the sword, would only have foamed and hissed
+the keenlier.
+
+Fixlein might now, at any hour he liked, lay hold of fifty florins
+Frankish, and clutch the pedagogic sceptre, and become coadjutor of the
+Rector, that is, Conrector. We may assert, that it is with debts, as
+with proportions in Architecture; of which Wolf has shown that those
+are the best which can be expressed in the smallest numbers.
+Nevertheless, the Quartermaster cheerfully took learned men under his
+arm; for the notion that his debtor would decease in his thirty-second
+year, and that so Death, as creditor in the first rank, must be paid
+his Debt of Nature, before the other creditors could come forward with
+their debts--this notion he named stuff and old-wifery; he was neither
+Superstitious nor Fanatical, and he walked by firm principles of
+action, such as the common man much oftener has than your vaporing man
+of letters, or your empty, dainty man of rank.
+
+As it is but a few clear Ladydays, warm Mayday-nights, at the most a
+few odorous Rose-weeks, which I am digging from this Fixleinic Life,
+embedded in the dross of week-day cares; and as if they were so many
+veins of silver, am separating, stamping, smelting, and burnishing for
+the reader,--I must now travel on with the stream, his history to
+Cantata-Sunday, 1792, before I can gather a few handfuls of this
+gold-dust, to carry in and wash in my biographical gold-hut. That
+Sunday, on the contrary, is very metalliferous; do but consider that
+Fixlein is yet uncertain (the ashes of the Church-books not being
+legible) whether it is conducting him into his thirty-second or his
+thirty-third year.
+
+From Christmas till then he did nothing, but simply became Conrector.
+The new chair of office was a Sun-altar, on which, from his
+Quintus-ashes, a young Ph[oe]nix combined itself together. Great
+changes--in offices, marriages, travels--make us younger; we always
+date our history from the last revolution, as the French have done from
+theirs. A colonel, who first set foot on the ladder of seniority as
+corporal, is five times younger than a king, who in his whole life has
+never been aught else except a--crown-prince.
+
+
+
+
+ FIFTH LETTER-BOX.
+
+ Cantata-Sunday.--Two Testaments.--Pontac; Blood; Love.
+
+
+The spring months clothe the earth in new variegated hues; but man they
+usually dress in black. Just when our icy regions are becoming
+fruitful, and the flower-waves of the meadows are rolling together over
+our quarter of the globe, we on all hands meet with men in sables, the
+beginning of whose Spring is full of tears. But, on the other hand,
+this very upblooming of the renovated earth is itself the best balm for
+sorrow over those who lie under it; and graves are better hid by
+blossoms than by snow.
+
+In April, which is no less deadly than it is fickle, old Senior
+Astmann, our Conrector's teacher, was overtaken by death. His departure
+it was meant to hide from the Rittmeisterinn; but the unusual ringing
+of funeral peals carried his swan-song to her heart; and gradually set
+the curfew-bell of her life into similar movement. Age and sufferings
+had already marked out the first incisions for Death, so that he
+required but little effort to cut her down; for it is with men as with
+trees, they are notched long before felling, that their life-sap may
+exude. The second stroke of apoplexy was soon followed by the last; it
+is strange that Death, like criminal courts, cites the apoplectic
+thrice.
+
+Men are apt to postpone their _last_ will as long as their _better_
+one; the Rittmeisterinn would perhaps have let all her hours, till the
+speechless and deaf one, roll away without testament, had not
+Thiennette, during the last night before from sick-nurse she became
+corpse-watcher, reminded the patient of the poor Conrector, and
+of his meagre, hunger-bitten existence, and of the scanty aliment and
+board-wages which Fortune had thrown him, and of his empty Future,
+where, like a drooping, yellow plant in the parched deal-box of the
+school-room, between scholars and creditors, he must languish to the
+end. Her own poverty offered her a model of his; and her inward tears
+were the fluid tints with which she colored her picture. As the
+Rittmeisterinn's testament related solely to domestics and dependants,
+and as she began with the male one, Fixlein stood at the top; and
+Death, who must have been a special friend of the Conrector's, did not
+lift his scythe and give the last stroke, till his _protégé_ had
+been with audible voice declared testamentary heir; then he cut all
+away,--life, testament, and hopes.
+
+When the Conrector, in a wash-bill from his mother, received these two
+Death's-posts and Job's-posts in his class, the first thing he did was
+to dismiss his class-boys, and break into tears before reaching home.
+Though the mother had informed him that he had been remembered in the
+will (I could wish, however, that the Notary had blabbed how much it
+was), yet almost with every O which he masoretically excerpted from his
+German Bible, and entered in his Masoretic Work, great drops fell down
+on his pen, and made his black ink pale. His sorrow was not the
+gorgeous sorrow of the Poet, who veils the gaping wounds of the
+departed in the winding-sheet, and breaks the cry of anguish in soft
+tones of plaintiveness; nor the sorrow of the Philosopher, who, through
+one open grave, must look into the whole catacomb-Necropolis of the
+Past, and before whom the spectre of a friend expands into the spectral
+Shadow of this whole Earth; but it was the woe of a child, of a mother,
+whom this thought itself, without subsidiary reflections, bitterly
+cuts asunder: "So I shall never more see thee; so must thou moulder
+away, and I shall never see thee, thou good soul, never, never any
+more!"--And even because he neither felt the philosophical nor the
+poetical sadness, every trifle could make a division, a break in his
+mourning; and, like a woman, he was that very evening capable of
+sketching some plans for the future employment of his legacy.
+
+Four weeks after, to wit, on the 5th of May, the testament was
+unsealed; but not till the 6th (Cantata-Sunday) did he go down to
+Hukelum. His mother met his salutations with tears; which she shed,
+over the corpse for grief, over the testament for joy.--To the now
+Conrector Egidius Zebedäus was left: _In the first place_, a large
+sumptuous bed, with a mirror-tester, in which the giant Goliath might
+have rolled at his ease, and to which I and my fair readers will by and
+by approach nearer, to examine it; _secondly_, there was devised to
+him, as unpaid Easter-godchild-money, for every year that he had lived,
+one ducat; _thirdly_, all the admittance and instalment dues, which his
+elevation to the Quintate and Conrectorate had cost him, were to be
+made good to the utmost penny. "And dost thou know, then," proceeded
+the mother, "what the poor Fräulein has got? Ah Heaven! Nothing! Not
+one brass farthing!" For Death had stiffened the hand, which was just
+stretching itself out to reach the poor Thiennette a little rain-screen
+against the foul weather of life. The mother related this perverse
+trick of Fortune with true condolence; which in women dissipates envy,
+and comes easier to them than congratulation, a feeling belonging
+rather to men. In many female hearts sympathy and envy are such near
+door-neighbors that they could be virtuous nowhere except in Hell,
+where men have such frightful times of it; and vicious nowhere except
+in Heaven, where people have more happiness than they know what to do
+with.
+
+The Conrector was now enjoying on Earth that Heaven to which his
+benefactress had ascended. First of all, he started off--without
+so much as putting up his handkerchief, in which lay his
+emotion--up-stairs to see the legacy-bed unshrouded; for he had a
+_female_ predilection for furniture. I know not whether the reader ever
+looked at or mounted any of these ancient chivalric beds, into which,
+by means of a little stair without balustrades, you can easily ascend;
+and in which you, properly speaking, sleep always at least one story
+above ground. Nazianzen informs us (_Orat_. XVI.) that the Jews, in old
+times, had high beds with cock-ladders of this sort; but simply because
+of vermin. The legacy bed-Ark was quite as large as one of these; and a
+flea would have measured it, not in Diameters of the Earth, but in
+Distances of Sirius. When Fixlein beheld this colossal dormitory, with
+the curtains drawn asunder, and its canopy of looking-glass, he could
+have longed to be in it; and had it been in his power to cut from the
+opaque hemisphere of Night, at that time in America, a small section,
+he would have established himself there along with it, just to swim
+about, for one half-hour, with his thin lath figure, in this sea of
+down. The mother, by longer chains of reasoning and chains of
+calculation than the bed was, had not succeeded in persuading him to
+have the broad mirror on the top cut in pieces, though his large
+dressing-table had nothing to see itself in but a mere shaving-glass;
+he let the mirror lie where it was for this reason: "Should I ever, God
+willing, get married," said he, "I shall then, towards morning, be able
+to look at my sleeping wife, without sitting up in bed."
+
+As to the second article of the testament, the godchild Easter-pence,
+his mother had, last night, arranged it perfectly. The Lawyer took her
+evidence on the years of the heir; and these she had stated at exactly
+the teeth-number, two-and-thirty. She would willingly have lied, and
+passed off her son, like an Inscription, for older than he was; but
+against this _venia ætatis_, she saw too well the authorities would
+have taken exception, "that it was falsehood and cozenage; had the son
+been two-and-thirty, he must have been dead some time ago, as it could
+not but be presumed that he then was."
+
+And just as she was recounting this, a servant from Schadeck called;
+and delivered to the Conrector, in return for a discharge and
+ratification of the birth-certificate given out by his mother, a gold
+bar of two-and-thirty ducat age-counters, like a helm-bar for the
+voyage of his life; Herr von Aufhammer was too proud to engage in any
+pettifogging discussion over a plebeian birth-certificate.
+
+And thus, by a proud open-handedness, was one of the best lawsuits
+thrown to the dogs; seeing this gold bar might, in the wire-mill of the
+judgment-bench, have been drawn out into the finest threads. From such
+a tangled lock, which was not to be unravelled--for in the first place,
+there was no document to prove Fixlein's age; in the second place, so
+long as he lived, the necessary conclusion was, that he was not yet
+thirty-two[50]--from such a lock might not only silk and hanging-cords,
+but whole drag nets, have been spun and twisted? Clients in general
+would have less reason to complain of their causes, if these lasted
+longer. Philosophers contend for thousands of years over philosophical
+questions; and it seems an unaccountable thing, therefore, that
+Advocates should attempt to end their juristical questions in a space
+of eighty, or even sometimes of sixty years. But the professors of Law
+are not to blame for this; on the other hand, as Lessing asserts of
+Truth, that not the _finding_, but the _seeking_ of it profits men, and
+that he himself would willingly make over his claim to all truths in
+return for the sweet labor of investigation, so is the professor of Law
+not profited by the finding and deciding, but by the investigation of a
+juridical truth,--which is called pleading and practising,--and he
+would willingly consent to approximate to Truth forever, like an
+hyperbola to its asymptote, without ever meeting it, seeing he can
+subsist as an honorable man with wife and child, let such approximation
+be as tedious as it likes.
+
+The Schadeck servant had, besides the gold legacy, a further commission
+from the Lawyer, whereby the testamentary heir was directed to sum up
+the mint-dues which he had been obliged to pay while lying under the
+coining-press of his superiors, as Quintus and Conrector; the which,
+properly documented and authenticated, were forthwith to be made good
+to him.
+
+Our Conrector, who now rated himself among the great capitalists of the
+world, held his short gold-roll like a sceptre in his hand; like a
+basket-net lifted from the sea of the Future, which was now to run on,
+and bring him all manner of fed-fishes, well-washed, sound, and in good
+season.
+
+I cannot relate all things at once; else I should ere now have told the
+reader, who must long have been waiting for it, that to the moneyed
+Conrector his two-and-thirty godchild-pennies but too much prefigured
+the two-and-thirty years of his age; besides which, to-day the
+Cantata-Sunday, this Bartholomew-night and Second of September of his
+family, came in as a further aggravation. The mother, who should have
+known the age of her child, said she had forgotten it; but durst wager
+he was thirty-two a year ago; only the Lawyer was a man you could not
+speak to. "I could swear it myself," said the capitalist; "I recollect
+how stupid I felt Cantata-Sunday last year." Fixlein beheld Death, not
+as the poet does, in the uptowering, asunder-driving concave-mirror of
+Imagination; but as the child, as the savage, as the peasant, as the
+woman does, in the plane octavo-mirror on the board of a Prayer-book;
+and Death looked to him like an old white-headed man, sunk down into
+slumber in some latticed pew.--
+
+And yet he thought oftener of him than last year; for joy readily melts
+us into softness; and the lackered Wheel of Fortune is a cistern-wheel
+that empties its water in our eyes.... But the friendly Genius of this
+terrestrial, or rather aquatic Ball--for, in the physical and in the
+moral world, there are more tear-seas than firm land--has provided for
+the poor water-insects that float about in it, for us, namely, a quite
+special elixir against spasms in the soul; I declare this same Genius
+must have studied the whole pathology of man with care; for to the poor
+devil who is no Stoic, and can pay no Soul-doctor, that for the
+fissures of his cranium and his breast might prepare costly
+prescriptions of simples, he has stowed up cask-wise in all cellarages
+a precious wound-water, which the patient has only to take and pour
+over his slashes and bone-breakages--gin-twist, I mean, or beer, or a
+touch of wine.... By Heaven! it is either stupid ingratitude towards
+this medicinal Genius on the one hand, or theological confusion of
+permitted tippling with prohibited drunkenness on the other, if men do
+not thank God that they have something at hand, which, in the nervous
+vertigoes of life, will instantly supply the place of Philosophy,
+Christianity, Judaism, Paganism, and _Time_;--liquor, as I said.
+
+The Conrector had long before sunset given the village post three
+groschens of post-money, and commissioned--for he had a whole cabinet
+of ducats in his pocket, which all day he was surveying in the dark
+with his hand--three thalers' worth of Pontac from the town. "I must
+have a Cantata merry-making," said he; "if it be my last day, let it be
+my gayest too!" I could wish he had given a larger order; but he kept
+the bit of moderation between his teeth at all times; even in a
+threatened sham-death-night, and in the midst of jubilee. The question
+is, whether he would not have restricted himself to a single bottle, if
+he had not wished to treat his mother and the Fräulein. Had he lived in
+the tenth century, when the Day of Judgment was thought to be at hand,
+or in other centuries, when new Noah's Deluges were expected, and when,
+accordingly, like sailors in a shipwreck, people boused up all,--he
+would not have spent one kreuzer more on that account. His joy was,
+that with his legacy he could now satisfy his head-creditor
+Steinberger, and leave the world an honest man. Just people, who make
+much of money, pay their debts the most punctually.
+
+The purple Pontac arrived at a time when Fixlein could compare the
+red-chalk-drawings and red-letter-titles of joy, which it would
+bring out on the cheeks of its drinker and drinkeresses,--with the
+Evening-carnation of the last clouds about the Sun....
+
+I declare, among all the spectators of this History, no one can be
+thinking more about poor Thiennette than I; nevertheless, it is not
+permitted me to bring her out from her tiring-room to my historical
+scene before the time. Poor girl! The Conrector cannot wish more warmly
+than his Biographer, that, in the Temple of Nature as in that of
+Jerusalem, there were a special door--besides that of Death--standing
+open, through which only the afflicted entered, that a Priest might
+give them solace. But Thiennette's heart-sickness over all her vanished
+prospects, over her entombed benefactress, over a whole life enwrapped
+in the pall, had hitherto, in a grief which the stony Rittmeister
+rather made to bleed than alleviated, swept all away from her,
+occupations excepted; had fettered all her steps which led not to some
+task, and granted to her eyes nothing to dry them or gladden them, save
+down-falling eyelids full of dreams and sleep.
+
+All sorrow raises us above the civic Ceremonial-law, and makes the
+Prosaist a Psalmist; in sorrow alone have women courage to front
+opinion. Thiennette walked out only in the evening, and then only in
+the garden.
+
+The Conrector could scarcely wait for the appearance of his fair
+friend, to offer his thanks,--and to-night also--his Pontac. Three
+Pontac decanters and three wineglasses were placed outside on the
+projecting window-sill of his cottage; and every time he returned from
+the dusky covered-way amid the flower forests, he drank a little from
+his glass,--and the mother sipped now and then from within through the
+opened window.
+
+I have already said, his Life-laboratory lay in the southwest corner of
+the garden or park, over against the Castle-Escurial, which stretched
+back into the village. In the northwest corner bloomed an acacia grove,
+like the floral crown of the garden. Fixlein turned his steps in that
+direction also; to see if, perhaps, he might not cast a happy glance
+through the wide-latticed grove over the intervening meads to
+Thiennette. He recoiled a little before two stone steps leading down
+into a pond before this grove, which were sprinkled with fresh blood.
+On the flags, also, there was blood hanging. Man shudders at this oil
+of our life's lamp where he finds it shed; to him it is the red
+death-signature of the Destroying Angel. Fixlein hurried apprehensively
+into the grove; and found here his paler benefactress leaning on the
+flower-bushes; her hands with her knitting-ware sunk into her bosom,
+her eyes lying under their lids as if in the bandage of slumber; her
+left arm in the real bandage of bloodletting; and with cheeks to which
+the twilight was lending as much red, as late woundings--this day's
+included--had taken from them. Fixlein, after his first terror--not at
+this flower's sleep, but at his own abrupt entrance--began to unroll
+the spiral butterfly's-sucker of his vision, and to lay it on the
+motionless leaves of this same sleeping flower. At bottom, I may
+assert, that this was the first time he had ever looked at her; he was
+now among the thirties; and he still continued to believe, that, in a
+young lady, he must look at the clothes only, not the person, and wait
+on her with his ears, not with his eyes.
+
+I impute it to the elevating influences of the Pontac, that the
+Conrector plucked up courage to--turn, to come back, and employ the
+resuscitating means of coughing, sneezing, trampling, and calling to
+his Shock, in stronger and stronger doses on the fair sleeper. To take
+her by the hand, and with some medical apology, gently pull her out of
+sleep, this was an audacity of which the Conrector, so long as he could
+stand for Pontac, and had any grain of judgment left, could never
+dream.
+
+However, he did awake her, by those other means.
+
+Wearied, heavy-laden Thiennette! how slowly does thy eye open! The
+warmest balsam of this earth, soft sleep has shifted aside, and the
+night-air of memory is again blowing on thy naked wounds!--and yet was
+the smiling friend of thy youth the fairest object which thy eye could
+light on, when it sank from the hanging-garden of Dreams into this
+lower one round thee.
+
+She herself was little conscious,--and the Conrector not at all,--that
+she was bending her flower-leaves imperceptibly towards a terrestrial
+body, namely, towards Fixlein. She resembled an Italian flower, that
+contains cunningly concealed within it a new-year's gift, which the
+receiver knows not at first how to extract. But now the golden chain of
+her late kind deed attracted her as well towards him, as him towards
+her. She at once gave her eye and her voice a mask of joy; for she did
+not put her tears, as Catholics do those of Christ, in relic-vials,
+upon altars, to be worshipped. He could very suitably preface his
+invitation to the Pontac festival with a long acknowledgment of thanks
+for the kind intervention which had opened to him the sources for
+procuring it. She rose slowly, and walked with him to the banquet of
+wine; but he was not so discreet, as at first to attempt leading her,
+or rather not so courageous; he could more easily have offered a young
+lady his hand (that is, with marriage ring) than offered her his arm.
+One only time in his life had he escorted a female, a Lombard Countess
+from the theatre; a thing truly not to be believed, were not this the
+secret of it, that he was obliged; for the lady, a foreigner, parted in
+the press from all her people, in a bad night, had laid hold of him as
+a sable Abbé by the arm, and requested him to take her to her inn. He,
+however, knew the fashions of society, and attended her no farther than
+the porch of his Quintus-mansion, and there directed her with his
+finger to her inn, which, with thirty blazing windows, was looking down
+from another street.
+
+These things he cannot help. But to-night he had scarcely, with his
+fair, faint companion, reached the bank of the pond, into which some
+superstitious dread of water-spirits had lately poured the pure blood
+of her left arm,--when, in his terror lest she fell in, with the rest
+of her blood, over the brink, he quite valiantly laid hold of the sick
+arm. Thus will much Pontac and a little courage at all times put a
+Conrector in case to lay hold of a Fräulein. I aver that at the
+banquet-board of the wine, at the window-sill, he continued in the same
+conducting position. What a soft group in the penumbra of the Earth,
+while Night, with its dusky waters, was falling deeper and deeper, and
+the silver-light of the Moon was already glancing back from the copper
+ball of the steeple! I call the group soft, because it consists of a
+maiden that in two senses has been bleeding; of a mother again with
+tears giving her thanks for the happiness of her child; and of a pious,
+modest man, pouring wine, and drinking health to both, and who traces
+in his veins a burning lava-stream, which is boiling through his heart,
+and threatening piece by piece to melt it and bear it away. A candle
+stood without among the three bottles, like Reason among the Passions;
+on this account the Conrector looked without intermission at the
+window-panes, for on them (the darkness of the room served as
+mirror-foil) was painted, among other faces which Fixlein liked, the
+face he liked best of all, and which he dared to look at only in
+reflection, the face of Thiennette.
+
+Every minute was a Federation-festival, and every second a
+Preparation-Sabbath for it. The Moon was gleaming from the evening dew,
+and the Pontac from their eyes, and the bean-stalks were casting a
+shorter grating of shadow. The quicksilver-drops of stars were hanging
+more and more continuous in the sable of night. The warm vapor of the
+wine set our two friends (like steam-engines) again in motion.
+
+Nothing makes the heart fuller and bolder than walking to and fro in
+the night. Fixlein now led the Fräulein in his arm without scruple. By
+reason of her lancet-wound, Thiennette could only put her hand, in a
+clasping position, in his arm; and he, to save her the trouble of
+holding fast, held fast himself, and pressed her fingers as well as
+might be with his arm to his heart. It would betray a total want of
+polished manners to censure his. At the same time, trifles are the
+provender of Love; the fingers are electric discharges of a fire
+sparkling along every fibre; sighs are the guiding tones of two
+approximating hearts; and the worst and most effectual thing of all in
+such a case is some misfortune; for the fire of Love, like that of
+naphtha, likes to swim on water. Two tear-drops, one in another's, one
+in your own eyes, compose, as with two convex lenses, a microscope
+which enlarges everything, and changes all sorrows into charms. Good
+sex! I too consider every sister in misfortune as fair; and, perhaps,
+thou wouldst deserve the name of the Fair, even because thou art the
+Suffering sex!
+
+And if Professor Hunczogsky in Vienna modelled all the wounds of the
+human frame in wax, to teach his pupils how to cure them, I also, thou
+good sex, am representing in little figures the cuts and scars of thy
+spirit, though only to keep away rude hands from inflicting new
+ones....
+
+Thiennette felt not the loss of the inheritance, but of her that should
+have left it; and this more deeply for one little trait, which she had
+already told his mother, as she now told him. In the last two nights of
+the Rittmeisterinn, when the feverish watching was holding up to
+Thiennette's imagination nothing but the winding-sheet and the
+mourning-coaches of her protectress; while she was sitting at the foot
+of the bed, looking on those fixed eyes, unconsciously quick drops
+often trickled over her cheeks, while in thought she prefigured the
+heavy, cumbrous dressing of her benefactress for the coffin. Once after
+midnight, the dying lady pointed with her finger to her own lips.
+Thiennette understood her not; but rose and bent over her face. The
+Enfeebled tried to lift her head, but could not,--and only rounded her
+lips. At last, a thought glanced through Thiennette, that the
+Departing, whose dead arms could now press no beloved heart to her own,
+wished that she herself should embrace her. O then, that instant, keen
+and tearful, she pressed her warm lips on the colder,--and she was
+silent like her that was to speak no more,--and she embraced alone and
+was not embraced. About four o'clock, the finger waved again; she sank
+down on the stiffened lips,--but this had been no signal, for the lips
+of her friend under the long kiss had grown stiff and cold....
+
+How deeply now, before the infinite Eternity's-countenance of Night,
+did the cutting of this thought pass through Fixlein's warm soul: "O
+thou forsaken one beside me! No happy accident, no twilight hast thou,
+like that now glimmering in the heavens, to point to the prospect of a
+sunny day; without parents art thou, without brother, without friend;
+here alone on a disblossomed, emptied corner of the Earth; and thou,
+left Harvest-flower, must wave lonely and frozen over the withered
+stubble of the Past." That was the meaning of his thoughts, whose
+internal words were: "Poor young lady! Not so much as a half-cousin
+left; no nobleman will seek her, and she grows old so forgotten, and
+she is so good from the very heart,--Me she has made happy,--Ah, had I
+the presentation to the parish of Hukelum in my pocket, I should make a
+trial." ... Their mutual lives, which a straitcutting bond of Destiny
+was binding so closely together, now rose before him overhung with
+sable,--and he forthwith conducted his friend (for a bashful man may in
+an hour and a half be transformed into the boldest, and then continues
+so) back to the last flask, that all these upsprouting thistles and
+passion-flowers of sorrow might therewith be swept away. I remark, in
+passing, that this was stupid; the torn vine is full of water-veins as
+well as grapes; and a soft oppressed heart the beverage of joy can melt
+only into tears.
+
+If any man disagree with me, I shall desire him to look at the
+Conrector, who demonstrates my experimental maxim like a very
+syllogism.--One might arrive at some philosophic views, if one traced
+out the causes, why liquors--that is to say, in the long run, more
+plentiful secretion of the nervous spirits--make men at once pious,
+soft, and poetical. The Poet, like Apollo his father, is _forever a
+youth_; and is, what other men are only once, namely, in love,--or only
+after Pontac, namely, intoxicated,--all his life long. Fixlein, who had
+been no poet in the morning, now became one at night; wine made him
+pious and soft; the Harmonica-bells in man, which sound to the tones of
+a higher world, must, like the glass Harmonica-bells, if they are to
+act, be kept _moist_.
+
+He was now standing with her again beside the wavering pond, in which
+the second blue hemisphere of heaven, with dancing stars and amid
+quivering trees, was playing; over the green hills ran the white,
+crooked footpaths dimly along; on the one mountain was the twilight
+sinking together, on the other was the mist of night rising up;
+and over all these vapors of life hung motionless and naming the
+thousand-armed lustre of the starry heaven, and every arm held in it a
+burning galaxy....
+
+It now struck eleven.... Amid such scenes, an unknown hand stretches
+itself out in man, and writes in foreign language on his heart, a dread
+_Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin_. "Perhaps by twelve I am dead," thought our
+friend, in whose soul the Cantata-Sunday, with all its black funeral
+piles, was mounting up.
+
+The whole future Crucifixion of his friend lay prickly and bethorned
+before him; and he saw every bloody trace from which she lifted her
+foot,--she who had made his own way soft with flowers and leaves. He
+could no longer restrain himself; trembling in his whole frame, and
+with a trembling voice, he solemnly said to her: "If the Lord this
+night call me away, let the half of my fortune be yours; for it is your
+goodness I must thank that I am free of debts, as few Teachers are."
+
+Thiennette, unacquainted with our sex, naturally mistook this speech
+for a proposal of marriage; and the fingers of her wounded arm to-night
+for the first time pressed suddenly against the arm in which they lay;
+the only living mortal's arm by which Joy, Love, and the Earth were
+still united with her bosom. The Conrector, rapturously terrified
+at the first pressure of a female hand, bent over his right to take
+hold of her left; and Thiennette, observing his unsuccessful movement,
+lifted her fingers, and laid her whole wounded arm in his, and
+her whole left hand in his right. Two lovers dwell in the
+Whispering-gallery,[51] where the faintest breath bodies itself forth
+into a sound. The good Conrector received and returned this blissful
+love-pressure, wherewith our poor, powerless soul, stammering, hemmed
+in, longing, distracted, seeks for a warmer language, which exists not;
+he was overpowered; he had not the courage to look at her; but he
+looked into the gleam of the twilight, and said (and here for
+unspeakable love the tears were running warm over his cheeks): "Ah, I
+will give you all; fortune, life, and all that I have, my heart and my
+hand."
+
+She was about to answer, but, casting a side glance, she cried, with a
+shriek: "Ah, Heaven!" He started round, and perceived the white muslin
+sleeve all dyed with blood; for in putting her arm into his, she had
+pushed away the bandage from the open vein. With the speed of
+lightning, he hurried her into the acacia-grove; the blood was already
+running from the muslin; he grew paler than she, for every drop of it
+was coming from his heart. The blue-white arm was bared; the bandage
+was put on: he tore a piece of gold from his pocket; clapped it, as one
+does with open arteries, on the spouting fountain, and bolted with this
+golden bar, and with the bandage over it, the door out of which her
+afflicted life was hurrying.--
+
+When it was over, she looked up to him; pale, languid, but her eyes
+were two glistening fountains of an unspeakable love, full of sorrow
+and full of gratitude.--The exhausting loss of blood was spreading her
+soul asunder in sighs. Thiennette was dissolved into inexpressible
+softness; and the heart lacerated by so many years, by so many arrows,
+was plunging with all its wounds in warm streams of tears, to be
+healed, as chapped flutes close together by lying in water, and get
+back their tones. Before such a magic form, before such a pure,
+heavenly love, her sympathizing friend was melted between the flames of
+joy and grief; and sank, with stifled voice, and bent down by love and
+rapture, on the pale, angelic face, the lips of which he timidly
+pressed, but did not kiss, till all-powerful Love bound its girdles
+round them, and drew the two closer and closer together, and their two
+souls, like two tears, melted into one. O now, when it struck twelve,
+the hour of death, did not the lover fancy that her lips were drawing
+his soul away, and all the fibres and all the nerves of his life closed
+spasmodically round the last heart in this world, round the last
+rapture of existence.... Yes, happy man, thou didst express thy love;
+for in thy love thou thoughtest to die....
+
+However, he did not die. After midnight, there floated a balmy morning
+air through the shaken flowers, and the whole spring was breathing.
+The blissful lover, setting bounds even to his sea of joy, reminded
+his delicate beloved, who was now his bride, of the dangers from
+night-cold; and himself of the longer night-cold of Death, which was
+now for long years passed over.--Innocent and blessed, they rose
+from the grove of their betrothment, from its dust broken by white
+acacia-flowers and straggling moonbeams. And without, they felt as if a
+whole wide Past had sunk away in a convulsion of the world; all was
+new, light, and young. The sky stood full of glittering dew-drops from
+the everlasting Morning; and the stars quivered joyfully asunder, and
+sank, resolved into beams, down into the hearts of men.--The Moon, with
+her fountain of light, had overspread and kindled all the garden, and
+was hanging above in a starless blue, as if she had consumed the
+nearest stars; and she seemed like a smaller wandering Spring, like a
+Christ's-face smiling in love of man.--
+
+Under this light they looked at one another for the first time after
+the first words of love; and the sky gleamed magically down on the
+disordered features with which the first rapture of love was still
+standing written on their faces....
+
+Dream, ye beloved, as ye wake, happy as in Paradise, innocent as in
+Paradise!
+
+
+
+
+ SIXTH LETTER-BOX.
+
+ Office-impost.--One of the Most Important of Petitions.
+
+
+The finest thing was his awakening in his European Settlement in the
+giant Schadeck bed!--With the inflammatory, tickling, eating fever of
+love in his breast; with the triumphant feeling that he had now got the
+introductory programme of love put happily by; and with the sweet
+resurrection from his living, prophetic burial; and with the joy that
+now, among his thirties, he could, for the first time, cherish hopes of
+a longer life (and did not longer mean at least till seventy?) than he
+could ten years ago;--with all this stirring life-balsam, in which the
+living fire-wheel of his heart was rapidly revolving, he lay here, and
+laughed at his glancing portrait in the bed-canopy; but he could not do
+it long; he was obliged to move. For a less happy man, it would have
+been gratifying to have measured--as pilgrims measure with the length
+of their pilgrimage, not so much by steps as by body-lengths, like
+Earth-diameters--the superficial content of the bed. But Fixlein, for
+his own part, had to launch from his bed into warm, billowy life; he
+had now his dear good Earth again to look after, and a Conrectorship
+thereon, and a bride to boot. Besides all this, his mother down-stairs
+now admitted that he had last night actually glided through beneath the
+scythe of Death, like supple grass, and that yesterday she had not told
+him, merely out of fear of his fear. Still a cold shudder went over
+him--especially as he was sober now--when he looked round at the high
+Tarpeian Rock, four hours' distance behind him, on the battlements of
+which he had last night walked hand in hand with Death.
+
+The only thing that grieved him was, that it was Monday, and that he
+must back to the Gymnasium. Such a freightage of joys he had never
+taken with him on his road to town. After four, he issued from his
+house, satisfied with coffee (which he drank in Hukelum merely for his
+mother's sake, who, for two days after, would still have portions of
+this woman's-wine to draw from the lees of the pot-sediment), into the
+_cooling_ dawning May-morning (for joy needs coolness, sorrow sun); his
+Betrothed comes--not indeed to meet him, but still--into his hearing,
+by her distant morning hymn; he makes but one momentary turn into the
+blissful haven of the blooming acacia-grove, which still, like the
+covenant sealed in it, has no thorns; he dips his warm hand in the
+cold-bath of the dewy leaves; he wades with pleasure through the
+beautifying-water of the dew, which, as it imparts color to faces, eats
+it away from boots ("but with thirty ducats, a Conrector may make shift
+to keep two pairs of boots on the hook"). And now the Moon, as it were
+the hanging seal of his last night's happiness, dips down into the
+West, like an emptied bucket of light, and in the East the other
+overrunning bucket, the Sun, mounts up, and the gushes of light flow
+broader and broader.
+
+The city stood in the celestial flames of Morning. Here his
+divining-rod (his gold-roll, which, excepting one sixteenth of an inch
+broken off from it, he carried along with him) began to quiver over all
+the spots where booty and silver-veins of enjoyment were concealed; and
+our rod-diviner easily discovered that the city and the future were a
+true entire Potosi of delights.
+
+In his Conrectorate closet he fell upon his knees and thanked God--not
+so much for his heritage and bride as--for his life; for he had gone
+away on Sunday morning with doubts whether he should ever come back;
+and it was purely out of love to the reader, and fear lest he might
+fret himself too much with apprehension, that I cunningly imputed
+Fixlein's journey more to his desire of knowing what was in the will,
+than of making his own will in presence of his mother. Every recovery
+is a bringing back and palingenesia of our youth; one loves the Earth
+and those that are on it with a new love. The Conrector could have
+found in his heart to take all his class by the locks, and press them
+to his breast; but he only did so to his adjutant, the Quartaner, who,
+in the first Letter-box, was still sitting in the rank of a
+Quintaner....
+
+His first expedition, after school-hours, was to the house of Meister
+Steinberger, where, without speaking a word, he counted down fifty
+florins cash in ducats, on the table: "At last I repay you," said
+Fixlein, "the moiety of my debt, and give you many thanks."
+
+"Ey, Herr Conrector," said the Quartermaster, and continued calmly
+stuffing puddings as before, "in my bond it is said, _payable at three
+months' mutual notice_. How could a man like me go on, else? However, I
+will change you the gold-pieces." Thereupon he advised him that it
+might be more judicious to take back a florin or two, and buy himself
+a better hat, and whole shoes. "If you like," added he, "to get a
+calf-skin and half a dozen hare-skins dressed, they are lying
+up-stairs." I should think, for my own part, that to the reader it must
+be as little a matter of indifference as it was to the Butcher, whether
+the hero of such a History appeared before him with an old tattered
+potlid of a hat, and a pump-sucker and leg-harness pair of boots, or in
+suitable apparel. In short, before St. John's day, the man was dressed
+with taste and pomp.
+
+But now came two most peculiarly important papers--at bottom only one,
+the petition for the Hukelum parsonship--to be elaborated; in regard to
+which I feel as if I myself must assist.... It were a simple turn, if
+now at least the assembled public did not pay attention.
+
+In the first place, the Conrector searched out and sorted all the
+Consistorial and Councillor quittances, or rather the toll-bills of the
+road-money, which he had been obliged to pay before the toll-gates at
+the Quintusship and Conrectorship had been thrown open; for the
+executor of the Schadeck testament had to reimburse him the whole, as
+his discharge would express it, "to penny and farthing." Another would
+have summed up his post-excise much more readily; by merely looking
+what he--owed; as these debt-bills and those toll-bills, like parallel
+passages, elucidate and confirm each other. But in Fixlein's case,
+there was a small circumstance of peculiarity at work, which I cannot
+explain till after what follows.
+
+It grieved him a little that for his two offices he had been obliged
+to pay and to borrow no larger a sum than 135 florins, 41 kreuzers,
+and one halfpenny. The legacy, it is true, was to pass directly
+from the hands of the testamentary executor into those of the
+Regiments-Quartermaster; but yet he could have liked well had he--for
+man is a fool from the very foundation of him--had more to pay, and
+therefore to inherit. The whole Conrectorate he had, by a slight
+deposit of 90 florins, plucked, as it were, from the Wheel of Fortune;
+and so small a sum must surprise my reader; but what will he say, when
+I tell him that there are countries where the entry-money into
+school-rooms is even more moderate? In Scherau, a Conrector is charged
+only 88 florins, and perhaps he may have an income triple of this sum.
+Not to speak of Saxony (what, in truth, was to be expected from the
+cradle of the Reformation, in Religion and Polite Literature), where a
+schoolmaster and a parson have _nothing_ to pay,--even in Baireuth, for
+example, in Hof, the progress of improvement has been such that a
+Quartus,--a Quartus, do I say,--a Tertius--a Tertius, do I say,--a
+Conrector,--at entrance on his post, is not required to pay down more
+than:--
+
+
+ Fl.rhen. Kr.rhen.
+ 30 49 For taking the oaths at the Consistorium.
+ 4 0 To the Syndic for the Presentation.
+ 2 0 To the then Burgermeister.
+ 45 7½ For the Government-sanction.
+ ---------------
+Total, 81 fl. 56½ kr.
+
+
+If the printing-charges of a Rector do stand a little higher in some
+points, yet, on the other hand, a Tertius, Quartus, &c., come cheaper
+from the press than even a Conrector. Now, it is clear, that in this
+case a schoolmaster can subsist; since, in the course of the very first
+year, he gets an overplus beyond this _dockmoney_ of his office. A
+schoolmaster must, like his scholars, have been advanced from class to
+class, before these his loans to Government, together with the interest
+for delay of payment, can jointly amount to so much as his yearly
+income in the highest class. Another thing in his favor is, that our
+institutions do not--as those of Athens did--prohibit people from
+entering on office while in debt; but every man, with his debt-knapsack
+on his shoulders, mounts up, step after step, without obstruction. The
+Pope, in large benefices, appropriates the income of the first year,
+under the title of _Annates_, or First-Fruits; and accordingly he, in
+all cases, bestows any large benefice on the possessor of a smaller
+one, thereby to augment both his own revenues and those of others; but
+it shows, in my opinion, a bright distinction between Popery and
+Lutheranism, that the Consistoriums of the latter abstract from their
+school-ministers and church-ministers not perhaps above two thirds of
+their first yearly income; though they too, like the Pope, must
+naturally have an eye to vacancies.
+
+It may be that I shall here come in collision with the Elector of
+Mentz, when I confess, that, in Schmausen's _Corp. jur. pub. Germ_., I
+have turned up the Mentz-Imperial-Court-Chancery-tax-ordinance of
+the 6th January, 1659, and there investigated how much this same
+Imperial-Court-Chancery demands, as contrasted with a Consistorium. For
+example, any man that wishes to be baked or sodden into a _Poet
+Laureate_, has 50 florins tax-dues, and 20 florins Chancery-dues, to
+pay down; whereas, for 20 florins more, he might have been made a
+Conrector, who is a poet of this species, as it were by the by and _ex
+officio_. The institution of a Gymnasium is permitted for 1,000
+florins; an extraordinary sum, with which the whole body of the
+teachers in the instituted Gymnasium might with us clear off the
+entry-moneys of their school-rooms. Again, a Freiherr, who, at any
+rate, often enough grows old without knowing how, must purchase the
+_venia ætatis_ with 200 hard florins; while, with the half sum, he
+might have become a schoolmaster, and here _age_ would have come of its
+own accord. And a thousand such things! They prove, however, that
+matters can be at no bad pass in our Governments and Circles, where
+promotions are sold dearer to Folly than to Diligence, and where it
+costs more to institute a school than to serve in one.
+
+The remarks I made on this subject to a Prince, as well as the remarks
+a Town-syndic made on it to myself, are too remarkable to be omitted
+for mere dread of digressiveness.
+
+The Syndic--a man of enlarged views, and of fiery patriotism, the
+warmth of which was the more beneficent that he collected all the beams
+of it into one focus, and directed them to himself and his family--gave
+me (I had perhaps been comparing the School-bench and the School-stair
+to the _bench_ and the _ladder_, on which people are laid when about to
+be tortured) the best reply: "If a schoolmaster consume nothing but 30
+reichsthalers;[52] if he annually purchase manufactured goods,
+according as Political Economists have calculated for each individual,
+namely, to the amount of 5 reichsthalers; and no more hundred-weights
+of victual than these assume, namely, 10; in short, if he live like a
+substantial wood-cutter, then the Devil must be in it if he cannot
+yearly lay by so much net profit as shall, in the long run, pay the
+interest of his entry debts."
+
+The Syndic must have failed to convince me at that time, since I
+afterwards told the Flachsenfingen Prince:[53]
+
+
+"Illustrious sir, you know not, but I do,--not a player in your Theatre
+would act the Schoolmaster in Engel's _Prodigal Son_, three nights
+running, for such a sum as every real Schoolmaster has to take for
+acting it all the days of the year. In Prussia, invalids are made
+Schoolmasters; with us, Schoolmasters are made invalids." ....
+
+
+But to our story! Fixlein wrote out the inventory of his Crown-debts;
+but with quite a different purpose than the reader will guess, who has
+still the Schadeck testament in his head. In one word, he wanted to be
+Parson of Hukelum. To be a clergyman, and in the place where his cradle
+stood, and all the little gardens of his childhood, his mother also,
+and the grove of betrothment,--this was an open gate into a New
+Jerusalem, supposing even that the living had been nothing but a meagre
+penitentiary. The main point was, he might marry, if he were appointed.
+For, in the capacity of lank Conrector, supported only by the
+strengthening-girth of his waistcoat, and with emoluments whereby
+scarcely the purchase-money of a--purse was to be come at; in this way
+he was more like collecting wick and tallow for his burial torch than
+for his bridal one.
+
+For the Schoolmaster class are, in well-ordered states, as little
+permitted to marry as the soldiery. In _Conringius de Antiquitatibus
+Academicis_, where in every leaf it is proved that all cloisters were
+originally schools, I hit upon the reason. Our schools are now
+cloisters, and consequently we endeavor to maintain in our teachers at
+least an imitation of the Three Monastic Vows. The Vow of Obedience
+might perhaps be sufficiently enforced by School-Inspectors; but the
+second vow, that of Celibacy, would be more hard of attainment, were it
+not that, by one of the best political arrangements, the third vow, I
+mean a beautiful equality in Poverty, is so admirably attended to,
+that no man who has made it needs any further _testimonium
+paupertatis_;--and now _let_ this man, if he likes, lay hold of a
+matrimonial half, when of the two halves each has a whole stomach, and
+nothing for it but half-coins and half-beer!...
+
+I know well, millions of my readers would themselves compose this
+Petition for the Conrector, and ride with it to Schadeck to his
+Lordship, that so the poor rogue might get the sheepfold, with the
+annexed wedding-mansion; for they see clearly enough, that directly
+thereafter one of the best Letter-Boxes would be written that ever came
+from such a repository.
+
+Fixlein's Petition was particularly good and striking; it submitted to
+the Rittmeister four grounds of preference: 1. "He was a native of the
+parish; his parents and ancestors had already done Hukelum service;
+therefore he prayed," &c.
+
+2. "The here documented official debts of 135 florins, 41 kreuzers, and
+one halfpenny, the cancelling of which a never-to-be-forgotten
+testament secured him, he himself could clear, in case he obtained the
+living, and so hereby give up his claim to the legacy," &c.
+
+_Voluntary Note by me_. It is plain he means to bribe his Godfather,
+whom the lady's testament has put into a fume. But, gentle reader,
+blame not without mercy a poor, oppressed, heavy-laden school-man and
+school-horse for an indelicate insinuation, which truly was never mine.
+Consider, Fixlein knew that the Rittmeister was a cormorant towards the
+poor, as he was a squanderer towards the rich. It may be, too, the
+Conrector might once or twice have heard, in the Law Courts, of patrons
+by whom not indeed the church and churchyard--though these things are
+articles of commerce in England--so much as the true management of
+them, had been sold, or rather farmed to farming-candidates. I know
+from Lange,[54] that the Church must support its patron, when he has
+nothing to live upon; and might not a nobleman, before he actually
+began begging, be justified in taking a little advance, a fore-payment
+of his alimentary moneys, from the hands of his pulpit-farmer?--
+
+3. "He had lately betrothed himself with Fräulein von Thiennette, and
+given her a piece of gold, as marriage-pledge; and could therefore wed
+the said Fräulein, were he once provided for," &c.
+
+_Voluntary Note by me_. I hold this ground to be the strongest in the
+whole Petition. In the eyes of Herr von Aufhammer, Thiennette's
+genealogical tree was long since stubbed, disleaved, worm-eaten, and
+full of millepedes; she was his [Oe]conoma, his Castle-Stewardess, and
+Legatess _a Latere_ for his domestics; and with her pretensions for an
+alms-coffer, was threatening in the end to become a burden to him. His
+indignant wish that she had been provided for with Fixlein's legacy
+might now be fulfilled. In a word, if Fixlein become Parson, he will
+have the third ground to thank for it; not at all the mad fourth....
+
+4. "He had learned with sorrow, that the name of his Shock, which he
+had purchased from an Emigrant at Leipzig, meant Egidius in German; and
+that the dog had drawn upon him the displeasure of his Lordship. Far be
+it from him so to designate the Shock in future; but he would take it
+as a special grace, if for the dog, which he at present called without
+any name, his Lordship would be pleased to appoint one himself."
+
+_My Voluntary Note_. The dog then, it seems, to which the nobleman has
+hitherto been godfather, is to receive its name a _second_ time from
+him!--But how can the famishing gardener's son, whose career never
+mounted higher than from the school-bench to the school-chair, and who
+never spoke with polished ladies, except singing, namely in the church,
+how can he be expected, in fingering such a string, to educe from it
+any finer tone than the pedantic one? And yet the source of it lies
+deeper; not the contracted _situation_, but the contracted _eye_, not a
+favorite science, but a narrow plebeian soul, makes us pedantic,--a
+soul that cannot _measure_ and _separate_ the _concentric_ circles of
+human knowledge and activity, that confounds the focus of universal
+human life, by reason of the focal distance, with every two or three
+converging rays; and that cannot see all, and tolerate all---- In
+short, the true Pedant is the Intolerant.
+
+
+The Conrector wrote out his Petition splendidly in five propitious
+evenings; employed a peculiar ink for the purpose; worked not indeed so
+long over it as the stupid Manucius over a Latin letter, namely, some
+months, if Scioppius's word is to be taken; still less so long as
+another scholar at a Latin epistle, who--truly we have nothing but
+Morhof's word for it--hatched it during four whole months; inserting
+his variations, adjectives, feet, with the authorities for his phrases,
+accurately marked between the lines. Fixlein possessed a more
+thoroughgoing genius, and had completely mastered the whole enterprise
+in sixteen days. While sealing, he thought, as we all do, how this
+cover was the seed-husk of a great entire Future, the rind of many
+sweet or bitter fruits, the swathing of his whole after life.
+
+Heaven bless his cover; but I let you throw me from the Tower of Babel,
+if he get the parsonage; can't you see, then, that Aufhammer's hands
+are tied? In spite of all his other faults, or even because of them, he
+will stand like iron by his word, which he has given so long ago to the
+Subrector. It were another matter had he been resident at Court; for
+there, where old German manners still are, no promise is kept; for as,
+according to Möser, the Ancient Germans kept only such promises as they
+made in the _forenoon_ (in the afternoon they were all dead-drunk),--so
+the Court Germans likewise keep no afternoon promise; forenoon ones
+they would keep if they made any, which, however, cannot possibly
+happen, as at those hours they are--sleeping.
+
+
+
+
+ SEVENTH LETTER-BOX.
+
+ Sermon.--School-Exhibition.--Splendid Mistake.
+
+
+The Conrector received his 135 florins, 43 kreuzers, one halfpenny
+Frankish; but no answer; the dog remained without name, his master
+without parsonage. Meanwhile the summer passed away; and the
+Dragoon Rittmeister had yet drawn out no pike from the Candidate
+_breeding-pond_, and thrown him into the _feeding-pond_ of the Hukelum
+parsonage. It gratified him to be behung with prayers like a Spanish
+guardian Saint; and he postponed (though determined to prefer the
+Subrector) granting any one petition, till he had seven-and-thirty
+dyers', button-makers', tinsmiths' sons, whose petitions he could at
+the same time refuse. Grudge not him of Aufhammer this outlengthening
+of his electorial power! He knows the privileges of rank; feels that a
+nobleman is like Timoleon, who gained his greatest victories on his
+birthday, and had nothing more to do than name some squiress, countess,
+or the like, as his mother. A man, however, who has been exalted to the
+Peerage, while still a f[oe]tus, may with more propriety be likened to
+the _spinner_, which, contrariwise to all other insects, passes from
+the chrysalis state, and becomes a perfect insect in its mother's
+womb.--
+
+But to proceed! Fixlein was at present not without cash. It will be the
+same as if I made a present of it to the reader, when I reveal to him,
+that of the legacy, which was clearing off old scores, he had still 35
+florins left to himself, as _allodium_ and pocket-money, wherewith he
+might purchase whatsoever seemed good to him. And how came he by so
+large a sum, by so considerable a competence? Simply by this means;
+every time he changed a piece of gold, and especially at every payment
+he received, it had been his custom to throw in, blindly at random,
+two, three, or four small coins, among the papers of his trunk. His
+purpose was to astonish himself one day, when he summed up and took
+possession of this sleeping capital. And, by Heaven! he reached it too,
+when, on mounting the throne of his Conrectorate, he drew out these
+funds from his papers, and applied them to the coronation charges. For
+the present, he sowed them in again among his waste letters. Foolish
+Fixlein! I mean, had he not luckily exposed his legacy to jeopardy,
+having offered it as bounty-money and luckpenny to the patron, this
+false clutch of his at the knocker of the Hukelum church door, would
+certainly have vexed him; but now, if he had missed the knocker, he had
+the luckpenny again, and could be merry.
+
+I now advance a little way in his History, and hit, in the rock of his
+Life, upon so fine a vein of silver, I mean upon so fine a day, that I
+must (I believe) content myself even in regard to the twenty-third of
+Trinity-term, when he preached a vacation sermon in his dear native
+village, with a brief transitory notice.
+
+In itself the sermon was good and glorious; and the day a rich day of
+pleasure; but I should really need to have more hours at my disposal
+than I can steal from May, in which I am at present living and writing;
+and more strength than wandering through this fine weather has left me
+for landscape pictures of the same, before I could attempt, with any
+well-founded hope, to draw out a mathematical estimate of the length
+and thickness, and the vibrations and accordant relations to each
+other, of the various strings, which combined together to form for his
+heart a Music of the Spheres, on this day of Trinity-term, though such
+a thing would please myself as much as another.... Do not ask me! In my
+opinion, when a man preaches on Sunday, before all the peasants, who
+had carried him in their arms when a gardener's boy; further, before
+his mother, who is leading off her tears through the conduit of her
+satin muff; further, before his Lordship, whom he can positively
+command to be blessed; and finally before his muslin bride, who is
+already blessed, and changing almost into stone, to find that the same
+lips can both kiss and preach; in my opinion, I say, when a man effects
+all this, he has some right to require of any Biographer who would
+paint his situation, that he--hold his jaw; and of the reader who would
+sympathize with it, that he open his, and preach himself.----
+
+But what I must _ex officio_ depict, is the day to which this Sunday
+was but the prelude, the vigil, and the whet; I mean the prelude, the
+vigil, and the whet to the _Martini Actus_, or _Martinmas Exhibition_
+of his school. On Sunday was the sermon, on Wednesday the Actus, on
+Tuesday the Rehearsal. This Tuesday shall now be delineated to the
+universe.
+
+I count upon it that I shall not be read by mere people of the world
+alone, to whom a School-Actus cannot truly appear much better, or more
+interesting, than some Investiture of a Bishop, or the _opera seria_ of
+Frankfort Coronation; but that I likewise have people before me, who
+have been at schools, and who know how the School-Drama of an Actus and
+the stage-manager, and the playbill (the programme) thereof are to be
+estimated, still without overrating their importance.
+
+Before proceeding to the Rehearsal of the _Martini Actus_, I impose
+upon myself, as dramaturgist of the play, the duty, if not of
+extracting, at least of recording, the Conrector's Letter of
+Invitation. In this composition he said many things; and (what an
+author likes so well) made proposals rather than reproaches;
+interrogatively reminding the public, whether, in regard to the
+well-known head-breakages of Priscian on the part of the Magnates in
+Pest and Poland, our school-houses were not the best quarantine and
+lazar-houses to protect us against infectious _barbarisms_? Moreover,
+he defended in schools what could be defended (and nothing in the world
+is sweeter or easier than a defence); and said, Schoolmasters, who, not
+quite justifiably, like certain Courts, spoke nothing, and let nothing
+be spoken to them, but Latin, might plead the Romans in excuse, whose
+subjects, and whose kings, at least in their epistles and public
+transactions, were obliged to make use of the Latin tongue. He wondered
+why only our Greek, and not also oar Latin Grammars, were composed in
+Latin, and put the pregnant question, whether the Romans, when they
+taught their little children the Latin tongue, did it in any other than
+in this same. Thereupon he went over to the Actus, and said what
+follows, in his own words:--
+
+"I am minded to prove, in a subsequent Invitation, that everything
+which can be said or known about the great founder of the Reformation,
+the subject of our present Martini Prolusions, has been long ago
+exhausted, as well by Seckendorf as others. In fact, with regard to
+Luther's personalities, his table-talk, incomes, journeys, clothes, and
+so forth, there can now nothing new be brought forward, if at the same
+time it is to be true. Nevertheless, the field of the Reformation
+history is, to speak in a figure, by no means wholly cultivated; and it
+does appear to me as if the inquirer even of the present day might in
+vain look about for correct intelligence respecting the children,
+grandchildren, and children's children, down to our own times, of this
+great Reformer; all of whom, however, appertain, in a more remote
+degree, to the Reformation history, as he himself in a nearer. Thou
+shalt not perhaps be threshing, said I to myself, altogether empty
+straw, if, according to thy small ability, thou bring forward and
+cultivate this neglected branch of History. And so have I ventured,
+with the last male descendant of Luther, namely, with the Advocate
+Martin Gottlob Luther, who practised in Dresden, and deceased there in
+1759, to make a beginning of a more special Reformation history. My
+feeble attempt, in regard to this Reformationary Advocate, will be
+sufficiently rewarded, should it excite to better works on the subject;
+however, the little which I have succeeded in digging up and collecting
+with regard to him I here submissively, obediently, and humbly request
+all friends and patrons of the Flachsenfingen Gymnasium to listen to,
+on the 14th of November, from the mouths of six well-conditioned
+perorators. In the first place, shall
+
+"_Gottlieb Spiesglass_, a Flachsenfinger, endeavor to show, in a Latin
+oration, that Martin Gottlob Luther was certainly descended of the
+Luther family. After him strives
+
+"_Friedrich Christian Krabbler_, from Hukelum, in German prose, to
+appreciate the influence which Martin Gottlob Luther exercised on the
+then existing Reformation; whereupon, after him, will
+
+"_Daniel Lorenz Stenzinger_ deliver, in Latin verse, an account of
+Martin Gottlob Luther's lawsuits; embracing the probable merits of
+Advocates generally, in regard to the Reformation. Which then will give
+opportunity to
+
+"_Nikol Tobias Pfizman_ to come forward in French, and recount the most
+important circumstances of Martin Gottlob Luther's school-years,
+university-life, and riper age. And now, when
+
+"_Andreas Eintarm_ shall have endeavored, in German verse, to apologize
+for the possible failings of this representative of the great Luther,
+will
+
+"_Justus Strobel_, in Latin verse according to ability, sing his
+uprightness and integrity in the Advocate profession; whereafter I
+myself shall mount the cathedra, and most humbly thank all the patrons
+of the Flachsenfingen School, and then further bring forward those
+portions in the life of this remarkable man, of which we yet know
+absolutely nothing, they being spared, _Deo volente_, for the speakers
+of the next _Martini Actus_."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The day before the Actus offered as it were the proof-shot and
+sample-sheet of the Wednesday. Persons who on account of dress could
+not be present at the great school-festival, especially ladies, made
+their appearance on Tuesday, during the six proof-orations. No
+one can be readier than I to subordinate the proof-Actus to the
+Wednesday-Actus; and I do anything but need being stimulated suitably
+to estimate the solemn feast of a School; but, on the other hand, I am
+equally convinced that no one, who did not go to the real Actus of
+Wednesday, could possibly figure anything more splendid than the
+proof-day preceding; because he could have no object wherewith to
+compare the pomp in which the Primate of the festival drove in with
+his triumphal chariot and six--to call the six brethren-speakers
+coach-horses--next morning in presence of ladies and Councillor
+gentleman. Smile away, Fixlein, at this astonishment over thy today's
+_Ovation_, which is leading on to-morrow's _Triumph_; on thy dissolving
+countenance quivers happy Self, feeding on these incense-fumes; but a
+vanity like thine, and that only, which enjoys without comparing or
+despising, can one tolerate, will one foster. But what flowed over all
+his heart, like a melting sunbeam over wax, was his mother, who after
+much persuasion had ventured in her Sunday's clothes humbly to place
+herself quite low down, beside the door of the Prima class-room. It
+were difficult to say who is happier, the mother, beholding how he whom
+she has borne under her heart can direct such noble young gentlemen,
+and hearing how he along with them can talk of these really high things
+and understand them too;--or the son, who, like some of the heroes of
+Antiquity, has the felicity of triumphing in the lifetime of his
+mother. I have never in my writings or doings cast a stone upon the
+late Burchardt Grossmann, who, under the initial letters of the stanzas
+in his song "_Brich an, du liebe Morgenröthe_," inserted the letters of
+his own name; and still less have I ever censured any poor herb-woman
+for smoothing out her winding-sheet, while still living, and making
+herself one twelfth of a dozen of grave-shifts. Nor do I regard the man
+as wise--though indeed as very clever and pedantic--who can fret his
+gall-bladder full because every one of us leaf-miners views the leaf
+whereon he is mining as a park-garden, as a fifth Quarter of the World
+(so near and rich is it); the leaf-pores as so many Valleys of Tempe,
+the leaf-skeleton as a Liberty-tree, a Bread-tree, and Life-tree, and
+the dewdrops as the Ocean. We poor day-moths, evening-moths, and
+night-moths fall universally into the same error, only on different
+leaves; and whosoever (as I do) laughs at the important airs with which
+the schoolmaster issues his programmes, the dramaturgist his playbills,
+the classical variation-alms-gatherer his alphabetic letters,--does it,
+if he is wise (as is the case here), with the consciousness of his own
+_similar_ folly; and laughs, in regard to his neighbor, at nothing but
+mankind and himself.
+
+The mother was not to be detained; she must off, this very night, to
+Hukelum, to give the Fräulein Thiennette at least some tidings of this
+glorious business.--
+
+And now the World will bet a hundred to one, that I forthwith take
+biographical wax, and emboss such a wax-figure cabinet of the Actus
+itself as shall be single of its kind.
+
+But on Wednesday morning, while the hope-intoxicated Conrector was just
+about putting on his fine raiment, something knocked.----
+
+It was the well-known servant of the Rittmeister, carrying the Hukelum
+Presentation for the Subrector _Füchslein_ in his pocket. To the
+last-named gentleman he had been sent with this call to the parsonage;
+but he had distinguished ill betwixt _Sub_ and _Con_rector; and had
+besides his own good reasons for directing his steps to the latter; for
+he thought, "Who can it be that gets it, but the parson that preached
+last Sunday, and that comes from the village, and is engaged to our
+Fräulein Thiennette, and to whom I brought a clock and a roll of ducats
+already?" That his Lordship could pass over his own godson never
+entered the man's head.
+
+Fixlein read the address of the Appointment: "To the Reverend the
+Parson _Fixlein_ of Hukelum." He naturally enough made the same mistake
+as the lackey; and broke up the Presentation as his own; and finding
+moreover in the body of the paper no special mention of persons, but
+only of a _Schul-unterbefehlshaber_, or School-undergovernor (instead
+of Subrector), he could not but persist in his error.
+
+Before I properly explain why the Rittmeister's Lawyer, the framer of
+the Presentation, had so designated a Subrector--we two, the reader
+and myself, will keep an eye for a moment on Fixlein's joyful
+salutations--on his gratefully-streaming eyes--on his full hands so
+laden with bounty--on the present of two ducats, which he drops into
+the hands of the mitre-bearer, as willingly as he will soon drop his
+own pedagogic office. Could he tell what to think (of the Rittmeister),
+or to write (to the same), or to table (for the lackey)? Did he not
+ask tidings of the noble health of his benefactor over and over,
+though the servant answered him with all distinctness at the very
+first? And was not this same man, who belonged to the nose-upturning,
+shoulder-shrugging, shoulder-knotted, toad-eating species of men, at
+last so moved by the joy which he had imparted, that he determined, on
+the spot, to bestow his presence on the new clergyman's School-Actus,
+though no person of quality whatever was to be there? Fixlein, in the
+first place, sealed his letter of thanks; and courteously invited this
+messenger of good news to visit him frequently in the Parsonage; and to
+call this evening, in passing, at his mother's, and give her a lecture
+for not staying last night, when she might have seen the Presentation
+from his Lordship arrive to-day.
+
+The lackey being gone, Fixlein for joy began to grow sceptical--and
+timorous (wherefore, to prevent filching, he stowed his Presentation
+securely in his coffer, under keeping of two padlocks); and devout and
+softened, since he thanked God without scruple for all good that
+happened to him, and never wrote this Eternal Name but in pulpit
+characters, and with colored ink; as the Jewish copyists never wrote it
+except ornamental letters and when newly washed;[55]--and deaf also did
+the parson, grow, so that he scarcely heard the soft wooing-hour of the
+Actus--for a still softer one beside Thiennette, with its rose-bushes
+and rose-honey, would not leave his thoughts. He who of old, when
+Fortune made a wry face at him, was wont, like children in their sport
+at one another, to laugh at her so long till she herself was obliged to
+begin smiling--he was now flying as on a huge seesaw higher and higher,
+quicker and quicker aloft.
+
+But before the Actus, let us examine the Schadeck Lawyer. _Fixlein_
+instead of _Füchslein_[56] he had written from uncertainty about the
+spelling of the name; the more naturally as in transcribing the
+Rittmeisterinn's will the former had occurred so often. _Von_, this
+triumphal arch, he durst not set up before Füchslein's new name,
+because Aufhammer forbade it, considering Hans Füchslein as a mushroom,
+who had no right to _vons_ and titles of nobility, for all his patents.
+In fine, the Presentation-writer was possessed with Campe's[57] whim of
+Germanizing everything, minding little though when Germanized it should
+cease to be intelligible;--as if a word needed any better act of
+naturalization than that which universal unintelligibility imparts to
+it. In itself it is the same--the rather as all languages, like all
+men, are cognate, intermarried and intermixed--whether a word was
+invented by a savage or a foreigner; whether it grew up like moss amid
+the German forests, or like street-grass, in the pavement of the Roman
+Forum. The Lawyer, on the other hand, contended that it was different;
+and accordingly he hid not from any of his clients that _Tagefarth_
+(Day-turn) meant _Term_, and that _Appealing_ was _Berufen_
+(Becalling). On this principle, he dressed the word _Subrector_ in the
+new livery of _School-undergovernor_. And this version further
+converted the Schoolmaster into Parson; to such a degree does our
+_civic_ fortune--not our _personal_ well-being, which supports
+itself on our own internal soil and resources--grow merely on the
+_drift-mould_ of accidents, connections, acquaintances, and Heaven or
+the Devil knows what!--
+
+By the by, from a Lawyer, at the same time a Country Judge, I should
+certainly have looked for more sense; I should (I may be mistaken) have
+presumed he knew that the _Acts_, or Reports, which in former times
+(see Hoffmann's _German or un-German Law-practice_) were written in
+Latin, as before the times of Joseph the Hungarian,--are now, if
+we may say so without offence, perhaps written fully more in the
+German dialect than in the Latin; and in support of this opinion,
+I can point to whole lines of German language to be found in these
+Imperial-Court-Confessions. However, I will not believe that the Jurist
+is endeavoring, because Imhofer declares the Roman tongue to be the
+mother tongue in the other world, to disengage himself from a language,
+by means of which, like the Roman _Eagle_, or later, like the Roman
+_Fish-heron_ (Pope), he has clutched such abundant booty in his
+talons.----
+
+Toll, toll your bell for the Actus; stream in, in to the ceremony; who
+cares for it? Neither I nor the Ex-Conrector. The six pygmy Ciceros
+will in vain set forth before us in sumptuous dress their thoughts and
+bodies. The draught-wind of Chance has blown away from the Actus its
+powder-nimbus of glory; and the Conrector that was has discovered how
+small a matter a cathedra is, and how great a one a pulpit. "I should
+not have thought," thought he now, "when I became Conrector, that there
+could be anything grander, I mean a parson." Man, behind his
+everlasting blind, which he only colors differently, and makes no
+thinner, carries his pride with him from one step to another; and on
+the higher step, blames only the pride of the lower.
+
+The best of the Actus was, that the Regiments-Quartermaster and Master
+Butcher, Steinberg, attended there, embaled in a long woollen shag.
+During the solemnity, the Subrector Hans von Füchslein cast several
+gratified and inquiring glances on the Schadeck servant, who did not
+once look at him. Hans would have staked his head, that, after the
+Actus, the fellow would wait upon him. When at last the sextuple
+cockerel-brood had on their dunghill done crowing, that is to say,
+had perorated, the scholastic cocker, over whom a higher banner
+was now waving, himself came upon the stage; and delivered to the
+School-Inspectorships, to the Subrectorship, to the Guardianship, and
+the lackeyship, his most grateful thanks for their attendance; shortly,
+announcing to them at the same time, "that Providence had now called
+him from his post to another; and committed to him, unworthy as he was,
+the cure of souls in the Hukelum parish, as well as in the Schadeck
+chapel of ease."
+
+This little address, to appearance, wellnigh blew up the then Subrector
+Hans von Füchslein from his chair; and his face looked of a mingled
+color, like red bole, green chalk, tinsel-yellow, and _vomissement de
+la reine_.
+
+The tall Quartermaster erected himself considerably in his shag, and
+hummed loud enough in happy forgetfulness: "The Dickens!--Parson?"----
+
+The Subrector dashed by like a comet before the lackey; ordered him to
+call and take a letter for his master; strode home, and prepared for
+his patron, who at Schadeck was waiting for a long thanksgiving psalm,
+a short satirical epistle, as nervous as haste would permit, and
+mingled a few nicknames and verbal injuries along with it.
+
+The courier handed in to his master Fixlein's song of gratitude and
+Füchslein's invectives with the same hand. The dragoon Rittmeister,
+incensed at the ill-mannered churl, and bound to his word, which
+Fixlein had publicly announced in his Actus, forthwith wrote back to
+the new Parson an acceptance and ratification; and Fixlein is and
+remains, to the joy of us all, incontestible ordained parson of
+Hukelum.
+
+His disappointed rival has still this consolation, that he holds a seat
+in the wasp-nest of the _Neue Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek_.[58]
+Should the Parson ever chrysalize himself into an author, the
+watch-wasp may then buzz out, and dart its sting into the chrysalis,
+and put its own brood in the room of the murdered butterfly. As the
+Subrector everywhere went about, and threatened in plain terms that he
+would review his colleague, let not the public be surprised that
+Fixlein's _Errata_, and his Masoretic _Exercitationes_, are to this
+hour withheld from it.
+
+In spring, the widowed church receives her new husband; and how it will
+be, when Fixlein, under a canopy of flower-trees, takes the _Sponsa
+Christi_ in one hand, and his own _Sponsa_ in the other,--this without
+an Eighth Letter-Box, which, in the present case, may be a true
+jewel-box and rainbow-key,[59] can no mortal figure, except the
+_Sponsus_ himself.
+
+
+
+
+ EIGHTH LETTER-BOX.
+
+ Instalment in the Parsonage.
+
+
+On the 15th of April, 1793, the reader may observe, far down in the
+hollow, three baggage-wagons groaning along. These baggage-wagons are
+transporting the house-gear of the new Parson to Hukelum; the
+proprietor himself, with a little escort of his parishioners, is
+marching at their side, that of his china sets and household furniture
+there may be nothing broken in the eighteenth century, as the whole
+came down to him unbroken from the seventeenth. Fixlein hears the
+School-bell ringing behind him; but this chime now sings to him,
+like a curfew, the songs of future rest; he is now escaped from the
+Death-valley of the Gymnasium, and admitted into the abodes of the
+Blessed. Here dwells no envy, no colleague, no Subrector; here, in the
+heavenly country, no man works in the _New Universal German Library_;
+here in the heavenly Hukelumic Jerusalem, they do nothing but sing
+praises in the church; and here the Perfected requires no more increase
+of knowledge.... Here, too, one needs not sorrow that Sunday and
+Saint's day so often fall together into one.
+
+Truth to tell, the parson goes too far; but it was his way from of old
+never to paint out the whole and half shadows of a situation till he
+was got into a new one; the beauties of which he could then enhance by
+contrast with the former. For it requires little reflection to discover
+that the torments of a Schoolmaster are nothing so extraordinary; but,
+on the contrary, as in the Gymnasium, he mounts from one degree to
+another, not very dissimilar to the common torments of Hell, which, in
+spite of their eternity, grow weaker from century to century. Moreover,
+since, according to the saying of a Frenchman, _deux afflictions mises
+ensemble peuvent devener une consolation_, a man gets afflictions
+enow in a school to console him; seeing out of eight combined
+afflictions--reckon only one for every teacher--certainly more
+comfort is to be extracted than out of two. The only pity is, that
+school-people will never act towards each other as court-people do:
+none but polished men and polished glasses will readily cohere. In
+addition to all this, in schools--and in offices generally--one is
+always recompensed; for, as in the second life a greater virtue is the
+recompense of an earthly one, so, in the Schoolmaster's case, his
+merits are always rewarded by more opportunities for new merits; and
+often enough he is not dismissed from his post at all.--
+
+Eight Gymnasiasts are trotting about in the Parsonage, setting up,
+nailing to, hauling in. I think, as a scholar of Plutarch, I am right
+to introduce such seeming _minutiæ_. A man whom grown-up people love,
+children love still more. The whole school had smiled on the smiling
+Fixlein, and liked him-in their hearts, because he did not thunder, but
+sport with them; because he said _Sie_ (They), to the Secundaners, and
+the Subrector said _Ihr_ (Ye); because his uprearing forefinger was his
+only sceptre and baculus; because in the Secunda he had interchanged
+Latin epistles with his scholars; and in the Quinta had taught not with
+Napier's Rods (or rods of a sharper description), but with sticks of
+barley-sugar.
+
+To-day his churchyard appeared to him so solemn and festive, that he
+wondered (though it was Monday) why his parishioners were not in their
+holiday, but merely in their week-day drapery. Under the door of the
+Parsonage stood a weeping woman; for she was too happy, and he was
+her--son. Yet the mother, in the height of her emotion, contrives quite
+readily to call upon the carriers, while disloading, not to twist off
+the four corner globes from the old Frankish chest of drawers. Her son
+now appeared to her as venerable as if he had sat for one of the
+copperplates in her pictured Bible; and that simply because he had cast
+off his pedagogue hair-cue, as the ripening tadpole does its tail; and
+was now standing in a clerical periwig before her; he was now a Comet,
+soaring away from the profane Earth, and had accordingly changed from a
+_stella caudata_ into a _stella crinita_.
+
+His bride also had, on former days, given sedulous assistance in this
+new improved edition of his house, and labored faithfully among the
+other furnishers and furbishers. But to-day she kept aloof; for she was
+too good to forget the maiden in the bride. Love, like men, dies
+oftener of excess than of hunger; it lives on love, but it resembles
+those Alpine flowers which feed themselves by _suction_ from the wet
+clouds, and die if you _besprinkle_ them.
+
+At length the Parson is settled, and of course he must--for I know my
+fair readers, who are bent on it as if they were bridemaids--without
+delay get married. But he may not; before Ascension-day there can
+nothing be done, and till then are full four weeks and a half.
+The matter was this. He wished in the first place to have the
+murder-Sunday, the Cantata, behind him; not indeed because he doubted
+of his earthly continuance, but because he would not (even for the
+bride's sake) that the slightest apprehension should mingle with these
+weeks of glory.
+
+The main reason was, he did not wish to marry till he were betrothed;
+which latter ceremony was appointed, with the Introduction Sermon, to
+take place next Sunday. It is the Cantata-Sunday. Let not the reader
+afflict himself with fears. Indeed, I should not have molested an
+enlightened century with this Sunday-_Wauwau_ at all, were it not that
+I delineate with such extreme fidelity. Fixlein himself--especially as
+the Quartermaster asked him if he was a baby--at last grew so sensible
+that he saw the folly of it; nay, he went so far that he committed a
+greater folly. For as dreaming that you die signifies, according to the
+exegetic _rule of false_, nothing else than long life and welfare, so
+did Fixlein easily infer that his death-imagination was just such a
+lucky dream; the rather as it was precisely on this Cantata-Sunday that
+Fortune had turned up her cornucopia over him, and at once showered
+down out of it a bride, a presentation, and a roll of ducats. Thus can
+Superstition imp its wings, let Chance favor it or not.
+
+A Secretary of State, a Peace-Treaty writer, a Notary, any such
+incarcerated Slave of the Desk, feels excellently well how far he is
+beneath a Parson composing his inaugural sermon. The latter (do but
+look at my Fixlein) lays himself heartily over the paper,--injects the
+venous system of his sermon-preparation with colored ink,--has a
+Text-Concordance on the right side, and a Song-Concordance on the
+left; is there digging out a marrowy sentence, here clipping off a
+song-blossom, with both to garnish his homiletic pastry;--sketches out
+the finest plan of operations, not, like a man of the world, to subdue
+the heart of one woman, but the hearts of all women that hear him, and
+of their husbands to boot; draws every peasant passing by his window
+into some niche of his discourse, to co-operate with the result;--and,
+finally, scoops out the butter of the smooth, soft hymn-book, and
+therewith exquisitely fattens the black broth of his sermon, which is
+to feed five thousand men.----
+
+At last, in the evening, as the red sun is dazzling him at the desk, he
+can rise with heart free from guilt; and, amid twittering sparrows and
+finches, over the cherry-trees encircling the parsonage, look toward
+the west, till there is nothing more in the sky but a faint gleam among
+the clouds. And then when Fixlein, amid the tolling of the evening
+prayer-bell, _slowly_ descends the stair to his cooking mother, there
+must be some miracle in the case, if for him whatever has been done or
+baked, or served up in the lower regions, is not right and good.... A
+bound, after supper, into the Castle; a look into a pure loving eye; a
+word without falseness to a bride without falseness; and then under the
+coverlet, a soft-breathing breast, in which there is nothing but
+Paradise, a sermon, and evening prayer.... I swear, with this I will
+satisfy a Mythic God, who has left his Heaven, and is seeking a new one
+among us here below!
+
+Can a mortal, can a Me in the wet clay of Earth, which Death will soon
+dry into dust, ask more in one week than Fixlein is gathering into his
+heart? I see not how. At least I should suppose, if such a dust-framed
+being, after such a twenty-thousand prize from the Lottery of Chance,
+could require aught more, it would at most be the twenty-one-thousand
+prize, namely, the inaugural discourse itself.
+
+And this prize our Zebedäus actually drew on Sunday; he preached,--he
+preached with unction,----he did it before the crowding, rustling press
+of people; before his Guardian, and before the Lord of Aufhammer, the
+godfather of the priest and the dog;--a flock, with whom in Childhood
+he had driven out the Castle herds about the pasture, he was now,
+himself a spiritual sheep-smearer, leading out to pasture;--he was
+standing to the ankles among Candidates and Schoolmasters, for to-day
+(what none of them could) at the altar, with the nail of his finger, he
+might scratch a large cross in the air, baptisms and marriages not once
+mentioned.... I believe I should feel less scrupulous than I do to
+checker this sunshiny esplanade with that thin shadow of the grave
+which the preacher threw over it, when, in the application, with wet,
+heavy eyes, he looked round over the mute, attentive church, as if in
+some corner of it he would seek the mouldering teacher of his youth and
+of this congregation, who without, under the white tombstone, the
+wrong-side of life, had laid away the garment of his pious spirit. And
+when he, himself hurried on by the internal stream, inexpressibly
+softened by the further recollections of his own fear of death on this
+day, of his life now overspread with flowers and benefits, of his
+entombed benefactress resting here in her narrow bed,--when he now,
+before the dissolving countenance of her friend, his Thiennette,
+overpowered, motionless, and weeping, looked down from the pulpit to
+the door of the Schadeck vault, and said: "Thanks, thou pious soul, for
+the good thou hast done to this flock and to their new teacher; and, in
+the fulness of time, may the dust of thy god-fearing and man-loving
+breast gather itself, transfigured as gold-dust, round thy reawakened
+heavenly heart,"--was there an eye in the audience dry? Her husband
+sobbed aloud, and Thiennette, her beloved, bowed her head, sinking down
+with inconsolable remembrances, over the front of the seat, like
+kindred mourners in a funeral train.
+
+No fairer forenoon could prepare the way for an afternoon in which a
+man was to betroth himself forever, and to unite the exchanged rings
+with the Ring of Eternity. Except the bridal pair, there was none
+present but an ancient pair; the mother and the long Guardian. The
+bridegroom wrote out the marriage-contract or marriage-charter with his
+own hand; hereby making over to his bride, from this day, his whole
+movable property (not, as you may suppose, his pocket-library, but his
+whole library; whereas, in the Middle Ages, the daughter of a noble was
+glad to get one or two books for marriage-portion);--in return for
+which, she liberally enough contributed--a whole nuptial coach or car,
+laden as follows: with nine pounds of feathers, not feathers for the
+cap such as we carry, but of the lighter sort such as carry us;--with a
+sumptuous dozen of godchild-plates and godchild-spoons (gifts from
+Schadeck), together with a fish-knife;--of silk, not only stockings
+(though even King Henry II. of France could dress no more than his legs
+in silk), but whole gowns;--with jewels and other furnishings of
+smaller value. Good Thiennette! in the chariot of thy spirit lies the
+true dowry; namely, thy noble, soft, modest heart, the morning-gift of
+Nature!
+
+The Parson--who, not from mistrust, but from "the uncertainty of life,"
+could have wished for a notary's seal on everything; to whom no
+security but a hypothecary one appeared sufficient; and who, in the
+depositing of every barleycorn, required quittances and contracts--had
+now, when the marriage-charter was completed, a lighter heart; and
+through the whole evening the good man ceased not to thank his bride
+for what she had given him. To me, however, a marriage-contract were a
+thing as painful and repulsive,--I confess it candidly, though you
+should in consequence upbraid me with my great youth,--as if I had to
+take my love-letter to a Notary Imperial, and make him docket and
+countersign it before it could be sent. Heavens! to see the light
+flower of Love, whose perfume acts not on the balance, so laid like
+tulip-bulbs on the hay-beam of Law; two hearts on the cold councillor
+and flesh-beam of relatives and Advocates, who are heaping on the
+scales nothing but houses, fields, and tin,--this, to the interested
+party, maybe as delightful as, to the intoxicated suckling and nursling
+of the Muses and Philosophy, it is to carry the evening and morning
+sacrifices he has offered up to his goddess into the book-shop, and
+there to change his devotions into money, and sell them by weight and
+measure.----
+
+From Cantata-Sunday to Ascension, that is, to marriage-day, are one and
+a half weeks--or one and a half blissful eternities. If it is pleasant
+that nights or winter separate the days and seasons of joy to a
+comfortable distance; if, for example, it is pleasant that birthday,
+Saint's-day, betrothment, marriage, and baptismal day, do not all occur
+on the same day (for with very few do those festivities, like Holiday
+and Apostle's day, commerge),--then is it still more pleasant to make
+the interval, the flower-border, between betrothment and marriage, of
+an extraordinary breadth. Before the marriage-day are the true
+honey-weeks; then come the wax-weeks; then the honey-vinegar-weeks.
+
+In the Ninth Letter-Box our Parson celebrates his wedding; and here, in
+the Eighth, I shall just briefly skim over his way and manner of
+existence till then; an existence, as might have been expected,
+celestial enough. To few is it allotted, as it was to him, to have at
+once such wings and such flowers (to fly over) before his nuptials;
+to few is it allotted, I imagine, to purchase flour and poultry
+on the same day, as Fixlein did;--to stuff the wedding-turkey
+with hangman-meals;--to go every night into the stall, and see
+whether the wedding-pig, which his Guardian had given him by way of
+marriage-present, is still standing and eating;--to spy out for his
+future wife the flax-magazines and clothes-press-niches in the
+house;--to lay in new wood-stores in the prospect of winter;--to obtain
+from the Consistorium directly, and for little smart-money, their Bull
+of Dispensation, their remission of the threefold proclamation of
+banns;--to live not in a city, where you must send to every fool
+(because you are one yourself), and disclose to him that you are going
+to be married; but in a little angular hamlet, where you have no one to
+tell aught, but simply the Schoolmaster that he is to ring a little
+later, and put a knee-cushion before the altar.----
+
+O, if the Ritter Michaelis maintains that Paradise was little, because
+otherwise the people would not have found each other,--a hamlet and its
+joys are little and narrow, so that some shadow of Eden may still
+linger on our Ball.----
+
+I have not even hinted that, the day before the wedding, the
+Regiments-Quartermaster came uncalled, and killed the pig, and made
+puddings gratis, such as were never eaten at any Court.
+
+And besides, dear Fixlein, on this soft, rich oil of joy there
+was also floating gratis a vernal sun,--and red twilights,--and
+flower-garlands,--and a bursting half-world of buds!...
+
+How didst thou behave thee in these hot whirlpools of pleasure?--Thou
+movedst thy Fishtail (Reason), and therewith describedst for thyself a
+rectilineal course through the billows. For even half as much would
+have hurried another Parson from his study; but the very crowning
+felicity of ours was, that he stood as if rooted to the boundary-hill
+of Moderation, and from thence looked down on what thousands flout
+away. Sitting opposite the Castle-windows, he was still in a condition
+to reckon up that _Amen_ occurs in the Bible one hundred and thirty
+times. Nay, to his old learned laboratory he now appended a new
+chemical stove; he purposed writing to Nürnberg and Baireuth, and there
+offering his pen to the Brothers Senft, not only for composing
+practical _Receipts_ at the end of their _Almanacs_, but also for
+separate _Essays_ in front under the copperplate title of each Month,
+because he had a thought of making some reformatory cuts at the common
+people's mental habitudes ... And now, when in the capacity of Parson
+he had less to do, and could add to the holy resting-day of the
+congregation six literary creating-days, he determined (even in these
+Carnival weeks) to strike his plough into the hitherto quite fallow
+History of Hukelum, and soon to follow the plough with his drill....
+
+Thus roll his minutes, on golden wheels-of-fortune, over the twelve
+days, which form the glancing star-paved road to the third heaven of
+the thirteenth, that is, to the
+
+
+
+
+ NINTH LETTER-BOX.
+
+ Or to the Marriage.
+
+
+Rise, fair Ascension and Marriage day, and gladden readers also! Adorn
+thyself with the fairest jewel, with the bride, whose soul is as pure
+and glittering as its vesture; like pearl and pearl-muscle, the one, as
+the other, lustrous and ornamental! And so over the espalier, whose
+fruit-hedge has hitherto divided our darling from his Eden, every
+reader now presses after him!--
+
+On the 9th of May, 1793, about three in the morning, there came a sharp
+peal of trumpets, like a light-beam, through the dim-red May-dawn; two
+twisted horns, with a straight trumpet between them, like a note of
+admiration between interrogation-points, were clanging from a house in
+which only a parishioner (not the Parson) dwelt and blew; for this
+parishioner had last night been celebrating the same ceremony which the
+pastor had this day before him. The joyful tallyho raised our Parson
+from his broad bed (and the Shock from beneath it, who some weeks ago
+had been exiled from the white, sleek coverlet), and this so early,
+that in the portraying tester, where on every former morning he had
+observed his ruddy visage, and his white bedclothes, all was at present
+dim and crayoned.
+
+I confess, the new-painted room, and a gleam of dawn on the wall, made
+it so light, that he could see his knee-buckles glancing on the chair.
+He then softly awakened his mother (the other guests were to lie for
+hours in the sheets), and she had the city cook-maid to awaken, who,
+like several other articles of wedding-furniture, had been borrowed for
+a day or two from Flachsenfingen. At two doors he knocked in vain, and
+without answer; for all were already down at the hearth, cooking,
+blowing; and arranging.
+
+How softly does the Spring day gradually fold back its nun-veil,
+and the Earth grow bright, as if it were the morning of a
+Resurrection!--The quicksilver-pillar of the barometer, the guiding
+Fire-pillar of the weather-prophet, rests firmly on Fixlein's Ark
+of the Covenant. The Sun raises himself, pure and cool, into the
+morning-blue, instead of into the morning-red. Swallows, instead of
+clouds, shoot skimming through the melodious air ... O, the good
+Genius of Fair Weather, who deserves many temples and festivals
+(because without him no festival could be held), lifted an ethereal,
+azure Day, as it were, from the well-clear atmosphere of the Moon,
+and sent it down, on blue butterfly-wings,--as if it were a _blue_
+Monday,--glittering below the Sun, in the zigzag of joyful, quivering
+descent, upon the narrow spot of Earth, which our heated fancies are
+now viewing .... And on this balmy, vernal spot stand, amid flowers,
+over which the trees are shaking blossoms instead of leaves, a bride
+and a bridegroom.... Happy Fixlein! how shall I paint thee without
+deepening the sighs of longing in the fairest souls?
+
+But soft! we will not drink the magic cup of Fancy to the bottom at six
+in the morning; but keep sober till towards night!
+
+At the sound of the morning prayer-bell, the bridegroom, for the din of
+preparation was disturbing his quiet orison, went out into the
+churchyard, which (as in many other places), together with the church,
+lay round his mansion like a court. Here on the moist green, over whose
+closed flowers the churchyard wall was still spreading broad shadows,
+did his spirit cool itself from the warm dreams of Earth; here, where
+the white flat gravestone of his Teacher lay before him like the
+fallen-in door on the Janus's-temple of Life, or like the windward side
+of the narrow house, turned towards the tempests of the world; here,
+where the little shrunk metallic door on the grated cross of his father
+uttered to him the inscriptions of death, and the year when his parent
+departed, and all the admonitions and mementos, graven on the
+lead;--there, I say, his mood grew softer and more solemn; and he now
+lifted up by heart his morning prayer, which usually he read; and
+entreated God to bless him in his office, and to spare his mother's
+life, and to look with favor and acceptance on the purpose of to-day.
+Then over the graves he walked into his fenceless little angular
+flower-garden; and here, composed and confident in the Divine keeping,
+he pressed the stalks of his tulips deeper into the mellow earth.
+
+But on returning to the house, he was met on all hands by the
+bell-ringing and the Janizary-music of wedding-gladness;--the
+marriage-guests had all thrown off their nightcaps, and were
+drinking diligently;--there was a clattering, a cooking, a
+frizzling;--tea-services, coffee-services, and warm beer-services, were
+advancing in succession; and plates full of bride-cakes were going
+round like potters' frames or cistern-wheels.--The Schoolmaster, with
+three young lads, was heard rehearsing from his own house an _Arioso_,
+with which, so soon as they were perfect, he purposed to surprise his
+clerical superior.--But now rushed all the arms of the foaming
+joy-streams into one, when the sky-queen besprinkled with blossoms, the
+bride, descended upon Earth in her timid joy, full of quivering, humble
+love;--when the bells began;--when the procession-column set forth with
+the whole village round and before it;--when the organ, the
+congregation, the officiating priest, and the sparrows on the trees of
+the church-window, struck louder and louder their rolling peals on the
+drum of the jubilee-festival.... The heart of the singing bridegroom
+was like to leap from its place for joy, "that on his bridal-day it was
+all so respectable and grand."--Not till the marriage benediction could
+he pray a little.
+
+Still worse and louder grew the business during dinner, when
+pastry-work and marchpane-devices were brought forward,--when glasses
+and slain fishes (laid under the napkins to frighten the guests) went
+round;--and when the guests rose, and themselves went round, and at
+length danced round; for they had instrumental music from the city
+there.
+
+One minute handed over to the other the sugar-bowl and bottle-case of
+joy; the guests heard and saw less and less, and the villagers began to
+see and hear more and more, and towards night they penetrated like a
+wedge into the open door,--nay, two youths ventured even, in the middle
+of the parsonage-court, to mount a plank over a beam, and commence
+seesawing. Out of doors, the gleaming vapor of the departed Sun was
+encircling the Earth, the evening star was glittering over parsonage
+and churchyard; no one heeded it.
+
+However, about nine o'clock,--when the marriage-guests had wellnigh
+forgotten the marriage-pair, and were drinking or dancing along for
+their own behoof; when poor mortals, in this sunshine of Fate, like
+fishes in the sunshine of the sky, were leaping up from their wet, cold
+element; and when the bridegroom, under the star of happiness and love,
+casting like a comet its long train of radiance over all his heaven,
+had in secret pressed to his joy-filled breast his bride and his
+mother,--then did he lock a slice of wedding-bread privily into a
+press, in the old superstitious belief, that this residue secured
+continuance of bread for the whole marriage. As he returned, with
+greater love for the sole partner of his life, she herself met him with
+his mother, to deliver him in private the bridal-nightgown and
+bridal-shirt, as is the ancient usage. Many a countenance grows pale in
+violent emotions, even of joy; Thiennette's wax-face was bleaching
+still whiter under the sunbeams of Happiness. O never fall, thou lily
+of Heaven, and may four springs instead of four seasons open and shut
+thy flower-bells to the sun! All the arms of his soul as he floated on
+the sea of joy were quivering to clasp the soft, warm heart of his
+beloved, to encircle it gently and fast, and draw it to his own....
+
+He led her from the crowded dancing-room into the cool evening. Why
+does the evening, does the night, put warmer love in our hearts? Is it
+the nightly pressure of helplessness; or is it the exalting separation
+from the turmoil of life; that veiling of the world, in which for the
+soul nothing more remains but souls;--is it therefore, that the letters
+in which the loved name stands written on our spirit appear, like
+phosphorus-writing, by night _in fire_, while by day in their _cloudy_
+traces they but smoke?
+
+He walked with his bride into the Castle-garden; she hastened quickly
+through the castle, and past its servants'-hall, where the fair flowers
+of her young life had been crushed broad and dry, under a long, dreary
+pressure; and her soul expanded, and breathed in the free open garden,
+on whose flowery soil destiny had cast forth the first seeds of the
+blossoms which to-day were gladdening her existence. Still Eden! Green
+flower-checkered _chiaroscuro_!--The moon is sleeping under ground like
+a dead one; but beyond the garden the sun's red evening-clouds have
+fallen down like rose-leaves; and the evening-star, the brideman of the
+sun, hovers, like a glancing butterfly, above the rosy red, and, modest
+as a bride, deprives no single starlet of its light.
+
+The wandering pair arrived at the old gardener's hut; now standing
+locked and dumb, with dark windows in the light garden, like a fragment
+of the Past surviving in the Present. Bared twigs of trees were
+folding, with clammy, half-formed leaves, over the thick, intertwisted
+tangles of the bushes.--The Spring was standing, like a conqueror,
+with Winter at his feet.--In the blue pond, now bloodless, a dusky
+evening-sky lay hollowed out, and the gushing waters were moistening
+the flower-beds.--The silver sparks of stars were rising on the altar
+of the East, and falling down extinguished in the red sea of the West.
+
+The wind whirred, like a night-bird, louder through the trees; and gave
+tones to the acacia-grove, and the tones called to the pair who had
+first become happy within it: "Enter, new mortal pair, and think of
+what is past, and of my withering and your own; and be holy as
+Eternity, and weep not only for joy, but for gratitude also!"--And the
+wet-eyed bridegroom led his wet-eyed bride under the blossoms, and laid
+his soul, like a flower, on her heart, and said: "Best Thiennette, I am
+unspeakably happy, and would say much, and cannot.--Ah, thou Dearest,
+we will live like angels, like children together! Surely I will do all
+that is good to thee; two years ago I had nothing, no nothing; ah, it
+is through thee, best love, that I am happy. I call thee Thou, now,
+thou dear good soul!" She drew him closer to her, and said, though
+without kissing him: "Call me Thou always, Dearest!"
+
+And as they stept forth again from the sacred grove into the
+magic-dusky garden, he took off his hat; first, that he might
+internally thank God, and secondly, because he wished to look into this
+fairest evening sky.
+
+They reached the blazing, rustling marriage-house, but their softened
+hearts sought stillness; and a foreign touch, as in the blossoming
+vine, would have disturbed the flower-nuptials of their souls. They
+turned rather, and winded up into the churchyard to preserve their
+mood. Majestic on the groves and mountains stood the Night before man's
+heart, and made it also great. Over the _white_ steeple-obelisk the sky
+rested _bluer_ and _darker_; and behind it wavered the withered summit
+of the May-pole with faded flag. The son noticed his father's grave, on
+which the wind was opening and shutting, with harsh noise, the little
+door of the metal cross, to let the year of his death be read on the
+brass plate within. An overpowering sadness seized his heart with
+violent streams of tears, and drove him to the sunk hillock, and he led
+his bride to the grave, and said: "Here sleeps he, my good father; in
+his thirty-second year he was carried hither to his long rest. O Thou
+good, dear father, couldst thou to-day but see the happiness of thy
+son, like my mother! But thy eyes are empty, and thy breast is full of
+ashes, and thou seest us not."--He was silent. The bride wept aloud;
+she saw the mouldering coffins of her parents open, and the two dead
+arise and look round for their daughter, who had stayed so long behind
+them, forsaken on the Earth. She fell upon his heart, and faltered: "O
+beloved, I have neither father nor mother; do not forsake me!"
+
+O thou who hast still a father and a mother, thank God for it, on the
+day when thy soul is full of joyful tears, and needs a bosom wherein to
+shed them....
+
+And with this embracing at a father's grave, let this day of joy be
+holily concluded.--
+
+
+
+
+ TENTH LETTER-BOX.
+
+ St. Thomas's-Day and Birthday.
+
+
+An Author is a sort of bee-keeper for his reader-swarm; in whose behalf
+he separates the Flora kept for their use into different seasons, and
+here accelerates, and there retards, the blossoming of many a flower,
+that so in all chapters there be blooming.
+
+The goddess of Love and the angel of Peace conducted our married pair
+on tracks running over full meadows, through the Spring; and on
+footpaths hidden by high corn-fields, through the Summer; and Autumn,
+as they advanced towards Winter, spread her marble leaves under their
+feet. And thus they arrived before the low, dark gate of Winter, full
+of life, full of love, trustful, contented, sound, and ruddy.
+
+On St. Thomas's-day was Thiennette's birthday as well as Winter's.
+About a quarter past nine, just when the singing ceases in the church,
+we shall take a peep through the window into the interior of the
+parsonage. There is nothing here but the old mother, who has all day
+(the son having restricted her to rest, and not work) been gliding
+about, and brushing, and burnishing, and scouring, and wiping; every
+carved chair-leg, and every brass nail of the waxcloth-covered table,
+she has polished into brightness;--everything hangs, as with all
+married people who have no children, in its right place, brushes,
+fly-flaps, and almanacs;--the chairs are stationed by the room-police
+in their ancient corners;--a flax-rock, encircled with a diadem, or
+scarf of azure riband, is lying in the Schadeck-bed, because, though it
+is a half-holiday, some spinning may go on;--the narrow slips of paper,
+whereon heads of sermons are to be arranged, lie white beside the
+sermons themselves, that is, beside the octavo paper-book which
+holds them, for the Parson and his work-table, by reason of the cold,
+have migrated from the study to the sitting-room;--his large furred
+doublet is hanging beside his clean bridegroom-nightgown; there is
+nothing wanting in the room but He and She. For he had preached her
+with him to-night into the empty Apostle's-day church, that so
+her mother, without witnesses,--except the two or three thousand
+readers who are peeping with me through the window,--might arrange
+the provender-baking, and whole commissariat department of the
+birthday-festival, and spread out her best table-gear and
+victual-stores without obstruction.
+
+The soul-curer reckoned it no sin to admonish, and exhort, and
+encourage, and threaten his parishioners, till he felt pretty
+certain that the soup must be smoking on the plates. Then he led
+his birthday helpmate home, and suddenly placed her before the altar
+of meat-offering, before a sweet title-page of bread-tart, on which
+her name stood baked, in true _monastic characters_, in tooth-letters
+of almonds. In the background of time and of the room, I yet conceal
+two--bottles of Pontac. How quickly, under the sunshine of joy, do thy
+cheeks grow ripe, Thiennette, when thy husband solemnly says: "This is
+thy birthday; and may the Lord bless thee, and watch over thee, and
+cause his countenance to shine on thee, and send thee, to the joy of
+our mother and thy husband especially, a happy, glad _recovery_.
+Amen!"--And when Thiennette perceived that it was the old mistress who
+had cooked and served up all this herself, she fell upon her neck, as
+if it had been not her husband's mother, but her own.
+
+Emotion conquers the appetite. But Fixlein's stomach was as strong as
+his heart; and with him no species of movement could subdue the
+peristaltic. Drink is the friction-oil of the tongue, as eating is its
+drag. Yet, not till he had eaten and spoken much, did the pastor fill
+the glasses. Then indeed he drew the corksluice from the bottle, and
+set forth its streams. The sickly mother, of a being still hid beneath
+her heart, turned her eyes, in embarrassed emotion, on the old
+woman only; and could scarcely chide him for sending to the city
+wine-merchant on her account. He took a glass in each hand, for each of
+the two whom he loved, and handed them to his mother and his wife, and
+said: "To thy long, long life, Thiennette!--And your health and
+happiness, Mamma!--And a glad arrival to our little one, if God so
+bless us!" "My son," said the gardeneress, "it is to thy long life that
+we must drink; for it is by thee we are supported. God grant thee
+length of days!" added she, with stifled voice, and her eyes betrayed
+her tears.
+
+I nowhere find a livelier emblem of the female sex, in all its
+boundless levity, than in the case where a woman is carrying the angel
+of Death beneath her heart, and yet in these nine months full of mortal
+tokens thinks of nothing more important than of who shall be the
+gossips, and what shall be cooked at the christening. But thou,
+Thiennette, hadst nobler thoughts, though these too along with them.
+The still hidden darling of thy heart was resting before thy eyes like
+a little angel sculptured on a gravestone, and pointing with its small
+finger to the hour when thou shouldst die; and every morning and every
+evening thou thoughtest of death with a certainty of which I yet knew
+not the reasons; and to thee it was as if the Earth were a dark mineral
+cave, where man's blood, like stalactitic water, drops down, and in
+dropping raises shapes which gleam so transiently, and so quickly fade
+away! And that was the cause why tears were continually trickling from
+thy soft eyes, and betraying all thy anxious thoughts about thy child;
+but thou repaidst these sad effusions of thy heart by the embrace in
+which, with new-awakened love, thou fellest on thy husband's neck, and
+saidst: "Be as it may, God's will be done, so thou and my child are
+left alive!--But I know well that thou, Dearest, lovest me as I do
+thee." ... Lay thy hand, good mother, full of blessings, on the two;
+and thou, kind Fate, never lift thine away from them!--
+
+It is with emotion and good wishes that I witness the kiss of two fair
+friends, or the embracing of two virtuous lovers; and from the fire of
+their altar sparks fly over to me; but what is this to our sympathetic
+exaltation when we see two mortals, bending under the same burden,
+bound to the same duties, animated to the same care for the same little
+darlings, fall on one another's overflowing hearts, in some fair hour?
+And if these, moreover, are two mortals who already wear the mourning
+weeds of life, I mean old age, whose hair and cheeks are now grown
+colorless, and eyes grown dim, and whose faces a thousand thorns have
+marred into images of Sorrow;--when these two clasp each other with
+such wearied, aged arms, and so near to the precipice of the grave, and
+when they say or think: "All in us is dead, but not our love--O we have
+lived and suffered long together, and now we will hold out our hands to
+Death together also, and let him carry us away together,"--does not all
+within us cry: O Love, thy spark is superior to Time; it burns neither
+in joy nor in the cheek of roses; it dies not, neither under a
+thousand tears nor under the snow of old age, nor under the ashes of
+thy--beloved. It never dies; and Thou, All-good! if there were no
+eternal love, there were no love at all....
+
+To the Parson it was easier than it is to me to pave for himself a
+transition from the heart to the digestive faculty. He now submitted to
+Thiennette (whose voice at once grew cheerful, while her eyes time
+after time began to sparkle) his purpose to take advantage of the
+frosty weather and have the winter meat slaughtered and salted. "The
+pig can scarcely rise," said he; and forthwith he fixed the
+determination of the women, further the butcher, and the day, and all
+_et ceteras_; appointing everything with a degree of punctuality,
+such as the war-college (when it applies the cupping-glass, the
+battle-sword, to the overfull system of mankind) exhibits on the
+previous day, in its arrangements, before it drives a province into the
+baiting-ring and slaughter-house.
+
+This settled, he began to talk and feel quite joyously about the course
+of winter, which had commenced to-day at two-and-twenty minutes past
+eight in the morning; "for," said he, "new-year is close at hand; and
+we shall not need so much candle to-morrow night as to-night." His
+mother, it is true, came athwart him with the weapons of her five
+senses; but he fronted her with his Astronomical Tables, and proved
+that the lengthening of the day was no less undeniable than
+imperceptible. In the last place, like most official and married
+persons, heeding little whether his women took him or not, he informed
+them, in juristico-theological phrase: "That he would put off no
+longer, but write this very afternoon to the venerable Consistorium,
+in whose hands lay the _jus circa sacra_, for a new Ball to the
+church-steeple; and the rather, as he hoped before new-year's day to
+raise a bountiful subscription from the parish for this purpose. If God
+spare us till spring," added he, with peculiar cheerfulness, "and thou
+wert happily recovered, I might so arrange the whole that the ball
+should be set up at thy first churchgoing, dame!"
+
+Thereupon he shifted his chair from the dinner and dessert table to the
+work-table; and spent the half of his afternoon over the petition for
+the steeple-ball. As there still remained a little space till dusk, he
+clapped his tackle to his new learned _Opus_, of which I must now
+afford a little glimpse. Out of doors among the snow, there stood near
+Hukelum an old Robber-Castle, which Fixlein, every day in Autumn, had
+hovered round like a _revenant_, with a view to gauge it,
+ichnographically to delineate it, to put every window-bar and every
+bridle-hook of it correctly on paper. He believed he was not expecting
+too much, if thereby--and by some drawings of the not so much vertical
+as horizontal walls--he hoped to impart to his "_Architectural
+Correspondence of two Friends concerning the Hukelum Robber-Castle_"
+that last polish and labor _limæ_ which contents Reviewers. For towards
+the critical Star-chamber of the Reviewers he entertained not that
+contempt which some authors actually feel--or only affect, as, for
+instance, I. From this mouldered Robber-_Louvre_, there grew for him
+more flowers of joy than ever in all probability had grown from it of
+old for its owners.--To my knowledge, it is an anecdote not hitherto
+made public, that for all this no man but _Büsching_ has to answer.
+Fixlein had, not long ago, among the rubbish of the church letter-room,
+stumbled on a paper wherein the Geographer had been requesting special
+information about the statistics of the village. Büsching, it is true,
+had picked up nothing,--accordingly, indeed, Hukelum, in his
+_Geography_, is still omitted altogether;--but this pestilential letter
+had infected Fixlein with the spring-fever of Ambition, so that his
+palpitating heart was no longer to be stilled or held in check, except
+by the assaf[oe]tida-emulsion of a review. It is with authorcraft as
+with love; both of them for decades long one may equally desire and
+forbear; but is the first spark once thrown into the powder-magazine,
+it burns to the end of the chapter.
+
+Simply because winter had commenced by the Almanac, the fire must be
+larger than usual; for warm rooms, like large furs and bear-skin caps,
+were things which he loved more than you would figure. The dusk, this
+fair _chiaroscuro_ of the day, this colored foreground of the night, he
+lengthened out as far as possible, that he might study Christmas
+discourses therein; and yet could his wife, without scruple, just as he
+was pacing up and down the room, with the sowing-sheet full of divine
+word-seeds hung round his shoulder,--hold up to him a spoonful of
+alegar, that he might try the same in his palate, and decide whether
+she should yet draw it off. Nay, did he not in all cases, though
+fonder of roe-fishes himself, order a milter to be drawn from the
+herring-barrel, because his good-wife liked it better?--
+
+Here light was brought in; and as Winter was just now commencing
+his glass-painting on the windows, his ice flower-pieces, and his
+snow-foliage, our Parson felt that it was time to read something cold,
+which he pleasantly named his cold collation; namely, the description
+of some unutterably frosty land. On the present occasion, it was the
+winter history of the four Russian sailors on Nova Zembla. I, for my
+share, do often in summer, when the sultry zephyr is inflating the
+flower-bells, append certain charts and sketches of Italy, or the East,
+as additional landscapes to those among which I am sitting. And yet
+to-night he further took up the _Weekly Chronicle_ of Flachsenfingen;
+and amid the bombshells, pestilences, famines, comets with long tails,
+and the roaring of all the Hell-floods of another Thirty Years' War, he
+could still listen with the one ear towards the kitchen, where the
+salad for his roast-duck was just a-cutting.
+
+Good-night, old Fixlein! I am tired. May kind Heaven send thee, with
+the young year 1794, when the Earth shall again carry her people, like
+precious night-moths, on leaves and flowers, the new steeple-ball, and
+a thick, handsome--boy, to boot!
+
+
+
+
+ ELEVENTH LETTER-BOX.
+
+ Spring; Investiture; and Childbirth.
+
+
+I have just risen from a singular dream; but the foregoing Box makes it
+natural. I dreamed that all was verdant, all full of odors; and I was
+looking up at a steeple-ball glittering in the sun, from my station
+in the window of a little white garden-house, my eyelids full of
+flower-pollen, my shoulders full of thin cherry-blossoms, and my ears
+full of humming from the neighboring beehives. Then, methought,
+advancing slowly through the beds, came the Hukelum Parson, and stept
+into the garden-house, and solemnly said to me: "Honored Sir, my wife
+has just brought me a little boy; and I make bold to solicit _your
+Honor_ to do the holy office for the same, when it shall be received
+into the bosom of the church."
+
+I naturally started up, and there was--Parson Fixlein standing bodily
+at my bedside, and requesting me to be godfather; for Thiennette had
+given him a son last night about one o'clock. The confinement had been
+as light and happy as could be conceived; for this reason, that the
+father had, some months before, been careful to provide one of those
+_Klappersteins_, as we call them, which are found in the aerie of the
+eagle, and therewith to alleviate the travail; for this stone performs,
+in its way, all the service which the bonnet of that old Minorite monk
+in Naples, of whom Gorani informs us, could accomplish for people in
+such circumstances, who put it on....
+
+--I might vex the reader still longer; but I willingly give up, and
+show him how the matter stood.
+
+Such a May as the present (of 1794) Nature has not, in the memory of
+man--begun; for this is but the fifteenth of it. People of reflection
+have for centuries been vexed once every year, that our German singers
+should indite May-songs, since several other months deserve such a
+poetical night-music much better; and I myself have often gone so far
+as to adopt the idiom of our market-women, and instead of May butter,
+to say June butter, as also June, March, April songs.--But thou, kind
+May of this year, thou deservest to thyself all the songs which were
+ever made on thy rude namesakes!--By Heaven! when I now issue from the
+wavering, checkered acacia-grove of the Castle-garden, in which I am
+writing this Chapter, and come forth into the broad, living day, and
+look up to the warming Heaven, and over its Earth budding out beneath
+it,--the Spring rises before me like a vast full cloud, with a splendor
+of blue and green. I see the Sun standing amid roses in the western
+sky, into which he has thrown his ray-brush, wherewith he has to-day
+been painting the Earth;--and when I look round a little in our
+picture-exhibition, his enamelling is still hot on the mountains; on
+the moist chalk of the moist Earth, the flowers full of sap-colors are
+laid out to dry, and the forget-me-not with miniature colors; under the
+varnish of the streams, the skyey Painter has pencilled his own eye;
+and the clouds, like a decoration-painter, he has touched off with wild
+outlines and single tints; and so he stands at the border of the Earth,
+and looks back upon his stately Spring, whose robe-folds are valleys,
+whose breast-bouquet is gardens, and whose blush is a vernal evening,
+and who, when she arises, shall be--Summer.
+
+But to proceed! Every spring--and especially in such a spring--I
+imitate on foot our birds of passage; and travel off the
+hypochondriacal sediment of winter; but I do not think I should have
+seen even the steeple-ball of Hukelum, which is to be set up one of
+these days, to say nothing of the Parson's family, had not I happened
+to be visiting the Flachsenfingen Superintendent and Consistorialrath.
+From him I got acquainted with Fixlein's history,--every Candidatus
+must deliver an account of his life to the Consistorium,--and with his
+still madder petition for a steeple-ball. I observed, with pleasure,
+how gayly the cob was diving and swashing about in his duck-pool and
+milk-bath of life; and forthwith determined on a journey to his shore.
+It is singular, that is to say, manlike, that when we have for years
+kept prizing and describing some original person or original book, yet
+the moment we see such, they anger us; we would have them fit us and
+delight us in all points, as if any originality could do this but our
+own.
+
+It was Saturday, the third of May, when I, with the Superintendent, the
+_Senior Capituli_, and some temporal Raths, mounted and rolled off, and
+in two carriages were driven to the Parson's door. The matter was, he
+was not yet--_invested_, and to-morrow this was to be done. I little
+thought, while we whirled by the white espalier of the Castle-garden,
+that there I was to write another book.
+
+I still see the Parson, in his peruke-minever and head-case, come
+springing to the coach-door and lead us out; so smiling--so
+courteous--so vain of the disloaded freight, and so attentive to it. He
+looked as if in the journey of life he had never once put on the
+_travelling-gauze_ of Sorrow; Thiennette again seemed never to have
+thrown hers back. How neat was everything in the house, how dainty,
+decorated, and polished! And yet so quiet, without the cursed
+alarm-ringing of servants' bells, and without the bass-drum tumult of
+stair-pedalling. Whilst the gentlemen, my road-companions, were sitting
+in state in the upper room, I flitted, as my way is, like a smell over
+the whole house, and my path led me through the sitting-room over the
+kitchen, and at last into the churchyard beside the house. Good
+Saturday! I will paint thy hours as I may, with the black asphaltos of
+ink, on the tablets of other souls! In the sitting-room, I lifted from
+the desk a volume gilt on the back and edges, and bearing this title:
+"_Holy Sayings, by Fixlein. First Collection_." And as I looked to see
+where it had been printed, the Holy Collection turned out to be in
+writing. I handled the quills, and dipped into the negro-black of the
+ink, and I found that all was right and good. With your fluttering
+gentlemen of letters, who hold only a department of the foreign, and
+none of the home affairs nothing (except some other things about them)
+can be worse than their ink and pens. I also found a little
+copperplate, to which I shall in due time return.
+
+In the kitchen, a place not more essential for the writing of an
+English novel than for the acting of a German one, I could plant myself
+beside Thiennette, and help her to blow the fire, and look at once into
+her face and her burning coals. Though she was in wedlock, a state in
+which white roses on the cheeks are changed for red ones, and young
+women are similar to a similitude given in my Note;[60]--and although
+the blazing wood threw a false rouge over her, I guessed how pale she
+must have been; and my sympathy in her paleness rose still higher at
+the thought of the burden which Fate had now not so much taken from
+her, as laid in her arms and nearer to her heart. In truth, a man must
+never have reflected on the Creation-moment, when the Universe first
+rose from the bosom of an Eternity, if he does not view with
+philosophic reverence a woman, whose thread of life a secret,
+all-wondrous Hand is spinning to a second thread, and who veils within
+her the transition from Nothingness to Existence, from Eternity to
+time;--but still less can a man have any heart of flesh, if his soul,
+in presence of a woman, who, to an unknown, unseen being, is
+sacrificing more than we will sacrifice when it is seen and known,
+namely, her nights, her joys, often her life, does not bow lower, and
+with deeper emotion, than in presence of a whole nun-orchestra on their
+Sahara-desert;--and worse than either is the man for whom his own
+mother has not made all other mothers venerable.
+
+"It is little serviceable to thee, poor Thiennette," thought I, "that
+now, when thy bitter cup of sickness is made to run over, thou must
+have loud festivities come crowding round thee." I meant the
+Investiture and the Ball-raising. My rank, the diploma of which the
+reader will find stitched in with the _Dog-post-days_, and which had
+formerly been hers, brought about my ears a host of repelling,
+embarrassed, wavering titles of address from her; which people, to whom
+they have once belonged, are at all times apt to parade before
+superiors or inferiors, and which it now cost me no little trouble to
+disperse. Through the whole Saturday and Sunday I could never get into
+the right track either with her or him, till the other guests were
+gone. As for the mother, she acted, like obscure ideas, powerfully and
+constantly, but out of view; this arose in part from her idolatrous
+fear of us; and partly also from a slight shade of care (probably
+springing from the state of her daughter), which had spread over her
+like a little cloud.
+
+I cruised about, so long as the moon-crescent glimmered in the sky,
+over the churchyard; and softened my fantasies, which are at any rate
+too prone to paint with the brown of crumbling mummies, not only by the
+red of twilight, but also by reflecting how easily our eyes and our
+hearts can become reconciled even to the ruins of Death; a reflection
+which the Schoolmaster, whistling as he arranged the charnel-house for
+the morrow, and the Parson's maid singing, as she reaped away the grass
+from the graves, readily enough suggested to me. And why should not
+this habituation to all forms of Fate in the other world, also, be a
+gift reserved for us in our nature by the bounty of our great
+Preserver?--I perused the gravestones; and I think even now that
+Superstition[61] is right in connecting with the reading of such things
+a loss of _memory_; at all events, one does _forget_ a thousand things
+belonging to this world....
+
+The Investiture on Sunday (whose Gospel, of the Good Shepherd,
+suited well with the ceremony) I must despatch in few words; because
+nothing truly sublime can bear to be treated of in many. However, I
+shall impart the most memorable circumstances, when I say that
+there was--drinking (in the Parsonage),--music-making (in the
+Choir),--reading (of the Presentation by the Senior, and of the
+Ratification-rescript by the lay Rath),--and preaching, by the
+Consistorialrath, who took the soul-curer by the hand, and presented,
+made over, and guaranteed him to the congregation, and them to him.
+Fixlein felt that he was departing as a high-priest from the church
+which he had entered as a country parson, and all day he had not once
+the heart to ban. When a man is treated with solemnity, he looks upon
+himself as a higher nature, and goes through his solemn feasts
+devoutly.
+
+This indenturing, this monastic profession, our Head-Rabbis and
+Lodge-masters (our Superintendents) have usually a taste for putting
+off till once the pastor has been some years ministering among the
+people, to whom they hereby present him; as the early Christians
+frequently postponed their consecration and investiture to
+Christianity, their baptism namely, till the day when they died. Nay, I
+do not even think this clerical Investiture would lose much of its
+usefulness, if it and the declaring-vacant of the office were reserved
+for the same day; the rather, as this usefulness consists entirely in
+two items; what the Superintendent and his Raths can eat, and what they
+can pocket.
+
+Not till towards evening did the Parson and I get acquainted. The
+Investiture officials and elevation pulley-men had, throughout the
+whole evening, been very violently--breathing. I mean thus; as these
+gentlemen could not but be aware, by the most ancient theories and the
+latest experiments, that air was nothing else than a sort of rarefied
+and exploded water, it became easy for them to infer, that, conversely,
+water was nothing else than a denser sort of air. Wine-drinking,
+therefore, is nothing else but the breathing of an air pressed together
+into proper spissitude, and sprinkled over with a few perfumes. Now, in
+our days, by clerical persons too much (fluid) breath can never be
+inhaled through the mouth; seeing the dignity of their station excludes
+them from that breathing through the _smaller_ pores which Abernethy so
+highly recommends under the name of _air-bath_; and can the Gullet in
+their case be aught else than door-neighbor to the Windpipe, the
+_consonant_ and fellow-shoot of the Windpipe?--I am running astray; I
+meant to signify that I this evening had adopted the same opinion; only
+that I used air or ether, not like the rest for loud laughter, but for
+the more quiet contemplation of life in general. I even shot forth at
+my gossip certain speeches which betrayed devoutness. These he at first
+took for jests, being aware that I was from Court, and of quality. But
+the concave mirror of the wine-mist at length suspended the images of
+my soul, enlarged and embodied like spiritual shapes, in the air before
+me.--Life shaded itself off to my eyes like a hasty summer night, which
+we little fireflies shoot across with transient gleam;--I said to him
+that man must turn himself like the leaves of the great mallow, at the
+different day-seasons of his life, now to the rising sun, now to the
+setting, now to the night, towards the Earth and its graves;--I said,
+the omnipotence of Goodness was driving us and the centuries of the
+world towards the gates of the City of God, as, according to Euler, the
+resistance of the _Ether_ leads the circling Earth towards the Sun,
+&c., &c.
+
+On the strength of these entremets, he considered me the first
+theologian of his age; and had he been obliged to go to war, would
+previously have taken my advice on the matter, as belligerent powers
+were wont of old from the theologians of the Reformation. I hide not
+from myself, however, that what preachers call vanity of the world is
+something altogether different from what philosophy so calls. When I,
+moreover, signified to him that I was not ashamed to be an Author; but
+had a turn for working up this and the other biography; and that I had
+got a sight of his _Life_ in the hands of the Superintendent; and might
+be in case to prepare a printed one therefrom, if so were he would
+assist me with here and there a tint of flesh-color,--then was my silk,
+which, alas! not only isolates one from electric fire, but also from a
+kindlier sort of it, the only grate which rose between his arms and me;
+for, like the most part of poor country parsons, it was not in his
+power to forget the rank of any man, or to vivify his own on a higher
+one. He said: "He would acknowledge it with veneration, if I should
+mention him in print; but he was much afraid his life was too common
+and too poor for a biography." Nevertheless, he opened me the drawer of
+his Letter-boxes, and said, perhaps he had hereby been paving the way
+for me.
+
+The main point, however, was, he hoped that his _Errata_, his
+_Exercitationes_, and his _Letters on the Robber-Castle_, if I should
+previously send forth a Life of the Author, might be better received;
+and that it would be much the same as if I accompanied them with a
+Preface.
+
+In short, when on Monday the other dignitaries with their nimbus of
+splendor had dissipated, I alone, like a precipitate, abode with him;
+and am still abiding, that is, from the fifth of May (the Public should
+take the Almanac of 1794, and keep it open beside them) to the
+fifteenth; to-day is Thursday, to-morrow is the sixteenth and Friday,
+when comes the Spinat-Kirmes, or Spinage-Wake, as they call it, and the
+uplifting of the steeple-ball, which I just purposed to await before I
+went. Now, however, I do not go so soon; for on Sunday I have to assist
+at the baptismal ceremony, as baptismal agent for my little future
+godson. Whoever pays attention to me, and keeps the Almanac open, may
+readily guess why the christening is put off till Sunday; for it is
+that memorable Cantata-Sunday, which once, for its mad, narcotic
+hemlock-virtues, was of importance in our History; but is now so only
+for the fair betrothment, which after two years we mean to celebrate
+with a baptism.
+
+Truly it is not in my power--for want of colors and presses--to paint
+or print upon my paper the soft, balmy flower-garland of a fortnight
+which has here wound itself about my sickly life; but with a single day
+I shall attempt it. Man, I know well, cannot prognosticate either his
+joys or his sorrows, still less repeat them, either in living or
+writing.
+
+The black hour of coffee has gold in its mouth for us and honey; here,
+in the morning coolness, we are all gathered; we maintain popular
+conversation, that so the parsoness and the gardeneress may be able to
+take share in it. The morning service in the church, where often the
+whole people[62] are sitting and singing, divides us. While the bell is
+sounding, I march with my writing-gear into the singing Castle-garden;
+and seat myself in the fresh acacia-grove, at the dewy two-legged
+table. Fixlein's Letter-boxes I keep by me in my pocket; and I
+have only to look and abstract from his what can be of use In my
+own.--Strange enough! so easily do we forget a thing in describing it,
+I really did not recollect for a moment that I am now sitting at the
+very grove-table of which I speak, and writing all this.--
+
+My gossip in the mean time is also laboring for the world. His study is
+a sort of sacristy, and his printing-press a pulpit, wherefrom he
+preaches to all men; for an Author is the Town-chaplain of the
+Universe. A man who is making a book will scarcely hang himself; all
+rich lords'-sons, therefore, should labor for the press; for, in that
+case, when you awake too early in bed, you have always a _plan_, an
+aim, and therefore a cause before you why you should get out of it.
+Better off, too, is the author who collects rather than invents,--for
+the latter with its eating fire calcines the heart; I praise the
+Antiquary, the Heraldist, Note-maker, Compiler; I esteem the
+_Title-perch_ (a fish called _Perca-Diagramma_, because of the letters
+on its scales), and the _Printer_ (a chafer, called _Scarabæus
+Typographus_, which eats letters in the bark of fir),--neither of them
+needs any greater or fairer arena in the world than a piece of
+rag-paper, or any other laying apparatus than a pointed pencil,
+wherewith to lay his four-and-twenty letter-eggs.--In regard to the
+_catalogue raisonné_, which my gossip is now drawing up of German
+_Errata_, I have several times suggested to him, "that it were good if
+he extended his researches in one respect, and revised the rule by
+which it has been computed, that, e. g. for a hundred-weight of pica
+black-letter, four hundred and fifty semicolons, three hundred periods,
+&c., are required; and to recount, and see whether, in Political
+writings and Dedications, the fifty notes of admiration for a
+hundred-weight of pica black-letter were not far too small an
+allowance, and if so, what the real quantity was."
+
+Several days he wrote nothing; but wrapped himself in the slough of his
+parson's-cloak; and so in his canonicals, beside the Schoolmaster, put
+the few A-b-c shooters which were not, like forest-shooters, absent on
+furlough by reason of the spring, through their platoon firing in the
+Hornbook. He never did more than his duty, but also never less. It
+brought a soft, benignant warmth over his heart, to think that he, who
+had once ducked under a School-inspectorship, was now one himself.
+
+About ten o'clock we meet from our different museums, and examine the
+village, especially the Biographical furniture and holy places, which I
+chance that morning to have had under my pen or pentagraph; because I
+look at them with more interest _after_ my description than _before_
+it.
+
+Next comes dinner.--
+
+After the concluding grace, which is too long, we both of us set to
+entering the charitable subsidies and religious donations, which our
+parishioners have remitted to the sinking or rather rising fund of the
+church-box for the purchase of the new steeple-globe, into two ledgers;
+the one of these, with the names of the subscribers, or (in case they
+have subscribed for their children) with their children's names
+also, is to be inurned in a leaden capsule, and preserved in the
+steeple-ball; the other will remain below among the parish Registers.
+You cannot fancy what contributions the ambition of getting into the
+Ball brings us in; I declare, several peasants, who had given and well
+once already, contributed again when they had baptisms; must not little
+Hans be in the Ball too?
+
+After this book-keeping by double entry, my gossip took to engraving on
+copper. He had been so happy as to elicit the discovery, that, from a
+certain stroke resembling an inverted Latin S, the capital letters of
+our German Chancery-hand, beautiful and intertwisted as you see them
+stand in Law-deeds and Letters-of-nobility, may every one of them be
+composed and spun out.
+
+"Before you can count sixty," said he to me, "I take my
+fundamental-stroke and make you any letter out of it."
+
+I merely inverted this fundamental-stroke, that is, gave him a German
+S, and counted sixty till he had it done. This line of beauty, when
+once it has been twisted and flourished into all the capitals, he
+purposes, by copperplates which he is himself engraving, to make more
+common for the use of Chanceries; and I may take upon me to give the
+Russian, the Prussian, and a few other smaller Courts, hopes of proof
+impressions from his hand; to under-secretaries they are indispensable.
+
+Now comes evening; and it is time for us both, here forking about with
+our fruit-hooks on the literary Tree of Knowledge, at the risk of our
+necks, to clamber down again into the meadow-flowers and pasturages of
+rural joy. We wait, however, till the busy Thiennette, whom we are now
+to receive into our communion, has no more walks to take but the one
+between us. Then slowly we stept along (the sick lady was weak) through
+the office-houses; that is to say, through stalls and their population,
+and past a horrid lake of ducks, and past a little milk-pond of carps,
+to both of which colonies, I and the rest, like princes, gave bread,
+seeing we had it in view, on the Sunday after the christening, to--take
+them for bread for ourselves.
+
+The sky is still growing kindlier and redder, the swallows and the
+blossom-trees louder, the house-shadows broader, and men more happy.
+The clustering blossoms of the acacia-grove hang down over our cold
+collation; and the ham is not stuck (which always vexes me) with
+flowers, but beshaded with them from a distance....
+
+And now the deeper evening and the nightingale conspire to soften me;
+and I soften in my turn the mild beings round me, especially the pale
+Thiennette, to whom, or to whose heart, after the apoplectic crushings
+of a down-pressed youth, the most violent pulses of joy are heavier
+than the movements of pensive sadness. And thus beautifully runs our
+pure transparent life along, under the blooming curtains of May; and in
+our modest pleasure, we look with timidity neither behind us nor
+before; as people who are lifting treasure gaze not round at the road
+they came, or the road they are going.
+
+So pass our days. To-day, however, it was different; by this time,
+usually, the evening meal is over; and the Shock has got the
+osseous-preparation of our supper between his jaws; but to-night
+I am still sitting here alone in the garden, writing the Eleventh
+Letter-Box, and peeping out every instant over the meadows, to see if
+my gossip is not coming.
+
+For he is gone to town, to bring a whole magazine of spiceries; his
+coat-pockets are wide. Nay, it is certain enough that oftentimes
+he brings home with him, simply in his coat-pocket, considerable
+flesh-tithes from his Guardian, at whose house he alights; though
+truly, intercourse with the polished world and city, and the refinement
+of manners thence arising--for he calls on the bookseller, on
+school-colleagues, and several respectable shop-keepers--does, much
+more than flesh-fetching, form the object of these journeys to the
+city. This morning he appointed me regent-head of the house, and
+delivered me the _fasces_ and _curule chair_. I sat the whole day
+beside the young, pale mother; and could not but think, simply because
+the husband had left me there as his representative, that I liked the
+fair soul better. She had to take dark colors, and paint out for me the
+winter landscape and ice region of her sorrow-wasted youth; but often,
+contrary to my intention, by some simple elegiac word, I made her still
+eye wet; for the too full heart, which had been crushed with other than
+sentimental woes, overflowed at the smallest pressure. A hundred times
+in the recital I was on the point of saying: "O yes, it was with
+winter that your life began, and the course of it has resembled
+winter!"--Windless, cloudless day! Three more words about thee the
+world will still not take amiss from me!
+
+I advanced nearer and nearer to the heart-central-fire of the woman;
+and at last they mildly broke forth in censure of the Parson; the best
+wives will complain of their husbands to a stranger, without in the
+smallest liking them the less on that account. The mother and the wife,
+during dinner, accused him of buying lots at every book-auction; and,
+in truth, in such places, he does strive and bid, not so much for good
+or for bad books--or old ones--or new ones--or such as he likes to
+read--or any sort of favorite books--but simply for books. The mother
+blamed especially his squandering so much on copperplates; yet some
+hours after, when the Schultheis, or Mayor, who wrote a beautiful hand,
+came in to subscribe for the steeple-ball, she pointed out to him how
+finely her son could engrave, and said that it was well worth while to
+spend a groschen or two on such capitals as these.
+
+They then handed me--for when once women are in the way of a full,
+open-hearted effusion, they like (only you must not turn the stop-cock
+of inquiry) to pour out the whole--a ring-case, in which he kept a
+Chamberlain's key that he had found, and asked me if I knew who had
+lost it. Who could know such a thing, when there are almost more
+Chamberlains than picklocks among us?--
+
+At last I took heart, and asked after the little toy-press of the
+drowned son, which hitherto I had sought for in vain over all the
+house. Fixlein himself had inquired for it, with as little success.
+Thiennette gave the old mother a persuading look full of love; and the
+latter led me up-stairs to an outstretched hoop-petticoat, covering the
+poor press as with a dome. On the way thither, the mother told me she
+kept it hid from her son because the recollection of his brother would
+pain him. When this deposit-chest of Time (the lock had fallen off) was
+laid open to me, and I had looked into the little charnel-house, with
+its wrecks of a childlike, sportful Past, I, without saying a word,
+determined, some time ere I went away, to unpack these playthings of
+the lost boy before his surviving brother. Can there be aught finer
+than to look at these ash-buried, deep-sunk, Herculanean ruins of
+childhood, now dug up and in the open air?
+
+Thiennette sent twice to ask me whether he was come. He and she,
+precisely because they do not give their love the weakening expression
+of phrases, but the strengthening one of actions, have a boundless
+feeling of it towards one another. Some wedded pairs eat each others
+lips and hearts and love away by kisses; as in Rome, the statues of
+Christ (by Angelo) have lost their feet by the same process of kissing,
+and got leaden ones instead; in other couples, again, you may see, by
+mere inspection, the number of their conflagrations and eruptions, as
+in Vesuvius you can discover his, of which there are now forty-three;
+but in these two beings rose the Greek fire of a moderate and
+everlasting love, and gave warmth without casting forth sparks, and
+flamed straight up without crackling. The evening-red is flowing back
+more magically from the windows of the gardener's cottage into my
+grove; and I feel as if I must say to Destiny: "Hast thou a sharp
+sorrow, then throw it rather into my breast, and strike not with it
+three good souls, who are too happy not to bleed by it, and too
+sequestered in their little dim village not to shrink back at the
+thunderbolt which hurries a stricken spirit from its earthly
+dwelling."----
+
+Thou good Fixlein! Here comes he hurrying over the parsonage-green.
+What languishing looks full of love already rest in the eye of thy
+Thiennette!--What news wilt thou bring us to-night from the town!--How
+will the ascending steeple-ball refresh thy soul to-morrow!--
+
+
+
+
+ TWELFTH LETTER-BOX.
+
+ Steeple-Ball Ascension.--The Toy-Press.
+
+
+How, on this sixteenth of May, the old steeple-ball was twisted off
+from the Hukelum steeple, and a new one put on in its stead, will I now
+describe to my best ability; but in that simple historical style of the
+Ancients, which, for great events, is perhaps the most suitable.
+
+At a very early hour, a coach arrived, containing Messrs. Court-Guilder
+Zeddel and Locksmith Wächser, and the new Peter's-cupola of the
+steeple. Towards eight o'clock the community, consisting of subscribers
+to the Globe, was visibly collecting. A little later came the Lord
+Dragoon Rittmeister von Aufhammer, as Patron of the church and steeple,
+attended by Mr. Church-Inspector Streichert. Hereupon my Reverend
+Cousin Fixlein and I repaired, with the other persons whom I have
+already named, into the Church, and there celebrated, before
+innumerable hearers, a week-day prayer-service. Directly afterwards,
+my Reverend Friend made his appearance above in the pulpit, and
+endeavored to deliver a speech which might correspond to the solemn
+transaction;--and immediately thereafter, he read aloud the names of
+the patrons and charitable souls, by whose donations the Ball had been
+put together; and showed to the congregation the leaden box in which
+they were specially recorded; observing that the book from which he had
+recited them was to be reposited in the Parish Register-office. Next he
+held it necessary to thank them and God, that he, above his deserts,
+had been chosen as the instrument and undertaker of such a work. The
+whole he concluded with a short prayer for Mr. Stechmann the Slater
+(who was already hanging on the outside on the steeple, and loosening
+the old shaft); and entreated that he might not break his neck, or any
+of his members. A short hymn was then sung, which the most of those
+assembled without the church-doors sang along with us, looking up at
+the same time to the steeple.
+
+All of us now proceeded out likewise; and the discarded ball, as it
+were the amputated cock's-comb of the church, was lowered down and
+untied. Church-Inspector Streichert drew a leaden case from the
+crumbling ball, which my Reverend Friend put into his pocket, purposing
+to read it at his convenience; I, however, said to some peasants: "See,
+thus will your names also be preserved in the new Ball, and when, after
+long years, it shall be taken down, the box lies within it, and the
+then parson becomes acquainted with you all."--And now was the new
+steeple-globe, with the leaden cup in which lay the names of the
+by-standers, at length full-laden, so to speak, and saturated, and
+fixed to the pulley-rope;--and so did this the whilom cupping-glass of
+the community ascend aloft....
+
+By Heaven! the unadorned style is here a thing beyond my power: for
+when the Ball moved, swung, mounted, there rose a drumming in the
+centre of the steeple; and the Schoolmaster, who, till now, had looked
+down through a sounding-hole directed towards the congregation, now
+stepped out with a trumpet at a side sounding-hole, which the mounting
+Ball was not to cross.--But when the whole Church rung and pealed, the
+nearer the capital approached its crown,--and when the Slater clutched
+it and turned it round, and happily incorporated the spike of it, and
+delivered down, between Heaven and Earth, and leaning on the Ball, a
+Topstone-speech to this and all of us,--and when my gossip's eyes, in
+his rapture at being Parson on this great day, were running over, and
+the tears trickling down his priestly garment;--I believe I was the
+only man--as his mother was the only woman--whose souls a common grief
+laid hold of to press them even to bleeding; for I and the mother had
+yesternight, as I shall tell more largely afterwards, discovered in the
+little chest of the drowned boy, from a memorial in his father's hand,
+that, on the day after the morrow, on Cantata-Sunday and his baptismal
+Sunday, he would be--two-and-thirty-years of age. "Oh!" thought I,
+while I looked at the blue heaven, the green graves, the glittering
+ball, the weeping priest, "so, at all times, stands poor man with
+bandaged eyes before thy sharp sword, incomprehensible Destiny! And
+when thou drawest it and brandishest it aloft, he listens with pleasure
+to the whizzing of the stroke before it falls!"--
+
+Last night I was aware of it; but to the reader, whom I was preparing
+for it afar off, I would tell nothing of the mournful news, that, in
+the press of the dead brother, I had found an old Bible which the boys
+had used at school, with a white blank leaf in it, on which the father
+had written down the dates of his children's birth. And even this it
+was that raised in thee, thou poor mother, the shade of sorrow which of
+late we have been attributing to smaller causes; and thy heart was
+still standing amid the rain, which seemed to us already past over and
+changed into a rainbow!--Out of love to him, she had yearly told one
+falsehood, and concealed his age. By extreme good luck, he had not been
+present when the press was opened. I still purpose, after this fatal
+Sunday, to surprise him with the party-colored relics of his childhood,
+and so of these old Christmas-presents to make him new ones. In the
+mean while, if I and his mother can but follow him incessantly,
+like fishhook-floats, and foot clogs, through to-morrow and next
+day, that no murderous accident lift aside the curtain from his
+birth-certificate,--all may yet be well. For now, in truth, to his
+eyes, this birthday, in the metamorphotic mirror of his superstitious
+imagination, and behind the magnifying magic vapor of his present joys,
+would burn forth like a red death-warrant.... But besides all this, the
+leaf of the Bible is now sitting higher than any of us, namely, in the
+new steeple-ball, into which I this morning prudently introduced it.
+Properly speaking, there is indeed no danger.
+
+
+
+
+ THIRTEENTH LETTER-BOX.
+
+ Christening.
+
+
+To-day is that stupid Cantata-Sunday; but nothing now remains of it
+save an hour.--By Heaven! in right spirits were we all to-day. I
+believe I have drunk as faithfully as another.--In truth, one
+should be moderate in all things, in writing, in drinking, in
+rejoicing; and as we lay straws into the honey for our bees, that
+they may not drown in their sugar, so ought one at all times to lay a
+few firm Principles and twigs from the tree of Knowledge into the
+Syrup of life, instead of those same bee-straws, that so one may cling
+thereto, and not drown like a rat. But now I do purpose in earnest
+to--write (and also live) with steadfastness; and therefore, that I may
+record the christening ceremony with greater coolness,--to besprinkle
+my fire with the night-air, and to roam out for an hour into the
+blossom-and-wave-embroidered night, where a lukewarm breath of air,
+intoxicated with soft odors, is sinking down from the blossom-peaks to
+the low-bent flowers, and roaming over the meadows, and at last
+launching on a wave, and with it sailing down the moonshiny brook. O,
+without, under the stars, under the tones of the nightingale, which
+seem to reverberate, not from the echo, but from the far-off
+down-glancing worlds; beside that moon, which the gushing brook, in its
+flickering, watery band, is carrying away, and which creeps under the
+little shadows of the bank as under clouds,--O, amid such forms and
+tones, the heart of man grows serious; and as of old an evening bell
+was rung to direct the wanderer through the deep forests to his nightly
+home, so in our Night are such voices within us and about us, which
+call to us in our strayings, and make us calmer, and teach us to
+moderate our own joys, and to conceive those of others.
+
+
+ * * *
+
+
+I return, peaceful and cool enough, to my narrative. All yesternight I
+left not the worthy Parson half an hour from my sight, to guard him
+from poisoning the well of his life. Full of paternal joy, and with the
+skeleton of the sermon (he was committing it to memory) in his hand, he
+set before me all that he had; and pointed out to me the fruit-baskets
+of pleasures which Cantata-Sunday always plucked and filled for him. He
+recounted to me, as I did not go away, his baptisms, his accidents of
+office; told me of his relatives; and removed my uncertainty with
+regard to the public revenues--of his parish, to the number of his
+communicants and expected catechumens. At this point, however, I am
+afraid that many a reader will in vain endeavor to transport himself
+into my situation, and still be unable to discover why I said to
+Fixlein, "Worthy gossip, better no man could wish himself." I lied not,
+for so it is.... But look in the Note.[63]
+
+At last rose the Sunday, the present; and on this holy day, simply
+because my little godson was for going over to Christianity, there was
+a vast racket made; every time a conversion happens, especially of
+nations, there is an uproaring and a shooting; I refer to the two
+Thirty Years' Wars, to the more recent one, and to the earlier, which
+Charlemagne so long carried on with the heathen Saxons; thus, in the
+_Palais Royal_, the Sun, at his transit over the meridian, fires off a
+cannon.[64] But this morning the little Unchristian, my godson, was
+precisely the person least attended to; for, in thinking of the
+conversion, they had no time left to think of the convert. Therefore I
+strolled about with him myself half the forenoon; and in our walk,
+hastily conferred on him a private baptism; having named him _Jean
+Paul_ before the priest did so. At midday, we sent the beef away as it
+had come; the Sun of happiness having desiccated all our gastric
+juices. We now began to look about us for pomp; I for scientific
+decorations of my hair, my godson for his christening-shirt, and his
+mother for her dress-cap. Yet before the child's-rattle of the
+christening-bell had been jingled, I and the midwife, in front of the
+mother's bed, instituted Physiognomical Travels on the countenance of
+the small Unchristian, and returned with the discovery, that some
+features had been embossed by the pattern of the mother, and many firm
+portions resembled me; a double similarity, in which my readers can
+take little interest. _Jean Paul_ looks very sensible for his years, or
+rather for his minutes, for it is the small one I am speaking of.----
+
+But now I would ask, what German writer durst take it upon him to
+spread out and paint a large historic sheet, representing the whole of
+us as we went to church? Would he not require to draw the father, with
+swelling canonicals, moving forward slowly, devoutly, and full of
+emotion? Would he not have to sketch the godfather, minded this day to
+lend out his names, which he derived from two Apostles (John and Paul),
+as Julius Cæsar lent out his names to two things still living even now
+(to a month and a throne)?--And must he not put the godson on his
+sheet, with whom even the Emperor Joseph (in his need of nurse-milk)
+might become a foster-brother, in his old days, if he were still in
+them?--
+
+In my chamber, I have a hundred times determined to smile at
+solemnities, in the midst of which I afterwards, while assisting at
+them, involuntarily wore a petrified countenance, full of dignity and
+seriousness. For, as the Schoolmaster, just before the baptism,
+began to sound the organ--an honor never paid to any other child in
+Hukelum,--and when I saw the wooden christening-angel, like an alighted
+Genius, with his painted timber arm spread out under the baptismal
+ewer, and I myself came to stand close by him, under his gilt wing, I
+protest the blood went slow and solemn, warm and close, through my
+pulsing head, and my lungs full of sighs; and to the silent darling
+lying in my arms, whose unripe eyes Nature yet held closed from the
+full perspective of the Earth, I wished, with more sadness than I do to
+myself, for his Future also as soft a sleep as to-day; and as good an
+angel as to-day, but a more living one, to guide him into a more living
+religion, and, with invisible hand, conduct him unlost through the
+forest of Life, through its falling trees, and Wild Hunters,[65] and
+all its storms and perils.... Will the world not excuse me, if when, by
+a side-glance, I saw on the paternal countenance prayers for the son,
+and tears of joy trickling down into the prayer; and when I noticed on
+the countenance of the grandmother far darker and fast-hidden drops,
+which she could not restrain, while I, in answer to the ancient
+question, engaged to provide for the child if its parents died,--am I
+not to be excused if I then cast my eyes deep down on my little godson,
+merely to hide their running over?--For I remembered that his father
+might perhaps this very day grow pale and cold before a suddenly
+arising mask of Death; I thought how the poor little one had only
+changed his bent posture in the womb with a freer one, to bend and
+cramp himself erelong more harshly in the strait arena of life; I
+thought of his inevitable follies, and errors, and sins; of these
+soiled steps to the Grecian Temple of our Perfection; I thought that
+one day his own fire of genius might reduce himself to ashes, as a man
+that is electrified can kill himself with his own lightning.... All the
+theological wishes, which, on the godson-billet printed over with them,
+I placed in his young bosom, were glowing written in mine.... But the
+white feathered-pink of my joy had then, as it always has, a bloody
+point within it,--I again, as it always is, went to nest, like a
+woodpecker, in a skull.... And as I am doing so even now, let the
+describing of the baptism be over for to-day, and proceed again
+to-morrow....
+
+
+
+
+ FOURTEENTH LETTER-BOX.
+
+
+Oh, so it is ever! So does Fate set fire to the theatre of our little
+plays, and our bright-painted curtain of Futurity! So does the
+Serpent of Eternity wind round us and our joys, and crush, like the
+royal-snake, what it does not poison! Thou good Fixlein!--Ah! last
+night, I little thought that thou, mild soul, while I was writing
+beside thee, wert already journeying into the poisonous Earth-shadow of
+Death.
+
+Last night, late as it was, he opened the lead box found in the old
+steeple-ball; a catalogue of those who had subscribed to the last
+repairing of the church was there; and he began to read it now; my
+presence and his occupations having prevented him before. O, how shall
+I tell that the record of his birth-year, which I had hidden in the new
+Ball, was waiting for him in the old one; that in the register of
+contributions he found his father's name, with the appendage, "given
+for his new-born son Egidius?"--
+
+This stroke sunk deep into his bosom, even to the rending of it
+asunder; in this warm hour, full of paternal joy, after such fair days,
+after such fair employments, after dread of death so often survived,
+here, in the bright, smooth sea, which is rocking and bearing him
+along, starts snorting, from the bottomless abyss, the sea-monster
+Death; and the monster's throat yawns wide, and the silent sea rushes
+into it in whirlpools, and hurries him along with it.
+
+But the patient man, quietly and slowly, and with a heart silent,
+though deadly cold, laid the leaves together; looked softly and firmly
+over the churchyard, where, in the moonshine, the grave of his father
+was to be distinguished; gazed timidly up to the sky, full of stars,
+which a white overarching laurel-tree screened from his sight;--and
+though he longed to be in bed, to settle there and sleep it off, yet he
+paused at the window to pray for his wife and child, in case this night
+were his last.
+
+At this moment the steeple-clock struck twelve; but, from the breaking
+of a pin, the weights kept rolling down, and the clock-hammer struck
+without stopping,--and he heard with horror the chains and wheels
+rattling along; and he felt as if Death were hurling forth in a heap
+all the longer hours which he might yet have had to live,--and now, to
+his eyes, the churchyard began to quiver and heave, the moonlight
+flickered on the church-windows, and in the church there were lights
+flitting to and fro, and in the charnel-house was a motion and a
+tumult.
+
+His heart fainted within him, and he threw himself into bed, and closed
+his eyes that he might not see;--but Imagination in the gloom now blew
+aloft the dust of the dead, and whirled it into giant shapes, and
+chased these hollow, fever-born masks alternately into lightning and
+shadow. Then at last from transparent thoughts grew colored visions,
+and he dreamed this dream. He was standing at the window looking out
+into the churchyard; and Death, in size as a scorpion, was creeping
+over it, and seeking for his bones. Death found some arm-bones and
+thigh-bones on the graves, and said, "They are my bones"; and he took a
+spine and the bone-legs, and stood with them, and the two arm-bones and
+clutched with them, and found on the grave of Fixlein's father a skull,
+and put it on. Then he lifted a scythe beside the little flower-garden,
+and cried: "Fixlein, where art thou? My finger is an icicle and no
+finger, and I will tap on thy heart with it." The Skeleton, thus piled
+together, now looked for him who was standing at the window, and
+powerless to stir from it; and carried in the one hand, instead of a
+sand-glass, the ever-striking steeple-clock, and held out the finger of
+ice, like a dagger, far into the air....
+
+Then he saw his victim above at the window, and raised himself
+as high as the laurel-tree to stab straight into his bosom with the
+finger,--and stalked towards him. But as he came nearer, his pale bones
+grew redder, and vapors floated woolly round his haggard form. Flowers
+started up from the ground; and he stood transfigured and without the
+clamm of the grave, hovering above them, and the balm-breath from the
+flower-cups wafted him gently on;--and as he came nearer, the scythe
+and clock were gone, and in his bony breast he had a heart, and on his
+bony head red lips;--and nearer still, there gathered on him soft,
+transparent, rosebalm-dipped flesh, like the splendor of an Angel
+flying hither from the starry blue;--and close at hand, he was an Angel
+with shut snow-white eyelids....
+
+The heart of my friend, quivering like a Harmonica-bell, now melted in
+bliss in his clear bosom;--and when the Angel opened its eyes, his were
+pressed together by the weight of celestial rapture, and his dream fled
+away.----
+
+But not his life; he opened his hot eyes, and--his good wife had hold
+of his feverish hand, and was standing in room of the Angel.
+
+The fever abated towards morning; but the certainty of dying still
+throbbed in every artery of the hapless man. He called for his fair
+little infant into his sick-bed, and pressed it silently, though it
+began to cry, too hard against his paternal, heavy-laden breast. Then
+towards noon his soul became cool, and the sultry thunder-clouds within
+it drew back. And here he described to us the previous (as it were,
+arsenical) fantasies of his usually quiet head. But it is even those
+tense nerves, which have not quivered at the touch of a poetic hand
+striking them to melody of sorrow, that start and fly asunder more
+easily under the fierce hand of Fate, when with sweeping stroke it
+smites into discord the firm-set strings.
+
+But towards night his ideas again began rushing in a torch-dance, like
+fire-pillars round his soul; every artery became a burning-rod, and the
+heart drove flaming naphtha-brooks into the brain. All within his soul
+grew bloody; the blood of his drowned brother united itself with the
+blood which had once flowed from Thiennette's arm, into a bloody
+rain;--he still thought he was in the garden in the night of
+betrothment, he still kept calling for bandages to stanch blood, and
+was for hiding his head in the ball of the steeple. Nothing afflicts
+one more than to see a reasonable, moderate man, who has been so even
+in his passions, raving in the poetic madness of fever. And yet if
+nothing save this mouldering corruption can soothe the hot brain; and
+if, while the reek and thick vapor of a boiling nervous-spirit and the
+hissing water-spouts of the veins are encircling and eclipsing the
+stifled soul, a higher Finger presses through the cloud, and suddenly
+lifts the poor bewildered spirit from amid the smoke to a sun,--is it
+more just to complain, than to reflect that Fate is like the oculist,
+who, when about to open to a blind eye the world of light, first
+bandages and darkens the other eye that sees?
+
+But the sorrow does affect me, which I read on Thiennette's pale lips,
+though do not hear. It is not the distortion of an excruciating agony,
+nor the burning of a dried-up eye, nor the loud lamenting or violent
+movement of a tortured frame, that I see in her; but what I am forced
+to see in her, and what too keenly cuts the sympathizing heart, is a
+pale, still, unmoved, undistorted face, a pale, bloodless head, which
+Sorrow is as it were holding up after the stroke, like a head just
+severed by the axe of the headsman; for oh! on this form the wounds,
+from which the three-edged dagger had been drawn, are all fallen firmly
+together, and the blood is flowing from them in secret into the choking
+heart. O Thiennette, go away from the sick-bed, and hide that face
+which is saying to us: "Now do I know that I shall not have any
+happiness on Earth; now do I give over hoping,--would this life were
+but soon done!"
+
+You will not comprehend my sympathy, if you know not what, some hours
+ago, the too loud lamenting mother told me. Thiennette, who of old had
+always trembled for his thirty-second year, had encountered this
+superstition with a nobler one; she had purposely stood farther back at
+the marriage-altar, and in the bridal-night fallen sooner asleep than
+he; thereby--as is the popular belief--so to order it that she might
+also die sooner. Nay, she has determined, if he die, to lay with his
+corpse a piece of her apparel, that so she may descend the sooner to
+keep him company in his narrow house. Thou good, thou faithful wife,
+but thou unhappy one!--
+
+
+
+
+ CHAPTER LAST.
+
+
+I have left Hukelum, and my gossip his bed; and the one is as sound as
+the other. The cure was as foolish as the malady. It first occurred to
+me, that, as Boerhaave used to remedy convulsions by convulsions, one
+fancy might in my gossip's case be remedied by another; namely, by the
+fancy that he was yet no man of thirty-two, but only a man of six or
+nine. Deliriums are dreams not encircled by sleep; and all dreams
+transport us back into youth, why not deliriums too? I accordingly
+directed every one to leave the patient; only his mother, while the
+fiercest meteors were darting, hissing before his fevered soul, was to
+sit down by him alone, and speak to him as if he were a child of eight
+years. The bed-mirror also I directed her to cover. She did so; she
+spoke to him as if he had the small-pox fever; and when he cried,
+"Death is standing with two-and-thirty pointed teeth before me,
+to eat my heart," she said to him, "Little dear, I will give thee thy
+roller-hat, and thy copy-book, and thy case, and thy hussar-cloak
+again, and more too if thou wilt be good." A reasonable speech he would
+have taken up and heeded much less than he did this foolish one.
+
+At last she said,--for to women in the depth of sorrow dissimulation
+becomes easy,--"Well, I will try it this once, and give thee thy
+playthings; but do the like again, thou rogue, and roll thyself about
+in the bed so, with the smallpox on thee!" And with this, from her full
+apron she shook out on the bed the whole stock of playthings and
+dressing-ware, which I had found in the press of the drowned brother.
+First of all his copy-book, where Egidius in his eighth year had put
+down his name, which he necessarily recognized as his own handwriting;
+then the black velvet _fall-hat_ or roller-cap; then the red and white
+leading-strings; his knife-case, with a little pamphlet of tin leaves;
+his green hussar-cloak, with its stiff facings; and a whole _orbis
+pictus_ or _fictus_ of Nürnberg puppets....
+
+The sick man recognized in a moment these projecting peaks of a
+spring-world sunk in the stream of Time,--these half shadows, this dusk
+of down-gone days,--this conflagration-place and Golgotha of a heavenly
+time, which none of us forgets, which we love forever, and look back to
+even from the grave.... And when he saw all this, he slowly turned
+round his head, as if he were awakening from a long, heavy dream; and
+his whole heart flowed down in warm showers of tears, and he said,
+fixing his full eyes on the eyes of his mother: "But are my father and
+brother still living then?"--"They are dead lately," said the wounded
+mother; but her heart was overpowered, and she turned away her eyes,
+and bitter tears fell unseen from her down-bent head. And now at once
+that evening, when he lay confined to bed by the death of his father,
+and was cured by his playthings, overflowed his soul with splendor and
+lights, and presence of the Past.
+
+And so Delirium dyed for itself rosy wings in the Aurora of life, and
+fanned the panting soul,--and shook down golden butterfly-dust from its
+plumage on the path, on the flowerage of the suffering man;--in the far
+distance rose lovely tones, in the distance floated lovely clouds--O
+his heart was like to fall in pieces, but only into fluttering
+flower-stamina, into soft sentient nerves; his eyes were like to melt
+away, but only into dew-drops for the cups of joy-blossoms, into
+blood-drops for loving hearts; his soul was floating, palpitating,
+drinking, and swimming in the warm, relaxing rose-perfume of the
+brightest delusion....
+
+The rapture bridled his feverish heart; and his mad pulse grew calm.
+Next morning his mother, when she saw that all was prospering, would
+have had the church-bells rung, to make him think that the second
+Sunday was already here. But his wife (perhaps out of shame in my
+presence) was averse to the lying; and said it would be all the same if
+we moved the month-hand of his clock (but otherwise than Hezekiah's
+Dial) eight days forward; especially as he was wont rather to rise and
+look at his clock for the day of the month, then to turn it up in the
+almanac. I for my own part simply went up to the bedside, and asked
+him: "If he was cracked--what in the world he meant with his mad
+death-dreams, when he had lain so long, and passed clean over the
+Cantata-Sunday, and yet, out of sheer terror, was withering to a lath?"
+
+A glorious reinforcement joined me; the Flesher or Quartermaster. In
+his anxiety, he rushed into the room, without saluting the women, and I
+forthwith addressed him aloud: "My gossip here is giving me trouble
+enough, Mr. Regiments-Quartermaster; last night, he let them persuade
+him he was little older than his own son; here is the child's fall-hat
+he was for putting on." The Guardian deuced and devilled, and said:
+"Ward, are you a parson or a fool?--Have not I told you twenty times,
+there was a maggot in your head about this?"--
+
+At last he himself perceived that he was not rightly wise, and so grew
+better; besides the guardian's invectives, my oaths contributed a good
+deal; for I swore I would hold him as no right gossip, and edit no word
+of his Biography, unless he rose directly and got better....
+
+--In short, he showed so much politeness to me that he rose and got
+better.--He was still sickly, it is true, on Saturday; and on Sunday
+could not preach a sermon (something of the sort the Schoolmaster read,
+instead); but yet he took Confessions on Saturday, and at the altar
+next day he dispensed the Sacrament. Service ended, the feast of his
+recovery was celebrated, my farewell-feast included; for I was to go in
+the afternoon.
+
+This last afternoon I will chalk out with all possible breadth, and
+then, with the pentagraph of free garrulity, fill up the outline and
+draw on the great scale.
+
+During the Thanksgiving-repast, there arrived considerable personal
+tribute from his catechumens, and fairings by way of bonfire for his
+recovery; proving how much the people loved him, and how well he
+deserved it; for one is oftener hated without reason by the many, than
+without reason loved by them. But Fixlein was friendly to every
+child; was none of those clergy who never pardon their enemies except
+in--God's stead; and he praised at once the whole world, his wife, and
+himself.
+
+I then attended at his afternoon's catechizing; and looked down (as he
+did in the first Letter-Box) from the choir, under the wing of the
+wooden cherub. Behind this angel, I drew out my note-book, and
+shifted a little under the cover of the Black Board, with its white
+Psalm-ciphers,[66] and wrote down what I was there--thinking. I was
+well aware, that when I to-day, on the twenty-fifth of May retired from
+this _Salernic_[67] spinning-school, where one is taught to spin out
+the thread of life, in fairer wise, and without wetting it by foreign
+mixtures,--I was well aware, I say, that I should carry off with me far
+more elementary principles of the Science of Happiness than the whole
+Chamberlain piquet ever muster all their days. I noted down my first
+impression, in the following Rules of Life for myself and the press.
+
+"Little joys refresh us constantly like house-bread, and never bring
+disgust; and great ones, like sugar-bread, briefly, and then bring
+it.--Trifles we should let, not plague us only, but also gratify us; we
+should seize not their poison-bags only, but their honey-bags also; and
+if flies often buzz about our room, we should, like Domitian, amuse
+ourselves with flies, or, like a certain still living Elector,[68] feed
+them.--For _civic_ life and its micrologies, for which the Parson has a
+natural taste, we must acquire an artificial one; must learn to love
+without esteeming it; learn, far as it ranks beneath _human_ life, to
+enjoy it like another twig of this human life, as poetically as we do
+the pictures of it in romances. The loftiest mortal loves and seeks the
+_same sort_ of things with the meanest; only from higher grounds and by
+higher paths. Be every minute, Man, a full life to thee!--Despise
+anxiety and wishing, the Future and the Past!--If the _Second-pointer_
+can be no road-pointer into an Eden for thy soul, the _Month-pointer_
+will still less be so, for thou livest not from month to month, but
+from second to second! Enjoy thy Existence more than thy Manner of
+Existence, and let the dearest object of thy Consciousness be this
+Consciousness itself!--Make not the Present a means of thy Future;
+for this Future is nothing but a coming Present; and the Present,
+which thou despisest, was once a Future which thou desiredst!--Stake
+in no lotteries,--keep at home,--give and accept no pompous
+entertainments,--travel not abroad every year!--Conceal not from
+thyself, by long plans, thy household goods, thy chamber, thy
+acquaintance!--Despise Life, that thou mayst enjoy it!--Inspect the
+neighborhood of thy life; every shelf, every nook of thy abode; and
+nestling in, quarter thyself in the farthest and most domestic winding
+of thy snail-house!--Look upon a capital but as a collection of
+villages, a village as some blind-alley of a capital; fame as the talk
+of neighbors at the street-door; a library as a learned conversation,
+joy as a second, sorrow as a minute, life as a day; and three things as
+all in all: God, Creation, Virtue!"----
+
+And if I would follow myself and these rules, it will behoove me not to
+make so much of this Biography; but once for all, like a moderate man,
+to let it sound out.
+
+After the Catechizing, I stept down to my wide-gowned and black-gowned
+gossip. The congregation gone, we clambered up to all high places,
+perused the plates on the pews--I took a lesson on the altar on its
+inscription incrusted with the _sediment of Time_ (I speak not
+metaphorically); I organed, my gossip managing the bellows; I mounted
+the pulpit, and was happy enough there to alight on one other
+rose-shoot, which in the farewell minute, I could still plant in the
+rose-garden of my Fixlein. For I descried aloft, on the back of a
+wooden Apostle, the name _Lavater_, which the Zurich Physiognomist had
+been pleased to leave on this sacred Torso in the course of his
+wayfaring. Fixlein did not know the hand, but I did, for I had seen it
+frequently in Flachsenfingen, not only on the tapestry of a Court Lady
+there, but also in his _Hand-Library_;[69] and met with it besides in
+many country churches, forming, as it were, the Directory and
+Address-Calendar of this wandering name, for Lavater likes to inscribe
+in pulpits, as a shepherd does in trees, the name of his beloved. I
+could now advise my gossip prudently to cut away the name, with the
+chip of wood containing it, from the back of the Apostle, and to
+preserve it carefully among his _curiosa_.
+
+On returning to the parsonage, I made for my hat and stick; but the
+design, as it were the projection and contour of a supper in the
+acacia-grove, had already been sketched by Thiennette. I declared that
+I would stay till evening, in case the young mother went out with us to
+the proposed meal.... and truly the Biographer at length got his way,
+all doctors' regulations notwithstanding.
+
+I then constrained the Parson to put on his Kräutermütze,[70] or
+Herb-cap, which he had stitched together out of simples for the
+strengthening of his memory: "Would to Heaven," said I, "that Princes
+instead of their Princely Hats, Doctors and Cardinals instead
+of theirs, and Saints instead of martyr-crowns, would clap such
+memory-bonnets on their heads!"--Thereupon, till the roasting and
+cooking within doors were over, we marched out alone over the parsonage
+meadows, and talked of learned matters, we packed ourselves into the
+ruined Robber-Castle, on which my gossip, as already mentioned,
+has a literary work in hand. I deeply approved, the rather as this
+Kidnapper-tower had once belonged to an Aufhammer, his intention of
+dedicating the description to the Rittmeister; that nobleman, I think,
+will sooner give his name to the Book than to the Shock. For the rest,
+I exhorted my fellow-craftsman to pluck up literary heart, and said to
+him: "A fearless pen, good gossip! Let Subrector Hans von Füchslein be,
+if he like, the Dragon of the Apocalypse, lying in wait for the
+delivery of the fugitive Woman, to swallow the offspring; I am there
+too, and have my friend the Editor of the _Litteraturzeitung_ at my
+side, who will gladly permit me to give an _anticritique_ on paying the
+insertion-dues!"--I especially excited him to new fillings and
+return-freights of his Letter-Boxes. I have not taken oath that into
+this biographical chest-of-drawers I will not in the course of time
+introduce another Box. "Neither to my godson, worthy gossip, will it do
+any harm that he is presented, poor child, even now to the reading
+public, when he does not count more months than, as Horace will have
+it, a literary child should count years, namely, _nine_."
+
+In walking homewards, I praised his wife. "If marriage," said I to him,
+"is the madder which in maids, as in cotton, makes the colors visible,
+then I contend, that Thiennette, when a maid, could scarcely be so good
+as she is now when a wife. By Heaven! in such a marriage, I should
+write Books of quite another sort, divine ones; in a marriage, I mean,
+where beside the writing-table (as beside the great voting-table at the
+Regensburg Diets, there are little tables of confectionery); where in
+like manner, I say, a little jar of marmalade were standing by me,
+namely, a sweetened, dainty, lovely face, and out of measure fond of
+the Letter-Box-writer, gossip! Your marriage will resemble the
+acacia-grove we are now going to, the leaves of which grow thicker with
+the heat of summer, while other shrubs are yielding only shrunk and
+porous shade."
+
+As we entered through the upper garden-door into this same bower, the
+supper and the good mistress were already there. Nothing is more pure
+and tender than the respect with which a wife treats the benefactor or
+comrade of her husband; and happily the Biographer himself was this
+comrade, and the object of this respect. Our talk was cheerful, but my
+spirit was oppressed. The fetters, which bind the mere reader to my
+heroes, were in my case of triple force; as I was at once their guest
+and their portrait-painter. I told the Parson that he would live to a
+greater age than I, for that his temperate temperament was balanced, as
+if by a doctor, so equally between the nervousness of refinement and
+the hot thick-bloodedness of the rustic. Fixlein said that if he lived
+but as long as he had done, namely, two-and-thirty years, it would
+amount, exclusive of the leap-year-days, to 280,320 seconds, which in
+itself was something considerable; and that he often reckoned up with
+satisfaction the many thousand persons of his own age that would have a
+life equally long.
+
+At last I tried to get in motion; for the red lights of the falling sun
+were mounting up over the grove, and dipping us still deeper in the
+shadows of night; the young mother had grown chill in the evening dew.
+In confused mood, I invited the Parson to visit me soon in the city,
+where I would show him not only all the chambers of the Palace, but the
+Prince himself. Gladder there was nothing this day on our old world
+than the face to which I said so; and than the other one which was
+the mild reflection of the former.--For the Biographer it would
+have been too hard, if now in that minute, when his fancy, like
+mirror-telescopes, was representing every object in a _tremulous_ form,
+he had been obliged to cut and run; if, I will say, it had not occurred
+to him that to the young mother it could do little harm (but much good)
+were she to take a short walk, and assist in escorting the Author and
+architect of the present Letter-Box out of the garden to his road.
+
+In short, I took this couple one in each hand, instead of under each
+arm, and moved with them through the garden to the Flachsenfingen
+highway. I often abruptly turned round my head between them, as if I
+had heard some one coming after us; but in reality I only meant once
+more, though mournfully, to look back into the happy hamlet, whose
+houses were all dwellings of contented still Sabbath-joy, and which is
+happy enough, though over its wide-parted pavement-stones there passes
+every week but one barber, every holiday but one dresser of hair, and
+every year but one hawker of parasols. Then truly I had again to turn
+round my head, and look at the happy pair beside me. My otherwise
+affectionate gossip could not rightly suit himself to these tokens of
+sorrow; but in thy heart, thou good, so oft afflicted sex, every
+mourning-bell soon finds its unison; and Thiennette, ennobled with the
+thin trembling _resonance_ of a reverberating soul, gave me back all my
+tones with the beauties of an echo.---- At last we reached the
+boundary, over which Thiennette could not be allowed to walk; and now
+must I part from my gossip, with whom I had talked so gayly every
+morning (each of us from his bed), and from the still circuit of modest
+hope where he dwelt, and return once more to the rioting, fermenting
+Court-sphere, where men in bull-beggar tone demand from Fate a root of
+Life-Licorice, thick as the arm, like the botanical one on the Wolga,
+not so much that they may chew the sweet bean themselves, as fell
+others to earth with it.
+
+As I thought to myself that I would say, Farewell! to them, all the
+coming plagues, all the corpses, and all the marred wishes of this
+good pair, arose before my heart; and I remembered that little, save
+the falling asleep of joy-flowers, would mark the current of their
+Life-day, as it does of mine and of every one's.--And yet is it fairer,
+if they measure their years not by the _Water-clock_ of falling tears,
+but by the _Flower-clock_[71] of asleep-going flowers, whose bells in
+our short-lived garden are sinking together before us from hour to
+hour.--
+
+I would even now--for I still recollect how I hung with streaming eyes
+over these two loved ones, as over their corpses--address myself, and
+say: Far too soft, _Jean Paul_, whose chalk still sketches the models
+of Nature on a ground of Melancholy; harden thy heart like thy frame,
+and waste not thyself and others by such thoughts. Yet why should I do
+it, why should I not confess directly what, in the softest emotion, I
+said to these two beings? "May all go right with you, ye mild beings,"
+I said, for I no longer thought of courtesies, "may the arm of
+Providence bear gently your lacerated hearts, and the good Father,
+above all these suns which are now looking down on us, keep you ever
+united, and exalt you still undivided to his bosom and his lips!" "Be
+you, too, right happy and glad!" said Thiennette. "And to you,
+Thiennette," continued I, "Ah! to your pale cheeks, to your oppressed
+heart, to your long cold maltreated youth, I can never, never wish
+enough. No! But all that can soothe a wounded soul, that can please a
+pure one, that can still the hidden sigh--O, all that you deserve--may
+this be given you; and when you see me again, then say to me, 'I am now
+much happier!'"
+
+We were all of us too deeply moved. We at last tore ourselves asunder
+from repeated embraces; my friend retired with the soul whom he
+loves,--I remained alone behind him with the Night.
+
+And I walked without aim through woods, through valleys, and over
+brooks, and through sleeping villages, to enjoy the great Night like a
+Day. I walked, and still looked like the magnet to the region of
+midnight, to strengthen my heart at the gleaming twilight, at
+this upstretching Aurora of a morning beneath our feet. White
+night-butterflies flitted, white blossoms fluttered, white stars fell,
+and the white snow-powder hung silvery in the high Shadow of the Earth,
+which reaches beyond the Moon, and which is our Night. Then began the
+Æolian Harp of the Creation to tremble and to sound, blown on from
+above, and my immortal soul was a string in this Harp.--The heart
+of a brother everlasting Man swelled under the everlasting Heaven,
+as the seas swell under the Sun and under the Moon.--The distant
+village-clocks struck midnight, mingling, as it were, with the
+ever-pealing tone of ancient Eternity.--The limbs of my buried ones
+touched cold on my soul, and drove away its blots, as dead hands heal
+eruptions of the skin.--I walked silently through little hamlets, and
+close by their outer churchyards, where crumbled upcast coffin-boards
+were glimmering, while the once bright eyes that had lain in them were
+mouldered into gray ashes.--Cold thought! clutch not like a cold
+spectre at my heart; I look up to the starry sky, and an everlasting
+chain stretches thither, and over and below; and all is Life, and
+Warmth, and Light, and all is godlike or God....
+
+Towards morning I descried thy late lights, little city of my dwelling,
+which I belong to on this side the grave; I return to the Earth; and in
+thy steeples, behind the by-advanced great Midnight, it struck half
+past two; about this hour, in 1794, Mars went down in the west, and the
+Moon rose in the east; and my soul desired, in grief for the noble
+warlike blood which is still streaming on the blossoms of Spring: "Ah,
+retire, bloody War, like red Mars; and thou, still Peace, come forth
+like the mild divided Moon!"--
+
+
+
+
+
+ ARMY-CHAPLAIN SCHMELZLE'S
+ JOURNEY TO FLÄTZ;
+
+ WITH
+
+ A RUNNING COMMENTARY OF NOTES.
+
+ TRANSLATED BY THOMAS CARLYLE.
+
+
+
+
+ PREFACE
+
+
+This, I conceive, may be managed in two words. The _first_ word must
+relate to the Circular Letter of Army-Chaplain Schmelzle, wherein he
+describes to his friends his Journey to the metropolitan city of Flätz;
+after having, in an Introduction, premised some proofs and assurances
+of his valor. Properly speaking, the _Journey_ itself has been written
+purely with a view that his courageousness, impugned by rumor, may be
+fully evinced and demonstrated by the plain facts which he therein
+records. Whether, in the mean time, there shall not be found certain
+quick-scented readers, who may infer, directly contrariwise, that his
+breast is not everywhere bomb-proof, especially in the left side,--on
+this point I keep my judgment suspended.
+
+For the rest, I beg the judges of literature, as well as their
+satellites, the critics of literature, to regard this _Journey_, for
+whose literary contents I, as Editor, am answerable, solely in the
+light of a Portrait (in the French sense), a little Sketch of
+Character. It is a voluntary or involuntary comedy-piece, at which I
+have laughed so often, that I purpose in time coming to paint some
+similar Pictures of Character myself. And, for the present, when could
+such a little comic toy be more fitly imparted and set forth to the
+world than in these very days, when the sound both of heavy money and
+of light laughter has died away from among us,--when, like the Turks,
+we count and pay merely with sealed _purses_, and the coin within them
+has vanished?
+
+Despicable would it seem to me, if any clownish squire of the
+goose-quill should publicly and censoriously demand of me in what way
+this self-cabinet-piece of Schmelzle's has come into my hands. I know
+it well, and do not disclose it. This comedy-piece, for which I, at all
+events, as my Bookseller will testify, draw the profit myself, I got
+hold of so unblamably, that I await, with unspeakable composure, what
+the Army-Chaplain shall please to say against the publication of it, in
+case he say anything at all. My conscience bears me witness, that I
+acquired this article at least by more honorable methods than are those
+of the learned persons who steal with their ears, who, in the character
+of spiritual auditory-thieves, and class-room cut-purses and pirates,
+are in the habit of disloading their plundered Lectures, and vending
+them up and down the country as productions of their own. Hitherto, in
+my whole life, I have stolen little, except now and then in youth
+some--glances.
+
+The _second_ word must explain or apologize for the singular form of
+this little Work, standing as it does on a substratum of Notes. I
+myself am not contented with it. Let the world open, and look, and
+determine, in like manner. But the truth is, this line of demarcation,
+stretching through the whole book, originated in the following
+accident: certain thoughts (or digressions) of my own, with which it
+was not permitted me to disturb those of the Army-Chaplain, and which
+could only be allowed to fight behind the lines, in the shape of Notes,
+I, with a view to conveniency and order, had written down in a separate
+paper; at the same time, as will be observed, regularly providing every
+Note with its Number, and thus referring it to the proper page of the
+main Manuscript. But, in the copying of the latter, I had forgotten to
+insert the corresponding numbers in the Text itself. Therefore, let no
+man, any more than I do, cast a stone at my worthy Printer, inasmuch as
+he (perhaps in the thought that it was my way, that I had some purpose
+in it) took these Notes, just as they stood, pellmell, without
+arrangement of Numbers, and clapped them under the Text; at the same
+time, by a praiseworthy, artful computation, taking care, at least,
+that at the bottom of every page in the Text there should some portion
+of this glittering Note-precipitate make its appearance. Well, the
+thing at any rate is done, nay, perpetuated, namely, printed. After
+all, I might almost partly rejoice at it. For, in good truth, had I
+meditated for years (as I have done for the last twenty) how to provide
+for my digression-comets new orbits, if not focal suns, for my episodes
+new epopees,--I could scarce possibly have hit upon a better or more
+spacious Limbo for such Vanities than Chance and Printer here
+accidentally offer me ready-made. I have only to regret that the thing
+has been printed before I could turn it to account. Heavens! what
+remotest allusions (had I known it before printing) might not have been
+privily introduced in every Text-page and Note-number; and what
+apparent incongruity in the real congruity between this upper and under
+side of the cards! How vehemently and devilishly might one not have cut
+aloft, and to the right and left, from these impregnable casemates and
+covered-ways; and what _læsio ultra dimidium_ (injury beyond the half
+of the Text) might not, with these satirical injuries, have been
+effected and completed!
+
+But Fate meant not so kindly with me; of this golden harvest-field of
+satire I was not to be informed till three days before the Preface.
+
+Perhaps, however, the writing world, by the little blue flame of this
+accident, may be guided to a weightier acquisition, to a larger
+subterranean treasure, than I, alas! have dug up. For, to the writer,
+there is now a way pointed out of producing in one marbled volume a
+group of altogether different works; of writing in one leaf, for both
+sexes at the same time, without confounding them, nay, for the five
+faculties all at once, without disturbing their limitations; since
+now, instead of boiling up a vile, fermenting shove-together,
+fit for nobody, he has nothing to do but draw his note-lines or
+partition-lines; and so on his five-story leaf give board and lodging
+to the most discordant heads. Perhaps one might then read many a book
+for the fourth time, simply because every time one had read but a
+fourth part of it.
+
+On the whole, this Work has at least the property of being a short one;
+so that the reader, I hope, may almost run through it, and read it at
+the bookseller's counter, without, as in the case of thicker volumes,
+first needing to buy it. And why, indeed, in this world of Matter
+should anything whatever be great, except only what belongs not to it,
+the world of Spirit?
+
+ Jean Paul Fr. Richter.
+
+_Bayreuth, in the Bay and Peace Month_, 1707.
+
+
+
+
+ SCHMELZLE'S
+ JOURNEY TO FLÄTZ.
+
+ _Circular Letter of the proposed Catechetical Professor_ Attila
+ Schmelzle _to his Friends; containing some Account of a Holidays'
+ Journey to Flätz, with an Introduction, touching his Flight, and
+ his Courage as former Army-Chaplain_.
+
+
+Nothing can be more ludicrous, my esteemed Friends, than to hear people
+stigmatizing a man as cowardly and hare-hearted, who perhaps is
+struggling all the while with precisely the opposite faults, those of a
+lion; though indeed the African lion himself, since the time of
+Sparrmann's Travels, passes among us for poltroon. Yet this case is
+mine, worthy Friends; and I purpose to say a few words thereupon,
+before describing my journey.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+108. Good princes easily obtain good subjects; not so easily good
+subjects good princes; thus Adam, in the state of innocence, ruled over
+animals all tame and gentle, till simply through his means they fell
+and grew savage.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+You in truth are all aware that, directly in the teeth of this calumny,
+it is courage, it is desperadoes (provided they be not braggarts
+and tumultuous persons), whom I chiefly venerate; for example, my
+brother-in-law, the Dragoon, who never in his life bastinadoed one man,
+but always a whole social circle at the same time. How truculent was my
+fancy, even in childhood, when I, as the parson was toning away to the
+silent congregation, used to take it into my head: "How now, if thou
+shouldst start up from thy pew, and shout aloud, I am here too, Mr.
+Parson!" and to paint out this thought in such glowing colors, that,
+for very dread, I have often been obliged to leave the church! Anything
+like Rugenda's battle-pieces; horrid murder-tumults, sea-fights or
+Stormings of Toulon, exploding fleets; and, in my childhood, Battles of
+Prague on the harpsichord; nay, in short, every map of any remarkable
+scene of war; these are perhaps too much my favorite objects; and I
+read--and purchase nothing sooner; and doubtless they might lead me
+into many errors, were it not that my circumstances restrain me. Now,
+if it be objected that true courage is something higher than mere
+thinking and willing, then you, my worthy friends, will be the first to
+recognize mine, when it shall break forth into not barren and empty,
+but active and effective words, while I strengthen my future
+Catechetical Pupils, as well as can be done in a course of College
+Lectures, and steel them into Christian heroes.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+5. For a good Physician saves, if not always from the disease, at least
+from a bad Physician.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+It is well known that, out of care for the preservation of my life, I
+never walk within at least ten fields of any shore full of bathers or
+swimmers; merely because I foresee to a certainty, that, in case one of
+them were drowning, I should that moment (for the heart overbalances
+the head) plunge after the fool to save him, into some bottomless depth
+or other, where we should both perish. And if dreaming is the reflex of
+waking, let me ask you, true Hearts, if you have forgotten my relating
+to you dreams of mine, which no Cæsar, no Alexander or Luther, need
+have felt ashamed of? Have I not, to mention a few instances, taken
+Rome by storm; and done battle with the Pope and the whole elephantine
+body of the Cardinal College, at one and the same time? Did I
+not once on horseback, while simply looking at a review of military,
+dash headlong into a _bataillon quarré_; and then capture, in
+Aix-la-Chapelle, the Peruke of Charlemagne, for which the town pays
+yearly ten reichsthalers of barber-money; and carrying it off to
+Halberstadt von Gleim, there in like manner seize the Great Frederick's
+Hat; put both Peruke and Hat on my head, and yet return home, after I
+had stormed their batteries and turned the cannon against the
+cannoneers themselves? Did I not once submit to be made a Jew of, and
+then be regaled with hams; though they were ape-hams on the Orinoco
+(see Humboldt)? And a thousand such things; for I have thrown the
+Consistorial President of Flätz out of the Palace window; those
+alarm-fulminators, sold by Heinrich Backofen in Gotha, at six groschen
+the dozen, and each going off like a cannon, I have listened to so
+calmly that the fulminators did not even awaken me; and more of the
+like sort.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+100. In books lie the Phoenix-ashes of a past Millennium and Paradise;
+but War blows, and much ashes are scattered away.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+But enough! It is now time briefly to touch that further slander of my
+chaplainship, which unhappily has likewise gained some circulation in
+Flätz, but which, as Cæsar did Alexander, I shall now by my touch
+dissipate into dust. Be what truth in it there can, it is still little
+or nothing. Your great Minister and General in Flätz (perhaps the very
+greatest in the world, for there are not many Schabackers) may indeed,
+like any other great man, be turned against me; but not with the
+Artillery of Truth; for this Artillery I here set before you, my good
+Hearts, and do you but fire it off for my advantage! The matter is
+this. Certain foolish rumors are afloat in the Flätz country, that I,
+on occasion of some important battles, took leg-bail (such is their
+plebeian phrase), and that afterwards, on the Chaplain's being called
+for to preach a Thanksgiving sermon for the victory, no chaplain
+whatever was to be found. The ridiculousness of this story will best
+appear, when I tell you that I never was in any action; but have always
+been accustomed, several hours prior to such an event, to withdraw so
+many miles to the rear, that our men, so soon as they were beaten,
+would be sure to find me. A good retreat is reckoned the masterpiece in
+the art of war; and at no time can a retreat be executed with such
+order, force, and security as just before the battle, when you are not
+yet beaten.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+102. Dear Political or Religious Inquisitor! Art thou aware that Turin
+tapers never rightly begin shining till thou breakest them, and then
+they take fire?
+
+------------------------
+
+
+It is true, I might perhaps, as expectant Professor of Catechetics, sit
+still and smile at such nugatory speculations on my courage; for if by
+Socratic questioning I can hammer my future Catechist Pupils into the
+habit of asking questions in their turn, I shall thereby have tempered
+_them_ into heroes, seeing they have nothing to fight with but
+children--(Catechists at all events, though dreading fire, have no
+reason to dread light, since in our days, as in London illuminations,
+it is only the _unlighted_ windows that are battered in; whereas, in
+other ages, it was with nations and light as it is with dogs and water;
+if you give them none for a long time, they at last get a horror at
+it);--and on the whole, for Catechists, any park looks kindlier, and
+smiles more sweetly, than a sulphurous park of artillery; and the
+Warlike Foot, which the age is placed on, is to them the true Devil's
+cloven-foot of human nature.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+86. Very true! In youth we love and enjoy the most ill-assorted
+friends, perhaps more than, in old age, the best assorted.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+But for my part I think not so; almost as if the party spirit of my
+Christian name, Attila, had passed into me more strongly than was
+proper, I feel myself impelled still further to prove my
+courageousness; which, dearest Friends! I shall here in a few lines
+again do. This proof I could manage by mere inferences and learned
+citations. For example, if Galen remarks that animals with large
+hind-quarters are timid, I have nothing to do but turn round, and show
+the enemy my back and what is under it, in order to convince him that I
+am not deficient in valor, but in flesh. Again, if by well-known
+experiences it has been found that flesh-eating produces courage, I can
+evince that in this particular I yield to no officer of the service;
+though it is the habit of these gentlemen not only to run up long
+scores of roast-meat with their landlords, but also to leave them
+unpaid, that so at every hour they may have an open document in the
+hands of the enemy himself (the landlord), testifying that they have
+eaten their own share (with some of other people's too), and so put
+common butcher-meat on a War-footing, living not like others _by_
+bravery, but _for_ bravery. As little have I ever, in my character of
+chaplain, shrunk from comparison with any officer in the regiment, who
+may be a true lion, and so snatch every sort of plunder, but yet, like
+this King of the Beasts, is afraid of _fire_; or who,--like King James
+of England,[72] that scampered off at sight of drawn swords, yet so
+much the more gallantly, before all Europe, went out against the
+storming Luther with book and pen,--does, from a similar idiosyncrasy,
+attack all warlike armaments, both by word and writing. And here I
+recollect, with satisfaction, a brave sub-lieutenant, whose confessor I
+was (he still owes me the confession-money), and who, in respect of
+stout-heartedness, had in him perhaps something of that Indian dog
+which Alexander had presented to him as a sort of Dog-Alexander. By way
+of trying this crack dog, the Macedonian made various heroic or
+heraldic beasts be let loose against him; first a stag; but the dog lay
+still; then a sow; he lay still; then a bear; he lay still. Alexander
+was on the point of condemning him; when a lion was let forth; the dog
+rose, and tore the lion in pieces. So likewise the sub-lieutenant. A
+challenger, a foreign enemy, a Frenchman, are to him only stag, and
+sow, and bear, and he lies still in his place; but let his oldest
+enemy, his creditor, come and knock at his gate, and demand of him
+actual smart-money for long bygone pleasures, thus presuming to rob him
+both of past and present; the sub-lieutenant rises, and throws his
+creditor down-stairs. I, alas! am still standing by the sow; and thus,
+naturally enough, misunderstood.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+128. In Love there are Summer Holidays; but in Marriage also there are
+Winter Holidays, I hope.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+_Quo_, says Livy, xii. 5, and with great justice, _quo timoris minus
+est, eo minus ferme periculi est_, The less fear you have, the less
+danger you are likely to be in. With equal justice I invert the maxim,
+and say, The less the danger, the smaller the fear; nay, there may be
+situations in which one has absolutely no knowledge of fear; and among
+these mine is to be reckoned. The more hateful, therefore, must that
+calumny about hare-heartedness appear to me.
+
+To my Holidays' Journey I shall prefix a few facts, which prove how
+easily foresight--that is to say, when a person would not resemble the
+stupid marmot, that will even attack a man out on horseback--may pass
+for cowardice. For the rest, I wish only that I could with equal ease
+wipe away a quite different reproach, that of being a foolhardy
+desperado; though I trust, in the sequel, I shall be able to advance
+some facts which invalidate it.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+143. Women have weekly at least one active and passive day of glory,
+the holy day, the Sunday. The higher ranks alone have more Sundays than
+work-days; as, in great towns, you can celebrate your Sunday on Friday
+with the Turks, on Saturday with the Jews, and on Sunday with yourself.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+What boots the heroic arm, without a hero's eye? The former readily
+grows stronger and more nervous; but the latter is not so soon ground
+sharper, like glasses. Nevertheless, the merits of foresight obtain
+from the mass of men less admiration (nay, I should say, more ridicule)
+than those of courage. Whoso, for instance, shall see me walking under
+quite cloudless skies with a wax-cloth umbrella over me, to him I shall
+probably appear ridiculous, so long as he is not aware that I carry
+this umbrella as a thunder-screen, to keep off any bolt out of the blue
+heaven (whereof there are several examples in the history of the Middle
+Ages) from striking me to death. My thunder-screen, in fact, is exactly
+that of Reimarus. On a long walking-stick I carry the wax-cloth roof;
+from the peak of which depends a string of gold-lace as a conductor;
+and this, by means of a key fastened to it, which it trails along the
+ground, will lead off every possible bolt, and easily distribute it
+over the whole superficies of the Earth. With this _Paratonnerre
+Portatif_ in my hand, I can walk about for weeks under the clear sky,
+without the smallest danger. This Diving-bell, moreover, protects me
+against something else; against shot. For who, in the latter end of
+Harvest, will give me black on white that no lurking ninny of a
+sportsman somewhere, when I am out enjoying Nature, shall so fire off
+his piece, at an angle of 45°, that, in falling down again, the shot
+needs only light directly on my crown, and so come to the same as if I
+had been shot through the brain from a side?
+
+It is bad enough, at any rate, that we have nothing to guard us from
+the Moon; which at present is bombarding us with stones like a very
+Turk; for this paltry little Earth's train-bearer and errand-maid
+thinks, in these rebellious times, that she too must begin, forsooth,
+to sling somewhat against her Mother! In good truth, as matters stand,
+any young Catechist of feeling may go out o' nights, with whole limbs,
+into the moonshine, a meditating; and erelong (in the midst of his
+meditation the villanous Satellite hits him) come home a pounded jelly.
+By Heaven! new proofs of courage are required of us on every hand! No
+sooner have we, with great effort, got thunder-rods manufactured, and
+comet-tails explained away, than the enemy opens new batteries in the
+Moon, or somewhere else in the Blue!
+
+
+------------------------
+
+21. Schiller and Klopstock are Poetic Mirrors held up to the Sun-god;
+the Mirrors reflect the Sun with such dazzling brightness, that you
+cannot find the Picture of the World imaged forth in them.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+Suffice one other story to manifest how ludicrous the most serious
+foresight, with all imaginable inward courage, often externally appears
+in the eyes of the many. Equestrians are well acquainted with the
+dangers of a horse that runs away. My evil star would have it that
+I should once in Vienna get upon a hack-horse; a pretty enough
+honey-colored nag, but old and hard-mouthed as Satan; so that the
+beast, in the next street, went off with me; and this in truth--only at
+a _walk_. No pulling, no tugging, took effect; I at last, on the back
+of this Self-riding-horse, made signals of distress, and cried: "Stop
+him, good people! for God's sake stop him! my horse is off!" But these
+simple persons seeing the beast move along as slowly as a Reichshofrath
+lawsuit, or the Daily Postwagen, could not in the least understand the
+matter, till I cried as if possessed: "Stop him then, ye blockheads and
+joltheads! don't you see that I cannot hold the nag?" But now, to these
+noodles the sight of a hard-mouthed horse going off with its rider step
+by step seemed ridiculous rather than otherwise; half Vienna gathered
+itself like a comet-tail behind my beast and me. Prince Kaunitz, the
+best horseman of the century (the last), pulled up to follow me. I
+myself sat and swam like a perpendicular piece of drift-ice on my
+honey-colored nag, which stalked on, on, step by step; a many-cornered,
+red-coated letter-carrier was delivering his letters, to the right and
+left, in the various stories, and he still crossed over before me
+again, with satirical features, because the nag went along too slowly.
+The Schwanzschleuderer, or Train-dasher (the person, as you know, who
+drives along the streets with a huge barrel of water, and besplashes
+them with a leathern pipe of three ells long from an iron trough), came
+across the haunches of my horse, and, in the course of his duty, wetted
+both these and myself in a very cooling manner, though, for my part, I
+had too much cold sweat on me already to need any fresh refrigeration.
+On my infernal Trojan Horse (only I myself was Troy, not beridden, but
+riding to destruction), I arrived at Malzlein (a suburb of Vienna), or
+perhaps, so confused were my senses, it might be quite another range of
+streets. At last, late in the dusk, I had to turn into the Prater; and
+here, long after the Evening Gun, to my horror, and quite against the
+police-rules, keep riding to and fro on my honey-colored nag; and
+possibly I might even have passed the night on him, had not my
+brother-in-law, the Dragoon, observed my plight, and so found me still
+sitting firm as a rock on my runaway steed. He made no ceremonies;
+caught the brute; and put the pleasant question, why I had not vaulted,
+and come off by ground-and-lofty tumbling; though he knew full well
+that for this a wooden horse, which stands still, is requisite.
+However, he took me down; and so, after all this riding, horse and man
+got home with whole skins and unbroken bones.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+84. Women are like precious carved works of ivory: nothing is whiter
+and smoother, and nothing sooner grows yellow.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+But now at last to my Journey!
+
+
+
+
+ JOURNEY TO FLÄTZ.
+
+
+
+------------------------
+
+72. The Half-learned is adored by the Quarter-learned; the latter by
+the Sixteenth-part-learned; and so on: but not the Whole-learned by the
+Half-learned.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+You are aware, my friends, that this Journey to Flätz was necessarily
+to take place in Vacation time; not only because the Cattle-market, and
+consequently the Minister and General von Schabacker, was there then;
+but more especially because the latter (as I had it positively from a
+private hand) did annually, on the 23d of July, the market-eve, about
+five o'clock, become so full of gaudium and graciousness, that in many
+cases he did not so much snarl on people as listen to them, and grant
+their prayers. The cause of this gaudium I had rather not trust to
+paper. In short, my Petition, praying that he would be pleased to
+indemnify and reward me, as an unjustly deposed army-chaplain, by a
+Catechetical Professorship, could plainly be presented to him at no
+better season than exactly about five o'clock in the evening of the
+first dog-day. In less than a week I had finished writing my Petition.
+As I spared neither summaries nor copies of it, I had soon got so far
+as to see the relatively best lying completed before me; when, to my
+terror, I observed that in this paper I had introduced above thirty
+_dashes_, or breaks, in the middle of my sentences! Now-a-days, alas!
+these stings shoot forth involuntarily from learned pens, as tails of
+wasps. I debated long within myself whether a private scholar could
+justly be entitled to approach a minister with dashes,--greatly as this
+level interlineation of thoughts, these horizontal note-marks of
+poetical _music_-pieces, and these rope-ladders or Achilles'-tendons of
+philosophical _see_-pieces, are at present fashionable and
+indispensable; but, at last, I was obliged (as erasures may offend
+people of quality) to write my best proof-petition over again; and then
+to afflict myself for another quarter of an hour over the name Attila
+Schmelzle, seeing it is always my principle that this and the address
+of the letter, the two cardinal points of the whole, can never be
+written legibly enough.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+85. _Bien écouter c'est presque répondre_, says Marivaux justly of
+social circles; but I extend it to round Councillor-tables and
+Cabinet-tables, where reports are made, and the Prince listens.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+
+
+ _First Stage; from Neusattel to Vierstädten_.
+
+
+The 22d of July, or Wednesday, about five in the afternoon, was now, by
+the way-bill of the regular Post-coach, irrevocably fixed for my
+departure. I had still half a day to order my house; from which, for
+two nights and two days and a half, my breast, its breastwork and
+palisado, was now, along with my Self, to be withdrawn. Besides this,
+my good wife Bergelchen, as I call my Teutoberga, was immediately to
+travel after me, on Friday the 24th, in order to see and to make
+purchases at the yearly Fair; nay, she was ready to have gone along
+with me, the faithful spouse. I therefore assembled my little knot of
+domestics, and promulgated to them the Household Law and Valedictory
+Rescript, which, after my departure, in the first place _before_ the
+outset of my wife, and in the second place _after_ this outset, they
+had rigorously to obey; explaining to them especially whatever, in case
+of conflagrations, housebreakings, thunder-storms, or transits of
+troops, it would behoove them to do. To my wife I delivered an
+inventory of the best goods in our little Registership; which goods
+she, in case the house took fire, had, in the first place, to secure. I
+ordered her in stormy nights (the peculiar thief-weather) to put our
+Æolian harp in the window, that so any villanous prowler might imagine
+I was fantasying on my instrument, and therefore awake; for like
+reasons, also, to take the house-dog within doors by day, that he might
+sleep then, and so be livelier at night. I further counselled
+her to have an eye on the focus of every knot in the panes of the
+stable-window, nay, on every glass of water she might set down in the
+house; as I had already often recounted to her examples of such
+accidental burning-glasses having set whole buildings in flames. I then
+appointed her the hour when she was to set out on Friday morning to
+follow me; and recapitulated more emphatically the household precepts
+which, prior to her departure, she must afresh inculcate on her
+domestics. My dear, heart-sound, blooming Berga answered her faithful
+lord, as it seemed very seriously: "Go thy ways, little old one; it
+shall all be done as smooth as velvet. Wert thou but away! There is no
+end of thee!" Her brother, my brother-in-law, the Dragoon, for whom,
+out of complaisance, I had paid the coach-fare, in order to have in the
+vehicle along with me a stout swordsman and hector, as spiritual
+relative and bully-rock, so to speak; the Dragoon, I say, on hearing
+these my regulations, puckered up (which I easily forgave the wild
+soldier and bachelor) his sun-burnt face considerably into ridicule,
+and said: "Were I in thy place, sister, I should do what I liked, and
+then afterwards take a peep into these regulation-papers of his."
+
+
+------------------------
+
+17. The Bed of Honor, since so frequently whole regiments lie on it,
+and receive their last unction, and last honor but one, really ought
+from time to time be new-filled, beaten, and sunned.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+"Oh!" answered I, "misfortune may conceal itself like a scorpion in any
+corner; I might say, we are like children, who, looking at their gayly
+painted toy-box, soon pull off the lid, and, pop! out springs a mouse
+who has young ones."
+
+"Mouse, mouse!" said he, stepping up and down. "But, good brother, it
+is five o'clock; and you will find, when you return, that all looks
+exactly as it does to-day; the dog like the dog, and my sister like a
+pretty woman; _allons donc_!" It was purely his blame that I, fearing
+his misconceptions, had not previously made a sort of testament.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+120. Many a one becomes a free-spoken Diogenes, not when he dwells in
+the Cask, but when the Cask dwells in him.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+I now packed in two different sorts of medicines, heating as well as
+cooling, against two different possibilities; also my old splints for
+arm or leg breakages, in case the coach overset; and (out of foresight)
+two times the money I was likely to need. Only here I could have
+wished, so uncertain is the stowage of such things, that I had been an
+Ape with cheek-pouches, or some sort of Opossum with a natural bag,
+that so I might have reposited these necessaries of existence in
+pockets which were sensitive. Shaving is a task I always go through
+before setting out on journeys; having a rational mistrust against
+stranger bloodthirsty barbers; but, on this occasion, I retained my
+beard; since, however close shaved, it would have grown again by the
+road to such a length that I could have fronted no Minister and General
+with it.
+
+With a vehement emotion, I threw myself on the pith-heart of my Berga,
+and with a still more vehement one, tore myself away; in her, however,
+this our first marriage-separation seemed to produce less lamentation
+than triumph, less consternation than rejoicing; simply because she
+turned her eye not half so much on the parting, as on the meeting, and
+the journey after me, and the wonders of the Fair. Yet she threw and
+hung herself on my somewhat long and thin neck and body, almost
+painfully, being, indeed, a too fleshy and weighty load, and said to
+me: "Whisk thee off quick, my charming Attel (Attila), and trouble thy
+head with no cares by the way, thou singular man! A whiff or two of ill
+luck we can stand, by God's help, so long as my father is no beggar.
+And for thee, Franz," continued she, turning with some heat to her
+brother, "I leave my Attel on thy soul; thou well knowest, thou wild
+fly, what I wilt do, if thou play the fool, and leave him anywhere in
+the lurch." Her meaning here was good, and I could not take it ill; to
+you, also, my Friends, her wealth and her open-heartedness are nothing
+new.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+8. Culture makes whole lands, for instance Germany, Gaul, and others,
+physically warmer, but spiritually colder.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+Melted into sensibility, I said: "Now, Berga, if there be a reunion
+appointed for us, surely it is either in Heaven or in Flätz; and I hope
+in God, the latter." With these words, we whirled stoutly away. I
+looked round through the back-window of the coach at my good little
+village of Neusattel, and it seemed to me, in my melting mood, as if
+its steeples were rising aloft like an epitaphium over my life,
+or over my body, perhaps to return a lifeless corpse. "How will it all
+be," thought I, "when thou at last, after two or three days, comest
+back?" And now I noticed my Bergelchen looking after us from the
+garret-window; I leaned far out from the coach-door, and her falcon eye
+instantly distinguished my head; kiss on kiss she threw with both
+hands after the carriage, as it rolled down into the valley. "Thou
+true-hearted wife," thought I, "how is thy lowly birth, by thy
+spiritual new-birth, made forgetable, nay, remarkable!"
+
+
+------------------------
+
+1. The more Weakness the more Lying. Force goes straight; any
+cannon-ball with holes or cavities in it goes crooked.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+I must confess, the assemblage and conversational picnic of the
+stage-coach was much less to my taste; the whole of them suspicious,
+unknown rabble, whom (as markets usually do) the Flätz cattle-market
+was alluring by its scent. I dislike becoming acquainted with
+strangers; not so my brother-in-law, the Dragoon; who now, as he always
+does, had in a few minutes elbowed himself into close quarters with the
+whole ragamuffin posse of them. Beside me sat a person, who, in all
+human probability, was a Harlot; on her breast a Dwarf intending to
+exhibit himself at the Fair; on the other side was a Rat-catcher gazing
+at me; and a Blind Passenger,[73] in a red mantle, had joined us down
+in the valley. No one of them, except my brother-in-law, pleased me.
+That rascals among these people would not study me and my properties
+and accidents, to entangle me in their snares, no man could be my
+surety. In strange places, I even, out of prudence, avoid looking long
+up at any jail-window; because some losel, sitting behind the bars, may
+in a moment call down out of mere malice: "How goes it, comrade
+Schmelzle?" or, further, because any lurking catchpole may fancy I am
+planning a rescue for some confederate above. From another sort of
+prudence, little different from this, I also make a point of never
+turning round when any booby calls, Thief! after me.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+88. Epictetus advises us to travel, because our old acquaintances, by
+the influence of shame, impede our transition to higher virtues; as a
+bashful man will rather lay aside his provincial accent in some foreign
+quarter, and then return wholly purified to his own countrymen. In our
+days, people of rank and virtue follow this advice, but inversely; and
+travel because their old acquaintances, by the influence of shame,
+would too much deter them from new sins.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+As to the Dwarf himself, I had no objection to his travelling with me
+whithersoever he pleased; but he thought to raise a particular
+delectation in our minds, by promising that his Pollux and Brother in
+Trade, an extraordinary Giant who was also making for the Fair to
+exhibit himself, would by midnight, with his elephantine pace,
+infallibly overtake the coach, and plant himself among us, or behind on
+the outside. Both these noodies, it appeared, are in the habit of going
+in company to fairs, as reciprocal exaggerators of opposite magnitudes;
+the Dwarf is the convex magnifying-glass of the Giant, the Giant the
+concave diminishing-glass of the Dwarf. Nobody expressed much joy at
+the prospective arrival of this Anti-dwarf, except my brother-in-law,
+who (if I may venture on a play of words) seems made, like a clock,
+solely for the purpose of _striking_, and once actually said to me,
+that "if in the Upper world he could not get a soul to curry and towzle
+by a time, he would rather go to the Under, where most probably there
+would be plenty of cuffing and to spare." The Rat-catcher--besides the
+circumstance that no man can prepossess us much in his favor, who
+lives solely by poisoning, like this Destroying Angel of rats, this
+mouse-Atropos; and also, which is still worse, that such a fellow bids
+fair to become an increaser of the vermin kingdom the moment he may
+cease to be a lessener of it--besides all this, I say, the present
+Rat-catcher had many baneful features about him. First, his stabbing
+look, piercing you like a stiletto; then the lean, sharp, bony visage,
+conjoined with his enumeration of his considerable stock of poisons;
+then (for I hated him more and more) his sly stillness, his sly smile,
+as if in some corner he noticed a mouse, as he would notice a man! To
+me, I declare, though usually I take not the slightest exception
+against people's looks, it seemed at last as if his throat were a
+Dog-grotto, a _Grotta del cane_, his cheekbones cliffs and breakers,
+his hot breath the wind of a calcining furnace, and his black, hairy
+breast, a kiln for parching and roasting.
+
+Nor was I far wrong, I believe; for soon after this, he began quite
+coolly to inform the company, in which were a dwarf and a female, that,
+in his time, he had, not without enjoyment, run ten men through the
+body; had with great convenience hewed off a dozen men's arms; slowly
+split four heads, torn out two hearts, and more of the like sort; while
+none of them, otherwise persons of spirit, had in the least resisted.
+"But why?" added he with a poisonous smile, and taking the hat from his
+odious baldpate; "I am invulnerable. Let any one of the company that
+chooses lay as much fire on my bare crown as he likes, I shall not mind
+it."
+
+My brother-in-law, the Dragoon, directly kindled his tinder-box, and
+put a heap of the burning matter on the Rat-catcher's pole; but the
+fellow stood it, as if it had been a mere picture of fire, and the two
+looked expectingly at one another; and the former smiled very
+foolishly, saying: "It was simply pleasant to him, like a good
+warming-plaster; for this was always the wintry region of his body."
+
+Here the Dragoon groped a little on the naked scull, and cried with
+amazement, that "it was as cold as a knee-pan."
+
+
+------------------------
+
+32. Our Age (by some called the Paper Age, as if it were made from the
+rags of some better dressed one) is improving in so far as it now
+tears, its rags rather into Bandages than into Papers; although,
+or because, the Rag-hacker (the Devil as they call it) will not
+altogether be at rest. Meanwhile, if Learned Heads transform themselves
+into Books, Crowned Heads transform and coin themselves into
+Government-paper. In Norway, according to the _Universal Indicator_,
+the people have even paper-houses; and in many good German States, the
+Exchequer Collegium (to say nothing of the Justice Collegium) keeps
+its own paper-mills, to furnish wrappage enough for the meal of its
+wind-mills. I could wish, however, that our Collegiums would take
+pattern from that Glass Manufactory at Madrid, in which (according to
+Baumgärtner) there were indeed nineteen clerks stationed, but also
+eleven workmen.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+But now the fellow, to our horror, after some preparations, actually
+lifted off the quarter-skull and held it out to us, saying: "He had
+sawed it off a murderer, his own having accidentally been broken"; and
+withal explained, that the stabbing and arm-cutting he had talked of
+was to be understood as a jest, seeing he had merely done it in the
+character of Famulus at an Anatomical Theatre. However, the jester
+seemed to rise little in favor with any of us; and for my part, as he
+put his brain-lid and sham-skull on again, I thought to myself: "This
+dung-bed-bell has changed its place, indeed, but not the hemlock it was
+made to cover."
+
+Further, I could not but reckon it a suspicious circumstance, that he
+as well as all the company (the Blind Passenger too) were making for
+this very Flätz, to which I myself was bound. Much good I could not
+expect of this; and, in truth, turning home again would have been as
+pleasant to me as going on, had I not rather felt a pleasure in defying
+the future.
+
+I come now to the red-mantled Blind Passenger; most probably an
+_Emigré_ or _Refugié_; for he speaks German not worse than he does
+French; and his name, I think, was _Jean Pierre_ or _Jean Paul_, or
+some such thing, if indeed he had any name. His red cloak,
+notwithstanding this his identity of color with the Hangman, would in
+itself have remained heartily indifferent to me; had it not been for
+this singular circumstance, that he had already five times, contrary to
+all expectation, come upon me in five different towns (in great Berlin,
+in little Hof, in Coburg, Meiningen, and Bayreuth), and, each of these
+times, had looked at me significantly enough, and then gone his ways.
+Whether this _Jean Pierre_ is dogging me with hostile intent or not, I
+cannot say; but to our fancy, at any rate, no object can be gratifying
+that thus, with corps of observation, or out of loop-holes, holds and
+aims at us with muskets, which for year after year it shall move to
+this side and that, without our knowing on whom it is to fire. Still
+more offensive did Redcloak become to me, when he began to talk about
+his soft mildness of soul; a thing which seemed either to betoken
+pumping you or undermining you.
+
+I replied: "Sir, I am just come, with my brother-in-law here, from the
+field of battle (the last affair was at Pimpelstadt), and so perhaps am
+too much of a humor for fire, pluck, and war-fury; and to many a one,
+who happens to have a roaring waterspout of a heart, it may be well if
+his clerical character (which is mine) rather enjoins on him mildness
+than wildness. However, all mildness has its iron limit. If any
+thoughtless dog chance to anger me, in the first heat of rage I kick my
+foot through him; and after me, my good brother here will perhaps drive
+matters twice as far, for he is the man to do it. Perhaps it may be
+singular; but I confess, I regret to this day, that once when a boy I
+received three blows from another, without tightly returning them; and
+I often feel as if I must still pay them to his descendants. In sooth,
+if I but chance to see a child running off like a dastard from the weak
+attack of a child like himself, I cannot for my life understand his
+running, and can scarcely keep from interfering to save him by a
+decisive knock."
+
+The Passenger meanwhile was smiling, not in the best fashion. He gave
+himself out for a Legations-Rath, and seemed fox enough for such a
+post; but a mad fox will, in the long run, bite me as rabidly as a mad
+wolf will. For the rest, I calmly went on with my eulogy on courage;
+only that, instead of ludicrous gasconading, which directly betrays the
+coward, I purposely expressed myself in words at once cool, clear, and
+firm.
+
+"I am altogether for Montaigne's advice," said I: "'Fear nothing but
+fear.'"
+
+"I again," replied the Legations-man, with useless wire-drawing, "I
+should fear again that I did not sufficiently fear fear, but continued
+too dastardly."
+
+"To this fear also," replied I, coldly, "I set limits. A man, for
+instance, may not in the least believe in or be afraid of ghosts; and
+yet by night may bathe himself in cold sweat, and this purely out of
+terror at the dreadful fright he should be in (especially with what
+whiffs of epilepsies, falling-sicknesses, and so forth, he might be
+visited), in case simply his own too vivid fancy should create any wild
+fever-image, and hang it up in the air before him."
+
+"One should not, therefore," added my brother-in-law the Dragoon,
+contrary to his custom, moralizing a little,--"one should not bamboozle
+the poor sheep, man, with any ghost-tricks; the henheart may die on the
+spot."
+
+
+------------------------
+
+2. In his Prince, a soldier reverences and obeys at once his Prince and
+his Generalissimo; a Citizen, only his Prince.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+A loud storm of thunder overtaking the stage-coach altered the
+discourse. You, my Friends, knowing me as a man not quite destitute of
+some tincture of Natural Philosophy, will easily guess my precautions
+against thunder. I place myself on a chair in the middle of the room
+(often, when suspicious clouds are out, I stay whole nights on it), and
+by careful removal of all conductors, rings, buckles, and so forth, I
+here sit thunder-proof, and listen with a cool spirit to this elemental
+music of the cloud-kettledrum. These precautions have never harmed me,
+for I am still alive at this date; and to the present hour I
+congratulate myself on once hurrying out of church, though I had
+confessed but the day previous; and running, without more ceremony,
+and before I had received the sacrament, into the charnel-house,
+because a heavy thunder-cloud (which did, in fact, strike the
+churchyard linden-tree) was hovering over it. So soon as the cloud had
+disloaded itself, I returned from the charnel-house into the church,
+and was happy enough to come in after the Hangman (usually the last),
+and so still participate in the Feast of Love.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+45. Our present writers shrug their shoulders most at those on whose
+shoulders they stand; and exalt those most who crawl up along them.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+Such, for my own part, is my manner of proceeding; but in the full
+stage-coach I met with men to whom Natural Philosophy was no philosophy
+at all. For when the clouds gathered dreadfully together over our
+coach-canopy, and sparkling, began to play through the air, like so
+many fireflies, and I at last could not but request that the sweating
+coach-conclave would at least bring out their watches, rings, money,
+and such like, and put them all into one of the carriage-pockets, that
+none of us might have a conductor on his body; not only would no one of
+them do it, but my own brother-in-law the Dragoon even sprang out, with
+naked drawn sword, to the coach-box, and swore that he would conduct
+the thunder all away himself. Nor do I know whether this desperate
+mortal was not acting prudently; for our position within was frightful,
+and any one of us might every moment be a dead man. At last, to crown
+all, I got into a half altercation with two of the rude members of our
+leathern household, the Poisoner and the Harlot; seeing, by their
+questions, they almost gave me to understand, that, in our
+conversational picnic, especially with the Blind Passenger, I had not
+always come off with the best share. Such an imputation wounds your
+honor to the quick; and in my breast there was a thunder louder than
+that above us. However, I was obliged to carry on the needful exchange
+of sharp words as quietly and slowly as possible; and I quarrelled
+softly, and in a low tone, lest in the end a whole coachful of people,
+set in arms against each other, might get into heat and perspiration;
+and so, by vapor steaming through the coach-roof, conduct the too near
+thunderbolt down into the midst of us. At last I laid before the
+company the whole theory of Electricity in clear words, but low and
+slow (striving to avoid all emission of vapor); and especially
+endeavored to frighten them away from fear. For, indeed, through fear,
+the stroke--nay, two strokes, the electric or the apoplectic--might hit
+any one of us; since in Erxleben and Reimarus it is sufficiently proved
+that violent fear, by the transpiration it causes, may attract the
+lightning. I accordingly, in some fear of my own and other people's
+fear, represented to the passengers that now, in a coach so hot and
+crowded, with a drawn sword on the coach-box piercing the very
+lightning, with the thunder-cloud hanging over us, and even with so
+many transpirations from incipient fear; in short, with such visible
+danger on every hand, they must absolutely fear nothing, if they would
+not, all and sundry, be smitten to death in a few minutes.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+103. The Great perhaps take as good charge of their posterity as the
+Ants; the eggs once laid, the male and female Ants fly about their
+business, and confide them to the trusty _working-Ants_.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+"O Heaven!" cried I, "Courage! only courage! No fear, not even fear of
+fear! Would you have Providence to shoot you here sitting, like so many
+hares hunted into a pinfold? Fear, if you like, when you are out of the
+coach; fear to your heart's content in other places, where there is
+less to be afraid of; only not here, not here!"
+
+I shall not determine--since among millions scarcely one man dies by
+thunder-clouds, but millions perhaps by snow-clouds, and rain-clouds,
+and thin mist--whether my Coach-sermon could have made any claim to a
+prize for man-saving; however, at last, all uninjured, and driving
+towards a rainbow, we entered the town of Vierstädten, where dwelt a
+Postmaster, in the only street which the place had.
+
+
+
+
+ _Second Stage; from Vierstädten to Niederschöna_.
+
+
+The Postmaster was a churl and a striker; a class of mortals whom I
+inexpressibly detest, as my fancy always whispers to me, in their
+presence, that by accident or dislike I might happen to put on a
+scornful or impertinent look, and hound these mastiffs on my own
+throat; and so, from the very first, I must incessantly watch them.
+Happily, in this case (supposing I even had made a wrong face), I could
+have shielded myself with the Dragoon; for whose giant force such
+matters are a tidbit. This brother-in-law of mine, for example, cannot
+pass any tavern where he hears a sound of battle, without entering,
+and, as he crosses the threshold, shouting, "Peace, dogs!"--and
+therewith, under show of a peace deputation, he directly snatches
+up the first chair-leg in his hand, as if it were an American
+peace-calumet, and cuts to the right and left among the belligerent
+powers, or he gnashes the hard heads of the parties together (he
+himself takes no side), catching each by the hind-lock. In such cases
+the rogue is in Heaven!
+
+
+------------------------
+
+10. And does Life offer us, in regard to our ideal hopes and purposes,
+anything but a prosaic, unrhymed, unmetrical Translation?
+
+78. Our German frame of Government, cased in its harness, had much
+difficulty in moving, for the same reason why Beetles cannot fly,
+when their _wings_ have _wing-shells_, of very sufficient strength,
+and--grown together.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+I, for my part, rather avoid discrepant circles than seek them; as I
+likewise avoid all dead or killed people. The prudent man easily
+foresees what is to be got by them; either vexatious and injurious
+witnessing, or often even (when circumstances conspire) painful
+investigation, and suspicions of your being an accomplice.
+
+In Vierstädten nothing of importance presented itself, except--to my
+horror--a dog without tail, which came running along the town or
+street. In the first fire of passion at this sight, I pointed it out to
+the passengers, and then put the question, whether they could reckon a
+system of Medical Police well arranged, which, like this of
+Vierstädten, allowed dogs openly to scour about, when their tails were
+wanting. "What am I to do," said I, "when this member is cut away, and
+any such beast comes running towards me, and I cannot, either by the
+tail being cocked up or being drawn in, since the whole is snipt off,
+come to any conclusion whether the vermin is mad or not? In this way,
+the most prudent man may be bit, and become rabid, and so make
+shipwreck purely for want of a tail compass."
+
+
+------------------------
+
+8. Constitutions of Government are like highways; on a new and quite
+untrodden one, where every carriage helps in the process of bruising
+and smoothing, you are as much jolted and pitched, as an old worn-out
+one, full of holes. What is to be done then? Travel on.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+The Blind Passenger (he now got himself inscribed as a Seeing one, God
+knows for what objects) had heard my observation; which he now spun out
+in my presence almost into ridicule, and at last awakened in me the
+suspicion, that, by an overdone flattery in imitating my style of
+speech, he meant to banter me. "The Dog-tail," said he, "is, in truth,
+an alarm-beacon, and finger-post for us, that we come not even into the
+outmost precincts of madness; cut away from Comets their tails, from
+Bashaws theirs, from Crabs theirs (outstretched it denotes that they
+are burst); and in the most dangerous predicaments of life, we are left
+without clew, without indicator, without hand _in margine_; and we
+perish not so much as knowing how."
+
+For the rest, this stage passed over without quarreling or peril. About
+ten o'clock, the whole party, including even the Postilion, myself
+excepted, fell asleep. I indeed pretended to be sleeping, that I might
+observe whether some one, for his own good reasons, might not also be
+pretending it. But all continued snoring; the moon threw its
+brightening beams on nothing but downpressed eyelids.
+
+I had now a glorious opportunity of following Lavater's counsel, to
+apply the physiognomical ellwand specially to sleepers, since sleep,
+like death, expresses the genuine form in coarser lines. Other sleepers
+not in stage-coaches I think it less advisable to mete with this
+ellwand; having always an apprehension lest some fellow, but pretending
+to be asleep, may, the instant I am near enough, start up as in a
+dream, and deceitfully plant such a knock on the physiognomical
+mensurator's own facial structure, as to exclude it forever from
+appearing in any Physiognomical Fragments (itself being reduced to
+one), either in the stippled or line style. Nay, might not the most
+honest sleeper in the world, just while you are in hand with his
+physiognomical dissection, lay about him, spurred on by honor in some
+cudgelling-scene he may be dreaming; and in a few instants of
+clapperclawing, and kicking, and trampling, lull you into a much more
+lasting sleep than that out of which he was awakened?
+
+
+------------------------
+
+8. In Criminal Courts, murdered children are often represented as
+still-born; in Anticritiques, still-born as murdered.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+In my _Adumbrating Magic-lantern_, as I have named the Work, the
+whole physiognomical contents of this same sleeping stage-coach will be
+given to the world. There I shall explain to you at large how the
+Poisoner, with the murder-cupola, appeared to me devil-like; the Dwarf
+old-child-like; the Harlot languidly shameless; my Brother-in-law
+peacefully satisfied, with revenge or food; and the Legations-Rath,
+_Jean Pierre_, Heaven only knows why, like a half angel,--though,
+perhaps, it might be because only the fair body, not the other half,
+the soul, which had passed away in sleep, was affecting me.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+101. Not only were the Rhodians, from their Colossus, called
+Colossians; but also innumerable Germans are, from their Luther, called
+Lutherans.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+I had almost forgotten to mention, that, in a little village, while my
+Brother-in-law and the Postilion were sitting at their liquor, I
+happily fronted a small terror, Destiny having twice been on my side.
+Not far from a Hunting Box, beside a pretty clump of trees, I noticed a
+white tablet, with a black inscription on it. This gave me hopes that
+perhaps some little monumental piece, some pillar of honor, some battle
+memento, might here be awaiting me. Over an untrodden flowery tangle I
+reach the black on white; and to my horror and amazement I decipher in
+the moonshine, _Beware of Spring-guns!_ Thus was I standing perhaps
+half a nail's breadth from the trigger, with which, if I but stirred my
+heel, I should shoot myself off, like a forgotten ramrod, into the
+other world, beyond the verge of Time! The first thing I did was to
+slutch down my toe-nails, to bite, and, as it were, eat myself into the
+ground with them; since I might, at least, continue in warm life so
+long as I pegged my body firmly in beside the Atropos-scissors and
+hangman's block, which lay beside me. Then I endeavored to recollect by
+what steps the Fiend had led me hither unshot, but in my agony I had
+perspired the whole of it, and could remember nothing. In the Devil's
+village, close at hand, there was no dog to be seen and called to, who
+might have plucked me from the water; and my Brother-in-law and the
+Postilion were both carousing with full can. However, I summoned my
+courage and determination; wrote down on a leaf of my pocket-book my
+last will, the accidental manner of my death, and my dying remembrance
+of Berga; and then, with full sails, flew helter-skelter through the
+midst of it the shortest way; expecting at every step to awaken the
+murderous engine, and thus to clap over my still long candle of life
+the bonsoir, or extinguisher, with my own hand. However, I got off
+without shot. In the tavern, indeed, there was more than one fool to
+laugh at me; because, forsooth, what none but a fool could know, this
+Notice had stood there for the last ten years without any gun, as guns
+often do without any notice. But so it is, my Friends, with our
+game-police, which warns against all things, only not against warnings.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+88. Hitherto I have always regarded the Polemical writings of our
+present philosophic and aesthetic Idealist Logic-buffers,--in which,
+certainly, a few contumelies, and misconceptions, and misconclusions do
+make their appearance,--rather on the fair side; observing in it merely
+an imitation of classical Antiquity, in particular of the ancient
+Athletes, who (according to Schöttgen) besmeared their bodies with
+_mud_, that they might not be laid hold of; and filled their hands with
+_sand_, that they might lay hold of their antagonists.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+For the rest, throughout the whole stage, I had a constant source of
+altercation with the coachman, because he grudged stopping perhaps
+once in the quarter of an hour, when I chose to come out for a
+natural purpose. Unhappily, in truth, one has little reason to expect
+water-doctors among the postilion class, since Physicians themselves
+have so seldom learned from Haller's large _Physiology_ that a
+postponement of the above operation will precipitate devilish
+stone-ware, and at last precipitate the proprietor himself; this
+stone-manufactory being generally concluded, not by the Lithotomist,
+but by Death. Had postilions read that Tycho Brahe died like a
+bombshell by bursting, they would rather pull up for a moment; with
+such unlooked-for knowledge, they would see it to be reasonable that a
+man, though expecting some time to carry his death-stone _on_ him,
+should not incline, for the time being, to carry it _in_ him. Nay, have
+I not often, at Weimar, in the longest concluding scenes of Schiller,
+run out with tears in my eyes; purely that, while his Minerva was
+melting me on the whole, I might not by the Gorgon's head on her breast
+be partially turned to stone? And did I not return to the weeping
+play-house, and fall into the general emotion so much the more briskly,
+as now I had nothing to give vent to but my heart?
+
+
+------------------------
+
+103. Or are all Mosques, Episcopal-churches, Pagodas, Chapels-of-Ease,
+Tabernacles, and Pantheons, anything else than the Ethnic Forecourt of
+the Invisible Temple and its Holy of Holies?
+
+------------------------
+
+
+Deep in the dark we arrived at Niederschöna.
+
+
+
+
+ _Third Stage; from Niederschöna to Flätz_.
+
+
+While I am standing at the Posthouse musing, with my eye fixed on my
+portmanteau, comes a beast of a watchman, and bellows and brays in his
+night-tube so close by my ear that I start back in trepidation, I whom
+even a too hasty accosting will vex. Is there no medical police, then,
+against such efflated hour-fulminators and alarm-cannon, by which
+notwithstanding no gunpowder cannon are saved? In my opinion nobody
+should be invested with the watchman-horn but some reasonable man, who
+had already blown himself into an asthma, and who would consequently be
+in case to sing out his hour-verse so low that you could not hear it.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+40. The common man is copious only in narration, not in reasoning; the
+cultivated man is brief only in the former, not in the latter; because
+the common man's reasons are a sort of sensations, which, as well as
+things visible, he merely _looks at_; by the cultivated man, again,
+both reasons and things visible are rather _thought_ than looked at.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+What I had long expected, and the Dwarf predicted, now took place;
+deeply stooping, through the high Posthouse door, issued the Giant,
+and raised in the open air a most unreasonably high figure, heightened
+by the ell-long bonnet and feather on his huge jobbernowl. My
+Brother-in-law, beside him, looked but like his son of fourteen years;
+the Dwarf like his lap-dog waiting for him on its two hind legs. "Good
+friend," said my bantering Brother-in-law, leading him towards me and
+the stagecoach, "just step softly in, we shall all be happy to make
+room for you. Fold yourself neatly together, lay your head on your
+knee, and it will do." The unseasonable banterer would willingly have
+seen the almost stupid Giant (of whom he had soon observed that his
+brain was no active substance, but in the inverse ratio of his trunk)
+squeezed in among us in the post-chest, and lying kneaded together like
+a sand-bag before him. "Won't do! Won't do!" said the Giant, looking
+in. "The gentleman perhaps does not know," said the Dwarf, "how big the
+Giant is; and so he thinks that because _I_ go in-- But that is another
+story; _I_ will creep into any hole, do but tell me where."
+
+In short, there was no resource for the Postmaster and the Giant, but
+that the latter should plant himself behind, in the character of
+luggage, and there lie bending down like a weeping willow over the
+whole vehicle. To me such a back-wall and rear-guard could not be
+particularly gratifying; and I may refer it (I hope) to any one of you,
+ye Friends, if with such ware at your back you would not, as clearly
+and earnestly as I, have considered what manifold murderous projects a
+knave of a Giant behind you, a _pursuer_ in all senses, might not
+maliciously attempt; say, that he broke in and assailed you by the
+back-window, or with Titanian strength laid hold of the coach-roof and
+demolished the whole party in a lump. However, this Elephant (who
+indeed seemed to owe the similarity more to his overpowering mass than
+to his quick light of inward faculty), crossing his arms over the top
+of the vehicle, soon began to sleep and snore above us; an Elephant, of
+whom, as I more and more joyfully observed, my Brother-in-law, the
+Dragoon, could easily be the tamer and bridle-holder, nay, had already
+been so.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+9. In any national calamity the ancient Egyptians took revenge on the
+god Typhon, whom they blamed for it, by hurling his favorites, the
+Asses, down over rocks. In similar wise have countries of a different
+religion now and then taken their revenge.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+As more than one person now felt inclined to sleep, but I, on the
+contrary, as was proper, to wake, I freely offered my seat of honor,
+the front place in the coach (meaning thereby to abolish many little
+flaws of envy in my fellow-passengers), to such persons as wished to
+take a nap thereon. The Legation's man accepted the offer with
+eagerness, and soon fell asleep there sitting, under the Titan.[74] To
+me this sort of coach-sleeping of a diplomatic _charge d'affaires_
+remained a thing incomprehensible. A man, that in the middle of a
+stranger and often barbarously-minded company permits himself to
+slumber, may easily, supposing him to talk in his sleep and coach,
+(think of the Saxon minister[75] before the Seven Years' War!) blab out
+a thousand secrets, and crimes, some of which, perhaps, he has not
+committed. Should not every minister, ambassador, or other man of honor
+and rank, really shudder at the thought of insanity or violent fevers;
+seeing no mortal can be his surety that he shall not in such cases
+publish the greatest scandals, of which, it may be, the half are lies?
+
+
+------------------------
+
+70. Let Poetry veil itself in Philosophy, but only as the latter does
+in the former. Philosophy in poetized Prose resembles those tavern
+drinking-glasses, encircled with party-colored wreaths of figures,
+which disturb your enjoyment both of the drink, and (often awkwardly
+eclipsing and covering each other) of the carving also.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+At last, after the long July night, we passengers, together with
+Aurora, arrived in the precincts of Flätz. I looked with a sharp
+yet moistened eye at the steeples. I believe, every man who has
+anything decisive to seek in a town, and to whom it is either to be a
+judgment-seat of his hopes, or their anchoring-station, either a
+battle-field or a sugar-field, first and longest directs his eye on the
+steeples of the town, as upon the indexes and balance-tongues of his
+future destiny; these artificial peaks, which, like natural ones, are
+the thrones of our Future. As I happened to express myself on this
+point perhaps too poetically to _Jean Pierre_, he answered with
+sufficient want of taste: "The steeples of such towns are indeed the
+Swiss Alpine peaks, on which we milk and manufacture the Swiss cheese
+of our Future." Did the Legations-Peter mean with this style to make me
+ridiculous, or only himself? Determine!
+
+"Here is the place, the town," said I in secret, "where to-day much and
+for many years is to be determined, where thou this evening, about five
+o'clock, art to present thy petition and thyself. May it prosper! May
+it be successful! Let Flätz, this arena of thy little efforts among the
+rest, become a building-space for fair castles and air-castles to two
+hearts, thy own and thy Berga's!"
+
+At the Tiger Inn I alighted.
+
+
+
+
+ _First Day in Flätz_.
+
+
+No mortal in my situation at this Tiger-hotel would have triumphed much
+in his more immediate prospects. I, as the only man known to me,
+especially in the way of love (of the runaway Dragoon anon!), looked
+out from the windows of the overflowing Inn, and down on the rushing
+sea of marketers, and very soon began to reflect, that, except Heaven
+and the rascals and murderers, none knew how many of the latter two
+classes were floating among the tide; purposing, perhaps, to lay hold
+of the most innocent strangers, and in part cut their purses, in part
+their throats. My situation had a special circumstance against it. My
+brother-in-law, who still comes plump out with everything, had
+mentioned that I was to put up at the Tiger. O Heaven! when will such
+people learn to be secret, and to cover even the meanest pettinesses of
+life under mantles and veils, were it only that a silly mouse may as
+often give birth to a mountain as a mountain to a mouse! The whole
+rabble of the stagecoach stopped at the Tiger; the Harlot, the
+Rat-catcher, _Jean Pierre_, the Giant, who had dismounted at the Gate
+of the town, and carrying the huge block-head of the Dwarf on his
+shoulders as his own (cloaking over the deception by his cloak), had
+thus, like a ninny, exhibited himself gratis by half a dwarf more
+gigantic than he could be seen for money.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+158. Governments should not too often change the penny-trumps and
+child's drums of the Poets for the regimental trumpet and fire-drum;
+on the other hand, good subjects should regard many a princely
+drum-tendency simply as a disease, in which the patient, by air
+insinuating under the skin, has got dreadfully swoln.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+And now for each of the Passengers, the question was how he could make
+the Tiger, the heraldic emblem of the Inn, his prototype; and so what
+lamb he might suck the blood of, and tear in pieces, and devour. My
+brother-in-law too left me, having gone in quest of some horse-dealer;
+but he retained the chamber next mine for his sister; this, it
+appeared, was to denote attention on his part. I remained solitary,
+left to my own intrepidity and force of purpose.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+89. In great towns, a stranger, for the first day or two after his
+arrival, lives purely at his own expense, in an inn; afterwards, in the
+houses of his friends, without expense; on the other hand, if you
+arrive at the Earth, as for instance I have done, you are courteously
+maintained, precisely for the first few years, free of charges; but in
+the next and longer series--for you often stay sixty--you are actually
+obliged (I have the documents in my hands) to pay for every drop and
+morsel, as if you were in the great Earth Inn, which indeed you are.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+Yet among so many villains, encompassing if not even beleaguring me, I
+thought warmly of one far distant, faithful soul, of my Berga in
+Neusattel; a true heart of pith, which perhaps with many a weak
+marriage-partner might have given protection rather than sought it.
+
+"Appear, then, quickly to-morrow at noon, Berga," said my heart; "and
+if possible before noon, that I may lengthen thy market paradise so
+many hours as thou arrivest earlier!"
+
+
+------------------------
+
+107. Germany is a long lofty mountain--under the sea.
+
+144. The Reviewer does not in reality employ his pen for writing; but
+he burns it, to awaken weak people from their swoons with the smell; he
+tickles with it the throat of the plagiary, to make him render back;
+and he picks with it his own teeth. He is the only individual in the
+whole learned lexicon that can never exhaust himself, never write
+himself out, let him sit before the ink-glass for centuries, or tens of
+centuries. For while the Scholar, the Philosopher, and the Poet produce
+their new book solely from new materials and growth, the Reviewer
+merely lays his old gauge of taste and knowledge on a thousand new
+works; and his light, in the ever-passing, ever-differently-cut
+glass-world, which he _elucidates_, is still refracted into new colors.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+A clergyman, amid the tempests of the world, readily makes for a free
+harbor, for the church; the church-wall is his casement-wall and
+fortification; and behind are to be found more peaceful and more
+accordant souls than on the market-place; in short, I went into the
+High Church. However, in the course of the psalm, I was somewhat
+disturbed by a Heiduc, who came up to a well-dressed young gentleman
+sitting opposite me, and tore the double opera-glass from his nose, it
+being against rule in Flätz, as it is in Dresden, to look at the Court
+with glasses which diminish and approximate. I myself had on a pair of
+spectacles, but they were magnifiers. It was impossible for me to
+resolve on taking them off; and here again, I am afraid, I shall pass
+for a foolhardy person and a desperado; so much only I reckoned fit, to
+look invariably into my psalm-book; not once lifting my eyes while the
+Court was rustling and entering, thereby to denote that my glasses were
+ground convex. For the rest, the sermon was good, if not always finely
+conceived for a Court-church; it admonished the hearers against
+innumerable vices, to whose counterparts, the virtues, another preacher
+might so readily have exhorted us. During the whole service, I made it
+my business to exhibit true, deep reverence, not only towards God, but
+also towards my illustrious Prince. For the latter reverence I had my
+private reason. I wished to stamp this sentiment strongly and openly as
+with raised letters on my countenance, and so give the lie to any
+malicious imp about Court, by whom my contravention of the _Panegyric
+on Nero_, and my free German satire on this real tyrant himself, which
+I had inserted in the _Plätz Weekly Journal_, might have been perverted
+into a secret characteristic portrait of my own Sovereign. We live in
+such times at present, that scarcely can we compose a pasquinade on the
+Devil in Hell, but some human Devil on Earth will apply it to an angel.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+71. The Youth is singular from caprice, and takes pleasure in it; the
+Man is so from constraint, unintentionally, and feels pain in it.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+When the Court at last issued from church, and were getting into their
+carriages, I kept at such a distance that my face could not possibly be
+noticed, in case I had happened to assume no reverent look, but an
+indifferent or even proud one. God knows, who has kneaded into me those
+mad, desperate fancies and crotchets, which perhaps would sit better on
+a Hero Schabacker, than on an Army-chaplain under him. I cannot here
+forbear recording to you, my Friends, one of the maddest among them,
+though at first it may throw too glaring a light on me. It was at my
+ordination to be Army-chaplain, while about to participate in the
+Sacrament, on the first day of Easter. Now, here while I was standing,
+moved into softness, before the balustrade of the altar, in the middle
+of the whole male congregation,--nay, I perhaps more deeply moved than
+any among them, since, as a person going to war, I might consider
+myself a half-dead man, that was now partaking in the last Feast of
+Souls, as it were like a person to be hanged on the morrow,--here,
+then, amid the pathetic effects of the organ and singing, there rose
+something--were it the first Easter-day which awoke in me what
+primitive Christians call their Easter-laughter, or merely the contrast
+between the most devilish predicaments and the most holy,--in short,
+there rose something in me (for which reason I have ever since taken
+the part of every simple person who might ascribe such things to the
+Devil), and this something started the question: "Now, could there be
+aught more diabolical than if thou, just in receiving the Holy Supper,
+wert madly and blasphemously to begin laughing?" Instantly I took to
+wrestling with this hell-dog of a thought; neglected the most precious
+feelings, merely to keep the dog in my eye, and scare him away; yet was
+forced to draw back from him, exhausted and unsuccessful, and arrived
+at the step of the altar with the mournful certainty that in a little
+while I should, without more ado, begin laughing, let me weep and moan
+inwardly as I liked. Accordingly, while I and a very worthy old
+Burgermeister were bowing down together before the long parson, and the
+latter (perhaps kneeling on the low cushion, I fancied him too long)
+put the wafer in my clenched mouth, I felt all the muscles of laughter
+already beginning sardonically to contract; and these had not long
+acted on the guiltless integument, till an actual smile appeared there;
+and as we bowed the second time, I was grinning like an ape. My
+companion the Burgermeister justly expostulated with me, in a low
+voice, as we walked round behind the altar: "In Heaven's name, are you
+an ordained Preacher of the Gospel, or a Merry-Andrew? Is it Satan that
+is laughing out of you?"
+
+
+------------------------
+
+198. The Populace and Cattle grow giddy on the edge of no abyss; with
+the Man it is otherwise.
+
+11. The Golden Calf of Self-love soon waxes to be a burning Phalaris's
+Bull, which reduces its father and adorer to ashes.
+
+103. The male Beau-crop, which surrounds the female Roses and Lilies,
+must (if I rightly comprehend its flatteries) most probably presuppose
+in the fair the manners of the Spaniards and Italians, who offer any
+valuable, by way of present, to the man who praises it excessively.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+"Ah, Heaven! who else?" said I; and this being over, I finished my
+devotions in a more becoming fashion.
+
+From the church (I now return to the Flätz one) I proceeded to the
+Tiger Inn, and dined at the _table-d'hôte_, being at no time shy of
+encountering men. Previous to the second course, a waiter handed me an
+empty plate, on which, to my astonishment, I noticed a French verse
+scratched in with a fork, containing nothing less than a lampoon on the
+Commandant of Flätz. Without ceremony, I held out the plate to the
+company; saying, I had just, as they saw, got this lampooning cover
+presented to me, and must request them to bear witness that I had
+nothing to do with the matter. An officer directly changed plates with
+me. During the fifth course, I could not but admire the chemico-medical
+ignorance of the company; for a hare, out of which a gentleman
+extracted and exhibited several grains of shot, that is to say,
+therefore, of lead alloyed with arsenic, and then cleaned by hot
+vinegar, did, nevertheless, by the spectators (I expected) continue to
+be pleasantly eaten.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+199. But not many existing Governments, I believe, do behead under
+pretext of trepanning; or sew (in a more choice allegory) the people's
+lips together, under pretence of sewing the harelips in them.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+In the course of our table-talk, one topic seized me keenly by my weak
+side, I mean by my honor. The law custom of the city happened to be
+mentioned, as it affects natural children; and I learned that here a
+loose girl may convert any man she pleases to select into the father of
+her brat, simply by her oath. "Horrible!" said I, and my hair stood on
+end. "In this way may the worthiest head of a family, with a wife and
+children, or a clergyman lodging in the Tiger, be stript of honor and
+innocence, by any wicked chambermaid whom he may have seen, or who may
+have seen him, in the course of her employment!"
+
+An elderly officer observed: "But will the girl swear herself to the
+Devil so readily?"
+
+What logic! "Or suppose," continued I, without answer, "a man happened
+to be travelling with that Vienna Locksmith, who afterwards became a
+mother, and was brought to bed of a baby son; or with any disguised
+Chevalier d'Eon, who often passes the night in his company, whereby the
+Locksmith or the Chevalier can swear to their private interviews; no
+delicate man of honor will in the end risk travelling with another;
+seeing he knows not how soon the latter may pull off his boots, and
+pull on his women's-pumps, and swear his companion into Fatherhood, and
+himself to the Devil!"
+
+
+------------------------
+
+67. Hospitable Entertainer, wouldst thou search into thy Guest?
+Accompany him to another Entertainer, and listen to him. Just so,
+wouldst thou become better acquainted with Mistress in an hour, than by
+living with her for a month? Accompany her among her female friends and
+female enemies (if that is no pleonasm), and look at her!
+
+------------------------
+
+
+Some of the company, however, misunderstood my oratorical fire so much,
+that they, sheep-wise, gave some insinuations as if I myself were not
+strict in this point, but lax. By Heaven! I no longer knew what I was
+eating or speaking. Happily, on the opposite side of the table, some
+lying story of a French defeat was started. Now, as I had read on the
+street corners that French and German Proclamation, calling before the
+Court Martial any one who had heard war rumors (disadvantageous,
+namely), without giving notice of them,--I, as a man not willing ever
+to forget himself, had nothing more prudent to do in this case, than to
+withdraw with empty ears, telling none but the landlord why.
+
+It was no improper time; for I had previously determined to have my
+beard shaven about half past four, that so, towards five, I might
+present myself with a chin just polished by the razor smoothing-iron,
+and sleek as wove-paper, without the smallest root-stump of a hair left
+on it. By way of preparation, like Pitt before Parliamentary debates, I
+poured a devilish deal of Pontac into my stomach, with true disgust,
+and contrary to all sanitary rules; not so much for fronting the light
+stranger Barber, as the Minister and General von Schabacker, with whom
+I had it in view to exchange perhaps more than one fiery statement.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+80. In the Summer of life, men keep digging and filling ice-pits, as
+well as circumstances will admit; that so, in their Winter, they may
+have something in store to give them coolness.
+
+28. It is impossible for me, amid the tendril-forest of allusions (even
+this again is a tendril-twig), to state and declare on the spot whether
+all the Courts or Heights, the (Bougouer) _Snowline_ of Europe, have
+ever been mentioned in my writings or not; but I could wish for
+information on the subject, that, if not, I may try to do it still.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+The common Hotel Barber was ushered in to me; but at first view you
+noticed in his polygonal, zigzag visage, more of a man that would
+finally go mad, than of one growing wiser. Now, madmen are a class of
+persons whom I hate incredibly; and nothing can take me to see any
+madhouse, simply because the first maniac among them may clutch me in
+his giant fists if he like; and bet cause, owing to infection, I cannot
+be sure that I shall ever get out again with the sense which I brought
+in. In a general way, I sit (when once I am lathered) in such a posture
+on my chair as to keep both my hands (the eyes I fix intently on the
+bartering countenance) lying clenched along my sides, and pointed
+directly at the midriff of the barber; that so, on the smallest
+ambiguity of movement, I may dash in upon him, and overset him in a
+twinkling.
+
+I scarce know rightly how it happened; but here, while I am anxiously
+studying the foolish, twisted visage of the shaver, and he just then
+chanced to lay his long whetted weapon a little too abruptly against my
+bare throat, I gave him such a sudden bounce on the abdominal viscera,
+that the silly varlet had wellnigh suicidally slit his own windpipe.
+For me, truly, nothing remained but to indemnify the man; and then,
+contrary to my usual principles, to tie round a broad stuffed cravat,
+by way of cloak to what remained unshorn.
+
+And now at last I sallied forth to the General, drinking out the
+remnant of the Pontac, as I crossed the threshold.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+36. And so I should like, in all cases, to be the First, especially in
+Begging. The first prisoner-of-war, the first cripple, the first man
+ruined by burning (like him who brings the first fire-engine), gains
+the head-subscription and the heart; the next comer finds nothing but
+Duty to address; and at last, in this melodious _mancando_ of sympathy,
+matters sink so far, that the last (if the last but one may at least
+have retired laden with a rich "God help you!") obtains from the
+benignant hand nothing more than its fist. And as in Begging the first,
+so in Giving I should like to be the last; one obliterates the other,
+especially the last the first. So, however, is the world ordered.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+I hope there were plans lying ready within me for answering rightly,
+nay for asking. The Petition I carried in my pocket, and in my right
+hand. In the left, I had a duplicate of it. My fire of spirit easily
+helped over the living fence of ministerial obstructions; and soon I
+unexpectedly found myself in the ante-chamber, among his most
+distinguished lackeys; persons, so far as I could see, not inclined to
+change flour for bran with any one. Selecting the most respectable
+individual of the number, I delivered him my paper request, accompanied
+with the verbal one that he would hand it in. He took it, but
+ungraciously. I waited in vain till far in the sixth hour, at which
+season alone the gay General can safely be applied to. At last I pitch
+upon another lackey, and repeat my request; he runs about seeking his
+runaway brother, or my Petition, to no purpose; neither of them
+could be found. How happy was it that in the midst of my Pontac,
+before shaving, I had written out the duplicate of this paper; and
+therefore--simply on the principle that you should always keep a second
+wooden leg packed into your knapsack when you have the first on your
+body--and out of fear, that, if the original petition chanced to drop
+from me in the way between the Tiger and Schabacker's, my whole journey
+and hope would melt into water,--and therefore, I say, having stuck the
+repeating work of that original paper into my pocket, I had, in any
+case, something to hand in, and that something truly a Ditto. I handed
+it in.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+136. If you mount too high above your time, your ears (on the side of
+Fame) are little better off than if you sink too deep below it; in
+truth, Charles up in his Balloon, and Halley down in his Diving-bell,
+felt equally the same strange pain in their ears.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+Unhappily six o'clock was already past. The lackey, however, did not
+keep me long waiting; but returned with--I may say, the text of this
+whole Circular--the almost rude answer (which you, my Friends, out of
+regard for me and Schabacker, will not divulge), that: "In case I
+were the Attila Schmelzle of Schabacker's Regiment, might lift my
+pigeon-liver flag again, and fly to the Devil, as I did at
+Pimpelstadt." Another man would have dropt dead on the spot; I,
+however, walked quite stoutly off, answering the fellow: "With great
+pleasure indeed, I fly to the Devil; and so Devil a fly I care." On the
+road home, I examined myself, whether it had not been the Pontac that
+spoke out of me (though the very examination contradicted this, for
+Pontac never examines); but I found that nothing but I, my heart, my
+courage perhaps, had spoken; and why, after all, any whimpering? Does
+not the patrimony of my good wife endow me better than ten Catechetical
+Professorships? And has she not furnished all the corners of my book of
+Life with so many golden clasps, that I can open it forever without
+wearing it? Let henhearts cackle and pip; I flapped my pinions, and
+said: "Dash boldly through it, come what may!" I felt myself excited
+and exalted; I fancied Republics, in which I, as a hero, might be at
+home; I longed to be in that noble Grecian time, when one hero readily
+put up with bastinadoes from another, and said, "Strike, but hear!" and
+out of this ignoble one, where men will scarcely put up with hard
+words, to say nothing of more. I painted out to my mind how I
+should feel, if, in happier circumstances, I were uprooting hollow
+Thrones, and before whole nations mounting on mighty deeds as on the
+Temple-steps of Immortality; and, in gigantic ages, finding quite other
+men to outman and outstrip, than the mite-populace about me, or, at the
+best, here and there a Vulcanello. I thought and thought, and grew
+wilder and wilder, and intoxicated myself (no Pontac intoxication
+therefore, which, you know, increases more by continuance than
+cessation of drinking), and gesticulated openly, as I put the
+question to myself: "Wilt thou be a mere state-lapdog? A dog's-dog,
+a _pium desiderium_ of an _impium desiderium_, an Ex-Ex, a
+Nothing's-Nothing?--Fire and Fury!" With this, however, I dashed down
+my hat into the mud of the market. On lifting and cleaning this old
+servant, I could not but perceive how worn and faded it was; and I
+therefore determined instantly to purchase a new one, and carry the
+same home in my hand.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+25. In youth, like a blind man just couched (and what is birth but a
+couching of the sight?), you take the Distant for the Near, the starry
+heaven for tangible room-furniture, pictures for objects; and, to the
+young man, the whole world is sitting on his very nose, till repeating
+bandaging and unbandaging have at last taught him, like the blind
+patient, to estimate _Distance_ and _Appearance_.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+I accomplished this. I bought one of the finest cut. Strangely enough,
+by this hat, as if it had been a Graduation-hat, was my head tried and
+examined in the Ziegengasse or Goat-gate of Flätz. For as General
+Schabacker came driving along that street in his carriage, and I (it
+need not be said) was determined to avenge myself, not by vulgar
+clownishness, but by courtesy, I had here got one of the most ticklish
+problems imaginable to solve on the spur of the instant. You observe,
+if I swung only the fine hat which I carried in my hand, and kept the
+faded one on my head,--I might have the appearance of a perfect clown,
+who does not doff at all; if, on the other hand, I pulled the old hat
+from my head, and therewith did my reverence, then two hats, both in
+play at once (let me swing the other at the same time or not), brought
+my salute within the verge of ridicule. Now do you, my Friends, before
+reading further, bethink you how a man was to extricate himself from
+such a plight, without losing his presence of mind! I think, perhaps,
+by this means; by merely losing his hat. In one word, then, I simply
+dropped the new hat from my hand into the mud, to put myself in a
+condition for taking off the old hat by itself, and swaying it in
+needful courtesy, without any shade of ridicule.
+
+Arrived at the Tiger,--to avoid misconstructions, I first had the
+glossy, fine, and superfine hat cleaned, and some time afterwards the
+mud-hat or rubbis-hat.
+
+And now, weighing my momentous Past in the adjusting balance within me,
+I walked in fiery mood to and fro. The Pontac must--I know that there
+is no unadulterated liquor here below--have been more than usually
+adulterated; so keenly did it chase my fancy out of one fire into the
+other. I now looked forth into a wide, glittering life, in which I
+lived without post, merely on money; and which I beheld, as it were,
+sowed with the Delphic caves, and Zenonic walks, and Muse-hills of all
+the Sciences, which I might now cultivate at my ease. In particular,
+I should have it in my power to apply more diligently to writing
+Prize-essays for Academies; of which (that is to say, of the
+Prize-essays) no author need ever be ashamed, since, in all cases,
+there is a whole crowning Academy to stand and blush for the crownee.
+And even if the Prize-marksman does not hit the crown, he still
+continues more unknown and more anonymous (his Device not being
+unsealed) than any other author, who indeed can publish some nameless
+Long-ear of a book, but not hinder it from being, by a Literary
+Ass-burial (_sepultura asinina_), publicly interred, in a short time,
+before half the world.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+126. In the long run, out of mere fear and necessity, we shall become
+the warmest cosmopolites I know of; so rapidly do ships shoot to and
+fro, and, like shuttles, weave Islands and Quarters of the World
+together. For let but the political weather-glass fall to-day in South
+America, to-morrow we in Europe have storm and thunder.
+
+19. It is easier, they say, to climb a hill when you ascend back
+foremost. This, perhaps, might admit of application to political
+eminences; if you still turned towards them that part of the body on
+which you sit, and kept your face directed down to the people; all the
+while, however, removing and mounting.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+Only one thing grieved me by anticipation; the sorrow of my Berga, for
+whom, dear tired wayfarer, I on the morrow must overcloud her arrival,
+and her shortened market-spectacle, by my negatory intelligence. She
+would so gladly (and who can take it ill of a rich farmer's Daughter?)
+have made herself somebody in Neusattel, and overshone many a female
+dignitary! Every mortal longs for his parade-place, and some earlier
+living honor than the last honors. Especially so good a lowly-born
+housewife as my Berga, conscious perhaps rather of her metallic than of
+her spiritual treasure, would still wish at banquets to be mistress of
+some seat or other, and so in place to overtop this or that plucked
+goose of the neighborhood.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+26. Few German writers are not original, if we may ascribe originality
+(as is at least the conversational practice of all people) to a man who
+merely dishes out his own thoughts without foreign admixture. For as,
+between their Memory, where their reading or foreign matter dwells, and
+their Imagination or Productive Power, where their writing or own
+peculiar matter originates, a sufficient space intervenes, and the
+boundary-stones are fixed in so conscientiously and firmly that nothing
+foreign may pass over into their own, or inversely, so that they may
+really read a hundred works without losing their own primitive flavor,
+or even altering it,--their individuality may, I believe, be considered
+as secured; and their spiritual nourishment, their pancakes, loaves,
+fritters, caviare, and meat-balls, are not assimilated to their system,
+but given back pure and unaltered. Often in my own mind, I figure such
+writers as living but thousand-fold more artificial Ducklings from
+Vaucasson's Artificial Duck of Wood. For in fact they are not less
+cunningly put together than this timber Duck, which will gobble meat
+and apparently void it again, under show of having digested it, and
+derived from it blood and juices; though the secret of the business is,
+the artist has merely introduced an ingenious compound ejective matter
+behind, with which concoction and nourishment have nothing to do, but
+which the Duck illusorily gives forth and publishes to the world.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+It is in this point of view that husbands are so indispensable. I
+therefore resolved to purchase for myself, and consequently for her,
+one of the best of those titles which our Courts in Germany (as in a
+Leipzig saleroom) stand offering to buyers, in all sizes and sorts,
+from Noble and Half-noble down to Rath or Councillor; and once
+invested therewith, to reflect from my own Quarter-nobility such an
+Eighth-part-nobility on this true soul, that many a Neusattelitess (I
+hope) shall half burst with envy, and say and cry: "Pooh, the stupid
+farmer thing! See how it wabbles and bridles! It has forgot how matters
+stood when it had no money-bag and no Hofrath!" For to the Hofrathship
+I shall before this have attained.
+
+But in the cold solitude of my room, and the fire of my remembrances, I
+longed unspeakably for my Bergelchen; I and my heart were wearied with
+the foreign busy day; no one here said a kind word to me, which he did
+not hope to put in the bill. Friends! I languished for my friend, whose
+heart would pour out its blood as a balsam for a second heart; I cursed
+my over-prudent regulations, and wished, that, to have the good Berga
+at my side, I had given up the stupid houseware to all thieves and
+fires whatsoever. As I walked to and fro, it seemed to me easier and
+easier to become all things, an Exchequer-Rath, an Excise-Rath, any
+Rath in the world, and whatever she required when she came.
+
+"See thou take thy pleasure in the town!" had Bergelchen kept saying
+the whole week through. But how, without her, can I take any? Our tears
+of sorrow friends dry up, and accompany with their own; but our tears
+of joy we find most readily repeated in the eyes of our wives. Pardon
+me, good Friends, these libations of my sensibility; I am but showing
+you my heart and my Berga. If I need an Absolution-merchant, the
+Pontac-merchant is the man.
+
+
+
+
+ _First Night in Flätz_.
+
+
+Yet the wine did not take from me the good sense to look under the bed,
+before going into it, and examine whether any one was lurking there;
+for example, the Dwarf, or the Rat-catcher, or the Legations-Rath; also
+to shove the key under the latch (which I reckon the best bolting
+arrangement of all), and then, by way of further assurance, to bore my
+night-screws into the door, and pile all the chairs in a heap behind
+it; and, lastly, to keep on my breeches and shoes, wishing absolutely
+to have no care upon my mind.
+
+But I had still other precautions to take in regard to sleep-walking.
+To me it has always been incomprehensible how so many men can go to
+bed, and lie down at their ease there, without reflecting that perhaps,
+in the first sleep, they may get up again as Somnambulists, and crawl
+over the tops of roofs and the like; awakening in some spot where they
+may fall in a moment and break their necks. While at home, there is
+little risk in my sleep; because, my right toe being fastened every
+night with three ells of tape (I call it in jest our marriage tie) to
+my wife's left hand, I feel a certainty that, in case I should start up
+from this bed-arrest, I must with the tether infallibly awaken her, and
+so by my Berga, as by my living bridle, be again led back to bed. But
+here in the Inn, I had nothing for it but to knot myself once or twice
+to the bed-foot, that I might not wander; though in this way, an
+irruption of villains would have brought double peril with it.--Alas!
+so dangerous is sleep at all times, that every man, who is not lying on
+his back a corpse, must be on his guard lest with the general system
+some limb or other also fall asleep; in which case the sleeping limb
+(there are not wanting examples of it in Medical History) may next
+morning be lying ripe for amputation. For this reason, I have myself
+frequently awakened, that no part of me fall asleep.
+
+Having properly tied myself to the bed-posts, and at length got under
+the coverlid, I now began to be dubious about my Pontac Fire-bath, and
+apprehensive of the valorous and tumultuous dreams too likely to ensue;
+which, alas, did actually prove to be nothing better than heroic and
+monarchic feats, castle-stormings, rock-throwings, and the like. This
+point also I am sorry to see so little attended to in medicine. Medical
+gentlemen, as well as their customers, all stretch themselves quietly
+in their beds, without one among them considering whether a furious
+rage (supposing him also directly after to drink cold water in his
+dream), or a heart-devouring grief, all which he may undergo in vision,
+does harm to life or not.
+
+Shortly before midnight, I awoke from a heavy dream, to encounter a
+ghost-trick much too ghostly for my fancy. My brother-in-law, who
+manufactured it, deserves for such vapid cookery to be named before you
+without reserve, as the maltmaster of this washy brewage. Had suspicion
+been more compatible with intrepidity, I might perhaps, by his moral
+maxim about this matter, on the road, as well as by his taking up the
+side-room, at the middle door of which stood my couch, have easily
+divined the whole. But now, on awakening, I felt myself blown upon by a
+cold ghost-breath, which I could nowise deduce from the distant bolted
+window; a point I had rightly decided, for the Dragoon was producing
+the phenomenon through the key-hole by a pair of bellows. Every sort
+of coldness in the night-season reminds you of clay-coldness and
+spectre-coldness. I summoned my resolution, however, and abode the
+issue; but now the very coverlid began to get in motion; I pulled it
+towards me; it would not stay; sharply I sit upright in my bed, and
+cry, "What is that?" No answer; everywhere silence in the Inn; the
+whole room full of moonshine. And now my drawing-plaster, my coverlid,
+actually rose up, and let in the air; at which I felt like a wounded
+man whose cataplasm you suddenly pull off. In this crisis, I made a
+bold leap from this Devil's-torus, and leaping, snapped asunder my
+somnambulist tether. "Where is the silly human fool," cried I, "that
+dares to ape the unseen sublime him?" But on, above, under the bed,
+there was nothing to be heard or seen, I looked out of the window;
+everywhere spectral moonlight and street-stillness; nothing moving
+except (probably from the wind), on the distant Gallows-hill, a person
+lately hanged.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+15. After the manner of the fine polished English folding-knives, there
+are now also folding-war-swords, or, in other words--Treaties of Peace.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+Any man would have taken it for self-deception as well as I; therefore
+I again wrapped myself in my passive _lit de justice_ and air-bed, and
+waited with calmness to see whether my fright would subside or not.
+
+In a few minutes the coverlid, the infernal Faust's-mantle, again began
+flying and towing; also, by way of change, the invisible bed-maker
+again lifted me up. Accursed hour!--I should beg to know whether, in
+the whole of cultivated Europe, there is one cultivated or uncultivated
+man, who, in a case of this kind, would not have lighted on
+ghost-devilry? I lighted on it, under my piece of (self) movable
+property, my coverlid; and thought Berga had died suddenly, and was
+now, in spirit, laying hold of my bed. However, I could not speak to
+her, nor as little to the Devil, who might well be supposed to have a
+hand in the game; but I turned myself solely to Heaven, and prayed
+aloud: "To thee I commit myself; thou alone heretofore hast cared for
+thy weak servant; and I swear that I will turn a new leaf,"--a promise
+which shall be kept nevertheless, though the whole was but stupid
+treachery and trick.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+13. _Omnibus una_ salus _Sanctis, sed_ gloria _dispar_; that is to say
+(as Divines once taught), according to Saint Paul, we have all the same
+Beatitude in Heaven, but different degrees of Honor. Here, on Earth, we
+find a shadow of this in the writing world; for the Beatitude of
+authors once beatified by Criticism, whether they be genial, good,
+mediocre, or poor, is the same throughout; they all obtain the same
+pecuniary Felicity, the same slender profit. But, Heavens! in regard to
+the degrees of Fame, again, how far (in spite of the same emolument and
+sale) will a Dunce, even in his lifetime, be put below a Genius! Is not
+a shallow writer frequently forgotten in a single Fair? while a deep
+writer, or even a writer of genius, will blossom through fifty Fairs,
+and so may celebrate his Twenty-five Years' Jubilee, before, late
+forgotten, he is lowered into the German Temple of Fame; a Temple
+imitating the peculiarity of the _Padri Lucchesi_ churches in Naples,
+which (according to Volkmann) permit _burials_ under their roofs, but
+no _tombstone_.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+My prayer had no effect with the unchristian Dragoon, who now, once for
+all, had got me prisoner in the dragnet of a coverlid; and heeded
+little whether a guest's bed were, by his means, made a state-bed and
+death-bed or not. He span out my nerves, like gold-wire through
+smaller and smaller holes, to utter inanition and evanition, for the
+bed-clothes at last literally marched off to the door of the room.
+
+Now was the moment to rise into the sublime, and to trouble myself no
+longer about aught here below, but softly to devote myself to death.
+"Snatch me away," cried I, and, without thinking, cut three crosses;
+"quick, dispatch me, ye ghosts; I die more innocent than thousands of
+tyrants and blasphemers, to whom ye yet appear not, but to unpolluted
+me." Here I heard a sort of laugh, either on the street or in the
+side-room. At this warm human tone, I suddenly bloomed up again, as at
+the coming of a new Spring, in every twig and leaf. Wholly despising
+the winged coverlid, which was not now to be picked from the door, I
+laid myself down uncovered, but warm and perspiring from other causes,
+and soon fell asleep. For the rest, I am not the least ashamed, in the
+face of all refined capital cities,--though they were standing here at
+my hand,--that, by this Devil-belief and Devil-address, I have attained
+some likeness to our great German Lion, to Luther.
+
+
+
+
+ _Second Day in Flätz_.
+
+
+Early in the morning, I felt myself awakened by the well-known
+coverlid; it had laid itself on me like a nightmare; I gaped up; quiet,
+in a corner of the room, sat a red, round, blooming, decorated girl,
+like a full-blown tulip in the freshness of life, and gently rustling
+with gay ribbons as with leaves.
+
+"Who's there--how came you in?" cried I, half-blind.
+
+"I covered thee softly, and thought to let thee sleep," said
+Bergelchen; "I have walked all night to be here early; do but look!"
+
+She showed me her boots, the only remnant of her travelling-gear which,
+in the moulting process of the toilette, she had not stript at the gate
+of Flätz.
+
+"Is there," said I, alarmed at her coming six hours sooner, and the
+more, as I had been alarmed all night and was still so, at her
+mysterious entrance; "is there some fresh woe come over us, fire,
+murder, robbery?"
+
+She answered: "The old Rat thou hast chased so long, died yesterday;
+further there was nothing of importance."
+
+"And all has been managed rightly, and according to my Letter of
+Instructions, at home?" inquired I.
+
+"Yes, truly," answered she; "only I did not see the Letter; it is lost;
+thou hast packed it among thy clothes."
+
+Well, I could not but forgive the blooming, brave pedestrian all
+omissions. Her eye, then her heart was bringing fresh cool morning air
+and morning red into my sultry hours. And yet, for this kind soul,
+looking into life with such love and hope, I must in a little while
+overcloud the merited Heaven of to-day, with tidings of my failure in
+the Catechetical Professorship! I dallied and postponed to the utmost.
+I asked how she had got in, as the whole _chevaux-de-frise_ barricado
+of chairs was still standing fast at the door. She laughed heartily,
+courtesying in village fashion, and said, she had planned it with her
+brother the day before yesterday, knowing my precautions in locking,
+that he should admit her into my room, that so she might cunningly
+awaken me. And now bolted the Dragoon with loud laughter into the
+apartment, and cried: "Slept well, brother?"
+
+In this wise truly the whole ghost-story was now solved and expounded,
+as if by the pen of a Biester or a Hennings. I instantly saw through
+the entire ghost-scheme which our Dragoon had executed. With some
+bitterness I told him my conjecture, and his sister my story. But
+he lied and laughed; nay, attempted shamelessly enough to palm
+spectre-notions on me a second time, in open day. I answered coldly,
+that in me he had found the wrong man, granting even that I had some
+similarity with Luther, with Hobbes, with Brutus, all of whom had seen
+and dreaded ghosts. He replied, tearing the facts away from their
+originating causes: "All he could say was, that last night he had heard
+some poor sinner creaking and lamenting dolefully enough; and from this
+he had inferred it must be an unhappy brother set upon by goblins."
+
+
+------------------------
+
+79. Weak and wrong heads are the hardest to change; and their inward
+man acquires a scanty covering; thus capons never moult.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+In the end, his sister's eyes also were opened to the low character
+which he had tried to act with me; she sharply flew at him, pushed
+him with both hands out of his and my door, and called after him:
+"Wait, thou villain, I will mind it!"
+
+Then hastily turning round, she fell on my neck, and (at the wrong
+place) into laughter, and said: "The wild fool! But I could not keep my
+laugh another minute, and he was not to see it. Forgive the ninny, thou
+a learned man, his ass-pranks; what can one expect?"
+
+I inquired whether she, in her nocturnal travelling, had not met any
+spectral persons; though I knew that to her a wild beast, a river, a
+half abyss, are nothing. No, she had not; but the gay-dressed
+town's-people, she said, had scared her in the morning. O, how I do
+love these soft Harmonica-quiverings of female fright!
+
+At last, however, I was forced to bite or cut the coloquinta-apple, and
+give her the half of it; I mean the news of my rejected petition for
+the Catechetical Professorship. Wishing to spare this joyful heart the
+rudeness of the whole truth, and to subtract something from a heavy
+burden, more fit for the shoulders of a man, I began: "Bergelchen, the
+Professorship affair is taking another, though still a good enough
+course; the General, whom may the Devil and his Grandmother teach
+sense, will not be taken except by storm; and storm he shall have, as
+certainly as I have on my nightcap."
+
+"Then thou art nothing yet?" inquired she.
+
+"For the moment, indeed, not!" answered I.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+89. In times of misfortune, the Ancients supported themselves with
+Philosophy or Christianity; the moderns again (for example, in the
+reign of Terror) take to Pleasure; as the wounded Buffalo, for bandage
+and salve, rolls himself in the mire.
+
+181. God be thanked that we live nowhere forever except in Hell or
+Heaven; on Earth otherwise we should grow to be the veriest rascals,
+and the World a House of Incurables, for want of the dog-doctor (the
+Hangman), and the issue-cord (on the Gallows), and the sulphur and
+chalybeate medicines (on Battle-fields). So that we too find our
+gigantic moral force dependent on the _Debt of Nature_ which we have to
+pay, exactly as your politicians (for example, the author of the _New
+Leviathan_) demonstrate that the English have their _National Debt_ to
+thank for their superiority.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+"But before Saturday night?" said she.
+
+"Not quite," said I.
+
+"Then am I sore stricken, and could leap out of the window," said she,
+and turned away her rosy face, to hide its wet eyes, and was silent
+very long. Then, with painfully quivering voice, she began: "Good
+Christ, stand by me at Neusattel on Sunday, when these high-prancing
+prideful dames look at me in church, and I grow scarlet for shame!"
+
+Here in sympathetic woe I sprang out of bed to the dear soul, over
+whose brightly blooming cheeks warm tears were rolling, and cried:
+"Thou true heart, do not tear me in pieces so! May I die, if yet in
+these dog-days I become not all and everything that thou wishest!
+Speak, wilt thou be Mining-räthin, Build-räthin, Court-räthin,
+War-räthin, Chamber-räthin, Commerce-räthin, Legations-räthin, or Devil
+and his Dam's räthin; I am here, and will buy it, and be it. To-morrow
+I send riding posts to Saxony and Hessia, to Prussia and Russia, to
+Friesland and Katzenellenbogen, and demand patents. Nay, I will carry
+matters further than another, and be all things at once, Flachsenfingen
+Court-rath, Scheerau Excise-rath, Haarhaar Building-rath, Pestitz[76]
+Chamber-rath (for we have the cash); and thus, alone and singlehanded,
+represent with one _podex_ and _corpus_ a whole Rath-session of select
+Raths; and stand, a complete Legion of Honor, on one single pair of
+legs; the like no man ever did.
+
+"O, now thou art angel-good!" said she, and gladder tears rolled down;
+"thou shalt counsel me thyself which are the finest Raths, and these we
+will be."
+
+"No," continued I, in the fire of the moment, "neither shall this serve
+us; to me it is not enough that to Mrs. Chaplain thou canst announce
+thyself as Building-räthin, to Mrs. Town-parson as Legations-räthin, to
+Mrs. Burgermeister as Court-räthin, to Mrs. Road-and-toll-surveyor as
+Commerce-räthin, or how and where thou pleasest----"
+
+"Ah! my own too good Attelchen!" said she.
+
+"--But," continued I, "I shall likewise become corresponding member of
+the several Learned Societies in the several best capital cities (among
+which I have only to choose); and truly no common actual member, but a
+whole honorary member; then thee, as another honorary member, growing
+out of my honorary-membership, I uplift and exalt."
+
+Pardon me, my Friends, this warm cataplasm, or deception-balsam for a
+wounded breast, whose blood is so pure and precious, that one may
+be permitted to endeavor, with all possible stanching-lints and
+spider-webs, to drive it back into the fair heart, its home.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+63. To apprehend danger from the Education of the People is like
+fearing lest the thunderbolt strike into the house because it has
+_windows_; whereas the lightning never comes through these, but through
+their _lead_ framing, or down by the smoke of the chimney.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+But now came bright and brightest hours. I had conquered Time, I had
+conquered myself and Berga; seldom does a conqueror, as I did, bless
+both the victorious and the vanquished party. Berga called back her
+former Heaven, and pulled off her dusty boots, and on her flowery
+shoes. Precious morning beverage, intoxicating to a heart that loves! I
+felt (if the low figure may be permitted) a double-beer of courage in
+me, now that I had one being more to protect. In general it is my
+nature--which the honorable Premier seems not to be fully aware of--to
+grow bolder not among the bold, but fastest among poltroons, the bad
+example acting on me by the rule of contraries. Little touches may in
+this case shadow forth man and wife without casting them into the
+shade. When the trim waiter with his green silk apron brought up
+cracknels for breakfast, and I told him, "Johann, for two!" Berga said:
+"He would oblige her very much," and called him Herr Johann.
+
+Bergelchen, more familiar with rural burghs than capital cities, felt a
+good deal amazed and alarmed at the coffee-trays, dressing-tables,
+paper-hangings, sconces, alabaster inkholders, with Egyptian emblems,
+as well as at the gilt bell-handle, lying ready for any one to pull out
+or to push in. Accordingly, she had not courage to walk through
+the hall, with its lustres, purely because a whistling, whiffling
+Cap-and-feather was gesturing up and down in it. Nay, her poor heart
+was like to fail when she peeped out of the window at so many gay,
+promenading town's people (I was briskly that in a little while, at my
+side, she must break into whistling a Gascon air down over them); and
+thought the middle of this dazzling courtly throng. In a case like
+this, reasons are of less avail than examples. I tried to elevate
+my Bergelchen, by reciting some of my nocturnal dream-feats; for
+example, how, riding on a whale's back, with a three-pronged fork, I
+had pierced and eaten three eagles; and by more of the like sort; but I
+produced no effect; perhaps, because to the timid female heart the
+battle-field was presented rather than the conqueror, the abyss rather
+than the overleaper of it.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+76. Your economical, preaching Poetry apparently supposes that a
+surgical Stone-cutter is an Artistical one; and a Pulpit or a Sinai a
+Hill of the Muses.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+At this time a sheaf of newspapers was brought me, full of gallant,
+decisive victories. And though these happen only on one side, and on
+the other are just so many defeats, yet the former somehow assimilate
+more with my blood than the latter, and inspire me (as Schiller's
+_Robbers_ used to do) with a strange inclination to lay hold of some
+one, and thrash and curry him on the spot. Unluckily for the waiter,
+he had chanced even now, like a military host, to stand a triple
+bell-order for march, before he would leave his ground and come up.
+"Sir," began I, my head full of battle-fields, and my arm of
+inclination to baste him; and Berga feared the very worst, as I gave
+her the well-known anger and alarm signal, namely, shoved up my cap to
+my hindhead,--"Sir, is this your way of treating guests? Why don't you
+come promptly? Don't come so again; and now be going, friend!" Although
+his retreat was my victory, I still kept briskly cannonading on the
+field of action, and fired the louder (to let him hear it), the more
+steps he descended in his flight. Bergelchen,--who felt quite
+horror-struck at my fury, particularly in a quite strange house, and
+at a quality waiter with silk apron, mustered all her soft words
+against the wild ones of a man-of-war, and spoke of dangers that might
+follow. "Dangers," answered I, "are just what I seek; but for a man
+there are none; in all cases he will either conquer or evade them,
+either show them front or back."
+
+
+------------------------
+
+115. According to Smith, the universal measure of economical value is
+Labor. This fact, at least in regard to spiritual and poetical value,
+we Germans had discovered before Smith; and to my knowledge, we have
+always preferred the learned poet to the poet of genius, and the heavy
+book full of labor to the light one full of sport.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+I could scarcely lay aside this indignant mood, so sweet was it to me,
+and so much did I feel refreshed by the fire of rage, and quickened in
+my breast as by a benignant stimulant. It belongs certainly to the
+class of Unrecognized Mercies (on which, in ancient times, special
+sermons were preached), that one is never more completely in his Heaven
+and _Monplaisir_ (a pleasure-palace), than while in the midst of right
+hearty storming and indignation. Heavens! what might not a man of
+weight accomplish in this new walk of charity! The gall bladder is for
+us the chief swimming-bladder and Montgolfier; and the filling of it
+costs us nothing but a contumelious word or two from some bystander.
+And does not the whirlwind Luther, with whom I nowise compare myself,
+confess, in his _Table-Talk_, that he never preached, sung, or prayed
+so well, as while in a rage? Truly, he was a man sufficient of himself
+to rouse many others into rage.
+
+The whole morning till noon now passed in viewing sights, and
+trafficking for wares; and indeed, for the greatest part, in the broad
+street of our Hotel. Berga needed but to press along with me into the
+market throng; needed but to look, and see that she was decorated more
+according to the fashion than hundreds like her. But soon, in her care
+for household gear, she forgot that of dress, and in the potter-market
+the toilette-table faded from her thoughts.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+4. The Hypocrite does not imitate the old practice, of cutting fruit by
+a knife poisoned only on the one side, and giving the poisoned side to
+the victim, the cutter eating the sound side himself; on the contrary,
+he so disinterestedly inverts this practice, that to others he shows
+and gives the sound moral half, or side, and retains for himself the
+poisoned one. Heavens! compared with such a man, how wicked does the
+Devil seem!
+
+------------------------
+
+
+I, for my share, full of true tedium, while gliding after her through
+her various marts, with their long cheapenings and chafferings, merely
+acted the Philosopher hid within me. I weighed this empty Life, and the
+heavy value which is put upon it, and the daily anxiety of man lest it,
+this lightest down-feather of the Earth, fly off', and feather him, and
+take him with it. These thoughts, perhaps, I owe to the street-fry of
+boys, who were turning their market-freedom to account, by throwing
+stones at one another all round me; for in the midst of this tumult I
+vividly figured myself to be a man who had never seen war; and who,
+therefore, never having experienced that often of a thousand bullets
+not one will hit, feels apprehensive of these few silly stones lest
+they beat in his nose and eyes. O, it is the battle-field alone that
+sows, manures, and nourishes true courage, courage even for daily,
+domestic, and smallest perils. For not till he comes from the
+battle-field can a man both sing and cannonade; like the canary-bird,
+which, though so melodious, so timid, so small, so tender, so solitary,
+so soft-feathered, can yet be trained to fire off cannon, though cannon
+of smaller calibre.
+
+After dinner (in our room) we issued from the Purgatory of the
+market-tumult,--where Berga, at every booth, had something to order,
+and load her attendant maid with,--into Heaven, into the Dog Inn, as
+the best Flätz public and pleasure-house without the gates is named,
+where, in market time, hundreds turn in, and see thousands going by. On
+the way thither, my little wife, my elbow-tendril, as it were, had
+extracted from me such a measure of courage, that, while going through
+the Gate (where I, aware of the military order, that you must not pass
+near the sentry, threw myself over to the other side), she quietly
+glided on, close by the very guns and fixed bayonets of the City Guard.
+Outside the wall, I could direct her, with my finger to the bechained,
+begrated, gigantic Schabacker-Palace, mounting up even externally on
+stairs, where I last night had called and (it may be) stormed: "I had
+rather take a peep at the Giant," said she, "and the Dwarf; why else
+are we under one roof with them?"
+
+
+------------------------
+
+67. Individual Minds, nay, Political Bodies, are like organic bodies;
+extract the interior air from them, the atmosphere crushes them
+together; pump off under the bell the exterior resisting air, the
+interior inflates and bursts them. Therefore let every State keep up
+its internal and its external resistance both at once.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+In the pleasure-house itself we found sufficient pleasure; encircled as
+we were, with blooming faces and meadows. In my secret heart, I all
+along kept looking down, with success, on Schabacker's refusal; and
+till midnight made myself a happy day of it. I had deserved it, Berga
+still more. Nevertheless, about one in the morning, I was destined to
+find a windmill to tilt with; a windmill, which truly lays about it
+with somewhat longer, stronger, and more numerous arms than a giant,
+for which Don Quixote might readily enough have taken it. On the market
+place, for reasons more easily fancied than specified in words, I let
+Berga go along some twenty paces before me; and I myself, for these
+foresaid reasons, retire without malice behind a covered booth, the
+tent most probably of some rude trader; and lingered there a moment
+according to circumstances. Lo! steering hither with dart and spear,
+comes the Booth-watcher, and coins and stamps me on the spot, into a
+filcher and housebreaker of his Booth-street; though the simpleton sees
+nothing but that I am standing in the corner, and doing anything
+but--taking. A sense of honor without callosity is never blunted for
+such attacks. But how in the dead of night was a man of this kind, who
+had nothing in his head--at the utmost beer, instead of brains--to be
+enlightened on the truth of the matter?
+
+I shall not conceal my perilous resource; I seized the fox by the tail,
+as we say; in other words, I made as if I had been muddled, and knew
+not rightly, in my liquor, what I was about. I therefore mimicked
+everything I was master of in this department; staggered hither and
+thither; splayed out my feet like a dancing-master; got into zigzag in
+spite of all efforts at the straight line; nay, I knocked my good head
+(perhaps one of the clearest and emptiest of the night) like a full
+one, against real posts.
+
+However, the Booth-bailiff, who probably had been oftener drunk than I,
+and knew the symptoms better, or even felt them in himself at this
+moment, looked upon the whole exhibition as mere craft, and shouted
+dreadfully: "Stop, rascal; thou art no more drunk than I! I know thee
+of old. Stand, I say, till I speak to thee! Wouldst have thy long
+finger in the market, too? Stand, dog, or I'll make thee!"
+
+
+------------------------
+
+8. In great Saloons, the real stove is masked into a pretty ornamented
+sham stove; so, likewise, it is fit and pretty that a virgin _Love_
+should always hide itself in an interesting virgin _Friendship_.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+You see the whole _nodus_ of the matter. I whisked away zigzag among
+the booths as fast as possible, from the claws of this rude Tosspot;
+yet he still hobbled after me. But my Teutoberga, who had heard
+somewhat of it came running back; clutched the tipsy market-warder by
+the collar, and said (shrieking, it is true, in village wise): "Stupid
+sot, go sleep the drink out of thy head, or I'll teach thee! Dost know,
+then, whom thou art speaking to? My husband, Army-chaplain Schmelzle
+under General and Minister von Schabacker at Pimpelstadt, thou
+blockhead!--Fie! Take shame, fellow!" The watchman mumbled, "Meant no
+harm," and reeled about his business. "O thou Lioness!" said I, in the
+transport of love, "why hast thou never been in any deadly peril, that
+I might show thee the Lion in thy husband!"
+
+Thus lovingly we both reached home; and perhaps in the sequel of this
+Fair day might still have enjoyed a glorious after-midnight, had not
+the Devil led my eye to the ninth volume of Lichtenberg's Works, and
+the 206th page, where this passage occurs: "It is not impossible, that,
+at a future period, our Chemists may light on some means of suddenly
+decomposing the Atmosphere by a sort of Ferment. In this way the world
+may be destroyed." Ah! true indeed! Since the Earth-ball is lapped up
+in the larger Atmospheric ball, let but any chemical scoundrel, in the
+remotest scoundrel-island, say in New Holland, devise some decomposing
+substance for the Atmosphere, like what a spark of fire would be for a
+powder-wagon; in a few seconds, the monstrous devouring world-storm
+catches me and you in Flätz by the throat; my breathing, and the like,
+in this choke-air is over, and the whole game ended! The Earth becomes
+a boundless gallows, where the very cattle are hanged; worm-powder, and
+bug-liquor, Bradly ant-ploughs, and rat-poison, and wolf-traps are, in
+this universal world-trap and world-poison, no longer specially
+needful; and the Devil takes the whole, in the Bartholomew-night, when
+this cursed "Ferment" is invented.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+12. Nations--unlike rivers, which precipitate their impurities in level
+places and when at rest--drop their baseness just whilst in the most
+violent motion; and become the dirtier the farther they flow along
+through lazy flats.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+From the true soul, however, I concealed these deadly Night Thoughts;
+seeing she would either painfully have sympathized in them, or else
+mirthfully laughed at them. I merely gave orders that next morning
+(Saturday) she was to be standing booted and ready, at the outset of
+the returning coach; if so were she would have me speedily fulfil her
+wishes in regard to that stock of Rathships which lay so near her
+heart. She rejoiced in my purpose, gladly surrendering the market for
+such prospects. I too slept sound, my great toe tied to her finger the
+whole night through.
+
+The Dragoon next morning twitched me by the ear, and secretly whispered
+into it that he had a pleasant fairing to give his sister; and so would
+ride off somewhat early, on the nag he had yesterday purchased of the
+horse-dealer. I thanked him beforehand.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+28. When Nature takes the huge old Earth-round, the Earth-loaf and
+kneads it up again, for the purpose of introducing, under this
+piecrust, new stuffing and Dwarfs--she then, for most part, as a mother
+when baking will do to her daughters, gives in jest a little fraction
+of the dough (two or three thousand square leagues of such dough are
+enough for a child) to some Poetical or Philosophical, or Legislative
+polisher, that so the little elf may have something to be shaping and
+manufacturing beside its mother. And when the other young ones get a
+taste of sisterkin's baking, they all clap hands, and cry, "Aha,
+Mother! canst bake like _Suky_ here?"
+
+------------------------
+
+
+At the appointed hour all gayly started from the Staple, I excepted;
+for I still retained, even in the fairest daylight, that nocturnal
+Devil's-Ferment and Decomposition (of my cerebral globe as well as of
+the Earth-globe) fermenting in my head; a proof that the night had not
+affected me, or exaggerated my fear. The Blind Passenger, whom I liked
+so ill, also mounted along with us, and looked at me as usual, but
+without effect; for on this occasion, when the destruction not of
+myself only, but of worlds, was occupying my thoughts, the Passenger
+was nothing to me but a joke and a show; as a man, while his leg is
+a-sawing off, does not feel the throbbing of his heart; or amid the
+humming of cannon, does not guard himself from that of wasps; so to me
+any Passenger, with all the firebrands he might throw into my near or
+distant Future, could appear but ludicrous, at a time when I was
+reflecting that the "Ferment" might, even in my journey between Flätz
+and Neusattel, be, by some American or European man of science, quite
+guiltlessly experimenting and decomposing, lighted upon by accident and
+let loose. The question, nay prize-question now, however, were this:
+"In how far, since Lichtenberg's threatening, it may not appear
+world-murderous and self-murderous, if enlightened Potentates of
+chemical nations do not enjoin it on their chemical subjects,--who in
+their decompositions and separations may so easily separate the soul
+from their body and unite Heaven with Earth,--not in future to make any
+other chemical experiments than those already made, which hitherto have
+profited the State rather than harmed it?"
+
+Unfortunately, I continued sunk in this Doomsday of the Ferment with
+all my thoughts and meditations, without, in the whole course of our
+return from Flätz to Neusattel, suffering or observing anything, except
+that I actually arrived there, and at the same time saw the Blind
+Passenger once more go his ways.
+
+My Bergelchen alone had I constantly looked at by the road, partly
+that I might still see her, so long as life and eyes endured; partly
+that, even at the smallest danger to her, be it a great, or even
+all-over-sweeping Deluge and World's-doom, I might die, if not _for_
+her, at least _by_ her, and so, united with that stanch, true heart,
+cast away a plagued and plaguing life, in which, at any rate, not half
+of my wishes for her have been fulfilled.
+
+So then were my Journey over--crowned with some _Historiola_; and in
+time coming, perhaps, still more rewarded through you, ye Friends about
+Flätz, if in these pages you shall find any well-ground pruning-knives,
+whereby you may more readily outroot the weedy tangle of Lies, which
+for the present excludes me from the gallant Schabacker--Only this
+cursed Ferment still sits in my head. Farewell, then, so long as there
+are Atmospheres left us to breathe. I wish I had that Ferment out of my
+head. Yours always,
+
+ Attila Schmelzle.
+
+P. S.--My brother-in-law has kept his promise well, and Berga is
+dancing. Particulars in my next!
+
+
+
+
+
+ Analects From Richter.
+
+
+ TRANSLATED BY
+
+ THOMAS DE QUINCEY.
+
+
+
+
+ ANALECTS FROM RICHTER.
+
+
+ THE HAPPY LIFE OF A PARISH PRIEST IN SWEDEN.
+
+
+Sweden apart, the condition of a parish priest is in itself
+sufficiently happy: in Sweden, then, much more so. There he enjoys
+summer and winter pure and unalloyed by any tedious interruptions: a
+Swedish spring, which is always a late one, is no repetition, in a
+lower key, of the harshness of winter, but anticipates, and is a
+prelibation of, perfect summer,--laden with blossoms,--radiant with the
+lily and the rose: insomuch, that a Swedish summer night represents
+implicitly one half of Italy, and a winter night one half of the world
+beside.
+
+I will begin with winter, and I will suppose it to be Christmas. The
+priest, whom we shall imagine to be a German, and summoned from the
+southern climate of Germany upon presentation to the church of a
+Swedish hamlet lying in a high polar latitude, rises in cheerfulness
+about seven o'clock in the morning; and till half past nine he burns
+his lamp. At nine o'clock, the stars are still shining, and the
+unclouded moon even yet longer. This prolongation of star-light into
+the forenoon is to him delightful; for he is a German, and has a sense
+of something marvellous in a starry forenoon. Methinks, I behold the
+priest and his flock moving towards the church with lanterns: the
+lights dispersed amongst the crowd connect the congregation into the
+appearance of some domestic group or larger household, and carry the
+priest back to his childish years during the winter season and
+Christmas matins, when every hand bore its candle. Arrived at the
+pulpit, he declares to his audience the plain truth, word for word, as
+it stands in the Gospel: in the presence of God, all intellectual
+pretensions are called upon to be silent; the very reason ceases to be
+reasonable; nor is anything reasonable in the sight of God but a
+sincere and upright heart.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Just as he and his flock are issuing from the church the bright
+Christmas sun ascends above the horizon, and shoots his beams upon
+their faces. The old men, who are numerous in Sweden, are all tinged
+with the colors of youth by the rosy morning-lustre; and the priest, as
+he looks away from them to mother earth lying in the sleep of winter,
+and to the churchyard, where the flowers and the men are all in their
+graves together, might secretly exclaim with the poet: "Upon the dead
+mother, in peace and utter gloom, are reposing the dead children. After
+a time, uprises the everlasting sun; and the mother starts up at the
+summons of the heavenly dawn with a resurrection of her ancient
+bloom:--And her children?--Yes: but they must wait awhile."
+
+At home he is awaited by a warm study, and a "long-levelled rule" of
+sunlight upon the book-clad wall.
+
+The afternoon he spends delightfully; for, having before him such
+perfect flower-stand of pleasures, he scarcely knows where he
+should settle. Supposing it to be Christmas-day, he preaches again:
+he preaches on a subject which calls up images of the beauteous
+eastern-land, or of eternity. By this time, twilight and gloom
+prevailed through the church: only a couple of wax-lights upon the
+altar throw wondrous and mighty shadows through the aisles: the angel
+that hangs down from the roof above the baptismal font is awoke into a
+solemn life by the shadows and the rays, and seems almost in the act of
+ascension: through the windows, the stars or the moon are beginning to
+peer: aloft, in the pulpit, which is now hid in gloom, the priest is
+inflamed and possessed by the sacred burden of glad tidings which he is
+announcing: he is lost and insensible to all besides; and from amidst
+the darkness which surrounds him, he pours down his thunders, with
+tears and agitation, reasoning of future worlds, and of the heaven of
+heavens, and whatsoever else can most powerfully shake the heart and
+the affections.
+
+Descending from his pulpit in these holy fervors, he now, perhaps,
+takes a walk: it is about four o'clock: and he walks beneath a sky lit
+up by the shifting northern lights, that to his eye appear but an
+Aurora striking upwards from the eternal morning of the south, or as a
+forest composed of saintly thickets, like the fiery bushes of Moses,
+that are round the throne of God.
+
+Thus, if it be the afternoon of Christmas-day: but if it be any other
+afternoon, visitors, perhaps, come and bring their well-bred, grown-up
+daughters; like the fashionable world in London, he dines at sunset;
+that is to say, like the _un_-fashionable world of London, he dines at
+two o'clock; and he drinks coffee by moonlight; and the parsonage-house
+becomes an enchanted palace of pleasure gleaming with twilight,
+starlight, and moonlight. Or, perhaps, he goes over to the
+schoolmaster, who is teaching his afternoon school: there by the
+candlelight, he gathers round his knees all the scholars, as if--being
+the children of his spiritual children--they must therefore be his own
+grandchildren; and with delightful words he wins their attention, and
+pours knowledge into their docile hearts.
+
+All these pleasures failing, he may pace up and down in his library,
+already, by three o'clock, gloomy with twilight, but fitfully enlivened
+by a glowing fire, and steadily by the bright moonlight; and he needs
+do no more than taste at every turn of his walk a little orange
+marmalade,--to call up images of beautiful Italy, and its gardens and
+orange groves, before all his five senses, and as it were to the very
+tip of his tongue. Looking at the moon, he will not fail to recollect
+that the very same silver disk hangs at the very same moment between
+the branches of the laurels in Italy. It will delight him to consider
+that the Æolian harp, and the lark, and indeed music of all kinds, and
+the stars, and children, are just the same in hot climates and in cold.
+And when the post-boy, that rides in with news from Italy, winds his
+horn through the hamlet, and with a few simple notes raises up on the
+frozen window of his study a vision of flowery realms; and when he
+plays with treasured leaves of roses and of lilies from some departed
+summer, or with plumes of a bird of paradise, the memorial of some
+distant friend; when, further, his heart is moved by the magnificent
+sounds of Lady-day, Salad-season, Cherry-time, Trinity-Sundays, the
+rose of June, &c., how can he fail to forget that he is in Sweden by
+the time that his lamp is brought in; and then, indeed, he will be
+somewhat disconcerted to recognize his study in what had now shaped
+itself to his fancy as a room in some foreign land. However, if he
+would pursue this airy creation, he need but light at his lamp a
+wax-candle-end, to gain a glimpse through the whole evening into
+that world of fashion and splendor, from which he purchased the
+said wax-candle-end. For I should suppose, that at the court of
+Stockholm, as elsewhere, there must be candle-ends to be bought of the
+state-footmen.
+
+But now, after the lapse of half a year, all at once there strikes upon
+his heart something more beautiful than Italy, where the sun sets so
+much earlier in summertime than it does at our Swedish hamlet: and what
+is _that_? It is the longest day, with the rich freight that it carries
+in its bosom, and leading by the hand the early dawn blushing with rosy
+light, and melodious with the carolling of larks at one o'clock in the
+morning. Before two, that is, at sunrise, the elegant party that we
+mentioned last winter arrive in gay clothing at the parsonage; for they
+are bound on a little excursion of pleasure in company with the priest.
+At two o'clock they are in motion; at which time all the flowers are
+glittering, and the forests are gleaming with the mighty light. The
+warm sun threatens them with no storm nor thunder-showers; for both are
+rare in Sweden. The priest, in common with the rest of the company, is
+attired in the costume of Sweden; he wears his short jacket with a
+broad scarf, his short cloak above that, his round hat with floating
+plumes, and shoes tied with bright ribbons: like the rest of the men,
+he resembles a Spanish knight, or a Provençal, or other man of the
+south: more especially when he and his gay company are seen flying
+through the lofty foliage luxuriant with blossom, that within so short
+a period of weeks has shot forth from the garden plots and the naked
+boughs.
+
+That a longest day like this, bearing such a cornucopia of sunshine, of
+cloudless ether, of buds and bells, of blossoms and of leisure, should
+pass away more rapidly than the shortest,--is not difficult to suppose.
+As early as eight o'clock in the evening the party breaks up; the sun
+is now burning more gently over the half-closed sleepy flowers: about
+nine he has mitigated his rays, and is beheld bathing as it were naked
+in the blue depths of heaven: about ten, at which hour the company
+reassemble at the parsonage, the priest is deeply moved, for throughout
+the hamlet, though the tepid sun, now sunk to the horizon, is still
+shedding a sullen glow upon the cottages and the window-panes,
+everything reposes in profoundest silence and sleep: the birds even are
+all slumbering in the golden summits of the woods: and at last, the
+solitary sun himself sets, like a moon, amidst the universal quiet of
+nature. To our priest, walking in his romantic dress, it seems as
+though rosy-colored realms were laid open, in which fairies and spirits
+range; and he would scarcely feel an emotion of wonder, if, in this
+hour of golden vision, his brother, who ran away in childhood, should
+suddenly present himself as one alighting from some blooming heaven of
+enchantment.
+
+The priest will not allow his company to depart: he detains them in the
+parsonage garden,--where, says he, every one that chooses may slumber
+away in beautiful bowers the brief, warm hours until the reappearance
+of the sun. This proposal is generally adopted: and the garden is
+occupied: many a lovely pair are making believe to sleep, but, in fact,
+are holding each other by the hand. The happy priest walks up and
+down through the parterres. Coolness comes, and a few stars. His
+night-violets and gillyflowers open and breathe out their powerful
+odors. To the north, from the eternal morning of the pole, exhales as
+it were a golden dawn. The priest thinks of the village of his
+childhood far away in Germany; he thinks of the life of man, his hopes,
+and his aspirations: and he is calm and at peace with himself. Then all
+at once starts up the morning sun in his freshness. Some there are in
+the garden who would fain confound it with the evening sun, and close
+their eyes again: but the larks betray all, and awaken every sleeper
+from bower to bower.
+
+Then again begin pleasure and morning in their pomp of radiance; and
+almost I could persuade myself to delineate the course of this day
+also, though it differs from its predecessor hardly by so much as the
+leaf of a rose-bud.
+
+
+
+
+ DREAM UPON THE UNIVERSE.
+
+
+I had been reading an excellent dissertation of Krüger's upon the old
+vulgar error which regards the space from one earth and sun to another
+as empty. Our sun together with all its planets fills only the
+31,419,460,000,000,000th part of the whole space between itself and the
+next solar body. Gracious Heavens! thought I,--in what an unfathomable
+abyss of emptiness were this universe swallowed up and lost, if all
+were void and utter vacuity except the few shining points of dust which
+we call a planetary system! To conceive of our earthly ocean as the
+abode of death, and essentially incapable of life, and of its populous
+islands as being no greater than snail-shells, would be a far less
+error in proportion to the compass of our planet than that which
+attributes emptiness to the great mundane spaces: and the error would
+be far less if the marine animals were to ascribe life and fulness
+exclusively to the sea, and to regard the atmospheric ocean above them
+as empty and untenanted. According to Herschel, the most remote of the
+galaxies which the telescope discovers lie at such a distance from us,
+that their light, which reaches us at this day, must have set out on
+its journey two millions of years ago; and thus by optical laws it is
+possible that whole squadrons of the starry hosts may be now reaching
+us with their beams which have themselves perished ages ago. Upon this
+scale of computation for the dimensions of the world, what heights and
+depths and breadths must there be in this universe--in comparison of
+which the positive universe would be itself a nihility, were it
+crossed--pierced--and belted about by so illimitable a wilderness of
+nothing! But is it possible that any man can for a moment overlook
+those vast forces which must pervade these imaginary deserts with
+eternal surges of flux and reflux, to make the very paths to those
+distant starry coasts voyageable to our eyes? Can you lock up in a sun
+or in its planets their reciprocal forces of attraction? Does not the
+light stream through the immeasurable spaces between our earth and the
+nebula which is farthest removed from us? And in this stream of light
+there is as ample an existence of the positive, and as much a home for
+the abode of a spiritual world, as there is a dwelling-place for thy
+own spirit in the substance of the brain. To these and similar
+reflections succeeded the following dream:--
+
+Methought my body sank down in ruins, and my inner form stepped out
+apparelled in light: and by my-side there stood another form which
+resembled my own, except that it did not shine like mine, but lightened
+unceasingly. "Two thoughts," said the form, "are the wings with which I
+move; the thought of _Here_, and the thought of _There_. And behold! I
+am yonder";--pointing to a distant world. "Come, then, and wait on me
+with thy thoughts and with thy flight, that I may show to thee the
+universe under a veil." And I flew along with the Form. In a moment our
+earth fell back, behind our consuming flight, into an abyss of
+distance; a faint gleam only was reflected from the summits of the
+Cordilleras; and a few moments more reduced the sun to a little star;
+and soon there remained nothing visible of our system except a comet
+which was travelling from our sun with angelic speed in the direction
+of Sirius. Our flight now carried us so rapidly through the flocks
+of solar bodies--flocks, past counting unless to their heavenly
+Shepherd,--that scarcely could they expand themselves before us into
+the magnitude of moons, before they sank behind us into pale nebular
+gleams; and their planetary earths could not reveal themselves for a
+moment to the transcendent rapidity of our course. At length Sirius and
+all the brotherhood of our constellations and the galaxy of our heavens
+stood far below our feet as a little nebula amongst other yet more
+distant nebulae. Thus we flew on through the starry wildernesses: one
+heaven after another unfurled its immeasurable banners before us, and
+then rolled up behind us: galaxy behind galaxy towered up into solemn
+altitudes before which the spirit shuddered; and they stood in long
+array through which the Infinite Being might pass in progress.
+Sometimes the Form that lightened would outfly my weary thoughts; and
+then it would be seen far off before me like a coruscation amongst the
+stars--till suddenly I thought again to myself the thought of _There_,
+and then I was at its side. But, as we were thus swallowed up by one
+abyss of stars after another, and the heavens above our eyes were not
+emptier--neither were the heavens below them fuller; and as suns
+without intermission fell into the solar ocean like water-spouts of a
+storm which fall into the ocean of waters;--then at length the human
+heart within me was overburdened and weary, and yearned after some
+narrow cell or quiet oratory in this metropolitan cathedral of the
+universe. And I said to the Form at my side, "O Spirit! has then this
+universe no end?" And the Form answered and said, "Lo! it has no
+beginning."
+
+Suddenly, however, the heavens above us appeared to be emptied, and not
+a star was seen to twinkle in the mighty abyss,--no gleam of light to
+break the unity of the infinite darkness. The starry hosts behind us
+had all contracted into an obscure nebula: and at length _that_ also
+had vanished. And I thought to myself, "At last the universe has
+ended": and I trembled at the thought of the illimitable dungeon of
+pure,--pure darkness which here began to imprison the creation: I
+shuddered at the dead sea of nothing, in whose unfathomable zone of
+blackness the jewel of the glittering universe seemed to be set and
+buried forever; and through the night in which we moved I saw the Form
+which still lightened as before, but left all around it unilluminated.
+Then the Form said to me in my anguish, "O creature of little faith!
+Look up! the most ancient light is coming!" I looked; and in a moment
+came a twilight,--in the twinkling of an eye a galaxy,--and then with a
+choral burst rushed in all the company of stars. For centuries gray
+with age, for millennia hoary with antiquity, had the starry light been
+on its road to us; and at length out of heights inaccessible to thought
+it had reached us. Now then, as through some renovated century, we flew
+through new cycles of heavens. At length again came a starless
+interval; and far longer it endured, before the beams of a starry host
+again had reached us.
+
+As we thus advanced forever through an interchange of nights and solar
+heavens, and as the interval grew still longer and longer before the
+last heaven we had quitted contracted to a point,--and as once we
+issued suddenly from the middle of thickest night into an Aurora
+Borealis,--the herald of an expiring world, and we found throughout
+this cycle of solar systems that a day of judgment had indeed arrived;
+the suns had sickened, and the planets were heaving--rocking, yawning
+in convulsions, the subterraneous waters of the great deeps were
+breaking up, and lightnings that were ten diameters of a world in
+length ran along--from east to west--from Zenith to Nadir; and here and
+there, where a sun should have been, we saw instead through the misty
+vapor a gloomy--ashy--leaden corpse of a solar body, that sucked in
+flames from the perishing world--but gave out neither light nor heat;
+and as I saw, through a vista which had no end, mountain towering above
+mountain, and piled up with what seemed glittering snow from the
+conflict of solar and planetary bodies;--then my spirit bent under the
+load of the universe, and I said to the Form, "Rest, rest: and lead me
+no farther: I am too solitary in the creation itself; and in its
+deserts yet more so: the full world is great, but the empty world is
+greater; and with the universe increase its Zaarahs."
+
+Then the Form touched me like the flowing of a breath, and spoke more
+gently than before: "In the presence of God there is no emptiness:
+above, below, between, and round about the stars, in the darkness and
+in the light, dwelleth the true and very Universe, the sum and fountain
+of all that is. But thy spirit can bear only earthly images of the
+unearthly; now then I cleanse thy sight with euphrasy; look forth, and
+behold the images." Immediately my eyes were opened; and I looked, and
+I saw as it were an interminable sea of light,--sea immeasurable, sea
+unfathomable, sea without a shore. All spaces between all heavens were
+filled with happiest light: and there was a thundering of floods: and
+there were seas above the seas, and seas below the seas: and I saw all
+the trackless regions that we had voyaged over: and my eye comprehended
+the farthest and the nearest: and darkness had become light, and the
+light darkness: for the deserts and wastes of the creation were now
+filled with the sea of light, and in this sea the suns floated like
+ash-gray blossoms, and the planets like black grains of seed. Then my
+heart comprehended that immortality dwelled in the spaces between the
+worlds, and death only amongst the worlds. Upon all the suns there
+walked upright shadows in the form of men: but they were glorified when
+they quitted these perishable worlds, and when they sank into the sea
+of light: and the murky planets, I perceived, were but cradles for the
+infant spirits of the universe of light. In the Zaarahs of the creation
+I saw--I heard--I felt--the glittering--the echoing--the breathing of
+life and creative power. The suns were but as spinning-wheels, the
+planets no more than weavers' shuttles, in relation to the infinite web
+which composes the veil of Isis; which veil is hung over the whole
+creation, and lengthens as any finite being attempts to raise it. And
+in sight of this immeasurability of life, no sadness could endure; but
+only joy that knew no limit, and happy prayers.
+
+But in the midst of this great vision of the Universe the Form that
+lightened eternally had become invisible, or had vanished to its home
+in the unseen world of spirits: I was left alone in the centre of a
+universe of life, and I yearned after some sympathizing being. Suddenly
+from the starry deeps there came floating through the ocean of light a
+planetary body; and upon it there stood a woman whose face was as the
+face of a Madonna; and by her side there stood a child, whose
+countenance varied not--neither was it magnified as he drew nearer.
+This child was a king, for I saw that he had a crown upon his head: but
+the crown was a crown of thorns. Then also I perceived that the
+planetary body was our unhappy earth: and, as the earth drew near, this
+child who had come forth from the starry deeps to comfort me threw upon
+me a look of gentlest pity and of unutterable love--so that in my heart
+I had a sudden rapture of joy such as passes all understanding; and I
+awoke in the tumult of my happiness.
+
+I awoke: but my happiness survived my dream: and I exclaimed, O how
+beautiful is death, seeing that we die in a world of life and of
+creation without end! and I blessed God for my life upon earth, but
+much more for the life in those unseen depths of the universe which are
+emptied of all but the Supreme Reality, and where no earthly life nor
+perishable hope can enter.
+
+
+
+
+ COMPLAINT OF THE BIRD IN A DARKENED CAGE.
+
+
+"Ah!" said the imprisoned bird, "how unhappy were I in my eternal
+night, but for those melodious tones which sometimes make their way to
+me like beams of light from afar, and cheer my gloomy day. But I will
+myself repeat these heavenly melodies like an echo, until I have
+stamped them in my heart; and then I shall be able to bring comfort to
+myself in my darkness!" Thus spoke the little warbler, and soon had
+learned the sweet airs that were sung to it with voice and instrument.
+That done, the curtain was raised; for the darkness had been purposely
+contrived to assist in its instruction. O man! how often dost thou
+complain of overshadowing grief and of darkness resting upon thy days!
+And yet what cause for complaint, unless indeed thou hast failed to
+learn wisdom from suffering? For is not the whole sum of human life a
+veiling and an obscuring of the immortal spirit of man? Then first,
+when the fleshly curtain falls away, may it soar upwards into a region
+of happier melodies!
+
+
+
+
+ ON THE DEATH OF YOUNG CHILDREN.
+
+
+Ephemera die all at sunset, and no insect of this class has ever
+sported in the beams of the morning sun. Happier are ye, little human
+ephemera! Ye played only in the ascending beams, and in the early dawn,
+and in the eastern light; ye drank only of the prelibations of life;
+hovered for a little space over a world of freshness and of blossoms;
+and fell asleep in innocence before yet the morning dew was exhaled!
+
+
+
+
+ THE PROPHETIC DEW-DROPS.
+
+
+A delicate child, pale and prematurely wise, was complaining on a hot
+morning that the poor dewdrops had been too hastily snatched away and
+not allowed to glitter on the flowers like other happier dewdrops that
+live the whole night through and sparkle in the moonlight, and through
+the morning onwards to noonday: "The sun," said the child, "has chased
+them away with his heat--or swallowed them in his wrath." Soon after
+came rain and a rainbow; whereupon his father pointed upwards: "See,"
+said he, "there stand thy dew-drops gloriously re-set--a glittering
+jewelry--in the heavens; and the clownish foot tramples on them no
+more. By this, my child, thou art taught that what withers upon earth
+blooms again in heaven." Thus the father spoke, and knew not that he
+spoke prefiguring words: for soon after the delicate child, with the
+morning brightness of his early wisdom, was exhaled, like a dewdrop,
+into heaven.
+
+
+
+
+ ON DEATH.
+
+
+We should all think of death as a less hideous object, if it simply
+untenanted our bodies of a spirit, without corrupting them; secondly,
+if the grief which we experience at the spectacle of our friends'
+graves were not by some confusion of the mind blended with the image of
+our own; thirdly, if we had not in this life seated ourselves in a warm
+domestic nest, which we are unwilling to quit for the cold blue regions
+of the unfathomable heavens; finally,--if death were denied to us. Once
+in dreams I saw a human being of heavenly intellectual faculties, and
+his aspirations were heavenly; but he was chained (methought) eternally
+to the earth. The immortal old man had five great wounds in his
+happiness--five worms that gnawed forever at his heart: he was unhappy
+in springtime, because _that_ is a season of hope--and rich with
+phantoms of far happier days than any which this aceldama of earth
+can realize. He was unhappy at the sound of music, which dilates the
+heart of man into its whole capacity for the infinite, and he cried
+aloud,--"Away, away! Thou speakest of things which throughout my
+endless life I have found not, and shall not find!" He was unhappy at
+the remembrance of earthly affections and dissevered hearts: for love
+is a plant which may bud in this life, but it must flourish in another.
+He was unhappy under the glorious spectacle of the starry host, and
+ejaculated forever in his heart,--"So then I am parted from you to all
+eternity by an impassable abyss: the great universe of suns is above,
+below, and round about me: but I am chained to a little ball of dust
+and ashes." He was unhappy before the great ideas of Virtue--of
+Truth--and of God; because he knew how feeble are the approximations to
+them which a son of earth can make. But this was a dream: God be
+thanked, that in reality there is no such craving and asking eye
+directed upwards to heaven--to which death will not one day bring an
+answer!
+
+
+
+
+ IMAGINATION UNTAMED BY THE COARSER
+ REALITIES OF LIFE.
+
+
+Happy is every actor in the guilty drama of life, to whom the higher
+illusion within supplies or conceals the external illusion; to whom, in
+the tumult of his part and its intellectual interest, the bungling
+landscapes of the stage have the bloom and reality of nature, and whom
+the loud parting and shocking of the scenes disturb not in his dream!
+
+
+
+
+ SATIRICAL NOTICE OF REVIEWERS.
+
+
+In Swabia, in Saxony, in Pomerania, are towns in which are stationed a
+strange sort of officers,--valuers of author's flesh, something like
+our old market-lookers in this town. They are commonly called tasters
+(or _Prægustatores_) because they eat a mouthful of every book
+beforehand, and tell the people whether its flavor be good. We authors,
+in spite, call them _reviewers_: but I believe an action of defamation
+would lie against us for such bad words. The tasters write no books
+themselves; consequently they have the more time to look over and tax
+those of other people. Or, if they do sometimes write books, they are
+bad ones: which again is very advantageous to them: for who can
+understand the theory of badness in other people's books so well as
+those who have learned it by practice in their own? They are reputed
+the guardians of literature and the literati for the same reason that
+St. Nepomuk is the patron saint of bridges and of all who pass over
+them,--namely, because he himself once lost his life from a bridge.
+
+
+
+
+ FEMALE TONGUES.
+
+
+Hippel, the author of the book "Upon Marriage," says, "A woman, that
+does not talk, must be a stupid woman." But Hippel is an author whose
+opinions it is more safe to admire than to adopt. The most intelligent
+women are often silent amongst women; and again the most stupid and the
+most silent are often neither one nor the other except amongst men. In
+general the current remark upon men is valid also with respect to
+women,--that those for the most part are the greatest thinkers who are
+the least talkers; as frogs cease to croak when _light_ is brought to
+the water edge. However, in fact, the disproportionate talking of
+women arises out of the sedentariness of their labors: sedentary
+artisans,--as tailors, shoemakers, weavers,--have this habit as well as
+hypochondriacal tendencies in common with women. Apes do not talk, as
+savages say, that they may not be set to work: but women often talk
+double their share--even _because_ they work.
+
+
+
+
+ FORGIVENESS.
+
+
+Nothing is more moving to man than the spectacle of reconciliation: our
+weaknesses are thus indemnified, and are not too costly--being the
+price we pay for the hour of forgiveness: and the archangel, who has
+never felt anger, has reason to envy the man who subdues it. When thou
+forgivest,--the man, who has pierced thy heart, stands to thee in the
+relation of the sea-worm that perforates the shell of the muscle, which
+straightway closes the wound with a pearl.
+
+ * * *
+
+The graves of the best of men, of the noblest martyrs, are like the
+graves of the Herrnhuters (the Moravian brethren)--level, and
+undistinguishable from the universal earth: and, if the earth could
+give up her secrets, our whole globe would appear a Westminster Abbey
+laid flat. Ah! what a multitude of tears, what myriads of bloody drops
+have been shed in secrecy about the three corner-trees of earth,--the
+tree of life, the tree of knowledge, and the tree of freedom,--shed,
+but never reckoned! It is only great periods of calamity that reveal to
+us our great men, as comets are revealed by total eclipses of the sun.
+Not merely upon the field of battle, but also upon the consecrated soil
+of virtue--and upon the classic ground of truth, thousands of
+_nameless_ heroes must fall and struggle to build up the footstool
+from which history surveys the _one_ hero, whose name is embalmed,
+bleeding--conquering--and resplendent. The grandest of heroic deeds are
+those which are performed within four walls and in domestic privacy.
+And, because history records only the self-sacrifices of the male sex,
+and because she dips her pen only in blood,--therefore is it that in
+the eyes of the unseen spirit of the world our annals appear doubtless
+far more beautiful and noble than in our own.
+
+
+
+
+ THE GRANDEUR OF MAN IN HIS LITTLENESS.
+
+
+Man upon this earth would be vanity and hollowness, dust and ashes,
+vapor and a bubble,--were it not that he felt himself to be so. That it
+is possible for him to harbor such a feeling,--_this_, by implying a
+comparison of himself with something higher in himself, _this_ is it
+which makes him the immortal creature that he is.
+
+
+
+
+ NIGHT.
+
+
+The earth is every day overspread with the veil of night for the same
+reason as the cages of birds are darkened,--namely, that we may the
+more readily apprehend the higher harmonies of thought in the hush and
+quiet of darkness. Thoughts, which day turns into smoke and mist, stand
+about us in the night as lights and flames: even as the column which
+fluctuates above the crater of Vesuvius, in the daytime appears a
+pillar of cloud, but by night a pillar of fire.
+
+
+
+
+ THE STARS.
+
+
+Look up, and behold the eternal fields of light that lie round about
+the throne of God. Had no star ever appeared in the heavens, to man
+there would have been no heavens; and he would have laid himself down
+to his last sleep, in a spirit of anguish, as upon a gloomy earth
+vaulted over by a material arch--solid and impervious.
+
+
+
+
+ MARTYRDOM.
+
+
+To die for the truth--is not to die for one's country, but to die for
+the world. Truth, like the _Venus del Medici_, will pass down in thirty
+fragments to posterity: but posterity will collect and recompose them
+into a goddess. Then also thy temple, O eternal Truth! that now stands
+half below the earth--made hollow by the sepulchres of its witnesses,
+will raise itself in the total majesty of its proportions; and will
+stand in monumental granite; and every pillar on which it rests will be
+fixed in the grave of a martyr.
+
+
+
+
+ THE QUARRELS OF FRIENDS.
+
+
+Why is it that the most fervent love becomes more fervent by brief
+interruption and reconciliation? and why must a storm agitate our
+affections before they can raise the highest rainbow of peace? Ah! for
+this reason it is--because all passions feel their object to be as
+eternal as themselves, and no love can admit the feeling that the
+beloved object should die. And under this feeling of imperishableness
+it is that we hard fields of ice shock together so harshly, whilst all
+the while under the sunbeams of a little space of seventy years we are
+rapidly dissolving.
+
+
+
+
+ DREAMING.
+
+
+But for dreams, that lay Mosaic worlds tessellated with flowers and
+jewels before the blind sleeper, and surround the recumbent living with
+the figures of the dead in the upright attitude of life, the time would
+be too long before we are allowed to rejoin our brothers, parents,
+friends: every year we should become more and more painfully sensible
+of the desolation made around us by death, if sleep--the ante-chamber
+of the grave--were not hung by dreams with the busts of those who live
+in the other world.
+
+
+
+
+ TWO DIVISIONS OF PHILOSOPHIC MINDS.
+
+
+There are two very different classes of philosophical heads--which,
+since Kant has introduced into philosophy the idea of positive and
+negative quantities, I shall willingly classify by means of that
+distinction. The positive intellect is, like the poet, in conjunction
+with the outer world, the father of an inner world; and, like the poet
+also, holds up a transforming mirror in which the entangled and
+distorted members as they are seen in our actual experience enter into
+new combinations which compose a fair and luminous world: the
+hypothesis of Idealism (i. e. the Fichtéan system) the Monads and the
+Pre-established Harmony of Leibnitz--and Spinozism are all births of a
+genial moment, and not the wooden carving of logical toil. Such men
+therefore as Leibnitz, Plato, Herder, &c., I call positive intellects;
+because they seek and yield the positive; and because their inner
+world, having raised itself higher out of the water than in others,
+thereby overlooks a larger prospect of island and continents. A
+negative head, on the other hand, discovers by its acuteness--not any
+positive truths, but the negative (i. e. the errors) of other people.
+Such an intellect, as for example Bayle, one of the greatest of that
+class,--appraises the funds of others, rather than brings any fresh
+funds of his own. In lieu of the obscure ideas which he finds he gives
+us clear ones: but in this there is no positive accession to our
+knowledge; for all that the clear idea contains in development exists
+already by implication in the obscure idea. Negative intellects of
+every age are unanimous in their abhorrence of everything positive.
+Impulse, feeling, instinct--everything, in short, which is
+incomprehensible, they can endure just once--that is, at the summit of
+their chain of arguments as a sort of hook on which they may hang
+them,--but never afterwards.
+
+
+
+
+ DIGNITY OF MAN IN SELF-SACRIFICE.
+
+
+That for which man offers up his blood or his property must be more
+valuable than they. A good man does not fight with half the courage
+for his own life that he shows in the protection of another's. The
+mother, who will hazard nothing for herself, will hazard all in defence
+of her child:--in short, only for the nobility within us--only for
+virtue, will man open his veins and offer up his spirit: but this
+nobility--this virtue--presents different phases: with the Christian
+martyr, it is faith; with the savage, it is honor; with the republican,
+it is liberty.
+
+
+
+
+ FANCY.
+
+
+Fancy can lay only the past and the future under her copying-paper: and
+every actual presence of the object sets limits to her power: just as
+water distilled from roses, according to the old naturalists, lost its
+power exactly at the periodical blooming of the rose.
+
+ * * *
+
+The older, the more tranquil, and pious a man is, so much the more holy
+does he esteem all that is _innate_, that is, _feeling_ and _power_;
+whereas in the estimate of the multitude whatsoever is _self-acquired_,
+the ability of practice and science in general has an undue
+pre-eminence; for the latter is universally appreciated, and therefore
+even by those who have it not, but the former not at all. In the
+twilight and the moonshine the fixed stars, which are suns, retire and
+veil themselves in obscurity; whilst the planets, which are simply
+earths, preserve their borrowed light unobscured. The elder races of
+men, amongst whom man _was_ more, though he had not yet _become_ so
+much, had a childlike feeling of sympathy with all the gifts of the
+Infinite--for example, with strength--beauty--and good fortune; and
+even the _involuntary_ had a sanctity in their eyes, and was to them a
+prophecy and a revelation: hence the value they ascribed, and the
+art of interpretation they applied, to the speeches of children--of
+madmen--of drunkards--and of dreamers.
+
+ * * *
+
+As the blind man knows not light, and through that ignorance also of
+necessity knows not darkness,--so likewise, but for disinterestedness
+we should know nothing of selfishness, but for slavery nothing of
+freedom: there are perhaps in this world many things which remain
+obscure to us for want of alternating with their opposites.
+
+ * * *
+
+Derham remarks in his Physico-theology that the deaf hear best in the
+midst of noise, as, for instance, during the ringing of bells, &c. This
+must be the reason, I suppose, that the thundering of drums, cannons,
+&c., accompany the entrance into cities of princes and ministers, who
+are generally rather deaf, in order that they may the better hear the
+petitions and complaints of the people.
+
+
+
+
+
+ MISCELLANEOUS PIECES.
+
+
+
+
+ REMINISCENCES
+ OF THE BEST HOURS OF LIFE FOR THE HOUR OF DEATH.
+
+
+"Give me," said Herder to his son, as he lay in the parched weariness
+of his last illness,--"give me a great thought, that I may quicken
+myself with it."
+
+It marks a strange perversity in human nature, that we are wont to
+offer nothing but images of terror--no stars of cheering light--to
+those who lie imprisoned in the darkness of a sick-bed, when the
+glitter of the dew of life is waxing gray and dim before them. It is
+indeed hard that lamentations and emotions are frequently vented upon
+the dying, which would be withheld from the living in all their vigor;
+as if the sick patient was to console those in health. There stands no
+spirit in the closeness of a sick-chamber to awaken a cheering smile on
+that nerveless, colorless countenance; but only confessors, lawyers,
+and doctors, who order everything, and relatives who lament at
+everything. There stands no lofty spirit, elevated above the
+circumstance of sorrow, to conduct the prostrate soul of the sufferer,
+thirsty for the refreshment of joy, back to the old springtide waters
+of pious recollection; and so to mingle these with the last ecstasies
+of life, as to give the dying man a foreboding of his transition to
+another state. On the contrary, the death-bed is narrowed into a coffin
+without a lid. The value of life is enhanced to the departing one by
+lies which promise cure, or words which proffer consolation; the bier
+is represented as a scaffold, the harsh discord of life is trumpeted
+into the ears which survive long after the eyes are dead, instead of
+letting life ebb away like an echo in sounds ever deeper, though
+fainter. Nevertheless, man has this of good in him, that he recalls the
+slightest joy which he has shared with a dying person, far rather than
+a thousand greater pleasures given to a person in health; perhaps
+because, in the latter case, we hope to repeat and redouble our
+attentions,--so little do mortals reflect that every pleasure they give
+or they receive may be the last.
+
+Our exit from life would therefore be greatly more painful than our
+entrance into it, were it not that our good mother Nature had
+previously mitigated its sufferings, by gently bearing her children
+from one world into another when they are already heavy with sleep. For
+in the hour before the last she allows a breastplate of indifference
+toward the survivors to freeze about the heart of the lamented one; and
+in the hour immediately preceding dissolution (as we learn from those
+who have recovered from apparent death, and from the demeanor of many
+dying persons), the brain is, as it were, inundated and watered by
+faint eddies of bliss, comparable to nothing upon earth better than to
+the ineffable sensations felt by a patient under magnetic treatment.
+
+We can by no means know how high these sensations of dying may reach,
+as we have accounts of them from none but those in whom the process has
+been interrupted; nor can we ascertain whether it is not these
+ecstatical transports which exhaust life more than the convulsions of
+pain, and which loosen the tie of this terrestrial state in some
+unknown heaven.
+
+The history of the dying is a serious and prodigious history, but on
+earth its leaves will never be unrolled.
+
+
+In the little village of Heim, Gottreich Hartmann resided with his old
+father, who was a curate; and although the old man had wellnigh
+outlived all those whom he had loved, he was made happy by his son.
+Gottreich discharged his duties for him in the parish, not so much in
+aid of his parent's unflinching vigor, as to satisfy his own energy,
+and to give his father the exquisite gratification of being edified by
+his child and companion.
+
+In Gottreich there thrilled a spirit of true poetry; he was not, like
+the greater number of poetical young men, a bulbous plant, which, when
+it has sent forth its own flower, fattens its unseemly fruit
+underground; but he was a tree which crowned its variegated blossoms
+with sweet and beautiful fruits; and these buds were as yet coiled up
+from the warmth of the earliest springtide of a poet's life.
+
+His father had had in his youth a poet's ardor of like intensity, but
+it was not favored by the times; for in the last century many a spirit
+which might have soared was engaged to the pulpit or the law-court,
+because the old-fashioned middle classes were convinced that their
+offspring would find richer pasture on the meadow and in the valley
+than on the peaks of the mountain of the Muses.
+
+Nevertheless, the repressed spirit of a poet, when it cannot exhale
+itself in creation, recoils but the more closely into the depths of his
+heart. His unuttered feelings speak in his motions as with a voice, and
+his actions express his imagery, and in this manner the poet may live
+as long as the man; just as the short-lived butterfly may last out the
+long, hard winter in its chrysalis state, if it has not burst its
+prison in the preceding summer.
+
+Such had been the life of the elder Hartmann; and yet more beautiful
+was it, because the virginal soul of the poet lives in the offices of
+religion, as in a nun's cell; and the twin sisters Piety and Poetry are
+wont to dwell together and stand by one another.
+
+How beautiful and how pure is the position of God's ministers! All that
+is good dwells around them,--religion, poetry, and the life of a
+shepherd of souls; whilst other professions oft serve only to choke up
+this goodly neighborhood. Son and father seemed to live in one another,
+and on the site of filial and paternal love there arose the structure
+of a rare and singular friendship. Gottreich not only cheered his
+father by the new birth of his lost poet's youth, but by the still more
+beautiful similarity of their faith. In days gone by, a minister who
+sent his son to the public theological schools might expect him to
+return the sworn antagonist of all that he had himself daily prayed to
+at the altar in the discharge of his office: the son returned to his
+father's roof as a missionary sent to convert the heathen, or as an
+antichrist. There may have been sorrows of a father, which, though all
+unspoken, were deeper than a mother's sorrows. But times are perhaps
+better now.
+
+Gottreich, though he entered the high schools with his share of the
+uppish, quibbling of early youth, returned with the faith of his
+ancestors and of his father. For he had studied under instructors who
+had taught him to cling rather to the teachings of the old faith than
+to the ingenious explanations of the commentators, and who had exposed
+to the light alone what is serviceable to man, as to a plant, and to
+its outward growth, but not the roots perniciously. Thus the father
+found again his old Christian heart sending forth new shoots in the
+bosom of his Gottreich, and moreover the best justification of the
+convictions of his life and of his love.
+
+If it be pain to us to love and at the same time to contradict, to
+refuse with the head what the heart grants, it is all the sweeter to us
+to find ourselves and our faith transplanted forwards in a younger
+being. Life is then a beautiful night, in which not one star goes down
+but another rises in its place.
+
+Gottreich possessed a paradise, in which he labored as his father's
+gardener; he was at once the wife, the brother, the friend, the all
+that is to be loved by man, of his parent. Every Sunday brought him a
+new pleasure, that of preaching a sermon before his father. He
+displayed so much power in his pulpit eloquence, that he seemed to
+labor more for the elevation and edification of his father than for the
+enlightenment of the common people; though he held a maxim, which I
+take to be far from erroneous, that the highest subjects of
+intellectual speculation are good for the people as for children, and
+that _man can only learn to rise, from the consideration of that which
+he cannot surmount_. If the eye of the old man was moistened, or if his
+hands were suddenly folded in an attitude of prayer, the Sunday became
+the holiest of festivals; and many a festival has there been in that
+quiet little parsonage, whose festivity no one understood and no one
+perceived. He who looks upon sermon-preaching and sermon-hearing as a
+dull pleasure, will but little understand the zest with which the two
+friends conversed on discourses delivered, and on those yet to come, as
+if pulpit-criticism was as engrossing as the criticism of the stage.
+The approbation and the love of an energetic old man like Hartmann,
+whose spiritual limbs had by no means stiffened on the chilly ridge of
+years, could not but exercise a powerful influence on a young man like
+Gottreich, who, more tenderly and delicately formed both in body and
+mind, was wont to shoot forth in loftier and more rapid flame.
+
+To these two happy men was added a happy woman also. Justa, an
+orphan, sole mistress of her property, had entirely left and sold the
+trading-house which had been her father's, in the town, and had removed
+into the upper part of a good peasant's cottage, to live entirely in
+the country. Justa did nothing in the world by halves, but she often
+did things more than most would deem completely, at least in all that
+touched her generosity. She had not long resided in the village of
+Heim, and had seen the meek Gottreich, and listened to some of his
+springtide sermons, ere she discovered that he had won her heart,
+filled as it was with the love of virtue; she nevertheless refused to
+grant him her hand until the conclusion of the great peace, after
+which they were to be married. She was ever fonder of doing what is
+difficult than what is easy. I wish that it was here the place to
+tell of the May-time life they led, which seemed to blossom in the low
+parsonage-house hard by the church-door under Justa's hand; how she came
+in the morning from her own cottage, to order matters in the little
+dwelling for the day; how the evenings were passed in the garden,
+ornamented with few, but pretty flower-beds, and commanding a view of
+many a well-watered meadow and distant hill, and stars without number;
+how these three hearts played into one another, no one of which in this
+most pure and intimate intercourse knew or felt anything which was not
+of the fairest; and how good and gay intention marked the passage of
+their lives. Every bench was a church chair, all was peaceful and holy,
+and the firmament above an infinite church dome.
+
+In many a village and in many a house a true Eden may be hid, which has
+neither been named nor marked down; for joy is fond of covering over
+and concealing her tenderest flowers. Gottreich reposed in such a
+fulness of bliss and love, of poetry and religion, of springtime, of
+the past and of the future, that he feared in the bottom of his heart
+to speak his happiness out, save in prayer. In prayer, thought he, man
+may say all, his happiness and his misery. His father was very happy
+also; there came over him a warm old age,--no winter night, but a
+summer evening, without frost or darkness: albeit the sun of his life
+was sunk pretty deep below the mound of earth under which his wife was
+lain down to sleep.
+
+Nothing recalls the close of life to a noble-hearted young man so much
+as precisely the happiest and fairest hours which he passes. Gottreich,
+in the midst of the united fragrance and beauty of the flowers of joy,
+even with the morning-star of life above him, could not but think on
+the time when the same should appear to him as the evening star,
+warning him of sleep. Then said he to himself: "All is now so certain
+and so clear before me,--the beauty and the holiness of life, the
+splendor of the universe, the Creator, the dignity and the greatness of
+man's heart, the bright images of eternal truth, the whole starry
+firmament of ideas, which enlightens, instructs, and upholds man! But
+when I am grown old, and in the obstruction of death, will not all that
+now rustles so bloomingly and livingly about me appear gray and dull?
+Just when man is approaching that heaven which he has so long
+contemplated, Death holds the telescope inverted before his dim eye,
+and lets him see only what is empty, distant, shadowy. But is this
+indeed true? Shall I be more likely to be right when I only feel and
+think and hope, with half a life, incapable of a keen glance or an
+intense sensation,--or am I right now, that my whole heart is warm,
+that my whole head is clear, and my strength fresh? I acknowledge that
+the present is the fittest season, and that precisely because I do
+acknowledge it to be the fittest. I will then live through this daytime
+of truth attentively, and bear it away with me to the evening dusk,
+that it may lighten my end."
+
+In these sweetest May-hours of youth, when heaven and earth and his own
+heart were beating together in harmony, he gave ardent words to his
+ardent thoughts, and kept them written down under the title of
+"_Reminiscences of the best Hours of Life for the Hour of Death_." He
+meant to cheer himself at his last hour with these views of his happy
+life, and to look back from the glow of the evening to the brightness
+of the morning of his youth.
+
+Thus lived these three beings, ever rejoicing more deeply in one
+another and in their genial happiness, when at last the chariots of the
+struggle and the victories of the holy War[77] began to roll over the
+land.
+
+Now Gottreich became another man; like a young bird of passage, which,
+though it know nothing of summer climates, frets in its warm cage that
+it cannot fly away with the older birds of its kind. The active powers
+of his nature, which had heretofore been the quiet audience of his
+poetical and oratorical powers, arose; and it seemed to him as if the
+spirit of energy, which hitherto had wasted itself like the flames of a
+bituminous soil on the empty air, were now seeking an object to lay
+hold of. He dared not, however, risk to propose a separation to his
+father, but he by turns tormented and refreshed himself inwardly with
+the idea of laboring and combating with the rest. To Justa alone he
+confided his wishes, but she did not give them encouragement, because
+she thought the old man's solitude would be too great for him to bear.
+At last the old man himself, inspirited for war by Gottreich and his
+betrothed one, said that his son had better go, that he had long
+desired it, and had only been silent through love for him. He hoped,
+with God's aid, to be able to discharge his pastoral duties for a
+twelvemonth; so that he, too, should be doing something for his
+country.
+
+Gottreich departed, trusting to the autumnal strength of his father's
+life. He enlisted as a common soldier, and preached also wherever he
+was able. The entrance on a new career awakens new energies and powers,
+which rapidly unfold into life and vigor. Although fortune spared him
+the wounds which he would so willingly have brought back with him into
+the peaceful future of his life, in memory as it were of the focus of
+his youth, yet it was happiness enough to take part in the battles,
+and, like an old republican, to fight together with a whole nation for
+the common cause.
+
+When at length, in the most beautiful month of May which ever Germany
+had won by conquest, the festivals of victory and of peace began in
+more than one nation. Gottreich was unwilling to pass those days of
+rejoicing so far from those who were dearest to him; he longed for
+their company, that his joy might be doubled: so he took the road to
+Heim. Thousands, before and after him, journeyed at that time over the
+liberated land, from a happy past to a happy future; but few there were
+who saw, like Gottreich, so pure a firmament over the mountains of his
+native valleys, in which not a star was missing, but every one of them
+was twinkling and bright. Justa had already sent him the little annals
+of the parsonage; had told him how she longed for his return, and how
+his father rejoiced; how well the old man stood the labors of his
+office, and how she had still better secrets of joy in store for him.
+To these latter belonged, perhaps, one which he had not forgotten,
+namely, her promise to give him her hand after the great peace.
+
+With such prospects he enjoyed in thought, ever from Whitsuntide
+forwards, that holy evening when he should unexpectedly relieve the old
+man from all his labors, and begin to prepare the tranquil festivities
+of the village.
+
+As he was thus thinking upon that day's meeting, and as the mountains
+above his father's village, in which he was so soon to clasp those fond
+hearts to his own, were seen more and more clearly in relief against
+the blue sky, his "Reminiscences of the best Hours of Life for the Hour
+of Death" re-echoed in his soul, and he could not refrain from noting
+amongst them, as he went along, the joy of meeting again here below.
+
+Behind him there was coming up a storm from the east, in the direction
+of his home, before which he seemed to come a happy messenger; for the
+storms of war, which he had seen upon the earth, had reconciled to him
+and made him love those of heaven; and the parched ground, the dropping
+flowers, and the ears of corn had long been thirsting for the waters of
+the warm clouds. A parishioner of Heim, who was laboring in the fields,
+saluted him as he passed, and expressed his joy that the rain and
+Gottreich had both come at last together.
+
+And now he caught sight of the low church-steeple, peeping from the
+clustered trees, and he entered upon that tract of the valley where the
+parsonage lay, all reddened by the evening sun. At every window he
+hoped to see his betrothed one, if perchance she might be looking out
+on the sunset before the storm came on; and as he came nearer, he hoped
+to see the lattice open, and Whitsuntide brooms in the chief apartment;
+but he found nothing of all this.
+
+At last he entered quietly the parsonage-house, and slowly opened the
+well-known door. The room was empty, but he heard a noise overhead.
+When he opened the door of his upper chamber, which was filled with a
+glow from the west, Justa was kneeling before the bed of his father,
+who, sitting half upright, was looking with a haggard, stiff, and bony
+countenance toward the setting sun before him. A clasp of her lover to
+her breast, and one exclamation, was all his reception. But his father
+stretched his wizened hand slowly out, and said, with difficulty, "Thou
+art come at the right time!" without adding whether he spoke of the
+preachings or of their separation.
+
+Justa hastily related how the old man had overworked himself, till body
+and spirit had given way together,--so that he no longer took a share
+in anything, though he longed to be with the sharers,--and how he lay
+prostrate with broken wings, looking upwards like a needy child. The
+old man was grown hard of hearing, and she could say all this in his
+presence.
+
+Gottreich soon confirmed it to himself. He would fain have infused the
+fire of conquest, reflected in his own bosom, which, like a red evening
+cloud, was announcing a fair dawn to Europe, into that old and once
+strong heart; but he heard neither wish nor question of it. The old
+man gazed steadily upon the sun, until at last it was hid by the storm.
+Nevertheless the war of the elements seemed to touch him but little;
+the glare of life broke dimly through the thickening ice of death. A
+dying man knows no present,--nothing but the future and the past.
+
+On a sudden the landscape grew dark, all the winds stood pent, the
+earth oppressed; then there came a gush of rain and a crash of thunder.
+The lightning streamed around the old man, and he looked up altered and
+astonished. "Hist!" said he; "I hear the rain once more;--speak
+quickly, children, for I shall soon depart."
+
+Both his children clung to him, but he was too weak to embrace them.
+
+And now, as the warm, healing springs of the clouds bathed the sick
+earth, down from the dripping tree to the blades of grass, and as the
+sky glistened mildly as with a tear of joy, and the thunder went
+warring away behind the distant mountains, the sick man pointed
+upwards, and said, "Seest thou the lordliness of God? My son,
+strengthen now at the last my weary soul with something holy, in the
+spirit of love, and not of penance; for if our hearts condemn us not,
+then have we confidence toward God. Say something rich in love to me of
+God and of his works."
+
+Then the eyes of his son overflowed, to think that he should read the
+Reminiscences which he had prepared for his own death-bed at the
+death-bed of his father. When he said this to him, the old man
+answered, "Hasten, my son!" and with a faltering voice, Gottreich began
+to read:--
+
+"Remember, in the darkening hour, that the glow of the universe once
+filled thy breast, and that thou hast acknowledged the magnitude of
+existence. Hast thou not looked forth into one half of infinity by
+night, and into the other half by day? Think away the nothingness of
+space, and the earth which is around thee; worlds above, around, and
+beneath arch thee about as a centre, all impelling and impelled,
+splendor within splendor, magnitude within magnitude; all brightness
+centring in the universal Sun. Carry thy thoughts forwards through
+eternity, toward that universal Sun; thou shalt not arrive at darkness
+nor emptiness. What is empty dwells only between the worlds, not around
+the world.
+
+"Remember, in the dark hour, those times when thou hast prayed to God
+in ecstasy, and when thou hast thought on him,--the greatest thought of
+finite man,--the Infinite One!"
+
+Here the old man clasped his hands, and prayed low.
+
+"Hast thou not known and felt the existence of that Being, whose
+infinity consists not only in his strength, in his wisdom, and his
+eternity, but also in his love and in his justice? Canst thou forget
+the time when the blue sky by day and the blue sky by night opened on
+thee, as if the mildness of God was looking down on thee? Hast thou not
+felt the love of the Infinite, when it veiled itself in its image, in
+loving hearts of men; as the sun, which casts its light not on our moon
+alone, for our nights, but on the morning and evening star also, and on
+every little twinkler, even to the farthest from the earth?
+
+"Remember, in the dark hour, how in the spring of thy life the mounds
+of earth which are graves appeared to thee only as the mountain-tops of
+another far and new world; and how in the midst of the fulness of life
+thou didst acknowledge the value of death. The snow of the grave shall
+warm the frost-bitten limbs of age to life again. As a navigator who
+suddenly disembarks from the cold, wintry, and lonely sea, upon a coast
+which is laden with the warm, rich blossoms of spring, so with one leap
+from our little bark we pass at once from winter to an eternal
+springtime.
+
+"Rejoice, in this dark hour, that thy life dwells in the midst of a
+wider and larger life. The earth-clod of the globe has been divinely
+breathed upon. A world swarms with life,--for the leaf of every tree is
+a land of souls; and every little life would freeze and perish, if it
+were not warmed and borne up by the eddies of life about it. The sea
+of time glitters, like the sea of space, with countless beings of
+light: death and resurrection are the valleys and mountains of the
+ever-swelling ocean. There exists no dead anatomy; what seems to be
+such is only another body. Without a universal living existence, there
+would be nothing but a wide, all-encompassing death. We cling like
+mosses to the Alps of nature, drawing life from the high clouds. Man is
+the butterfly which flutters up to Chimborazo, but above the butterfly
+soars the condor: however many, small or great, the giant and the child
+are free wanderers in one garden; and the fly of a day may retrace its
+infinite series of progenitors to those first beings of its kind which
+played over the waters of Paradise before the evening sun.
+
+"Never forget the thought, which is now so clear to thee, that the
+individuality of man lasts out the greatest suffering and the most
+entrancing joy alike unscathed, while the body crumbles away in the
+pains and pleasures of the flesh. Herein are souls like marsh-lights,
+which shine in the storm and the rain unextinguishable.
+
+"Canst thou forget, in the dark hour, that there have been mighty men
+amongst us, and that thou art following after them? Raise thyself like
+the spirits which stood upon their mountains, having the storm of life
+only about and never above them. Call back to thee the kingly race of
+sages and of poets, who have inspirited and enlightened nation after
+nation."
+
+"Speak of our Redeemer!" said the father.
+
+"Remember Jesus Christ, in the dark hour,--remember Him who also passed
+through life,--remember that soft Moon of the infinite Sun, given to
+enlighten the night of the world. Let life be hallowed to thee, and
+death also, for he shared both of them with thee. May his calm and
+lofty form look down on thee in the last darkness, and show thee his
+Father!"
+
+A low roll of thunder was now heard to pass over the dun clouds which
+the tempest had left, and the setting sun filled the entire vault of
+heaven with the magnificence of his fire.
+
+"Remember, in the last hour, how the heart of man can love. Canst thou
+forget the love wherewith one heart repays a thousand hearts, and the
+soul during life is nourished and vivified from another soul, as the
+oak of a hundred years clings fast to the same spot with its roots, and
+derives new strength, and sends forth new buds during its hundred
+springs?"
+
+"Dost thou mean me?" said the father.
+
+"I mean my mother also," replied the son.
+
+Justa wept, when she heard how her lover would console himself in his
+last hours with the reminiscence of the days of her love; and the
+father said, but very gently, thinking on his wife, "To meet again, to
+meet again!"
+
+"Remember then, in the last hour," continued Gottreich, "that pure
+being with whom thy life was beautiful and great,--with whom thou hast
+wept tears of joy, with whom thou hast prayed to God, and in whom God
+appeared unto thee, in whom thou didst find the first and last heart of
+love,--and then close thine eyes in peace!"
+
+On a sudden the clouds were cleft into two huge, black mountains,
+and the deep sun looked forth from between them, as it were out of
+a valley between buttresses of rock, gazing upon the earth with its
+joy-glistening eye.
+
+"See!" said the dying man, "what a glare!"
+
+"It is the evening sun, father."
+
+"Ay, this day shall we see one another again!" continued the old man;
+but he spoke of his wife, who was long since dead.
+
+The son was unable, from his emotion, to paint to his father the
+blessedness of meeting again upon the earth, which he had that very day
+enjoyed by anticipation and described upon his journey; or to say to
+him how it comes, that meeting again is a renewal of love in a better
+state; and that, if the first meeting was apt to overflow into the
+future, reminiscence binds the flowers of the present and the fruits of
+the past upon one stem.
+
+Who could have courage to speak of the joys of earthly meeting to one
+who seemed to be already in the contemplation of a meeting in heaven?
+
+Startled, he asked, "Father, what ails thee?"
+
+"I _do_ think thereon in the dark hour; ay, thereon and thereupon
+again; and death is also beautiful, and the parting in Christ,"
+murmured to himself the old man, as he tried to take Gottreich's hand,
+which he had not strength to press. It was but the usual nervous
+snatching of the fingers of the dying. He continued to think that his
+son was still speaking to him, and said, more and more distinctly and
+emphatically, "O thou blessed God!" until all the other luminaries of
+life were extinguished, and in his soul there stood nothing but the one
+sun,--God!
+
+At length he raised himself, and, stretching out his arm forcibly,
+exclaimed: "There are three fair rainbows over the evening sun; I must
+go after the sun, and pass through with him!" He then fell back, and
+all was over.
+
+At that moment the sun went down, and there glimmered at his setting a
+broad rainbow in the east.
+
+"He is gone!" said Gottreich to Justa, in a voice choked with grief;
+"but he is gone from us unto his God, in the midst of great, pious, and
+unmingled joy; then weep no more, Justa!"
+
+At that moment his own hitherto restrained tears found a vent, and he
+pressed the dead hand against his face.
+
+It grew dark, and a warm rain distilled gently over the earth. The
+children left his motionless form alone, and wept more tranquilly for
+that sun of their love, which, with its pure light, had withdrawn from
+the clouds and tempests of the world to another dawn.
+
+
+
+
+ THE NEW-YEAR'S NIGHT OF AN UNHAPPY MAN.
+
+
+An old man stood in the New-Year's night at the window, and gazed with
+a look of restless despair upon the immutable, ever-blooming heaven,
+and out over the still pure white earth whereupon there was now no one
+so joyless and sleepless as he. For his grave stood near to him. It was
+covered only with the snow of age, not with the green of youth; and he
+brought with him thither out of his whole rich life nothing but errors
+and sins and sickness; a ruined body, a desolated soul, a breast full
+of poison, an old age full of remorse. The fair days of his youth
+wandered about him now like ghosts, and they bore him back again to
+that clear morning when his father first placed him at the cross-road
+of life, the right hand leading by the sunny ways of virtue into a
+wide, peaceful land, full of light and of harvests; the left, down into
+the mole-ways of vice towards a black cavern, full of down-dropping
+poison, full of darting serpents and dark sultry damps.
+
+Ah! the serpents hung about his breast, and the poison-drops upon his
+tongue, and he knew now where he was.
+
+Knowing not what he did, and with unspeakable grief, he cried out to
+Heaven: "Give me my youth once more! O father, place me again upon the
+cross-road, that I may choose otherwise!"
+
+But his father and his youth were long gone. He saw wandering lights
+dancing on the marshes, and dying out upon _God's Acre_, and he said,
+"These are my sinful days!" He saw a star fly out from heaven, to
+glimmer in its fall, and to be extinguished on the earth. "That is I,"
+said his bleeding heart; and the serpent-teeth of remorse gnawed again
+into his wounds.
+
+His burning fancy showed him creeping night-wanderers upon the roofs,
+and the windmill threw up its arms threatening to crush him, and a mask
+left behind in the dead-house assumed by degrees his own feature.
+
+Suddenly, in the midst of this tumult, music for the New Year flowed
+down from the tower, like distant church-song. He was deeply moved. He
+looked around the horizon and over the wide earth, and thought of his
+youthful friends, who now, happier and better than he, were teachers
+for the world, fathers of happy children, and favored men, and he
+said, "O, I also could be happy, dear parents, had I fulfilled your
+New-Year's wishes and instructions."
+
+In the feverish memories of his youth, it seemed to him that the mask
+with his features raised itself up in the dead-house; finally, through
+the superstition which discerns spirits and the future on New-Year's
+night, it became a living youth, in the position of the beautiful boy
+of the Capitol, pulling out a thorn, and his formerly blooming face
+danced weird and bitter before him.
+
+He could look no more: he covered his eyes: hot tears streamed down
+upon the snow;--again he softly sighed, hopeless and unconscious, "Come
+again, O youth, come again!"
+
+And it came again; for on that New-Year's night he had only dreamed
+thus fearfully. He was still a youth; yet his errors had been no dream.
+But he thanked God that he, still young, might turn aside from the foul
+ways of vice, and could follow the sunny path which leads to the fair
+land of harvests. Turn aside with him, O youth, if thou standest upon
+his wandering way. This frightful dream will in future be thy judge;
+but if thou shouldst one day call out, full of grief, "Come again, O
+beautiful youth!" so shall it never return again.
+
+
+
+
+ THE DEATH OF AN ANGEL.
+
+
+The tenderest and kindest angel, the Angel of the _last_ hour, whom we
+harshly call Death, is sent to us, that he may mildly and gently pluck
+away the sinking heart of man from life, and bear it unhurt in his warm
+hands out of the cold breast into high, warming Eden. His brother is
+the Angel of the first hour, who twice kisses man,--once when he begins
+this life; and again, when he awakes on high, without wounds, and
+enters smiling upon the other life, as he came weeping into this.
+
+As the Angel of the last hour saw the battle-fields stretched before
+him, full of blood and tears, and drew the trembling souls away, his
+mild eyes melted, and he said: "Ah! I will once die like man, that I
+may enter into his last agony, and soothe it when I dissolve the ties
+of life!"
+
+The boundless circle of angels, who love each other above, pressed
+around the sympathetic one, and promised their beloved to surround him
+with heavenly rays after the instant of his death; thereby he might
+know that death had been; and his brother, whose kiss opens our cold
+lips, as the morning light does the chill flowers, gently touched his
+forehead, and said: "When I kiss thee again, my brother, thou shalt
+have died upon the earth, and will be again with us."
+
+Loving and moved, the Angel descended to the battlefield, where only
+one beautiful, ardent Youth still panted, and heaved his shattered
+breast. Near the hero stood his Betrothed alone. He could no longer
+feel her hot tears, and her sorrow passed him unrecognized, like a
+distant battle-cry.--Then the Angel quickly clothed himself in her dear
+form, rested by him, drew the wounded soul with one hot kiss out of the
+cloven breast, and gave it to his brother on high, who kissed it for
+the second time, when suddenly it smiled.
+
+The Angel of the last hour passed like a lightning-flash into
+the deserted frame, shone through the body, and stirred the warm
+life-stream again with the strengthened heart. But how was he affected
+by this new clothing of the body! His clear eye became confused in the
+whirl of unwonted, nervous life;--his once flying thought waded now
+slowly through the atmosphere of his brain,--the moist, faint-hued
+vapor dried away from all objects which formerly hung, autumnal-like,
+floating over them; now they pierced him out of the hot air with
+burning, painful spots of color,--all sensations became more gloomy,
+yet stormier and more nearly allied to _self_; and they seemed to him
+to be like instinct, as those of the beasts appear to us. Hunger tore
+him, thirst consumed him, pain stabbed him. Alas! his breast, torn and
+bleeding, heaved upward, and his first breath drawn was his first sigh
+after the heaven he had left! "Is this the death of man?" he thought;
+but as he did not see the promised token of death, neither angel nor
+the surrounding heavenly flame, therefore he perceived this to be only
+the life of man.
+
+In the evening, the earthly strength of the Angel declined, and a
+crushing globe seemed to revolve about his head. Then Sleep sent his
+messengers. Images of the mind shifted out of the sunshine into a misty
+fire; the shadows of the day were thrown upon his brain; they came
+confused, and colossal, one upon another, and the world of sense reared
+itself uncontrolled and poured in upon him. Then Dream sent his
+messengers. Finally the funereal veil of Sleep wrapped itself thickly
+about him, and, sunk in the vault of night, he lay there lonely and
+motionless, like us poor mortals. But then, thou, heavenly Dream! didst
+descend, with thy thousand reflecting-glasses before his soul, and
+didst show in all of them a circle of angels and a radiant heaven; and
+the earthly body seemed to fall away from him with all its thorns.
+"Ah!" said he, in vain rapture, "my sleep was also my death." Yet when
+he awoke again, with his compressed heart full of heavy human blood,
+and looked out upon the earth and upon the night, he cried, "I saw the
+angels and the starry heavens; but it was only the image of Death, and
+not his presence."
+
+The Betrothed of the translated hero did not mark that an angel only
+dwelt in the breast of her beloved; yet she loved the purified aspect
+of the wounded soul, and still gladly held the hand of him who had past
+so far away. But the Angel loved her deceived heart with the love of a
+man's soul in return; jealous of his own nature, he wished that he
+might not die before her, but love her so long that she might forgive
+him, when they met again in heaven, for having clasped together upon
+her breast an angel and a lover. Yet she died sooner; the late sorrow
+had bowed the head of this flower too low, and it lay broken upon the
+grave. She sank before the weeping Angel, not like the sun, who before
+all-beholding Nature casts himself so gorgeous into the sea that its
+red waves strike the very heaven, but like the tranquil moon, who, in
+the midnight, silvers the vaporous air, and sinks down unseen behind
+its dim veil. Death sent his gentler sister Unconsciousness before; she
+touched the heart of the Betrothed, and chilled the warm countenance;
+the flowers of her cheek withered; the pale snow of winter, under which
+the spring of eternity grows green, clothed her forehead and her hands.
+Then a burning tear broke from the swelling eye of the Angel, and,
+while he thought his heart loosed itself in the form of a tear as a
+pearl from the brittle shell, his Betrothed, awaked to the last
+delirium, moved her eyes once again, drew him close to her heart, and
+died as she kissed him, and said, "Now I am with thee, my brother!"
+Then the Angel believed his heavenly brother had given him the sign of
+the kiss and death. Yet no radiant heaven surrounded him, nor aught but
+funereal darkness, and he sighed because this was not his death, only
+the anguish of man over the death of another.
+
+"O ye afflicted mortals!" he cried, "how can ye weary ones survive
+this! How can ye become old when the circle of youthful forms breaks
+and lies at length altogether scattered around,--when the graves of
+your friends lead down like steps to your own,--and when age becomes
+like the silent, blank evening hour of a cold battle-field! O ye poor
+mortals! how can your hearts endure it?"
+
+The body of the translated hero-soul placed the gentle Angel among hard
+men, their injustice, and the distortions of Vice and of Passion; about
+his figure, also, was laid the thorny girdle of sceptres bound
+together, which compresses the hemispheres with its stings, and
+which is always laced more tightly by the great; he saw the claws of
+crowned and emblazoned beasts fasten themselves on their displumed
+prey, and heard it panting with enfeebled beating of the wings; he saw
+the whole terrestrial globe encircled in the winding swarthy folds of
+the giant-serpent, Vice, plunging and concealing its poisonous head
+deep in the breast of man. Then the hot sting of enmity was made to
+shoot through that tender heart, which, during a long eternity, had
+lain in the warmth of angelic love, and the holy love-fed spirit was
+forced to shudder over an inward dissolution. "Ah!" said he, "the death
+of man is full of woe!" Yet this was not death; for no angel appeared.
+
+Thus in a few days he became weary of this life which we bear for half
+a hundred years, and he longed to go back. The evening sun attracted
+his kindred spirit. The wounds of his shattered breast exhausted him
+with pain. He went out with the evening glow upon his pale cheeks to
+"God's Acre," that green background of our life, where the forms which
+he had once stripped of all their beautiful souls were now crumbling
+away. He placed himself with sorrowful longing upon the bare grave of
+his unspeakably beloved and departed bride, and looked towards the
+fading evening sun. Seated on this dear knoll, he regarded his
+suffering body, and thought: Thou also, tender breast, wouldst be lying
+here in decay, and wouldst give no more pain, did I not support thee.
+Then he reflected upon the grievous life of man, and the throbs of the
+wounded breast showed him the pangs with which mortals purchase their
+virtue and their death, and which he had joyfully spared the noble soul
+of this body. Deeply touched by human virtue, he wept out of his
+boundless love for men, who, amid the craving of their own needs, under
+low-hung clouds, behind mists which stream over the sharp-cutting paths
+of life, never turn away from the lofty star of duty, but in their
+darkness stretch out loving arms towards every suffering breast they
+encounter, while around them nothing glimmers but the hope of setting
+like the sun in the old world, in order to arise in the new.
+
+Just then the ecstasy opened his wounds, and blood, the tear of the
+soul, flowed from his heart upon the cherished knoll,--the dissolving
+body sank quietly towards his beloved,--tears of rapture broke the
+sunset light into, a rosy, swimming sea,--distant echoing tones, as of
+the earth passing wide through ringing ether, played in the vaporous
+lustre. Then a dark cloud or short night shot by the Angel, and was
+full of sleep; and now a radiant heaven opened and overspread him, and
+a thousand angels shone around. "Art thou again here, thou deceiving
+dream?" he said. But the Angel of the first hour stepped through the
+rays to him, and gave the sign of the kiss, and said: "That was death,
+thou immortal brother and heavenly friend!"
+
+And the Youth and his beloved softly repeated the words.
+
+
+
+
+ A DREAM AND THE TRUTH.
+
+ WRITTEN ON THE DEATH OF A MOTHER FOLLOWING
+ THAT OF HER HUSBAND.
+
+
+Sleep buries the first world, its nights and sorrows, and brings to us
+a second world, with the forms we have loved and lost, and scenes too
+vast for this little earth.
+
+I was in the Isle of the Blest, in the second world. This I dreamed.
+The stars were nearer; the heaven-blue lay on the flowers; all the
+breezes were melodious tones; and repose and ravishment, which with us
+are sundered, there dwelt conjoined. And the dead, from around whom had
+fallen that mist of life which veiled the higher heaven before, rested
+like mild evening suns in the azure ether.
+
+Then, behold, the earth rose out of the deep beneath, on her course,
+and the Spring had covered her with his blossoms and buds. As she drew
+nearer to the Isle of the Blest, a voice full of love cried, "Look
+down, ye dead, on your old home, and see the beloved who have lost, but
+not forgotten you."
+
+For in the spring the earth always passes by the eternal World of the
+Blest, whose off-cast husk sinks into its clods; and therefore it is,
+that in the spring poor mortals experience such a profound longing, so
+powerful a presentiment, and so many haunting recollections of their
+lost beloved.
+
+After the voice, all the Blest stepped forward on the shore of the
+Supernal Isle, and each one sought on the wan earth the heart which had
+remembered him. One noble being gazed down, seeking after his spouse
+and after his children, around whom the glad spring-tide of earth was
+flowing; but _they_ had no spring.
+
+Alas! the father now saw his wife racked with anguish, and his children
+dissolved in tears. He discerned, in the strangling hand of Pain, the
+pallid form whose convulsed heart now reposes, and whose moistened eyes
+are now shut and cold; and beside it he recognized the loving companion
+of his former life fatally bleeding on the thorns of earthly martyrdom.
+And as sorrow, with glowing iron stylus, graved in the crumbling image
+life's farewell letter, and as she lost hope, but not yet patience, and
+as her fading eye desired no further happiness save that of her
+children, and as these could only share, but not remove, the sleepless
+nights of their mother, the affectionate father sank down, weeping, and
+prayed: "Eternal One, suffer her to die! Break the agonized bosom, and
+give me my friend again, and heal the wounded form at last under the
+earth. Eternal One, suffer her to die!"
+
+And as he prayed, the weary heart here in its martyr-life heard him,
+and his faithful wife returned forever to his heart. Why weep ye,
+tender children, that your parents, after the same sufferings,
+should now have the same joys? that now, after their winter of life,
+an everlasting May has dawned on their souls? Does the painted
+spring-house under the earth trouble you, or the black boundary-hill on
+the earth, or the dread hand of decay, which extinguishes earthly scars
+and wounds and the whole body?
+
+No, let the Spring scatter his flowers on their cold faces, and dry the
+tears on yours; and when you think painfully of them, comfort
+yourselves with saying, "We tenderly loved them, and no one has
+wounded, save He who now heals them."
+
+
+
+
+ THE BEAUTY OF DEATH IN THE
+ BLOOM OF YOUTH.
+
+
+In the lives both of men and of women, the period of the deepest
+happiness will be found to be, not that of childhood, but of youth. The
+joys of childhood are like the spring flowers,--beautiful, but small;
+like the tinted forget-me-not,--pretty, but without fragrance. The
+higher and more brilliant joys of knowledge and the affections are as
+yet undeveloped; the world of the ideal lies wrapped, as it were, in a
+dark-green bud.
+
+With what other and what brighter radiance is the period of youth
+encircled!--that heavenly time of our first friendship and our first
+love,--of our first poem and our first philosophy,--of our first full
+enjoyment of nature and music and the drama,--of our first castles in
+the air, and our first vigorous training for active life. And this
+period is not simply irrecoverable,--that is the case with all past
+time,--but for the very reason that in its perfect bloom its only
+office is to minister to the fruits it so beautifully enfolds, it is
+the highest and the culminating period; for there is necessarily a
+greater productive force present in the process than in the results of
+development, in the flower of youth than in the ripeness of manhood. In
+his more advanced years, one is seldom led to enter upon a new path of
+knowledge or a higher moral life; but in his youth, one gives himself
+up, with inextinguishable fire, to some system of philosophy, or some
+total change in his moral life. It calls for more strength in a man to
+be converted than to stand still.
+
+As the highest bodily strength and the most perfect health, the
+probability of the longest life and the greatest beauty,--in short, the
+best bodily attributes,--belong to the period of youth, so, and for
+that very reason, the intellectual wealth which comes not by
+acquisition, but by inheritance, is the largest. Great attainments,
+experience, and skill are certainly the fruits of age and of labor; but
+what are these things, compared with the ideal enjoyments which come of
+the first sciences we study, when the tree of knowledge, grafted upon
+the tree of life, puts forth its branches,--compared with the delight
+with which the new truths of geometry, or of philosophy, or of any
+favorite science new-born to us, fill the soul? For even in science,
+however far its limits may be pushed, one is ever descending from the
+height of the ideal to the vulgar level of reality.
+
+Youth is the full moon, illumined by the magic light of the sun. Age is
+the new moon, upon which the day-earth (life) throws a meagre light.
+
+
+
+
+ A DREAM OF A BATTLE-FIELD.
+
+
+I dreamed that from far off in the darkness I heard groans which seemed
+to come from every quarter to which I turned. At length they came only
+out of the gate of a valley which led between two, rocky ridges, where
+the darkness was illumined only by the red light of a comet, with its
+sparkling eye, and its tail sweeping back and forth like that of a
+tiger thirsty for blood. Then several wagons, filled with amputated
+hands grasping one the other either in prayer or struggle, came softly
+towards me on unrevolving wheels; and one small wagon also, full of
+eyes without eyelids, which grimly gazed upon and mirrored one another.
+A long metal coffin, mounted on the wheels of a gun-carriage, was with
+difficulty pulled along by iron elephants. On it was inscribed, "The
+ashes of the tenth army." With frightful exertion it was dragged like a
+tall tree round the corner of the narrow, rocky valley,--forced to bend
+by the weight of its contents, and the end of it seeming never to come.
+
+Over the earth, and the sorrow of it, was a round ball of fire like a
+sun, whence came incessant flashes of lightning. And thirsty people
+opened vessels full of vipers, which darted out, and stung them to more
+burning thirst.... A crown, great like a shield, and red-hot, came
+whirling down with circular motion into a group of soldiers dancing,
+and scattered them. Upon still-gaping wounds it rained down thistles,
+which took root quickly and grew; and upon every fallen corpse struck a
+thunderbolt, and slew it again. I looked up to the heavens for
+consolation; but there, in the place of the sunset's glow, and the
+colors of the dawn, and the northern lights, was smoking blood. Swift
+as an arrow, villages and cities shot through the air like long clouds
+of ashes; some few streets only, which had been blown up by mining,
+hanging fast in the sky, with the remnants of houses and of men
+clinging to them. On a neighboring mountain were glaciers and ice-peaks,
+upon which children were transfixed; and on the distant summits, whence
+one could look down upon the battle-field, were parents and children
+and brides, eagerly gazing upon a mirror held over it.
+
+At length the gate sprang open, and broke in pieces on the
+battle-field, and the storm of woe burst forth. Then I looked in upon
+that terrible world, and fell senseless to the earth; for what I saw
+was too horrible for man to look upon or to remember.
+
+Gradually it seemed to me in my swoon as if this frightful field was
+moving further and further off, while its sounds of horror died away
+into songs of swans. And out of the distance floated up to me, on the
+gentle breezes, the tones of shepherd's flutes,--now far off, now
+near,--breaking, at length, with full sound upon my ear. And then I was
+lifted up and borne along on wings of ether, with the light breaking
+through my closed eyelids. And a creative finger touched me, and high
+in heaven, upon a green cloud, I opened my eyes. Above me was the blue
+abyss of the stars; below me stretched a blue ocean, on whose horizon
+glittered, in the glow of the sunset, the countless islands of the
+blessed; around me floated scattered cloudlets, tinted with the red and
+white of roses and of lilies, and with the many colors of manifold
+flowers.
+
+"Who, O God, has brought me to life out of my woe?" I cried.
+
+"Child of man, it is my Father who has done it," answered a soft voice
+very near me. But I saw no form of any person; only a halo of glory
+hovering near me indicated the place of the invisible being.
+
+Under the stare now, on high, rose again, like the songs of the
+spheres, the old mournful tones. The islands on the horizon began to
+move, and swim in joy around one another. Many of them dipped into the
+dark waves, and came up again brilliant as the colors of the morning.
+Some went down into the sea, and reappeared covered with pearls. But
+one of them, crowned with cedars and palms and oaks, with strong young
+giants on its shores, went straight out into the ocean, toward the
+east.
+
+"Am I upon earth?" I inquired.
+
+"Ask me not," replied the voice, "for I know all thy thoughts, and will
+answer thee in thy heart. Thou wilt be upon the earth when it rises in
+the east from the sea; beneath the sea it circles swiftly round the
+sun. The sea of time is the wave on the ocean of eternity."
+
+As if borne upon a stream, the cedar island came ever nearer to the
+green cloud. Youths greater than those of earth looked down upon the
+blue sea, and sang songs of gladness,--or gazed in rapture upon the
+heavens, and folded their hands in prayer,--or slumbered in arbors of
+rainbows and tears of joy. Behind them stood lions; above them circled
+eagles.
+
+"Upon the cedar island dwell men _who, like me_, have died for the
+earth; but in earthly faces shall it be revealed to thee how the
+Infinite Father rewards those who have shed their blood for their
+country. The youths who are looking down into the waves have a nearer
+view of their old earth moving in the waters, as the island moves with
+it. They see only happy countries, and their friends who rejoice in
+their deeds, and posterity which praises them. And every flower which
+sprang from their blood is shown to them of God.
+
+"Those who are gazing up to heaven, and praying, see an altar upon
+every sun,--and greater brethren who make higher sacrifices to the
+Highest; and they are entreating the Father to summon them also to
+still higher sacrifices. And when he thunders, he calls them.
+
+"Those who are slumbering in tears of joy are seeing their brother
+soldiers dying bravely, and are comforting them in death, and welcoming
+them in tearful recognition as they pass from the earth to the island."
+
+And now white flowers floated up from the earth to the surface of the
+sea, and all the sleepers awoke. The flowers were the souls of their
+mothers, who in death were following their sons fallen upon the
+battle-field; and the flowers became angels and flew towards the youths.
+It was an endless dying of endless joy. The soft murmurs of love from
+those who thus again found one another stirred the lilies and the roses
+to sounds as of harps. But as the mothers breathed the vibrating air
+and their hearts beat tremulously in harmony with the sound, they died
+away and exhaled into a flower-cloud. And the cloud arose and floated
+along the heavens to the distant islands where dwell the good mothers
+and the happy brides, longing still for the time when all the islands
+of the blessed were one fixed land of promise.
+
+"Ye sons of men, joy is an eternity older than pain, and ever will be
+so,--for that has scarcely existed. Sacrifice ye, then, time to
+eternity."
+
+A noble old man with the martyr's crown on his head looked up to the
+green cloud and prayed to the voice near me. Then saw I mirrored in the
+old man's eyes the form of the being near me. And my heart was humbled
+before the greatest man of earth as he repeated to me again the words,
+"Sacrifice time to eternity."
+
+And now there came up from the sea near the cedar island a smoke as of
+a volcano, but throwing out only crowns of oak-leaves and palm-branches
+and streams of light. And at length a vast altar covered with young men
+and old, sleeping, rose from the waves. But when the light of heaven
+touched the sleepers they awoke suddenly, and, rushing upon the island,
+fell upon the breasts of their old comrades in arms. And the stars of
+heaven shone over them in glad, undying token of their union. The
+oak-forests rustled and the lions roared and the eagles, circling in
+the air, bathed themselves for joy in the fire and the lightning which
+shot from the stars. And the storm spread itself over the universe, and
+scattered balls of fire like suns, and thundered as with the noise of
+many worlds, and mingled its hot tears of joy with those of the heroes.
+And from below the sea came a dull echo from the earth. Then the cloud
+sank upon the island, and with a rushing sound received up into itself
+the heroes who had prayed to the Father to permit them to sacrifice in
+higher worlds.
+
+When the storm had disappeared with them behind the stars, the vastness
+of creation appeared. All being rejoiced in eternity. The worlds lay
+along the heavens like an Alpine chain; the suns encircled the primal
+source of light; and covering all was the Throne of God.
+
+"Pray before thou wakest, for the earth, too, will disappear," said the
+voice near me. And my whole heart was filled with prayer by the very
+nearness of this higher being. But the green cloud now moved more
+rapidly with me eastward toward the approaching earth; and the cedar
+island floated with its happy multitudes towards the other islands. The
+sea glowed in the east as with the colors of the dawn; and deeper and
+deeper sank the green cloud into the aurora of earth.
+
+Suddenly, then, the halo of glory round the head of the invisible being
+became as a great rainbow, and was absorbed in an infinite radiance
+which filled the heavens.
+
+And the earth passed away like a summer night.
+
+I awoke, and instead of the cloud there was a green meadow around me,
+and above me glittered the stars. The first night of summer had
+followed the last night of spring. The moon was rising like a silver
+bow in the ghostly air. And in the north the sunset colors of the
+spring were changing upon the mountain-tops into the morning glow of
+the summer. My heart still clung to the eternal stars, where now awake
+I lingered in my dream, and I sighed, "Alas! each day above is the
+beginning of spring." Then I heard the voice in me repeat the old
+words, "Child of man, sacrifice time to eternity,"--and I sighed no
+more.
+
+
+
+ FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 1: I need not tell any one that the valley itself is situated
+in the departments of the Upper Pyrenees.]
+
+[Footnote 2: It is well known that the Symplegadian rocks continually
+dashed against each other, and destroyed every passing ship, until
+Orpheus's lyre subdued and tranquillized them.]
+
+[Footnote 3: Alluding to a painting by Reynolds, in which Garrick,
+invited by both Muses, follows Thalia.]
+
+[Footnote 4: A kind of jelly-fish.]
+
+[Footnote 5: Ten drops of this instantly sweeten half a pound of sour
+beer.]
+
+[Footnote 6: The cave is twenty feet high, but the entrance only five
+feet.]
+
+[Footnote 7: French miles. The valley is about two German miles--ten
+English miles--long.]
+
+[Footnote 8: The Höfersche heaven-path, or how to learn the way to
+eternal salvation in twenty-four hours.]
+
+[Footnote 9: A market-place in Rome where deformed beings were sold,
+and fetched a higher price the uglier they were.]
+
+[Footnote 10: A Parisian dentist wrote this over his door.]
+
+[Footnote 11: In the same § Kant says: "Everything that Newton has
+written in his immortal _Principia_, though such a large head was
+required to invent it, can be learned; but to compose spirited poems
+cannot be taught, however complete the instructions for learning the
+art may be. The reason is, that Newton can explain all the steps he had
+to take, from the first elements of geometry to his grandest and most
+profound inventions; he can explain them, not alone to himself, but to
+others, even to the remote descendants, while no Homer or Wieland can
+show how his ideally rich, and yet thoughtful characters, came forth
+from his brain; for he knows it not himself, and therefore cannot teach
+it others."
+
+I had hoped that I could depend upon Kant, who has a million times more
+intelligence than I have, as upon a mental _Chargé d'Affaires_; but
+when I came to this passage (and to those upon repentance, music, the
+origin of evil, &c), I saw I must myself follow him, and not only pray
+after him, as I had before done, but reflect. But to return! Certainly
+Newton's "Principles" can be learned, that is, the new ones may be
+repeated, but that also can happen to the invented poems; yet you can
+be taught to invent them as little as Newton's Principles. A new
+philosophic idea seems, after its birth, to lie more clearly in its
+former seed-vessels and organic molecules than a poetic one; but why
+was Newton the first to see it? He and Kant can discover, no better
+than Shakespeare or Leibnitz, how the beginning of a new idea suddenly
+bursts from the cloud of old ones; they can show their _Nexus_ (else
+they would not be human ones) with the old ones, but not their
+conception from it; the same holds of the poetic. Let Kant teach us to
+_invent systems_ and truths (not to prove them, though, strictly
+speaking, the one is closely allied to the other), then he shall be
+taught to invent epics, and I will be responsible for it. He seems to
+me to confound the difficulty of forming ideas with the less important
+one of forming new ones; the difficulty of transition with the
+inexplicability of the matter. I fear and wonder at the latent
+almightiness with which man orders, that is, creates his range of
+ideas. I know no better symbol of creation than the regularity and
+causality of the creation of ideas in us, which no will and no mind can
+regulate and create, for any such arrangement and intention would
+presuppose the unborn idea. And in this creation the grand enigma of
+our moral freedom is veiled.]
+
+[Footnote 12: Gold dissolved in strong acid, mixed with a small
+quantity of quicksilver in a vial, forms a tree with foliage.]
+
+[Footnote 13: The male glowworms are black.]
+
+[Footnote 14: Rameses caused his son to be fastened to the topmost
+point of an obelisk, that they who had to raise it should risk a more
+valuable life than their own.]
+
+[Footnote 15: It lives more than two years, though it does not long
+survive the period of its leaving the grub-state, just as other
+insects, to whom nature has given the rose period of youth, only
+_after_ the thorny age of reproduction.]
+
+[Footnote 16: It is well known that the sight of blood damps courage,
+and that the Jews are not permitted to eat blood.]
+
+[Footnote 17: Beauty in this connection, I adopt in the same sense
+which Schiller gives to it in his æsthetic critique, a prize essay of
+his genius on Beauty, which here, like Longinus, is at once the subject
+and the delineator of the exalted.]
+
+[Footnote 18: If he had been, I would have read page 224 in the third
+part of Hesperus to him.]
+
+[Footnote 19: The sun reflected in the water.]
+
+[Footnote 20: At a circumcision, the Jews place one chair for the
+operator, and another for the prophet Elias, who is supposed invisibly
+to occupy it.]
+
+[Footnote 21: These animals shine by night. Care must be taken not to
+draw them into the brain from the flower calyxes with the perfume.]
+
+[Footnote 22: The Guernsey lily from Japan has its name from the Island
+of Guernsey, on which some roots of it were cast by a wrecked vessel.]
+
+[Footnote 23: For the climatic dissimilarity of the planets must
+produce, as the climatic difference between the zones, Negroes, Greeks,
+Indians, etc., but always human beings.]
+
+[Footnote 24: One ought, therefore, not to say _mundus intelligibilis_,
+but _mundus intellectus_.]
+
+[Footnote 25: It may be said, that in this manner every Utopia, which
+is also a copy, must be realized, for the original of all dreams and
+Utopias does indeed exist,--though partially and disconnectedly; but
+the Original of the Eternal cannot exist in pieces and by parcels.]
+
+[Footnote 26: This applies chiefly to the higher and richer orders,
+with whom the saturation of the five camel stomachs, the senses, and
+the starving of Psyche or the soul, at last determines into a horrible
+horror of life, and into a repulsive mingling of _high aspirations and
+grovelling desires_. The savage, the beggar, and the provincialist far
+surpass the rich and high in spiritual enjoyment, for in these, as in
+the houses of the Jews, (in memory of the destruction of Jerusalem)
+there must always be something incomplete, and the poor have too many
+of their earthly wants assuaged to be overwhelmed and pained by the
+demands of their ethereal nature.]
+
+[Footnote 27: The new moon always rises with the sun, although dark and
+invisible.]
+
+[Footnote 28: There are three kinds of men. To some, a heaven is
+granted even on this earth; to others, a _limbus patrum_ in which joy
+and sorrow reign equally; and, lastly, to some a hell in which grief
+predominates. Beings who have suffered for twenty years on the sick-bed
+of bodily pain, which is not, like mental sorrow, worn out by time,
+have certainly had more unhappiness than happiness, and, but for
+immortality, would be an eternal reproach to the highest moral being.
+And if there exists no such unhappy being, it is yet in the power of a
+tyrant to make one, on a clinical torture-bed, with the assistance of a
+physician and a philosopher. Such a one, at least, has a right to
+demand a future indemnity for his sufferings, because the Creator
+cannot have formed a creature to mourn more than it can rejoice.
+
+Besides, though the object of our grief may seem but a deception in the
+eyes of the Eternal One, our grief itself cannot. Human suffering is
+also distinguished from brutish pain, because the animal only feels the
+wound, as we perhaps do in sleep, but it sees it not. Its pain is not
+trebled and increased by _anticipation_, _recollection_, and
+_sensibility_; it is an evanescent sting, and nothing more. Therefore
+tears were only given to human eyes.]
+
+[Footnote 29: Ignorance concerning our connection with the body and our
+connection with the second world.]
+
+[Footnote 30: The yearly destruction of the slowly developed, beautiful
+flower-world does not argue against this; for to the tangible world
+each condition of its parts is as indifferent and perfect as the other,
+and rose-ashes are as good as rose-buds (without, of course,
+considering the organic soul). Nothing is beautiful but our
+appreciation of the beautiful, not the object itself. If it should be
+said that nature destroys so many developments, for whose growth she
+had already provided, that she breaks many thousand eggs, tears so many
+buds, crushes men in all stages of life with her blind tread, I would
+reply that the interrupted development is yet a condition of the
+perfected one, and that every position of its parts is indifferent to
+material objects, and, as coverings of the spiritual being, they still
+testify to a compensating immortality of the latter.]
+
+[Footnote 31: Methinks the folly of spiritual mortality has not been
+sufficiently considered from this point of view. The living or
+spiritual whole (for the lifeless one has no other object than to be a
+means for the living), as such, can attain no object which each portion
+of it does not attain, for each one is one whole, and every other whole
+can only exist as a collective idea, and not as a reality. To consider
+the untenability of a progress contained in a course of vanishing
+shadows more vividly, one might shorten the life of a soul so that he,
+e. g. could only read one page of Kant's Critic, and then die. For the
+second page another soul must be created, and so for the new edition
+884 souls. The mistake will perhaps become perceptible to most people
+by the increasing moonlight of liberality which has gradually risen
+over the past centuries; but the necessity for compensation demands
+immortality.]
+
+[Footnote 32: Raphael died when he had finished the painting of the
+resurrection, and Haman died while his essay on resurrection and
+disembodiment was being printed.]
+
+[Footnote 33: So are the Vampires called.]
+
+[Footnote 34: _Fixlein_ stands in the middle of the volume; preceded by
+_Einer Mustheil für Mädchen_ (A Jelly-course for young Ladies); and
+followed by _Some_ Jus De Tablette _for Men_. A small portion of the
+Preface relating to the first I have already omitted. Neither of the
+two have the smallest relation to _Fixlein_.--Ed.]
+
+[Footnote 35: _J. P. H_., _Jean Paul_ Hasus, _Jean Paul_, &c., have in
+succession been Richter's signatures. At present even, his German
+designation, either in writing or speech, is never _Richter_, but _Jean
+Paul_.--Ed.]
+
+[Footnote 36: For understanding many little hints which occur in this
+_Life of Fixlein_, it will be necessary to bear in mind the following
+particulars: A German _Gymnasium_, in its complete state, appears to
+include eight Masters; Rector, Conrector, Subrector, Quintus, Quartus,
+Tertius, &c., to the _first_ or lowest. The _forms_, or classes, again,
+are arranged in an inverse order; the _Primaner_ (boys of the _Prima_,
+or first form) being the most advanced, and taught by the Rector; the
+_Secundaner_, by the Conrector, &c.; and therefore the _Quartaner_ by
+the Quintus. In many cases, it would seem, the number of Teachers is
+only six; but in this Flachsenfingen Gymnasium we have express evidence
+that there was no curtailment.--Ed.]
+
+[Footnote 37: A university beer.]
+
+[Footnote 38: From Peter I will copy one or two of these privileges;
+the whole of which were once, at the origin of universities, in full
+force. For instance, a student can compel a citizen to let him his
+house and his horse; an injury, done even to his relations, must be
+made good fourfold; he is not obliged to fulfil the written commands of
+the Pope; the neighborhood must indemnify him for what is stolen from
+him; if he and a non-student are living at variance, the latter only
+can be expelled from the boarding-house; a Doctor is obliged to support
+a poor student; if he is killed, the next ten houses are laid under
+interdict till the murderer is discovered; his legacies are not
+abridged by _falcidia_, &c., &c.]
+
+[Footnote 39: _Literary Germany_, a work (I believe of no great merit)
+which Richter often twitches in the same style.--Ed.]
+
+[Footnote 40: See _Schmelzle's Journey_, p. 289--Ed.]
+
+[Footnote 41: As in the State.--[V. or Von, _de_, _of_, being the
+symbol of the nobility, the middle order of the State.--Ed.]]
+
+[Footnote 42: In Erlang, my petition has been granted. The _Bible
+Institution_ of that town have found instead of the 116,301 As,
+which Fixlein at first pretended with such certainty to find in the
+Bible-books (which false number was accordingly given in the first
+Edition of this Work, p. 81), the above-mentioned 323,015; which
+(uncommonly singular) is precisely the sum of all the letters in the
+Koran put together. See _Lüdeke's Beschr. des Turk. Reichs_ (Lüdeke's
+Description of the Turkish Empire. New edition, 1780).]
+
+[Footnote 43: _Paravicini Singularia de viris claris_, Cent. I. 2.]
+
+[Footnote 44: _Ejusd_., Cent. II. Philelphus quarrelled with the Greek
+about the quantity of a syllable; the prize or bet was the beard of the
+vanquished. Timotheus lost his.]
+
+[Footnote 45: Their prayer-barrel, Kürüdu, is a hollowed shell, a
+calabash, full of unrolled formulas of prayer; they sway it from side
+to side, and then it works. More philosophically viewed, since in
+prayer the feeling only is of consequence, it is much the same whether
+this express itself by motion of the mouth or of the calabash.]
+
+[Footnote 46: In German, as in some other languages, the common mode of
+address is by the _third_ person; plural, it indicates respect;
+singular, command; the _second_ person is also used; plural, it
+generally denotes indifference; singular, great familiarity, and
+sometimes its product, contempt. _Dutzenfreund_, _Thouing-friend_, is
+the strictest term of intimacy; and among the wild _Burschen_
+(Students) many a duel (happily however, often ending like the
+_Polemo-Middinia_ in one drop of blood) has been fought, in consequence
+of saying _Du_ (thou) and _Sie_ (they) in the wrong place.--Ed.]
+
+[Footnote 47: These antique Christmas festivities Richter describes
+with equal _gusto_ in another work (_Briefe und Zukünftige
+Lebenslemf_); where the Christ-child (falsely reported to the young
+ones to have been seen flying through the air, with gold wings); the
+Birch-bough fixed in a corner of the room, and by him made to grow; the
+fruit of gilt sweetmeats, apples, nuts, which (for good boys) it
+suddenly produces, &c., &c., are specified with the same fidelity as
+here.--Ed.]
+
+[Footnote 48: Which he purposed to make for his Island of St. Pierre in
+the Bienne Lake.]
+
+[Footnote 49: Borrowed from the "Imperial Mine-product-sale-Commission,"
+in Vienna. In their very names these Vienna people show taste.]
+
+[Footnote 50: As, by the evidence at present before us, we can found on
+no other presumption, than that he must die in his thirty-second year;
+it would follow, that, in case he died two-and-thirty years after the
+death of the testatrix, no farthing could be claimed by him; since,
+according to our fiction, at the making of the testament he was not
+even one year old.]
+
+[Footnote 51: In St. Paul's Church at London, where the slightest
+whisper sounds over, across a space of 143 feet.]
+
+[Footnote 52: So much, according to Political Economists, a man yearly
+requires in Germany.]
+
+[Footnote 53: This singular tone of my address to a Prince can only be
+excused by the equally singular relation wherein the Biographer stands
+to the Flachsenfingen Sovereign, and which I would willingly unfold
+here were it not that, in my Book, which, under the title of
+_Dog-post-days_, I mean to give to the world at Easter-fair, 1795, I
+hoped to expound the matter to universal satisfaction.]
+
+[Footnote 54: His _Clerical Law_, p. 551.]
+
+[Footnote 55: Eichhorn's _Einleitung ins A. T_. (Introduction to the
+Old Testament), Vol. II.]
+
+[Footnote 56: Both have the same sound. _Füchslein_ means Foxling,
+Fox-whelp.--Ed.]
+
+[Footnote 57: Campe, a German philologist, who, along with several
+others of that class, has really proposed, as represented in the text,
+to substitute for all Greek or Latin derivatives corresponding German
+terms of the like import. _Geography_, which may be _Erdbeschreibung_
+(Earth-description), was thenceforth to be nothing else; a _Geometer_
+became an _Earth-measurer_, &c., &c. _School-undergovernor_, instead of
+_Subrector_, is by no means the happiest example of the system, and
+seems due rather to the Schadeck Lawyer than to Campe, whom our Author
+has elsewhere more than once eulogized for his project in similar
+style.--Ed.]
+
+[Footnote 58: _New Universal German Library_, a reviewing periodical,
+in those days conducted by Nicolai, a sworn enemy to what has since
+been called the New School.--Ed.]
+
+[Footnote 59: Superstition declares, that on the spot where the rainbow
+rises a golden key is left.]
+
+[Footnote 60: To the Spring, namely, which begins with snow-drops, and
+ends with roses and pinks.]
+
+[Footnote 61: This Christian superstition is not only a Rabbinical, but
+also a Roman one. _Cicero de Senectute_.]
+
+[Footnote 62: For, according to the Jurists, fifteen persons make a
+people.]
+
+[Footnote 63: A long philosophical elucidation is indispensably
+requisite; which will be found in this Book, under the title, _Natural
+Magic of the Imagination_. [A part of the _Jus de Tablette_ appended to
+this Biography, unconnected with it, and not given here.--Ed.]]
+
+[Footnote 64: This pygmy piece of ordnance, with its cunningly devised
+burning-glass, is still to be seen on the south side of the Paris
+Vanity-Fair; and in fine weather, to be heard, on all sides thereof,
+proclaiming the conversion (so it seems to Richter) of the Day from
+Forenoon to Afternoon.--Ed.]
+
+[Footnote 65: The Wild Hunter, _Wilde Jäger_, is a popular spectre of
+Germany.--Ed.]
+
+[Footnote 66: Indicating to the congregation what Psalm is to be
+sung.--Ed.]
+
+[Footnote 67: Salerno was once famous for its medical science; but
+here, as in many other cases, we could desire the aid of Herr Reinhold
+with his _Lexicon-Commentary_.--Ed.]
+
+[Footnote 68: This hospitable Potentate is as unknown to me as to any
+of my readers.--Ed.]
+
+[Footnote 69: A little work printed in manuscript types; and seldom
+given by him to any but Princes. This piece of print-writing he
+intentionally passes off to the great as a piece of hand-writing; these
+persons being both more habituated and inclined to the reading of
+manuscript than of print.]
+
+[Footnote 70: Thus defined by Adelung in his Lexicon: "_Kräutermütze_,
+in Medicine, a cap with various dried herbs sewed into it, and which is
+worn for all manner of troubles in the head."--Ed.]
+
+[Footnote 71: Linné formed in Upsal a flower-clock, the flowers of
+which, by their different times of falling asleep, indicated the hours
+of the day.]
+
+[Footnote 72: The good Professor of Catechetics is out here. _Indignor
+quandoque bonus dormitat Schmelzle_.--Ed.]
+
+[Footnote 73: Passenger so placed in the huge German Postwagen, that he
+cannot look out.--Ed.]
+
+[Footnote 74: _Titan_ is also the title of this Legations-Rath Jean
+Pierre or Jean Paul (Friedrich Richter)'s chief novel.--Ed.]
+
+[Footnote 75: Brühl, I suppose; but the historical edition of the
+matter is, that Brühl's treasonable secrets were come at by the more
+ordinary means of wax impressions of his keys.--Ed.]
+
+[Footnote 76: Cities of Richter's romance kingdom. Flachsenfingen he
+sometimes calls _Klein-Wien_, Little Vienna.--Ed.]
+
+[Footnote 77: The campaign of 1813-14 was the holy war of Germany, or
+Freiheitskampf, to which Jean Paul here alludes.--Translator.]
+
+
+
+ THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ Cambridge: Stereotyped and Printed by Welch, Bigelow, & Co.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Campaner Thal and Other Writings, by
+Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
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+<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
+<html>
+<head>
+<title>The Campaner Thal, and Other Writings.</title>
+<meta name="Author" content="Jean Paul Friedrich Richter">
+<meta name="Publisher" content="Ticknor and Fields">
+<meta name="Date" content="1864">
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
+<style type="text/css">
+body {margin-left:10%;
+ margin-right:10%; background-color:#FFFFFF;}
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+
+
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+
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Campaner Thal and Other Writings, by
+Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Campaner Thal and Other Writings
+
+Author: Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
+
+Release Date: April 24, 2011 [EBook #35948]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CAMPANER THAL AND OTHER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Bowen, from page scans provided by Google Books.
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<p class="hang1">Transcriber's Note:<br>
+
+1. Page scan source: Google Books:
+http://books.google.com/books?id=3muLoyVE2ecC</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>RICHTER'S WRITINGS.</h2>
+<hr class="W20">
+
+<p class="hang1"><b>TITAN</b>. <span class="sc2">A Romance</span>. 2 vols. 16mo. $3.00.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><b>FLOWER, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES</b>. 2 vols. 16mo. $2.75.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><b>LEVANA</b>; <span class="sc2">Or, The Doctrine of Education</span>. 1 vol. 16mo. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><b>THE CAMPANER THAL</b>, <span class="sc2">and Other Writings</span>. 1 vol. 16mo. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><b>HESPERUS</b>. 2 vols. 16mo. <i>Preparing</i>.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>The above volumes are printed in uniform size and style</i>.</p>
+
+<hr class="W10">
+
+<h3>IN PRESS.</h3>
+
+<p class="hang1"><b>LIFE OF JEAN PAUL</b>. By <span class="sc2">Eliza Buckminster Lee</span>. New Edition, Revised. 1
+volume.</p>
+
+
+<p class="right" style="font-size:120%"><b>TICKNOR AND FIELDS, Publishers</b>.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<div style="line-height:300%">
+<h4>THE</h4>
+
+
+<h1>CAMPANER THAL,</h1>
+
+
+<h4>AND</h4>
+
+
+<h3>OTHER WRITINGS.</h3>
+</div>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<p class="center"><i><b>From the German of</b></i></p>
+
+<h3>JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER.</h3>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h3>BOSTON:<br>
+TICKNOR AND FIELDS.<br>
+1864.</h3>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h4><span class="sc2">University Press:</span><br>
+<span class="sc2">Welch, Bigelow, and Company</span>,<br>
+<span class="sc2">Cambridge</span>.</h4>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>CONTENTS.</h2>
+<br>
+
+<h3><i><a name="div1_campaner" href="#div1Ref_campaner">THE CAMPANER THAL</a></i>.</h3>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc"><a name="div1_cintro" href="#div1Ref_cintro">Introduction</a></span>.</p>
+
+
+<h4><a name="div1_c501" href="#div1Ref_c501">501<sup>st</sup> STATION.</a></h4>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc">The Diversities of Life.--The Dirge as Billet-Doux.--The Cavern.--The
+Surprise</span>.</p>
+
+
+<h4><a name="div1_c502" href="#div1Ref_c502">502<sup>d</sup> STATION.</a></h4>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc">The Thundering Morning.--The Short Trip after the Long One.--The
+Sofa-Cushions.</span></p>
+
+
+<h4><a name="div1_c503" href="#div1Ref_c503">503<sup>d</sup> STATION.</a></h4>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc">Lampoon on the Chaplain.--Praise of Him.--The Diamond.--Opinions
+against Immortality.--Eden Jokes.</span></p>
+
+
+<h4><a name="div1_c504" href="#div1Ref_c504">504<sup>th</sup> STATION.</a></h4>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc">Flower Toying</span>.</p>
+
+
+<h4><a name="div1_c505" href="#div1Ref_c505">505<sup>th</sup> STATION.</a></h4>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc">The Ephemera.--Relative Conclusions.--Doubts of the Length of the Chain
+of Living Beings.--The Wart-Eaters.--The Cure.</span></p>
+
+
+<h4><a name="div1_c506" href="#div1Ref_c506">506<sup>th</sup> STATION.</a></h4>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc">Objections to Immortality.--The Second Childhood of the Outer and Inner
+Man.</span></p>
+
+
+<h4><a name="div1_c507" href="#div1Ref_c507">507<sup>th</sup> STATION.</a></h4>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc">The Theft of the Souvenir.--Answers to previous Stations.--On the
+Emigration of the Dead to the Planets.--The Threefold World in
+Man.--Grief without Hope.--The Seal of Immortality.--The
+Country-Seat.--The Balloons.--Ecstasy.</span></p>
+<br>
+<br>
+
+
+<h3><a name="div1_fixlein" href="#div1Ref_fixlein">LIFE OF QUINTUS FIXLEIN.</a></h3>
+
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc"><a name="div1_letter" href="#div1Ref_letter">Letter to my Friends, instead of Preface</a></span>.</p>
+
+
+<h4><a name="div1_lb01" href="#div1Ref_lb01">FIRST LETTER-BOX.</a></h4>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc">Dog-Day's' Vacation.--Visits.--An Indigent of Quality</span>.</p>
+
+
+<h4><a name="div1_lb02" href="#div1Ref_lb02">SECOND LETTER-BOX.</a></h4>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc">Frau von Aufhammer.--Childhood-Resonance.--Authorcraft</span>.</p>
+<br>
+
+<h4><a name="div1_lb03" href="#div1Ref_lb03">THIRD LETTER-BOX.</a></h4>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc">Christmas Recollections.--New Occurrence</span>.</p>
+<br>
+
+<h4><a name="div1_lb04" href="#div1Ref_lb04">FOURTH LETTER BOX.</a></h4>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc">Office-Brokage.--Discovery of the promised Secret.--Hans von Füchslein.</span></p>
+<br>
+
+<h4><a name="div1_lb05" href="#div1Ref_lb05">FIFTH LETTER-BOX.</a></h4>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc">Cantata-Sunday.--Two Testaments.--Pontac; Blood; Love</span>.</p>
+<br>
+
+<h4><a name="div1_lb06" href="#div1Ref_lb06">SIXTH LETTER-BOX.</a></h4>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc">Office-Impost.--One of the most important of Petitions</span>.</p>
+<br>
+
+<h4><a name="div1_lb07" href="#div1Ref_lb07">SEVENTH LETTER-BOX.</a></h4>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc">Sermon.--School Exhibition.--Splendid Mistake</span>.</p>
+<br>
+
+<h4><a name="div1_lb08" href="#div1Ref_lb08">EIGHTH LETTER-BOX.</a></h4>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc">Instalment in the Parsonage</span>.</p>
+<br>
+
+<h4><a name="div1_lb09" href="#div1Ref_lb09">NINTH LETTER-BOX.</a></h4>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc">Or to the Marriage</span>.</p>
+<br>
+
+<h4><a name="div1_lb10" href="#div1Ref_lb10">TENTH LETTER BOX.</a></h4>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc">St. Thomas's-Day and Birthday</span>.</p>
+<br>
+
+<h4><a name="div1_lb11" href="#div1Ref_lb11">ELEVENTH LETTER BOX.</a></h4>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc">Spring; Investiture; and Childbirth</span>.</p>
+<br>
+
+<h4><a name="div1_lb12" href="#div1Ref_lb12">TWELFTH LETTER-BOX.</a></h4>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc">Steeple-Ball Ascension.--The Toy-Press</span>.</p>
+<br>
+
+<h4><a name="div1_lb13" href="#div1Ref_lb13">THIRTEENTH LETTER BOX.</a></h4>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc">Christening</span>.</p>
+<br>
+
+<h4><a name="div1_lb14" href="#div1Ref_lb14">FOURTEENTH LETTER-BOX.</a></h4>
+<br>
+<h4><a name="div1_last" href="#div1Ref_last">CHAPTER LAST.</a></h4>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h3><i><a name="div1_schmelzle" href="#div1Ref_schmelzle">SCHMELZLE'S JOURNEY TO FLÄTZ</a></i>.</h3>
+<br>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc"><a name="div1_preface" href="#div1Ref_preface">Preface</a></span>.</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc"><a name="div1_circ" href="#div1Ref_circ">Circular Letter of the proposed Catechetical Professor Attila Schmelzel
+to his Friends; containing some Account of a Holidays' Journey to
+Flätz, with an Introduction, touching his Flight, and his Courage as
+former Army-Chaplain.</a></span></p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc"><a name="div1_journey" href="#div1Ref_journey">Journey to Flätz</a></span>.</p>
+<br>
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc"><a name="div1_s01" href="#div1Ref_s01">First Stage; from Neusattel to Vierstädten</a></span>.</p>
+<br>
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc"><a name="div1_s02" href="#div1Ref_s02">Second Stage; from Vierstädten to Niederschöna</a></span>.</p>
+<br>
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc"><a name="div1_s03" href="#div1Ref_s03">Third Stage; from Niederschöna to Flätz</a></span>.</p>
+<br>
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc"><a name="div1_day01" href="#div1Ref_day01">First Day in Flätz</a></span>.</p>
+<br>
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc"><a name="div1_night01" href="#div1Ref_night01">First Night in Flätz</a></span>.</p>
+<br>
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc"><a name="div1_day02" href="#div1Ref_day02">Second Day in Flätz</a></span>.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h3><i><a name="div1_analects" href="#div1Ref_analects">ANALECTS FROM RICHTER</a></i>.</h3>
+<br>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div1_a.happy" href="#div1Ref_a.happy"><span class="sc">The Happy Life of a Parish Priest in Sweden</span>.</a></p>
+<br>
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div1_a.dream" href="#div1Ref_a.dream"><span class="sc">Dream upon the Universe</span>.</a></p>
+<br>
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div1_a.complaint" href="#div1Ref_a.complaint"><span class="sc">Complaint of the Bird in a darkened Cage</span>.</a></p>
+<br>
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div1_a.ondeath" href="#div1Ref_a.ondeath"><span class="sc">On the Death of Young Children</span>.</a></p>
+<br>
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div1_a.prophetic" href="#div1Ref_a.prophetic"><span class="sc">The prophetic Dew-Drops</span>.</a></p>
+<br>
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div1_a.death" href="#div1Ref_a.death"><span class="sc">On Death</span>.</a></p>
+<br>
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div1_a.imagin" href="#div1Ref_a.imagin"><span class="sc">Imagination untamed by the coarser Realities of Life</span>.</a></p>
+<br>
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div1_a.satirical" href="#div1Ref_a.satirical"><span class="sc">Satirical Notice of Reviewers</span>.</a></p>
+<br>
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div1_a.female" href="#div1Ref_a.female"><span class="sc">Female Tongues</span>.</a></p>
+<br>
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div1_a.forgive" href="#div1Ref_a.forgive"><span class="sc">Forgiveness</span>.</a></p>
+<br>
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div1_a.grandeur" href="#div1Ref_a.grandeur"><span class="sc">The Grandeur of Man in his Littleness</span>.</a></p>
+<br>
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div1_a.night" href="#div1Ref_a.night"><span class="sc">Night</span>.</a></p>
+<br>
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div1_a.stars" href="#div1Ref_a.stars"><span class="sc">The Stars</span>.</a></p>
+<br>
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div1_a.martyr" href="#div1Ref_a.martyr"><span class="sc">Martyrdom</span>.</a></p>
+<br>
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div1_a.quarrel" href="#div1Ref_a.quarrel"><span class="sc">The Quarrels of Friends</span>.</a></p>
+<br>
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div1_a.dreaming" href="#div1Ref_a.dreaming"><span class="sc">Dreaming</span>.</a></p>
+<br>
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div1_a.2div" href="#div1Ref_a.2div"><span class="sc">Two Divisions of Philosophic Minds</span>.</a></p>
+<br>
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div1_a.dignity" href="#div1Ref_a.dignity"><span class="sc">Dignity of Man in Self-Sacrifice</span>.</a></p>
+<br>
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div1_a.fancy" href="#div1Ref_a.fancy"><span class="sc">Fancy</span>.</a></p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h3><i><a name="div1_misc" href="#div1Ref_misc">MISCELLANEOUS PIECES</a></i>.</h3>
+<br>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div1_misc01" href="#div1Ref_misc01"><span class="sc">Reminiscences of the best Hours of Life for the Hour of Death</span>.</a></p>
+<br>
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div1_misc02" href="#div1Ref_misc02"><span class="sc">The New-Year's Night of an Unhappy Man</span>.</a></p>
+<br>
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div1_misc03" href="#div1Ref_misc03"><span class="sc">The Death of an Angel</span>.</a></p>
+<br>
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div1_misc04" href="#div1Ref_misc04"><span class="sc">A Dream and the Truth</span>.</a></p>
+<br>
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div1_misc05" href="#div1Ref_misc05"><span class="sc">The Beauty of Death in the Bloom of Youth</span>.</a></p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h4>THE</h4>
+
+<h1><span class="sc"><a name="div1Ref_campaner" href="#div1_campaner">Campaner Thal</a></span>;</h1>
+<br>
+<h5>OR,</h5>
+<br>
+<h2>DISCOURSES ON THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL.</h2>
+<br>
+<h4>TRANSLATED BY JULIETTE BAUER.</h4>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<p class="normal">&quot;Report also, we regret to say, is all that we know of the <i>Campaner
+Thal</i>, one of Richter's beloved topics, or rather the life of his whole
+philosophy, glimpses of which look forth on us from almost every one of
+his writings. He died while engaged, under recent and almost total
+blindness, in enlarging and remodelling this <i>Campaner Thal</i>. The
+unfinished manuscript was borne upon his coffin to the burial vault;
+and Klopstock's hymn, <i>Auferstehen wirst du!</i> 'Thou shalt arise, my
+soul!' can seldom have been sung with more appropriate application than
+over the grave of Jean Paul.&quot;--From <i>Carlyle's Miscellanies</i>.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_cintro" href="#div1_cintro">INTRODUCTION.</a></h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">In my distilling processes, I frequently precipitated the phlegma
+of our earthball--its polar deserts, its Russian forests, its
+icebergs--and from the sediments extracted a beautiful by-earth, a
+small satellite. If we extract and regulate the charms of this old
+world, we can form a delightful though minutely condensed world.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">For the caves of this miniature or ditto-earth, we will take the
+caves of Antiparos and of Baumann, for its plains, the Rhine
+provinces--Hybla, Thabor, and Mont Blanc shall be its mountains--its
+islands, the Friendly, the Holy, and the Palm isles. Wentworth's park
+and Daphne's grotto, and some corner-pieces from the Paphian, we have
+for its forests--for a charming valley, the Seifer's-dorfer and that of
+Campan. Thus we possess, besides this dirty, weary world, the most
+beautiful by or after-world--an important dessert service--an
+Ante-Heaven between Ante-Hells.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I have purposely included this valley of Campan in my extract and
+decoction, as I know none other in which I would rather awake, or die,
+or love than in this one; if I had to command, I would not permit my
+valley to be mixed up or placed beside the vale of Tempe or the Rose
+Valley, perhaps with Utopia. The reader must have known this valley in
+his geographical lessons, or in the works of Arthur Young, who praises
+it even more than I do.<a name="div2Ref_01" href="#div2_01"><sup>[1]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p class="normal">I must take for granted, that in July, 1796, the Goddess of Fortune
+descended from her throne to our earth, and placed in my hand--not
+mammon, nor garters, nor golden sheep--nothing but her own, and led
+me--by this I recognized the goddess--to the Campan vale. Truly, man
+needs but look into it, and he will have--as I had--more than the Devil
+<i>offered</i> to Christ and Louis XIV., and <i>gave</i> to the popes.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The test of enjoyment is memory. Only the paradises of the imagination
+willingly remain, and are never lost, but always conquered. Poetry
+alone reconciles the past to the future, and is the Orpheus's lyre
+which commands these two destroying rocks to rest.<a name="div2Ref_02" href="#div2_02"><sup>[2]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p class="normal">As stated, in the year 1796, I made a trip through France, with my
+friend H. Karlson. He is honorary master of horse in the <span style="letter-spacing:5px">* * *</span> service.
+The wise public cares little for true names, it always treats them as
+fictitious ones, by way of literary taxation; and the existing
+characters, at least those of any importance, may prefer not to be torn
+over the wheel of criticism, and dragged piecemeal through libraries
+and reading-clubs. At almost every milestone, I despatched the best
+hourly bulletin to my friend Victor: when I had sent him the following
+valley-piece, he persecuted me until I promised to grant this
+illuminated portrait of nature, not alone to the letter, but also to
+the printing-press. Therefore I do it. I know already, my poor Victor
+sees, that in our days no green branch is left as a spinning-hut
+for the man-caterpillar, and that inimical divers try to cut our
+anchor-rope, sunk in the sea of death. Therefore he thinks more of the
+conversations on immortality, than of the valley in which they took
+place. I know this, because he calls me the counterpart of Claude
+Lorraine, who only drew the landscape, while another drew the human
+beings in it. Truly such a valley deserves that the mining and
+sabbath-lamp of truth should be lowered into the suffocating air of the
+grave, in place of our <i>self</i>, merely to see if that <i>self</i> can
+breathe
+at such a depth.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I have jokingly divided my letters into stations. I of course omit 500,
+and commence at the 501st, wherein I appear in the valley.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>CAMPANER THAL.</h2>
+<br>
+
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_c501" href="#div1_c501">501st STATION.</a></h2>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="sc">The Diversities of Life.--The Dirge as Billet-Doux.--The
+Cavern.--The Surprise</span>.</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="right"><i>Campan, 23d July</i>.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Here have I been since the day before yesterday. After descent into
+hell and purgatory, and passage through <i>limbos infantum et patrum</i>,
+man must at last reach heaven. But I owe you yet our exit from our inn
+on the 20th. Never can the head have a harder couch than when we hold
+it in our hands. The reason that this happened to Karlson and myself
+was, that in the rooms adjoining ours a wedding-dance was taking place,
+and that below, the youngest daughter of our <i>maître d'hôtel</i>, who had
+not only the name, but also the charms of <i>Corday</i>, with two white
+roses on her cheeks, and two red ones in her hair, was being interred,
+and that human beings with pale faces and heavy hearts waited on happy
+and blooming ones. When fate harnesses to Psyche's car, the merry and
+the mourning steed together, the mourning one ever takes the lead;
+i. e. if the muses of Mirth and Sorrow play on the same stage in the
+same hour, man does not, like Garrick,<a name="div2Ref_03" href="#div2_03"><sup>[3]</sup></a>
+follow the former; he does
+not even remain neuter, but takes the side of the mourning one. Thus we
+always paint, like Milton, our lost Paradise more glowing than the
+regained one,--like Dante, hell better than purgatory. In short, the
+silent corpse made us cold to the warm, joyful influence of the
+dancers. But is it not absurd, my dear Victor, that a man who, like
+myself, knows nothing better than that every hour unfolds at once
+morning bloom and evening clouds; that here an Ash Wednesday and there
+a black Monday commence; that such a man, who grieves little that
+dancing music and funeral marches should sound at the same time on the
+broad national theatre of humanity, should yet hang his head and grow
+pale, when, in a side scene, this double music sounds in his ears? Is
+not this as absurd as all his other doings?</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Into Karlson's eyes something of this cloud had fallen. It was to him
+the restirred ashes of a funeral urn. He can withstand all sorrows, but
+not their recollection. He has replaced his years by lands, and the
+space he has travelled over must be called his time. But the firm youth
+changed color when he came to tell that the lover of the pale Corday
+had torn her folded taper hands asunder, and, on his knees, had dragged
+them to his burning lips.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He perceived his paleness in the glass; and to explain it, he imparted
+the last and most secret leaf of his life's Robinsonade to me. You see
+what an opaque gem this youth is, who follows his friends through all
+France, without opening to his communicative friend and travelling
+companion, even a fold or a loophole in his relation to them. Now only
+from emotion on entering the Campan Vale, he draws the key from the
+keyhole, which shall become a prompter's hole for you.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">That he had accompanied the Baron Wilhelmi and his betrothed Gione,
+with her sister Nadine, to Lausanne, in order to celebrate their
+Arcadian marriage in the Campan Vale, you know already; that he had
+left them suddenly at Lausanne, and returned to the Rhine fall at
+Shaffhausen, you know also, but not the reason, which will now be
+related to you by me and by him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">By daily contact Karlson had at last penetrated the thickly-woven veil,
+magically colored by betrothed love, thrown over the strong, firm, and
+kindred mind of Gione. Probably others discovered him ere he had
+discovered himself. His heart became like the so-called world's eye<a name="div2Ref_04" href="#div2_04"><sup>[4]</sup></a>
+in water, first bright, then varying its colors, then dull and misty,
+and at last transparent. Not to cloud their beautiful intimacy, he
+addressed the suspicious part of his attentions to Nadine. He did not
+explain to me clearly whether he had led her into a beautiful error,
+without taking a beautiful truth from Gione.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The sword of death seemed likely to separate all these stage knots.
+Gione, the healthy and calm Gione, was suddenly attacked by a nervous
+disorder. One evening, Wilhelmi, with his usual poetic ardor, entered
+Karlson's chamber weeping, and, embracing him, could only sob forth the
+words, &quot;She is no more.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Karlson said not a word, but in the tumult of his own and others'
+griefs, departed that night for Shaffhausen, and probably fled at the
+same time from a beloved and a loving one,--from Gione and from Nadine.
+By this eternal waterspout of the Rhine, this onward pressing, molten
+avalanche, this gleaming perpendicular milky-way, his soul was slowly
+healed; but he was long imprisoned in the dark, cold, serpent's-nest of
+envenomed pains; they entwined and crawled over him, even to his
+heart. For he believed, as most world-men among whom he had grown up
+do,--perhaps, also, too much accustomed to analyzed ideas and opinions
+by his favorite study, chemistry,--that our last sleep is annihilation,
+as in the epopee the first man imagined the first sleep to be the first
+death.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">To Wilhelmi he only sent the name of his retreat and a poem, entitled,
+&quot;Grief-without Hope,&quot; which declared his disbelief, for he had never
+broken the Ambrosia, whose delights a trust in immortality affords. But
+just that strengthened his enfeebled heart, that the muses led him to
+Hippocrene's spring of health.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Wilhelmi answered, that he had read his beautiful requiem to the
+deceased, or the immortal one. A long swoon had occasioned the painful
+mistake. Gione and he entreated him to follow speedily. Karlson
+replied: &quot;Fate had separated him from their beautiful feast by the
+Alpine Wall, but as it would, like the Campan Vale, ever renew its
+springs, he hoped to lose nothing but time by his delay.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Now that the next world had cast its supernatural light on Gione's
+countenance, Karlson loved her too much to be capable of assisting at
+the ceremony of losing her forever. I will give you the opinion I
+formed of her by listening to his description.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Even by a love and a praise in a person's absence we may be won; how
+much more, then, if both are thrown to us as farewell kisses after the
+ascent to Heaven! Therefore the idea of the future funeral procession
+behind my gay, richly decorated dust, onion and relic box is only
+another incentive, not only to drug, but also to absolve myself, for
+when older we are less missed. And even you, who so seldom hang us, or
+drive us all to the Devil, I mean, how seldom soever the tempest of
+anger sours the beer-barrel of your breast! Even you have no more
+efficacious morsel of white chalk, no better <i>oleum tartari per
+deliquium</i>,<a name="div2Ref_05" href="#div2_05"><sup>[5]</sup></a> with which
+you can sweeten your internal fluids, than
+the thought how we shall all turn pale round your death-bed, and be
+dumb at your grave-mound, and how none will forget you! I cannot
+possibly believe that there exists one being who, when death draws him
+into the diving-bell of the grave, will not leave <i>one</i> weeping eye,
+<i>one</i> bending head behind, and therefore each one can love the soul
+which will some time weep for him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">When I think now of the convalescent Gione, with her wounded heart,
+which had received a new sensitiveness in the hot electric atmosphere
+of the sinking thunderbolt of Death, I need not measure her emotion at
+Karlson's poem, by the dew and hygrometer, nor with the loadstone of
+her love. But not Wilhelmi's brilliant riches, nor his still more
+brilliant conduct, her first choice, her first promise, forbade her
+even to touch the diamond scales.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">When Karlson told me all this, he turned Gione's ring-portrait upwards
+on his finger, and pressed the hard edge of the ring-finger with his
+tearful eyes, till the adorned hand was unconsciously touched by the
+lip's kiss. The bashfulness of his grief moved me so much, that I
+offered to take another route into the Vale, under the pretence that
+the dreams of it had lessened the desire for the reality, and that we
+should disturb the newly-affianced in their first rose-honey days, as
+they had probably waited for the mild late spring. He divined my
+intention; but his promise to come to-morrow dragged him by chains.
+Right gladly would I have missed the new spring-filled Eden, and drawn
+from my friend's feet the Jacob's ladder from which he might gaze on
+his former glad heaven, but could not ascend to it. On the other hand,
+I rejoiced at his firm, promise-keeping character, which opposed its
+strong nature to the thorns and boring-worms of sorrow; as with the
+increase of moonlight, tempests decrease. Unperceived, I now added
+Gione, not only Karlson, to the list of rare beings, who, like
+Raphael's and Plato's works, uncloud themselves only on earnest
+contemplation, and who, as both, resemble the Pleiades, which to the
+naked eye seems only to have seven suns, but with a telescope discloses
+more than forty.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">On the 20th, we started towards the Vale. On the way, I looked too
+often into Karlson's faithful, heavenly, deep-blue eyes. I descended
+into his heart, and sought the scene of the day on which the holy
+church tie would tear the noble Gione forever from out his pure muse
+and goddess-warmed heart. I confess I can imagine no day on which I
+regard my friend with deeper emotion that on that never-to-be-forgotten
+one, on which Fate gives him the brother kiss, the hand-pressure, the
+land of love and Philadelphia and Vaucluse's spring, united in one
+female heart.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The day before yesterday, at ten in the evening, we arrived at
+Wilhelmi's Arcadian dwelling, which pressed its straw roof against a
+green marble wall. Karlson found it easily from its proximity to the
+famed Campan Cave, from which he had often broken stalactites. The sky
+was clouded with colored shadows, and on the green cradle of slumbering
+children night threw her star-embroidered cradle-cover, fastened to the
+summits of the Pyrenees. From out Wilhelmi's hermitage advanced some
+men in <i>black</i> attire, with torches in their hands, who seemed to be
+waiting for us, and told us the baron was in the Cave. By heaven, under
+such circumstances, it is easier to imagine the most circumscribed,
+than the <i>largest</i> and most <i>beautiful</i> Cave! The sable attendants
+carried the flame before them, and drew the flying smoke-picture from
+oak-top to oak-top, and led us, stooping, through the catacomb
+entrance. But how splendidly was arched the high and wide grotto,<a name="div2Ref_06" href="#div2_06"><sup>[6]</sup></a>
+with its crystal sides, shining like an illumined ice Louvre, a
+gleaming sub-terrestrial heaven vault. Wilhelmi threw away a handful of
+gathered spars, and joyfully hastened into his friend's arms. Gione,
+with her sister, advanced from behind a connected stalactite and
+stalagmite. The gleaming of the torches gave her an undecided outline,
+but at length Wilhelmi advanced to her, and said, &quot;Here is our friend.&quot;
+Bending low, Karlson kissed the warm living hand, and was dumb with
+emotion. But the firm features of Gione's earnest face, which wanted
+but Nadine's juvenile bloom, changed into a shining joy, greater than
+he dared to return or reward. &quot;We have long expected and missed you in
+this paradise,&quot; she said, with unshaken voice; and her clear, calm eye
+opened a view into a richly-gifted, steadfast soul. &quot;Welcome to the
+infernal regions,&quot; said Nadine; &quot;you believe in reunion and Elysium
+now?&quot; Though she received him with an assemblage or Flora of wit, or
+was it grace? for they were difficult to distinguish, this cheerfulness
+of character and acquirement seemed not to be the cheerfulness of a
+contented or reposeful mind.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">My friend introduced me properly, that no supermember or <i>hors
+d'[oe]uvre</i> should remain in this corporation of friendship.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">To all of us--even to me--for around me never before seen beings
+floated in silver reflections--it seemed as if the world had ceased,
+Elysium had opened, and the separated, covered, sub-terrestrial regions
+cradled only tranquil, but happy souls.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">There was a certain heartfulness in the joyous interest which this
+affectionate trinity took in Karlson's appearance, which generally
+accompanies the last step before the disclosure of some hidden plan,
+but this plan was concealed. To speak something also to me, Nadine
+said, that there was a critical philosopher and arguer with them, who
+would rejoice to hear any one <i>for</i> or <i>against</i> his
+opinions,--namely,
+the house-chaplain. When we stepped from the illumined diamond and
+magic cave into the dark night, we saw the cloak of Erebus hang in
+thick cloudy folds over the earth, and pale lightning shot from the
+nightly mist, the flowers breathed from covered calysses, and under the
+fast approaching storm the nightingales raised their melodious voices
+behind their blooming hedges.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Suddenly Gione walked more slowly by Karlson's side, and said, with
+much warmth, but without hesitation: &quot;I heartily love truth, even at
+the expense of stage-like effect: I must, in the name of the Baron,
+discover to you that he and I will to-morrow be forever united. You
+must forgive <i>your</i> friend that he would not celebrate this ceremony
+without <i>his</i>.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I think that now, in Karlson's heart, the cooled lava immediately
+became fluid and glowing. Suddenly lightning flashed from a cloud
+around the rising moon, and illumined the rain-drops, intended for
+darkness, in Gione's and in Karlson's eyes. Wilhelmi asked, &quot;Can you
+not forgive me?&quot; Karlson pressed him warmly and lovingly to his
+grateful heart: this lofty confidence of friendship, and this
+affectionate proof of it, raised his strengthened soul above all
+desires, and another's virtue spread in his breast the calm
+tranquillity of his own. We took shelter for the night in three Thabor
+huts,--the ladies in the first, Wilhelmi with the critical philosopher
+in the second, Karlson and myself in the third,--which the Baron had
+hired for us. The fatigue of the journey, and even of our feelings,
+deferred our joys and confidences for another night. But I cannot tell
+you how nobly sorrow changed into exaltation in my friend's
+countenance, how grief fell like a cloud from his heaven, and
+discovered the serene blue beneath. The sacrifices and virtues of our
+beloved ones belong to the inexpressible joys which the soul at least
+can count and appreciate; which it can imitate.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">His and my eyes overflowed with holy gladness from a singularly elysian
+mood of harmony in anticipation of the coming day. Ah, my Victor!
+nations and men are only the <i>best</i> when they are the gladdest, and
+deserve Heaven when they enjoy it. The tear of grief is but a diamond
+of the second water, but the tear of joy of the first. And therefore
+fatherly fate, thou spreadest the flowers of joy, as nurses do lilies
+in the nursery of life, that the awakening children may sleep the
+sounder! O, let philosophy, which grudges our <i>pleasures</i>, and blots
+them out from the plans of Providence, say by what right did torturing
+<i>pain</i> enter into our frail life? Have we not already an eternal right
+to a warm down bed? I think not now of the deepest mattress in the
+earth, because we are so pierced with stigmas of the past, so covered
+with its wounds.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">You once said to me: &quot;In your early years, you have been drawn and
+driven from the stoic philosophy by Sorites; for if the sensation of
+pleasure be as little as the stoics pretend, it were wiser to convert
+than to benefit your neighbor,--wiser to preach morality from pulpit
+and desk than to practise it in the work-rooms,--wiser to turn towards
+your neighbor the dirt-balls and <i>soap-pills</i> of moral philosophy, than
+the enlarged marble <i>soap-bubbles</i> of joy. Further, that it is a
+mistake to assert that virtue makes more worthy of happiness, if
+happiness possessed not an eternal, independent value in itself; for
+else it might be maintained that virtue would make the possessor of a
+straw, &amp;c. worthy--&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">You said this once. Do you believe it yet?--I do.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_c502" href="#div1_c502">502d STATION.</a></h2>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="sc">The Thundering Morning.--The Short Trip after the
+Long One.--The Sofa-cushions</span>.</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">Through the whole night, a half-lost thundering was heard, as though it
+murmured in its sleep. In the morning, before sunrise, Karlson and
+myself stepped out into the wide cloud-tapestried bridal-chamber of
+nature. The moon approached the double moment of its waning and its
+fulness. The sun, standing on America as on a burning altar, drove the
+cloudy incense of its <i>feu de joie</i> high and red into the air; but a
+morning tempest boiled angrily above it, and darted its fierce
+lightnings to meet his ascending rays. The oppressive heat of nature
+drew longer and louder plaints from the nightingales, and evanescent
+aroma from the long flower-meads. Heavy warm drops were pressed from
+the clouds, and beat loudly on the stream and on the foliage. Only the
+Mittagshorn, the pinnacle of the Pyrenees, stood brightly and clearly
+in the heavenly blue. Now a gust of wind from the waning moon dispersed
+the raging storm, and the sun stood victoriously under a triumphal arch
+of lightnings. The wind restored the heaven's blue, and dashed the rain
+behind the earth, and around the dazzling sun-diamond there lay only
+the silvered fringes of the once threatening clouds.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">O my Victor, what a new-born day was now on earth, encamped in the
+glorious valley. The nightingales and the larks loudly sung its
+welcome, the rosechafers rustled round its lily garlands, and the
+eagle, riding on the highest cloud, surveyed it from mountain
+to mountain. How rurally all things surrounded the serpentine
+field-embracing Adour. The marble walls, not raised by human skill,
+surround its flower-beds like large vases, and the Pyrenees, with their
+high tops, watch over and protect the lowly scattered shepherd huts.
+Tranquil Tempe! May a storm never disturb thy gardens and thy murmuring
+Adour. May a stronger one never visit thee, than would gently rock the
+cradle of nature, or dash a bee from the honey-dew of the wheat-sheaf,
+or force but a single drop from the waterfall upon the flowers of thy
+shores.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">You must not think that I am placing my paintbrushes at my side to copy
+the heavenly rounded valley by the measure of art for you; I will let
+you peep into this picture-book of nature as chance shall turn each
+succeeding page. My stations will lead you through its different
+chambers, in which the rich dowry of Spring, like that of a king's
+daughter, is placed for show. But truly it is a more glorious thing to
+see the whole dowry disposed over the person of the royal bride
+herself.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">A servant seeking the chaplain, roused us both from our reverie. We saw
+him advance towards a gentleman standing on the banks of the Adour, who
+slowly turned down his rolled-up shirt-sleeves. It was the chaplain,
+who had been catching crabs during the storm, and had subsequently
+fished. As I knew that his hairy hand had worked for the food of the
+critical, as well as his own philosophy, with trowel and mortar, with
+pen and ink, I boldly advanced towards him, and told him what I was
+writing. But the coarse, obstinate, yet timid free-mason, coldly
+welcomed me in a language as broad as his own frosty visage.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He despises biographers; for the windows of a philosophical audience
+are too high,--perhaps, as in ancient temples, in the roof,--so that
+they cannot see into the streets of real life, as, according to
+Winkelmann, the Roman windows were architecturally as high. Lord
+Rochester is said to have been continually drunk during a whole
+quintennium; but such a chaplain is capable of being <i>sober</i> for an
+entire decennium. A man like this bites the buds of all powerful
+truths, experiences, and fictions, as ants bite the buds from
+corn-seeds, that they may not fructify, but wither and die and form
+building materials.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">When the Chaplain left me to join the Baron, as consecrator of the
+marriage sacrament, I found Karlson in the dustrain of a near cascade.
+Round him, almost close to our windows, the hermitages of the farmers
+waded in green foliage, with the fresh harvest wreath roofed by faded
+ones; and inside, there bloomed families, outside, elms. He showed me
+Gione's card, which, he said, she had given him before her marriage.
+But it was not so; he had found it on the moss near the cascade. It
+represented a Roman landscape, and beside the living fountain was the
+pictured one of Tivoli, and on a stone in the foreground Gione's name
+was written. Such a printed trifle, a beloved name shortly before its
+sublunar annihilation, moves the whole heart with a succession of
+pleasing reflections.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Karlson went to the ceremony. I remained alone under the splendid blue
+heaven, and rejoiced that all the inhabitants of Campan wore its
+livery, the blue, which we had yesterday mistaken for black.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I will not hide from you that during the coupling, softened by the many
+beauties of spring, I lost myself in Nadine's equally charming ones,
+which were an undiscovered Central Africa for me, while I wished she
+were as warm. After eight or ten dreams, I saw the beautiful couples
+cross my path. How earnestly glad and serene we all stood under the
+spring music of flutes and pipes, and harps and warbling, which were
+living around us, with and without wings. Gione and Karlson concealed
+an equal emotion, as at an almost equal fate. Wilhelmi, who is, as a
+comet, sometimes in the burning, sometimes in the freezing point of a
+sun, requires no joys than those of others to make him happy. But a
+tear stood in Nadine's bright eye, which could not be smiled or looked
+away. Her heart seemed to me to resemble the earth, whose exterior is
+cold, but which carries in its centre a latent heat. And yesterday her
+whole being seemed so mirthful and so gay!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">We never make more erroneous conclusions in our opinions on any subject
+than on woman's cheerfulness. Oh! how many of these charming beings
+there are, who decay unvalued, who, while jesting, despair, and while
+joking, bleed to death; who hide their merry laughing eyes behind a
+wall, as behind a fan, to give glad vent to their long-restrained
+tears; who pay for a merry day by a tearful night, just as an unusually
+clear, transparent, and fogless air betokens rain. Remember the
+beautiful N. N., and also her youngest sister. In the mean time, the
+charming, sun-variegated dew-drop under Nadine's eye was balanced by a
+wart of half the size, the solitaire among her personal charms.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Wilhelmi's lyric and dithyrambic head was filled with projects for
+pleasure, and with the eagerness of delight, he demanded a hasty
+determination concerning the proper use and enjoyment of the day. &quot;O
+yes,&quot; said I, quickly and impertinently, &quot;life flies to-day on a
+minute-hand, like an alarum it winds off; but how shall we form a plan,
+a good plan?&quot; Nadine, who had arranged everything beforehand with the
+bridegroom, replied: &quot;I think we need none for such a delightful day,
+and such a charming valley. We will pilgrimize carelessly along the
+banks of the Adour, the length of the Vale, and rest at every new
+flower, and at every bud, and in the evening we will sail back by
+moonlight! That would be quite Arcadian and shepherd-like in this
+Arcadia. Will you all? You certainly will, dearest sister?&quot; &quot;O yes,&quot;
+said Gione, &quot;for I think we are as yet all strangers to the charms of
+this paradise.&quot; The Baron seemed to hesitate before giving his consent,
+and said: &quot;It depends whether the ladies can walk two and a quarter
+miles in one day.&quot;<a name="div2Ref_07" href="#div2_07"><sup>[7]</sup></a> I was
+mad with joy, and cried, &quot;Charming!&quot; Such a
+long horizontal heaven-journey, such a melodious Arpeggio through the
+chords of delight was an old innate wish of my youth. I imparted my
+delight to the Chaplain, to whose feelings this <i>voyage pitturesque</i>
+was as repugnant as a Good Friday procession, and to whom, instead of
+this heaven-way, that of Höfer<a name="div2Ref_08" href="#div2_08"><sup>[8]</sup></a>
+would have been more acceptable,
+because he would rather have remained at home to read, and because he
+did not enjoy the Epopee of nature as a man, nor scan it as a
+naturalist, but like an usher, separated and divided it, for practice
+in building up again. I said to him: &quot;If we two will be shepherds,
+representing the old Myrtil and Phylax, it would be interesting. You
+know best that whims should be ten times less bold before ladies and
+refined ears than on print, and that for such people it has to be
+filtered through so many filtering-papers and strainers, that I would
+not give a proof-sheet for it after the process.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">A hired country-house, at the end of the valley, was the architectural
+Eden with which Wilhelmi intended to surprise and delight his bride in
+this botanic one. But Nadine alone knew it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In as many moments as a swan would take to spread his wings and rise,
+we were all ready. I do not blame man for making preparations for the
+examination for death, but for no (shorter) journey. The long <i>hunt</i>
+destroys the game of enjoyment. I, for my part, never think of starting
+until I am on the road.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Wilhelmi loaded himself with his bride's guitar; Karlson carried a
+portable ice-cellar. The ladies had their parasols; the Chaplain and I
+had nothing. I whispered to the shallow Phylax,--so I can now call him,
+and myself the old Myrtil,--&quot;Sir Chaplain, we rebel against all good
+manners if we follow empty-handed.&quot; He immediately offered himself to
+Gione, as pack-horse, wagon, and carrier for her--parasol. But clever
+genius prompted me to return to Karlson's chamber, and bring two
+cushions from the sofa, and I returned with these twins in my arms;
+nothing could have been more appropriate, as the ladies sat down a
+thousand times on the way, and could not have dipped their silken
+elbows in the juicy paint of the flowers. To his vexation, Phylax was
+obliged to carry the soft block in his arms; I hung the other one, like
+a stick, to my thumb. At last we started.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">We advanced towards the Pyrenees. Corn-fields, waterfalls, shepherd
+huts, marble blocks, woods and grottoes, animated by the vascular
+system of the many-branched Adour, passed beautifully before our eyes,
+and we were forced to leave them behind, like the bright years of youth
+changed into dreams by the stern hand of Time.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Ah, Victor, travelling alone is life, as life, on the contrary, is only
+a journey. And if, like certain shell-fish, I could only push myself on
+with one foot, or, like sea-nettles and women, I could only progress
+six lines in a quarter of an hour, or if I lived under Fritz II. or
+Fritz I. (Lycurgus), who both forbade a long journey, I would make a
+short one, that I might not perish like the loach, which languishes in
+every vessel, if not shaken.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">How spirited, how poetical, how inventive can we not be while we run
+onwards. As Montaigne, Rousseau, and the sea-nettle only shine when
+they move on. By Heaven! it is no wonder that man rises and will go on;
+for does not the sun follow the pedestrian from tree to tree? does not
+its reflected likeness swim after him in the water? do not landscapes,
+mountains, hills, men, rapidly changing, come and go? and does not
+Freedom's breath blow on the ever-varying Eden, when, released from the
+neck and heart-breaking chains of narrow circumstances, we fly freely
+and gladly, as in dreams, over ever-new scenes.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">For unfortunately the bell-glass over men and melons, which at first is
+covered by a broken bottle, must always be raised higher and higher,
+and at last removed entirely. At first, a man will go into the next
+town, then to the university, then to an important residency, then--if
+he has only written twenty lines--to Weimar, and finally, to Italy or
+to heaven. And if the planets were stringed together on a cord, and
+near each other, or if the rays of light were roads, and the atoms of
+light bridges, then surely would post-houses be erected in Uranus, and
+the insatiable inner man--for the outer one is so very satiable--would
+go longing and roaming from planet to planet.----</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Therefore, my Victor, nothing is confined in so many prison-walls as is
+this our human self. And our cages are enclosed, onion-like, one in the
+other. Tour and my <i>self</i> are imprisoned not only on this earth, but in
+this King's Bench are the town walls; in these our four walls surround
+us; in the four walls, the arm-chair or the bed; in this again, the
+shirt or the coat, or both; and lastly, the body. And, to be minute
+(according to Sömmering), in the brain crevices, the duck's
+pond.---- Start at the fatal many-sided suite of houses of correction
+which surround thy<i>self</i>?----</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_c503" href="#div1_c503">503d STATION.</a></h2>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="sc">Lampoon on the Chaplain.--Praise of Him.--The Diamond.--Opinions
+against Immortality.--Eden Jokes</span>.</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">We two fellow-carriers formed the rear-guard. I wished to enter into
+discourse, but Phylax had a very poor opinion of me; at most he thought
+me a fickle sentimentalist who only portrays feelings. Yet feelings are
+the sponge of atmospheric air, which the poet, on his high Parnassus,
+as well as the philosophical diver in his depths, <i>must</i> hold in his
+mouth, and yet poetry has cast an earlier light on many obscure works
+of nature than philosophy, as the dark <i>new moon</i> borrows light from
+<i>Venus</i>.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But the philosopher sins against poets more than you sin against the
+followers of Kant, from whom you seem to expect that they shall write
+pleasingly. Your arguments are ideas, not reasonings, when you say that
+philosophy's attendants are like those of Turkish ladies, mute, black,
+and deformed; that the philosophical market-place is a <i>forium
+morionum</i>,<a name="div2Ref_09" href="#div2_09"><sup>[9]</sup></a> and that
+beauty is forbidden to philosophers, as it was
+to the Helots, who were killed for possessing it. Is it not evident
+that a certain barbarous, un-German, far-fetched language is more an
+ornament than a detriment to it. Oracles despise grace, <i>vox dei
+sol[oe]cismus</i>, i. e. a Kantist cannot be read,--he must be studied.
+Further, it is not beneath a philosopher to enrich the language instead
+of the science. For some other may seek the ideas for the terms, and
+find them, as animals were found for the Ammonites. Therefore the
+Greeks have the same term for <i>word</i> and <i>knowledge</i>, which
+combination
+was at last deified. The philosopher should always write over his door
+<i>pour l'oudalgie</i>,<a name="div2Ref_10" href="#div2_10"><sup>[10]</sup></a>
+instead of &quot;here lives a dentist.&quot; This is the
+best reason, except a second one, why the philosopher, especially the
+Kantist, as I saw in Phylax, needs not books, nor men, nor experience,
+nor chemistry, botany, the fine arts, nor natural history. He can and
+must decipher the positive, the material, the given number, the unknown
+X. He creates the term, and sucks, as children often do,--it may
+suffocate them,--his own blistered tongue.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I must return to the company! As the Chaplain carried his
+walking-stick, or rather walking-tree of a cushion, with the greatest
+indifference towards me, I wished to prejudice him for me by a
+panegyric at the expense of Kant. I said to him: &quot;It surprised me that
+the philosophers should have suffered Kant to have made so great a
+distinction between them and artists, and only allowed the merit of
+genius to the latter. He says, in § 47 of his 'Kritik der
+Urtheilkraft,' 'In sciences, the greatest inventor is only
+distinguished from the most labored imitator and apprentice by
+gradation; but from, those whom nature has gifted for beautiful nature,
+he is specifically distinguished.' This is derogatory, Sir Chaplain,
+and besides, not true. Why can Kant, then, only make Kantists, but no
+Kants?<a name="div2Ref_11" href="#div2_11"><sup>[11]</sup></a> Are new systems
+discovered by syllogisms, yet they are
+proved and tried by them? Can, then, the connection of a new
+philosophical idea with the old one better explain or facilitate its
+comprehension than the same connection which each new poetic one must
+have with old ones, which are the means of its creation. Sir Chaplain,
+I know not whom Kant has most sinned against, Truth, himself, or his
+school. Leibnitz's 'Monadology,' <i>harmonia præstabilita</i>, &amp;c., are as
+much pure, brilliant emanations of genius, as any beaming form in
+Shakespeare or Homer. Besides, Leibnitz is a genial almighty Demiurg in
+the philosophical world, its greatest and first circumnavigator, and
+who, happier than Archimedes, found in his genius the standing-point
+from which he might move the philosophical <i>universa</i>, and play with
+worlds. He was an extraordinary spirit, he threw new chains on the
+earth, but he himself bore none: I think you agree with me, Sir
+Chaplain!&quot; He replied, He did not, that the critical philosophy knew
+what to make of Leibnitz's experiments, his immaterial world, the
+asserted approximation of the definite to the indefinite line, and how
+to honor genius. In short, I had rather angered than conquered him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Karlson, whom even Amor's torch could not blind to the philosophical
+one, took as much interest in our war as could be taken with the ears.
+Fortunately we all stood still. A small diamond had fallen from
+Nadine's necklace, and she sought for the silver petrified spark in the
+grass. Strange that a man always hopes to find a thing on the spot
+where he perceives his loss. Nadine looked for her hardened dew-drop on
+the sparkling, spangled mead. As a bright diamond of the first water,
+it was so easily mistaken for a dew-drop, that I remarked, seeing one
+in Nadine's breast-rose, &quot;Everything is covered with soft diamonds, and
+who will find the hard one? The dew in your rose sparkles as brightly
+as the lost stone.&quot; She looked down, and in the rose-cup lay the
+sought-for gem! It was thought I had been clever, and I was angry with
+myself for having been so stupid. But Nadine liked me no less for it,
+and that was reward enough.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">As the Adour bent, not an arm, but a finger, around this gay moss-bank
+and bees' sugar-field, the whole company sat among the bees and the
+flowers, and the cushion-bearers laid down their burdens. Nadine said,
+playfully, &quot;If flowers have souls, the bees, whose nurses they are,
+must seem to them like dear sucking children.&quot; &quot;They have,&quot; said
+Karlson, &quot;souls like frozen window flowers, or like the tree of
+Petit,<a name="div2Ref_12" href="#div2_12"><sup>[12]</sup></a> which I once
+showed to you, or like pyramids of alum.&quot; &quot;O,
+you always destroy, sir,&quot; said Gione. &quot;Nadine and I once painted to
+ourselves an elysium for the souls of faded flowers.&quot; &quot;I believe in a
+middle path for flowers after their death,&quot; said Wilhelmi, seriously;
+&quot;the souls of lilies probably go into woman's forehead; hyacinth and
+forget-me-not souls into woman's eyes, and rose souls into lips and
+cheeks.&quot; I added, &quot;It is a fortunate coincidence for this hypothesis,
+that a girl has perceptibly more color from the departing soul at the
+moment when she breaks or kills a rose.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Joyfully and affectionately we continued our journey. Only into my
+carrier-companion the souls of thistles and sloes seemed to have
+entered. This play of ideas and this politeness in argument provoked
+him. Only Karlson pleased him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">At last the Chaplain said to me: &quot;No immortality but that of moral
+beings can be discussed, and with them it is a postulate or
+apprenticeship of practical sense. For as a full conformity of the
+human will to the moral law, with which the just Creator never can
+dispense, is quite unattainable by a finite being, an eternally
+continuing progress, i. e. an unceasing duration, must contain and
+prove this conformity in God's eyes, who overlooks the everlasting
+course. Therefore our immortality is necessary.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Karlson stood still at Gione's side, that we might approach, and said:
+&quot;Dear philosopher, pray take from this proof the boldness or the
+indistinctness which it has for laymen. How can we imagine the
+supervision, i. e. the termination, of an infinite, a never-ending
+course? or how will you make the eternity of time harmonize with the
+eternity of the moral requirements. How can a righteousness, scattered
+and dispersed over an interminable period of time, satisfy Divine
+Justice, which must require this righteousness in each portion of the
+period. And has the constant approximation of man towards this state of
+purity been proved? And will not the number, if not the grossness of
+faults, in this infinite space, increase with the number of virtues?
+And what comparison will the list of faults bear to that of the virtues
+at the examination? But let us leave that also. Will, in the sight of
+the Divine eye, the moral purity of two different beings--for instance,
+a seraph and a man, or of two different men, as Robespierre and
+Socrates--be equally contained in two equally long, i. e. eternal,
+courses of time? If on comparing the two, a difference appear, then one
+of them cannot have attained the so-called perfection, and must still
+be mortal.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The Chaplain answered: &quot;But Kant does not intend to demonstrate
+immortality by this argument. He says even, that it has been left so
+uncertain in order that free, pure will, and no selfish views, shall
+prompt our aspirations to immortality.&quot; &quot;Strange,&quot; said Karlson. &quot;But
+as we have now discovered this intention, its object would be defeated.
+Philosophers ought then to imitate me, and attack immortality to the
+advantage of virtue. It is a strange axiom to presuppose the truth of
+an opinion from its indemonstrability. Either immortality can be
+proved, then one half of your argument is right, or it cannot, then the
+whole of it is wrong. Besides, if the belief in immortality makes
+virtue selfish, the experience of it in the next world would make it
+more so. Does the belief in it deter the common man from doing what his
+confessor forbids, and forgives him? As little as the first stroke of
+apoplexy deters the drunkard from rushing to the second.&quot;</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_c504" href="#div1_c504">504th STATION.</a></h2>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="sc">Flower Toying</span>.</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">Karlson joined the others in conversation, and Phylax was enraged that
+he could not triumph,--not even dispute. I said to him, that my
+opinions agreed with his, though not on the same grounds, and that,
+uniting, we would subsequently together issue forth and attack Karlson.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I then went with my silken club to Nadine, and on a rose-bush showed
+her the flying light-magnets, the shining will-o'-the-wisps of night,
+the brown glowworms which she had never seen by day. I colonized a box
+with them for a living firework in the evening. Chance had romantically
+bent a bright rose-bush between graceful bluebells, on a green marble
+boundary stone; its foliage had the appearance of being seamed with
+black glowworms;<a name="div2Ref_13" href="#div2_13"><sup>[13]</sup></a> the
+lily-chafer hung like gold embroidery on the
+pale, ripe roses; long-legged, shining gnats ran glittering over the
+thorns; the flower-divers and nectary treasure-diggers, the bees,
+covered the rose-cups with new thorns; the butterflies, like moving
+tints, like Epicurean colors, gently floated round the branch's gay
+world. I cannot tell you how this glance, turned from the vast whole on
+to a beautiful small portion, gave a warmer glow to our hearts and to
+nature. Instead of the hand, we could only hold, like children, the
+fingers of the great mother of life, and reverently kiss them. By the
+creation, God became human for men, as therefore for angels an
+angel,--like the sun whose bright immensity the painter gently divides
+into the beauties of a human face.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Wilhelmi said, that, to rise into Eden or Arcadia, he would need no
+larger wings than the four of a butterfly. What a poetical,
+paradisaical existence, like the papilio, to roam without stomach or
+hunger, among buds and flowers, to suffer no long night, no winter, and
+no storm, to toy away one's life in a delightful chase for another
+papilio, or to nestle, like the flower-colored bird of paradise, among
+lemon-blossoms, to float round blooming honey-cups, and to be rocked in
+silken cradles!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Blissfully we proceeded on our way, and each new step drove an exciting
+blood-drop to our warmed hearts. I said to the Chaplain, that the
+temple of nature had been changed into a concert-hall for me, and every
+vocal into instrumental music. Victor! should not philosophy and the
+philosophers imitate electric bodies, which not only enlighten, but
+also attract? The soul's wine will indeed ever taste of the bodily
+barrel-hoops, but the soul is scarcely spirit-like enough only to serve
+as a body to another soul.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_c505" href="#div1_c505">505th STATION.</a></h2>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="sc">The Ephemera.--Relative Conclusions.--Doubts of the Length of the
+Chain of Living Beings.--The Wart-Eaters.--The Cure</span>.</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">The sun and the valley surrounded us with their burning-glasses, and it
+was pleasant to sit down in a shady spot, and eat; and as just opposite
+to us was a marble-quarry, and close to the iron rock-wall a sap-green
+meadow, and beside us a group of elms and a little shining solitary
+white house, we asked at it for as much food as a roaming, contented
+quintet requires. The mistress of the house was alone, the husband was
+at work (as most Campanians are, in Spain), four children waited on us;
+our ice-cellar was opened, and with its contents the soul was warmed
+and the body cooled. The white glowing keystone of the heaven arch
+awoke with its flames the noonday wind, which slept on the cold summit
+of the Pyrenees.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Little or nothing would taste well to poor Phylax, to whom it was more
+important to prove that he would be eternal. Fortunately, the French
+wine armed him more with French customs, and he asked the Baron
+politely: &quot;I believe I owe M. Karlson some proofs of our immortality.
+Might I be allowed to give them?&quot; Wilhelmi sent him to Gione, saying,
+&quot;Ask there.&quot; Gione willingly granted his request, and said, &quot;Why should
+not recollections of immortality ornament our joys as much as monuments
+do English gardens?&quot; Nadine threw in the question, &quot;But if men quarrel
+about the hopes of humanity, what remains for women?&quot; &quot;Her heart and
+its hopes, Nadine,&quot; said Gione. Wilhelmi said, smiling: &quot;The owl of
+Minerva, as all other owls, is said to forebode destruction to a
+household, by settling on its roof. But I hope it is not so.&quot; I added,
+&quot;The lives of all our beloved ones are tied to the obelisk of
+immortality, as to that of Rameses,<a name="div2Ref_14" href="#div2_14"><sup>[14]</sup></a>
+that the danger may double our
+strength; for they will be destroyed if it rebound.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In the mean time, Karlson had taken an ephemeral fly from a neighboring
+elm, to which it had clung, in order to cast off its super body before
+death. The ephemera should not be an embodiment of our immortality,<a name="div2Ref_15" href="#div2_15"><sup>[15]</sup></a>
+but of our unfolding; for, unlike other insects, after all its
+transformations, and when already furnished with wings, it changes its
+shape once more before death. He held it before us, and said: &quot;In my
+opinion, a philosophical ephemera would argue thus. What! I should have
+uselessly accomplished all my various changes, and the Creator had no
+other intention in calling me from the egg to the grub, then to a
+chrysalis, and at last to a flying being, whose wings must burst
+another covering before death, with this long range of spiritual and
+corporeal developments, he should have had no other aim than a six
+hours' existence, and the grave must be the only goal of so long a long
+a course?&quot; The Chaplain opportunely answered, &quot;Your argument proves
+against yourself, for it is <i>petitio principii</i> to presuppose mortality
+amongst ephemera.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I confess I am an enemy to these relative conclusions, because they
+take as much from truth as they give to eloquence, for contrary
+opinions can be proved by them. To one whose eyes are hurt by a grain
+of sand, I can prove that he is comparatively happy, as there are many
+in the world who suffer from sand-blisters and gravel; and also that he
+is unfortunate, as Sultanic eyes are never pressed by anything harder
+than Circassian eyelids--or two rosy lips. Thus I can make the world
+immense in comparison to bullets, grains of poison, or round puddings,
+or minute, if placed beside Jupiter, the sun, or the milky-way. If the
+ephemera on the ladder of existence would turn its back on the
+brilliant development of the beings above it, and only count the
+important ones on the steps beneath it, it would increase in its own
+importance. In short, our oratorical fantasy continually mistakes the
+distinction between more and less for that of something or nothing; but
+every relative conclusion must be based on something positive, which
+only eternal eyes, which can measure the whole range of innumerable
+degrees, can truly weigh. Indeed, there must be some bodily substance,
+and were it even the earth; for every comparison, every measurement,
+presupposes a fixed, unchanging standard. Therefore, the ephemeral
+development is a true one, and the conclusions on it are the same as on
+a seraphic one. The difference in the degrees can only bring forth
+<i>relative</i>, not <i>opposite</i> conclusions. And here, in this letter--for
+in print I would not dare to do it--I will acknowledge a doubt. No one
+has ever <i>seen</i> the steps of the ladder of beings above us,--no one has
+<i>counted</i> those beneath us. What if the former were less, the latter
+greater, than we have hitherto imagined. The eternal promotion of souls
+from angels to archangels, in short, the nine philosophical hierarchies
+have only been asserted, but not proved. The common opinion, that the
+immense difference between man and the Eternal must be filled up by a
+chain of spiritual giants, is false; as no chain can shorten the
+distance, much less fill it, for it will ever retain the same width;
+and the seraph, i. e. the highest finite being according to human
+thoughts, must imagine just as many, if not more, beings above him, as
+I do beneath me. Astronomy, this sawing machine of suns, this ship's
+wharf and laboratory of earths, would persuade us that the
+<i>enlargement</i> of worlds and beings is a sign of their improvement. But
+over the whole sky there hang only earth and fire-balls, and all things
+on them, from milk-way to milk-way, are less than the wishes and
+longings of our hearts. Then why should our earth alone, why not every
+other also, be progressing? why should they, rather than we, have the
+start in this inaugural eternity? In short, it may be disputed if in
+the whole universe there are other angels and archangels than Victor
+and Jean Paul. It seems scarcely credible to me. But truly the
+<i>melodious</i> progression to sublime beings has hitherto been merely
+taken for granted. I believe in a <i>harmonious</i> one, in an eternal
+ascension, but in no created culmination.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I presume Karlson intended to answer my argument, not on the seraphs,
+but on ephemera, when Nadine, who had borrowed the fly in order to
+examine it, held it too near her eyes, and thereby disturbed and
+extinguished our Mendelssohn-Platonic conversation. For Madame Berlier
+(such was the noble name of our temporary hostess) stepped up to
+Nadine, and said: &quot;It is a pity for the pain. You must take the
+wart-locust, I have proofs,&quot; do you understand? It is this. The
+so-called wart-eater, a locust with light brown spots, takes away a
+wart in a very short time by a single bite. Dame Berlier, over whom, as
+over most Southrons, beauty had greater power than self-love and sex,
+had falsely imagined that Nadine wished to annihilate the only fault in
+her charming form with the fly. The Chaplain had scarcely heard the
+wart-eater mentioned, when he vanished among the green, and commenced a
+hunt for wart-locusts. I was vexed that I had known the remedy as well
+as Dame Berlier, and never thought of it. For a shabby simile I should
+have easily recollected it, but not for a useful cure. Fortune
+permitted him soon to return with the winged wart-operator; this
+excited my envy. When he gave it to Nadine, the officious Phylax had
+squeezed, with the letter and paper press of his hands, like in a good
+calendar-press, the brown spotted vegetable-eater to--death. The animal
+could bite no more; I immediately darted off in search of another, and
+soon returned, holding one by the tips of its wings, and said, I would
+myself hold it over the wart until he would operate on it. While
+performing the action I praised it. Every great deed, I said, is only
+accomplished in the soul, at the moment of determination; when it comes
+outward and is repeated by the body,--which holds the locust,--it
+disperses into insignificant movements and thirds; but when it is done,
+as now the operation, it becomes great again, and, ever increasing,
+flows onward through all time. Thus the Rhine rushes like a giant from
+its summit, disperses in the fog, falls as rain upon the plain, then it
+forms itself into clouds, and roams over the sands, and carries suns
+instead of rainbows.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">It need not be concealed from you that it affected me to look into the
+retina of two such bright and warm, upturned eyes, without mentioning
+the whole warlike array of curls and lips, and forehead, and the
+Waterloo landscapes of the cheeks. Nadine's terror at the teeth of the
+brown little doctor made her more charming, and the danger of my
+situation greater. After holding it for some time, when I thought the
+operation was finished, she told me the locust had not yet touched her,
+as I held it two or three Parisian feet too far from the wart. It is
+true, I had lost myself in her net skin; but I remarked that the cure
+could not be accomplished, if I did not rest the ball of my right hand
+slightly on her cheek, in order to hold the wart-eater more firmly over
+the wart. Now he bit the required wound, and propelled into it as much
+of his corrosive fluid as he carried with him. I artfully diverted
+Nadine's pain, which resembled that of a pin pricking, by
+philosophizing. Man, I said, finds the stoic theory true and forcible
+for all pain, only not for the present. And when he bleeds from cut
+wounds, he imagines bruises heal more easily. He therefore defers his
+practice of the stoic-school until his own schooling is over. O, but
+then he stands by a running stream, waiting until the waters shall have
+passed. True firmness bears the bite of a locust, and rejoices at the
+trial!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Now the operation was happily accomplished, which could easily excite
+an illness in me. It is true that her countenance had inflicted a
+deeper wound on me than the wart-eater upon it,--I should fear and
+examine whether mine, which was just as near to hers, had done as much
+damage; but Nadine is exceedingly--young. The hearts of young girls,
+like new waterbutts, at first let everything drop through, until in
+time, the vessels swell and thus retain their contents.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_c506" href="#div1_c506">506th STATION.</a></h2>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="sc">Objections To Immortality.--The Second Childhood of the
+Outer and Inner Man</span>.</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">We broke up and proceeded. On high, light feathers floated through the
+sky, like the loose-flowing hair of the sun, which could not veil it.
+The day became hotter and stiller. But our path lay beneath a green
+roof, and each branch spread over us a parasol of broad fresh leaves.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Gione asked, &quot;Can we not continue our conversation in walking?&quot; O, your
+Clotilde should know her; she has, excepting her charms, half her soul.
+No discord exists between her outer and inner harmony; her earnest,
+generous soul resembles the palm-tree, which has neither bark nor
+branches, but which bears broad foliage and buds on its summit.
+&quot;Gione,&quot; said Nadine, &quot;these arguments unsettle our minds, instead of
+removing our doubts.&quot; &quot;No one,&quot; she replied, &quot;has yet given his
+opinion; if we even have the firmest convictions, still by their
+beautiful conformity with another's convictions our own become more
+beautiful and firm.&quot; &quot;Just as water-plants, surrounded by their water,
+are yet as much refreshed by rain as land plants are,&quot; said Myrtil (I
+am Myrtil).</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Wilhelmi said, just as we were passing through the Midsummer's-day
+night of a grotto cooled by oakshade and cascades: &quot;Our conversation
+would better suit a total eclipse of the sun. I would that I could see
+one, when the moon hangs beauteously before the midday sun, when the
+noisy day is suddenly hushed, when the nightingales sing, the flowers
+fade, and when nightly mists and shuddering cold and dew fall.&quot; Phylax
+had now let slip his sofa-cushion into a murmuring spring; Nadine saw
+it, and, not to confuse him in the act of drawing it out, she, with
+charming zeal, drove us back to our conversation. Her intercourse with
+the world had given her a playful, light, ever-joyous exterior. But
+Gione's style, like the highest Grecian, is, artistically speaking,
+somewhat meagre and spare,--and the ball-rooms had made her, as
+mahogany presses make dresses, more agreeable. But her exterior charms
+did not contradict or injure her interior beauty.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I said to Karlson, &quot;Pray, prove to us the spiritual mortality, this
+soul's death.&quot; &quot;M. Karlson needs not do that,&quot; answered the stupid
+Phylax, vexed at the wet cushion, &quot;only the assertor must prove.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Very well,&quot; I said, &quot;I call proofs objections, but I shall certainly
+give you only two;--firstly, the proof or objection: the simultaneous
+decay and destruction of the body and of the soul; secondly, the
+absolute impossibility of ascertaining the mode of life of a future
+existence, or as the Chaplain would say, to see into the spiritual
+world from the sensuous one. Now, M. Karlson, throw your two bombs into
+the greatest possible angles, which, according to Hennert, is 40
+degrees, but according to Bezout, 43 degrees.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He aimed well. He showed how the spiritual Dryad flowered, burst and
+dispersed with the corporeal bark, how the noblest impulses are chained
+to the lead--earth, revolving wheel of the body; how memory,
+imagination, and madness only feed on the egg-yolk of the brain,--how
+bravery and mildness stand in as opposite degree to blood as leeches
+and Jews;<a name="div2Ref_16" href="#div2_16"><sup>[16]</sup></a> how, in age,
+the inner and outer man together bend
+towards the grave, together petrify, together, like metal compositions,
+<i>slowly</i> cool, and at last together die!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He then asked why, with the continual experience that every bodily
+down-bending digs a spiritual wound, and with this unceasing parallel
+of body and soul, we give to the latter, after death, everything which
+we have seen annihilated in the former. He said, and I believe it, that
+neither Bonnet's underbody, nor the incorporated soul corsets of
+Plattner (the &quot;second soul organ&quot;) can diminish the difficulty of the
+question, for as both soul's under-garments or night-gowns and
+pinafores, always share, in life, the good and bad fate of the coarse,
+corporeal coat and martyr-cloak, and as in us double-cased English
+watches, the works, and the first and second cases (Bonnet's and
+Plattner's) always suffered and gained together, it would be absurd to
+seek the Iliad of the future world in the narrow hazel-nut shell of the
+<i>revived</i> little body which has first stood and fallen with the coarse
+outward one.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I then asked him to aim his second ball in the angle of forty degrees
+also. I added, that &quot;I would have begged leave to give a long
+parliamentary speech on it, but that long speeches have a life and
+reproducing power, as, according to Reaumür, long animals more easily
+re-form themselves, when cut, than short ones.&quot; Though certainly it
+occurs to me, that Unzer says, tall persons do not live as long as
+short ones. But Karlson needed little time or power to prove the
+uncertainty of the next world. The Sun-land behind the hillocks of the
+God's acre, behind the pest-cloud of Death, is covered by a complete,
+an impenetrable darkness of twelve inches, or of as many holy nights.
+He showed, and not badly, what an immense leap beyond all terrestrial
+analogies and experiences it is, to hope for, i. e. to create, a world,
+a transcendent Arcadia, a world of which we know neither copy nor
+original, which wants no less than a form and a name, map and globe,
+another Vespucius Americus, of which neither chemistry nor astronomy
+can give us the compounds or the quarters; a universe of air, on which,
+from the leaf-stripped, faded soul, a new body will bud forth, i. e. a
+nothing on which nothing is to embody itself.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">O, my good Karlson! how could your noble soul omit a second world which
+is already contained in this physical first one, like bright crystals
+in dark earth, namely, the sun-world of <i>Virtue</i>, <i>Truth</i>, and
+<i>Beauty</i>,<a name="div2Ref_17" href="#div2_17"><sup>[17]</sup></a> glowing
+in our souls, whose golden vein inexplicably
+extends its ramification through the dark, dirty clump of the sensuous
+world.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">It was now my turn to answer: &quot;I will lessen your two difficulties, and
+then I will give my innumerable proofs. You are no materialist,<a name="div2Ref_18" href="#div2_18"><sup>[18]</sup></a>
+you
+therefore take for granted that bodily and mental activity only
+accompany and mutually excite each other. Yes, the body represents the
+keys of the inner Harmonica through all its scales. Hitherto only the
+corporeal outward signs have been called feelings, as the swelling
+heart and the slowly-beating pulse--longing; the outpouring of gall,
+anger, and so on. But the net-like texture, the anastomy between the
+inner and outer man, is so life-full, so warm, that to every <i>picture</i>,
+every <i>thought</i>,--a nerve, a fibre must move. We should also observe,
+and put into the notes of speech all the bodily after sounds of
+poetic, algebraic, artistic, numismatic, and anatomic ideas. But the
+sounding-board of the body is neither the soul's scale nor its
+harmony. Grief has no resemblance to a tear,--shame, none to the
+cheek-imprisoned blood,--wit, none to champagne,--the idea of this
+valley, none to its portrait on the retina. The inner man, this God,
+hidden in the statue, is not of marble as it is, but in the stony
+limbs, the living ones grow and ripen in an unknown life. We do not
+sufficiently mark how the inner man even tames and forms the outer one;
+how, for example, the passionate body which, according to physiology,
+should ever increase in heat, is gradually cooled and extinguished by
+principles,--how terror, anger, holds the dividing texture of the body
+in a spiritual grasp. When the whole brain is paralyzed, every nerve
+rusty and exhausted, and the soul carrying leaden weights, man needs
+but to <i>will</i> (which he can do every moment), he needs only a letter, a
+striking idea, and the fibre-work of the soul's mechanism proceeds
+again without help from the body.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Wilhelmi said, &quot;Then the soul is but a watch which winds itself.&quot;
+&quot;There must always be some <i>perpetuum mobile</i>,&quot; I said, &quot;for all things
+have moved for an eternity already. The question is, either the soul
+never winds off, or it is its own watchmaker. I return to the subject.
+If a ruptured life-vein in the fourth brain-chamber of a Socrates place
+the whole land of his ideas and moral tendencies in a blood-bath, these
+ideas and moral tendencies will surely be covered with blood-water, but
+not spoilt by it; because not the drowned brains were virtuous and
+wise, but his <i>self</i> was, and because the dependence of a watch on its
+case for protection from dust, &amp;c. does not prove the identity of the
+two, or that the watch consists only of cases. As spiritual exertions
+are not bodily ones, but only <i>precede</i> or <i>follow</i> them; and as every
+spiritual activity leaves traces, not only in the soul, but also in the
+body; must, then, if apoplexy or age destroy corporeal activity,--must
+the soul's fire be therefore quenched? Is there no difference between
+the soul of a <i>childish</i> old man, and that of a <i>child</i>? Must the soul
+of Socrates, imprisoned in Borgia's body as in a mud-bath, lose its
+moral powers, and does it suddenly change its virtuous qualities for
+vicious ones? Or shall in left-handed wedlock (which has no common
+property of body and soul) the one conjugal half only share the gains,
+not also the losses of the other? Shall the ablactated soul feel only
+the blooming, not also the faded body? And if it does, the earth
+surrounding it must, as our earth does to the superior planets, give it
+the reflection of our advancing and retrograding. If we shall ever be
+disembodied, the slow hand of time, that is, ever encroaching age, must
+do it. If our course is not to be concluded in one world, the gulf
+between it and the second must always appear to us a grave. The <i>short</i>
+interruption to our progress by age, and the <i>longer</i> one by death,
+destroy this progress as little as the <i>shortest</i> interruption by
+sleep. We anxiously suppose--as the first man did--the <i>total</i>
+sun-eclipse of sleep to be the <i>night</i> of death, and this again the
+<i>doomsday</i> of the world.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That must yet be proved, although I believe it,&quot; replied Phylax.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">New beauties prevented my answering, and closed the 506th Station.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">(P. S.--I have been told the Chaplain has declared that he had
+purposely not replied to several of my arguments, but he hoped he could
+see them in print, and then he would publish his opinions. But he will
+scarcely live until this letter is printed, and he will answer it.)</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_c507" href="#div1_c507">507th STATION.</a></h2>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc">The Theft of the Souvenir.--Answers to Previous Stations.--On the
+Emigration of the Dead to the Planets.--The Threefold World in
+Man.--Grief without Hope.--The Seal of Immortality.--The
+Country-seat.--The Balloons.--Ecstasy.</span></p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">When it is three o'clock, and a wandering Arcadian council is very well
+but somewhat warm, when the narrowing Adour, which has its source at
+the end of the Valley, flows round a projecting tongue of land, and
+draws its silver gauze cover over the pale moon reposing on its
+breast,<a name="div2Ref_19" href="#div2_19"><sup>[19]</sup></a> when round this
+slip of earth, this flowery anchoring
+place, half water scene, half bowling green, a broadleaved oak arcade
+grows, beneath which trembles a sun-gilt shadow, gliding from between
+the branches of the trees, on to the grass, embroidered by the
+restless, roving, gay-colored sand, on the book of nature--its insects,
+when the hammering in the shining marble blocks, the living Alp-horns,
+the bleating pasture-sheep, and the murmuring of waves fill the heart
+to its topmost branches and up to the brim with life-balsam, and the
+head with life-spirit; and when so many beauties are heard and
+seen,--living beauties who walk are inclined to sit down on the slip of
+earth, after the cushion-carriers have placed their burdens as
+resting-places for their arms.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">My dear Victor! all this came to pass.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">While sitting, long speeches were not as practicable as while walking.
+Even before, when we, from some distance, were choosing this spot for a
+resting-place, they had suffered considerably. I remained on the shore
+near Nadine, whose cheeks, reflected in the shadow-painted waves,
+appeared a charming pale red, as though a cochineal had bled to death
+on them. The walk and her red parasol had been too great colorists.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">My dear brother, I am preparing to fall in love. The operation on the
+wart was unimportant as a corner-piece of vexation, as negative
+electricity; but warts have their good points.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Nadine plucked roses and other flowers. I drew an empty jewel-box from
+my pocket,--it was empty, like the 9th Kurstuhl, the Elias chair,<a name="div2Ref_20" href="#div2_20"><sup>[20]</sup></a>
+or the <i>limbus patrum</i>,--and held it under them, begging her to shake
+the flowers, that I might catch the millipeds,<a name="div2Ref_21" href="#div2_21"><sup>[21]</sup></a>
+which, like tallow
+candles, are more suitable for the eye than the nose. I caught a whole
+germanic diet of these creatures from the fragrant flower-cups, and
+imprisoned them in the box.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">During the flower-toying, which brought us nearer to each other, a
+small cockchafer fell on my skin. I looked round for the flowers and
+could find nothing till I saw, protruding from Nadine's left pocket, a
+souvenir, filled with sweet-smelling herbs. To steal from a beautiful
+woman is often nothing else than to give to her. I thought it
+fit, secretly to take the scented pocket-book in order to make a
+scent-bottle, and a joke of it in future. I so arranged the theft, that
+the Baron perceived my hand, holding the book, retreating from the
+pocket.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The souvenir, thought I, may occasion some scene; meanwhile I can smell
+at it. I indemnified her for the loss of the scent-bag by the
+millipeds, whose prison I immediately insinuated into her pocket. The
+Baron was witness.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Wilhelmi said, when we rose: &quot;In the evening we shall be separated and
+deafened by the carriages. If something has yet to be decided--&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Something?&quot; replied Phylax,--&quot;everything has to be decided. M. Jean
+Paul, you have yet to raise M. Karlson's second difficulty.&quot; &quot;Raise?&quot; I
+asked, &quot;I am to raise the cover of the whole future world? I am but
+going <i>towards</i> it, not coming <i>from</i> it. But this dissimilarity
+between the present and the future world, its inconceivable magnitude,
+has made many apostates. Not the bursting of our bodily doll-skin in
+death, but the wide disparity between the present autumn and the future
+spring, raises such overwhelming doubts in our poor, timid breasts.
+This is shown by the savages, who consider the future life merely as
+the second volume, the new testament of the first, and make no greater
+distinction between the first and second life than between youth and
+age: they easily believe in all their hopes; your <i>first</i> difficulty,
+the bursting and fading of the bodily polish, does not deprive the
+savage of the hope to bud anew in another flower-vase. But your second
+difficulty daily increases itself, and its advocates, for by the
+increasing proofs and apparatus of chemistry and physiology, the future
+world is daily more effectually annihilated and dispersed, as it cannot
+be brought within play of a sun-microscope or of a chemical furnace. In
+fact, not only the reality, but also the theory of the body, not only
+the practised measurement of its longings, but also the pure moral
+philosophy of its spirit-world, must darken and make difficult the
+prospect on the inner world from the outer one. Only the moralist, the
+physiologist, the poet, and the artist more readily comprehend our
+inner world; but the chemist, the physician, and the mathematician want
+both seeing and hearing faculties for it, and in time, even eyes and
+ears.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;On the whole, I find fewer men than one would imagine who decidedly
+believe in, or deny, the existence of a future world. Few dare to deny
+it, as for them this life would then lose all unity, form, peace, and
+hope;--few dare to believe it, for they are startled at their own
+purification and at the destruction of the lessened earth. The
+majority, according to the promptness of alternating feelings, waver
+poetically between both beliefs.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;As we paint Devils more easily than Gods, Furies than Venus Urania,
+Hell than Heaven, we can more easily believe in the former than in the
+latter,--in the greatest misfortune than in the greatest happiness.
+Must not our spirit, used to misgivings and earth chains, be startled
+at a Utopia against which earth will be shipwrecked, that the lilies of
+it, like the Guernsey lilies,<a name="div2Ref_22" href="#div2_22"><sup>[22]</sup></a>
+may find the shore to bloom on, which
+saves and satisfies, elevates and makes blessed, our much tormented
+humanity.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I now come to your difficulty. I imagine, if even we were to take the
+grave to be merely the moat of communication between allied globes, our
+ignorance concerning the second world should not terrify us, and we
+need not take for granted that the mountain ridge of humanity does not
+continue under the Dead Sea, merely because we cannot see through its
+waters, for do not all mountain ridges continue on the bottom of the
+ocean? What! man will guess at <i>worlds</i>, when he cannot even guess
+<i>world-quarters</i>! Would the Greenlander paint a Negro, a Dane, a Greek,
+in his mind's eye, without ever having seen one? Can the political
+genius divine the inner versifications of the poetic one, without
+experience? Can the Abderite imagine the architecture of the sage?
+Would we have guessed the existence of but one of the animal creations
+of Anthropomorphism which copy the human figure in all animals, and yet
+change it? Or could a bodiless self, placed in a vacuum, with all
+existing logic and metaphysic, ever have conceived but a single vein of
+its present embodification and humanification?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But what are you asserting or denying?&quot; asked Wilhelmi.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I only assert that a second life on another planet cannot be denied,
+merely because we are unable to map out the planet, and portray its
+inhabitants. But we need no other planet.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The Baron said: &quot;O, I have often dreamed delicious dreams of this
+'<i>grande tour</i>' through the stars! It seemed the progression of a
+student from one class to another,--the classes being worlds.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But,&quot; replied Karlson, &quot;to all these worlds, as upon our own, you will
+be refused admittance if you arrive without a body. By what miracle
+will you obtain one?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;<i>By a repeated one</i>,&quot; I answered. &quot;For by a miracle we have our
+present body. But we can say in favor of this planet wandering, that
+our eyes too widely separate the worlds of which each one is but an
+<i>element</i> of the infinite <i>integral whole</i>. The different worlds
+and their satellites above and around us, are only far removed
+world-quarters. The moon is but a smaller, more distant America, and
+space is the ocean.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Nadine said: &quot;One day I so pictured the inhabitants of a lemon-tree to
+myself. The worm on the leaf may think it is on the green earth, the
+second worm on the white bud is on the moon, and the one on the lemon
+believes itself to be upon the sun.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;And yet this,&quot; said I, &quot;is but a tree of immeasurable life. As around
+the earth-kernel cling wider and finer covers,--the earth, the seas,
+the air and space,--so the giant of one world is surrounded by
+increasingly large ones, with ever larger arms. The longest shell is
+the finest one, as light and the attractive power. The beauteous
+covering elongates and rarefies itself from iron bands to pearl ties,
+from flower-chains to rainbows and milky-ways.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Will we not now descend from the milky-way,&quot; said Karlson, &quot;for we
+cannot ascend it. It is precisely this uniformity of the universe which
+forbids the rambling of emigrants from the earth. Every planet already
+has its own crew; more dense ones, as for instance Mercury, may be
+peopled with real sailors.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Precisely as Kant supposes!&quot; said Phylax.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Finer, less solid ones, as e. g. Uranus, only with the most tender
+beings, perhaps only with women and nuns who love not the sun. He who
+intends to rectify the so-called soul or spirit by distilling it from
+one planet to the other, may with as much justice assert, that the
+spirits of the slacked Mercury receive their dephlegmation in a
+distilling process through our earth,--in short, that the earth is the
+second world for Mercury and Venus. The dead of the arctic zones could
+even pass into the temperate ones (it would be <i>distillatio per
+latus</i>), for on all planets there can be no other than coarser or finer
+<i>human beings</i><a name="div2Ref_23" href="#div2_23"><sup>[23]</sup></a> like
+ourselves.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Karlson waited for an answer and a contradiction, but I said his
+opinion was also mine. &quot;I have still a stronger reason,&quot; I continued,
+&quot;against emigration to, and voyage picturesque through, the planets,
+because we carry and lock up a heaven of starry light in our own
+breasts, for which no dirty earth-ball is clean or large enough. But on
+this subject I must have permission to speak uninterruptedly, at least
+until we have passed all these cornfields.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Our pleasure-trip now was an alley of magic gardens, our passage
+through a golden sea of corn-blades, was accompanied and surrounded on
+all sides by a promised land, in which solitary houses reposed beneath
+picturesquely grouped leaf groves, as in Italy sleepers take their
+siestas on shaded meads. I was permitted to speak.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;There is an inner, heart-contained spirit-world, which breaks through
+the dark clouds of the body-world as a warm sun. I mean the inner
+universe of <i>virtue</i>, <i>beauty</i>, and <i>truth</i>; three soul-worlds
+and
+heavens, which are neither parts, nor shoots, nor cuttings, nor copies
+of the outer one. We are less astonished at the inexplicable existence
+of these three transcendent heavens, because they are ever floating
+before us, and because we foolishly imagine we <i>create</i> them, while we
+merely <i>recognize</i> them. After which copy, with what plastic material,
+and of what, could we create and insert in ourselves<a name="div2Ref_24" href="#div2_24"><sup>[24]</sup></a>
+this same
+spirit-world? Let the atheist ask himself how he conceived the giant
+ideal of a God, which he either denies or embodies? An idea which has
+not been built upon comparative greatness and degrees, for it is the
+contrary of every measure and of every created greatness. In short, the
+atheist denies the great <i>original</i> of the <i>copy</i>.<a name="div2Ref_25" href="#div2_25"><sup>[25]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;As there are idealists of the outer world who believe that perception
+makes objects, instead of that objects cause perception, so there are
+idealists of the inner world, who deduct the <i>being</i> from the
+<i>seeming</i>, the <i>sound</i> from the <i>echo</i>, the <i>fact</i> from its
+<i>appearance</i>; instead of, on the contrary, the seeming from the being,
+our consciousness from the objects of it. We mistake our power of
+analyzing our inner world, for its preformation, i. e. the genealogist
+thinks himself both originator and founder.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;This inner universe, which is still more glorious and admirable than
+the outer one, needs another heaven than the one above us, and a higher
+world than one a sun now shines upon. Therefore we rightly say, not a
+second earth or globe, but a second <i>world</i>,--another beyond the
+universe.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Gione already interrupted me: &quot;And every virtuous and wise being is in
+himself a proof of immortality.&quot; &quot;And every one,&quot; added Nadine,
+quickly, &quot;who suffers innocently.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, it is that,&quot; said I, with emotion, &quot;which extends our line of
+life through countless ages. The chord of <i>Virtue</i>, <i>Truth</i>, and
+<i>Beauty</i>, taken from the music of the spheres, calls us from this dark
+oppressive earth, and announces to us the nearness of a more melodious
+existence. <i>Why</i>, and <i>from whence</i> were these <i>super-earthly</i>
+wants
+and longings created in us, if only, like swallowed diamonds, slowly to
+cut through our earthy shell. Why was a being endowed with wings of
+light chained to this dirty clump of earth, if it were to rot in its
+birth-clod, without ever being freed from it by means of its ethereal
+wings?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Wilhelmi said, &quot;I also like to dream the dream of a second life in the
+sleep of this first one. But may not our beautiful spiritual powers
+have been given to us for the <i>enjoyment</i> and <i>preservation</i> of the
+present life?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;For its preservation?&quot; I said. &quot;Then an angel has been locked in the
+body to be the mute servant and fire-lighter, butler, cook, and porter
+of the stomach? Would not brutish souls have sufficed to drive
+man-bodies to the fruit-tree and the spring? Shall the pure ethereal
+flame only dry and bake the bodily patent stove with life-warmth, while
+it now slakes and dissolves it? For every tree of knowledge is the
+poison-tree of the body, and every mental refinement a slow-poison
+chalice. But, on the contrary, want is the iron key of freedom, the
+stomach is the manure-filled hot-house or manufactory of human blood,
+and the various animal instincts are but the earthy, soiled steps to
+the Grecian temple of our spiritual elevation.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;For <i>enjoyment</i> you said also. That means, we received the palate and
+appetite of a god, with the food for an animal. That portion of us
+which is of earth, and creeps on worm-folds, may and can, like the
+earthworm, be fed and fattened on earth. Exertion, bodily pain, the
+burning hunger of necessity, and the tumult of our senses exclude and
+choke the spiritual autumn bloom of humanity in nations and classes.
+All these conditions of terrestrial existence must be fulfilled ere the
+soul may claim its due. To the unhappy, therefore, who must be the
+business men and carriers of their bodily wants, the whole inner world
+seems but as an imaginary gilt cobweb, like the man who, breathing only
+the electrical <i>atmosphere</i>, instead of feeling the spark, thinks to
+grasp an invisible web. But when our necessary <i>animal servitude</i> is
+over, when the barking inner dog-kennel is fed, and the dog-fight
+finished, then the inner man demands his nectar and ambrosia, and if he
+is turned off with earth-food only, he changes to an angel of Death,
+and a Hellfiend, driving himself to suicide, or makes of him a
+poison-mixer who destroys all joy.<a name="div2Ref_26" href="#div2_26"><sup>[26]</sup></a>
+The eternal hunger <i>in</i> man, the
+insatiability of his heart, wants not a <i>richer</i>, but a <i>different</i>
+food, fruit, not grass. If our wants referred but to the degree, not to
+the quality, then the imagination, at least, might paint a <i>degree of
+satiety</i>. But imagination cannot make us happy, by showing us
+innumerable heaps of treasures, if they be other than <i>Virtue</i>,
+<i>Truth</i>, and <i>Beauty</i>.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But the more beautiful soul?&quot; asked Nadine. I answered, &quot;This
+discrepancy between our wishes and our circumstances, the heart and the
+earth, will remain, an <i>enigma</i>, if we are immortal, and would be a
+blasphemy if we decay. Ah! how could the beautiful soul be happy?
+Strangers, born on mountains and living in lowland places, pine in an
+incurable homesickness. We belong to a higher place, and therefore an
+eternal longing consumes us, and every music is our soul's Swiss <i>ranz
+des vaches</i>. In the morning of life, the joys which hearken to the
+anxious wishes of our hearts are seen blooming for us in later years.
+When we have attained these years, we turn on the deceitful spot, and
+see behind us, pleasure blooming in the strong hopeful youth, and we
+enjoy instead of our <i>hopes</i>, the <i>recollections of our hopes</i>. Joy in
+this also resembles the rainbow, which in the morning shines over
+evening, and in the evening arches over the east. The <i>eye</i> may reach
+the <i>light</i>, but the arm is short, and holds but the fruit of the
+soil.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;And this proves?&quot; asked the Chaplain.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Not that we are unhappy, but that we are immortal, and that the second
+world in us demands, and proves a second world beyond us. O, how much
+might not be said of this second life whose commencement is so clearly
+shown in the first one, and which so strangely doubles us! Why is
+Virtue too exalted to make us, and, what is more, others (sensually)
+happy? Why does the incapability of being useful on earth (as the
+expression is) increase with a certain higher purity of character, as,
+according to Herschel, there are suns which have no earth? Why is our
+heart tortured, dried, consumed, and at last broken by a slow burning
+fever of ceaseless love for an unattainable object, only alleviated by
+the hope that this <i>consumption</i>, like a physical one, must one day be
+sheltered and raised by the <i>ice cover</i> of death?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No,&quot; said Gione, with more emotion in her eye than in her voice, &quot;it
+is not ice, but lightning. When our heart lies a sacrifice on the
+altar, fire from heaven consumes it as a proof that the offering is
+accepted.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I know not why her calm voice so painfully disturbed my whole soul (not
+only my argument). Even Nadine's eyes, which triumphed over her own
+sorrows, were suffused with tears by her sister's, and, although she is
+generally more timid and fastidious than Gione, in passing a little
+garden, she raised from a projecting hairy potato-stalk, a large moth,
+and showed it to us with a firm mouth, which should have been softened
+by a smile.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">It was the so-called Death's-head. I stroked the flat, drooping wings,
+and said, &quot;It come? from Egypt, the land of mummies and graves; it
+bears a <i>memento mori</i> on its back, and a <i>miserere</i> in its plaintive
+voice.&quot; &quot;In the mean time it is a butterfly, and visits the nectaries,
+which we day-birds will do also,&quot; appropriately observed Wilhelmi; but
+he took the words out of my mouth.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Gione's countenance again expressed thoughtful calmness, and to me she
+became immeasurably beautiful and grand by the stillness of her grief.
+You once said that the female soul, though it be pierced with burning
+shafts, must never beat its wings convulsively together, else, like
+other butterflies, it would destroy their beauty. How true is this!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Nadine's eyes seldom shone without at last overflowing, and every
+sorrowful emotion remained long in her heart, because she tried to
+guard against it. She resembled those springs which take a temperature
+opposed to the time of day, and which are warmest in the cool evening.
+She turned to me and said, putting her hand in her left pocket, &quot;I will
+show you some poetry which will prove your prose.&quot; While she was
+seeking it, she stood still with her companion Wilhelmi. He guessed
+before I did, that she intended to give me something from the Souvenir,
+and when, in its stead, she took the milliped's prison from her pocket,
+he obligingly said, &quot;If not with my hands yet with my eyes I assisted
+at the theft, and as accomplice I beg for mercy.&quot; The serious apology
+for this foolishness scarcely suited our earnest tone of mind. I said,
+&quot;I wished to cause a more useless, than pardonable joke, but I--&quot; She
+did not allow me to conclude, but mildly and unchanged (except by a
+reproving and a forgiving smile) she showed me in the aromatic book the
+noble Karlson's requiem on the death of the exalted Gione. I willingly
+give you the prosaic echo of it, from my prosaic memory.</p>
+
+
+<h3>GRIEF WITHOUT HOPE.</h3>
+<br>
+<p class="normal">What cloud is that, which like the clouds of the tropics, passes from
+morn to eve, and then sets? It is humanity. Is that the magnet-mountain
+covered with the nails of wrecked ships? No, it is the great Earth,
+strewed with the bones of fallen men.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Ah! why did I love? I had not then lost so much!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Nadine, give me thy grief, for it contains hope. Thou standest by thy
+crushed sister, who dissolves even beneath the winding-sheet, and
+lookest upwards to the trembling stars, and thinkest: Above, O dearest
+one, thou dost reside, and on the suns we find again our hearts, and
+the small tears of life will be over.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But mine remain, and burn in the dim eye. My cypress alley is not open,
+and discloses no heaven. Human blood paints the fluid figure called man
+on the monument, as oil on marble forms forests; Death wipes away the
+man, and leaves the stone. O Gione! I would have some consolation, if
+thou wert but far away from us all, on a clouded forest, in a cave of
+the Earth, or on the most distant world in space. But thou art gone,
+thy soul is dead, not only thy life and thy body.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">See, Nadine, on the judgment-seat of Time lies the crushed angel, with
+the death color of the spirit-world. Gione has lost all her virtues,
+her love, her patience, her strength, her all-embracing heart, and her
+rich mind: the thunderbolt of Death has destroyed the diamond, and now
+the wax statue of the body slowly melts beneath the soil.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Serpent of Eternity, quickly take away the beautiful form, as the
+larger serpent first poisons and then devours man. But I, Gione, stand
+beside your ruins with unalleviated pain, with undestroyed soul; and
+grieving, think of you until I also dissolve. And my grief is noble and
+deep, for I have no hope! May thy invisible shadow-picture, like the
+new moon with the sun,<a name="div2Ref_27" href="#div2_27"><sup>[27]</sup></a>
+arise to heaven in my soul! And may the
+creative wheel of Time, which raises innumerable hearts, and fills them
+with blood, only to pour them again into the grave, and let them die,
+pour out my life slowly, for long time would I mourn for thee, thou
+lost one!</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">I cannot tell you, dearest Victor, how horrible and fearful the eternal
+snow of annihilating death seemed to me, placed beside the noble form
+it should have covered; how frightful the thought: if Karlson is right,
+the last day has torn this never happy, innocent soul from the prisons
+upon the earth to the closer ones beneath it: man too often carries his
+errors as his truths only as word arguments, not as feelings. But let
+the disbeliever of immortality imagine a life of sixty minutes instead
+of sixty years, and let him try if he can bear to see loved, noble, or
+wise men only aimless, hour-long air-phantoms, hollow thin shadows
+which fly towards the light and are consumed by it, and who, without
+path, trace, or aim, after a short flight, dissolve into their former
+night. No; even over him steals a supposition of immortality. Else a
+black cloud would forever hang over his soul, and the earth would quake
+beneath him when he trod on it, as if he were a Cain.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I continued, but all arguments were poetized into feelings. &quot;Yes, if
+all forests of this earth were pleasure grottoes, all valleys Campan,
+all islands holy, all fields Elysian, and all eyes sparkling, yes,
+then--no, even then the Eternal One would have given to our souls the
+promise of a future life, even in the blessedness of the present one.
+But now, O God! when so many houses are mourning ones, so many fields
+battle-fields, so many cheeks pale, and when we pass so many sunken,
+red, torn, closed eyes,--O, can death be but the last destroying
+whirlwind? And when at last, after thousand, thousand years, our earth
+is dried up by the sun's heat, and every living sound on its surface
+silenced, will an immortal spirit look down on the silent globe, and,
+gazing on the empty hearse moving slowly on, say: 'There the churchyard
+of humanity flies into the crater of the sun; on that burning heap many
+shadows, and dreamers, and wax-figures, have wept and bled, but now
+they are all melted and consumed: Fly into the sun, which will also
+dissolve thee, thou silent desert with thy swallowed tears, with thy
+dried-up blood!' No, the crushed worm dares raise himself to his
+Creator, and say: 'Thou canst not have made me only to suffer.'&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;And who gives the worm the right to this demand?&quot; asked Karlson.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Gione answered, gently, &quot;The Eternal One himself, who gives us charity
+and who speaks in all our souls to calm us, and who alone has created
+in us our demands to Him and our hope in Him.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">This good sweet word could still not calm all the waves of my excited
+soul. From a distant house, turtle-doves sent after us trembling,
+soul-felt plaints. About my tear-filled inward eye assembled all those
+forms whose hearts were without guilt and without joy,<a name="div2Ref_28" href="#div2_28"><sup>[28]</sup></a>
+who attained
+no single wish here below, and who, sinking under the frost and
+snow-storm of fate, only longed, like persons freezing to death, to
+sleep; and all those forms who have loved too deeply, and lost too
+much, and whose wounds were never cured until death had widened them,
+like a cracked bell which retains its hollow sound until the crevice is
+made larger, and the beings nearest me, and many other female ones,
+whose exquisitely tender souls fate most consecrates to torture, as
+Narcissus is consecrated to the God of Hell. I also remembered your
+true remark, that you had never pronounced the words <i>pain</i> and <i>the
+past</i> before a woman, without hearing an almost inaudible sigh at the
+union of the two words, from the suffering heart; for woman on the
+narrower stage of her plans, with idealized wishes and desires built on
+others' worth, rather than on her own, has a thousand times more
+disappointments to suffer than we men.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The sun sank deeper behind the mountains, and giant shadows, like
+mighty birds of prey, came coldly down upon us from the eternal snow. I
+took Karlson's hand in mine, and looked with tearful eyes into his
+manly, beautiful countenance, and said, &quot;O Karlson! on what a blooming,
+grand world you throw an immeasurable gravestone, which no time can
+lift! Are two difficulties,<a name="div2Ref_29" href="#div2_29"><sup>[29]</sup></a>
+based too on the <i>necessary ignorance</i>
+of man, sufficient to overthrow a belief, which explains thousand
+greater difficulties, without which our existence is without aim, our
+sufferings without explanation, and the holy Trinity in our breast
+three furies, and three terrible contradictions? A tending God's hand,
+leading and feeding the inner man (the child of the outer one),
+teaching him to go and to speak, educating, refining him, is shown in
+all things, from the shapeless earthworm to the brilliant human face,
+from the chaotic nations of the primitive ages to the present century,
+from the first faint pulsation of the invisible heart to its full,
+bold, throbbing pulse in manhood,--and why? That when man stands
+upright and exalted, a beautiful demi-god, even amid the ruins of his
+old body temple, the club of Death may annihilate the demi-god forever?
+And on the eternal sea, on which the least drop throws immeasurable
+rings, on this sea a life-long rising and a life-long falling of the
+soul should have the same termination, namely, the end of all
+things,--annihilation?<a name="div2Ref_30" href="#div2_30"><sup>[30]</sup></a>
+And as, from the same cause, the souls of
+all other worlds must fall and die with ours, and of this shroud and
+crape-veiled immeasurability nothing remain but the ever-sowing and
+never-reaping solitary world-spirit, who sees one eternity mourn for
+another, there can be no aim and no object in the whole spiritual
+universum, for the purpose of the development of succeeding or
+successive ephemera is no progress for the vanished ephemera, scarcely
+even for the last one which can never exist.<a name="div2Ref_31" href="#div2_31"><sup>[31]</sup></a>
+And you take for
+granted all these enigmas and contradictions by which all the strings
+of creation, not only its harmony, are torn, because two difficulties
+present themselves to you, which <i>cannot any better</i> explain mortality
+... Dearest Karlson, you would bring your eternally jarring discord
+into this harmony of the spheres! See how calmly the day goes, how
+grandly the night sets in; did you not think that our spirit will rise
+one day from its grave of ashes, when you saw the mild pale moon rise
+grandly from the crater of Vesuvius?&quot; ... The sun stood on the
+mountains, about to plunge into the sea and swim to the new world.
+Nadine embraced her sister with emotion, and said, &quot;O, we love each
+other forever and immortally, dearest sister.&quot; Karlson accidentally
+touched the chords of the lyre which he carried: Gione took it from him
+with one hand, gave him the other, and said, &quot;You are the only one
+among us who is tormented by this melancholy belief,--and you deserve
+to have one so beautiful!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">This word of concealed love overpowered his long-filled heart, and two
+burning drops fell from the blinded eyes, and the sun gilded the holy
+tears, and he said, looking towards the mountains: &quot;I can bear no
+annihilation but my own,--my whole heart is of your opinion, and my
+head must slowly follow.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I will not again mention a man whom I have blamed so often.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">We now stood before a mansion, the windows of which were silvered, and,
+when it was darker, gilt by girandoles. Aloft over its Italian balcony
+hung two balloons, one at its eastern, the other at its western
+extremity. Without those beautiful globes, the counterpart, as it were,
+of the two glorious ones in heaven, the sun and the moon, I should have
+scarcely paid heed to the scene on earth, in the splendor of the one on
+high.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Dearest friend, how beautiful was the place and the time. Around us,
+in their majesty, reposed the Pyrenees, half robed in night and half
+in day, not stooping, like man, beneath the load of years, but
+erect--forever; and I felt why the great ancients had thought the
+mountains were a breed of giants. On the mountain heads hung wreaths of
+roses cloud-woven; but each time that a star appeared upon the clear,
+deep sea of ether and sparkled on its azure waves, a rose from the
+mountain's chaplet faded and dropped away. The Mittaghorn, alone, like
+a higher spirit, gazed long after the sinking lonely sun, and glowed
+with ecstasy. Down beneath us an amphitheatre of lemon-trees, by its
+perfumes, brought us back to the veiled earth, and made a dusky
+paradise of it. And Gione, in calm rapture, struck the chords of her
+guitar, and softly did Nadine's voice accompany the gliding tones. The
+nightingale in the rose-hedges by the lake awoke, and the plaintive
+tones from its tiny heart pierced deep into the great heart of man; and
+shining glowworms flew from rose-bush to rose-bush, but in the mirror
+of the lake they were but as golden sparks, floating over pale yellow
+flowers. But when we looked again towards the heavens, lo! all its
+stars were gleaming, and in place of rose-woven wreaths, the mountains
+were clad in extinguished rainbows, and the giant of the Pyrenees was
+crowned with stars instead of roses. O my beloved Victor! in this
+moment it was with each of our enraptured souls as if from its
+oppressed heart earth's load had dropped away; as if from her mother's
+arms, the earth were giving us, matured in the Father arms of the
+infinite Creator; as if our little life were over! To ourselves, we
+seemed the immortal, the exalted. We fancied that our speech of man's
+immortality had been the prophecy of our own, as with two great and
+noble men.<a name="div2Ref_32" href="#div2_32"><sup>[32]</sup></a> But though we
+entered the brilliant rooms, the storm of
+new joys could not destroy the old ones. We were not yet able to be
+without the great night around us, and we ascended the platform, that
+from this little throne we might better contemplate the higher throne
+of creation beneath the eternal canopy; although kneeling would have
+been a higher ascension for the moved soul.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">There were night-violets in a glass box, which traced Gione's name in
+blooming colors. I remembered the glowworms and millipeds. I let the
+former fly down upon the rose-bushes in confused star-pictures; with
+the latter I fired Gione's beautiful flower namesake.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Gione looked longingly towards the eastern Mongolfière. Wilhelmi
+understood her. Her soul was as bold as it was calm, she had already
+visited many of the magic caves of earth, and had ascended to the
+summits of the highest Alps; she wished now to rise in the air, and to
+float in the heavens above this beautiful country, and on this
+beauteous night; but the enjoyment of the prospect was not her only
+motive. Wilhelmi asked who should be her companion. Solitude was her
+chief desire. The breadth and depth of the boat under the globe, a
+chair in it, and the cords by which she would be raised and lowered,
+secured the trip from all danger.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Like a celestial being she rose beneath the stars,--the night and the
+height threw a mist over her rising form. A slight zephyr rocked the
+blooming Aurora, and crowned the moving goddess with alternate
+constellations. Now her countenance appeared surrounded by pale
+supernatural rays. It seemed bright as an angel rising towards its
+kindred stars through the rich dark blue space. An unusual tremor
+seized on Wilhelmi and Karlson; it was as if they saw their beloved one
+again carried from them on the wings of the angel of Death.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">When she returned to us her eyes were red with weeping; she had
+ascended, that she might in an unseen moment, shed her old heavy tears
+near the stars. O the Celestial one! She smiled strangely in the
+slumber of this life at higher joys than earthly ones, as sleeping
+children smile when they see Angels.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">It was now impossible to repress my longing for the stars, and my
+petition to be allowed to ascend. Permission to use the western
+Mongolfière was willingly bestowed. Nadine, emboldened by the safe
+return of her sister, and by the companion in the danger, skipped into
+the boat, with her usual impulsive warmth, to refresh her thirsting
+soul with the majestic immeasurability of night.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And now the suns raised us. The heavy earth sank down as the past;
+wings such as man has in happy dreams bore us upwards.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The mighty vacancy and silence of space lay stretched before us even up
+into the stars;--as we rose higher, the dark forests seemed but clouds,
+and snow-girt mountaintops like snow-flakes. The ascending globe bore
+us nearer to the harmless, silent lightning of the moon, in whose
+bright satellite we seemed cradled, and which stood as a calm Elysium
+beneath the heavens, and high above the thick fog air, the light heart
+beating more quickly, seemed to pant with ethereal gladness to have
+left the earth with out discarding its shell covering. Our ascent was
+suddenly arrested--we looked down into the valley, half concealed by
+distance and the darkness of the night. Only the lights from the
+mansion were visible to us,--a western cloud hung like a white fog
+before us, and a black eagle flew like an angel of death from the east
+through the cloud pillar, seeking its summit, and a cool breeze
+playfully drew us towards the mist-island. The evening red had already
+passed the earth at midnight, and wandered over charming France as its
+future Aurora. O, how the soul was raised towards the stars, and how
+lightly did our hearts beat above the earth!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But now from the bright mansion arose sweet harmony, and the subdued
+echo of the voices of our beloved ones calling upon us. And when Nadine
+looked down, her lonely heart broke with longing after those dear ones;
+and when she glanced into the silvered valley, over which the moon had
+risen, and where the trembling waterfalls danced beside the flowing
+archings of the stream and the green marble caves, and the white paths
+between poplars and wheat-ears, and the whole enchanting path of our
+day's journey lay silvered beneath her inconstant rays,--bright,
+shining tears flowed unrestrained from her mild eyes, and she looked
+imploringly to me, as if begging for consideration and secrecy, and
+said expressively, &quot;We are yet so far from the cruel earth.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">When our little globe was drawn back to the shining meadows and the
+merry music, she looked inquiringly at me, to ask if the traces of
+tears yet remained in her eyes. She dried them more quickly, but in
+vain. Silently we descended; I took her burning hand in mine, and
+looked into her weeping eyes, but could not speak.... --And how could I
+speak better now, dearest friend!</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>LIFE</h2>
+<br>
+<h5>OF</h5>
+<br>
+<h1><a name="div1Ref_fixlein" href="#div1_fixlein"><span class="sc">Quintus Fixlein</span>.</a></h1>
+<br>
+<h5>EXTRACTED FROM</h5>
+<br>
+<h3>FIFTEEN LETTER-BOXES.</h3>
+<br>
+<h4>TRANSLATED BY THOMAS CARLYLE.</h4>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_letter" href="#div1_letter">LETTER TO MY FRIENDS,</a></h2>
+<h3>INSTEAD OF PREFACE.</h3>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">Merchants, Authors, young Ladies, and Quakers, call all persons, with
+whom they have any business, Friends; and my readers accordingly are my
+table and college Friends. Now, at this time, I am about presenting so
+many hundred Friends with just as many hundred gratis copies; and my
+Bookseller has orders to supply each on request, after the Fair, with
+his copy--in return for a trifling consideration and <i>don gratuit</i> to
+printers, pressmen, and other such persons. But as I could not, like
+the French authors, send the whole Edition to the binder, the blank
+leaf in front was necessarily wanting; and thus to write a
+complimentary word or two upon it was out of my power. I have therefore
+caused a few white leaves to be inserted directly after the title-page;
+on these we are now printing.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">My Book contains the Life of a Schoolmaster, extracted and compiled
+from various public and private documents. With this Biography, dear
+Friends, it is the purpose of the Author not so much to procure you a
+pleasure as to teach you how to enjoy one. In truth, King Xerxes should
+have offered his prize-medals, not for the invention of new pleasures,
+but for a good methodology and directory to use the old ones.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Of ways for becoming happier (not happy) I could never inquire out more
+than three. The first, rather an elevated road, is this: to soar away
+so far above the clouds of life, that you see the whole external world,
+with its wolf-dens, charnel-houses, and thunder-rods, lying far down
+beneath you, shrunk into a little child's garden. The second is: simply
+to sink down into this little garden; and there to nestle yourself so
+snugly, so homewise, in some furrow, that, in looking out from your
+warm lark-nest, you likewise can discern no wolf-dens, charnel-houses,
+or thunder-rods, but only blades and ears, every one of which, for the
+nest-bird, is a tree, and a sun-screen, and a rain-screen. The third,
+finally, which I look upon as the hardest and cunningest, is that of
+alternating between the other two.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">This I shall now satisfactorily expound to men at large.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The Hero, the Reformer, your Brutus, your Howard, your Republican, he
+whom civic storm, or genius poetic storm, impels; in short, every
+mortal with a great Purpose, or even a perennial Passion (were it but
+that of writing the largest folios); all these men fence themselves in
+by their internal world against the frosts and heats of the external,
+as the madman in a worse sense does; every <i>fixed</i> idea, such as rules
+every genius, every enthusiast, at least periodically, separates and
+elevates a man above the bed and board of this Earth, above its
+Dog's-grottoes, buckthorns, and Devil's-walls; like the Bird of
+Paradise, he slumbers flying; and, on his outspread pinions, oversleeps
+unconsciously the earthquakes and conflagrations of Life, in his long,
+fair dream of his ideal Mother-land.--Alas! To few is this dream
+granted; and these few are so often awakened by Flying Dogs!<a name="div2Ref_33" href="#div2_33"><sup>[33]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p class="normal">This skyward track, however, is fit only for the winged portion of the
+human species, for the smallest. What can it profit poor quill-driving
+brethren, whose souls have not even wing-shells, to say nothing of
+wings? Or these tethered persons with the best back, breast, and
+neck-fins, who float motionless in the wicker Fish-box of the State,
+and are not allowed to swim, because the Box or State, long ago tied to
+the shore, itself swims in the name of the Fishes? To the whole
+standing and writing host of heavy-laden State-domestics, Purveyors,
+Clerks of all departments, and all the lobsters packed together heels
+over head into the Lobster-basket of the Government office-rooms, and
+for refreshments, sprinkled over with a few nettles; to these persons,
+what way of becoming happy <i>here</i> can I possibly point out?</p>
+
+<p class="normal">My <i>second</i> merely; and that is as follows: to take a compound
+microscope, and with it to discover, and convince themselves, that
+their drop of Burgundy is properly a Red Sea, that butterfly-dust is
+peacock-feathers, mouldiness a flowery-field, and sand a heap of
+jewels. These microscopic recreations are more lasting than all
+costly watering-place recreations.--But I must explain these metaphors
+by new ones. The purpose for which I have sent <i>Fixlein's Life</i>
+into the Messrs. Lübeks' Warehouse, is simply that in this same
+<i>Life</i>--therefore in this Preface it is less needful--I may show to the
+whole Earth that we ought to value little joys more than great ones, the
+night-gown more than the dress-coat; that Plutus's heaps are worth less
+than his handfuls, the plum than the penny for a rainy day; and that
+not great, but little good-haps can make us happy.--Can I accomplish
+this, I shall, through means of my Book, bring up for Posterity a race
+of men finding refreshment in all things; in the warmth of their rooms
+and of their night-caps; in their pillows; in the three High Festivals;
+in mere Apostles' days; in the Evening Moral Tales of their wives, when
+these gentle persons have been forth as ambassadresses visiting some
+Dowager Residence, whither the husband could not be persuaded; in the
+bloodletting-day of these their newsbringers; in the day of
+slaughtering, salting, potting against the rigor of grim winter; and in
+all such days. You perceive, my drift is, that man must become a little
+Tailor-bird, which, not amid the crashing boughs of the storm-tost,
+roaring, immeasurable tree of Life, but on one of its leaves, sews
+itself a nest together, and there lies snug. The most essential sermon
+one could preach to our century were a sermon on the duty of staying at
+home.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The <i>third</i> skyward road is the alternation between the other two. The
+foregoing <i>second</i> way is not good enough for man, who here on Earth
+should take into his hand not the Sickle only, but also the Plough. The
+<i>first</i> is too good for him. He has not always the force, like
+Rugendas, in the midst of the Battle to compose Battle-pieces; and,
+like Backhuisen in the Shipwreck, to clutch at no board but the
+drawing-board to paint it on. And then his pains are not less lasting
+than his <i>fatigues</i>. Still oftener is Strength denied its Arena; it is
+but the smallest portion of life that, to a working soul, offers Alps,
+Revolutions, Rhine-falls, Worms Diets, and Wars with Xerxes; and for
+the whole it is better so; the longer portion of life is a field beaten
+flat as a threshing-floor, without lofty Gothard Mountains; often it is
+a tedious ice-field, without a single glacier tinged with dawn.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But even by walking, a man rests and recovers himself for climbing; by
+little joys and duties, for great. The victorious Dictator must
+contrive to plough down his battle Mars-field into a flax and carrot
+field; to transform his theatre of war into a parlor theatre, on which
+his children may enact some good pieces from the <i>Children's Friend</i>.
+Can he accomplish this, can he turn so softly from the path of poetical
+happiness into that of household happiness,--then is he little
+different from myself, who even now, though modesty might forbid me to
+disclose it--who even now, I say, amid the creation of this Letter,
+have been enabled to reflect, that, when it is done, so also will the
+Roses and Elder-berries of pastry be done, which a sure hand is
+seething in butter for the Author of this Work.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">As I purpose appending to this Letter a Postscript (at the end of the
+Book), I reserve somewhat which I had to say about the Third<a name="div2Ref_34" href="#div2_34"><sup>[34]</sup></a>
+half-satirical, half-philosophical part of the Work till that
+opportunity.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Here, out of respect for the rights of a Letter, the Author drops his
+half anonymity,<a name="div2Ref_35" href="#div2_35"><sup>[35]</sup></a> and for
+the first time subscribes himself with his
+whole true name,</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="sc">Jean Paul Friedrich Richter</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="normal"><i>Hof in Voigtland, 29th June</i>, 1795.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>LIFE OF QUINTUS FIXLEIN,</h2>
+<h4>DOWN TO OUR OWN TIMES.</h4>
+<h3>IN FIFTEEN LETTER-BOXES.</h3>
+<br>
+
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_lb01" href="#div1_lb01">FIRST LETTER-BOX.</a></h2>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="sc">Dog-days' Vacation.--Visits.--An Indigent of Quality</span>.</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">EGIDIUS ZEBDÄUS FIXLEIN had just for eight days been Quintus,<a name="div2Ref_36" href="#div2_36"><sup>[36]</sup></a>
+and
+fairly commenced teaching duties, when Fortune tabled out for him four
+refreshing courses and collations, besprinkled with flowers and sugar.
+These were the four canicular weeks. I could find in my heart, at this
+hour, to pat the cranium of that good man who invented the Dog-days'
+Vacation. I never go to walk in that season, without thinking how a
+thousand down-pressed pedagogic persons are now erecting themselves in
+the open air; and the stiff knapsack is lying unbuckled at their feet,
+and they can seek whatsoever their soul desires; butterflies,--or roots
+of numbers,--or roots of words,--or herbs,--or their native villages.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The last did our Fixlein. He moved not, however, till Sunday,--for you
+like to know how holidays taste in the city; and then, in company with
+his Shock and a Quintaner, or Fifth-Form boy, who carried his Green
+nightgown, he issued through the gate in the morning. The dew was still
+lying; and as he reached the back of the gardens, the children of the
+Orphan Hospital were uplifting with clear voices their morning hymn.
+The city was Flachsenfingen, the village Hukelum, the dog Schil, and
+the year of Grace 1791.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Manikin,&quot; said he, to the Quintaner, for he liked to speak, as Love,
+children, and the people of Vienna do, in diminutives, &quot;Manikin, give
+me the bundle to the village; run about, and seek thee a little
+bird, as thou art thyself, and so have something to pet too in
+vacation-time.&quot; For the manikin was at once his page, lackey,
+room-comrade, train-bearer, and gentleman in waiting; and the Shock
+also was his manikin.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He stept slowly along, through the crisped cole-beds, overlaid with
+colored beads of dew; and looked at the bushes, out of which, when the
+morning wind bent them asunder, there seemed to start a flight of
+jewel-colibri, so brightly did they glitter. From time to time he
+drew the bell-rope of his--whistle, that the manikin might, not skip
+away too far; and he shortened his league and half of road, by
+measuring it not in leagues, but in villages. It is more pleasant for
+pedestrians--for geographers it is not--to count by wersts than by
+miles. In walking, our Quintus furthermore got by heart the few fields
+on which the grain was already reaped.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But now roam slower, Fixlein, through His Lordship's garden of Hukelum;
+not, indeed, lest thy coat sweep away any tulip-stamina, but that thy
+good mother may have time to lay her Cupid's-band of black taffeta
+about her smooth brow. I am grieved to think my fair readers take it
+ill of her, that she means first to iron this same band; they cannot
+know that she has no maid; and that to-day the whole Preceptorial
+dinner--the money purveyances the guest has made over to her three days
+before--is to be arranged and prepared by herself, without the aid of
+any Mistress of the Household whatever; for indeed she belongs to the
+<i>Tiers État</i>, being neither more nor less than a gardener's widow.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">You can figure how this true, warm-hearted mother may have lain in wait
+all morning for her Schoolman, whom she loved as the apple of her eye;
+since, on the whole populous Earth, she had not (her first son, as well
+as her husband, was dead) any other for her soul, which indeed
+overflowed with love; not any other but her Zebedäus. Could she ever
+tell you aught about him, I mean aught joyful, without ten times wiping
+her eyes? Nay, did she not once divide her solitary Kirmes (or
+Churchale) cake between two mendicant students, because she thought
+Heaven would punish her for so feasting, while her boy in Leipzig had
+nothing to feast on, and must pass the cake-garden like other gardens,
+merely smelling at it?</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Dickens! Thou already, Zebedäus!&quot; said the mother, giving an
+embarrassed smile, to keep from weeping, as the son, who had ducked
+past the window, and crossed the grassy threshold without knocking,
+suddenly entered. For joy she forgot to put the heater into the
+smoothing-iron, as her illustrious scholar, amid the loud boiling of
+the soup, tenderly kissed her brow, and even said Mamma; a name
+which lighted on her breast like downy silk. All the windows were open;
+and the garden, with its flower-essences, and bird-music, and
+butterfly-collections, was almost half within the room. But I
+suppose I have not yet mentioned that the little garden-house, rather a
+chamber than a house, was situated on the western cape of the Castle
+garden. The owner had graciously allowed the widow to retain this
+dowager-mansion; as indeed the mansion would otherwise have stood
+empty, for he now kept no gardener.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But Fixlein, in spite of his joy, could not stay long with her; being
+bound for the Church, which, to his spiritual appetite, was at all
+times a king's kitchen; a mother's. A sermon pleased him simply because
+it was a sermon, and because he himself had once preached one. The
+mother was contented he should go; these good women think they enjoy
+their guests, if they can only give them aught to enjoy.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In the choir, this Free-haven and Ethnic Forecourt of stranger
+church-goers, he smiled on all parishioners; and, as in his childhood,
+standing under the wooden wing of an archangel, he looked down on the
+coifed <i>parterre</i>. His young years now enclosed him like children in
+their smiling circle; and a long garland wound itself in rings among
+them, and by fits they plucked flowers from it, and threw them in his
+face. Was it not old Senior Astman that stood there on the pulpit
+Parnassus, the man by whom he had been so often flogged, while
+acquiring Greek with him from a grammar written in Latin, which he
+could not explain, yet was forced to walk by the light of? Stood there
+not behind the pulpit-stairs the sacristy-cabin, and in this was there
+not a church-library of consequence--no school-boy could have buckled
+it wholly in his book-strap--lying under the minever cover of pastil
+dust? And did it not consist of the Polyglot in folio, which he,
+spurred on by Pfeiffer's <i>Critica Sacra</i>, had turned up leaf by leaf,
+in his early years, excerpting therefrom the <i>literæ inversæ majusculæ
+minusculæ</i>, and so forth, with an immensity of toil? And could he not
+at present, the sooner the more readily, have wished to cast this
+alphabetic soft-fodder into the Hebrew letter-trough, whereto your
+Oriental Rhizophagi (Rooteaters) are tied, especially as here they get
+so little vowel hard-fodder to keep them in heart?--Stood there not
+close by him the organ-stool, the throne to which, every Apostle-day,
+the Schoolmaster had by three nods elevated him, thence to fetch down
+the sacred hyssop, the sprinkler of the Church?</p>
+
+<p class="normal">My readers themselves will gather spirits when they now hear that our
+Quintus, during the outshaking of the poor-bag, was invited by the
+Senior to come over in the afternoon; and to them it will be little
+less gratifying than if he had invited themselves. But what will they
+say, when they get home with him to mother and dinner-table, both
+already clad in their white Sunday dress; and behold the large cake
+which Fräulein Thiennette (Stephanie) has rolled from her peel? In the
+first place, however, they will wish to know who <i>she</i> is.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She is,--for if (according to Lessing), in the very excellence of the
+Iliad, we neglect the personalities of its author; the same thing will
+apply to the fate of several authors, for instance, to my own; but an
+authoress of cakes must not be forgotten in the excellence of her
+baking,--Thiennette is a poor, indigent, insolvent young lady; has not
+much, except years, of which she counts five-and-twenty; no near
+relations living now; no acquirements (for in literature she does not
+even know <i>Werter</i>) except economical; reads no books, not even mine;
+inhabits, that is, watches like a wardeness, quite alone, the thirteen
+void, disfurnished chambers of the Castle of Hukelum, which belongs to
+the Dragoon Rittmeister Aufhammer, at present resident in his other
+mansion of Schadeck; on occasion, she commands and feeds his soccagers
+and handmaids; and can write herself By the grace of God--which, in the
+thirteenth century, the country nobles did as well as princes,--for she
+lives by the grace of man, at least of woman, the Lady Rittmeisterinn
+Aufhammer's grace, who, at all times, blesses those vassals whom her
+husband curses. But, in the breast of the orphaned Thiennette, lay a
+sugared marchpane heart, which, for very love, you could have devoured;
+her fate was hard, but her soul was soft; she was modest, courteous,
+and timid, but too much so;--cheerfully and coldly she received the
+most cutting humiliations in Schadeck, and felt no pain, and not till
+some days after did she see it all clearly, and then these cuts began
+sharply to bleed, and she wept in her loneliness over her lot.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">It is hard for me to give a light tone, after this deep one, and to
+add, that Fixlein had been almost brought up beside her, and that she,
+his school-moiety over with the Senior, while the latter was training
+him for the dignities of the Third Form, had learned the <i>Verba
+Anomala</i> along with him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The Achilles'-shield of the cake, jagged and embossed with carved work
+of brown scales, was whirling round in the Quintus like a swing-wheel
+of hungry and thankful ideas. Of that philosophy which despises eating,
+and of that high breeding which wastes it, he had not so much about him
+as belongs to the ungratefulness of such cultivated persons; but for
+his platter of meat, for his dinner of herbs, he could never give
+thanks enough.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Innocent and contented, the quadruple dinner-party--for the Shock with
+his cover under the stove cannot be omitted--now began their Feast of
+Sweet Bread, their Feast of Honor for Thiennette, their Grove-feast in
+the garden. It may truly be a subject of wonder how a man who has not,
+like the King of France, four hundred and forty-eight persons (the
+hundred and sixty-one <i>Garçons de la Maisonbouche</i> I do not reckon) in
+his kitchen, nor a <i>Fruiterie</i> of thirty-one human bipeds, nor a
+Pastry-cookery of three-and-twenty, nor a daily expenditure of 387
+Livres 21 Sous,--how such a man, I say, can eat with any satisfaction.
+Nevertheless, to me, a cooking mother is as dear as a whole royal
+cooking household, given rather to feed upon me than to feed me.--The
+most precious fragments which the Biographer and the World can
+gather from this meal consist of here and there an edifying piece of
+table-talk. The mother had much to tell. Thiennette is this night, she
+mentions, for the first time, to put on her morning promenade-dress of
+white muslin, as also a satin girdle and steel buckle; but, adds she,
+it will not sit her; as the Rittmeisterinn (for this lady used to hang
+her cast clothes on Thiennette, as Catholics do their cast crutches and
+sores on their patron Saints) was much thicker. Good women grudge each
+other nothing save only clothes, husbands, and flax. In the fancy of
+the Quintus, by virtue of this apparel, a pair of angel pinions were
+sprouting forth from the shoulder-blades of Thiennette; for him a
+garment was a sort of hollow half-man, to whom only the nobler parts
+and the first principles were wanting; he honored these wrappages and
+hulls of our interior, not as an Elegant, or a Critic of Beauty, but
+because it was not possible for him to despise aught which he saw
+others honoring. Further, the good mother read to him, as it were, the
+monumental inscription of his father, who had sunk into the arms of
+Death in the thirty-second year of his age, from a cause which I
+explain not here, but in a future Letter-box, having too much affection
+for the reader. Our Quintus could not sate himself with hearing of his
+father.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The fairest piece of news was, that Fräulein Thiennette had sent word
+to-day, &quot;he might visit Her Ladyship to-morrow, as My Lord, his
+godfather, was to be absent in town.&quot; This, however, I must explain.
+Old Aufhammer was called <i>Egidius</i>, and was Fixlein's godfather; but
+he--though the Rittmeisterinn duly covered the cradle of the child with
+nightly offerings, with flesh-tithes and grain-tithes--had frugally
+made him no christening present, except that of his name, which
+proved to be the very balefullest. For, our <i>Egidius</i> Fixlein, with his
+Shock, which, by reason of the French convulsions, had, in company with
+other emigrants, run off from Nantes, was but lately returned from
+college--when he and his dog, as ill-luck would have it, went to walk
+in the Hukelum wood. Now, as the Quintus was ever and anon crying out
+to his attendant: &quot;Coosh, Schil&quot; (<i>Couche Gilles</i>), it must apparently
+have been the Devil that had just then planted the Lord of Aufhammer
+among the trees and bushes in such a way, that this whole travestying
+and docking of his name--for Gilles means Egidius--must fall directly
+into his ear. Fixlein could neither speak French, nor any offence to
+mortal; he knew not head or tail of what <i>couche</i> signified; a word,
+which, in Paris, even the plebeian dogs are now in the habit of saying
+to their <i>valets de chiens</i>. But there were three things which Von
+Aufhammer never recalled,--his error, his anger, and his word. The
+provokee, therefore, determined that the plebeian provoker and
+honor-stealer should never more speak to him, or--get a doit from him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I return. After dinner he gazed out of the little window into the
+garden, and saw his path of life dividing into four branches, leading
+towards just as many skyward Ascensions; towards the Ascension into the
+Parsonage, and that into the Castle to Thiennette, for this day; and
+towards the third into Schadeck for the morrow; and lastly, into every
+house in Hukelum as the fourth. And now, when the mother had long
+enough kept cheerfully gliding about on tiptoe, &quot;not to disturb him in
+studying his Latin Bible&quot; (the <i>Vulgata</i>), that is, in reading the
+<i>Litteraturzeitung</i>, he at last rose to his own feet; and the humble
+joy of the mother ran long after the courageous son, who dared to go
+forth and speak to a Senior, quite unappalled. Yet it was not without
+reverence that he entered the dwelling of his old, rather gray than
+bald-headed, teacher, who was not only Virtue itself, but also Hunger,
+eating frequently, and with the appetite of Pharaoh's lean kine. A
+schoolman that expects to become a professor will scarcely deign to
+cast an eye on a pastor; but one who is himself looking up to a
+parsonage as to his working-house and breeding-house, knows how to
+value such a character. The new parsonage--as if it had, like a <i>Casa
+Santa</i>, come flying out of Erlang, or the Berlin Friedrichs-strasse,
+and alighted in Hukelum--was for the Quintus a Temple of the Sun, and
+the Senior a Priest of the Sun. To be Parson there himself was a
+thought overlaid with virgin honey; such a thought as occurs but one
+other time in History, namely, in the head of Hannibal, when he
+projected stepping over the Alps, that is to say, over the threshold of
+Rome.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The landlord and his guest formed an excellent <i>bureau d'esprit</i>;
+people of office, especially of the same office, have more to tell each
+other, namely, their own history, than your idle May-chafers and
+Court-celestials, who must speak only of other people's.--The Senior
+made a soft transition from his iron-ware (in the stable furniture), to
+the golden age of his Academic life, of which such people like as much
+to think, as poets do of their childhood. So good as he was, he still
+half joyfully recollected that he had once been less so; but joyful
+remembrances of wrong actions are their half repetition, as repentant
+remembrances of good ones are their half abolishment.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Courteously and kindly did Zebedäus (who could not even enter in his
+Notebook the name of a person of quality without writing an H. for Herr
+before it) listen to the Academic Saturnalia of the old gentleman, who
+in Wittenberg had toped as well as written, and thirsted not more for
+the Hippocrene than for Gukguk.<a name="div2Ref_37" href="#div2_37"><sup>[37]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p class="normal">Herr Jerusalem has observed that the barbarism, which often springs up
+close on the brightest efflorescence of the sciences, is a sort of
+strengthening mud-bath, good for averting the over-refinement wherewith
+such efflorescence always threatens us. I believe that a man who
+considers how high the sciences have mounted with our upper
+classes,--for instance with every Patrician's son in Nürnberg, to whom
+the public must present 1000 florins for studying with,--I believe that
+such a man will not grudge the Son of the Muses a certain barbarous
+Middle-age (the Burschen or Student Life, as it is called), which may
+again so case-harden him that his refinement shall not go beyond the
+limits. The Senior, while in Wittenberg, had protected the one hundred
+and eighty Academic Freedoms--so many of them has Petrus Rebuffus
+summed up<a name="div2Ref_38" href="#div2_38"><sup>[38]</sup></a>--against
+prescription, and lost none except his moral
+one, of which truly a man, even in a convent, can seldom make much.
+This gave our Quintus courage to relate certain pleasant somersets of
+his own, which at Leipzig, under the Incubus-pressure of poverty, he
+had contrived to execute. Let us hear him. His landlord, who was at the
+same time Professor and Miser, maintained in his enclosed court a whole
+community of hens. Fixlein, in company with three room-mates, without
+difficulty mastered the rent of a chamber, or closet. In general their
+main equipments, like Ph[oe]nixes, existed but in the singular number:
+one bed, in which always the one pair slept before midnight, the other
+after midnight, like nocturnal watchmen; one coat, in which one after
+the other they appeared in public, and which, like a watch-coat, was
+the national uniform of the company; and several other <i>ones</i>,
+Unities both of Interest and Place. Nowhere can you collect the
+stress-memorials and siege-medals of Poverty more pleasantly and
+philosophically than at College; the Academic burgher exhibits to us
+how many humorists and Diogeneses Germany has in it. Our Unitarians had
+just one thing four times, and that was hunger. The Quintus related,
+perhaps with a too pleasurable enjoyment of the recollection, how one
+of this famishing <i>coro</i> invented means of appropriating the
+Professor's hens as just tribute, or subsidies. He said (he was a
+Jurist), they must once for all borrow a legal fiction from the Feudal
+code, and look on the Professor as the soccage tenant, to whom the
+usufruct of the hen-yard and hen-house belonged; but on themselves as
+the feudal superiors of the same, to whom accordingly the vassal was
+bound to pay his feudal dues. And now, that the Fiction might follow
+Nature, continued he--&quot;<i>fictio sequitur naturam</i>,&quot;--it behooved them to
+lay hold of said Yule-hens, by direct personal distraint. But into the
+court-yard there was no getting. The feudalist, therefore, prepared a
+fishing-line; stuck a bread-pill on the hook, and lowered his
+fishing-tackle, anglewise, down into the court. In a few seconds the
+barb stuck in a hen's throat, and the hen, now communicating with its
+feudal superior, could silently, like ships by Archimedes, be heaved
+aloft to the hungry air-fishing society, where, according to
+circumstances, the proper feudal name and title of possession failed
+not to be awaiting her; for the updrawn fowls were now denominated
+Christmas-fowls, now Forest-hens, Bailiff-hens, Pentecost and
+Summer-hens. &quot;I begin,&quot; said the angling lord of the manor, &quot;with
+taking <i>Rutcher-dues</i>, for so we call the triple and quintuple of the
+original quitrent, when the vassal, as is the case here, has long
+neglected payment.&quot; The Professor, like any other prince, observed with
+sorrow the decreasing population of his hen-yard, for his subjects,
+like the Hebrews, were dying by enumeration. At last he had the
+happiness, while reading his lecture--he was just come to the subject
+of <i>Forest Salt and Coin Regalities</i>--to descry through the window of
+his auditorium a quitrent hen suspended, like Ignatius Loyola in
+prayer, or Juno in her punishment, in middle-air. He followed the
+incomprehensible direct ascension of the aeronautic animal, and
+at last descried at the upper window the attracting artist, and
+animal-magnetizer, who had drawn his lot for dinner from the hen-yard
+below. Contrary to all expectation, he terminated this fowling sport
+sooner than his Lecture on Regalities.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Fixlein walked home, amid the vesperal melodies of the steeple
+sounding-holes; and by the road courteously took off his hat before the
+empty windows of the Castle. Houses of quality were to him like persons
+of quality, as in India the Pagoda at once represents the temple and
+the god. To the mother he brought feigned compliments, which she repaid
+with authentic ones; for this afternoon she had been over, with
+her historical tongue and nature-interrogating eye, visiting the
+white-muslin Thiennette. The mother was wont to show her every
+spare-penny which he dropped into her large empty purse, and so raise
+him in the good graces of the Fräulein; for women feel their hearts
+much more attracted towards a son, who tenderly reserves for a mother
+some of their benefits, than we do to a daughter anxiously caring for
+her father; perhaps from a hundred causes, and this among the rest,
+that in their experience of sons and husbands they are more used to
+find these persons mere six-feet thunder-clouds, forked waterspouts, or
+even reposing tornadoes.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Blessed Quintus! on whose Life this other distinction, like an order of
+nobility, does also shine, that thou canst tell it over to thy mother;
+as, for example, this past afternoon in the parsonage. Thy joy flows
+into another heart, and streams back from it, redoubled, into thy own.
+There is a closer approximating of hearts, and also of sounds, than
+that of the <i>Echo</i>; the highest approximation melts Tone and Echo into
+<i>Resonance</i> together.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">It is historically certain that both of them supped this evening; and
+that instead of the whole dinner fragments which to-morrow might
+themselves represent a dinner, nothing but the cake-offering or pudding
+was laid upon the altar of the table. The mother, who for her own child
+would willingly have neglected not herself only, but all other people,
+now made a motion that to the Quintaner, who was sporting out of doors
+and baiting a bird instead of himself, there should no crumb of the
+precious pastry be given, but only table-bread without the crust. But
+the Schoolman had a Christian disposition, and said that it was Sunday,
+and the young man liked something delicate to eat as well as he.
+Fixlein--the counterpart of great men and geniuses--was inclined to
+treat, to gift, to gratify a serving housemate, rather than a man who
+is for the first time passing through the gate, and at the next
+post-stage will forget both his hospitable landlord and the last
+postmaster. On the whole, our Quintus had a touch of honor in him, and
+notwithstanding his thrift and sacred regard for money, he willingly
+gave it away in cases of honor, and unwillingly in cases of
+overpowering sympathy, which too painfully filled the cavities of his
+heart, and emptied those of his purse. Whilst the Quintaner was
+exercising the <i>jus compascui</i> on the cake, and six arms were
+peacefully resting on Thiennette's free-table, Fixlein read to himself
+and the company the Flachsenfingen Address-calendar; any higher thing,
+except Meusel's <i>Gelehrtes Deutschland</i>,<a name="div2Ref_39" href="#div2_39"><sup>[39]</sup></a>
+he could not figure; the
+Kammerherrs and Raths of the Calendar went tickling over his tongue
+like the raisins of the cake; and of the more rich church-livings he,
+by reading, as it were levied a tithe.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He purposely remained his own Edition in Sunday Wove-paper; I mean, he
+did not lay away his Sunday coat, even when the Prayer-bell tolled; for
+he had still much to do.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">After supper he was just about visiting the Fräulein, when he descried
+her in person, like a lily dipped in the red twilight, in the Castle
+garden, whose western limit his house constituted, the southern one
+being the Chinese wall of the Castle.... By the way, how I got to the
+knowledge of all this, what Letter-boxes are, whether I myself was ever
+there, &amp;c., &amp;c.--the whole of this shall, upon my life, be soon and
+faithfully communicated to the reader, and that too in the present
+Book.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Fixlein hopped forth like a Will-o'-wisp into the garden, whose
+flower-perfume was mingling with his supper-perfume. No one bowed
+lower to a nobleman than he, not out of plebeian servility, nor of
+self-interested cringing, but because he thought &quot;a nobleman was a
+nobleman.&quot; But in this case his bow, instead of falling forwards, fell
+obliquely to the right, as it were after his hat; for he had not risked
+taking a stick with him; and hat and stick were his proppage and
+balance-wheel, in short, his bowing-gear, without which it was out of
+his power to produce any courtly bow, had you offered him the High
+Church of Hamburg for so doing. Thiennette's mirthfulness soon unfolded
+his crumpled soul into straight form, and into the proper tone. He
+delivered her a long, neat Thanksgiving and Harvest sermon for the
+scaly cake; which appeared to her at once kind and tedious. Young women
+without the polish of high life reckon tedious pedantry, merely like
+snuffing, one of the necessary ingredients of a man; they reverence us
+infinitely; and as Lambert could never speak to the King of Prussia, by
+reason of his sun-eyes, except in the dark, so they, I believe, often
+like better--also by reason of our sublime air--if they can catch us in
+the dark too. <i>Him</i> Thiennette edified by the Imperial History of Herr
+von Aufhammer and Her Ladyship his spouse, who meant to put him, the
+Quintus, in her will; <i>her</i> he edified by his Literary History, as
+relating to himself and the Subrector; how, for instance, he was at
+present vicariating in the Second Form, and ruling over scholars as
+long in stature as himself. And thus did the two in happiness, among
+red bean-blossoms, red May-chafers, before the red of the twilight
+burning lower and lower on the horizon, walk to and fro in the garden;
+and turn always with a smile as they approached the head of the ancient
+gardeneress, standing like a window-bust through the little lattice,
+which opened in the bottom of a larger one.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">To me it is incomprehensible he did not fall in love. I know his
+reasons, indeed. In the first place, she had nothing; secondly, he had
+nothing, and school-debts to boot; thirdly, her genealogical tree was a
+boundary tree and warning-post; fourthly, his hands were tied up by
+another nobler thought, which, for good cause, is yet reserved from the
+reader. Nevertheless--Fixlein! I durst not have been in thy place!
+I should have looked at her, and remembered her virtues and our
+school-years, and then have drawn forth my too fusible heart, and
+presented it to her as a bill of exchange, or insinuated it as a
+summons. For I should have considered that she resembled a nun in two
+senses, in her good heart and in her good pastry; that, in spite of her
+intercourse with male vassals, she was no Charles Genevieve Louise
+Auguste Timothé Eon de Beaumont,<a name="div2Ref_40" href="#div2_40"><sup>[40]</sup></a>
+but a smooth, fair-haired,
+white-capped dove; that she sought more to please her own sex than
+ours; that she showed a melting heart, not previously borrowed from the
+Circulating Library, in tears, for which in her innocence she rather
+took shame than credit.--At the very first cheapening, I should, on
+these grounds, have been out with my heart.--Had I fully reflected,
+Quintus! that I knew her as myself; that her hands and mine (to wit,
+had I been thou) had both been guided by the same Senior to Latin
+penmanship; that we two, when little children, had kissed each other
+before the glass, to see whether the two image-children would do it
+likewise in the mirror; that often we had put hands of both sexes into
+the same muff, and there played with them in secret; had I, lastly,
+considered that we were here standing before the glass-house, now
+splendent in the enamel of twilight, and that on the cold panes of this
+glass-house we two (she within, I without) had often pressed our warm
+cheeks together, parted only by the thickness of the glass,--then had I
+taken this poor gentle soul, pressed asunder by Fate, and seeing, amid
+her thunder-clouds, no higher elevation to part them and protect her
+than the grave, and had drawn her to my own soul, and warmed her on my
+heart, and encompassed her about with my eyes.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In truth, the Quintus would have done so too, had not the
+above-mentioned nobler thought, which I yet disclose not, kept him
+back. Softened, without knowing the cause,--(accordingly he gave his
+mother a kiss,)--and blessed without having had a literary
+conversation; and dismissed with a freight of humble compliments, which
+he was to disload on the morrow before the Dragoon Rittmeisterinn, he
+returned to his little cottage, and looked yet a long while out of its
+dark windows, at the light ones of the Castle. And then, when the first
+quarter of the moon was setting, that is, about midnight, he again, in
+the cool sigh of a mild, fanning, moist, and directly heart-addressing
+night-breeze, opened the eyelids of a sight already sunk in
+dreaming....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Sleep, for to-day thou hast done naught ill! I, whilst the drooping,
+shut flower-bell of thy spirit sinks on thy pillow, will look into the
+breezy night over thy morning footpath, which, through the translucent
+little wood, is to lead thee to Schadeck, to thy patroness. All
+prosperity attend thee, thou foolish Quintus!--</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_lb02" href="#div1_lb02">SECOND LETTER-BOX.</a></h2>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="sc">Frau von Aufhammer.--Childhood-resonance.--Authorcraft</span>.</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">The early piping which the little thrush, last night adopted by the
+Quintaner from its nest, started for victual about two o'clock,
+soon drove our Quintus into his clothes; whose calender-press and
+parallel-ruler the hands of his careful mother had been, for she would
+not send him to the Rittmeisterinn &quot;like a runagate dog.&quot; The Shock was
+incarcerated, the Quintaner taken with him, as likewise many wholesome
+rules from Mother Fixlein, how to conduct himself towards the
+Rittmeisterinn. But the son answered: &quot;Mamma, when a man has been in
+company, like me, with high people, with a Fräulein Thiennette, he soon
+knows whom he is speaking to, and what polished manners and Saver di
+veaver (<i>Savoir vivre</i>) require.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He arrived with the Quintaner, and green fingers (dyed with the leaves
+he had plucked on the path), and with a half-nibbled rose between his
+teeth, in presence of the sleek lackeys of Schadeck. If women are
+flowers--though as often silk and Italian and gum-flowers as botanical
+ones--then was Frau von Aufhammer a ripe flower, with (adipose)
+neck-bulb, and tuberosity (of lard). Already, in the half of her body,
+cut away from life by the apoplexy, she lay upon her lard-pillow but as
+on a softer grave; nevertheless, the portion of her that remained was
+at once lively, pious, and proud. Her heart was a flowing cornucopia to
+all men, yet this not from philanthropy, but from rigid devotion; the
+lower classes she assisted, cherished, and despised, regarding nothing
+in them, except it were their piety. She received the bowing Quintus
+with the back-bowing air of a patroness; yet she brightened into a look
+of kindliness at his disloading of the compliments from Thiennette.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She began the conversation, and long continued it alone, and said,--yet
+without losing the inflation of pride from her countenance,--&quot;She
+should soon die; but the godchildren of her husband she would remember
+in her will.&quot; Further, she told him directly in the face, which stood
+there all over-written with the Fourth Commandment before her, that &quot;he
+must not build upon a settlement in Hukelum; but to the Flachsenfingen
+Conrectorate (to which the Burgermeister and Council had the right of
+nomination) she hoped to promote him, as it was from the then
+Burgermeister that she bought her coffee, and from the Town-Syndic (he
+drove a considerable wholesale and retail trade in Hamburg candles)
+that she bought both her wax and tallow lights.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And now by degrees he arrived at his humble petition, when she asked
+him sick-news of Senior Astmann, who guided himself more by Luther's
+Catechism than by the Catechism of Health. She was Astmann's patroness
+in a stricter than ecclesiastical sense; and she even confessed that
+she would soon follow this true shepherd of souls, when she heard, here
+at Schadeck, the sound of his funeral-bell. Such strange chemical
+affinities exist between our dross and our silver veins; as, for
+example, here between Pride and Love; and I could wish that we would
+pardon this hypostatic union in all persons, as we do it in the
+fair, who, with all their faults, are nevertheless by us--as, according
+to Du Fay, iron, though mixed with any other metal, is by the
+magnet--attracted and held fast.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Supposing even that the Devil <i>had</i>, in some idle minute, sown a
+handful or two of the seeds of Envy in our Quintus's soul, yet they had
+not sprouted; and to-day especially they did not, when he heard the
+praises of a man who had been his teacher, and who--what he reckoned a
+Titulado of the Earth, not from vanity, but from piety--was a
+clergyman. So much, however, is, according to History, not to be
+denied; that he now straightway came forth with his petition to the
+noble lady, signifying that &quot;indeed he would cheerfully content himself
+for a few years in the school; but yet in the end he longed to be in
+some small quiet priestly office.&quot; To her question, &quot;But was he
+orthodox?&quot; he answered, that &quot;he hoped so; he had, in Leipzig, not only
+attended all the public lectures of Dr. Burscher, but also had taken
+private instructions from several sound teachers of the faith, well
+knowing that the Consistorium, in its examinations as to purity of
+doctrine, was now more strict than formerly.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The sick lady required him to make a proof-shot, namely, to administer
+to her a sick-bed exhortation. By Heaven! he administered to her one of
+the best. Her pride of birth now crouched before his pride of office
+and priesthood; for though he could not, with the Dominican monk,
+Alanus de Rupe, believe that a priest was greater than God, inasmuch as
+the latter could only make a World, but the former a God (in the mass);
+yet he could not but fall in with Hostiensis, who shows that the
+priestly dignity is seven thousand six hundred and forty-four times
+greater than the kingly, the Sun being just so many times greater than
+the Moon. But a Rittmeisterinn--<i>she</i> shrinks into absolute nothing
+before a parson.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In the servants' hall he applied to the lackeys for the last annual
+series of the <i>Hamburg Political Journal</i>; perceiving that with these
+historical documents of the time they were scandalously papering the
+buttons of travelling raiment. In gloomy harvest evenings, he could now
+sit down and read for himself what good news were transpiring in the
+political world--twelve months ago.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">On a Triumphal Car, full-laden with laurel, and to which Hopes alone
+were yoked, he drove home at night, and by the road advised the
+Quintaner not to be puffed up with any earthly honor, but silently to
+thank God, as himself was now doing.</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">The thickset blooming grove of his four canicular weeks, and the flying
+tumult of blossoms therein, are already painted on three of the sides.
+I will now clutch blindfold into his days, and bring out one of them;
+one smiles and sends forth its perfumes like another.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Let us take, for instance, the Saint's day of his mother, <i>Clara</i>, the
+twelfth of August. In the morning, he had perennial, fire-proof joys,
+that is to say, Employments. For he was writing, as I am doing. Truly,
+if Xerxes proposed a prize for the invention of a new pleasure, any man
+who had sat down to write his thoughts on the prize-question had the
+new pleasure already among his fingers. I know only one thing sweeter
+than making a book, and that is, to project one. Fixlein used to write
+little works, of the twelfth part of an alphabet in size, which in
+their manuscript state he got bound by the bookbinder in gilt boards,
+and betitled with printed letters, and then inserted them among the
+literary ranks of his book-board. Every one thought they were novelties
+printed in writing types. He had labored--I shall omit his less
+interesting performances--at a <i>Collection of Errors of the Press</i>, in
+German writings; he compared <i>Errata</i> with each other; showed which
+occurred most frequently; observed that important results were to be
+drawn from this, and advised the reader to draw them.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Moreover, he took his place among the German <i>Masorites</i>. He observes
+with great justice in his Preface: &quot;The Jews had their <i>Masora</i> to
+show, which told them how often every letter was to be found in their
+Bible; for example, the Aleph (the A) 42,377 times; how many verses
+there are in which all the consonants appear (there are 26 verses), or
+only eighty (there are 3); how many verses we have into which 42 words
+and 160 consonants enter (there is just one, Jeremiah xxi. 7); which is
+the middle letter in certain books (in the Pentateuch, it is in
+Leviticus xi. 42, the noble V<a name="div2Ref_41" href="#div2_41"><sup>[41]</sup></a>),
+or in the whole Bible itself. But
+where have we Christians any similar Masora for Luther's Bible to show?
+Has it been accurately investigated which is the middle word, or the
+middle letter here, which vowel appears seldomest, and how often each
+vowel? Thousands of Bible-Christians go out of the world, without ever
+knowing that the German A occurs 323,015 times (therefore above 7 times
+oftener than the Hebrew one) in their Bible.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I could wish that inquirers into Biblical Literature among our
+Reviewers would publicly let me know if, on a more accurate summation,
+they find this number incorrect.<a name="div2Ref_42" href="#div2_42"><sup>[42]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p class="normal">Much also did the Quintus <i>collect</i>; he had a fine <i>Almanack
+Collection</i>, a <i>Catechism</i> and <i>Pamphlet Collection</i>; also, a
+<i>Collection of Advertisements</i>, which he began, is not so incomplete as
+you most frequently see such things. He puts high value on his
+<i>Alphabetical Lexicon of German Subscribers for Books</i>, where my name
+also occurs among the Js.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But what he liked best to produce were Schemes of Books. Accordingly,
+he sewed together a large work, wherein he merely advised the Learned
+of things they ought to introduce in Literary History, which History he
+rated some ells higher than Universal or Imperial History. In his
+Prolegomena to this performance, he transiently submitted to the
+Literary republic that Hommel had given a register of Jurists who were
+sons of wh--, of others who had become Saints; that Baillet enumerates
+the Learned who <i>meant</i> to write something; and Ancillon those who
+wrote nothing at all; and the Lübeck Superintendent Götze, those who
+were shoemakers, those who were drowned; and Bernhard those whose
+fortunes and history before birth were interesting. This (he could now
+continue) should, as it seems, have excited us to similar muster-rolls
+and matriculations of other kinds of Learned; whereof he proposed a
+few; for example, of the Learned who were unlearned; of those who were
+entire rascals; of such as wore their own hair,--of cue-preachers,
+cue-psalmists, cue-annalists, and so forth; of the Learned who
+had worn black leather breeches, of others who had worn rapiers;
+of the Learned who had died in their eleventh year,--in their
+twentieth,--twenty-first, &amp;c.,--in their hundred and fiftieth, of which
+he knew no instance, unless the Beggar Thomas Parr might be adduced; of
+the Learned who wrote a more abominable hand than the other Learned
+(whereof we know only Rolfinken and his letters, which were as long as
+his hands<a name="div2Ref_43" href="#div2_43"><sup>[43]</sup></a>); or of the
+Learned who had clipt nothing from each other
+but the beard (whereof no instance is known, save that of Philelphus
+and Timotheus<a name="div2Ref_44" href="#div2_44"><sup>[44]</sup></a>).</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Such by-studies did he carry on along with his official labors; but I
+think the State in viewing these matters is actually mad: it compares
+the man who is great in Philosophy and Belles-Lettres at the expense of
+his jog-trot officialities, to <i>concert-clocks</i>, which, though striking
+their hours in flute-melodies, are worse time-keepers than your gross,
+stupid steeple-clocks.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">To return to St. Clara's day. Fixlein, after such mental exertions,
+bolted out under the music-bushes and rustling trees; and returned not
+again out of warm Nature, till plate and chair were already placed at
+the table. In the course of the repast, something occurred which a
+Biographer must not omit; for his mother had, by request, been wont to
+map out for him, during the process of mastication, the chart of his
+child's-world, relating all the traits which in any way prefigured what
+he had now grown to. This perspective sketch of his early Past he
+committed to certain little leaves which merit our undivided attention.
+For such leaves exclusively, containing scenes, acts, plays of his
+childhood, he used chronologically to file and arrange in separate
+drawers in a little child's-desk of his; and thus to divide his
+Biography, as Moser did his Publicistic Materials, into separate
+<i>letter-boxes</i>. He had boxes or drawers for memorial-letters of his
+twelfth, of his thirteenth, fourteenth, &amp;c., of his twenty-first year,
+and so on. Whenever he chose to conclude a day of pedagogic drudgery by
+an evening of peculiar rest, he simply pulled out a letter-drawer, a
+register-bar in his Life-hand-organ, and recollected the whole.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And here must I, in reference to these reviewing Mutes, who may be for
+casting the noose of strangulation round my neck, most particularly
+beg, that, before doing so on account of my Chapters being called
+Letter-boxes, they would have the goodness to look whose blame it was,
+and to think whether I could possibly help it, seeing the Quintus had
+divided his Biography into such Boxes himself: they have Christian
+bowels.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But about his elder brother he put no saddening question to his mother;
+this poor boy a peculiar Fate had laid hold of, and with all his genial
+endowment dashed to pieces on the iceberg of Death. For he chanced to
+leap on an ice-board that had jammed itself among several others; but
+these recoiled, and his shot forth with him; melted away as it floated
+under his feet, and so sunk his heart of fire amid the ice and waves.
+It grieved his mother that he was not found, that her heart had not
+been harrowed by the look of the swoln corpse.--O good mother, rather
+thank God for it!--</p>
+
+<p class="normal">After breakfast, to fortify himself with new vigor for his desk,
+he for some time strolled idly over the house, and, like a Police
+Fire-inspector, visited all the nooks of his cottage, to gather from
+them here and there a live ember from the ash-covered rejoicing-fire of
+his childhood. He mounted to the garret, to the empty bird-coops of his
+father, who in winter had been a birder; and he transiently reviewed
+the lumber of his old playthings, which were lying in the netted
+enclosure of a large canary breeding-cage. In the minds of children, it
+is regular <i>little</i> forms, such as those of balls and dies, that
+impress and express themselves most forcibly. From this may the reader
+explain to himself Fixlein's delight in the red acorn-blockhouse,
+in the sparwork glued together out of white chips and husks of
+potato-plums, in the cheerful glasshouse of a cube-shaped lantern, and
+other the like products of his early architecture. The following,
+however, I explain quite differently; he had ventured, without leave
+given from any lord of the manor, to build a clay house; not for
+cottagers, but for flies; and which, therefore, you could readily
+enough have put in your pocket. This fly-hospital had its glass
+windows, and a red coat of coloring, and very many alcoves, and three
+balconies; balconies, as a sort of house within a house, he had loved
+from of old so much, that he could scarcely have liked Jerusalem well,
+where (according to Lightfoot) no such thing is permitted to be
+built. From the glistening eyes with which the architect had viewed
+his tenantry creeping about the windows, or feeding out of the
+sugar-trough,--for, like the Count St. Germain, they ate nothing but
+sugar,--from this joy an adept in the art of education might easily
+have prophesied his turn for household contraction; to his fancy, in
+those times, even gardeners'-huts were like large waste Arks and Halls,
+and nothing bigger than such a fly-Louvre seemed a true, snug
+citizen's-house. He now felt and handled his old high child's-stool,
+which had in former days resembled the <i>Sedes Exploratoria</i> of the
+Pope; he gave his child's-coach a tug and made it run; but he could not
+understand what balsam and holiness so much distinguished it from all
+other child's-coaches. He wondered that the real sports of children
+should not so delight him as the emblems of these sports, when the
+child that had carried them on was standing grown up to manhood in his
+presence.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Before one article in the house he stood heart-melted and sad; before a
+little angular clothes-press, which was no higher than my table, and
+which had belonged to his poor drowned brother. When the boy with the
+key of it was swallowed by the waves, the excruciated mother had made a
+vow that this toy-press of his should never be broken up by violence.
+Most probably there is nothing in it but the poor soul's playthings.
+Let us look away from this bloody urn.----</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Bacon reckons the remembrances of childhood among wholesome, medicinal
+things; naturally enough, therefore, they acted like a salutary
+digestive on the Quintus. He could now again betake him with new heart
+to his desk, and produce something quite peculiar,--petitions for
+church livings. He took the Address-calendar, and, for every country
+parish that he found in it, got a petition in readiness; which he then
+laid aside, till such time as the present incumbent should decease. For
+Hukelum alone he did not solicit.--It is a pretty custom in
+Flachsenfingen, that, for every office which is vacant, you are
+required, if you want it, to sue. As the higher use of Prayer consists,
+not in its fulfilment, but in its accustoming you to pray; so likewise
+petitionary papers ought to be given in, not indeed that you may get
+the office,--this nothing but your money can do,--but that you may
+learn to write petitions. In truth, if, among the Calmucks, the turning
+of a calabash<a name="div2Ref_45" href="#div2_45"><sup>[45]</sup></a> stands in
+place of Prayer, a slight movement of the
+purse may be as much as if you supplicated in words.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Towards evening--it was Sunday--he went out roving over the village; he
+pilgrimed to his old sporting-places, and to the common where he had so
+often driven his snails to pasture; visited the peasant who, from
+school-times upwards, had been wont, to the amazement of the rest, to
+<i>thou</i><a name="div2Ref_46" href="#div2_46"><sup>[46]</sup></a> him; went,
+an Academic Tutor, to the Schoolmaster; then to
+the Senior; then to the Episcopal-barn or church. This last no mortal
+understands, till I explain it. The case was this. Some three-and-forty
+years ago a fire had destroyed the church (not the steeple), the
+parsonage, and, what was not to be replaced, the church-records. (For
+this reason it was only the smallest portion of the Hukelum people that
+knew exactly how old they were; and the memory of our Quintus himself
+vibrated between adopting the thirty-third year and the thirty-second.)
+In consequence, the preaching had now to be carried on where formerly
+there had been threshing; and the seed of the divine word to be
+turned over on the same threshing-floor with natural corn-seed. The
+Chanter and the School-boys took up the threshing-floor; the female
+mother-church-people stood on the one sheaves-loft, the Schadeck
+womankind on the other; and their husbands clustered pyramidically,
+like groschen and farthing-gallery men; about the barn-stairs; and far
+up on the straw-loft, mixed souls stood listening. A little flute was
+their organ, an upturned beer-cask their altar, round which they had to
+walk. I confess, I myself could have preached in such a place, not
+without humor. The Senior (at that time still a Junior), while the
+parsonage was building, dwelt and taught in the Castle; it was here,
+accordingly, that Fixlein had learned the <i>Irregular Verbs</i> with
+Thiennette.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">These voyages of discovery completed, our Hukelum voyager could still,
+after evening prayers, pick leaf-insects, with Thiennette, from the
+roses; worms from the beds, and a Heaven of joy from every minute.
+Every dew-drop was colored as with oil of cloves and oil of gladness;
+every star was a sparkle from the sun of happiness; and in the closed
+heart of the maiden, there lay near to him, behind a little wall of
+separation, (as near to the Righteous man behind the thin wall of
+Life,) an outstretched blooming Paradise.... I mean, she loved him a
+little.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He might have known it, perhaps. But to his compressed delight he gave
+freer vent, as he went to bed, by early recollections on the stair. For
+in his childhood he had been accustomed, by way of evening-prayer, to
+go over, under his coverlet, as it were, a rosary, including fourteen
+Bible Proverbs, the first verse of the Psalm, &quot;All people that on
+Earth,&quot; the Tenth Commandment, and, lastly, a long blessing. To get the
+sooner done with it, he had used to begin his devotion, not only on the
+stair, but before leaving that place where Alexander studied men, and
+Semler stupid books. Moored in the haven of the down-waves, he was
+already over with his evening supplication; and could now, without
+further exertion, shut his eyes and plump into sleep.----Thus does
+there lurk, in the smallest <i>homunculus</i>, the model of--the Catholic
+Church.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">So far the Dog-days of Quintus Zebedäus Egidius Fixlein.--I, for the
+second time, close a Chapter of this <i>Life</i>, as Life itself is closed,
+with a sleep.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_lb03" href="#div1_lb03">THIRD LETTER-BOX.</a></h2>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="sc">Christmas Recollections.--New Occurrence</span>.</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">For all of us the passage to the grave is, alas! a string of empty,
+insipid days, as of glass pearls, only here and there divided by an
+orient one of price. But you die murmuring, unless, like the Quintus,
+you regard your existence as a drum; this has only one single <i>tone</i>,
+but variety of <i>time</i> gives the sound of it cheerfulness enough. Our
+Quintus taught in the Fourth Class; vicariated in the Second; wrote at
+his desk by night; and so lived on the usual monotonous fashion--all
+the time from the Holidays--till Christmas eve, 1791; and nothing was
+remarkable in his history except this same eve, which I am now about to
+paint.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But I shall still have time to paint it, after, in the first place,
+explaining shortly how, like birds of passage, he had contrived to soar
+away over the dim, cloudy Harvest. The secret was, he set upon the
+<i>Hamburg Political Journal</i>, with which the lackeys of Schadeck had
+been for papering their buttons. He could now calmly, with his back at
+the stove, accompany the winter campaigns of the foregoing year; and
+fly after every battle, as the ravens did after that of Pharsalia. On
+the printed paper he could still, with joy and admiration, walk round
+our German triumphal arches and scaffoldings for fireworks; while to
+the people in the town, who got only the newest newspapers, the very
+fragments of these our trophies, maliciously torn down by the French,
+were scarcely discernible; nay, with old plans he could drive back and
+discomfit the enemy, while later readers in vain tried to resist them
+with new ones.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Moreover, not only did the facility of conquering the French prepossess
+him in favor of this journal; but also the circumstance that it--cost
+him nothing. His attachment to gratis reading was decided. And does not
+this throw light on the fact that he, as Morhof advised, was wont
+sedulously to collect the separate leaves of wastepaper books as they
+came from the grocer, and to rake among the same, as Virgil did in
+Ennius? Nay, for him the grocer was a Fortius (the scholar), or a
+Frederick (the king), both which persons were in the habit of simply
+cutting from complete books such leaves as contained anything. It was
+also this respect for all waste-paper that inspired him with such
+esteem for the aprons of French cooks, which it is well known consist
+of printed paper; and he often wished some German would translate these
+aprons; indeed, I am willing to believe that a good version of more
+than one of such paper aprons might contribute to elevate our
+Literature (this Muse <i>à belles fesses</i>), and serve her in place of
+drivel-bib.--On many things a man puts a <i>pretium affectionis</i>, simply
+because he hopes he may have half stolen them; on this principle,
+combined with the former, our Quintus adopted into his belief anything
+he could snap away from an open Lecture, or as a visitor in
+class-rooms; opinions only for which the Professor must be paid, he
+rigorously examined.--I return to the Christmas eve.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">At the very first, Egidius was glad, because out of doors millers and
+bakers were at fisticuffs (as we say of drifting snow in large flakes),
+and the ice-flowers of the window were blossoming; for external frost,
+with a snug warm room, was what he liked. He could now put fir wood
+into his stove, and Mocha coffee into his stomach; and shove his right
+foot (not into the slipper, but) under the warm side of his Shock, and
+also on the left keep swinging his pet Starling, which was pecking at
+the snout of old Schil; and then with the right hand--with the left he
+was holding his pipe--proceed, so undisturbed, so intrenched, so
+cloud-capt, without the smallest breath of frost, to the highest
+enterprise which a Quintus can attempt,--to writing the Class-prodromus
+of the Flachsenfingen Gymnasium, namely, the eighth part thereof. I
+hold the <i>first printing</i> in the history of a literary man to be more
+important than the <i>first printing</i> in the history of Letters. Fixlein
+could not sate himself with specifying what he purposed, God willing,
+in the following year, to treat of; and accordingly, more for the sake
+of printing than of use, he further inserted three or four pedagogic
+glances at the plan of operations to be followed by his schoolmaster
+colleagues as a body.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He lastly introduced a few dashes, by way of hooking his thoughts
+together; and then laid aside the <i>Opus</i>, and would no longer look at
+it, that so, when printed, he might stand astonished at his own
+thoughts. And now he could take the Leipzig Fair Catalogue, which he
+purchased yearly, instead of the books therein, and open it without a
+sigh; he too was in print, as well as I am.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The happy fool, while writing, had shaken his head, rubbed his hands,
+hitched about on his chair, puckered his face, and sucked the end of
+his cue.--He could now spring up about five o'clock in the evening to
+recreate himself; and across the magic vapor of his pipe, like a
+new-caught bird, move up and down in his cage. On the warm smoke the
+long galaxy of street-lamps was gleaming; and red on his bed-curtains
+lay the fitful reflection of the blazing windows and illuminated trees
+in the neighborhood. And now he shook away the snow of Time from the
+winter-green of Memory; and beheld the fair years of his childhood,
+uncovered, fresh, green, and balmy, standing afar off before him. From
+his distance of twenty years, he looked into the quiet cottage of his
+parents, where his father and his brother had not yet been reaped away
+by the sickle of Death. He said to himself: &quot;I will go through the
+whole Christmas eve, from the very dawn, as I had it of old.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">At his very rising he finds spangles on the table; sacred spangles from
+the gold-leaf and silver-leaf with which the Christ-child<a name="div2Ref_47" href="#div2_47"><sup>[47]</sup></a>
+has been
+emblazoning and coating his apples and nuts, the presents of the
+night.--On the mint-balance of joy, this metallic foam pulls heavier
+than the golden cars, and golden Pythagoras-legs, and golden
+Philistine-mice of wealthier capitalists.--Then came his mother,
+bringing him both Christianity and clothes; for in drawing on his
+trousers, she easily recapitulated the Ten Commandments, and in tying
+his garters, the Apostles' Creed. So soon as candle-light was over,
+and daylight come, he clambers to the arm of the settle, and
+then measures the nocturnal growth of the yellow wiry grove of
+Christmas-Birch; and devotes far less attention than usual to the
+little white winter-flowerage, which the seeds shaken from the
+bird-cage are sending forth in the wet joints of the window-panes.--I
+nowise grudge J. J. Rousseau his <i>Flora Petrinsularis</i>;<a name="div2Ref_48" href="#div2_48"><sup>[48]</sup></a>
+but let him
+also allow our Quintus his <i>Window-flora</i>.--There was no such thing as
+school all day; so he had time enough to seek his Flescher (his
+brother), and commence (when could there be finer frost for it?) the
+slaughtering of their winter-meat. Some days before, the brother,
+at the peril of his life and of a cudgelling, had caught their
+stalled-beast--so they called the sparrow--under a window-sill in the
+Castle. Their slaughtering wants not an axe (of wood), nor puddings,
+nor potted meat.--About three o'clock the old Gardener, whom neighbors
+must call the Professor of Gardening, takes his place on his large
+chair, with his Cologne tobacco-pipe; and after this no mortal
+shall work a stroke. He tells nothing but lies; of the aeronautic
+Christ-child, and the jingling Ruprecht with his bells. In the dusk,
+our little Quintus takes an apple; divides it into all the figures of
+stereometry, and spreads the fragments in two heaps on the table; then
+as the lighted candle enters, he starts up in amazement at the
+unexpected present, and says to his brother, &quot;Look what the good
+Christ-child has given thee and me; and I saw one of his wings
+glittering.&quot; And for this same glittering he himself lies in wait the
+whole evening.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">About eight o'clock--here he walks chiefly by the chronicle of his
+letter-drawer--both of them, with necks almost excoriated with washing,
+and in clean linen, and in universal anxiety lest the Holy Christ-child
+find them up, are put to bed. What a magic night! What tumult of
+dreaming hopes!--The populous, motley, glittering cave of Fancy opens
+itself, in the length of the night, and in the exhaustion of dreamy
+effort, still darker and darker, fuller and more grotesque; but the
+awakening gives back to the thirsty heart its hopes. All accidental
+tones, the cries of animals, of watchmen, are, for the timidly devout
+Fancy, sounds out of Heaven; singing voices of Angels in the air,
+church-music of the morning worship.--</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Ah! it was not the mere Lubberland of sweetmeats and playthings, which
+then, with its perspective, stormed like a river of joy against the
+chambers of our hearts; and which yet in the moonlight of memory, with
+its dusky landscapes, melts our souls in sweetness. Ah! this was it,
+that then for our boundless wishes there were still boundless hopes;
+but now reality is round us, and the wishes are all that we have left!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">At last came rapid lights from the neighborhood playing through the
+window on the walls, and the Christmas trumpets, and the crowing from
+the steeple, hurries both the boys from their bed. With their clothes
+in their hands, without fear for the darkness, without feeling for the
+morning-frost, rushing, intoxicated, shouting, they hurry down-stairs
+into the dark room. Fancy riots in the pastry and fruit perfume of the
+still eclipsed treasures, and paints her air-castles by the glimmering
+of the Hesperides-fruit with which the Birch-tree is loaded. While
+their mother strikes a light, the falling sparks sportfully open and
+shroud the dainties on the table, and the many-colored grove on the
+wall; and a single atom of that fire bears on it a hanging garden of
+Eden.----</p>
+
+<p class="normal">--On a sudden all grew light; and the Quintus got--the Conrectorship,
+and a table-clock.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_lb04" href="#div1_lb04">FOURTH LETTER-BOX.</a></h2>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="sc">Office-brokage.--Discovery of the Promised Secret.--Hans
+von Füchslein</span>.</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">For while the Quintus, in his vapory chamber was thus running over the
+sounding-board of his early years, the Rathsdiener, or City-officer,
+entered with a lantern and the Presentation; and behind him the courier
+of the Frau von Aufhammer with a note and a table-clock. The
+Rittmeisterinn had transformed her payment for the Dog-days sick-bed
+exhortation into a Christmas present; which consisted, <i>first</i>, of a
+table-clock, with a wooden ape thereon, starting out when the hour
+struck, and drumming along with every stroke; <i>secondly</i>, of the
+Conrectorate, which she had procured for him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">As in the public this appointment from the private Flachsenfingen
+Council has not been judged of as it deserved, I consider it my duty to
+offer a defence for the body corporate; and that rather here than in
+the <i>Reichsanzeiger</i>, or <i>Imperial Indicator</i>.--I have already
+mentioned, in the Second Letter-Box, that the Town-Syndic drove a trade
+in Hamburg candles; and the then Burgermeister in coffee-beans, which
+he sold as well whole as ground. Their joint traffic, however, which
+they carried on exclusively, was in the eight School-offices of
+Flachsenfingen; the other members of the Council acting only as
+bale-wrappers, shopmen, and accountants in the Council wareroom. A
+Council-house, indeed, is like an India-house, where not only
+resolutions or appointments, but also shoes and cloth, are exposed to
+sale. Properly speaking, the Councillor derives his freedom of
+office-trading from that principle of the Roman law, <i>Cui jus est
+donandi, eidem et vendendi jus est</i>; that is to say, He who has the
+right of giving anything away has also a right to dispose of it for
+money, if he can. Now as the Council-members have palpably the right of
+conferring offices gratis, the right of selling them must follow of
+course.</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Short Extra-word on Appointment-brokers in general</i>.</p>
+<br>
+<p class="normal">My chief anxiety is lest the Academy-product-sale-Commission<a name="div2Ref_49" href="#div2_49"><sup>[49]</sup></a>
+of the
+State carry on its office-trade too slackly. And what but the
+commonweal must suffer in the long run, if important posts are
+distributed, not according to the current cash which is laid down for
+them, but according to connections, relationships, party
+recommendations, and bowings and cringings? Is it not a contradiction,
+to charge titulary offices dearer than real ones? Should one not rather
+expect that the real Hofrath would pay higher by the <i>alterum tantum</i>
+than the mere titulary Hofrath?--Money, among European nations, is now
+the equivalent and representative of value in all things, and
+consequently in understanding; the rather as a <i>head</i> is stamped on it;
+to pay down the purchase-money of an office is therefore neither more
+nor less than to stand an <i>examen rigorosum</i>, which is held by a good
+<i>schema examinandi</i>. To invert this, to pretend exhibiting your
+qualifications, in place of these their surrogates, and assignates, and
+<i>monnoie de confiance</i>, is simply to resemble the crazy philosophers in
+<i>Gulliver's Travels</i>, who, for social converse, instead of names of
+things, brought the things themselves tied up in a bag; it is, indeed,
+plainly as much as trying to fall back into the barbarous times of
+trade by barter, when the Romans, instead of the figured cattle on
+their leather money, drove forth the beeves themselves.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">From all such injudicious notions I myself am so far removed, that
+often, when I used to read that the King of France was devising new
+offices, to stand and sell them under the booth of his Baldaquin, I
+have set myself to do something of the like. This I shall now at least
+calmly propose; not vexing my heart whether Governments choose to adopt
+it or not. As our Sovereign will not allow us to multiply offices
+purely for sale, nay, on the contrary, is day and night (like managers
+of strolling companies) meditating how to give more parts to one
+State-actor; and thus to the Three Stage Unities to add a Fourth, that
+of Players; as the above French method, therefore, will not apply, could
+we not at least contrive to invent some Virtues harmonizing with the
+offices, along with which they might be sold as titles? Might we not,
+for instance, with the office of a Referendary, put off at the same
+time a titular Incorruptibility, for a fair consideration; and so that
+this virtue, as not belonging to the office, must be separately paid
+for by the candidate? Such a market-title and patent of nobility could
+not but be ornamental to a Referendary. We forget that in former times
+such high titles were appended to all posts whatsoever. The scholastic
+Professor then wrote himself (besides his official designation) &quot;The
+Seraphic,&quot; &quot;The Incontrovertible,&quot; &quot;The Penetrating&quot;; the King wrote
+himself, &quot;The Great,&quot; &quot;The Bald,&quot; &quot;The Bold,&quot; and so also did the
+Rabbins. Could it be unpleasant to gentlemen in the higher stations of
+Justice, if the titles of Impartiality, Rapidity, &amp;c., might be
+conferred on them by sale, as well as the posts themselves? Thus with
+the appointment of a Kammerrath, or Councillor of Revenue, the virtue
+of Patriotism might fitly be conjoined; and I believe few Advocates
+would grudge purchasing the title of Integrity (as well as their common
+one of Government-advocacy), were it to be had in the market. If,
+however, any candidate chose to take his post without the virtues, then
+it would stand with himself to do so, and in the adoption of this
+reflex morality Government should not constrain him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">It might be that, as, according to Tristram Shandy, clothes, according
+to Walter Shandy and Lavater, proper names, exert an influence on men,
+appellatives would do so still more; since, on us, as on testaceous
+animals, <i>the foam so often hardens into shell</i>; but such internal
+morality is not a thing the State can have an eye to; for, as in the
+fine arts, it is not this, but the <i>representation</i> of it, which forms
+her true aim.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I have found it rather difficult to devise for our different offices
+different verbal-virtues; but I should think there might many such
+divisions of Virtue (at this moment, Love of Freedom, Public-spirit,
+Sincerity, and Uprightness occur to me) be hunted out; were but some
+well-disposed minister of state to appoint a Virtue-board or Moral
+Address Department, with some half-dozen secretaries, who, for a small
+salary, might devise various virtues for the various posts. Were I in
+their place, I should hold a good prism before the white ray of Virtue,
+and divide it completely. Pity that it were not crimes we wanted--their
+subdivision I mean;--our country Judges might then be selected for this
+purpose. For in their tribunals, where only inferior jurisdiction, and
+no penalty above five florins Frankish, is admitted, they have a daily
+training how out of every mischief to make several small ones, none of
+which they ever punish to a greater amount than their five florins.
+This is a precious moral <i>Rolfinkenism</i>, which our Jurists have learned
+from the great Sin-cutters, St. Augustin and his Sorbonne, who together
+have carved more sins on Adam's Sin-apple than ever Rolfinken did faces
+on a cherry-stone. How different one of our Judges from a Papal
+Casuist, who, by side-scrapings, will rasp you down the best deadly sin
+into a venial!--</p>
+
+<p class="normal">School-offices (to come to these) are a small branch of traffic
+certainly; yet still they are monarchies,--school-monarchies, to
+wit,--resembling the Polish crown, which, according to Pope's verse, is
+twice exposed to sale in the century; a statement, I need hardly say,
+arithmetically false, Newton having settled the average duration of a
+reign at twenty-two years. For the rest, whether the city Council bring
+the young of the community a Hamel's <i>Rat</i>-and-Child-<i>catcher</i>; or a
+Weissen's <i>Child's-friend</i>,--this to the Council can make no
+difference; seeing the Schoolmaster is not a horse, for whose secret
+defects the horse-dealer is to be responsible. It is enough if
+Town-Syndic and Co. cannot reproach themselves with having picked out
+any fellow of genius; for a genius, as he is useless to the State,
+except for recreation and ornament, would at the very least exclude the
+duller, cooler head, who properly forms the true care and profit of the
+State; as your costly carat-pearl is good for show alone, but coarse
+grain-pearls for medicine. On the whole, if a schoolmaster be adequate
+to flog his scholars, it should suffice; and I cannot but blame our
+Commission of Inspectors, when they go examining schools, that they do
+not make the schoolmaster go through the duty of firking one or two
+young persons of his class in their presence, by way of trial, to see
+what is in him.</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="center"><i>End of the Extra-word on Appointment-brokers in general</i>.</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">Now again to our history! The Councillor Heads of the Firm had
+conferred the Conrectorate on my hero, not only with a view to the
+continued consumpt of candles and beans, but also on the strength of a
+quite mad notion: they believed the Quintus would very soon die.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">--And here I have reached a most important circumstance in this
+History, and one into which I have yet let no mortal look; now,
+however, it no longer depends on my will whether I shall shove aside
+the folding-screen from it or not; but I must positively lay it open,
+nay, hang a reverberating-lamp over it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In medical history, it is a well-known fact, that in certain families
+the people all die precisely at the same age, just as in these families
+they are all born at the same age (of nine months); nay, from Voltaire,
+I recollect one family, the members of which at the same age all killed
+themselves. Now, in the Fixleinic lineage, it was the custom that the
+male ascendants uniformly on Cantata-Sunday, in their thirty-second
+year, took to bed and died; every one of my readers would do well to
+insert in his copy of the <i>Thirty Years' War</i>, Schiller having entirely
+omitted it, the fact, that, in the course thereof, one Fixlein died of
+the plague, another of hunger, another of a musket-bullet; all in their
+thirty-second year. True Philosophy explains the matter thus: &quot;The
+first two or three times, it happened purely by accident; and the other
+times, the people died of sheer fright: if not so, the whole fact is
+rather to be questioned.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But what did Fixlein make of the affair? Little or nothing; the only
+thing he did was, that he took little or no pains to fall in love with
+Thiennette; that so no other might have cause for fear on his account.
+He himself, however, for five reasons, minded it so little, that he
+hoped to be older than Senior Astmann before he died. First, because
+three Gypsies, in three different places, and at three different times,
+had each shown him the same long vista of years in her magic mirror.
+Secondly, because he had a sound constitution. Thirdly, because his own
+brother had formed an exception, and perished before the thirties.
+Fourthly, on this ground: When a boy he had fallen sick of sorrow, on
+the very Cantata-Sunday when his father was lying in the winding-sheet,
+and only been saved from death by his playthings; and with this
+Cantata-sickness, he conceived that he had given the murderous Genius
+of his race the slip. Fifthly, the church-books being destroyed, and
+with them the certainty of his age, he could never fall into a right
+definite deadly fear: &quot;It may be,&quot; said he, &quot;that I have got whisked
+away over this whoreson year, and no one the wiser.&quot; I will not deny
+that last year he had fancied he was two-and-thirty; &quot;however,&quot; said
+he, &quot;if I am not to be so till, God willing, the next (1792), it may
+run away as smoothly as the last; am I not always in <i>His</i> keeping? And
+were it unjust if the pretty years that were broken off from the life
+of my brother should be added to mine?&quot; Thus, under the cold snow of
+the Present, does poor man strive to warm himself, or to mould out of
+it a fair snow-man.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The Councillor Oligarchy, however, built upon the opposite opinion;
+and, like a Divinity, elevated our Quintus all at once from the
+Quintusship to the Conrectorate; swearing to themselves that he would
+soon vacate it again. Properly speaking, by school-seniority, this holy
+chair should have belonged to the Subrector Hans von Füchslein; but he
+wished it not; being minded to become Hukelum Parson; especially, as
+Astmann's Death-angel, according to sure intelligence, was opening more
+and more widely the door of this spiritual sheepfold. &quot;If the fellow
+weather another year, 't is more than I expect,&quot; said Hans.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">This Hans was such a churl, that it is pity he had not been a
+Hanoverian Post-boy; that so, by the Mandate of the Hanoverian
+Government, enjoining on all its Post-officers an elegant style of
+manners, he might have somewhat refined himself. To our poor Quintus,
+whom no mortal disliked, and who again could hate no mortal, he alone
+bore a grudge; simply because <i>Fixlein</i> did not write himself
+<i>Füchslein</i>, and had not chosen along with him to purchase a Patent of
+Nobility. The Subrector, on this his Patent triumphal chariot, drawn by
+a team of four specified ancestors, was obliged to see the Quintus, who
+was related to him, clutching by the lackey-straps behind the carriage;
+and to hear him, in the most despicable raiment, saying to the train:
+&quot;He that rides there is my cousin, and a mortal, and I always remind
+him of it.&quot; The mild, compliant Quintus never noticed this large
+wasp-poison-bag in the Subrector, but took it for a honey-bag; nay, by
+his brotherly warmness, which the nobleman regarded as mere show, he
+concreted these venomous juices into still feller consistency. The
+Quintus, in his simplicity, took Füchslein's contempt for envy of his
+pedagogic talents.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">A Catherinenhof, an Annenhof, an Elizabethhof, Stralenhof, and
+Petershof, all these Russian pleasure palaces, a man can dispense with
+(if not despise), who has a room, in which on Christmas eve he walks
+about with a Presentation in his hand. The new Conrector now longed for
+nothing but--daylight; joys always (cares never) nibbled from him, like
+sparrows, his sleep-grains; and to-night, moreover, the registrator of
+his glad time, the clock-ape, drummed out every hour to him, which,
+accordingly, he spent in gay dreaming, rather than in sound snoring.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">On Christmas morn he looked at his Class-prodromus, and thought but
+little of it; he scarcely knew what to make of his last night's foolish
+inflation about his Quintusship. &quot;The Quintus-post,&quot; said he to
+himself, &quot;is not to be named in the same day with the Conrectorate; I
+wonder how I could parade so last night before my promotion; at
+present, I had more reason.&quot; To-day he eat, as on all Sundays and
+holidays, with the Master-Butcher Steinberger, his former Guardian. To
+this man Fixlein was, what common people are <i>always</i>, but polished,
+philosophical, and sentimental people very <i>seldom</i> are,--<i>thankful</i>;
+a
+man thanks you the less for presents, the more inclined he is to give
+presents of his own; and the beneficent is rarely a grateful person.
+Meister Steinberger, in the character of storemaster, had introduced
+into the wire-cage of a garret, where Fixlein, while a Student
+at Leipzig, was suspended, many a well-filled trough with good
+canary-meat, of hung-beef, of household bread, and <i>Sauerkraut</i>. Money
+indeed was never to be wrung from him; it is well known that he often
+sent the best calf-skins gratis to the tanner, to be boots for our
+Quintus; but the tanning-charges the Ward himself had to bear.--On
+Fixlein's entrance, as was at all times customary, a smaller damask
+table-cloth was laid upon the large coarser one; the arm-chair, silver
+implements, and a wine-soup were handed him; mere waste, which, as the
+Guardian used to say, suited well enough for a Scholar; but for a
+Flescher not at all. Fixlein first took his victuals, and then
+signified that he was made Conrector. &quot;Ward,&quot; said Steinberger, &quot;if you
+are made that, it is well.--Seest thou, Eva, I cannot buy a tail of thy
+cows now; I must have smelt it beforehand.&quot; He was hereby informing his
+daughter that the cash set apart for the fatted cattle must now be
+applied to the Conrectorate; for he was in the habit of advancing all
+instalment-dues to his Ward, at an interest of four and a half per
+cent. Fifty gulden he had already lent the Quintus on his advancement
+to the Quintusship; of these the interest had to be duly paid; yet, on
+the day of payment, the Quintus always got some abatement; being wont
+every Sunday after dinner to instruct his guardian's daughter in
+arithmetic, writing, and geography. Steinberger with justice required
+of his own grown-up daughter that she should know all the towns where
+he in his wanderings as a journeyman had slain fat oxen; and if she
+slipped, or wrote crookedly, or subtracted wrong, he himself, as
+Academical Senate and Justiciary, was standing behind her chair, ready,
+so to speak, with the forge-hammer of his fist to beat out the dross
+from her brain, and at a few strokes hammer it into right ductility.
+The soft Quintus, for his part, had never struck her. On this account
+she had perhaps, with a few glances, appointed him executor and
+assignee of her heart. The old Flescher--simply because his wife was
+dead--had constantly been in the habit of searching with mine-lamps and
+pokers into all the corners of Eva's heart; and had in consequence long
+ago observed--what the Quintus never did--that she had a mind for the
+said Quintus. Young women conceal their sorrows more easily than their
+joys; to-day, at the mention of this Conrectorate, Eva had become
+unusually <i>red</i>.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">When she went after breakfast to bring in coffee, which the Ward had to
+drink down to the grounds: &quot;I beat Eva to death if she but look at
+him,&quot; said he. Then addressing Fixlein: &quot;Hear you, Ward, did you never
+cast an eye on my Eva? She can suffer you, and if you want her, you get
+her; but <i>we</i> have done with one another; for a learned man needs quite
+another sort of thing.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Herr Regiments-Quartermaster,&quot; said Fixlein, (for this post
+Steinberger filled in the Provincial Militia,) &quot;such a match were far
+too rich, at any rate, for a Schoolman.&quot; The Quartermaster nodded fifty
+times; and then said to Eva, as she returned,--at the same time taking
+down from the shelf a wooden crook, on which he used to rack out and
+suspend his slain calves: &quot;Stop!--Hark, dost wish the present Herr
+Conrector here for thy husband?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Ah, good Heaven!&quot; said Eva.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Mayst wish him or not,&quot; continued the Flescher; &quot;with this crook thy
+father knocks thy brains out, if thou but think of a learned man. Now
+make his coffee.&quot; And so by the dissevering stroke of this wooden crook
+was a love easily smitten asunder, which in a higher rank, by such
+cutting through it with the sword, would only have foamed and hissed
+the keenlier.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Fixlein might now, at any hour he liked, lay hold of fifty florins
+Frankish, and clutch the pedagogic sceptre, and become coadjutor of the
+Rector, that is, Conrector. We may assert, that it is with debts, as
+with proportions in Architecture; of which Wolf has shown that those
+are the best which can be expressed in the smallest numbers.
+Nevertheless, the Quartermaster cheerfully took learned men under his
+arm; for the notion that his debtor would decease in his thirty-second
+year, and that so Death, as creditor in the first rank, must be paid
+his Debt of Nature, before the other creditors could come forward with
+their debts--this notion he named stuff and old-wifery; he was neither
+Superstitious nor Fanatical, and he walked by firm principles of
+action, such as the common man much oftener has than your vaporing man
+of letters, or your empty, dainty man of rank.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">As it is but a few clear Ladydays, warm Mayday-nights, at the most a
+few odorous Rose-weeks, which I am digging from this Fixleinic Life,
+embedded in the dross of week-day cares; and as if they were so many
+veins of silver, am separating, stamping, smelting, and burnishing for
+the reader,--I must now travel on with the stream, his history to
+Cantata-Sunday, 1792, before I can gather a few handfuls of this
+gold-dust, to carry in and wash in my biographical gold-hut. That
+Sunday, on the contrary, is very metalliferous; do but consider that
+Fixlein is yet uncertain (the ashes of the Church-books not being
+legible) whether it is conducting him into his thirty-second or his
+thirty-third year.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">From Christmas till then he did nothing, but simply became Conrector.
+The new chair of office was a Sun-altar, on which, from his
+Quintus-ashes, a young Ph[oe]nix combined itself together. Great
+changes--in offices, marriages, travels--make us younger; we always
+date our history from the last revolution, as the French have done from
+theirs. A colonel, who first set foot on the ladder of seniority as
+corporal, is five times younger than a king, who in his whole life has
+never been aught else except a--crown-prince.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_lb05" href="#div1_lb05">FIFTH LETTER-BOX.</a></h2>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="sc">Cantata-Sunday.--Two Testaments.--Pontac; Blood; Love</span>.</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">The spring months clothe the earth in new variegated hues; but man they
+usually dress in black. Just when our icy regions are becoming
+fruitful, and the flower-waves of the meadows are rolling together over
+our quarter of the globe, we on all hands meet with men in sables, the
+beginning of whose Spring is full of tears. But, on the other hand,
+this very upblooming of the renovated earth is itself the best balm for
+sorrow over those who lie under it; and graves are better hid by
+blossoms than by snow.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In April, which is no less deadly than it is fickle, old Senior
+Astmann, our Conrector's teacher, was overtaken by death. His departure
+it was meant to hide from the Rittmeisterinn; but the unusual ringing
+of funeral peals carried his swan-song to her heart; and gradually set
+the curfew-bell of her life into similar movement. Age and sufferings
+had already marked out the first incisions for Death, so that he
+required but little effort to cut her down; for it is with men as with
+trees, they are notched long before felling, that their life-sap may
+exude. The second stroke of apoplexy was soon followed by the last; it
+is strange that Death, like criminal courts, cites the apoplectic
+thrice.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Men are apt to postpone their <i>last</i> will as long as their <i>better</i>
+one; the Rittmeisterinn would perhaps have let all her hours, till the
+speechless and deaf one, roll away without testament, had not
+Thiennette, during the last night before from sick-nurse she became
+corpse-watcher, reminded the patient of the poor Conrector, and
+of his meagre, hunger-bitten existence, and of the scanty aliment and
+board-wages which Fortune had thrown him, and of his empty Future,
+where, like a drooping, yellow plant in the parched deal-box of the
+school-room, between scholars and creditors, he must languish to the
+end. Her own poverty offered her a model of his; and her inward tears
+were the fluid tints with which she colored her picture. As the
+Rittmeisterinn's testament related solely to domestics and dependants,
+and as she began with the male one, Fixlein stood at the top; and
+Death, who must have been a special friend of the Conrector's, did not
+lift his scythe and give the last stroke, till his <i>protégé</i> had
+been with audible voice declared testamentary heir; then he cut all
+away,--life, testament, and hopes.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">When the Conrector, in a wash-bill from his mother, received these two
+Death's-posts and Job's-posts in his class, the first thing he did was
+to dismiss his class-boys, and break into tears before reaching home.
+Though the mother had informed him that he had been remembered in the
+will (I could wish, however, that the Notary had blabbed how much it
+was), yet almost with every O which he masoretically excerpted from his
+German Bible, and entered in his Masoretic Work, great drops fell down
+on his pen, and made his black ink pale. His sorrow was not the
+gorgeous sorrow of the Poet, who veils the gaping wounds of the
+departed in the winding-sheet, and breaks the cry of anguish in soft
+tones of plaintiveness; nor the sorrow of the Philosopher, who, through
+one open grave, must look into the whole catacomb-Necropolis of the
+Past, and before whom the spectre of a friend expands into the spectral
+Shadow of this whole Earth; but it was the woe of a child, of a mother,
+whom this thought itself, without subsidiary reflections, bitterly
+cuts asunder: &quot;So I shall never more see thee; so must thou moulder
+away, and I shall never see thee, thou good soul, never, never any
+more!&quot;--And even because he neither felt the philosophical nor the
+poetical sadness, every trifle could make a division, a break in his
+mourning; and, like a woman, he was that very evening capable of
+sketching some plans for the future employment of his legacy.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Four weeks after, to wit, on the 5th of May, the testament was
+unsealed; but not till the 6th (Cantata-Sunday) did he go down to
+Hukelum. His mother met his salutations with tears; which she shed,
+over the corpse for grief, over the testament for joy.--To the now
+Conrector Egidius Zebedäus was left: <i>In the first place</i>, a large
+sumptuous bed, with a mirror-tester, in which the giant Goliath might
+have rolled at his ease, and to which I and my fair readers will by and
+by approach nearer, to examine it; <i>secondly</i>, there was devised to
+him, as unpaid Easter-godchild-money, for every year that he had lived,
+one ducat; <i>thirdly</i>, all the admittance and instalment dues, which his
+elevation to the Quintate and Conrectorate had cost him, were to be
+made good to the utmost penny. &quot;And dost thou know, then,&quot; proceeded
+the mother, &quot;what the poor Fräulein has got? Ah Heaven! Nothing! Not
+one brass farthing!&quot; For Death had stiffened the hand, which was just
+stretching itself out to reach the poor Thiennette a little rain-screen
+against the foul weather of life. The mother related this perverse
+trick of Fortune with true condolence; which in women dissipates envy,
+and comes easier to them than congratulation, a feeling belonging
+rather to men. In many female hearts sympathy and envy are such near
+door-neighbors that they could be virtuous nowhere except in Hell,
+where men have such frightful times of it; and vicious nowhere except
+in Heaven, where people have more happiness than they know what to do
+with.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The Conrector was now enjoying on Earth that Heaven to which his
+benefactress had ascended. First of all, he started off--without
+so much as putting up his handkerchief, in which lay his
+emotion--up-stairs to see the legacy-bed unshrouded; for he had a
+<i>female</i> predilection for furniture. I know not whether the reader ever
+looked at or mounted any of these ancient chivalric beds, into which,
+by means of a little stair without balustrades, you can easily ascend;
+and in which you, properly speaking, sleep always at least one story
+above ground. Nazianzen informs us (<i>Orat</i>. XVI.) that the Jews, in old
+times, had high beds with cock-ladders of this sort; but simply because
+of vermin. The legacy bed-Ark was quite as large as one of these; and a
+flea would have measured it, not in Diameters of the Earth, but in
+Distances of Sirius. When Fixlein beheld this colossal dormitory, with
+the curtains drawn asunder, and its canopy of looking-glass, he could
+have longed to be in it; and had it been in his power to cut from the
+opaque hemisphere of Night, at that time in America, a small section,
+he would have established himself there along with it, just to swim
+about, for one half-hour, with his thin lath figure, in this sea of
+down. The mother, by longer chains of reasoning and chains of
+calculation than the bed was, had not succeeded in persuading him to
+have the broad mirror on the top cut in pieces, though his large
+dressing-table had nothing to see itself in but a mere shaving-glass;
+he let the mirror lie where it was for this reason: &quot;Should I ever, God
+willing, get married,&quot; said he, &quot;I shall then, towards morning, be able
+to look at my sleeping wife, without sitting up in bed.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">As to the second article of the testament, the godchild Easter-pence,
+his mother had, last night, arranged it perfectly. The Lawyer took her
+evidence on the years of the heir; and these she had stated at exactly
+the teeth-number, two-and-thirty. She would willingly have lied, and
+passed off her son, like an Inscription, for older than he was; but
+against this <i>venia ætatis</i>, she saw too well the authorities would
+have taken exception, &quot;that it was falsehood and cozenage; had the son
+been two-and-thirty, he must have been dead some time ago, as it could
+not but be presumed that he then was.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And just as she was recounting this, a servant from Schadeck called;
+and delivered to the Conrector, in return for a discharge and
+ratification of the birth-certificate given out by his mother, a gold
+bar of two-and-thirty ducat age-counters, like a helm-bar for the
+voyage of his life; Herr von Aufhammer was too proud to engage in any
+pettifogging discussion over a plebeian birth-certificate.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And thus, by a proud open-handedness, was one of the best lawsuits
+thrown to the dogs; seeing this gold bar might, in the wire-mill of the
+judgment-bench, have been drawn out into the finest threads. From such
+a tangled lock, which was not to be unravelled--for in the first place,
+there was no document to prove Fixlein's age; in the second place, so
+long as he lived, the necessary conclusion was, that he was not yet
+thirty-two<a name="div2Ref_50" href="#div2_50"><sup>[50]</sup></a>--from such a
+lock might not only silk and hanging-cords,
+but whole drag nets, have been spun and twisted? Clients in general
+would have less reason to complain of their causes, if these lasted
+longer. Philosophers contend for thousands of years over philosophical
+questions; and it seems an unaccountable thing, therefore, that
+Advocates should attempt to end their juristical questions in a space
+of eighty, or even sometimes of sixty years. But the professors of Law
+are not to blame for this; on the other hand, as Lessing asserts of
+Truth, that not the <i>finding</i>, but the <i>seeking</i> of it profits men,
+and
+that he himself would willingly make over his claim to all truths in
+return for the sweet labor of investigation, so is the professor of Law
+not profited by the finding and deciding, but by the investigation of a
+juridical truth,--which is called pleading and practising,--and he
+would willingly consent to approximate to Truth forever, like an
+hyperbola to its asymptote, without ever meeting it, seeing he can
+subsist as an honorable man with wife and child, let such approximation
+be as tedious as it likes.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The Schadeck servant had, besides the gold legacy, a further commission
+from the Lawyer, whereby the testamentary heir was directed to sum up
+the mint-dues which he had been obliged to pay while lying under the
+coining-press of his superiors, as Quintus and Conrector; the which,
+properly documented and authenticated, were forthwith to be made good
+to him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Our Conrector, who now rated himself among the great capitalists of the
+world, held his short gold-roll like a sceptre in his hand; like a
+basket-net lifted from the sea of the Future, which was now to run on,
+and bring him all manner of fed-fishes, well-washed, sound, and in good
+season.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I cannot relate all things at once; else I should ere now have told the
+reader, who must long have been waiting for it, that to the moneyed
+Conrector his two-and-thirty godchild-pennies but too much prefigured
+the two-and-thirty years of his age; besides which, to-day the
+Cantata-Sunday, this Bartholomew-night and Second of September of his
+family, came in as a further aggravation. The mother, who should have
+known the age of her child, said she had forgotten it; but durst wager
+he was thirty-two a year ago; only the Lawyer was a man you could not
+speak to. &quot;I could swear it myself,&quot; said the capitalist; &quot;I recollect
+how stupid I felt Cantata-Sunday last year.&quot; Fixlein beheld Death, not
+as the poet does, in the uptowering, asunder-driving concave-mirror of
+Imagination; but as the child, as the savage, as the peasant, as the
+woman does, in the plane octavo-mirror on the board of a Prayer-book;
+and Death looked to him like an old white-headed man, sunk down into
+slumber in some latticed pew.--</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And yet he thought oftener of him than last year; for joy readily melts
+us into softness; and the lackered Wheel of Fortune is a cistern-wheel
+that empties its water in our eyes.... But the friendly Genius of this
+terrestrial, or rather aquatic Ball--for, in the physical and in the
+moral world, there are more tear-seas than firm land--has provided for
+the poor water-insects that float about in it, for us, namely, a quite
+special elixir against spasms in the soul; I declare this same Genius
+must have studied the whole pathology of man with care; for to the poor
+devil who is no Stoic, and can pay no Soul-doctor, that for the
+fissures of his cranium and his breast might prepare costly
+prescriptions of simples, he has stowed up cask-wise in all cellarages
+a precious wound-water, which the patient has only to take and pour
+over his slashes and bone-breakages--gin-twist, I mean, or beer, or a
+touch of wine.... By Heaven! it is either stupid ingratitude towards
+this medicinal Genius on the one hand, or theological confusion of
+permitted tippling with prohibited drunkenness on the other, if men do
+not thank God that they have something at hand, which, in the nervous
+vertigoes of life, will instantly supply the place of Philosophy,
+Christianity, Judaism, Paganism, and <i>Time</i>;--liquor, as I said.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The Conrector had long before sunset given the village post three
+groschens of post-money, and commissioned--for he had a whole cabinet
+of ducats in his pocket, which all day he was surveying in the dark
+with his hand--three thalers' worth of Pontac from the town. &quot;I must
+have a Cantata merry-making,&quot; said he; &quot;if it be my last day, let it be
+my gayest too!&quot; I could wish he had given a larger order; but he kept
+the bit of moderation between his teeth at all times; even in a
+threatened sham-death-night, and in the midst of jubilee. The question
+is, whether he would not have restricted himself to a single bottle, if
+he had not wished to treat his mother and the Fräulein. Had he lived in
+the tenth century, when the Day of Judgment was thought to be at hand,
+or in other centuries, when new Noah's Deluges were expected, and when,
+accordingly, like sailors in a shipwreck, people boused up all,--he
+would not have spent one kreuzer more on that account. His joy was,
+that with his legacy he could now satisfy his head-creditor
+Steinberger, and leave the world an honest man. Just people, who make
+much of money, pay their debts the most punctually.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The purple Pontac arrived at a time when Fixlein could compare the
+red-chalk-drawings and red-letter-titles of joy, which it would
+bring out on the cheeks of its drinker and drinkeresses,--with the
+Evening-carnation of the last clouds about the Sun....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I declare, among all the spectators of this History, no one can be
+thinking more about poor Thiennette than I; nevertheless, it is not
+permitted me to bring her out from her tiring-room to my historical
+scene before the time. Poor girl! The Conrector cannot wish more warmly
+than his Biographer, that, in the Temple of Nature as in that of
+Jerusalem, there were a special door--besides that of Death--standing
+open, through which only the afflicted entered, that a Priest might
+give them solace. But Thiennette's heart-sickness over all her vanished
+prospects, over her entombed benefactress, over a whole life enwrapped
+in the pall, had hitherto, in a grief which the stony Rittmeister
+rather made to bleed than alleviated, swept all away from her,
+occupations excepted; had fettered all her steps which led not to some
+task, and granted to her eyes nothing to dry them or gladden them, save
+down-falling eyelids full of dreams and sleep.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">All sorrow raises us above the civic Ceremonial-law, and makes the
+Prosaist a Psalmist; in sorrow alone have women courage to front
+opinion. Thiennette walked out only in the evening, and then only in
+the garden.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The Conrector could scarcely wait for the appearance of his fair
+friend, to offer his thanks,--and to-night also--his Pontac. Three
+Pontac decanters and three wineglasses were placed outside on the
+projecting window-sill of his cottage; and every time he returned from
+the dusky covered-way amid the flower forests, he drank a little from
+his glass,--and the mother sipped now and then from within through the
+opened window.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I have already said, his Life-laboratory lay in the southwest corner of
+the garden or park, over against the Castle-Escurial, which stretched
+back into the village. In the northwest corner bloomed an acacia grove,
+like the floral crown of the garden. Fixlein turned his steps in that
+direction also; to see if, perhaps, he might not cast a happy glance
+through the wide-latticed grove over the intervening meads to
+Thiennette. He recoiled a little before two stone steps leading down
+into a pond before this grove, which were sprinkled with fresh blood.
+On the flags, also, there was blood hanging. Man shudders at this oil
+of our life's lamp where he finds it shed; to him it is the red
+death-signature of the Destroying Angel. Fixlein hurried apprehensively
+into the grove; and found here his paler benefactress leaning on the
+flower-bushes; her hands with her knitting-ware sunk into her bosom,
+her eyes lying under their lids as if in the bandage of slumber; her
+left arm in the real bandage of bloodletting; and with cheeks to which
+the twilight was lending as much red, as late woundings--this day's
+included--had taken from them. Fixlein, after his first terror--not at
+this flower's sleep, but at his own abrupt entrance--began to unroll
+the spiral butterfly's-sucker of his vision, and to lay it on the
+motionless leaves of this same sleeping flower. At bottom, I may
+assert, that this was the first time he had ever looked at her; he was
+now among the thirties; and he still continued to believe, that, in a
+young lady, he must look at the clothes only, not the person, and wait
+on her with his ears, not with his eyes.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I impute it to the elevating influences of the Pontac, that the
+Conrector plucked up courage to--turn, to come back, and employ the
+resuscitating means of coughing, sneezing, trampling, and calling to
+his Shock, in stronger and stronger doses on the fair sleeper. To take
+her by the hand, and with some medical apology, gently pull her out of
+sleep, this was an audacity of which the Conrector, so long as he could
+stand for Pontac, and had any grain of judgment left, could never
+dream.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">However, he did awake her, by those other means.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Wearied, heavy-laden Thiennette! how slowly does thy eye open! The
+warmest balsam of this earth, soft sleep has shifted aside, and the
+night-air of memory is again blowing on thy naked wounds!--and yet was
+the smiling friend of thy youth the fairest object which thy eye could
+light on, when it sank from the hanging-garden of Dreams into this
+lower one round thee.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She herself was little conscious,--and the Conrector not at all,--that
+she was bending her flower-leaves imperceptibly towards a terrestrial
+body, namely, towards Fixlein. She resembled an Italian flower, that
+contains cunningly concealed within it a new-year's gift, which the
+receiver knows not at first how to extract. But now the golden chain of
+her late kind deed attracted her as well towards him, as him towards
+her. She at once gave her eye and her voice a mask of joy; for she did
+not put her tears, as Catholics do those of Christ, in relic-vials,
+upon altars, to be worshipped. He could very suitably preface his
+invitation to the Pontac festival with a long acknowledgment of thanks
+for the kind intervention which had opened to him the sources for
+procuring it. She rose slowly, and walked with him to the banquet of
+wine; but he was not so discreet, as at first to attempt leading her,
+or rather not so courageous; he could more easily have offered a young
+lady his hand (that is, with marriage ring) than offered her his arm.
+One only time in his life had he escorted a female, a Lombard Countess
+from the theatre; a thing truly not to be believed, were not this the
+secret of it, that he was obliged; for the lady, a foreigner, parted in
+the press from all her people, in a bad night, had laid hold of him as
+a sable Abbé by the arm, and requested him to take her to her inn. He,
+however, knew the fashions of society, and attended her no farther than
+the porch of his Quintus-mansion, and there directed her with his
+finger to her inn, which, with thirty blazing windows, was looking down
+from another street.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">These things he cannot help. But to-night he had scarcely, with his
+fair, faint companion, reached the bank of the pond, into which some
+superstitious dread of water-spirits had lately poured the pure blood
+of her left arm,--when, in his terror lest she fell in, with the rest
+of her blood, over the brink, he quite valiantly laid hold of the sick
+arm. Thus will much Pontac and a little courage at all times put a
+Conrector in case to lay hold of a Fräulein. I aver that at the
+banquet-board of the wine, at the window-sill, he continued in the same
+conducting position. What a soft group in the penumbra of the Earth,
+while Night, with its dusky waters, was falling deeper and deeper, and
+the silver-light of the Moon was already glancing back from the copper
+ball of the steeple! I call the group soft, because it consists of a
+maiden that in two senses has been bleeding; of a mother again with
+tears giving her thanks for the happiness of her child; and of a pious,
+modest man, pouring wine, and drinking health to both, and who traces
+in his veins a burning lava-stream, which is boiling through his heart,
+and threatening piece by piece to melt it and bear it away. A candle
+stood without among the three bottles, like Reason among the Passions;
+on this account the Conrector looked without intermission at the
+window-panes, for on them (the darkness of the room served as
+mirror-foil) was painted, among other faces which Fixlein liked, the
+face he liked best of all, and which he dared to look at only in
+reflection, the face of Thiennette.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Every minute was a Federation-festival, and every second a
+Preparation-Sabbath for it. The Moon was gleaming from the evening dew,
+and the Pontac from their eyes, and the bean-stalks were casting a
+shorter grating of shadow. The quicksilver-drops of stars were hanging
+more and more continuous in the sable of night. The warm vapor of the
+wine set our two friends (like steam-engines) again in motion.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Nothing makes the heart fuller and bolder than walking to and fro in
+the night. Fixlein now led the Fräulein in his arm without scruple. By
+reason of her lancet-wound, Thiennette could only put her hand, in a
+clasping position, in his arm; and he, to save her the trouble of
+holding fast, held fast himself, and pressed her fingers as well as
+might be with his arm to his heart. It would betray a total want of
+polished manners to censure his. At the same time, trifles are the
+provender of Love; the fingers are electric discharges of a fire
+sparkling along every fibre; sighs are the guiding tones of two
+approximating hearts; and the worst and most effectual thing of all in
+such a case is some misfortune; for the fire of Love, like that of
+naphtha, likes to swim on water. Two tear-drops, one in another's, one
+in your own eyes, compose, as with two convex lenses, a microscope
+which enlarges everything, and changes all sorrows into charms. Good
+sex! I too consider every sister in misfortune as fair; and, perhaps,
+thou wouldst deserve the name of the Fair, even because thou art the
+Suffering sex!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And if Professor Hunczogsky in Vienna modelled all the wounds of the
+human frame in wax, to teach his pupils how to cure them, I also, thou
+good sex, am representing in little figures the cuts and scars of thy
+spirit, though only to keep away rude hands from inflicting new
+ones....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Thiennette felt not the loss of the inheritance, but of her that should
+have left it; and this more deeply for one little trait, which she had
+already told his mother, as she now told him. In the last two nights of
+the Rittmeisterinn, when the feverish watching was holding up to
+Thiennette's imagination nothing but the winding-sheet and the
+mourning-coaches of her protectress; while she was sitting at the foot
+of the bed, looking on those fixed eyes, unconsciously quick drops
+often trickled over her cheeks, while in thought she prefigured the
+heavy, cumbrous dressing of her benefactress for the coffin. Once after
+midnight, the dying lady pointed with her finger to her own lips.
+Thiennette understood her not; but rose and bent over her face. The
+Enfeebled tried to lift her head, but could not,--and only rounded her
+lips. At last, a thought glanced through Thiennette, that the
+Departing, whose dead arms could now press no beloved heart to her own,
+wished that she herself should embrace her. O then, that instant, keen
+and tearful, she pressed her warm lips on the colder,--and she was
+silent like her that was to speak no more,--and she embraced alone and
+was not embraced. About four o'clock, the finger waved again; she sank
+down on the stiffened lips,--but this had been no signal, for the lips
+of her friend under the long kiss had grown stiff and cold....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">How deeply now, before the infinite Eternity's-countenance of Night,
+did the cutting of this thought pass through Fixlein's warm soul: &quot;O
+thou forsaken one beside me! No happy accident, no twilight hast thou,
+like that now glimmering in the heavens, to point to the prospect of a
+sunny day; without parents art thou, without brother, without friend;
+here alone on a disblossomed, emptied corner of the Earth; and thou,
+left Harvest-flower, must wave lonely and frozen over the withered
+stubble of the Past.&quot; That was the meaning of his thoughts, whose
+internal words were: &quot;Poor young lady! Not so much as a half-cousin
+left; no nobleman will seek her, and she grows old so forgotten, and
+she is so good from the very heart,--Me she has made happy,--Ah, had I
+the presentation to the parish of Hukelum in my pocket, I should make a
+trial.&quot; ... Their mutual lives, which a straitcutting bond of Destiny
+was binding so closely together, now rose before him overhung with
+sable,--and he forthwith conducted his friend (for a bashful man may in
+an hour and a half be transformed into the boldest, and then continues
+so) back to the last flask, that all these upsprouting thistles and
+passion-flowers of sorrow might therewith be swept away. I remark, in
+passing, that this was stupid; the torn vine is full of water-veins as
+well as grapes; and a soft oppressed heart the beverage of joy can melt
+only into tears.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">If any man disagree with me, I shall desire him to look at the
+Conrector, who demonstrates my experimental maxim like a very
+syllogism.--One might arrive at some philosophic views, if one traced
+out the causes, why liquors--that is to say, in the long run, more
+plentiful secretion of the nervous spirits--make men at once pious,
+soft, and poetical. The Poet, like Apollo his father, is <i>forever a
+youth</i>; and is, what other men are only once, namely, in love,--or only
+after Pontac, namely, intoxicated,--all his life long. Fixlein, who had
+been no poet in the morning, now became one at night; wine made him
+pious and soft; the Harmonica-bells in man, which sound to the tones of
+a higher world, must, like the glass Harmonica-bells, if they are to
+act, be kept <i>moist</i>.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He was now standing with her again beside the wavering pond, in which
+the second blue hemisphere of heaven, with dancing stars and amid
+quivering trees, was playing; over the green hills ran the white,
+crooked footpaths dimly along; on the one mountain was the twilight
+sinking together, on the other was the mist of night rising up;
+and over all these vapors of life hung motionless and naming the
+thousand-armed lustre of the starry heaven, and every arm held in it a
+burning galaxy....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">It now struck eleven.... Amid such scenes, an unknown hand stretches
+itself out in man, and writes in foreign language on his heart, a dread
+<i>Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin</i>. &quot;Perhaps by twelve I am dead,&quot; thought our
+friend, in whose soul the Cantata-Sunday, with all its black funeral
+piles, was mounting up.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The whole future Crucifixion of his friend lay prickly and bethorned
+before him; and he saw every bloody trace from which she lifted her
+foot,--she who had made his own way soft with flowers and leaves. He
+could no longer restrain himself; trembling in his whole frame, and
+with a trembling voice, he solemnly said to her: &quot;If the Lord this
+night call me away, let the half of my fortune be yours; for it is your
+goodness I must thank that I am free of debts, as few Teachers are.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Thiennette, unacquainted with our sex, naturally mistook this speech
+for a proposal of marriage; and the fingers of her wounded arm to-night
+for the first time pressed suddenly against the arm in which they lay;
+the only living mortal's arm by which Joy, Love, and the Earth were
+still united with her bosom. The Conrector, rapturously terrified
+at the first pressure of a female hand, bent over his right to take
+hold of her left; and Thiennette, observing his unsuccessful movement,
+lifted her fingers, and laid her whole wounded arm in his, and
+her whole left hand in his right. Two lovers dwell in the
+Whispering-gallery,<a name="div2Ref_51" href="#div2_51"><sup>[51]</sup></a>
+where the faintest breath bodies itself forth
+into a sound. The good Conrector received and returned this blissful
+love-pressure, wherewith our poor, powerless soul, stammering, hemmed
+in, longing, distracted, seeks for a warmer language, which exists not;
+he was overpowered; he had not the courage to look at her; but he
+looked into the gleam of the twilight, and said (and here for
+unspeakable love the tears were running warm over his cheeks): &quot;Ah, I
+will give you all; fortune, life, and all that I have, my heart and my
+hand.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She was about to answer, but, casting a side glance, she cried, with a
+shriek: &quot;Ah, Heaven!&quot; He started round, and perceived the white muslin
+sleeve all dyed with blood; for in putting her arm into his, she had
+pushed away the bandage from the open vein. With the speed of
+lightning, he hurried her into the acacia-grove; the blood was already
+running from the muslin; he grew paler than she, for every drop of it
+was coming from his heart. The blue-white arm was bared; the bandage
+was put on: he tore a piece of gold from his pocket; clapped it, as one
+does with open arteries, on the spouting fountain, and bolted with this
+golden bar, and with the bandage over it, the door out of which her
+afflicted life was hurrying.--</p>
+
+<p class="normal">When it was over, she looked up to him; pale, languid, but her eyes
+were two glistening fountains of an unspeakable love, full of sorrow
+and full of gratitude.--The exhausting loss of blood was spreading her
+soul asunder in sighs. Thiennette was dissolved into inexpressible
+softness; and the heart lacerated by so many years, by so many arrows,
+was plunging with all its wounds in warm streams of tears, to be
+healed, as chapped flutes close together by lying in water, and get
+back their tones. Before such a magic form, before such a pure,
+heavenly love, her sympathizing friend was melted between the flames of
+joy and grief; and sank, with stifled voice, and bent down by love and
+rapture, on the pale, angelic face, the lips of which he timidly
+pressed, but did not kiss, till all-powerful Love bound its girdles
+round them, and drew the two closer and closer together, and their two
+souls, like two tears, melted into one. O now, when it struck twelve,
+the hour of death, did not the lover fancy that her lips were drawing
+his soul away, and all the fibres and all the nerves of his life closed
+spasmodically round the last heart in this world, round the last
+rapture of existence.... Yes, happy man, thou didst express thy love;
+for in thy love thou thoughtest to die....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">However, he did not die. After midnight, there floated a balmy morning
+air through the shaken flowers, and the whole spring was breathing.
+The blissful lover, setting bounds even to his sea of joy, reminded
+his delicate beloved, who was now his bride, of the dangers from
+night-cold; and himself of the longer night-cold of Death, which was
+now for long years passed over.--Innocent and blessed, they rose
+from the grove of their betrothment, from its dust broken by white
+acacia-flowers and straggling moonbeams. And without, they felt as if a
+whole wide Past had sunk away in a convulsion of the world; all was
+new, light, and young. The sky stood full of glittering dew-drops from
+the everlasting Morning; and the stars quivered joyfully asunder, and
+sank, resolved into beams, down into the hearts of men.--The Moon, with
+her fountain of light, had overspread and kindled all the garden, and
+was hanging above in a starless blue, as if she had consumed the
+nearest stars; and she seemed like a smaller wandering Spring, like a
+Christ's-face smiling in love of man.--</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Under this light they looked at one another for the first time after
+the first words of love; and the sky gleamed magically down on the
+disordered features with which the first rapture of love was still
+standing written on their faces....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Dream, ye beloved, as ye wake, happy as in Paradise, innocent as in
+Paradise!</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_lb06" href="#div1_lb06">SIXTH LETTER-BOX.</a></h2>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="sc">Office-impost.--One of the Most Important of Petitions</span>.</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">The finest thing was his awakening in his European Settlement in the
+giant Schadeck bed!--With the inflammatory, tickling, eating fever of
+love in his breast; with the triumphant feeling that he had now got the
+introductory programme of love put happily by; and with the sweet
+resurrection from his living, prophetic burial; and with the joy that
+now, among his thirties, he could, for the first time, cherish hopes of
+a longer life (and did not longer mean at least till seventy?) than he
+could ten years ago;--with all this stirring life-balsam, in which the
+living fire-wheel of his heart was rapidly revolving, he lay here, and
+laughed at his glancing portrait in the bed-canopy; but he could not do
+it long; he was obliged to move. For a less happy man, it would have
+been gratifying to have measured--as pilgrims measure with the length
+of their pilgrimage, not so much by steps as by body-lengths, like
+Earth-diameters--the superficial content of the bed. But Fixlein, for
+his own part, had to launch from his bed into warm, billowy life; he
+had now his dear good Earth again to look after, and a Conrectorship
+thereon, and a bride to boot. Besides all this, his mother down-stairs
+now admitted that he had last night actually glided through beneath the
+scythe of Death, like supple grass, and that yesterday she had not told
+him, merely out of fear of his fear. Still a cold shudder went over
+him--especially as he was sober now--when he looked round at the high
+Tarpeian Rock, four hours' distance behind him, on the battlements of
+which he had last night walked hand in hand with Death.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The only thing that grieved him was, that it was Monday, and that he
+must back to the Gymnasium. Such a freightage of joys he had never
+taken with him on his road to town. After four, he issued from his
+house, satisfied with coffee (which he drank in Hukelum merely for his
+mother's sake, who, for two days after, would still have portions of
+this woman's-wine to draw from the lees of the pot-sediment), into the
+<i>cooling</i> dawning May-morning (for joy needs coolness, sorrow sun); his
+Betrothed comes--not indeed to meet him, but still--into his hearing,
+by her distant morning hymn; he makes but one momentary turn into the
+blissful haven of the blooming acacia-grove, which still, like the
+covenant sealed in it, has no thorns; he dips his warm hand in the
+cold-bath of the dewy leaves; he wades with pleasure through the
+beautifying-water of the dew, which, as it imparts color to faces, eats
+it away from boots (&quot;but with thirty ducats, a Conrector may make shift
+to keep two pairs of boots on the hook&quot;). And now the Moon, as it were
+the hanging seal of his last night's happiness, dips down into the
+West, like an emptied bucket of light, and in the East the other
+overrunning bucket, the Sun, mounts up, and the gushes of light flow
+broader and broader.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The city stood in the celestial flames of Morning. Here his
+divining-rod (his gold-roll, which, excepting one sixteenth of an inch
+broken off from it, he carried along with him) began to quiver over all
+the spots where booty and silver-veins of enjoyment were concealed; and
+our rod-diviner easily discovered that the city and the future were a
+true entire Potosi of delights.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In his Conrectorate closet he fell upon his knees and thanked God--not
+so much for his heritage and bride as--for his life; for he had gone
+away on Sunday morning with doubts whether he should ever come back;
+and it was purely out of love to the reader, and fear lest he might
+fret himself too much with apprehension, that I cunningly imputed
+Fixlein's journey more to his desire of knowing what was in the will,
+than of making his own will in presence of his mother. Every recovery
+is a bringing back and palingenesia of our youth; one loves the Earth
+and those that are on it with a new love. The Conrector could have
+found in his heart to take all his class by the locks, and press them
+to his breast; but he only did so to his adjutant, the Quartaner, who,
+in the first Letter-box, was still sitting in the rank of a
+Quintaner....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">His first expedition, after school-hours, was to the house of Meister
+Steinberger, where, without speaking a word, he counted down fifty
+florins cash in ducats, on the table: &quot;At last I repay you,&quot; said
+Fixlein, &quot;the moiety of my debt, and give you many thanks.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Ey, Herr Conrector,&quot; said the Quartermaster, and continued calmly
+stuffing puddings as before, &quot;in my bond it is said, <i>payable at three
+months' mutual notice</i>. How could a man like me go on, else? However, I
+will change you the gold-pieces.&quot; Thereupon he advised him that it
+might be more judicious to take back a florin or two, and buy himself
+a better hat, and whole shoes. &quot;If you like,&quot; added he, &quot;to get a
+calf-skin and half a dozen hare-skins dressed, they are lying
+up-stairs.&quot; I should think, for my own part, that to the reader it must
+be as little a matter of indifference as it was to the Butcher, whether
+the hero of such a History appeared before him with an old tattered
+potlid of a hat, and a pump-sucker and leg-harness pair of boots, or in
+suitable apparel. In short, before St. John's day, the man was dressed
+with taste and pomp.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But now came two most peculiarly important papers--at bottom only one,
+the petition for the Hukelum parsonship--to be elaborated; in regard to
+which I feel as if I myself must assist.... It were a simple turn, if
+now at least the assembled public did not pay attention.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In the first place, the Conrector searched out and sorted all the
+Consistorial and Councillor quittances, or rather the toll-bills of the
+road-money, which he had been obliged to pay before the toll-gates at
+the Quintusship and Conrectorship had been thrown open; for the
+executor of the Schadeck testament had to reimburse him the whole, as
+his discharge would express it, &quot;to penny and farthing.&quot; Another would
+have summed up his post-excise much more readily; by merely looking
+what he--owed; as these debt-bills and those toll-bills, like parallel
+passages, elucidate and confirm each other. But in Fixlein's case,
+there was a small circumstance of peculiarity at work, which I cannot
+explain till after what follows.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">It grieved him a little that for his two offices he had been obliged
+to pay and to borrow no larger a sum than 135 florins, 41 kreuzers,
+and one halfpenny. The legacy, it is true, was to pass directly
+from the hands of the testamentary executor into those of the
+Regiments-Quartermaster; but yet he could have liked well had he--for
+man is a fool from the very foundation of him--had more to pay, and
+therefore to inherit. The whole Conrectorate he had, by a slight
+deposit of 90 florins, plucked, as it were, from the Wheel of Fortune;
+and so small a sum must surprise my reader; but what will he say, when
+I tell him that there are countries where the entry-money into
+school-rooms is even more moderate? In Scherau, a Conrector is charged
+only 88 florins, and perhaps he may have an income triple of this sum.
+Not to speak of Saxony (what, in truth, was to be expected from the
+cradle of the Reformation, in Religion and Polite Literature), where a
+schoolmaster and a parson have <i>nothing</i> to pay,--even in Baireuth, for
+example, in Hof, the progress of improvement has been such that a
+Quartus,--a Quartus, do I say,--a Tertius--a Tertius, do I say,--a
+Conrector,--at entrance on his post, is not required to pay down more
+than:--</p>
+<table cellpadding="10" style="width:100%; margin-top:12pt; margin-bottom:12pt">
+<colgroup><col style="width:10%"><col style="width:10%"><col style="width:10%">
+<col style="width:70%"></colgroup>
+<tr>
+<td rowspan="5">&nbsp;</td>
+<td style="text-align:right">Fl.rhen.</td>
+<td style="text-align:right">Kr.rhen.</td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td style="text-align:right">30&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+<td style="text-align:right">49&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+<td>For taking the oaths at the Consistorium.</td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td style="text-align:right">4&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+<td style="text-align:right">0&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+<td>To the Syndic for the Presentation.</td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td style="text-align:right">2&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+<td style="text-align:right">0&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+<td>To the then Burgermeister.</td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td style="text-align:right; border-bottom:solid black 2px">45&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+<td style="text-align:right; border-bottom:solid black 2px">7½&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+<td>For the Government-sanction.</td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td>Total,</td>
+<td style="text-align:right">81 fl.</td>
+<td style="text-align:right">56½ kr.</td>
+</tr></table>
+
+
+<p class="normal">If the printing-charges of a Rector do stand a little higher in some
+points, yet, on the other hand, a Tertius, Quartus, &amp;c., come cheaper
+from the press than even a Conrector. Now, it is clear, that in this
+case a schoolmaster can subsist; since, in the course of the very first
+year, he gets an overplus beyond this <i>dockmoney</i> of his office. A
+schoolmaster must, like his scholars, have been advanced from class to
+class, before these his loans to Government, together with the interest
+for delay of payment, can jointly amount to so much as his yearly
+income in the highest class. Another thing in his favor is, that our
+institutions do not--as those of Athens did--prohibit people from
+entering on office while in debt; but every man, with his debt-knapsack
+on his shoulders, mounts up, step after step, without obstruction. The
+Pope, in large benefices, appropriates the income of the first year,
+under the title of <i>Annates</i>, or First-Fruits; and accordingly he, in
+all cases, bestows any large benefice on the possessor of a smaller
+one, thereby to augment both his own revenues and those of others; but
+it shows, in my opinion, a bright distinction between Popery and
+Lutheranism, that the Consistoriums of the latter abstract from their
+school-ministers and church-ministers not perhaps above two thirds of
+their first yearly income; though they too, like the Pope, must
+naturally have an eye to vacancies.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">It may be that I shall here come in collision with the Elector of
+Mentz, when I confess, that, in Schmausen's <i>Corp. jur. pub. Germ</i>., I
+have turned up the Mentz-Imperial-Court-Chancery-tax-ordinance of
+the 6th January, 1659, and there investigated how much this same
+Imperial-Court-Chancery demands, as contrasted with a Consistorium. For
+example, any man that wishes to be baked or sodden into a <i>Poet
+Laureate</i>, has 50 florins tax-dues, and 20 florins Chancery-dues, to
+pay down; whereas, for 20 florins more, he might have been made a
+Conrector, who is a poet of this species, as it were by the by and <i>ex
+officio</i>. The institution of a Gymnasium is permitted for 1,000
+florins; an extraordinary sum, with which the whole body of the
+teachers in the instituted Gymnasium might with us clear off the
+entry-moneys of their school-rooms. Again, a Freiherr, who, at any
+rate, often enough grows old without knowing how, must purchase the
+<i>venia ætatis</i> with 200 hard florins; while, with the half sum, he
+might have become a schoolmaster, and here <i>age</i> would have come of its
+own accord. And a thousand such things! They prove, however, that
+matters can be at no bad pass in our Governments and Circles, where
+promotions are sold dearer to Folly than to Diligence, and where it
+costs more to institute a school than to serve in one.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The remarks I made on this subject to a Prince, as well as the remarks
+a Town-syndic made on it to myself, are too remarkable to be omitted
+for mere dread of digressiveness.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The Syndic--a man of enlarged views, and of fiery patriotism, the
+warmth of which was the more beneficent that he collected all the beams
+of it into one focus, and directed them to himself and his family--gave
+me (I had perhaps been comparing the School-bench and the School-stair
+to the <i>bench</i> and the <i>ladder</i>, on which people are laid when about
+to
+be tortured) the best reply: &quot;If a schoolmaster consume nothing but 30
+reichsthalers;<a name="div2Ref_52" href="#div2_52"><sup>[52]</sup></a> if he
+annually purchase manufactured goods,
+according as Political Economists have calculated for each individual,
+namely, to the amount of 5 reichsthalers; and no more hundred-weights
+of victual than these assume, namely, 10; in short, if he live like a
+substantial wood-cutter, then the Devil must be in it if he cannot
+yearly lay by so much net profit as shall, in the long run, pay the
+interest of his entry debts.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The Syndic must have failed to convince me at that time, since I
+afterwards told the Flachsenfingen Prince:<a name="div2Ref_53" href="#div2_53"><sup>[53]</sup></a></p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="continue">&quot;Illustrious sir, you know not, but I do,--not a player in your Theatre
+would act the Schoolmaster in Engel's <i>Prodigal Son</i>, three nights
+running, for such a sum as every real Schoolmaster has to take for
+acting it all the days of the year. In Prussia, invalids are made
+Schoolmasters; with us, Schoolmasters are made invalids.&quot; ....</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">But to our story! Fixlein wrote out the inventory of his Crown-debts;
+but with quite a different purpose than the reader will guess, who has
+still the Schadeck testament in his head. In one word, he wanted to be
+Parson of Hukelum. To be a clergyman, and in the place where his cradle
+stood, and all the little gardens of his childhood, his mother also,
+and the grove of betrothment,--this was an open gate into a New
+Jerusalem, supposing even that the living had been nothing but a meagre
+penitentiary. The main point was, he might marry, if he were appointed.
+For, in the capacity of lank Conrector, supported only by the
+strengthening-girth of his waistcoat, and with emoluments whereby
+scarcely the purchase-money of a--purse was to be come at; in this way
+he was more like collecting wick and tallow for his burial torch than
+for his bridal one.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">For the Schoolmaster class are, in well-ordered states, as little
+permitted to marry as the soldiery. In <i>Conringius de Antiquitatibus
+Academicis</i>, where in every leaf it is proved that all cloisters were
+originally schools, I hit upon the reason. Our schools are now
+cloisters, and consequently we endeavor to maintain in our teachers at
+least an imitation of the Three Monastic Vows. The Vow of Obedience
+might perhaps be sufficiently enforced by School-Inspectors; but the
+second vow, that of Celibacy, would be more hard of attainment, were it
+not that, by one of the best political arrangements, the third vow, I
+mean a beautiful equality in Poverty, is so admirably attended to,
+that no man who has made it needs any further <i>testimonium
+paupertatis</i>;--and now <i>let</i> this man, if he likes, lay hold of a
+matrimonial half, when of the two halves each has a whole stomach, and
+nothing for it but half-coins and half-beer!...</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I know well, millions of my readers would themselves compose this
+Petition for the Conrector, and ride with it to Schadeck to his
+Lordship, that so the poor rogue might get the sheepfold, with the
+annexed wedding-mansion; for they see clearly enough, that directly
+thereafter one of the best Letter-Boxes would be written that ever came
+from such a repository.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Fixlein's Petition was particularly good and striking; it submitted to
+the Rittmeister four grounds of preference: 1. &quot;He was a native of the
+parish; his parents and ancestors had already done Hukelum service;
+therefore he prayed,&quot; &amp;c.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">2. &quot;The here documented official debts of 135 florins, 41 kreuzers, and
+one halfpenny, the cancelling of which a never-to-be-forgotten
+testament secured him, he himself could clear, in case he obtained the
+living, and so hereby give up his claim to the legacy,&quot; &amp;c.</p>
+
+<p class="normal"><i>Voluntary Note by me</i>. It is plain he means to bribe his Godfather,
+whom the lady's testament has put into a fume. But, gentle reader,
+blame not without mercy a poor, oppressed, heavy-laden school-man and
+school-horse for an indelicate insinuation, which truly was never mine.
+Consider, Fixlein knew that the Rittmeister was a cormorant towards the
+poor, as he was a squanderer towards the rich. It may be, too, the
+Conrector might once or twice have heard, in the Law Courts, of patrons
+by whom not indeed the church and churchyard--though these things are
+articles of commerce in England--so much as the true management of
+them, had been sold, or rather farmed to farming-candidates. I know
+from Lange,<a name="div2Ref_54" href="#div2_54"><sup>[54]</sup></a> that the
+Church must support its patron, when he has
+nothing to live upon; and might not a nobleman, before he actually
+began begging, be justified in taking a little advance, a fore-payment
+of his alimentary moneys, from the hands of his pulpit-farmer?--</p>
+
+<p class="normal">3. &quot;He had lately betrothed himself with Fräulein von Thiennette, and
+given her a piece of gold, as marriage-pledge; and could therefore wed
+the said Fräulein, were he once provided for,&quot; &amp;c.</p>
+
+<p class="normal"><i>Voluntary Note by me</i>. I hold this ground to be the strongest in the
+whole Petition. In the eyes of Herr von Aufhammer, Thiennette's
+genealogical tree was long since stubbed, disleaved, worm-eaten, and
+full of millepedes; she was his [Oe]conoma, his Castle-Stewardess, and
+Legatess <i>a Latere</i> for his domestics; and with her pretensions for an
+alms-coffer, was threatening in the end to become a burden to him. His
+indignant wish that she had been provided for with Fixlein's legacy
+might now be fulfilled. In a word, if Fixlein become Parson, he will
+have the third ground to thank for it; not at all the mad fourth....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">4. &quot;He had learned with sorrow, that the name of his Shock, which he
+had purchased from an Emigrant at Leipzig, meant Egidius in German; and
+that the dog had drawn upon him the displeasure of his Lordship. Far be
+it from him so to designate the Shock in future; but he would take it
+as a special grace, if for the dog, which he at present called without
+any name, his Lordship would be pleased to appoint one himself.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal"><i>My Voluntary Note</i>. The dog then, it seems, to which the nobleman has
+hitherto been godfather, is to receive its name a <i>second</i> time from
+him!--But how can the famishing gardener's son, whose career never
+mounted higher than from the school-bench to the school-chair, and who
+never spoke with polished ladies, except singing, namely in the church,
+how can he be expected, in fingering such a string, to educe from it
+any finer tone than the pedantic one? And yet the source of it lies
+deeper; not the contracted <i>situation</i>, but the contracted <i>eye</i>, not
+a
+favorite science, but a narrow plebeian soul, makes us pedantic,--a
+soul that cannot <i>measure</i> and <i>separate</i> the <i>concentric</i>
+circles of
+human knowledge and activity, that confounds the focus of universal
+human life, by reason of the focal distance, with every two or three
+converging rays; and that cannot see all, and tolerate all---- In
+short, the true Pedant is the Intolerant.</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">The Conrector wrote out his Petition splendidly in five propitious
+evenings; employed a peculiar ink for the purpose; worked not indeed so
+long over it as the stupid Manucius over a Latin letter, namely, some
+months, if Scioppius's word is to be taken; still less so long as
+another scholar at a Latin epistle, who--truly we have nothing but
+Morhof's word for it--hatched it during four whole months; inserting
+his variations, adjectives, feet, with the authorities for his phrases,
+accurately marked between the lines. Fixlein possessed a more
+thoroughgoing genius, and had completely mastered the whole enterprise
+in sixteen days. While sealing, he thought, as we all do, how this
+cover was the seed-husk of a great entire Future, the rind of many
+sweet or bitter fruits, the swathing of his whole after life.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Heaven bless his cover; but I let you throw me from the Tower of Babel,
+if he get the parsonage; can't you see, then, that Aufhammer's hands
+are tied? In spite of all his other faults, or even because of them, he
+will stand like iron by his word, which he has given so long ago to the
+Subrector. It were another matter had he been resident at Court; for
+there, where old German manners still are, no promise is kept; for as,
+according to Möser, the Ancient Germans kept only such promises as they
+made in the <i>forenoon</i> (in the afternoon they were all dead-drunk),--so
+the Court Germans likewise keep no afternoon promise; forenoon ones
+they would keep if they made any, which, however, cannot possibly
+happen, as at those hours they are--sleeping.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_lb07" href="#div1_lb07">SEVENTH LETTER-BOX.</a></h2>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="sc">Sermon.--School-Exhibition.--Splendid Mistake</span>.</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">The Conrector received his 135 florins, 43 kreuzers, one halfpenny
+Frankish; but no answer; the dog remained without name, his master
+without parsonage. Meanwhile the summer passed away; and the
+Dragoon Rittmeister had yet drawn out no pike from the Candidate
+<i>breeding-pond</i>, and thrown him into the <i>feeding-pond</i> of the Hukelum
+parsonage. It gratified him to be behung with prayers like a Spanish
+guardian Saint; and he postponed (though determined to prefer the
+Subrector) granting any one petition, till he had seven-and-thirty
+dyers', button-makers', tinsmiths' sons, whose petitions he could at
+the same time refuse. Grudge not him of Aufhammer this outlengthening
+of his electorial power! He knows the privileges of rank; feels that a
+nobleman is like Timoleon, who gained his greatest victories on his
+birthday, and had nothing more to do than name some squiress, countess,
+or the like, as his mother. A man, however, who has been exalted to the
+Peerage, while still a f[oe]tus, may with more propriety be likened to
+the <i>spinner</i>, which, contrariwise to all other insects, passes from
+the chrysalis state, and becomes a perfect insect in its mother's
+womb.--</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But to proceed! Fixlein was at present not without cash. It will be the
+same as if I made a present of it to the reader, when I reveal to him,
+that of the legacy, which was clearing off old scores, he had still 35
+florins left to himself, as <i>allodium</i> and pocket-money, wherewith he
+might purchase whatsoever seemed good to him. And how came he by so
+large a sum, by so considerable a competence? Simply by this means;
+every time he changed a piece of gold, and especially at every payment
+he received, it had been his custom to throw in, blindly at random,
+two, three, or four small coins, among the papers of his trunk. His
+purpose was to astonish himself one day, when he summed up and took
+possession of this sleeping capital. And, by Heaven! he reached it too,
+when, on mounting the throne of his Conrectorate, he drew out these
+funds from his papers, and applied them to the coronation charges. For
+the present, he sowed them in again among his waste letters. Foolish
+Fixlein! I mean, had he not luckily exposed his legacy to jeopardy,
+having offered it as bounty-money and luckpenny to the patron, this
+false clutch of his at the knocker of the Hukelum church door, would
+certainly have vexed him; but now, if he had missed the knocker, he had
+the luckpenny again, and could be merry.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I now advance a little way in his History, and hit, in the rock of his
+Life, upon so fine a vein of silver, I mean upon so fine a day, that I
+must (I believe) content myself even in regard to the twenty-third of
+Trinity-term, when he preached a vacation sermon in his dear native
+village, with a brief transitory notice.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In itself the sermon was good and glorious; and the day a rich day of
+pleasure; but I should really need to have more hours at my disposal
+than I can steal from May, in which I am at present living and writing;
+and more strength than wandering through this fine weather has left me
+for landscape pictures of the same, before I could attempt, with any
+well-founded hope, to draw out a mathematical estimate of the length
+and thickness, and the vibrations and accordant relations to each
+other, of the various strings, which combined together to form for his
+heart a Music of the Spheres, on this day of Trinity-term, though such
+a thing would please myself as much as another.... Do not ask me! In my
+opinion, when a man preaches on Sunday, before all the peasants, who
+had carried him in their arms when a gardener's boy; further, before
+his mother, who is leading off her tears through the conduit of her
+satin muff; further, before his Lordship, whom he can positively
+command to be blessed; and finally before his muslin bride, who is
+already blessed, and changing almost into stone, to find that the same
+lips can both kiss and preach; in my opinion, I say, when a man effects
+all this, he has some right to require of any Biographer who would
+paint his situation, that he--hold his jaw; and of the reader who would
+sympathize with it, that he open his, and preach himself.----</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But what I must <i>ex officio</i> depict, is the day to which this Sunday
+was but the prelude, the vigil, and the whet; I mean the prelude, the
+vigil, and the whet to the <i>Martini Actus</i>, or <i>Martinmas Exhibition</i>
+of his school. On Sunday was the sermon, on Wednesday the Actus, on
+Tuesday the Rehearsal. This Tuesday shall now be delineated to the
+universe.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I count upon it that I shall not be read by mere people of the world
+alone, to whom a School-Actus cannot truly appear much better, or more
+interesting, than some Investiture of a Bishop, or the <i>opera seria</i> of
+Frankfort Coronation; but that I likewise have people before me, who
+have been at schools, and who know how the School-Drama of an Actus and
+the stage-manager, and the playbill (the programme) thereof are to be
+estimated, still without overrating their importance.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Before proceeding to the Rehearsal of the <i>Martini Actus</i>, I impose
+upon myself, as dramaturgist of the play, the duty, if not of
+extracting, at least of recording, the Conrector's Letter of
+Invitation. In this composition he said many things; and (what an
+author likes so well) made proposals rather than reproaches;
+interrogatively reminding the public, whether, in regard to the
+well-known head-breakages of Priscian on the part of the Magnates in
+Pest and Poland, our school-houses were not the best quarantine and
+lazar-houses to protect us against infectious <i>barbarisms</i>? Moreover,
+he defended in schools what could be defended (and nothing in the world
+is sweeter or easier than a defence); and said, Schoolmasters, who, not
+quite justifiably, like certain Courts, spoke nothing, and let nothing
+be spoken to them, but Latin, might plead the Romans in excuse, whose
+subjects, and whose kings, at least in their epistles and public
+transactions, were obliged to make use of the Latin tongue. He wondered
+why only our Greek, and not also oar Latin Grammars, were composed in
+Latin, and put the pregnant question, whether the Romans, when they
+taught their little children the Latin tongue, did it in any other than
+in this same. Thereupon he went over to the Actus, and said what
+follows, in his own words:--</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I am minded to prove, in a subsequent Invitation, that everything
+which can be said or known about the great founder of the Reformation,
+the subject of our present Martini Prolusions, has been long ago
+exhausted, as well by Seckendorf as others. In fact, with regard to
+Luther's personalities, his table-talk, incomes, journeys, clothes, and
+so forth, there can now nothing new be brought forward, if at the same
+time it is to be true. Nevertheless, the field of the Reformation
+history is, to speak in a figure, by no means wholly cultivated; and it
+does appear to me as if the inquirer even of the present day might in
+vain look about for correct intelligence respecting the children,
+grandchildren, and children's children, down to our own times, of this
+great Reformer; all of whom, however, appertain, in a more remote
+degree, to the Reformation history, as he himself in a nearer. Thou
+shalt not perhaps be threshing, said I to myself, altogether empty
+straw, if, according to thy small ability, thou bring forward and
+cultivate this neglected branch of History. And so have I ventured,
+with the last male descendant of Luther, namely, with the Advocate
+Martin Gottlob Luther, who practised in Dresden, and deceased there in
+1759, to make a beginning of a more special Reformation history. My
+feeble attempt, in regard to this Reformationary Advocate, will be
+sufficiently rewarded, should it excite to better works on the subject;
+however, the little which I have succeeded in digging up and collecting
+with regard to him I here submissively, obediently, and humbly request
+all friends and patrons of the Flachsenfingen Gymnasium to listen to,
+on the 14th of November, from the mouths of six well-conditioned
+perorators. In the first place, shall</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;<i>Gottlieb Spiesglass</i>, a Flachsenfinger, endeavor to show, in a Latin
+oration, that Martin Gottlob Luther was certainly descended of the
+Luther family. After him strives</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;<i>Friedrich Christian Krabbler</i>, from Hukelum, in German prose, to
+appreciate the influence which Martin Gottlob Luther exercised on the
+then existing Reformation; whereupon, after him, will</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;<i>Daniel Lorenz Stenzinger</i> deliver, in Latin verse, an account of
+Martin Gottlob Luther's lawsuits; embracing the probable merits of
+Advocates generally, in regard to the Reformation. Which then will give
+opportunity to</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;<i>Nikol Tobias Pfizman</i> to come forward in French, and recount the most
+important circumstances of Martin Gottlob Luther's school-years,
+university-life, and riper age. And now, when</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;<i>Andreas Eintarm</i> shall have endeavored, in German verse, to apologize
+for the possible failings of this representative of the great Luther,
+will</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;<i>Justus Strobel</i>, in Latin verse according to ability, sing his
+uprightness and integrity in the Advocate profession; whereafter I
+myself shall mount the cathedra, and most humbly thank all the patrons
+of the Flachsenfingen School, and then further bring forward those
+portions in the life of this remarkable man, of which we yet know
+absolutely nothing, they being spared, <i>Deo volente</i>, for the speakers
+of the next <i>Martini Actus</i>.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr class="W20">
+
+<p class="normal">The day before the Actus offered as it were the proof-shot and
+sample-sheet of the Wednesday. Persons who on account of dress could
+not be present at the great school-festival, especially ladies, made
+their appearance on Tuesday, during the six proof-orations. No
+one can be readier than I to subordinate the proof-Actus to the
+Wednesday-Actus; and I do anything but need being stimulated suitably
+to estimate the solemn feast of a School; but, on the other hand, I am
+equally convinced that no one, who did not go to the real Actus of
+Wednesday, could possibly figure anything more splendid than the
+proof-day preceding; because he could have no object wherewith to
+compare the pomp in which the Primate of the festival drove in with
+his triumphal chariot and six--to call the six brethren-speakers
+coach-horses--next morning in presence of ladies and Councillor
+gentleman. Smile away, Fixlein, at this astonishment over thy today's
+<i>Ovation</i>, which is leading on to-morrow's <i>Triumph</i>; on thy
+dissolving
+countenance quivers happy Self, feeding on these incense-fumes; but a
+vanity like thine, and that only, which enjoys without comparing or
+despising, can one tolerate, will one foster. But what flowed over all
+his heart, like a melting sunbeam over wax, was his mother, who after
+much persuasion had ventured in her Sunday's clothes humbly to place
+herself quite low down, beside the door of the Prima class-room. It
+were difficult to say who is happier, the mother, beholding how he whom
+she has borne under her heart can direct such noble young gentlemen,
+and hearing how he along with them can talk of these really high things
+and understand them too;--or the son, who, like some of the heroes of
+Antiquity, has the felicity of triumphing in the lifetime of his
+mother. I have never in my writings or doings cast a stone upon the
+late Burchardt Grossmann, who, under the initial letters of the stanzas
+in his song &quot;<i>Brich an, du liebe Morgenröthe</i>,&quot; inserted the letters of
+his own name; and still less have I ever censured any poor herb-woman
+for smoothing out her winding-sheet, while still living, and making
+herself one twelfth of a dozen of grave-shifts. Nor do I regard the man
+as wise--though indeed as very clever and pedantic--who can fret his
+gall-bladder full because every one of us leaf-miners views the leaf
+whereon he is mining as a park-garden, as a fifth Quarter of the World
+(so near and rich is it); the leaf-pores as so many Valleys of Tempe,
+the leaf-skeleton as a Liberty-tree, a Bread-tree, and Life-tree, and
+the dewdrops as the Ocean. We poor day-moths, evening-moths, and
+night-moths fall universally into the same error, only on different
+leaves; and whosoever (as I do) laughs at the important airs with which
+the schoolmaster issues his programmes, the dramaturgist his playbills,
+the classical variation-alms-gatherer his alphabetic letters,--does it,
+if he is wise (as is the case here), with the consciousness of his own
+<i>similar</i> folly; and laughs, in regard to his neighbor, at nothing but
+mankind and himself.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The mother was not to be detained; she must off, this very night, to
+Hukelum, to give the Fräulein Thiennette at least some tidings of this
+glorious business.--</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And now the World will bet a hundred to one, that I forthwith take
+biographical wax, and emboss such a wax-figure cabinet of the Actus
+itself as shall be single of its kind.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But on Wednesday morning, while the hope-intoxicated Conrector was just
+about putting on his fine raiment, something knocked.----</p>
+
+<p class="normal">It was the well-known servant of the Rittmeister, carrying the Hukelum
+Presentation for the Subrector <i>Füchslein</i> in his pocket. To the
+last-named gentleman he had been sent with this call to the parsonage;
+but he had distinguished ill betwixt <i>Sub</i> and <i>Con</i>rector; and had
+besides his own good reasons for directing his steps to the latter; for
+he thought, &quot;Who can it be that gets it, but the parson that preached
+last Sunday, and that comes from the village, and is engaged to our
+Fräulein Thiennette, and to whom I brought a clock and a roll of ducats
+already?&quot; That his Lordship could pass over his own godson never
+entered the man's head.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Fixlein read the address of the Appointment: &quot;To the Reverend the
+Parson <i>Fixlein</i> of Hukelum.&quot; He naturally enough made the same mistake
+as the lackey; and broke up the Presentation as his own; and finding
+moreover in the body of the paper no special mention of persons, but
+only of a <i>Schul-unterbefehlshaber</i>, or School-undergovernor (instead
+of Subrector), he could not but persist in his error.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Before I properly explain why the Rittmeister's Lawyer, the framer of
+the Presentation, had so designated a Subrector--we two, the reader
+and myself, will keep an eye for a moment on Fixlein's joyful
+salutations--on his gratefully-streaming eyes--on his full hands so
+laden with bounty--on the present of two ducats, which he drops into
+the hands of the mitre-bearer, as willingly as he will soon drop his
+own pedagogic office. Could he tell what to think (of the Rittmeister),
+or to write (to the same), or to table (for the lackey)? Did he not
+ask tidings of the noble health of his benefactor over and over,
+though the servant answered him with all distinctness at the very
+first? And was not this same man, who belonged to the nose-upturning,
+shoulder-shrugging, shoulder-knotted, toad-eating species of men, at
+last so moved by the joy which he had imparted, that he determined, on
+the spot, to bestow his presence on the new clergyman's School-Actus,
+though no person of quality whatever was to be there? Fixlein, in the
+first place, sealed his letter of thanks; and courteously invited this
+messenger of good news to visit him frequently in the Parsonage; and to
+call this evening, in passing, at his mother's, and give her a lecture
+for not staying last night, when she might have seen the Presentation
+from his Lordship arrive to-day.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The lackey being gone, Fixlein for joy began to grow sceptical--and
+timorous (wherefore, to prevent filching, he stowed his Presentation
+securely in his coffer, under keeping of two padlocks); and devout and
+softened, since he thanked God without scruple for all good that
+happened to him, and never wrote this Eternal Name but in pulpit
+characters, and with colored ink; as the Jewish copyists never wrote it
+except ornamental letters and when newly washed;<a name="div2Ref_55" href="#div2_55"><sup>[55]</sup></a>--and
+deaf also did
+the parson, grow, so that he scarcely heard the soft wooing-hour of the
+Actus--for a still softer one beside Thiennette, with its rose-bushes
+and rose-honey, would not leave his thoughts. He who of old, when
+Fortune made a wry face at him, was wont, like children in their sport
+at one another, to laugh at her so long till she herself was obliged to
+begin smiling--he was now flying as on a huge seesaw higher and higher,
+quicker and quicker aloft.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But before the Actus, let us examine the Schadeck Lawyer. <i>Fixlein</i>
+instead of <i>Füchslein</i><a name="div2Ref_56" href="#div2_56"><sup>[56]</sup></a>
+he had written from uncertainty about the
+spelling of the name; the more naturally as in transcribing the
+Rittmeisterinn's will the former had occurred so often. <i>Von</i>, this
+triumphal arch, he durst not set up before Füchslein's new name,
+because Aufhammer forbade it, considering Hans Füchslein as a mushroom,
+who had no right to <i>vons</i> and titles of nobility, for all his patents.
+In fine, the Presentation-writer was possessed with Campe's<a name="div2Ref_57" href="#div2_57"><sup>[57]</sup></a>
+whim of
+Germanizing everything, minding little though when Germanized it should
+cease to be intelligible;--as if a word needed any better act of
+naturalization than that which universal unintelligibility imparts to
+it. In itself it is the same--the rather as all languages, like all
+men, are cognate, intermarried and intermixed--whether a word was
+invented by a savage or a foreigner; whether it grew up like moss amid
+the German forests, or like street-grass, in the pavement of the Roman
+Forum. The Lawyer, on the other hand, contended that it was different;
+and accordingly he hid not from any of his clients that <i>Tagefarth</i>
+(Day-turn) meant <i>Term</i>, and that <i>Appealing</i> was <i>Berufen</i>
+(Becalling). On this principle, he dressed the word <i>Subrector</i> in the
+new livery of <i>School-undergovernor</i>. And this version further
+converted the Schoolmaster into Parson; to such a degree does our
+<i>civic</i> fortune--not our <i>personal</i> well-being, which supports
+itself on our own internal soil and resources--grow merely on the
+<i>drift-mould</i> of accidents, connections, acquaintances, and Heaven or
+the Devil knows what!--</p>
+
+<p class="normal">By the by, from a Lawyer, at the same time a Country Judge, I should
+certainly have looked for more sense; I should (I may be mistaken) have
+presumed he knew that the <i>Acts</i>, or Reports, which in former times
+(see Hoffmann's <i>German or un-German Law-practice</i>) were written in
+Latin, as before the times of Joseph the Hungarian,--are now, if
+we may say so without offence, perhaps written fully more in the
+German dialect than in the Latin; and in support of this opinion,
+I can point to whole lines of German language to be found in these
+Imperial-Court-Confessions. However, I will not believe that the Jurist
+is endeavoring, because Imhofer declares the Roman tongue to be the
+mother tongue in the other world, to disengage himself from a language,
+by means of which, like the Roman <i>Eagle</i>, or later, like the Roman
+<i>Fish-heron</i> (Pope), he has clutched such abundant booty in his
+talons.----</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Toll, toll your bell for the Actus; stream in, in to the ceremony; who
+cares for it? Neither I nor the Ex-Conrector. The six pygmy Ciceros
+will in vain set forth before us in sumptuous dress their thoughts and
+bodies. The draught-wind of Chance has blown away from the Actus its
+powder-nimbus of glory; and the Conrector that was has discovered how
+small a matter a cathedra is, and how great a one a pulpit. &quot;I should
+not have thought,&quot; thought he now, &quot;when I became Conrector, that there
+could be anything grander, I mean a parson.&quot; Man, behind his
+everlasting blind, which he only colors differently, and makes no
+thinner, carries his pride with him from one step to another; and on
+the higher step, blames only the pride of the lower.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The best of the Actus was, that the Regiments-Quartermaster and Master
+Butcher, Steinberg, attended there, embaled in a long woollen shag.
+During the solemnity, the Subrector Hans von Füchslein cast several
+gratified and inquiring glances on the Schadeck servant, who did not
+once look at him. Hans would have staked his head, that, after the
+Actus, the fellow would wait upon him. When at last the sextuple
+cockerel-brood had on their dunghill done crowing, that is to say,
+had perorated, the scholastic cocker, over whom a higher banner
+was now waving, himself came upon the stage; and delivered to the
+School-Inspectorships, to the Subrectorship, to the Guardianship, and
+the lackeyship, his most grateful thanks for their attendance; shortly,
+announcing to them at the same time, &quot;that Providence had now called
+him from his post to another; and committed to him, unworthy as he was,
+the cure of souls in the Hukelum parish, as well as in the Schadeck
+chapel of ease.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">This little address, to appearance, wellnigh blew up the then Subrector
+Hans von Füchslein from his chair; and his face looked of a mingled
+color, like red bole, green chalk, tinsel-yellow, and <i>vomissement de
+la reine</i>.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The tall Quartermaster erected himself considerably in his shag, and
+hummed loud enough in happy forgetfulness: &quot;The Dickens!--Parson?&quot;----</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The Subrector dashed by like a comet before the lackey; ordered him to
+call and take a letter for his master; strode home, and prepared for
+his patron, who at Schadeck was waiting for a long thanksgiving psalm,
+a short satirical epistle, as nervous as haste would permit, and
+mingled a few nicknames and verbal injuries along with it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The courier handed in to his master Fixlein's song of gratitude and
+Füchslein's invectives with the same hand. The dragoon Rittmeister,
+incensed at the ill-mannered churl, and bound to his word, which
+Fixlein had publicly announced in his Actus, forthwith wrote back to
+the new Parson an acceptance and ratification; and Fixlein is and
+remains, to the joy of us all, incontestible ordained parson of
+Hukelum.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">His disappointed rival has still this consolation, that he holds a seat
+in the wasp-nest of the <i>Neue Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek</i>.<a name="div2Ref_58" href="#div2_58"><sup>[58]</sup></a>
+Should the Parson ever chrysalize himself into an author, the
+watch-wasp may then buzz out, and dart its sting into the chrysalis,
+and put its own brood in the room of the murdered butterfly. As the
+Subrector everywhere went about, and threatened in plain terms that he
+would review his colleague, let not the public be surprised that
+Fixlein's <i>Errata</i>, and his Masoretic <i>Exercitationes</i>, are to this
+hour withheld from it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In spring, the widowed church receives her new husband; and how it will
+be, when Fixlein, under a canopy of flower-trees, takes the <i>Sponsa
+Christi</i> in one hand, and his own <i>Sponsa</i> in the other,--this without
+an Eighth Letter-Box, which, in the present case, may be a true
+jewel-box and rainbow-key,<a name="div2Ref_59" href="#div2_59"><sup>[59]</sup></a>
+can no mortal figure, except the
+<i>Sponsus</i> himself.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_lb08" href="#div1_lb08">EIGHTH LETTER-BOX.</a></h2>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="sc">Instalment in the Parsonage</span>.</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">On the 15th of April, 1793, the reader may observe, far down in the
+hollow, three baggage-wagons groaning along. These baggage-wagons are
+transporting the house-gear of the new Parson to Hukelum; the
+proprietor himself, with a little escort of his parishioners, is
+marching at their side, that of his china sets and household furniture
+there may be nothing broken in the eighteenth century, as the whole
+came down to him unbroken from the seventeenth. Fixlein hears the
+School-bell ringing behind him; but this chime now sings to him,
+like a curfew, the songs of future rest; he is now escaped from the
+Death-valley of the Gymnasium, and admitted into the abodes of the
+Blessed. Here dwells no envy, no colleague, no Subrector; here, in the
+heavenly country, no man works in the <i>New Universal German Library</i>;
+here in the heavenly Hukelumic Jerusalem, they do nothing but sing
+praises in the church; and here the Perfected requires no more increase
+of knowledge.... Here, too, one needs not sorrow that Sunday and
+Saint's day so often fall together into one.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Truth to tell, the parson goes too far; but it was his way from of old
+never to paint out the whole and half shadows of a situation till he
+was got into a new one; the beauties of which he could then enhance by
+contrast with the former. For it requires little reflection to discover
+that the torments of a Schoolmaster are nothing so extraordinary; but,
+on the contrary, as in the Gymnasium, he mounts from one degree to
+another, not very dissimilar to the common torments of Hell, which, in
+spite of their eternity, grow weaker from century to century. Moreover,
+since, according to the saying of a Frenchman, <i>deux afflictions mises
+ensemble peuvent devener une consolation</i>, a man gets afflictions
+enow in a school to console him; seeing out of eight combined
+afflictions--reckon only one for every teacher--certainly more
+comfort is to be extracted than out of two. The only pity is, that
+school-people will never act towards each other as court-people do:
+none but polished men and polished glasses will readily cohere. In
+addition to all this, in schools--and in offices generally--one is
+always recompensed; for, as in the second life a greater virtue is the
+recompense of an earthly one, so, in the Schoolmaster's case, his
+merits are always rewarded by more opportunities for new merits; and
+often enough he is not dismissed from his post at all.--</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Eight Gymnasiasts are trotting about in the Parsonage, setting up,
+nailing to, hauling in. I think, as a scholar of Plutarch, I am right
+to introduce such seeming <i>minutiæ</i>. A man whom grown-up people love,
+children love still more. The whole school had smiled on the smiling
+Fixlein, and liked him-in their hearts, because he did not thunder, but
+sport with them; because he said <i>Sie</i> (They), to the Secundaners, and
+the Subrector said <i>Ihr</i> (Ye); because his uprearing forefinger was his
+only sceptre and baculus; because in the Secunda he had interchanged
+Latin epistles with his scholars; and in the Quinta had taught not with
+Napier's Rods (or rods of a sharper description), but with sticks of
+barley-sugar.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">To-day his churchyard appeared to him so solemn and festive, that he
+wondered (though it was Monday) why his parishioners were not in their
+holiday, but merely in their week-day drapery. Under the door of the
+Parsonage stood a weeping woman; for she was too happy, and he was
+her--son. Yet the mother, in the height of her emotion, contrives quite
+readily to call upon the carriers, while disloading, not to twist off
+the four corner globes from the old Frankish chest of drawers. Her son
+now appeared to her as venerable as if he had sat for one of the
+copperplates in her pictured Bible; and that simply because he had cast
+off his pedagogue hair-cue, as the ripening tadpole does its tail; and
+was now standing in a clerical periwig before her; he was now a Comet,
+soaring away from the profane Earth, and had accordingly changed from a
+<i>stella caudata</i> into a <i>stella crinita</i>.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">His bride also had, on former days, given sedulous assistance in this
+new improved edition of his house, and labored faithfully among the
+other furnishers and furbishers. But to-day she kept aloof; for she was
+too good to forget the maiden in the bride. Love, like men, dies
+oftener of excess than of hunger; it lives on love, but it resembles
+those Alpine flowers which feed themselves by <i>suction</i> from the wet
+clouds, and die if you <i>besprinkle</i> them.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">At length the Parson is settled, and of course he must--for I know my
+fair readers, who are bent on it as if they were bridemaids--without
+delay get married. But he may not; before Ascension-day there can
+nothing be done, and till then are full four weeks and a half.
+The matter was this. He wished in the first place to have the
+murder-Sunday, the Cantata, behind him; not indeed because he doubted
+of his earthly continuance, but because he would not (even for the
+bride's sake) that the slightest apprehension should mingle with these
+weeks of glory.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The main reason was, he did not wish to marry till he were betrothed;
+which latter ceremony was appointed, with the Introduction Sermon, to
+take place next Sunday. It is the Cantata-Sunday. Let not the reader
+afflict himself with fears. Indeed, I should not have molested an
+enlightened century with this Sunday-<i>Wauwau</i> at all, were it not that
+I delineate with such extreme fidelity. Fixlein himself--especially as
+the Quartermaster asked him if he was a baby--at last grew so sensible
+that he saw the folly of it; nay, he went so far that he committed a
+greater folly. For as dreaming that you die signifies, according to the
+exegetic <i>rule of false</i>, nothing else than long life and welfare, so
+did Fixlein easily infer that his death-imagination was just such a
+lucky dream; the rather as it was precisely on this Cantata-Sunday that
+Fortune had turned up her cornucopia over him, and at once showered
+down out of it a bride, a presentation, and a roll of ducats. Thus can
+Superstition imp its wings, let Chance favor it or not.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">A Secretary of State, a Peace-Treaty writer, a Notary, any such
+incarcerated Slave of the Desk, feels excellently well how far he is
+beneath a Parson composing his inaugural sermon. The latter (do but
+look at my Fixlein) lays himself heartily over the paper,--injects the
+venous system of his sermon-preparation with colored ink,--has a
+Text-Concordance on the right side, and a Song-Concordance on the
+left; is there digging out a marrowy sentence, here clipping off a
+song-blossom, with both to garnish his homiletic pastry;--sketches out
+the finest plan of operations, not, like a man of the world, to subdue
+the heart of one woman, but the hearts of all women that hear him, and
+of their husbands to boot; draws every peasant passing by his window
+into some niche of his discourse, to co-operate with the result;--and,
+finally, scoops out the butter of the smooth, soft hymn-book, and
+therewith exquisitely fattens the black broth of his sermon, which is
+to feed five thousand men.----</p>
+
+<p class="normal">At last, in the evening, as the red sun is dazzling him at the desk, he
+can rise with heart free from guilt; and, amid twittering sparrows and
+finches, over the cherry-trees encircling the parsonage, look toward
+the west, till there is nothing more in the sky but a faint gleam among
+the clouds. And then when Fixlein, amid the tolling of the evening
+prayer-bell, <i>slowly</i> descends the stair to his cooking mother, there
+must be some miracle in the case, if for him whatever has been done or
+baked, or served up in the lower regions, is not right and good.... A
+bound, after supper, into the Castle; a look into a pure loving eye; a
+word without falseness to a bride without falseness; and then under the
+coverlet, a soft-breathing breast, in which there is nothing but
+Paradise, a sermon, and evening prayer.... I swear, with this I will
+satisfy a Mythic God, who has left his Heaven, and is seeking a new one
+among us here below!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Can a mortal, can a Me in the wet clay of Earth, which Death will soon
+dry into dust, ask more in one week than Fixlein is gathering into his
+heart? I see not how. At least I should suppose, if such a dust-framed
+being, after such a twenty-thousand prize from the Lottery of Chance,
+could require aught more, it would at most be the twenty-one-thousand
+prize, namely, the inaugural discourse itself.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And this prize our Zebedäus actually drew on Sunday; he preached,--he
+preached with unction,----he did it before the crowding, rustling press
+of people; before his Guardian, and before the Lord of Aufhammer, the
+godfather of the priest and the dog;--a flock, with whom in Childhood
+he had driven out the Castle herds about the pasture, he was now,
+himself a spiritual sheep-smearer, leading out to pasture;--he was
+standing to the ankles among Candidates and Schoolmasters, for to-day
+(what none of them could) at the altar, with the nail of his finger, he
+might scratch a large cross in the air, baptisms and marriages not once
+mentioned.... I believe I should feel less scrupulous than I do to
+checker this sunshiny esplanade with that thin shadow of the grave
+which the preacher threw over it, when, in the application, with wet,
+heavy eyes, he looked round over the mute, attentive church, as if in
+some corner of it he would seek the mouldering teacher of his youth and
+of this congregation, who without, under the white tombstone, the
+wrong-side of life, had laid away the garment of his pious spirit. And
+when he, himself hurried on by the internal stream, inexpressibly
+softened by the further recollections of his own fear of death on this
+day, of his life now overspread with flowers and benefits, of his
+entombed benefactress resting here in her narrow bed,--when he now,
+before the dissolving countenance of her friend, his Thiennette,
+overpowered, motionless, and weeping, looked down from the pulpit to
+the door of the Schadeck vault, and said: &quot;Thanks, thou pious soul, for
+the good thou hast done to this flock and to their new teacher; and, in
+the fulness of time, may the dust of thy god-fearing and man-loving
+breast gather itself, transfigured as gold-dust, round thy reawakened
+heavenly heart,&quot;--was there an eye in the audience dry? Her husband
+sobbed aloud, and Thiennette, her beloved, bowed her head, sinking down
+with inconsolable remembrances, over the front of the seat, like
+kindred mourners in a funeral train.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">No fairer forenoon could prepare the way for an afternoon in which a
+man was to betroth himself forever, and to unite the exchanged rings
+with the Ring of Eternity. Except the bridal pair, there was none
+present but an ancient pair; the mother and the long Guardian. The
+bridegroom wrote out the marriage-contract or marriage-charter with his
+own hand; hereby making over to his bride, from this day, his whole
+movable property (not, as you may suppose, his pocket-library, but his
+whole library; whereas, in the Middle Ages, the daughter of a noble was
+glad to get one or two books for marriage-portion);--in return for
+which, she liberally enough contributed--a whole nuptial coach or car,
+laden as follows: with nine pounds of feathers, not feathers for the
+cap such as we carry, but of the lighter sort such as carry us;--with a
+sumptuous dozen of godchild-plates and godchild-spoons (gifts from
+Schadeck), together with a fish-knife;--of silk, not only stockings
+(though even King Henry II. of France could dress no more than his legs
+in silk), but whole gowns;--with jewels and other furnishings of
+smaller value. Good Thiennette! in the chariot of thy spirit lies the
+true dowry; namely, thy noble, soft, modest heart, the morning-gift of
+Nature!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The Parson--who, not from mistrust, but from &quot;the uncertainty of life,&quot;
+could have wished for a notary's seal on everything; to whom no
+security but a hypothecary one appeared sufficient; and who, in the
+depositing of every barleycorn, required quittances and contracts--had
+now, when the marriage-charter was completed, a lighter heart; and
+through the whole evening the good man ceased not to thank his bride
+for what she had given him. To me, however, a marriage-contract were a
+thing as painful and repulsive,--I confess it candidly, though you
+should in consequence upbraid me with my great youth,--as if I had to
+take my love-letter to a Notary Imperial, and make him docket and
+countersign it before it could be sent. Heavens! to see the light
+flower of Love, whose perfume acts not on the balance, so laid like
+tulip-bulbs on the hay-beam of Law; two hearts on the cold councillor
+and flesh-beam of relatives and Advocates, who are heaping on the
+scales nothing but houses, fields, and tin,--this, to the interested
+party, maybe as delightful as, to the intoxicated suckling and nursling
+of the Muses and Philosophy, it is to carry the evening and morning
+sacrifices he has offered up to his goddess into the book-shop, and
+there to change his devotions into money, and sell them by weight and
+measure.----</p>
+
+<p class="normal">From Cantata-Sunday to Ascension, that is, to marriage-day, are one and
+a half weeks--or one and a half blissful eternities. If it is pleasant
+that nights or winter separate the days and seasons of joy to a
+comfortable distance; if, for example, it is pleasant that birthday,
+Saint's-day, betrothment, marriage, and baptismal day, do not all occur
+on the same day (for with very few do those festivities, like Holiday
+and Apostle's day, commerge),--then is it still more pleasant to make
+the interval, the flower-border, between betrothment and marriage, of
+an extraordinary breadth. Before the marriage-day are the true
+honey-weeks; then come the wax-weeks; then the honey-vinegar-weeks.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In the Ninth Letter-Box our Parson celebrates his wedding; and here, in
+the Eighth, I shall just briefly skim over his way and manner of
+existence till then; an existence, as might have been expected,
+celestial enough. To few is it allotted, as it was to him, to have at
+once such wings and such flowers (to fly over) before his nuptials;
+to few is it allotted, I imagine, to purchase flour and poultry
+on the same day, as Fixlein did;--to stuff the wedding-turkey
+with hangman-meals;--to go every night into the stall, and see
+whether the wedding-pig, which his Guardian had given him by way of
+marriage-present, is still standing and eating;--to spy out for his
+future wife the flax-magazines and clothes-press-niches in the
+house;--to lay in new wood-stores in the prospect of winter;--to obtain
+from the Consistorium directly, and for little smart-money, their Bull
+of Dispensation, their remission of the threefold proclamation of
+banns;--to live not in a city, where you must send to every fool
+(because you are one yourself), and disclose to him that you are going
+to be married; but in a little angular hamlet, where you have no one to
+tell aught, but simply the Schoolmaster that he is to ring a little
+later, and put a knee-cushion before the altar.----</p>
+
+<p class="normal">O, if the Ritter Michaelis maintains that Paradise was little, because
+otherwise the people would not have found each other,--a hamlet and its
+joys are little and narrow, so that some shadow of Eden may still
+linger on our Ball.----</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I have not even hinted that, the day before the wedding, the
+Regiments-Quartermaster came uncalled, and killed the pig, and made
+puddings gratis, such as were never eaten at any Court.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And besides, dear Fixlein, on this soft, rich oil of joy there
+was also floating gratis a vernal sun,--and red twilights,--and
+flower-garlands,--and a bursting half-world of buds!...</p>
+
+<p class="normal">How didst thou behave thee in these hot whirlpools of pleasure?--Thou
+movedst thy Fishtail (Reason), and therewith describedst for thyself a
+rectilineal course through the billows. For even half as much would
+have hurried another Parson from his study; but the very crowning
+felicity of ours was, that he stood as if rooted to the boundary-hill
+of Moderation, and from thence looked down on what thousands flout
+away. Sitting opposite the Castle-windows, he was still in a condition
+to reckon up that <i>Amen</i> occurs in the Bible one hundred and thirty
+times. Nay, to his old learned laboratory he now appended a new
+chemical stove; he purposed writing to Nürnberg and Baireuth, and there
+offering his pen to the Brothers Senft, not only for composing
+practical <i>Receipts</i> at the end of their <i>Almanacs</i>, but also for
+separate <i>Essays</i> in front under the copperplate title of each Month,
+because he had a thought of making some reformatory cuts at the common
+people's mental habitudes ... And now, when in the capacity of Parson
+he had less to do, and could add to the holy resting-day of the
+congregation six literary creating-days, he determined (even in these
+Carnival weeks) to strike his plough into the hitherto quite fallow
+History of Hukelum, and soon to follow the plough with his drill....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Thus roll his minutes, on golden wheels-of-fortune, over the twelve
+days, which form the glancing star-paved road to the third heaven of
+the thirteenth, that is, to the</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_lb09" href="#div1_lb09">NINTH LETTER-BOX.</a></h2>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="sc">Or to the Marriage</span>.</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">Rise, fair Ascension and Marriage day, and gladden readers also! Adorn
+thyself with the fairest jewel, with the bride, whose soul is as pure
+and glittering as its vesture; like pearl and pearl-muscle, the one, as
+the other, lustrous and ornamental! And so over the espalier, whose
+fruit-hedge has hitherto divided our darling from his Eden, every
+reader now presses after him!--</p>
+
+<p class="normal">On the 9th of May, 1793, about three in the morning, there came a sharp
+peal of trumpets, like a light-beam, through the dim-red May-dawn; two
+twisted horns, with a straight trumpet between them, like a note of
+admiration between interrogation-points, were clanging from a house in
+which only a parishioner (not the Parson) dwelt and blew; for this
+parishioner had last night been celebrating the same ceremony which the
+pastor had this day before him. The joyful tallyho raised our Parson
+from his broad bed (and the Shock from beneath it, who some weeks ago
+had been exiled from the white, sleek coverlet), and this so early,
+that in the portraying tester, where on every former morning he had
+observed his ruddy visage, and his white bedclothes, all was at present
+dim and crayoned.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I confess, the new-painted room, and a gleam of dawn on the wall, made
+it so light, that he could see his knee-buckles glancing on the chair.
+He then softly awakened his mother (the other guests were to lie for
+hours in the sheets), and she had the city cook-maid to awaken, who,
+like several other articles of wedding-furniture, had been borrowed for
+a day or two from Flachsenfingen. At two doors he knocked in vain, and
+without answer; for all were already down at the hearth, cooking,
+blowing; and arranging.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">How softly does the Spring day gradually fold back its nun-veil,
+and the Earth grow bright, as if it were the morning of a
+Resurrection!--The quicksilver-pillar of the barometer, the guiding
+Fire-pillar of the weather-prophet, rests firmly on Fixlein's Ark
+of the Covenant. The Sun raises himself, pure and cool, into the
+morning-blue, instead of into the morning-red. Swallows, instead of
+clouds, shoot skimming through the melodious air ... O, the good
+Genius of Fair Weather, who deserves many temples and festivals
+(because without him no festival could be held), lifted an ethereal,
+azure Day, as it were, from the well-clear atmosphere of the Moon,
+and sent it down, on blue butterfly-wings,--as if it were a <i>blue</i>
+Monday,--glittering below the Sun, in the zigzag of joyful, quivering
+descent, upon the narrow spot of Earth, which our heated fancies are
+now viewing .... And on this balmy, vernal spot stand, amid flowers,
+over which the trees are shaking blossoms instead of leaves, a bride
+and a bridegroom.... Happy Fixlein! how shall I paint thee without
+deepening the sighs of longing in the fairest souls?</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But soft! we will not drink the magic cup of Fancy to the bottom at six
+in the morning; but keep sober till towards night!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">At the sound of the morning prayer-bell, the bridegroom, for the din of
+preparation was disturbing his quiet orison, went out into the
+churchyard, which (as in many other places), together with the church,
+lay round his mansion like a court. Here on the moist green, over whose
+closed flowers the churchyard wall was still spreading broad shadows,
+did his spirit cool itself from the warm dreams of Earth; here, where
+the white flat gravestone of his Teacher lay before him like the
+fallen-in door on the Janus's-temple of Life, or like the windward side
+of the narrow house, turned towards the tempests of the world; here,
+where the little shrunk metallic door on the grated cross of his father
+uttered to him the inscriptions of death, and the year when his parent
+departed, and all the admonitions and mementos, graven on the
+lead;--there, I say, his mood grew softer and more solemn; and he now
+lifted up by heart his morning prayer, which usually he read; and
+entreated God to bless him in his office, and to spare his mother's
+life, and to look with favor and acceptance on the purpose of to-day.
+Then over the graves he walked into his fenceless little angular
+flower-garden; and here, composed and confident in the Divine keeping,
+he pressed the stalks of his tulips deeper into the mellow earth.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But on returning to the house, he was met on all hands by the
+bell-ringing and the Janizary-music of wedding-gladness;--the
+marriage-guests had all thrown off their nightcaps, and were
+drinking diligently;--there was a clattering, a cooking, a
+frizzling;--tea-services, coffee-services, and warm beer-services, were
+advancing in succession; and plates full of bride-cakes were going
+round like potters' frames or cistern-wheels.--The Schoolmaster, with
+three young lads, was heard rehearsing from his own house an <i>Arioso</i>,
+with which, so soon as they were perfect, he purposed to surprise his
+clerical superior.--But now rushed all the arms of the foaming
+joy-streams into one, when the sky-queen besprinkled with blossoms, the
+bride, descended upon Earth in her timid joy, full of quivering, humble
+love;--when the bells began;--when the procession-column set forth with
+the whole village round and before it;--when the organ, the
+congregation, the officiating priest, and the sparrows on the trees of
+the church-window, struck louder and louder their rolling peals on the
+drum of the jubilee-festival.... The heart of the singing bridegroom
+was like to leap from its place for joy, &quot;that on his bridal-day it was
+all so respectable and grand.&quot;--Not till the marriage benediction could
+he pray a little.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Still worse and louder grew the business during dinner, when
+pastry-work and marchpane-devices were brought forward,--when glasses
+and slain fishes (laid under the napkins to frighten the guests) went
+round;--and when the guests rose, and themselves went round, and at
+length danced round; for they had instrumental music from the city
+there.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">One minute handed over to the other the sugar-bowl and bottle-case of
+joy; the guests heard and saw less and less, and the villagers began to
+see and hear more and more, and towards night they penetrated like a
+wedge into the open door,--nay, two youths ventured even, in the middle
+of the parsonage-court, to mount a plank over a beam, and commence
+seesawing. Out of doors, the gleaming vapor of the departed Sun was
+encircling the Earth, the evening star was glittering over parsonage
+and churchyard; no one heeded it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">However, about nine o'clock,--when the marriage-guests had wellnigh
+forgotten the marriage-pair, and were drinking or dancing along for
+their own behoof; when poor mortals, in this sunshine of Fate, like
+fishes in the sunshine of the sky, were leaping up from their wet, cold
+element; and when the bridegroom, under the star of happiness and love,
+casting like a comet its long train of radiance over all his heaven,
+had in secret pressed to his joy-filled breast his bride and his
+mother,--then did he lock a slice of wedding-bread privily into a
+press, in the old superstitious belief, that this residue secured
+continuance of bread for the whole marriage. As he returned, with
+greater love for the sole partner of his life, she herself met him with
+his mother, to deliver him in private the bridal-nightgown and
+bridal-shirt, as is the ancient usage. Many a countenance grows pale in
+violent emotions, even of joy; Thiennette's wax-face was bleaching
+still whiter under the sunbeams of Happiness. O never fall, thou lily
+of Heaven, and may four springs instead of four seasons open and shut
+thy flower-bells to the sun! All the arms of his soul as he floated on
+the sea of joy were quivering to clasp the soft, warm heart of his
+beloved, to encircle it gently and fast, and draw it to his own....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He led her from the crowded dancing-room into the cool evening. Why
+does the evening, does the night, put warmer love in our hearts? Is it
+the nightly pressure of helplessness; or is it the exalting separation
+from the turmoil of life; that veiling of the world, in which for the
+soul nothing more remains but souls;--is it therefore, that the letters
+in which the loved name stands written on our spirit appear, like
+phosphorus-writing, by night <i>in fire</i>, while by day in their <i>cloudy</i>
+traces they but smoke?</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He walked with his bride into the Castle-garden; she hastened quickly
+through the castle, and past its servants'-hall, where the fair flowers
+of her young life had been crushed broad and dry, under a long, dreary
+pressure; and her soul expanded, and breathed in the free open garden,
+on whose flowery soil destiny had cast forth the first seeds of the
+blossoms which to-day were gladdening her existence. Still Eden! Green
+flower-checkered <i>chiaroscuro</i>!--The moon is sleeping under ground like
+a dead one; but beyond the garden the sun's red evening-clouds have
+fallen down like rose-leaves; and the evening-star, the brideman of the
+sun, hovers, like a glancing butterfly, above the rosy red, and, modest
+as a bride, deprives no single starlet of its light.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The wandering pair arrived at the old gardener's hut; now standing
+locked and dumb, with dark windows in the light garden, like a fragment
+of the Past surviving in the Present. Bared twigs of trees were
+folding, with clammy, half-formed leaves, over the thick, intertwisted
+tangles of the bushes.--The Spring was standing, like a conqueror,
+with Winter at his feet.--In the blue pond, now bloodless, a dusky
+evening-sky lay hollowed out, and the gushing waters were moistening
+the flower-beds.--The silver sparks of stars were rising on the altar
+of the East, and falling down extinguished in the red sea of the West.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The wind whirred, like a night-bird, louder through the trees; and gave
+tones to the acacia-grove, and the tones called to the pair who had
+first become happy within it: &quot;Enter, new mortal pair, and think of
+what is past, and of my withering and your own; and be holy as
+Eternity, and weep not only for joy, but for gratitude also!&quot;--And the
+wet-eyed bridegroom led his wet-eyed bride under the blossoms, and laid
+his soul, like a flower, on her heart, and said: &quot;Best Thiennette, I am
+unspeakably happy, and would say much, and cannot.--Ah, thou Dearest,
+we will live like angels, like children together! Surely I will do all
+that is good to thee; two years ago I had nothing, no nothing; ah, it
+is through thee, best love, that I am happy. I call thee Thou, now,
+thou dear good soul!&quot; She drew him closer to her, and said, though
+without kissing him: &quot;Call me Thou always, Dearest!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And as they stept forth again from the sacred grove into the
+magic-dusky garden, he took off his hat; first, that he might
+internally thank God, and secondly, because he wished to look into this
+fairest evening sky.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">They reached the blazing, rustling marriage-house, but their softened
+hearts sought stillness; and a foreign touch, as in the blossoming
+vine, would have disturbed the flower-nuptials of their souls. They
+turned rather, and winded up into the churchyard to preserve their
+mood. Majestic on the groves and mountains stood the Night before man's
+heart, and made it also great. Over the <i>white</i> steeple-obelisk the sky
+rested <i>bluer</i> and <i>darker</i>; and behind it wavered the withered summit
+of the May-pole with faded flag. The son noticed his father's grave, on
+which the wind was opening and shutting, with harsh noise, the little
+door of the metal cross, to let the year of his death be read on the
+brass plate within. An overpowering sadness seized his heart with
+violent streams of tears, and drove him to the sunk hillock, and he led
+his bride to the grave, and said: &quot;Here sleeps he, my good father; in
+his thirty-second year he was carried hither to his long rest. O Thou
+good, dear father, couldst thou to-day but see the happiness of thy
+son, like my mother! But thy eyes are empty, and thy breast is full of
+ashes, and thou seest us not.&quot;--He was silent. The bride wept aloud;
+she saw the mouldering coffins of her parents open, and the two dead
+arise and look round for their daughter, who had stayed so long behind
+them, forsaken on the Earth. She fell upon his heart, and faltered: &quot;O
+beloved, I have neither father nor mother; do not forsake me!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">O thou who hast still a father and a mother, thank God for it, on the
+day when thy soul is full of joyful tears, and needs a bosom wherein to
+shed them....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And with this embracing at a father's grave, let this day of joy be
+holily concluded.--</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_lb10" href="#div1_lb10">TENTH LETTER-BOX.</a></h2>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="sc">St. Thomas's-Day and Birthday</span>.</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">An Author is a sort of bee-keeper for his reader-swarm; in whose behalf
+he separates the Flora kept for their use into different seasons, and
+here accelerates, and there retards, the blossoming of many a flower,
+that so in all chapters there be blooming.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The goddess of Love and the angel of Peace conducted our married pair
+on tracks running over full meadows, through the Spring; and on
+footpaths hidden by high corn-fields, through the Summer; and Autumn,
+as they advanced towards Winter, spread her marble leaves under their
+feet. And thus they arrived before the low, dark gate of Winter, full
+of life, full of love, trustful, contented, sound, and ruddy.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">On St. Thomas's-day was Thiennette's birthday as well as Winter's.
+About a quarter past nine, just when the singing ceases in the church,
+we shall take a peep through the window into the interior of the
+parsonage. There is nothing here but the old mother, who has all day
+(the son having restricted her to rest, and not work) been gliding
+about, and brushing, and burnishing, and scouring, and wiping; every
+carved chair-leg, and every brass nail of the waxcloth-covered table,
+she has polished into brightness;--everything hangs, as with all
+married people who have no children, in its right place, brushes,
+fly-flaps, and almanacs;--the chairs are stationed by the room-police
+in their ancient corners;--a flax-rock, encircled with a diadem, or
+scarf of azure riband, is lying in the Schadeck-bed, because, though it
+is a half-holiday, some spinning may go on;--the narrow slips of paper,
+whereon heads of sermons are to be arranged, lie white beside the
+sermons themselves, that is, beside the octavo paper-book which
+holds them, for the Parson and his work-table, by reason of the cold,
+have migrated from the study to the sitting-room;--his large furred
+doublet is hanging beside his clean bridegroom-nightgown; there is
+nothing wanting in the room but He and She. For he had preached her
+with him to-night into the empty Apostle's-day church, that so
+her mother, without witnesses,--except the two or three thousand
+readers who are peeping with me through the window,--might arrange
+the provender-baking, and whole commissariat department of the
+birthday-festival, and spread out her best table-gear and
+victual-stores without obstruction.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The soul-curer reckoned it no sin to admonish, and exhort, and
+encourage, and threaten his parishioners, till he felt pretty
+certain that the soup must be smoking on the plates. Then he led
+his birthday helpmate home, and suddenly placed her before the altar
+of meat-offering, before a sweet title-page of bread-tart, on which
+her name stood baked, in true <i>monastic characters</i>, in tooth-letters
+of almonds. In the background of time and of the room, I yet conceal
+two--bottles of Pontac. How quickly, under the sunshine of joy, do thy
+cheeks grow ripe, Thiennette, when thy husband solemnly says: &quot;This is
+thy birthday; and may the Lord bless thee, and watch over thee, and
+cause his countenance to shine on thee, and send thee, to the joy of
+our mother and thy husband especially, a happy, glad <i>recovery</i>.
+Amen!&quot;--And when Thiennette perceived that it was the old mistress who
+had cooked and served up all this herself, she fell upon her neck, as
+if it had been not her husband's mother, but her own.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Emotion conquers the appetite. But Fixlein's stomach was as strong as
+his heart; and with him no species of movement could subdue the
+peristaltic. Drink is the friction-oil of the tongue, as eating is its
+drag. Yet, not till he had eaten and spoken much, did the pastor fill
+the glasses. Then indeed he drew the corksluice from the bottle, and
+set forth its streams. The sickly mother, of a being still hid beneath
+her heart, turned her eyes, in embarrassed emotion, on the old
+woman only; and could scarcely chide him for sending to the city
+wine-merchant on her account. He took a glass in each hand, for each of
+the two whom he loved, and handed them to his mother and his wife, and
+said: &quot;To thy long, long life, Thiennette!--And your health and
+happiness, Mamma!--And a glad arrival to our little one, if God so
+bless us!&quot; &quot;My son,&quot; said the gardeneress, &quot;it is to thy long life that
+we must drink; for it is by thee we are supported. God grant thee
+length of days!&quot; added she, with stifled voice, and her eyes betrayed
+her tears.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I nowhere find a livelier emblem of the female sex, in all its
+boundless levity, than in the case where a woman is carrying the angel
+of Death beneath her heart, and yet in these nine months full of mortal
+tokens thinks of nothing more important than of who shall be the
+gossips, and what shall be cooked at the christening. But thou,
+Thiennette, hadst nobler thoughts, though these too along with them.
+The still hidden darling of thy heart was resting before thy eyes like
+a little angel sculptured on a gravestone, and pointing with its small
+finger to the hour when thou shouldst die; and every morning and every
+evening thou thoughtest of death with a certainty of which I yet knew
+not the reasons; and to thee it was as if the Earth were a dark mineral
+cave, where man's blood, like stalactitic water, drops down, and in
+dropping raises shapes which gleam so transiently, and so quickly fade
+away! And that was the cause why tears were continually trickling from
+thy soft eyes, and betraying all thy anxious thoughts about thy child;
+but thou repaidst these sad effusions of thy heart by the embrace in
+which, with new-awakened love, thou fellest on thy husband's neck, and
+saidst: &quot;Be as it may, God's will be done, so thou and my child are
+left alive!--But I know well that thou, Dearest, lovest me as I do
+thee.&quot; ... Lay thy hand, good mother, full of blessings, on the two;
+and thou, kind Fate, never lift thine away from them!--</p>
+
+<p class="normal">It is with emotion and good wishes that I witness the kiss of two fair
+friends, or the embracing of two virtuous lovers; and from the fire of
+their altar sparks fly over to me; but what is this to our sympathetic
+exaltation when we see two mortals, bending under the same burden,
+bound to the same duties, animated to the same care for the same little
+darlings, fall on one another's overflowing hearts, in some fair hour?
+And if these, moreover, are two mortals who already wear the mourning
+weeds of life, I mean old age, whose hair and cheeks are now grown
+colorless, and eyes grown dim, and whose faces a thousand thorns have
+marred into images of Sorrow;--when these two clasp each other with
+such wearied, aged arms, and so near to the precipice of the grave, and
+when they say or think: &quot;All in us is dead, but not our love--O we have
+lived and suffered long together, and now we will hold out our hands to
+Death together also, and let him carry us away together,&quot;--does not all
+within us cry: O Love, thy spark is superior to Time; it burns neither
+in joy nor in the cheek of roses; it dies not, neither under a
+thousand tears nor under the snow of old age, nor under the ashes of
+thy--beloved. It never dies; and Thou, All-good! if there were no
+eternal love, there were no love at all....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">To the Parson it was easier than it is to me to pave for himself a
+transition from the heart to the digestive faculty. He now submitted to
+Thiennette (whose voice at once grew cheerful, while her eyes time
+after time began to sparkle) his purpose to take advantage of the
+frosty weather and have the winter meat slaughtered and salted. &quot;The
+pig can scarcely rise,&quot; said he; and forthwith he fixed the
+determination of the women, further the butcher, and the day, and all
+<i>et ceteras</i>; appointing everything with a degree of punctuality,
+such as the war-college (when it applies the cupping-glass, the
+battle-sword, to the overfull system of mankind) exhibits on the
+previous day, in its arrangements, before it drives a province into the
+baiting-ring and slaughter-house.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">This settled, he began to talk and feel quite joyously about the course
+of winter, which had commenced to-day at two-and-twenty minutes past
+eight in the morning; &quot;for,&quot; said he, &quot;new-year is close at hand; and
+we shall not need so much candle to-morrow night as to-night.&quot; His
+mother, it is true, came athwart him with the weapons of her five
+senses; but he fronted her with his Astronomical Tables, and proved
+that the lengthening of the day was no less undeniable than
+imperceptible. In the last place, like most official and married
+persons, heeding little whether his women took him or not, he informed
+them, in juristico-theological phrase: &quot;That he would put off no
+longer, but write this very afternoon to the venerable Consistorium,
+in whose hands lay the <i>jus circa sacra</i>, for a new Ball to the
+church-steeple; and the rather, as he hoped before new-year's day to
+raise a bountiful subscription from the parish for this purpose. If God
+spare us till spring,&quot; added he, with peculiar cheerfulness, &quot;and thou
+wert happily recovered, I might so arrange the whole that the ball
+should be set up at thy first churchgoing, dame!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Thereupon he shifted his chair from the dinner and dessert table to the
+work-table; and spent the half of his afternoon over the petition for
+the steeple-ball. As there still remained a little space till dusk, he
+clapped his tackle to his new learned <i>Opus</i>, of which I must now
+afford a little glimpse. Out of doors among the snow, there stood near
+Hukelum an old Robber-Castle, which Fixlein, every day in Autumn, had
+hovered round like a <i>revenant</i>, with a view to gauge it,
+ichnographically to delineate it, to put every window-bar and every
+bridle-hook of it correctly on paper. He believed he was not expecting
+too much, if thereby--and by some drawings of the not so much vertical
+as horizontal walls--he hoped to impart to his &quot;<i>Architectural
+Correspondence of two Friends concerning the Hukelum Robber-Castle</i>&quot;
+that last polish and labor <i>limæ</i> which contents Reviewers. For towards
+the critical Star-chamber of the Reviewers he entertained not that
+contempt which some authors actually feel--or only affect, as, for
+instance, I. From this mouldered Robber-<i>Louvre</i>, there grew for him
+more flowers of joy than ever in all probability had grown from it of
+old for its owners.--To my knowledge, it is an anecdote not hitherto
+made public, that for all this no man but <i>Büsching</i> has to answer.
+Fixlein had, not long ago, among the rubbish of the church letter-room,
+stumbled on a paper wherein the Geographer had been requesting special
+information about the statistics of the village. Büsching, it is true,
+had picked up nothing,--accordingly, indeed, Hukelum, in his
+<i>Geography</i>, is still omitted altogether;--but this pestilential letter
+had infected Fixlein with the spring-fever of Ambition, so that his
+palpitating heart was no longer to be stilled or held in check, except
+by the assaf[oe]tida-emulsion of a review. It is with authorcraft as
+with love; both of them for decades long one may equally desire and
+forbear; but is the first spark once thrown into the powder-magazine,
+it burns to the end of the chapter.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Simply because winter had commenced by the Almanac, the fire must be
+larger than usual; for warm rooms, like large furs and bear-skin caps,
+were things which he loved more than you would figure. The dusk, this
+fair <i>chiaroscuro</i> of the day, this colored foreground of the night, he
+lengthened out as far as possible, that he might study Christmas
+discourses therein; and yet could his wife, without scruple, just as he
+was pacing up and down the room, with the sowing-sheet full of divine
+word-seeds hung round his shoulder,--hold up to him a spoonful of
+alegar, that he might try the same in his palate, and decide whether
+she should yet draw it off. Nay, did he not in all cases, though
+fonder of roe-fishes himself, order a milter to be drawn from the
+herring-barrel, because his good-wife liked it better?--</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Here light was brought in; and as Winter was just now commencing
+his glass-painting on the windows, his ice flower-pieces, and his
+snow-foliage, our Parson felt that it was time to read something cold,
+which he pleasantly named his cold collation; namely, the description
+of some unutterably frosty land. On the present occasion, it was the
+winter history of the four Russian sailors on Nova Zembla. I, for my
+share, do often in summer, when the sultry zephyr is inflating the
+flower-bells, append certain charts and sketches of Italy, or the East,
+as additional landscapes to those among which I am sitting. And yet
+to-night he further took up the <i>Weekly Chronicle</i> of Flachsenfingen;
+and amid the bombshells, pestilences, famines, comets with long tails,
+and the roaring of all the Hell-floods of another Thirty Years' War, he
+could still listen with the one ear towards the kitchen, where the
+salad for his roast-duck was just a-cutting.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Good-night, old Fixlein! I am tired. May kind Heaven send thee, with
+the young year 1794, when the Earth shall again carry her people, like
+precious night-moths, on leaves and flowers, the new steeple-ball, and
+a thick, handsome--boy, to boot!</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_lb11" href="#div1_lb11">ELEVENTH LETTER-BOX.</a></h2>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="sc">Spring; Investiture; and Childbirth</span>.</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">I have just risen from a singular dream; but the foregoing Box makes it
+natural. I dreamed that all was verdant, all full of odors; and I was
+looking up at a steeple-ball glittering in the sun, from my station
+in the window of a little white garden-house, my eyelids full of
+flower-pollen, my shoulders full of thin cherry-blossoms, and my ears
+full of humming from the neighboring beehives. Then, methought,
+advancing slowly through the beds, came the Hukelum Parson, and stept
+into the garden-house, and solemnly said to me: &quot;Honored Sir, my wife
+has just brought me a little boy; and I make bold to solicit <i>your
+Honor</i> to do the holy office for the same, when it shall be received
+into the bosom of the church.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I naturally started up, and there was--Parson Fixlein standing bodily
+at my bedside, and requesting me to be godfather; for Thiennette had
+given him a son last night about one o'clock. The confinement had been
+as light and happy as could be conceived; for this reason, that the
+father had, some months before, been careful to provide one of those
+<i>Klappersteins</i>, as we call them, which are found in the aerie of the
+eagle, and therewith to alleviate the travail; for this stone performs,
+in its way, all the service which the bonnet of that old Minorite monk
+in Naples, of whom Gorani informs us, could accomplish for people in
+such circumstances, who put it on....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">--I might vex the reader still longer; but I willingly give up, and
+show him how the matter stood.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Such a May as the present (of 1794) Nature has not, in the memory of
+man--begun; for this is but the fifteenth of it. People of reflection
+have for centuries been vexed once every year, that our German singers
+should indite May-songs, since several other months deserve such a
+poetical night-music much better; and I myself have often gone so far
+as to adopt the idiom of our market-women, and instead of May butter,
+to say June butter, as also June, March, April songs.--But thou, kind
+May of this year, thou deservest to thyself all the songs which were
+ever made on thy rude namesakes!--By Heaven! when I now issue from the
+wavering, checkered acacia-grove of the Castle-garden, in which I am
+writing this Chapter, and come forth into the broad, living day, and
+look up to the warming Heaven, and over its Earth budding out beneath
+it,--the Spring rises before me like a vast full cloud, with a splendor
+of blue and green. I see the Sun standing amid roses in the western
+sky, into which he has thrown his ray-brush, wherewith he has to-day
+been painting the Earth;--and when I look round a little in our
+picture-exhibition, his enamelling is still hot on the mountains; on
+the moist chalk of the moist Earth, the flowers full of sap-colors are
+laid out to dry, and the forget-me-not with miniature colors; under the
+varnish of the streams, the skyey Painter has pencilled his own eye;
+and the clouds, like a decoration-painter, he has touched off with wild
+outlines and single tints; and so he stands at the border of the Earth,
+and looks back upon his stately Spring, whose robe-folds are valleys,
+whose breast-bouquet is gardens, and whose blush is a vernal evening,
+and who, when she arises, shall be--Summer.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But to proceed! Every spring--and especially in such a spring--I
+imitate on foot our birds of passage; and travel off the
+hypochondriacal sediment of winter; but I do not think I should have
+seen even the steeple-ball of Hukelum, which is to be set up one of
+these days, to say nothing of the Parson's family, had not I happened
+to be visiting the Flachsenfingen Superintendent and Consistorialrath.
+From him I got acquainted with Fixlein's history,--every Candidatus
+must deliver an account of his life to the Consistorium,--and with his
+still madder petition for a steeple-ball. I observed, with pleasure,
+how gayly the cob was diving and swashing about in his duck-pool and
+milk-bath of life; and forthwith determined on a journey to his shore.
+It is singular, that is to say, manlike, that when we have for years
+kept prizing and describing some original person or original book, yet
+the moment we see such, they anger us; we would have them fit us and
+delight us in all points, as if any originality could do this but our
+own.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">It was Saturday, the third of May, when I, with the Superintendent, the
+<i>Senior Capituli</i>, and some temporal Raths, mounted and rolled off, and
+in two carriages were driven to the Parson's door. The matter was, he
+was not yet--<i>invested</i>, and to-morrow this was to be done. I little
+thought, while we whirled by the white espalier of the Castle-garden,
+that there I was to write another book.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I still see the Parson, in his peruke-minever and head-case, come
+springing to the coach-door and lead us out; so smiling--so
+courteous--so vain of the disloaded freight, and so attentive to it. He
+looked as if in the journey of life he had never once put on the
+<i>travelling-gauze</i> of Sorrow; Thiennette again seemed never to have
+thrown hers back. How neat was everything in the house, how dainty,
+decorated, and polished! And yet so quiet, without the cursed
+alarm-ringing of servants' bells, and without the bass-drum tumult of
+stair-pedalling. Whilst the gentlemen, my road-companions, were sitting
+in state in the upper room, I flitted, as my way is, like a smell over
+the whole house, and my path led me through the sitting-room over the
+kitchen, and at last into the churchyard beside the house. Good
+Saturday! I will paint thy hours as I may, with the black asphaltos of
+ink, on the tablets of other souls! In the sitting-room, I lifted from
+the desk a volume gilt on the back and edges, and bearing this title:
+&quot;<i>Holy Sayings, by Fixlein. First Collection</i>.&quot; And as I looked to see
+where it had been printed, the Holy Collection turned out to be in
+writing. I handled the quills, and dipped into the negro-black of the
+ink, and I found that all was right and good. With your fluttering
+gentlemen of letters, who hold only a department of the foreign, and
+none of the home affairs nothing (except some other things about them)
+can be worse than their ink and pens. I also found a little
+copperplate, to which I shall in due time return.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In the kitchen, a place not more essential for the writing of an
+English novel than for the acting of a German one, I could plant myself
+beside Thiennette, and help her to blow the fire, and look at once into
+her face and her burning coals. Though she was in wedlock, a state in
+which white roses on the cheeks are changed for red ones, and young
+women are similar to a similitude given in my Note;<a name="div2Ref_60" href="#div2_60"><sup>[60]</sup></a>--and
+although
+the blazing wood threw a false rouge over her, I guessed how pale she
+must have been; and my sympathy in her paleness rose still higher at
+the thought of the burden which Fate had now not so much taken from
+her, as laid in her arms and nearer to her heart. In truth, a man must
+never have reflected on the Creation-moment, when the Universe first
+rose from the bosom of an Eternity, if he does not view with
+philosophic reverence a woman, whose thread of life a secret,
+all-wondrous Hand is spinning to a second thread, and who veils within
+her the transition from Nothingness to Existence, from Eternity to
+time;--but still less can a man have any heart of flesh, if his soul,
+in presence of a woman, who, to an unknown, unseen being, is
+sacrificing more than we will sacrifice when it is seen and known,
+namely, her nights, her joys, often her life, does not bow lower, and
+with deeper emotion, than in presence of a whole nun-orchestra on their
+Sahara-desert;--and worse than either is the man for whom his own
+mother has not made all other mothers venerable.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It is little serviceable to thee, poor Thiennette,&quot; thought I, &quot;that
+now, when thy bitter cup of sickness is made to run over, thou must
+have loud festivities come crowding round thee.&quot; I meant the
+Investiture and the Ball-raising. My rank, the diploma of which the
+reader will find stitched in with the <i>Dog-post-days</i>, and which had
+formerly been hers, brought about my ears a host of repelling,
+embarrassed, wavering titles of address from her; which people, to whom
+they have once belonged, are at all times apt to parade before
+superiors or inferiors, and which it now cost me no little trouble to
+disperse. Through the whole Saturday and Sunday I could never get into
+the right track either with her or him, till the other guests were
+gone. As for the mother, she acted, like obscure ideas, powerfully and
+constantly, but out of view; this arose in part from her idolatrous
+fear of us; and partly also from a slight shade of care (probably
+springing from the state of her daughter), which had spread over her
+like a little cloud.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I cruised about, so long as the moon-crescent glimmered in the sky,
+over the churchyard; and softened my fantasies, which are at any rate
+too prone to paint with the brown of crumbling mummies, not only by the
+red of twilight, but also by reflecting how easily our eyes and our
+hearts can become reconciled even to the ruins of Death; a reflection
+which the Schoolmaster, whistling as he arranged the charnel-house for
+the morrow, and the Parson's maid singing, as she reaped away the grass
+from the graves, readily enough suggested to me. And why should not
+this habituation to all forms of Fate in the other world, also, be a
+gift reserved for us in our nature by the bounty of our great
+Preserver?--I perused the gravestones; and I think even now that
+Superstition<a name="div2Ref_61" href="#div2_61"><sup>[61]</sup></a> is right in
+connecting with the reading of such things
+a loss of <i>memory</i>; at all events, one does <i>forget</i> a thousand things
+belonging to this world....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The Investiture on Sunday (whose Gospel, of the Good Shepherd,
+suited well with the ceremony) I must despatch in few words; because
+nothing truly sublime can bear to be treated of in many. However, I
+shall impart the most memorable circumstances, when I say that
+there was--drinking (in the Parsonage),--music-making (in the
+Choir),--reading (of the Presentation by the Senior, and of the
+Ratification-rescript by the lay Rath),--and preaching, by the
+Consistorialrath, who took the soul-curer by the hand, and presented,
+made over, and guaranteed him to the congregation, and them to him.
+Fixlein felt that he was departing as a high-priest from the church
+which he had entered as a country parson, and all day he had not once
+the heart to ban. When a man is treated with solemnity, he looks upon
+himself as a higher nature, and goes through his solemn feasts
+devoutly.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">This indenturing, this monastic profession, our Head-Rabbis and
+Lodge-masters (our Superintendents) have usually a taste for putting
+off till once the pastor has been some years ministering among the
+people, to whom they hereby present him; as the early Christians
+frequently postponed their consecration and investiture to
+Christianity, their baptism namely, till the day when they died. Nay, I
+do not even think this clerical Investiture would lose much of its
+usefulness, if it and the declaring-vacant of the office were reserved
+for the same day; the rather, as this usefulness consists entirely in
+two items; what the Superintendent and his Raths can eat, and what they
+can pocket.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Not till towards evening did the Parson and I get acquainted. The
+Investiture officials and elevation pulley-men had, throughout the
+whole evening, been very violently--breathing. I mean thus; as these
+gentlemen could not but be aware, by the most ancient theories and the
+latest experiments, that air was nothing else than a sort of rarefied
+and exploded water, it became easy for them to infer, that, conversely,
+water was nothing else than a denser sort of air. Wine-drinking,
+therefore, is nothing else but the breathing of an air pressed together
+into proper spissitude, and sprinkled over with a few perfumes. Now, in
+our days, by clerical persons too much (fluid) breath can never be
+inhaled through the mouth; seeing the dignity of their station excludes
+them from that breathing through the <i>smaller</i> pores which Abernethy so
+highly recommends under the name of <i>air-bath</i>; and can the Gullet in
+their case be aught else than door-neighbor to the Windpipe, the
+<i>consonant</i> and fellow-shoot of the Windpipe?--I am running astray; I
+meant to signify that I this evening had adopted the same opinion; only
+that I used air or ether, not like the rest for loud laughter, but for
+the more quiet contemplation of life in general. I even shot forth at
+my gossip certain speeches which betrayed devoutness. These he at first
+took for jests, being aware that I was from Court, and of quality. But
+the concave mirror of the wine-mist at length suspended the images of
+my soul, enlarged and embodied like spiritual shapes, in the air before
+me.--Life shaded itself off to my eyes like a hasty summer night, which
+we little fireflies shoot across with transient gleam;--I said to him
+that man must turn himself like the leaves of the great mallow, at the
+different day-seasons of his life, now to the rising sun, now to the
+setting, now to the night, towards the Earth and its graves;--I said,
+the omnipotence of Goodness was driving us and the centuries of the
+world towards the gates of the City of God, as, according to Euler, the
+resistance of the <i>Ether</i> leads the circling Earth towards the Sun,
+&amp;c., &amp;c.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">On the strength of these entremets, he considered me the first
+theologian of his age; and had he been obliged to go to war, would
+previously have taken my advice on the matter, as belligerent powers
+were wont of old from the theologians of the Reformation. I hide not
+from myself, however, that what preachers call vanity of the world is
+something altogether different from what philosophy so calls. When I,
+moreover, signified to him that I was not ashamed to be an Author; but
+had a turn for working up this and the other biography; and that I had
+got a sight of his <i>Life</i> in the hands of the Superintendent; and might
+be in case to prepare a printed one therefrom, if so were he would
+assist me with here and there a tint of flesh-color,--then was my silk,
+which, alas! not only isolates one from electric fire, but also from a
+kindlier sort of it, the only grate which rose between his arms and me;
+for, like the most part of poor country parsons, it was not in his
+power to forget the rank of any man, or to vivify his own on a higher
+one. He said: &quot;He would acknowledge it with veneration, if I should
+mention him in print; but he was much afraid his life was too common
+and too poor for a biography.&quot; Nevertheless, he opened me the drawer of
+his Letter-boxes, and said, perhaps he had hereby been paving the way
+for me.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The main point, however, was, he hoped that his <i>Errata</i>, his
+<i>Exercitationes</i>, and his <i>Letters on the Robber-Castle</i>, if I should
+previously send forth a Life of the Author, might be better received;
+and that it would be much the same as if I accompanied them with a
+Preface.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In short, when on Monday the other dignitaries with their nimbus of
+splendor had dissipated, I alone, like a precipitate, abode with him;
+and am still abiding, that is, from the fifth of May (the Public should
+take the Almanac of 1794, and keep it open beside them) to the
+fifteenth; to-day is Thursday, to-morrow is the sixteenth and Friday,
+when comes the Spinat-Kirmes, or Spinage-Wake, as they call it, and the
+uplifting of the steeple-ball, which I just purposed to await before I
+went. Now, however, I do not go so soon; for on Sunday I have to assist
+at the baptismal ceremony, as baptismal agent for my little future
+godson. Whoever pays attention to me, and keeps the Almanac open, may
+readily guess why the christening is put off till Sunday; for it is
+that memorable Cantata-Sunday, which once, for its mad, narcotic
+hemlock-virtues, was of importance in our History; but is now so only
+for the fair betrothment, which after two years we mean to celebrate
+with a baptism.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Truly it is not in my power--for want of colors and presses--to paint
+or print upon my paper the soft, balmy flower-garland of a fortnight
+which has here wound itself about my sickly life; but with a single day
+I shall attempt it. Man, I know well, cannot prognosticate either his
+joys or his sorrows, still less repeat them, either in living or
+writing.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The black hour of coffee has gold in its mouth for us and honey; here,
+in the morning coolness, we are all gathered; we maintain popular
+conversation, that so the parsoness and the gardeneress may be able to
+take share in it. The morning service in the church, where often the
+whole people<a name="div2Ref_62" href="#div2_62"><sup>[62]</sup></a> are sitting
+and singing, divides us. While the bell is
+sounding, I march with my writing-gear into the singing Castle-garden;
+and seat myself in the fresh acacia-grove, at the dewy two-legged
+table. Fixlein's Letter-boxes I keep by me in my pocket; and I
+have only to look and abstract from his what can be of use In my
+own.--Strange enough! so easily do we forget a thing in describing it,
+I really did not recollect for a moment that I am now sitting at the
+very grove-table of which I speak, and writing all this.--</p>
+
+<p class="normal">My gossip in the mean time is also laboring for the world. His study is
+a sort of sacristy, and his printing-press a pulpit, wherefrom he
+preaches to all men; for an Author is the Town-chaplain of the
+Universe. A man who is making a book will scarcely hang himself; all
+rich lords'-sons, therefore, should labor for the press; for, in that
+case, when you awake too early in bed, you have always a <i>plan</i>, an
+aim, and therefore a cause before you why you should get out of it.
+Better off, too, is the author who collects rather than invents,--for
+the latter with its eating fire calcines the heart; I praise the
+Antiquary, the Heraldist, Note-maker, Compiler; I esteem the
+<i>Title-perch</i> (a fish called <i>Perca-Diagramma</i>, because of the letters
+on its scales), and the <i>Printer</i> (a chafer, called <i>Scarabæus
+Typographus</i>, which eats letters in the bark of fir),--neither of them
+needs any greater or fairer arena in the world than a piece of
+rag-paper, or any other laying apparatus than a pointed pencil,
+wherewith to lay his four-and-twenty letter-eggs.--In regard to the
+<i>catalogue raisonné</i>, which my gossip is now drawing up of German
+<i>Errata</i>, I have several times suggested to him, &quot;that it were good if
+he extended his researches in one respect, and revised the rule by
+which it has been computed, that, e. g. for a hundred-weight of pica
+black-letter, four hundred and fifty semicolons, three hundred periods,
+&amp;c., are required; and to recount, and see whether, in Political
+writings and Dedications, the fifty notes of admiration for a
+hundred-weight of pica black-letter were not far too small an
+allowance, and if so, what the real quantity was.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Several days he wrote nothing; but wrapped himself in the slough of his
+parson's-cloak; and so in his canonicals, beside the Schoolmaster, put
+the few A-b-c shooters which were not, like forest-shooters, absent on
+furlough by reason of the spring, through their platoon firing in the
+Hornbook. He never did more than his duty, but also never less. It
+brought a soft, benignant warmth over his heart, to think that he, who
+had once ducked under a School-inspectorship, was now one himself.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">About ten o'clock we meet from our different museums, and examine the
+village, especially the Biographical furniture and holy places, which I
+chance that morning to have had under my pen or pentagraph; because I
+look at them with more interest <i>after</i> my description than <i>before</i>
+it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Next comes dinner.--</p>
+
+<p class="normal">After the concluding grace, which is too long, we both of us set to
+entering the charitable subsidies and religious donations, which our
+parishioners have remitted to the sinking or rather rising fund of the
+church-box for the purchase of the new steeple-globe, into two ledgers;
+the one of these, with the names of the subscribers, or (in case they
+have subscribed for their children) with their children's names
+also, is to be inurned in a leaden capsule, and preserved in the
+steeple-ball; the other will remain below among the parish Registers.
+You cannot fancy what contributions the ambition of getting into the
+Ball brings us in; I declare, several peasants, who had given and well
+once already, contributed again when they had baptisms; must not little
+Hans be in the Ball too?</p>
+
+<p class="normal">After this book-keeping by double entry, my gossip took to engraving on
+copper. He had been so happy as to elicit the discovery, that, from a
+certain stroke resembling an inverted Latin S, the capital letters of
+our German Chancery-hand, beautiful and intertwisted as you see them
+stand in Law-deeds and Letters-of-nobility, may every one of them be
+composed and spun out.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Before you can count sixty,&quot; said he to me, &quot;I take my
+fundamental-stroke and make you any letter out of it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I merely inverted this fundamental-stroke, that is, gave him a German
+S, and counted sixty till he had it done. This line of beauty, when
+once it has been twisted and flourished into all the capitals, he
+purposes, by copperplates which he is himself engraving, to make more
+common for the use of Chanceries; and I may take upon me to give the
+Russian, the Prussian, and a few other smaller Courts, hopes of proof
+impressions from his hand; to under-secretaries they are indispensable.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Now comes evening; and it is time for us both, here forking about with
+our fruit-hooks on the literary Tree of Knowledge, at the risk of our
+necks, to clamber down again into the meadow-flowers and pasturages of
+rural joy. We wait, however, till the busy Thiennette, whom we are now
+to receive into our communion, has no more walks to take but the one
+between us. Then slowly we stept along (the sick lady was weak) through
+the office-houses; that is to say, through stalls and their population,
+and past a horrid lake of ducks, and past a little milk-pond of carps,
+to both of which colonies, I and the rest, like princes, gave bread,
+seeing we had it in view, on the Sunday after the christening, to--take
+them for bread for ourselves.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The sky is still growing kindlier and redder, the swallows and the
+blossom-trees louder, the house-shadows broader, and men more happy.
+The clustering blossoms of the acacia-grove hang down over our cold
+collation; and the ham is not stuck (which always vexes me) with
+flowers, but beshaded with them from a distance....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And now the deeper evening and the nightingale conspire to soften me;
+and I soften in my turn the mild beings round me, especially the pale
+Thiennette, to whom, or to whose heart, after the apoplectic crushings
+of a down-pressed youth, the most violent pulses of joy are heavier
+than the movements of pensive sadness. And thus beautifully runs our
+pure transparent life along, under the blooming curtains of May; and in
+our modest pleasure, we look with timidity neither behind us nor
+before; as people who are lifting treasure gaze not round at the road
+they came, or the road they are going.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">So pass our days. To-day, however, it was different; by this time,
+usually, the evening meal is over; and the Shock has got the
+osseous-preparation of our supper between his jaws; but to-night
+I am still sitting here alone in the garden, writing the Eleventh
+Letter-Box, and peeping out every instant over the meadows, to see if
+my gossip is not coming.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">For he is gone to town, to bring a whole magazine of spiceries; his
+coat-pockets are wide. Nay, it is certain enough that oftentimes
+he brings home with him, simply in his coat-pocket, considerable
+flesh-tithes from his Guardian, at whose house he alights; though
+truly, intercourse with the polished world and city, and the refinement
+of manners thence arising--for he calls on the bookseller, on
+school-colleagues, and several respectable shop-keepers--does, much
+more than flesh-fetching, form the object of these journeys to the
+city. This morning he appointed me regent-head of the house, and
+delivered me the <i>fasces</i> and <i>curule chair</i>. I sat the whole day
+beside the young, pale mother; and could not but think, simply because
+the husband had left me there as his representative, that I liked the
+fair soul better. She had to take dark colors, and paint out for me the
+winter landscape and ice region of her sorrow-wasted youth; but often,
+contrary to my intention, by some simple elegiac word, I made her still
+eye wet; for the too full heart, which had been crushed with other than
+sentimental woes, overflowed at the smallest pressure. A hundred times
+in the recital I was on the point of saying: &quot;O yes, it was with
+winter that your life began, and the course of it has resembled
+winter!&quot;--Windless, cloudless day! Three more words about thee the
+world will still not take amiss from me!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I advanced nearer and nearer to the heart-central-fire of the woman;
+and at last they mildly broke forth in censure of the Parson; the best
+wives will complain of their husbands to a stranger, without in the
+smallest liking them the less on that account. The mother and the wife,
+during dinner, accused him of buying lots at every book-auction; and,
+in truth, in such places, he does strive and bid, not so much for good
+or for bad books--or old ones--or new ones--or such as he likes to
+read--or any sort of favorite books--but simply for books. The mother
+blamed especially his squandering so much on copperplates; yet some
+hours after, when the Schultheis, or Mayor, who wrote a beautiful hand,
+came in to subscribe for the steeple-ball, she pointed out to him how
+finely her son could engrave, and said that it was well worth while to
+spend a groschen or two on such capitals as these.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">They then handed me--for when once women are in the way of a full,
+open-hearted effusion, they like (only you must not turn the stop-cock
+of inquiry) to pour out the whole--a ring-case, in which he kept a
+Chamberlain's key that he had found, and asked me if I knew who had
+lost it. Who could know such a thing, when there are almost more
+Chamberlains than picklocks among us?--</p>
+
+<p class="normal">At last I took heart, and asked after the little toy-press of the
+drowned son, which hitherto I had sought for in vain over all the
+house. Fixlein himself had inquired for it, with as little success.
+Thiennette gave the old mother a persuading look full of love; and the
+latter led me up-stairs to an outstretched hoop-petticoat, covering the
+poor press as with a dome. On the way thither, the mother told me she
+kept it hid from her son because the recollection of his brother would
+pain him. When this deposit-chest of Time (the lock had fallen off) was
+laid open to me, and I had looked into the little charnel-house, with
+its wrecks of a childlike, sportful Past, I, without saying a word,
+determined, some time ere I went away, to unpack these playthings of
+the lost boy before his surviving brother. Can there be aught finer
+than to look at these ash-buried, deep-sunk, Herculanean ruins of
+childhood, now dug up and in the open air?</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Thiennette sent twice to ask me whether he was come. He and she,
+precisely because they do not give their love the weakening expression
+of phrases, but the strengthening one of actions, have a boundless
+feeling of it towards one another. Some wedded pairs eat each others
+lips and hearts and love away by kisses; as in Rome, the statues of
+Christ (by Angelo) have lost their feet by the same process of kissing,
+and got leaden ones instead; in other couples, again, you may see, by
+mere inspection, the number of their conflagrations and eruptions, as
+in Vesuvius you can discover his, of which there are now forty-three;
+but in these two beings rose the Greek fire of a moderate and
+everlasting love, and gave warmth without casting forth sparks, and
+flamed straight up without crackling. The evening-red is flowing back
+more magically from the windows of the gardener's cottage into my
+grove; and I feel as if I must say to Destiny: &quot;Hast thou a sharp
+sorrow, then throw it rather into my breast, and strike not with it
+three good souls, who are too happy not to bleed by it, and too
+sequestered in their little dim village not to shrink back at the
+thunderbolt which hurries a stricken spirit from its earthly
+dwelling.&quot;----</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Thou good Fixlein! Here comes he hurrying over the parsonage-green.
+What languishing looks full of love already rest in the eye of thy
+Thiennette!--What news wilt thou bring us to-night from the town!--How
+will the ascending steeple-ball refresh thy soul to-morrow!--</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_lb12" href="#div1_lb12">TWELFTH LETTER-BOX.</a></h2>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="sc">Steeple-Ball Ascension.--The Toy-Press</span>.</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">How, on this sixteenth of May, the old steeple-ball was twisted off
+from the Hukelum steeple, and a new one put on in its stead, will I now
+describe to my best ability; but in that simple historical style of the
+Ancients, which, for great events, is perhaps the most suitable.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">At a very early hour, a coach arrived, containing Messrs. Court-Guilder
+Zeddel and Locksmith Wächser, and the new Peter's-cupola of the
+steeple. Towards eight o'clock the community, consisting of subscribers
+to the Globe, was visibly collecting. A little later came the Lord
+Dragoon Rittmeister von Aufhammer, as Patron of the church and steeple,
+attended by Mr. Church-Inspector Streichert. Hereupon my Reverend
+Cousin Fixlein and I repaired, with the other persons whom I have
+already named, into the Church, and there celebrated, before
+innumerable hearers, a week-day prayer-service. Directly afterwards,
+my Reverend Friend made his appearance above in the pulpit, and
+endeavored to deliver a speech which might correspond to the solemn
+transaction;--and immediately thereafter, he read aloud the names of
+the patrons and charitable souls, by whose donations the Ball had been
+put together; and showed to the congregation the leaden box in which
+they were specially recorded; observing that the book from which he had
+recited them was to be reposited in the Parish Register-office. Next he
+held it necessary to thank them and God, that he, above his deserts,
+had been chosen as the instrument and undertaker of such a work. The
+whole he concluded with a short prayer for Mr. Stechmann the Slater
+(who was already hanging on the outside on the steeple, and loosening
+the old shaft); and entreated that he might not break his neck, or any
+of his members. A short hymn was then sung, which the most of those
+assembled without the church-doors sang along with us, looking up at
+the same time to the steeple.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">All of us now proceeded out likewise; and the discarded ball, as it
+were the amputated cock's-comb of the church, was lowered down and
+untied. Church-Inspector Streichert drew a leaden case from the
+crumbling ball, which my Reverend Friend put into his pocket, purposing
+to read it at his convenience; I, however, said to some peasants: &quot;See,
+thus will your names also be preserved in the new Ball, and when, after
+long years, it shall be taken down, the box lies within it, and the
+then parson becomes acquainted with you all.&quot;--And now was the new
+steeple-globe, with the leaden cup in which lay the names of the
+by-standers, at length full-laden, so to speak, and saturated, and
+fixed to the pulley-rope;--and so did this the whilom cupping-glass of
+the community ascend aloft....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">By Heaven! the unadorned style is here a thing beyond my power: for
+when the Ball moved, swung, mounted, there rose a drumming in the
+centre of the steeple; and the Schoolmaster, who, till now, had looked
+down through a sounding-hole directed towards the congregation, now
+stepped out with a trumpet at a side sounding-hole, which the mounting
+Ball was not to cross.--But when the whole Church rung and pealed, the
+nearer the capital approached its crown,--and when the Slater clutched
+it and turned it round, and happily incorporated the spike of it, and
+delivered down, between Heaven and Earth, and leaning on the Ball, a
+Topstone-speech to this and all of us,--and when my gossip's eyes, in
+his rapture at being Parson on this great day, were running over, and
+the tears trickling down his priestly garment;--I believe I was the
+only man--as his mother was the only woman--whose souls a common grief
+laid hold of to press them even to bleeding; for I and the mother had
+yesternight, as I shall tell more largely afterwards, discovered in the
+little chest of the drowned boy, from a memorial in his father's hand,
+that, on the day after the morrow, on Cantata-Sunday and his baptismal
+Sunday, he would be--two-and-thirty-years of age. &quot;Oh!&quot; thought I,
+while I looked at the blue heaven, the green graves, the glittering
+ball, the weeping priest, &quot;so, at all times, stands poor man with
+bandaged eyes before thy sharp sword, incomprehensible Destiny! And
+when thou drawest it and brandishest it aloft, he listens with pleasure
+to the whizzing of the stroke before it falls!&quot;--</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Last night I was aware of it; but to the reader, whom I was preparing
+for it afar off, I would tell nothing of the mournful news, that, in
+the press of the dead brother, I had found an old Bible which the boys
+had used at school, with a white blank leaf in it, on which the father
+had written down the dates of his children's birth. And even this it
+was that raised in thee, thou poor mother, the shade of sorrow which of
+late we have been attributing to smaller causes; and thy heart was
+still standing amid the rain, which seemed to us already past over and
+changed into a rainbow!--Out of love to him, she had yearly told one
+falsehood, and concealed his age. By extreme good luck, he had not been
+present when the press was opened. I still purpose, after this fatal
+Sunday, to surprise him with the party-colored relics of his childhood,
+and so of these old Christmas-presents to make him new ones. In the
+mean while, if I and his mother can but follow him incessantly,
+like fishhook-floats, and foot clogs, through to-morrow and next
+day, that no murderous accident lift aside the curtain from his
+birth-certificate,--all may yet be well. For now, in truth, to his
+eyes, this birthday, in the metamorphotic mirror of his superstitious
+imagination, and behind the magnifying magic vapor of his present joys,
+would burn forth like a red death-warrant.... But besides all this, the
+leaf of the Bible is now sitting higher than any of us, namely, in the
+new steeple-ball, into which I this morning prudently introduced it.
+Properly speaking, there is indeed no danger.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_lb13" href="#div1_lb13">THIRTEENTH LETTER-BOX.</a></h2>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="sc">Christening</span>.</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">To-day is that stupid Cantata-Sunday; but nothing now remains of it
+save an hour.--By Heaven! in right spirits were we all to-day. I
+believe I have drunk as faithfully as another.--In truth, one
+should be moderate in all things, in writing, in drinking, in
+rejoicing; and as we lay straws into the honey for our bees, that
+they may not drown in their sugar, so ought one at all times to lay a
+few firm Principles and twigs from the tree of Knowledge into the
+Syrup of life, instead of those same bee-straws, that so one may cling
+thereto, and not drown like a rat. But now I do purpose in earnest
+to--write (and also live) with steadfastness; and therefore, that I may
+record the christening ceremony with greater coolness,--to besprinkle
+my fire with the night-air, and to roam out for an hour into the
+blossom-and-wave-embroidered night, where a lukewarm breath of air,
+intoxicated with soft odors, is sinking down from the blossom-peaks to
+the low-bent flowers, and roaming over the meadows, and at last
+launching on a wave, and with it sailing down the moonshiny brook. O,
+without, under the stars, under the tones of the nightingale, which
+seem to reverberate, not from the echo, but from the far-off
+down-glancing worlds; beside that moon, which the gushing brook, in its
+flickering, watery band, is carrying away, and which creeps under the
+little shadows of the bank as under clouds,--O, amid such forms and
+tones, the heart of man grows serious; and as of old an evening bell
+was rung to direct the wanderer through the deep forests to his nightly
+home, so in our Night are such voices within us and about us, which
+call to us in our strayings, and make us calmer, and teach us to
+moderate our own joys, and to conceive those of others.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="W10">
+
+
+<p class="normal">I return, peaceful and cool enough, to my narrative. All yesternight I
+left not the worthy Parson half an hour from my sight, to guard him
+from poisoning the well of his life. Full of paternal joy, and with the
+skeleton of the sermon (he was committing it to memory) in his hand, he
+set before me all that he had; and pointed out to me the fruit-baskets
+of pleasures which Cantata-Sunday always plucked and filled for him. He
+recounted to me, as I did not go away, his baptisms, his accidents of
+office; told me of his relatives; and removed my uncertainty with
+regard to the public revenues--of his parish, to the number of his
+communicants and expected catechumens. At this point, however, I am
+afraid that many a reader will in vain endeavor to transport himself
+into my situation, and still be unable to discover why I said to
+Fixlein, &quot;Worthy gossip, better no man could wish himself.&quot; I lied not,
+for so it is.... But look in the Note.<a name="div2Ref_63" href="#div2_63"><sup>[63]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p class="normal">At last rose the Sunday, the present; and on this holy day, simply
+because my little godson was for going over to Christianity, there was
+a vast racket made; every time a conversion happens, especially of
+nations, there is an uproaring and a shooting; I refer to the two
+Thirty Years' Wars, to the more recent one, and to the earlier, which
+Charlemagne so long carried on with the heathen Saxons; thus, in the
+<i>Palais Royal</i>, the Sun, at his transit over the meridian, fires off a
+cannon.<a name="div2Ref_64" href="#div2_64"><sup>[64]</sup></a> But this morning
+the little Unchristian, my godson, was
+precisely the person least attended to; for, in thinking of the
+conversion, they had no time left to think of the convert. Therefore I
+strolled about with him myself half the forenoon; and in our walk,
+hastily conferred on him a private baptism; having named him <i>Jean
+Paul</i> before the priest did so. At midday, we sent the beef away as it
+had come; the Sun of happiness having desiccated all our gastric
+juices. We now began to look about us for pomp; I for scientific
+decorations of my hair, my godson for his christening-shirt, and his
+mother for her dress-cap. Yet before the child's-rattle of the
+christening-bell had been jingled, I and the midwife, in front of the
+mother's bed, instituted Physiognomical Travels on the countenance of
+the small Unchristian, and returned with the discovery, that some
+features had been embossed by the pattern of the mother, and many firm
+portions resembled me; a double similarity, in which my readers can
+take little interest. <i>Jean Paul</i> looks very sensible for his years, or
+rather for his minutes, for it is the small one I am speaking of.----</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But now I would ask, what German writer durst take it upon him to
+spread out and paint a large historic sheet, representing the whole of
+us as we went to church? Would he not require to draw the father, with
+swelling canonicals, moving forward slowly, devoutly, and full of
+emotion? Would he not have to sketch the godfather, minded this day to
+lend out his names, which he derived from two Apostles (John and Paul),
+as Julius Cæsar lent out his names to two things still living even now
+(to a month and a throne)?--And must he not put the godson on his
+sheet, with whom even the Emperor Joseph (in his need of nurse-milk)
+might become a foster-brother, in his old days, if he were still in
+them?--</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In my chamber, I have a hundred times determined to smile at
+solemnities, in the midst of which I afterwards, while assisting at
+them, involuntarily wore a petrified countenance, full of dignity and
+seriousness. For, as the Schoolmaster, just before the baptism,
+began to sound the organ--an honor never paid to any other child in
+Hukelum,--and when I saw the wooden christening-angel, like an alighted
+Genius, with his painted timber arm spread out under the baptismal
+ewer, and I myself came to stand close by him, under his gilt wing, I
+protest the blood went slow and solemn, warm and close, through my
+pulsing head, and my lungs full of sighs; and to the silent darling
+lying in my arms, whose unripe eyes Nature yet held closed from the
+full perspective of the Earth, I wished, with more sadness than I do to
+myself, for his Future also as soft a sleep as to-day; and as good an
+angel as to-day, but a more living one, to guide him into a more living
+religion, and, with invisible hand, conduct him unlost through the
+forest of Life, through its falling trees, and Wild Hunters,<a name="div2Ref_65" href="#div2_65"><sup>[65]</sup></a>
+and
+all its storms and perils.... Will the world not excuse me, if when, by
+a side-glance, I saw on the paternal countenance prayers for the son,
+and tears of joy trickling down into the prayer; and when I noticed on
+the countenance of the grandmother far darker and fast-hidden drops,
+which she could not restrain, while I, in answer to the ancient
+question, engaged to provide for the child if its parents died,--am I
+not to be excused if I then cast my eyes deep down on my little godson,
+merely to hide their running over?--For I remembered that his father
+might perhaps this very day grow pale and cold before a suddenly
+arising mask of Death; I thought how the poor little one had only
+changed his bent posture in the womb with a freer one, to bend and
+cramp himself erelong more harshly in the strait arena of life; I
+thought of his inevitable follies, and errors, and sins; of these
+soiled steps to the Grecian Temple of our Perfection; I thought that
+one day his own fire of genius might reduce himself to ashes, as a man
+that is electrified can kill himself with his own lightning.... All the
+theological wishes, which, on the godson-billet printed over with them,
+I placed in his young bosom, were glowing written in mine.... But the
+white feathered-pink of my joy had then, as it always has, a bloody
+point within it,--I again, as it always is, went to nest, like a
+woodpecker, in a skull.... And as I am doing so even now, let the
+describing of the baptism be over for to-day, and proceed again
+to-morrow....</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_lb14" href="#div1_lb14">FOURTEENTH LETTER-BOX.</a></h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">Oh, so it is ever! So does Fate set fire to the theatre of our little
+plays, and our bright-painted curtain of Futurity! So does the
+Serpent of Eternity wind round us and our joys, and crush, like the
+royal-snake, what it does not poison! Thou good Fixlein!--Ah! last
+night, I little thought that thou, mild soul, while I was writing
+beside thee, wert already journeying into the poisonous Earth-shadow of
+Death.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Last night, late as it was, he opened the lead box found in the old
+steeple-ball; a catalogue of those who had subscribed to the last
+repairing of the church was there; and he began to read it now; my
+presence and his occupations having prevented him before. O, how shall
+I tell that the record of his birth-year, which I had hidden in the new
+Ball, was waiting for him in the old one; that in the register of
+contributions he found his father's name, with the appendage, &quot;given
+for his new-born son Egidius?&quot;--</p>
+
+<p class="normal">This stroke sunk deep into his bosom, even to the rending of it
+asunder; in this warm hour, full of paternal joy, after such fair days,
+after such fair employments, after dread of death so often survived,
+here, in the bright, smooth sea, which is rocking and bearing him
+along, starts snorting, from the bottomless abyss, the sea-monster
+Death; and the monster's throat yawns wide, and the silent sea rushes
+into it in whirlpools, and hurries him along with it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But the patient man, quietly and slowly, and with a heart silent,
+though deadly cold, laid the leaves together; looked softly and firmly
+over the churchyard, where, in the moonshine, the grave of his father
+was to be distinguished; gazed timidly up to the sky, full of stars,
+which a white overarching laurel-tree screened from his sight;--and
+though he longed to be in bed, to settle there and sleep it off, yet he
+paused at the window to pray for his wife and child, in case this night
+were his last.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">At this moment the steeple-clock struck twelve; but, from the breaking
+of a pin, the weights kept rolling down, and the clock-hammer struck
+without stopping,--and he heard with horror the chains and wheels
+rattling along; and he felt as if Death were hurling forth in a heap
+all the longer hours which he might yet have had to live,--and now, to
+his eyes, the churchyard began to quiver and heave, the moonlight
+flickered on the church-windows, and in the church there were lights
+flitting to and fro, and in the charnel-house was a motion and a
+tumult.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">His heart fainted within him, and he threw himself into bed, and closed
+his eyes that he might not see;--but Imagination in the gloom now blew
+aloft the dust of the dead, and whirled it into giant shapes, and
+chased these hollow, fever-born masks alternately into lightning and
+shadow. Then at last from transparent thoughts grew colored visions,
+and he dreamed this dream. He was standing at the window looking out
+into the churchyard; and Death, in size as a scorpion, was creeping
+over it, and seeking for his bones. Death found some arm-bones and
+thigh-bones on the graves, and said, &quot;They are my bones&quot;; and he took a
+spine and the bone-legs, and stood with them, and the two arm-bones and
+clutched with them, and found on the grave of Fixlein's father a skull,
+and put it on. Then he lifted a scythe beside the little flower-garden,
+and cried: &quot;Fixlein, where art thou? My finger is an icicle and no
+finger, and I will tap on thy heart with it.&quot; The Skeleton, thus piled
+together, now looked for him who was standing at the window, and
+powerless to stir from it; and carried in the one hand, instead of a
+sand-glass, the ever-striking steeple-clock, and held out the finger of
+ice, like a dagger, far into the air....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Then he saw his victim above at the window, and raised himself
+as high as the laurel-tree to stab straight into his bosom with the
+finger,--and stalked towards him. But as he came nearer, his pale bones
+grew redder, and vapors floated woolly round his haggard form. Flowers
+started up from the ground; and he stood transfigured and without the
+clamm of the grave, hovering above them, and the balm-breath from the
+flower-cups wafted him gently on;--and as he came nearer, the scythe
+and clock were gone, and in his bony breast he had a heart, and on his
+bony head red lips;--and nearer still, there gathered on him soft,
+transparent, rosebalm-dipped flesh, like the splendor of an Angel
+flying hither from the starry blue;--and close at hand, he was an Angel
+with shut snow-white eyelids....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The heart of my friend, quivering like a Harmonica-bell, now melted in
+bliss in his clear bosom;--and when the Angel opened its eyes, his were
+pressed together by the weight of celestial rapture, and his dream fled
+away.----</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But not his life; he opened his hot eyes, and--his good wife had hold
+of his feverish hand, and was standing in room of the Angel.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The fever abated towards morning; but the certainty of dying still
+throbbed in every artery of the hapless man. He called for his fair
+little infant into his sick-bed, and pressed it silently, though it
+began to cry, too hard against his paternal, heavy-laden breast. Then
+towards noon his soul became cool, and the sultry thunder-clouds within
+it drew back. And here he described to us the previous (as it were,
+arsenical) fantasies of his usually quiet head. But it is even those
+tense nerves, which have not quivered at the touch of a poetic hand
+striking them to melody of sorrow, that start and fly asunder more
+easily under the fierce hand of Fate, when with sweeping stroke it
+smites into discord the firm-set strings.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But towards night his ideas again began rushing in a torch-dance, like
+fire-pillars round his soul; every artery became a burning-rod, and the
+heart drove flaming naphtha-brooks into the brain. All within his soul
+grew bloody; the blood of his drowned brother united itself with the
+blood which had once flowed from Thiennette's arm, into a bloody
+rain;--he still thought he was in the garden in the night of
+betrothment, he still kept calling for bandages to stanch blood, and
+was for hiding his head in the ball of the steeple. Nothing afflicts
+one more than to see a reasonable, moderate man, who has been so even
+in his passions, raving in the poetic madness of fever. And yet if
+nothing save this mouldering corruption can soothe the hot brain; and
+if, while the reek and thick vapor of a boiling nervous-spirit and the
+hissing water-spouts of the veins are encircling and eclipsing the
+stifled soul, a higher Finger presses through the cloud, and suddenly
+lifts the poor bewildered spirit from amid the smoke to a sun,--is it
+more just to complain, than to reflect that Fate is like the oculist,
+who, when about to open to a blind eye the world of light, first
+bandages and darkens the other eye that sees?</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But the sorrow does affect me, which I read on Thiennette's pale lips,
+though do not hear. It is not the distortion of an excruciating agony,
+nor the burning of a dried-up eye, nor the loud lamenting or violent
+movement of a tortured frame, that I see in her; but what I am forced
+to see in her, and what too keenly cuts the sympathizing heart, is a
+pale, still, unmoved, undistorted face, a pale, bloodless head, which
+Sorrow is as it were holding up after the stroke, like a head just
+severed by the axe of the headsman; for oh! on this form the wounds,
+from which the three-edged dagger had been drawn, are all fallen firmly
+together, and the blood is flowing from them in secret into the choking
+heart. O Thiennette, go away from the sick-bed, and hide that face
+which is saying to us: &quot;Now do I know that I shall not have any
+happiness on Earth; now do I give over hoping,--would this life were
+but soon done!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">You will not comprehend my sympathy, if you know not what, some hours
+ago, the too loud lamenting mother told me. Thiennette, who of old had
+always trembled for his thirty-second year, had encountered this
+superstition with a nobler one; she had purposely stood farther back at
+the marriage-altar, and in the bridal-night fallen sooner asleep than
+he; thereby--as is the popular belief--so to order it that she might
+also die sooner. Nay, she has determined, if he die, to lay with his
+corpse a piece of her apparel, that so she may descend the sooner to
+keep him company in his narrow house. Thou good, thou faithful wife,
+but thou unhappy one!--</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_last" href="#div1_last">CHAPTER LAST.</a></h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">I have left Hukelum, and my gossip his bed; and the one is as sound as
+the other. The cure was as foolish as the malady. It first occurred to
+me, that, as Boerhaave used to remedy convulsions by convulsions, one
+fancy might in my gossip's case be remedied by another; namely, by the
+fancy that he was yet no man of thirty-two, but only a man of six or
+nine. Deliriums are dreams not encircled by sleep; and all dreams
+transport us back into youth, why not deliriums too? I accordingly
+directed every one to leave the patient; only his mother, while the
+fiercest meteors were darting, hissing before his fevered soul, was to
+sit down by him alone, and speak to him as if he were a child of eight
+years. The bed-mirror also I directed her to cover. She did so; she
+spoke to him as if he had the small-pox fever; and when he cried,
+&quot;Death is standing with two-and-thirty pointed teeth before me,
+to eat my heart,&quot; she said to him, &quot;Little dear, I will give thee thy
+roller-hat, and thy copy-book, and thy case, and thy hussar-cloak
+again, and more too if thou wilt be good.&quot; A reasonable speech he would
+have taken up and heeded much less than he did this foolish one.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">At last she said,--for to women in the depth of sorrow dissimulation
+becomes easy,--&quot;Well, I will try it this once, and give thee thy
+playthings; but do the like again, thou rogue, and roll thyself about
+in the bed so, with the smallpox on thee!&quot; And with this, from her full
+apron she shook out on the bed the whole stock of playthings and
+dressing-ware, which I had found in the press of the drowned brother.
+First of all his copy-book, where Egidius in his eighth year had put
+down his name, which he necessarily recognized as his own handwriting;
+then the black velvet <i>fall-hat</i> or roller-cap; then the red and white
+leading-strings; his knife-case, with a little pamphlet of tin leaves;
+his green hussar-cloak, with its stiff facings; and a whole <i>orbis
+pictus</i> or <i>fictus</i> of Nürnberg puppets....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The sick man recognized in a moment these projecting peaks of a
+spring-world sunk in the stream of Time,--these half shadows, this dusk
+of down-gone days,--this conflagration-place and Golgotha of a heavenly
+time, which none of us forgets, which we love forever, and look back to
+even from the grave.... And when he saw all this, he slowly turned
+round his head, as if he were awakening from a long, heavy dream; and
+his whole heart flowed down in warm showers of tears, and he said,
+fixing his full eyes on the eyes of his mother: &quot;But are my father and
+brother still living then?&quot;--&quot;They are dead lately,&quot; said the wounded
+mother; but her heart was overpowered, and she turned away her eyes,
+and bitter tears fell unseen from her down-bent head. And now at once
+that evening, when he lay confined to bed by the death of his father,
+and was cured by his playthings, overflowed his soul with splendor and
+lights, and presence of the Past.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And so Delirium dyed for itself rosy wings in the Aurora of life, and
+fanned the panting soul,--and shook down golden butterfly-dust from its
+plumage on the path, on the flowerage of the suffering man;--in the far
+distance rose lovely tones, in the distance floated lovely clouds--O
+his heart was like to fall in pieces, but only into fluttering
+flower-stamina, into soft sentient nerves; his eyes were like to melt
+away, but only into dew-drops for the cups of joy-blossoms, into
+blood-drops for loving hearts; his soul was floating, palpitating,
+drinking, and swimming in the warm, relaxing rose-perfume of the
+brightest delusion....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The rapture bridled his feverish heart; and his mad pulse grew calm.
+Next morning his mother, when she saw that all was prospering, would
+have had the church-bells rung, to make him think that the second
+Sunday was already here. But his wife (perhaps out of shame in my
+presence) was averse to the lying; and said it would be all the same if
+we moved the month-hand of his clock (but otherwise than Hezekiah's
+Dial) eight days forward; especially as he was wont rather to rise and
+look at his clock for the day of the month, then to turn it up in the
+almanac. I for my own part simply went up to the bedside, and asked
+him: &quot;If he was cracked--what in the world he meant with his mad
+death-dreams, when he had lain so long, and passed clean over the
+Cantata-Sunday, and yet, out of sheer terror, was withering to a lath?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">A glorious reinforcement joined me; the Flesher or Quartermaster. In
+his anxiety, he rushed into the room, without saluting the women, and I
+forthwith addressed him aloud: &quot;My gossip here is giving me trouble
+enough, Mr. Regiments-Quartermaster; last night, he let them persuade
+him he was little older than his own son; here is the child's fall-hat
+he was for putting on.&quot; The Guardian deuced and devilled, and said:
+&quot;Ward, are you a parson or a fool?--Have not I told you twenty times,
+there was a maggot in your head about this?&quot;--</p>
+
+<p class="normal">At last he himself perceived that he was not rightly wise, and so grew
+better; besides the guardian's invectives, my oaths contributed a good
+deal; for I swore I would hold him as no right gossip, and edit no word
+of his Biography, unless he rose directly and got better....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">--In short, he showed so much politeness to me that he rose and got
+better.--He was still sickly, it is true, on Saturday; and on Sunday
+could not preach a sermon (something of the sort the Schoolmaster read,
+instead); but yet he took Confessions on Saturday, and at the altar
+next day he dispensed the Sacrament. Service ended, the feast of his
+recovery was celebrated, my farewell-feast included; for I was to go in
+the afternoon.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">This last afternoon I will chalk out with all possible breadth, and
+then, with the pentagraph of free garrulity, fill up the outline and
+draw on the great scale.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">During the Thanksgiving-repast, there arrived considerable personal
+tribute from his catechumens, and fairings by way of bonfire for his
+recovery; proving how much the people loved him, and how well he
+deserved it; for one is oftener hated without reason by the many, than
+without reason loved by them. But Fixlein was friendly to every
+child; was none of those clergy who never pardon their enemies except
+in--God's stead; and he praised at once the whole world, his wife, and
+himself.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I then attended at his afternoon's catechizing; and looked down (as he
+did in the first Letter-Box) from the choir, under the wing of the
+wooden cherub. Behind this angel, I drew out my note-book, and
+shifted a little under the cover of the Black Board, with its white
+Psalm-ciphers,<a name="div2Ref_66" href="#div2_66"><sup>[66]</sup></a> and wrote
+down what I was there--thinking. I was
+well aware, that when I to-day, on the twenty-fifth of May retired from
+this <i>Salernic</i><a name="div2Ref_67" href="#div2_67"><sup>[67]</sup></a>
+spinning-school, where one is taught to spin out
+the thread of life, in fairer wise, and without wetting it by foreign
+mixtures,--I was well aware, I say, that I should carry off with me far
+more elementary principles of the Science of Happiness than the whole
+Chamberlain piquet ever muster all their days. I noted down my first
+impression, in the following Rules of Life for myself and the press.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Little joys refresh us constantly like house-bread, and never bring
+disgust; and great ones, like sugar-bread, briefly, and then bring
+it.--Trifles we should let, not plague us only, but also gratify us; we
+should seize not their poison-bags only, but their honey-bags also; and
+if flies often buzz about our room, we should, like Domitian, amuse
+ourselves with flies, or, like a certain still living Elector,<a name="div2Ref_68" href="#div2_68"><sup>[68]</sup></a>
+feed
+them.--For <i>civic</i> life and its micrologies, for which the Parson has a
+natural taste, we must acquire an artificial one; must learn to love
+without esteeming it; learn, far as it ranks beneath <i>human</i> life, to
+enjoy it like another twig of this human life, as poetically as we do
+the pictures of it in romances. The loftiest mortal loves and seeks the
+<i>same sort</i> of things with the meanest; only from higher grounds and by
+higher paths. Be every minute, Man, a full life to thee!--Despise
+anxiety and wishing, the Future and the Past!--If the <i>Second-pointer</i>
+can be no road-pointer into an Eden for thy soul, the <i>Month-pointer</i>
+will still less be so, for thou livest not from month to month, but
+from second to second! Enjoy thy Existence more than thy Manner of
+Existence, and let the dearest object of thy Consciousness be this
+Consciousness itself!--Make not the Present a means of thy Future;
+for this Future is nothing but a coming Present; and the Present,
+which thou despisest, was once a Future which thou desiredst!--Stake
+in no lotteries,--keep at home,--give and accept no pompous
+entertainments,--travel not abroad every year!--Conceal not from
+thyself, by long plans, thy household goods, thy chamber, thy
+acquaintance!--Despise Life, that thou mayst enjoy it!--Inspect the
+neighborhood of thy life; every shelf, every nook of thy abode; and
+nestling in, quarter thyself in the farthest and most domestic winding
+of thy snail-house!--Look upon a capital but as a collection of
+villages, a village as some blind-alley of a capital; fame as the talk
+of neighbors at the street-door; a library as a learned conversation,
+joy as a second, sorrow as a minute, life as a day; and three things as
+all in all: God, Creation, Virtue!&quot;----</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And if I would follow myself and these rules, it will behoove me not to
+make so much of this Biography; but once for all, like a moderate man,
+to let it sound out.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">After the Catechizing, I stept down to my wide-gowned and black-gowned
+gossip. The congregation gone, we clambered up to all high places,
+perused the plates on the pews--I took a lesson on the altar on its
+inscription incrusted with the <i>sediment of Time</i> (I speak not
+metaphorically); I organed, my gossip managing the bellows; I mounted
+the pulpit, and was happy enough there to alight on one other
+rose-shoot, which in the farewell minute, I could still plant in the
+rose-garden of my Fixlein. For I descried aloft, on the back of a
+wooden Apostle, the name <i>Lavater</i>, which the Zurich Physiognomist had
+been pleased to leave on this sacred Torso in the course of his
+wayfaring. Fixlein did not know the hand, but I did, for I had seen it
+frequently in Flachsenfingen, not only on the tapestry of a Court Lady
+there, but also in his <i>Hand-Library</i>;<a name="div2Ref_69" href="#div2_69"><sup>[69]</sup></a>
+and met with it besides in
+many country churches, forming, as it were, the Directory and
+Address-Calendar of this wandering name, for Lavater likes to inscribe
+in pulpits, as a shepherd does in trees, the name of his beloved. I
+could now advise my gossip prudently to cut away the name, with the
+chip of wood containing it, from the back of the Apostle, and to
+preserve it carefully among his <i>curiosa</i>.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">On returning to the parsonage, I made for my hat and stick; but the
+design, as it were the projection and contour of a supper in the
+acacia-grove, had already been sketched by Thiennette. I declared that
+I would stay till evening, in case the young mother went out with us to
+the proposed meal.... and truly the Biographer at length got his way,
+all doctors' regulations notwithstanding.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I then constrained the Parson to put on his Kräutermütze,<a name="div2Ref_70" href="#div2_70"><sup>[70]</sup></a>
+or
+Herb-cap, which he had stitched together out of simples for the
+strengthening of his memory: &quot;Would to Heaven,&quot; said I, &quot;that Princes
+instead of their Princely Hats, Doctors and Cardinals instead
+of theirs, and Saints instead of martyr-crowns, would clap such
+memory-bonnets on their heads!&quot;--Thereupon, till the roasting and
+cooking within doors were over, we marched out alone over the parsonage
+meadows, and talked of learned matters, we packed ourselves into the
+ruined Robber-Castle, on which my gossip, as already mentioned,
+has a literary work in hand. I deeply approved, the rather as this
+Kidnapper-tower had once belonged to an Aufhammer, his intention of
+dedicating the description to the Rittmeister; that nobleman, I think,
+will sooner give his name to the Book than to the Shock. For the rest,
+I exhorted my fellow-craftsman to pluck up literary heart, and said to
+him: &quot;A fearless pen, good gossip! Let Subrector Hans von Füchslein be,
+if he like, the Dragon of the Apocalypse, lying in wait for the
+delivery of the fugitive Woman, to swallow the offspring; I am there
+too, and have my friend the Editor of the <i>Litteraturzeitung</i> at my
+side, who will gladly permit me to give an <i>anticritique</i> on paying the
+insertion-dues!&quot;--I especially excited him to new fillings and
+return-freights of his Letter-Boxes. I have not taken oath that into
+this biographical chest-of-drawers I will not in the course of time
+introduce another Box. &quot;Neither to my godson, worthy gossip, will it do
+any harm that he is presented, poor child, even now to the reading
+public, when he does not count more months than, as Horace will have
+it, a literary child should count years, namely, <i>nine</i>.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In walking homewards, I praised his wife. &quot;If marriage,&quot; said I to him,
+&quot;is the madder which in maids, as in cotton, makes the colors visible,
+then I contend, that Thiennette, when a maid, could scarcely be so good
+as she is now when a wife. By Heaven! in such a marriage, I should
+write Books of quite another sort, divine ones; in a marriage, I mean,
+where beside the writing-table (as beside the great voting-table at the
+Regensburg Diets, there are little tables of confectionery); where in
+like manner, I say, a little jar of marmalade were standing by me,
+namely, a sweetened, dainty, lovely face, and out of measure fond of
+the Letter-Box-writer, gossip! Your marriage will resemble the
+acacia-grove we are now going to, the leaves of which grow thicker with
+the heat of summer, while other shrubs are yielding only shrunk and
+porous shade.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">As we entered through the upper garden-door into this same bower, the
+supper and the good mistress were already there. Nothing is more pure
+and tender than the respect with which a wife treats the benefactor or
+comrade of her husband; and happily the Biographer himself was this
+comrade, and the object of this respect. Our talk was cheerful, but my
+spirit was oppressed. The fetters, which bind the mere reader to my
+heroes, were in my case of triple force; as I was at once their guest
+and their portrait-painter. I told the Parson that he would live to a
+greater age than I, for that his temperate temperament was balanced, as
+if by a doctor, so equally between the nervousness of refinement and
+the hot thick-bloodedness of the rustic. Fixlein said that if he lived
+but as long as he had done, namely, two-and-thirty years, it would
+amount, exclusive of the leap-year-days, to 280,320 seconds, which in
+itself was something considerable; and that he often reckoned up with
+satisfaction the many thousand persons of his own age that would have a
+life equally long.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">At last I tried to get in motion; for the red lights of the falling sun
+were mounting up over the grove, and dipping us still deeper in the
+shadows of night; the young mother had grown chill in the evening dew.
+In confused mood, I invited the Parson to visit me soon in the city,
+where I would show him not only all the chambers of the Palace, but the
+Prince himself. Gladder there was nothing this day on our old world
+than the face to which I said so; and than the other one which was
+the mild reflection of the former.--For the Biographer it would
+have been too hard, if now in that minute, when his fancy, like
+mirror-telescopes, was representing every object in a <i>tremulous</i> form,
+he had been obliged to cut and run; if, I will say, it had not occurred
+to him that to the young mother it could do little harm (but much good)
+were she to take a short walk, and assist in escorting the Author and
+architect of the present Letter-Box out of the garden to his road.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In short, I took this couple one in each hand, instead of under each
+arm, and moved with them through the garden to the Flachsenfingen
+highway. I often abruptly turned round my head between them, as if I
+had heard some one coming after us; but in reality I only meant once
+more, though mournfully, to look back into the happy hamlet, whose
+houses were all dwellings of contented still Sabbath-joy, and which is
+happy enough, though over its wide-parted pavement-stones there passes
+every week but one barber, every holiday but one dresser of hair, and
+every year but one hawker of parasols. Then truly I had again to turn
+round my head, and look at the happy pair beside me. My otherwise
+affectionate gossip could not rightly suit himself to these tokens of
+sorrow; but in thy heart, thou good, so oft afflicted sex, every
+mourning-bell soon finds its unison; and Thiennette, ennobled with the
+thin trembling <i>resonance</i> of a reverberating soul, gave me back all my
+tones with the beauties of an echo.---- At last we reached the
+boundary, over which Thiennette could not be allowed to walk; and now
+must I part from my gossip, with whom I had talked so gayly every
+morning (each of us from his bed), and from the still circuit of modest
+hope where he dwelt, and return once more to the rioting, fermenting
+Court-sphere, where men in bull-beggar tone demand from Fate a root of
+Life-Licorice, thick as the arm, like the botanical one on the Wolga,
+not so much that they may chew the sweet bean themselves, as fell
+others to earth with it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">As I thought to myself that I would say, Farewell! to them, all the
+coming plagues, all the corpses, and all the marred wishes of this
+good pair, arose before my heart; and I remembered that little, save
+the falling asleep of joy-flowers, would mark the current of their
+Life-day, as it does of mine and of every one's.--And yet is it fairer,
+if they measure their years not by the <i>Water-clock</i> of falling tears,
+but by the <i>Flower-clock</i><a name="div2Ref_71" href="#div2_71"><sup>[71]</sup></a>
+of asleep-going flowers, whose bells in
+our short-lived garden are sinking together before us from hour to
+hour.--</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I would even now--for I still recollect how I hung with streaming eyes
+over these two loved ones, as over their corpses--address myself, and
+say: Far too soft, <i>Jean Paul</i>, whose chalk still sketches the models
+of Nature on a ground of Melancholy; harden thy heart like thy frame,
+and waste not thyself and others by such thoughts. Yet why should I do
+it, why should I not confess directly what, in the softest emotion, I
+said to these two beings? &quot;May all go right with you, ye mild beings,&quot;
+I said, for I no longer thought of courtesies, &quot;may the arm of
+Providence bear gently your lacerated hearts, and the good Father,
+above all these suns which are now looking down on us, keep you ever
+united, and exalt you still undivided to his bosom and his lips!&quot; &quot;Be
+you, too, right happy and glad!&quot; said Thiennette. &quot;And to you,
+Thiennette,&quot; continued I, &quot;Ah! to your pale cheeks, to your oppressed
+heart, to your long cold maltreated youth, I can never, never wish
+enough. No! But all that can soothe a wounded soul, that can please a
+pure one, that can still the hidden sigh--O, all that you deserve--may
+this be given you; and when you see me again, then say to me, 'I am now
+much happier!'&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">We were all of us too deeply moved. We at last tore ourselves asunder
+from repeated embraces; my friend retired with the soul whom he
+loves,--I remained alone behind him with the Night.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And I walked without aim through woods, through valleys, and over
+brooks, and through sleeping villages, to enjoy the great Night like a
+Day. I walked, and still looked like the magnet to the region of
+midnight, to strengthen my heart at the gleaming twilight, at
+this upstretching Aurora of a morning beneath our feet. White
+night-butterflies flitted, white blossoms fluttered, white stars fell,
+and the white snow-powder hung silvery in the high Shadow of the Earth,
+which reaches beyond the Moon, and which is our Night. Then began the
+Æolian Harp of the Creation to tremble and to sound, blown on from
+above, and my immortal soul was a string in this Harp.--The heart
+of a brother everlasting Man swelled under the everlasting Heaven,
+as the seas swell under the Sun and under the Moon.--The distant
+village-clocks struck midnight, mingling, as it were, with the
+ever-pealing tone of ancient Eternity.--The limbs of my buried ones
+touched cold on my soul, and drove away its blots, as dead hands heal
+eruptions of the skin.--I walked silently through little hamlets, and
+close by their outer churchyards, where crumbled upcast coffin-boards
+were glimmering, while the once bright eyes that had lain in them were
+mouldered into gray ashes.--Cold thought! clutch not like a cold
+spectre at my heart; I look up to the starry sky, and an everlasting
+chain stretches thither, and over and below; and all is Life, and
+Warmth, and Light, and all is godlike or God....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Towards morning I descried thy late lights, little city of my dwelling,
+which I belong to on this side the grave; I return to the Earth; and in
+thy steeples, behind the by-advanced great Midnight, it struck half
+past two; about this hour, in 1794, Mars went down in the west, and the
+Moon rose in the east; and my soul desired, in grief for the noble
+warlike blood which is still streaming on the blossoms of Spring: &quot;Ah,
+retire, bloody War, like red Mars; and thou, still Peace, come forth
+like the mild divided Moon!&quot;--</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<div style="line-height:300%">
+<h3><a name="div1Ref_schmelzle" href="#div1_schmelzle">ARMY-CHAPLAIN SCHMELZLE'S</a></h3>
+<h1><span class="sc">Journey to Flätz</span>;</h1>
+
+<h5>WITH</h5>
+
+<h3>A RUNNING COMMENTARY OF NOTES.</h3>
+
+<h4>TRANSLATED BY THOMAS CARLYLE.</h4>
+</div>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_preface" href="#div1_preface">PREFACE</a></h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">This, I conceive, may be managed in two words. The <i>first</i> word must
+relate to the Circular Letter of Army-Chaplain Schmelzle, wherein he
+describes to his friends his Journey to the metropolitan city of Flätz;
+after having, in an Introduction, premised some proofs and assurances
+of his valor. Properly speaking, the <i>Journey</i> itself has been written
+purely with a view that his courageousness, impugned by rumor, may be
+fully evinced and demonstrated by the plain facts which he therein
+records. Whether, in the mean time, there shall not be found certain
+quick-scented readers, who may infer, directly contrariwise, that his
+breast is not everywhere bomb-proof, especially in the left side,--on
+this point I keep my judgment suspended.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">For the rest, I beg the judges of literature, as well as their
+satellites, the critics of literature, to regard this <i>Journey</i>, for
+whose literary contents I, as Editor, am answerable, solely in the
+light of a Portrait (in the French sense), a little Sketch of
+Character. It is a voluntary or involuntary comedy-piece, at which I
+have laughed so often, that I purpose in time coming to paint some
+similar Pictures of Character myself. And, for the present, when could
+such a little comic toy be more fitly imparted and set forth to the
+world than in these very days, when the sound both of heavy money and
+of light laughter has died away from among us,--when, like the Turks,
+we count and pay merely with sealed <i>purses</i>, and the coin within them
+has vanished?</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Despicable would it seem to me, if any clownish squire of the
+goose-quill should publicly and censoriously demand of me in what way
+this self-cabinet-piece of Schmelzle's has come into my hands. I know
+it well, and do not disclose it. This comedy-piece, for which I, at all
+events, as my Bookseller will testify, draw the profit myself, I got
+hold of so unblamably, that I await, with unspeakable composure, what
+the Army-Chaplain shall please to say against the publication of it, in
+case he say anything at all. My conscience bears me witness, that I
+acquired this article at least by more honorable methods than are those
+of the learned persons who steal with their ears, who, in the character
+of spiritual auditory-thieves, and class-room cut-purses and pirates,
+are in the habit of disloading their plundered Lectures, and vending
+them up and down the country as productions of their own. Hitherto, in
+my whole life, I have stolen little, except now and then in youth
+some--glances.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The <i>second</i> word must explain or apologize for the singular form of
+this little Work, standing as it does on a substratum of Notes. I
+myself am not contented with it. Let the world open, and look, and
+determine, in like manner. But the truth is, this line of demarcation,
+stretching through the whole book, originated in the following
+accident: certain thoughts (or digressions) of my own, with which it
+was not permitted me to disturb those of the Army-Chaplain, and which
+could only be allowed to fight behind the lines, in the shape of Notes,
+I, with a view to conveniency and order, had written down in a separate
+paper; at the same time, as will be observed, regularly providing every
+Note with its Number, and thus referring it to the proper page of the
+main Manuscript. But, in the copying of the latter, I had forgotten to
+insert the corresponding numbers in the Text itself. Therefore, let no
+man, any more than I do, cast a stone at my worthy Printer, inasmuch as
+he (perhaps in the thought that it was my way, that I had some purpose
+in it) took these Notes, just as they stood, pellmell, without
+arrangement of Numbers, and clapped them under the Text; at the same
+time, by a praiseworthy, artful computation, taking care, at least,
+that at the bottom of every page in the Text there should some portion
+of this glittering Note-precipitate make its appearance. Well, the
+thing at any rate is done, nay, perpetuated, namely, printed. After
+all, I might almost partly rejoice at it. For, in good truth, had I
+meditated for years (as I have done for the last twenty) how to provide
+for my digression-comets new orbits, if not focal suns, for my episodes
+new epopees,--I could scarce possibly have hit upon a better or more
+spacious Limbo for such Vanities than Chance and Printer here
+accidentally offer me ready-made. I have only to regret that the thing
+has been printed before I could turn it to account. Heavens! what
+remotest allusions (had I known it before printing) might not have been
+privily introduced in every Text-page and Note-number; and what
+apparent incongruity in the real congruity between this upper and under
+side of the cards! How vehemently and devilishly might one not have cut
+aloft, and to the right and left, from these impregnable casemates and
+covered-ways; and what <i>læsio ultra dimidium</i> (injury beyond the half
+of the Text) might not, with these satirical injuries, have been
+effected and completed!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But Fate meant not so kindly with me; of this golden harvest-field of
+satire I was not to be informed till three days before the Preface.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Perhaps, however, the writing world, by the little blue flame of this
+accident, may be guided to a weightier acquisition, to a larger
+subterranean treasure, than I, alas! have dug up. For, to the writer,
+there is now a way pointed out of producing in one marbled volume a
+group of altogether different works; of writing in one leaf, for both
+sexes at the same time, without confounding them, nay, for the five
+faculties all at once, without disturbing their limitations; since
+now, instead of boiling up a vile, fermenting shove-together,
+fit for nobody, he has nothing to do but draw his note-lines or
+partition-lines; and so on his five-story leaf give board and lodging
+to the most discordant heads. Perhaps one might then read many a book
+for the fourth time, simply because every time one had read but a
+fourth part of it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">On the whole, this Work has at least the property of being a short one;
+so that the reader, I hope, may almost run through it, and read it at
+the bookseller's counter, without, as in the case of thicker volumes,
+first needing to buy it. And why, indeed, in this world of Matter
+should anything whatever be great, except only what belongs not to it,
+the world of Spirit?</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="sc">Jean Paul Fr. Richter</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="continue"><i>Bayreuth, in the Bay and Peace Month</i>, 1707.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>SCHMELZLE'S<br>
+JOURNEY TO FLÄTZ.</h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div1Ref_circ" href="#div1_circ"><i>Circular Letter of the proposed Catechetical Professor </i><span class="sc">Attila
+Schmelzle </span><i>to his Friends; containing some Account of a Holidays'
+Journey to Flätz, with an Introduction, touching his Flight, and
+his Courage as former Army-Chaplain</i>.</a></p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">Nothing can be more ludicrous, my esteemed Friends, than to hear people
+stigmatizing a man as cowardly and hare-hearted, who perhaps is
+struggling all the while with precisely the opposite faults, those of a
+lion; though indeed the African lion himself, since the time of
+Sparrmann's Travels, passes among us for poltroon. Yet this case is
+mine, worthy Friends; and I purpose to say a few words thereupon,
+before describing my journey.</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+108. Good princes easily obtain good subjects; not so easily good
+subjects good princes; thus Adam, in the state of innocence, ruled over
+animals all tame and gentle, till simply through his means they fell
+and grew savage.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">You in truth are all aware that, directly in the teeth of this calumny,
+it is courage, it is desperadoes (provided they be not braggarts
+and tumultuous persons), whom I chiefly venerate; for example, my
+brother-in-law, the Dragoon, who never in his life bastinadoed one man,
+but always a whole social circle at the same time. How truculent was my
+fancy, even in childhood, when I, as the parson was toning away to the
+silent congregation, used to take it into my head: &quot;How now, if thou
+shouldst start up from thy pew, and shout aloud, I am here too, Mr.
+Parson!&quot; and to paint out this thought in such glowing colors, that,
+for very dread, I have often been obliged to leave the church! Anything
+like Rugenda's battle-pieces; horrid murder-tumults, sea-fights or
+Stormings of Toulon, exploding fleets; and, in my childhood, Battles of
+Prague on the harpsichord; nay, in short, every map of any remarkable
+scene of war; these are perhaps too much my favorite objects; and I
+read--and purchase nothing sooner; and doubtless they might lead me
+into many errors, were it not that my circumstances restrain me. Now,
+if it be objected that true courage is something higher than mere
+thinking and willing, then you, my worthy friends, will be the first to
+recognize mine, when it shall break forth into not barren and empty,
+but active and effective words, while I strengthen my future
+Catechetical Pupils, as well as can be done in a course of College
+Lectures, and steel them into Christian heroes.</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+5. For a good Physician saves, if not always from the disease, at least
+from a bad Physician.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">It is well known that, out of care for the preservation of my life, I
+never walk within at least ten fields of any shore full of bathers or
+swimmers; merely because I foresee to a certainty, that, in case one of
+them were drowning, I should that moment (for the heart overbalances
+the head) plunge after the fool to save him, into some bottomless depth
+or other, where we should both perish. And if dreaming is the reflex of
+waking, let me ask you, true Hearts, if you have forgotten my relating
+to you dreams of mine, which no Cæsar, no Alexander or Luther, need
+have felt ashamed of? Have I not, to mention a few instances, taken
+Rome by storm; and done battle with the Pope and the whole elephantine
+body of the Cardinal College, at one and the same time? Did I
+not once on horseback, while simply looking at a review of military,
+dash headlong into a <i>bataillon quarré</i>; and then capture, in
+Aix-la-Chapelle, the Peruke of Charlemagne, for which the town pays
+yearly ten reichsthalers of barber-money; and carrying it off to
+Halberstadt von Gleim, there in like manner seize the Great Frederick's
+Hat; put both Peruke and Hat on my head, and yet return home, after I
+had stormed their batteries and turned the cannon against the
+cannoneers themselves? Did I not once submit to be made a Jew of, and
+then be regaled with hams; though they were ape-hams on the Orinoco
+(see Humboldt)? And a thousand such things; for I have thrown the
+Consistorial President of Flätz out of the Palace window; those
+alarm-fulminators, sold by Heinrich Backofen in Gotha, at six groschen
+the dozen, and each going off like a cannon, I have listened to so
+calmly that the fulminators did not even awaken me; and more of the
+like sort.</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+100. In books lie the Phoenix-ashes of a past Millennium and Paradise;
+but War blows, and much ashes are scattered away.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">But enough! It is now time briefly to touch that further slander of my
+chaplainship, which unhappily has likewise gained some circulation in
+Flätz, but which, as Cæsar did Alexander, I shall now by my touch
+dissipate into dust. Be what truth in it there can, it is still little
+or nothing. Your great Minister and General in Flätz (perhaps the very
+greatest in the world, for there are not many Schabackers) may indeed,
+like any other great man, be turned against me; but not with the
+Artillery of Truth; for this Artillery I here set before you, my good
+Hearts, and do you but fire it off for my advantage! The matter is
+this. Certain foolish rumors are afloat in the Flätz country, that I,
+on occasion of some important battles, took leg-bail (such is their
+plebeian phrase), and that afterwards, on the Chaplain's being called
+for to preach a Thanksgiving sermon for the victory, no chaplain
+whatever was to be found. The ridiculousness of this story will best
+appear, when I tell you that I never was in any action; but have always
+been accustomed, several hours prior to such an event, to withdraw so
+many miles to the rear, that our men, so soon as they were beaten,
+would be sure to find me. A good retreat is reckoned the masterpiece in
+the art of war; and at no time can a retreat be executed with such
+order, force, and security as just before the battle, when you are not
+yet beaten.</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+102. Dear Political or Religious Inquisitor! Art thou aware that Turin
+tapers never rightly begin shining till thou breakest them, and then
+they take fire?</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">It is true, I might perhaps, as expectant Professor of Catechetics, sit
+still and smile at such nugatory speculations on my courage; for if by
+Socratic questioning I can hammer my future Catechist Pupils into the
+habit of asking questions in their turn, I shall thereby have tempered
+<i>them</i> into heroes, seeing they have nothing to fight with but
+children--(Catechists at all events, though dreading fire, have no
+reason to dread light, since in our days, as in London illuminations,
+it is only the <i>unlighted</i> windows that are battered in; whereas, in
+other ages, it was with nations and light as it is with dogs and water;
+if you give them none for a long time, they at last get a horror at
+it);--and on the whole, for Catechists, any park looks kindlier, and
+smiles more sweetly, than a sulphurous park of artillery; and the
+Warlike Foot, which the age is placed on, is to them the true Devil's
+cloven-foot of human nature.</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+86. Very true! In youth we love and enjoy the most ill-assorted
+friends, perhaps more than, in old age, the best assorted.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">But for my part I think not so; almost as if the party spirit of my
+Christian name, Attila, had passed into me more strongly than was
+proper, I feel myself impelled still further to prove my
+courageousness; which, dearest Friends! I shall here in a few lines
+again do. This proof I could manage by mere inferences and learned
+citations. For example, if Galen remarks that animals with large
+hind-quarters are timid, I have nothing to do but turn round, and show
+the enemy my back and what is under it, in order to convince him that I
+am not deficient in valor, but in flesh. Again, if by well-known
+experiences it has been found that flesh-eating produces courage, I can
+evince that in this particular I yield to no officer of the service;
+though it is the habit of these gentlemen not only to run up long
+scores of roast-meat with their landlords, but also to leave them
+unpaid, that so at every hour they may have an open document in the
+hands of the enemy himself (the landlord), testifying that they have
+eaten their own share (with some of other people's too), and so put
+common butcher-meat on a War-footing, living not like others <i>by</i>
+bravery, but <i>for</i> bravery. As little have I ever, in my character of
+chaplain, shrunk from comparison with any officer in the regiment, who
+may be a true lion, and so snatch every sort of plunder, but yet, like
+this King of the Beasts, is afraid of <i>fire</i>; or who,--like King James
+of England,<a name="div2Ref_72" href="#div2_72"><sup>[72]</sup></a> that
+scampered off at sight of drawn swords, yet so
+much the more gallantly, before all Europe, went out against the
+storming Luther with book and pen,--does, from a similar idiosyncrasy,
+attack all warlike armaments, both by word and writing. And here I
+recollect, with satisfaction, a brave sub-lieutenant, whose confessor I
+was (he still owes me the confession-money), and who, in respect of
+stout-heartedness, had in him perhaps something of that Indian dog
+which Alexander had presented to him as a sort of Dog-Alexander. By way
+of trying this crack dog, the Macedonian made various heroic or
+heraldic beasts be let loose against him; first a stag; but the dog lay
+still; then a sow; he lay still; then a bear; he lay still. Alexander
+was on the point of condemning him; when a lion was let forth; the dog
+rose, and tore the lion in pieces. So likewise the sub-lieutenant. A
+challenger, a foreign enemy, a Frenchman, are to him only stag, and
+sow, and bear, and he lies still in his place; but let his oldest
+enemy, his creditor, come and knock at his gate, and demand of him
+actual smart-money for long bygone pleasures, thus presuming to rob him
+both of past and present; the sub-lieutenant rises, and throws his
+creditor down-stairs. I, alas! am still standing by the sow; and thus,
+naturally enough, misunderstood.</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+128. In Love there are Summer Holidays; but in Marriage also there are
+Winter Holidays, I hope.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal"><i>Quo</i>, says Livy, xii. 5, and with great justice, <i>quo timoris minus
+est, eo minus ferme periculi est</i>, The less fear you have, the less
+danger you are likely to be in. With equal justice I invert the maxim,
+and say, The less the danger, the smaller the fear; nay, there may be
+situations in which one has absolutely no knowledge of fear; and among
+these mine is to be reckoned. The more hateful, therefore, must that
+calumny about hare-heartedness appear to me.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">To my Holidays' Journey I shall prefix a few facts, which prove how
+easily foresight--that is to say, when a person would not resemble the
+stupid marmot, that will even attack a man out on horseback--may pass
+for cowardice. For the rest, I wish only that I could with equal ease
+wipe away a quite different reproach, that of being a foolhardy
+desperado; though I trust, in the sequel, I shall be able to advance
+some facts which invalidate it.</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+143. Women have weekly at least one active and passive day of glory,
+the holy day, the Sunday. The higher ranks alone have more Sundays than
+work-days; as, in great towns, you can celebrate your Sunday on Friday
+with the Turks, on Saturday with the Jews, and on Sunday with yourself.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">What boots the heroic arm, without a hero's eye? The former readily
+grows stronger and more nervous; but the latter is not so soon ground
+sharper, like glasses. Nevertheless, the merits of foresight obtain
+from the mass of men less admiration (nay, I should say, more ridicule)
+than those of courage. Whoso, for instance, shall see me walking under
+quite cloudless skies with a wax-cloth umbrella over me, to him I shall
+probably appear ridiculous, so long as he is not aware that I carry
+this umbrella as a thunder-screen, to keep off any bolt out of the blue
+heaven (whereof there are several examples in the history of the Middle
+Ages) from striking me to death. My thunder-screen, in fact, is exactly
+that of Reimarus. On a long walking-stick I carry the wax-cloth roof;
+from the peak of which depends a string of gold-lace as a conductor;
+and this, by means of a key fastened to it, which it trails along the
+ground, will lead off every possible bolt, and easily distribute it
+over the whole superficies of the Earth. With this <i>Paratonnerre
+Portatif</i> in my hand, I can walk about for weeks under the clear sky,
+without the smallest danger. This Diving-bell, moreover, protects me
+against something else; against shot. For who, in the latter end of
+Harvest, will give me black on white that no lurking ninny of a
+sportsman somewhere, when I am out enjoying Nature, shall so fire off
+his piece, at an angle of 45°, that, in falling down again, the shot
+needs only light directly on my crown, and so come to the same as if I
+had been shot through the brain from a side?</p>
+
+<p class="normal">It is bad enough, at any rate, that we have nothing to guard us from
+the Moon; which at present is bombarding us with stones like a very
+Turk; for this paltry little Earth's train-bearer and errand-maid
+thinks, in these rebellious times, that she too must begin, forsooth,
+to sling somewhat against her Mother! In good truth, as matters stand,
+any young Catechist of feeling may go out o' nights, with whole limbs,
+into the moonshine, a meditating; and erelong (in the midst of his
+meditation the villanous Satellite hits him) come home a pounded jelly.
+By Heaven! new proofs of courage are required of us on every hand! No
+sooner have we, with great effort, got thunder-rods manufactured, and
+comet-tails explained away, than the enemy opens new batteries in the
+Moon, or somewhere else in the Blue!</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+21. Schiller and Klopstock are Poetic Mirrors held up to the Sun-god;
+the Mirrors reflect the Sun with such dazzling brightness, that you
+cannot find the Picture of the World imaged forth in them.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">Suffice one other story to manifest how ludicrous the most serious
+foresight, with all imaginable inward courage, often externally appears
+in the eyes of the many. Equestrians are well acquainted with the
+dangers of a horse that runs away. My evil star would have it that
+I should once in Vienna get upon a hack-horse; a pretty enough
+honey-colored nag, but old and hard-mouthed as Satan; so that the
+beast, in the next street, went off with me; and this in truth--only at
+a <i>walk</i>. No pulling, no tugging, took effect; I at last, on the back
+of this Self-riding-horse, made signals of distress, and cried: &quot;Stop
+him, good people! for God's sake stop him! my horse is off!&quot; But these
+simple persons seeing the beast move along as slowly as a Reichshofrath
+lawsuit, or the Daily Postwagen, could not in the least understand the
+matter, till I cried as if possessed: &quot;Stop him then, ye blockheads and
+joltheads! don't you see that I cannot hold the nag?&quot; But now, to these
+noodles the sight of a hard-mouthed horse going off with its rider step
+by step seemed ridiculous rather than otherwise; half Vienna gathered
+itself like a comet-tail behind my beast and me. Prince Kaunitz, the
+best horseman of the century (the last), pulled up to follow me. I
+myself sat and swam like a perpendicular piece of drift-ice on my
+honey-colored nag, which stalked on, on, step by step; a many-cornered,
+red-coated letter-carrier was delivering his letters, to the right and
+left, in the various stories, and he still crossed over before me
+again, with satirical features, because the nag went along too slowly.
+The Schwanzschleuderer, or Train-dasher (the person, as you know, who
+drives along the streets with a huge barrel of water, and besplashes
+them with a leathern pipe of three ells long from an iron trough), came
+across the haunches of my horse, and, in the course of his duty, wetted
+both these and myself in a very cooling manner, though, for my part, I
+had too much cold sweat on me already to need any fresh refrigeration.
+On my infernal Trojan Horse (only I myself was Troy, not beridden, but
+riding to destruction), I arrived at Malzlein (a suburb of Vienna), or
+perhaps, so confused were my senses, it might be quite another range of
+streets. At last, late in the dusk, I had to turn into the Prater; and
+here, long after the Evening Gun, to my horror, and quite against the
+police-rules, keep riding to and fro on my honey-colored nag; and
+possibly I might even have passed the night on him, had not my
+brother-in-law, the Dragoon, observed my plight, and so found me still
+sitting firm as a rock on my runaway steed. He made no ceremonies;
+caught the brute; and put the pleasant question, why I had not vaulted,
+and come off by ground-and-lofty tumbling; though he knew full well
+that for this a wooden horse, which stands still, is requisite.
+However, he took me down; and so, after all this riding, horse and man
+got home with whole skins and unbroken bones.</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+84. Women are like precious carved works of ivory: nothing is whiter
+and smoother, and nothing sooner grows yellow.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">But now at last to my Journey!</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_journey" href="#div1_journey">JOURNEY TO FLÄTZ.</a></h2>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+72. The Half-learned is adored by the Quarter-learned; the latter by
+the Sixteenth-part-learned; and so on: but not the Whole-learned by the
+Half-learned.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">You are aware, my friends, that this Journey to Flätz was necessarily
+to take place in Vacation time; not only because the Cattle-market, and
+consequently the Minister and General von Schabacker, was there then;
+but more especially because the latter (as I had it positively from a
+private hand) did annually, on the 23d of July, the market-eve, about
+five o'clock, become so full of gaudium and graciousness, that in many
+cases he did not so much snarl on people as listen to them, and grant
+their prayers. The cause of this gaudium I had rather not trust to
+paper. In short, my Petition, praying that he would be pleased to
+indemnify and reward me, as an unjustly deposed army-chaplain, by a
+Catechetical Professorship, could plainly be presented to him at no
+better season than exactly about five o'clock in the evening of the
+first dog-day. In less than a week I had finished writing my Petition.
+As I spared neither summaries nor copies of it, I had soon got so far
+as to see the relatively best lying completed before me; when, to my
+terror, I observed that in this paper I had introduced above thirty
+<i>dashes</i>, or breaks, in the middle of my sentences! Now-a-days, alas!
+these stings shoot forth involuntarily from learned pens, as tails of
+wasps. I debated long within myself whether a private scholar could
+justly be entitled to approach a minister with dashes,--greatly as this
+level interlineation of thoughts, these horizontal note-marks of
+poetical <i>music</i>-pieces, and these rope-ladders or Achilles'-tendons of
+philosophical <i>see</i>-pieces, are at present fashionable and
+indispensable; but, at last, I was obliged (as erasures may offend
+people of quality) to write my best proof-petition over again; and then
+to afflict myself for another quarter of an hour over the name Attila
+Schmelzle, seeing it is always my principle that this and the address
+of the letter, the two cardinal points of the whole, can never be
+written legibly enough.</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+85. <i>Bien écouter c'est presque répondre</i>, says Marivaux justly of
+social circles; but I extend it to round Councillor-tables and
+Cabinet-tables, where reports are made, and the Prince listens.</p>
+</div>
+
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<p class="center"><a name="div1Ref_s01" href="#div1_s01"><i>First Stage; from Neusattel to Vierstädten</i>.</a></p>
+<br>
+<p class="normal">The 22d of July, or Wednesday, about five in the afternoon, was now, by
+the way-bill of the regular Post-coach, irrevocably fixed for my
+departure. I had still half a day to order my house; from which, for
+two nights and two days and a half, my breast, its breastwork and
+palisado, was now, along with my Self, to be withdrawn. Besides this,
+my good wife Bergelchen, as I call my Teutoberga, was immediately to
+travel after me, on Friday the 24th, in order to see and to make
+purchases at the yearly Fair; nay, she was ready to have gone along
+with me, the faithful spouse. I therefore assembled my little knot of
+domestics, and promulgated to them the Household Law and Valedictory
+Rescript, which, after my departure, in the first place <i>before</i> the
+outset of my wife, and in the second place <i>after</i> this outset, they
+had rigorously to obey; explaining to them especially whatever, in case
+of conflagrations, housebreakings, thunder-storms, or transits of
+troops, it would behoove them to do. To my wife I delivered an
+inventory of the best goods in our little Registership; which goods
+she, in case the house took fire, had, in the first place, to secure. I
+ordered her in stormy nights (the peculiar thief-weather) to put our
+Æolian harp in the window, that so any villanous prowler might imagine
+I was fantasying on my instrument, and therefore awake; for like
+reasons, also, to take the house-dog within doors by day, that he might
+sleep then, and so be livelier at night. I further counselled
+her to have an eye on the focus of every knot in the panes of the
+stable-window, nay, on every glass of water she might set down in the
+house; as I had already often recounted to her examples of such
+accidental burning-glasses having set whole buildings in flames. I then
+appointed her the hour when she was to set out on Friday morning to
+follow me; and recapitulated more emphatically the household precepts
+which, prior to her departure, she must afresh inculcate on her
+domestics. My dear, heart-sound, blooming Berga answered her faithful
+lord, as it seemed very seriously: &quot;Go thy ways, little old one; it
+shall all be done as smooth as velvet. Wert thou but away! There is no
+end of thee!&quot; Her brother, my brother-in-law, the Dragoon, for whom,
+out of complaisance, I had paid the coach-fare, in order to have in the
+vehicle along with me a stout swordsman and hector, as spiritual
+relative and bully-rock, so to speak; the Dragoon, I say, on hearing
+these my regulations, puckered up (which I easily forgave the wild
+soldier and bachelor) his sun-burnt face considerably into ridicule,
+and said: &quot;Were I in thy place, sister, I should do what I liked, and
+then afterwards take a peep into these regulation-papers of his.&quot;</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+17. The Bed of Honor, since so frequently whole regiments lie on it,
+and receive their last unction, and last honor but one, really ought
+from time to time be new-filled, beaten, and sunned.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Oh!&quot; answered I, &quot;misfortune may conceal itself like a scorpion in any
+corner; I might say, we are like children, who, looking at their gayly
+painted toy-box, soon pull off the lid, and, pop! out springs a mouse
+who has young ones.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Mouse, mouse!&quot; said he, stepping up and down. &quot;But, good brother, it
+is five o'clock; and you will find, when you return, that all looks
+exactly as it does to-day; the dog like the dog, and my sister like a
+pretty woman; <i>allons donc</i>!&quot; It was purely his blame that I, fearing
+his misconceptions, had not previously made a sort of testament.</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+120. Many a one becomes a free-spoken Diogenes, not when he dwells in
+the Cask, but when the Cask dwells in him.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">I now packed in two different sorts of medicines, heating as well as
+cooling, against two different possibilities; also my old splints for
+arm or leg breakages, in case the coach overset; and (out of foresight)
+two times the money I was likely to need. Only here I could have
+wished, so uncertain is the stowage of such things, that I had been an
+Ape with cheek-pouches, or some sort of Opossum with a natural bag,
+that so I might have reposited these necessaries of existence in
+pockets which were sensitive. Shaving is a task I always go through
+before setting out on journeys; having a rational mistrust against
+stranger bloodthirsty barbers; but, on this occasion, I retained my
+beard; since, however close shaved, it would have grown again by the
+road to such a length that I could have fronted no Minister and General
+with it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">With a vehement emotion, I threw myself on the pith-heart of my Berga,
+and with a still more vehement one, tore myself away; in her, however,
+this our first marriage-separation seemed to produce less lamentation
+than triumph, less consternation than rejoicing; simply because she
+turned her eye not half so much on the parting, as on the meeting, and
+the journey after me, and the wonders of the Fair. Yet she threw and
+hung herself on my somewhat long and thin neck and body, almost
+painfully, being, indeed, a too fleshy and weighty load, and said to
+me: &quot;Whisk thee off quick, my charming Attel (Attila), and trouble thy
+head with no cares by the way, thou singular man! A whiff or two of ill
+luck we can stand, by God's help, so long as my father is no beggar.
+And for thee, Franz,&quot; continued she, turning with some heat to her
+brother, &quot;I leave my Attel on thy soul; thou well knowest, thou wild
+fly, what I wilt do, if thou play the fool, and leave him anywhere in
+the lurch.&quot; Her meaning here was good, and I could not take it ill; to
+you, also, my Friends, her wealth and her open-heartedness are nothing
+new.</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+3. Culture makes whole lands, for instance Germany, Gaul, and others,
+physically warmer, but spiritually colder.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">Melted into sensibility, I said: &quot;Now, Berga, if there be a reunion
+appointed for us, surely it is either in Heaven or in Flätz; and I hope
+in God, the latter.&quot; With these words, we whirled stoutly away. I
+looked round through the back-window of the coach at my good little
+village of Neusattel, and it seemed to me, in my melting mood, as if
+its steeples were rising aloft like an epitaphium over my life,
+or over my body, perhaps to return a lifeless corpse. &quot;How will it all
+be,&quot; thought I, &quot;when thou at last, after two or three days, comest
+back?&quot; And now I noticed my Bergelchen looking after us from the
+garret-window; I leaned far out from the coach-door, and her falcon eye
+instantly distinguished my head; kiss on kiss she threw with both
+hands after the carriage, as it rolled down into the valley. &quot;Thou
+true-hearted wife,&quot; thought I, &quot;how is thy lowly birth, by thy
+spiritual new-birth, made forgetable, nay, remarkable!&quot;</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+1. The more Weakness the more Lying. Force goes straight; any
+cannon-ball with holes or cavities in it goes crooked.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">I must confess, the assemblage and conversational picnic of the
+stage-coach was much less to my taste; the whole of them suspicious,
+unknown rabble, whom (as markets usually do) the Flätz cattle-market
+was alluring by its scent. I dislike becoming acquainted with
+strangers; not so my brother-in-law, the Dragoon; who now, as he always
+does, had in a few minutes elbowed himself into close quarters with the
+whole ragamuffin posse of them. Beside me sat a person, who, in all
+human probability, was a Harlot; on her breast a Dwarf intending to
+exhibit himself at the Fair; on the other side was a Rat-catcher gazing
+at me; and a Blind Passenger,<a name="div2Ref_73" href="#div2_73"><sup>[73]</sup></a>
+in a red mantle, had joined us down
+in the valley. No one of them, except my brother-in-law, pleased me.
+That rascals among these people would not study me and my properties
+and accidents, to entangle me in their snares, no man could be my
+surety. In strange places, I even, out of prudence, avoid looking long
+up at any jail-window; because some losel, sitting behind the bars, may
+in a moment call down out of mere malice: &quot;How goes it, comrade
+Schmelzle?&quot; or, further, because any lurking catchpole may fancy I am
+planning a rescue for some confederate above. From another sort of
+prudence, little different from this, I also make a point of never
+turning round when any booby calls, Thief! after me.</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+88. Epictetus advises us to travel, because our old acquaintances, by
+the influence of shame, impede our transition to higher virtues; as a
+bashful man will rather lay aside his provincial accent in some foreign
+quarter, and then return wholly purified to his own countrymen. In our
+days, people of rank and virtue follow this advice, but inversely; and
+travel because their old acquaintances, by the influence of shame,
+would too much deter them from new sins.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">As to the Dwarf himself, I had no objection to his travelling with me
+whithersoever he pleased; but he thought to raise a particular
+delectation in our minds, by promising that his Pollux and Brother in
+Trade, an extraordinary Giant who was also making for the Fair to
+exhibit himself, would by midnight, with his elephantine pace,
+infallibly overtake the coach, and plant himself among us, or behind on
+the outside. Both these noodies, it appeared, are in the habit of going
+in company to fairs, as reciprocal exaggerators of opposite magnitudes;
+the Dwarf is the convex magnifying-glass of the Giant, the Giant the
+concave diminishing-glass of the Dwarf. Nobody expressed much joy at
+the prospective arrival of this Anti-dwarf, except my brother-in-law,
+who (if I may venture on a play of words) seems made, like a clock,
+solely for the purpose of <i>striking</i>, and once actually said to me,
+that &quot;if in the Upper world he could not get a soul to curry and towzle
+by a time, he would rather go to the Under, where most probably there
+would be plenty of cuffing and to spare.&quot; The Rat-catcher--besides the
+circumstance that no man can prepossess us much in his favor, who
+lives solely by poisoning, like this Destroying Angel of rats, this
+mouse-Atropos; and also, which is still worse, that such a fellow bids
+fair to become an increaser of the vermin kingdom the moment he may
+cease to be a lessener of it--besides all this, I say, the present
+Rat-catcher had many baneful features about him. First, his stabbing
+look, piercing you like a stiletto; then the lean, sharp, bony visage,
+conjoined with his enumeration of his considerable stock of poisons;
+then (for I hated him more and more) his sly stillness, his sly smile,
+as if in some corner he noticed a mouse, as he would notice a man! To
+me, I declare, though usually I take not the slightest exception
+against people's looks, it seemed at last as if his throat were a
+Dog-grotto, a <i>Grotta del cane</i>, his cheekbones cliffs and breakers,
+his hot breath the wind of a calcining furnace, and his black, hairy
+breast, a kiln for parching and roasting.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Nor was I far wrong, I believe; for soon after this, he began quite
+coolly to inform the company, in which were a dwarf and a female, that,
+in his time, he had, not without enjoyment, run ten men through the
+body; had with great convenience hewed off a dozen men's arms; slowly
+split four heads, torn out two hearts, and more of the like sort; while
+none of them, otherwise persons of spirit, had in the least resisted.
+&quot;But why?&quot; added he with a poisonous smile, and taking the hat from his
+odious baldpate; &quot;I am invulnerable. Let any one of the company that
+chooses lay as much fire on my bare crown as he likes, I shall not mind
+it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">My brother-in-law, the Dragoon, directly kindled his tinder-box, and
+put a heap of the burning matter on the Rat-catcher's pole; but the
+fellow stood it, as if it had been a mere picture of fire, and the two
+looked expectingly at one another; and the former smiled very
+foolishly, saying: &quot;It was simply pleasant to him, like a good
+warming-plaster; for this was always the wintry region of his body.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Here the Dragoon groped a little on the naked scull, and cried with
+amazement, that &quot;it was as cold as a knee-pan.&quot;</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+32. Our Age (by some called the Paper Age, as if it were made from the
+rags of some better dressed one) is improving in so far as it now
+tears, its rags rather into Bandages than into Papers; although,
+or because, the Rag-hacker (the Devil as they call it) will not
+altogether be at rest. Meanwhile, if Learned Heads transform themselves
+into Books, Crowned Heads transform and coin themselves into
+Government-paper. In Norway, according to the <i>Universal Indicator</i>,
+the people have even paper-houses; and in many good German States, the
+Exchequer Collegium (to say nothing of the Justice Collegium) keeps
+its own paper-mills, to furnish wrappage enough for the meal of its
+wind-mills. I could wish, however, that our Collegiums would take
+pattern from that Glass Manufactory at Madrid, in which (according to
+Baumgärtner) there were indeed nineteen clerks stationed, but also
+eleven workmen.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">But now the fellow, to our horror, after some preparations, actually
+lifted off the quarter-skull and held it out to us, saying: &quot;He had
+sawed it off a murderer, his own having accidentally been broken&quot;; and
+withal explained, that the stabbing and arm-cutting he had talked of
+was to be understood as a jest, seeing he had merely done it in the
+character of Famulus at an Anatomical Theatre. However, the jester
+seemed to rise little in favor with any of us; and for my part, as he
+put his brain-lid and sham-skull on again, I thought to myself: &quot;This
+dung-bed-bell has changed its place, indeed, but not the hemlock it was
+made to cover.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Further, I could not but reckon it a suspicious circumstance, that he
+as well as all the company (the Blind Passenger too) were making for
+this very Flätz, to which I myself was bound. Much good I could not
+expect of this; and, in truth, turning home again would have been as
+pleasant to me as going on, had I not rather felt a pleasure in defying
+the future.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I come now to the red-mantled Blind Passenger; most probably an
+<i>Emigré</i> or <i>Refugié</i>; for he speaks German not worse than he does
+French; and his name, I think, was <i>Jean Pierre</i> or <i>Jean Paul</i>, or
+some such thing, if indeed he had any name. His red cloak,
+notwithstanding this his identity of color with the Hangman, would in
+itself have remained heartily indifferent to me; had it not been for
+this singular circumstance, that he had already five times, contrary to
+all expectation, come upon me in five different towns (in great Berlin,
+in little Hof, in Coburg, Meiningen, and Bayreuth), and, each of these
+times, had looked at me significantly enough, and then gone his ways.
+Whether this <i>Jean Pierre</i> is dogging me with hostile intent or not, I
+cannot say; but to our fancy, at any rate, no object can be gratifying
+that thus, with corps of observation, or out of loop-holes, holds and
+aims at us with muskets, which for year after year it shall move to
+this side and that, without our knowing on whom it is to fire. Still
+more offensive did Redcloak become to me, when he began to talk about
+his soft mildness of soul; a thing which seemed either to betoken
+pumping you or undermining you.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I replied: &quot;Sir, I am just come, with my brother-in-law here, from the
+field of battle (the last affair was at Pimpelstadt), and so perhaps am
+too much of a humor for fire, pluck, and war-fury; and to many a one,
+who happens to have a roaring waterspout of a heart, it may be well if
+his clerical character (which is mine) rather enjoins on him mildness
+than wildness. However, all mildness has its iron limit. If any
+thoughtless dog chance to anger me, in the first heat of rage I kick my
+foot through him; and after me, my good brother here will perhaps drive
+matters twice as far, for he is the man to do it. Perhaps it may be
+singular; but I confess, I regret to this day, that once when a boy I
+received three blows from another, without tightly returning them; and
+I often feel as if I must still pay them to his descendants. In sooth,
+if I but chance to see a child running off like a dastard from the weak
+attack of a child like himself, I cannot for my life understand his
+running, and can scarcely keep from interfering to save him by a
+decisive knock.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The Passenger meanwhile was smiling, not in the best fashion. He gave
+himself out for a Legations-Rath, and seemed fox enough for such a
+post; but a mad fox will, in the long run, bite me as rabidly as a mad
+wolf will. For the rest, I calmly went on with my eulogy on courage;
+only that, instead of ludicrous gasconading, which directly betrays the
+coward, I purposely expressed myself in words at once cool, clear, and
+firm.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I am altogether for Montaigne's advice,&quot; said I: &quot;'Fear nothing but
+fear.'&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I again,&quot; replied the Legations-man, with useless wire-drawing, &quot;I
+should fear again that I did not sufficiently fear fear, but continued
+too dastardly.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;To this fear also,&quot; replied I, coldly, &quot;I set limits. A man, for
+instance, may not in the least believe in or be afraid of ghosts; and
+yet by night may bathe himself in cold sweat, and this purely out of
+terror at the dreadful fright he should be in (especially with what
+whiffs of epilepsies, falling-sicknesses, and so forth, he might be
+visited), in case simply his own too vivid fancy should create any wild
+fever-image, and hang it up in the air before him.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;One should not, therefore,&quot; added my brother-in-law the Dragoon,
+contrary to his custom, moralizing a little,--&quot;one should not bamboozle
+the poor sheep, man, with any ghost-tricks; the henheart may die on the
+spot.&quot;</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+2. In his Prince, a soldier reverences and obeys at once his Prince and
+his Generalissimo; a Citizen, only his Prince.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">A loud storm of thunder overtaking the stage-coach altered the
+discourse. You, my Friends, knowing me as a man not quite destitute of
+some tincture of Natural Philosophy, will easily guess my precautions
+against thunder. I place myself on a chair in the middle of the room
+(often, when suspicious clouds are out, I stay whole nights on it), and
+by careful removal of all conductors, rings, buckles, and so forth, I
+here sit thunder-proof, and listen with a cool spirit to this elemental
+music of the cloud-kettledrum. These precautions have never harmed me,
+for I am still alive at this date; and to the present hour I
+congratulate myself on once hurrying out of church, though I had
+confessed but the day previous; and running, without more ceremony,
+and before I had received the sacrament, into the charnel-house,
+because a heavy thunder-cloud (which did, in fact, strike the
+churchyard linden-tree) was hovering over it. So soon as the cloud had
+disloaded itself, I returned from the charnel-house into the church,
+and was happy enough to come in after the Hangman (usually the last),
+and so still participate in the Feast of Love.</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+45. Our present writers shrug their shoulders most at those on whose
+shoulders they stand; and exalt those most who crawl up along them.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">
+Such, for my own part, is my manner of proceeding; but in the full
+stage-coach I met with men to whom Natural Philosophy was no philosophy
+at all. For when the clouds gathered dreadfully together over our
+coach-canopy, and sparkling, began to play through the air, like so
+many fireflies, and I at last could not but request that the sweating
+coach-conclave would at least bring out their watches, rings, money,
+and such like, and put them all into one of the carriage-pockets, that
+none of us might have a conductor on his body; not only would no one of
+them do it, but my own brother-in-law the Dragoon even sprang out, with
+naked drawn sword, to the coach-box, and swore that he would conduct
+the thunder all away himself. Nor do I know whether this desperate
+mortal was not acting prudently; for our position within was frightful,
+and any one of us might every moment be a dead man. At last, to crown
+all, I got into a half altercation with two of the rude members of our
+leathern household, the Poisoner and the Harlot; seeing, by their
+questions, they almost gave me to understand, that, in our
+conversational picnic, especially with the Blind Passenger, I had not
+always come off with the best share. Such an imputation wounds your
+honor to the quick; and in my breast there was a thunder louder than
+that above us. However, I was obliged to carry on the needful exchange
+of sharp words as quietly and slowly as possible; and I quarrelled
+softly, and in a low tone, lest in the end a whole coachful of people,
+set in arms against each other, might get into heat and perspiration;
+and so, by vapor steaming through the coach-roof, conduct the too near
+thunderbolt down into the midst of us. At last I laid before the
+company the whole theory of Electricity in clear words, but low and
+slow (striving to avoid all emission of vapor); and especially
+endeavored to frighten them away from fear. For, indeed, through fear,
+the stroke--nay, two strokes, the electric or the apoplectic--might hit
+any one of us; since in Erxleben and Reimarus it is sufficiently proved
+that violent fear, by the transpiration it causes, may attract the
+lightning. I accordingly, in some fear of my own and other people's
+fear, represented to the passengers that now, in a coach so hot and
+crowded, with a drawn sword on the coach-box piercing the very
+lightning, with the thunder-cloud hanging over us, and even with so
+many transpirations from incipient fear; in short, with such visible
+danger on every hand, they must absolutely fear nothing, if they would
+not, all and sundry, be smitten to death in a few minutes.</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+103. The Great perhaps take as good charge of their posterity as the
+Ants; the eggs once laid, the male and female Ants fly about their
+business, and confide them to the trusty <i>working-Ants</i>.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;O Heaven!&quot; cried I, &quot;Courage! only courage! No fear, not even fear of
+fear! Would you have Providence to shoot you here sitting, like so many
+hares hunted into a pinfold? Fear, if you like, when you are out of the
+coach; fear to your heart's content in other places, where there is
+less to be afraid of; only not here, not here!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I shall not determine--since among millions scarcely one man dies by
+thunder-clouds, but millions perhaps by snow-clouds, and rain-clouds,
+and thin mist--whether my Coach-sermon could have made any claim to a
+prize for man-saving; however, at last, all uninjured, and driving
+towards a rainbow, we entered the town of Vierstädten, where dwelt a
+Postmaster, in the only street which the place had.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<p class="center"><a name="div1Ref_s02" href="#div1_s02"><i>Second Stage; from Vierstädten to Niederschöna</i>.</a></p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">The Postmaster was a churl and a striker; a class of mortals whom I
+inexpressibly detest, as my fancy always whispers to me, in their
+presence, that by accident or dislike I might happen to put on a
+scornful or impertinent look, and hound these mastiffs on my own
+throat; and so, from the very first, I must incessantly watch them.
+Happily, in this case (supposing I even had made a wrong face), I could
+have shielded myself with the Dragoon; for whose giant force such
+matters are a tidbit. This brother-in-law of mine, for example, cannot
+pass any tavern where he hears a sound of battle, without entering,
+and, as he crosses the threshold, shouting, &quot;Peace, dogs!&quot;--and
+therewith, under show of a peace deputation, he directly snatches
+up the first chair-leg in his hand, as if it were an American
+peace-calumet, and cuts to the right and left among the belligerent
+powers, or he gnashes the hard heads of the parties together (he
+himself takes no side), catching each by the hind-lock. In such cases
+the rogue is in Heaven!</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+10. And does Life offer us, in regard to our ideal hopes and purposes,
+anything but a prosaic, unrhymed, unmetrical Translation?</p>
+
+<p class="normal">78. Our German frame of Government, cased in its harness, had much
+difficulty in moving, for the same reason why Beetles cannot fly,
+when their <i>wings</i> have <i>wing-shells</i>, of very sufficient strength,
+and--grown together.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">I, for my part, rather avoid discrepant circles than seek them; as I
+likewise avoid all dead or killed people. The prudent man easily
+foresees what is to be got by them; either vexatious and injurious
+witnessing, or often even (when circumstances conspire) painful
+investigation, and suspicions of your being an accomplice.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In Vierstädten nothing of importance presented itself, except--to my
+horror--a dog without tail, which came running along the town or
+street. In the first fire of passion at this sight, I pointed it out to
+the passengers, and then put the question, whether they could reckon a
+system of Medical Police well arranged, which, like this of
+Vierstädten, allowed dogs openly to scour about, when their tails were
+wanting. &quot;What am I to do,&quot; said I, &quot;when this member is cut away, and
+any such beast comes running towards me, and I cannot, either by the
+tail being cocked up or being drawn in, since the whole is snipt off,
+come to any conclusion whether the vermin is mad or not? In this way,
+the most prudent man may be bit, and become rabid, and so make
+shipwreck purely for want of a tail compass.&quot;</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+8. Constitutions of Government are like highways; on a new and quite
+untrodden one, where every carriage helps in the process of bruising
+and smoothing, you are as much jolted and pitched, as an old worn-out
+one, full of holes. What is to be done then? Travel on.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">The Blind Passenger (he now got himself inscribed as a Seeing one, God
+knows for what objects) had heard my observation; which he now spun out
+in my presence almost into ridicule, and at last awakened in me the
+suspicion, that, by an overdone flattery in imitating my style of
+speech, he meant to banter me. &quot;The Dog-tail,&quot; said he, &quot;is, in truth,
+an alarm-beacon, and finger-post for us, that we come not even into the
+outmost precincts of madness; cut away from Comets their tails, from
+Bashaws theirs, from Crabs theirs (outstretched it denotes that they
+are burst); and in the most dangerous predicaments of life, we are left
+without clew, without indicator, without hand <i>in margine</i>; and we
+perish not so much as knowing how.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">For the rest, this stage passed over without quarreling or peril. About
+ten o'clock, the whole party, including even the Postilion, myself
+excepted, fell asleep. I indeed pretended to be sleeping, that I might
+observe whether some one, for his own good reasons, might not also be
+pretending it. But all continued snoring; the moon threw its
+brightening beams on nothing but downpressed eyelids.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I had now a glorious opportunity of following Lavater's counsel, to
+apply the physiognomical ellwand specially to sleepers, since sleep,
+like death, expresses the genuine form in coarser lines. Other sleepers
+not in stage-coaches I think it less advisable to mete with this
+ellwand; having always an apprehension lest some fellow, but pretending
+to be asleep, may, the instant I am near enough, start up as in a
+dream, and deceitfully plant such a knock on the physiognomical
+mensurator's own facial structure, as to exclude it forever from
+appearing in any Physiognomical Fragments (itself being reduced to
+one), either in the stippled or line style. Nay, might not the most
+honest sleeper in the world, just while you are in hand with his
+physiognomical dissection, lay about him, spurred on by honor in some
+cudgelling-scene he may be dreaming; and in a few instants of
+clapperclawing, and kicking, and trampling, lull you into a much more
+lasting sleep than that out of which he was awakened?</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+8. In Criminal Courts, murdered children are often represented as
+still-born; in Anticritiques, still-born as murdered.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">In my <i>Adumbrating Magic-lantern</i>, as I have named the Work, the
+whole physiognomical contents of this same sleeping stage-coach will be
+given to the world. There I shall explain to you at large how the
+Poisoner, with the murder-cupola, appeared to me devil-like; the Dwarf
+old-child-like; the Harlot languidly shameless; my Brother-in-law
+peacefully satisfied, with revenge or food; and the Legations-Rath,
+<i>Jean Pierre</i>, Heaven only knows why, like a half angel,--though,
+perhaps, it might be because only the fair body, not the other half,
+the soul, which had passed away in sleep, was affecting me.</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+101. Not only were the Rhodians, from their Colossus, called
+Colossians; but also innumerable Germans are, from their Luther, called
+Lutherans.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">I had almost forgotten to mention, that, in a little village, while my
+Brother-in-law and the Postilion were sitting at their liquor, I
+happily fronted a small terror, Destiny having twice been on my side.
+Not far from a Hunting Box, beside a pretty clump of trees, I noticed a
+white tablet, with a black inscription on it. This gave me hopes that
+perhaps some little monumental piece, some pillar of honor, some battle
+memento, might here be awaiting me. Over an untrodden flowery tangle I
+reach the black on white; and to my horror and amazement I decipher in
+the moonshine, <i>Beware of Spring-guns!</i> Thus was I standing perhaps
+half a nail's breadth from the trigger, with which, if I but stirred my
+heel, I should shoot myself off, like a forgotten ramrod, into the
+other world, beyond the verge of Time! The first thing I did was to
+slutch down my toe-nails, to bite, and, as it were, eat myself into the
+ground with them; since I might, at least, continue in warm life so
+long as I pegged my body firmly in beside the Atropos-scissors and
+hangman's block, which lay beside me. Then I endeavored to recollect by
+what steps the Fiend had led me hither unshot, but in my agony I had
+perspired the whole of it, and could remember nothing. In the Devil's
+village, close at hand, there was no dog to be seen and called to, who
+might have plucked me from the water; and my Brother-in-law and the
+Postilion were both carousing with full can. However, I summoned my
+courage and determination; wrote down on a leaf of my pocket-book my
+last will, the accidental manner of my death, and my dying remembrance
+of Berga; and then, with full sails, flew helter-skelter through the
+midst of it the shortest way; expecting at every step to awaken the
+murderous engine, and thus to clap over my still long candle of life
+the bonsoir, or extinguisher, with my own hand. However, I got off
+without shot. In the tavern, indeed, there was more than one fool to
+laugh at me; because, forsooth, what none but a fool could know, this
+Notice had stood there for the last ten years without any gun, as guns
+often do without any notice. But so it is, my Friends, with our
+game-police, which warns against all things, only not against warnings.</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+88. Hitherto I have always regarded the Polemical writings of our
+present philosophic and aesthetic Idealist Logic-buffers,--in which,
+certainly, a few contumelies, and misconceptions, and misconclusions do
+make their appearance,--rather on the fair side; observing in it merely
+an imitation of classical Antiquity, in particular of the ancient
+Athletes, who (according to Schöttgen) besmeared their bodies with
+<i>mud</i>, that they might not be laid hold of; and filled their hands with
+<i>sand</i>, that they might lay hold of their antagonists.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">For the rest, throughout the whole stage, I had a constant source of
+altercation with the coachman, because he grudged stopping perhaps
+once in the quarter of an hour, when I chose to come out for a
+natural purpose. Unhappily, in truth, one has little reason to expect
+water-doctors among the postilion class, since Physicians themselves
+have so seldom learned from Haller's large <i>Physiology</i> that a
+postponement of the above operation will precipitate devilish
+stone-ware, and at last precipitate the proprietor himself; this
+stone-manufactory being generally concluded, not by the Lithotomist,
+but by Death. Had postilions read that Tycho Brahe died like a
+bombshell by bursting, they would rather pull up for a moment; with
+such unlooked-for knowledge, they would see it to be reasonable that a
+man, though expecting some time to carry his death-stone <i>on</i> him,
+should not incline, for the time being, to carry it <i>in</i> him. Nay, have
+I not often, at Weimar, in the longest concluding scenes of Schiller,
+run out with tears in my eyes; purely that, while his Minerva was
+melting me on the whole, I might not by the Gorgon's head on her breast
+be partially turned to stone? And did I not return to the weeping
+play-house, and fall into the general emotion so much the more briskly,
+as now I had nothing to give vent to but my heart?</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+103. Or are all Mosques, Episcopal-churches, Pagodas, Chapels-of-Ease,
+Tabernacles, and Pantheons, anything else than the Ethnic Forecourt of
+the Invisible Temple and its Holy of Holies?</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">Deep in the dark we arrived at Niederschöna.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<p class="center"><a name="div1Ref_s03" href="#div1_s03"><i>Third Stage; from Niederschöna to Flätz</i>.</a></p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">While I am standing at the Posthouse musing, with my eye fixed on my
+portmanteau, comes a beast of a watchman, and bellows and brays in his
+night-tube so close by my ear that I start back in trepidation, I whom
+even a too hasty accosting will vex. Is there no medical police, then,
+against such efflated hour-fulminators and alarm-cannon, by which
+notwithstanding no gunpowder cannon are saved? In my opinion nobody
+should be invested with the watchman-horn but some reasonable man, who
+had already blown himself into an asthma, and who would consequently be
+in case to sing out his hour-verse so low that you could not hear it.</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+40. The common man is copious only in narration, not in reasoning; the
+cultivated man is brief only in the former, not in the latter; because
+the common man's reasons are a sort of sensations, which, as well as
+things visible, he merely <i>looks at</i>; by the cultivated man, again,
+both reasons and things visible are rather <i>thought</i> than looked at.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">What I had long expected, and the Dwarf predicted, now took place;
+deeply stooping, through the high Posthouse door, issued the Giant,
+and raised in the open air a most unreasonably high figure, heightened
+by the ell-long bonnet and feather on his huge jobbernowl. My
+Brother-in-law, beside him, looked but like his son of fourteen years;
+the Dwarf like his lap-dog waiting for him on its two hind legs. &quot;Good
+friend,&quot; said my bantering Brother-in-law, leading him towards me and
+the stagecoach, &quot;just step softly in, we shall all be happy to make
+room for you. Fold yourself neatly together, lay your head on your
+knee, and it will do.&quot; The unseasonable banterer would willingly have
+seen the almost stupid Giant (of whom he had soon observed that his
+brain was no active substance, but in the inverse ratio of his trunk)
+squeezed in among us in the post-chest, and lying kneaded together like
+a sand-bag before him. &quot;Won't do! Won't do!&quot; said the Giant, looking
+in. &quot;The gentleman perhaps does not know,&quot; said the Dwarf, &quot;how big the
+Giant is; and so he thinks that because <i>I</i> go in-- But that is another
+story; <i>I</i> will creep into any hole, do but tell me where.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In short, there was no resource for the Postmaster and the Giant, but
+that the latter should plant himself behind, in the character of
+luggage, and there lie bending down like a weeping willow over the
+whole vehicle. To me such a back-wall and rear-guard could not be
+particularly gratifying; and I may refer it (I hope) to any one of you,
+ye Friends, if with such ware at your back you would not, as clearly
+and earnestly as I, have considered what manifold murderous projects a
+knave of a Giant behind you, a <i>pursuer</i> in all senses, might not
+maliciously attempt; say, that he broke in and assailed you by the
+back-window, or with Titanian strength laid hold of the coach-roof and
+demolished the whole party in a lump. However, this Elephant (who
+indeed seemed to owe the similarity more to his overpowering mass than
+to his quick light of inward faculty), crossing his arms over the top
+of the vehicle, soon began to sleep and snore above us; an Elephant, of
+whom, as I more and more joyfully observed, my Brother-in-law, the
+Dragoon, could easily be the tamer and bridle-holder, nay, had already
+been so.</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+9. In any national calamity the ancient Egyptians took revenge on the
+god Typhon, whom they blamed for it, by hurling his favorites, the
+Asses, down over rocks. In similar wise have countries of a different
+religion now and then taken their revenge.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">As more than one person now felt inclined to sleep, but I, on the
+contrary, as was proper, to wake, I freely offered my seat of honor,
+the front place in the coach (meaning thereby to abolish many little
+flaws of envy in my fellow-passengers), to such persons as wished to
+take a nap thereon. The Legation's man accepted the offer with
+eagerness, and soon fell asleep there sitting, under the Titan.<a name="div2Ref_74" href="#div2_74"><sup>[74]</sup></a>
+To
+me this sort of coach-sleeping of a diplomatic <i>charge d'affaires</i>
+remained a thing incomprehensible. A man, that in the middle of a
+stranger and often barbarously-minded company permits himself to
+slumber, may easily, supposing him to talk in his sleep and coach,
+(think of the Saxon minister<a name="div2Ref_75" href="#div2_75"><sup>[75]</sup></a>
+before the Seven Years' War!) blab out
+a thousand secrets, and crimes, some of which, perhaps, he has not
+committed. Should not every minister, ambassador, or other man of honor
+and rank, really shudder at the thought of insanity or violent fevers;
+seeing no mortal can be his surety that he shall not in such cases
+publish the greatest scandals, of which, it may be, the half are lies?</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+70. Let Poetry veil itself in Philosophy, but only as the latter does
+in the former. Philosophy in poetized Prose resembles those tavern
+drinking-glasses, encircled with party-colored wreaths of figures,
+which disturb your enjoyment both of the drink, and (often awkwardly
+eclipsing and covering each other) of the carving also.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">At last, after the long July night, we passengers, together with
+Aurora, arrived in the precincts of Flätz. I looked with a sharp
+yet moistened eye at the steeples. I believe, every man who has
+anything decisive to seek in a town, and to whom it is either to be a
+judgment-seat of his hopes, or their anchoring-station, either a
+battle-field or a sugar-field, first and longest directs his eye on the
+steeples of the town, as upon the indexes and balance-tongues of his
+future destiny; these artificial peaks, which, like natural ones, are
+the thrones of our Future. As I happened to express myself on this
+point perhaps too poetically to <i>Jean Pierre</i>, he answered with
+sufficient want of taste: &quot;The steeples of such towns are indeed the
+Swiss Alpine peaks, on which we milk and manufacture the Swiss cheese
+of our Future.&quot; Did the Legations-Peter mean with this style to make me
+ridiculous, or only himself? Determine!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Here is the place, the town,&quot; said I in secret, &quot;where to-day much and
+for many years is to be determined, where thou this evening, about five
+o'clock, art to present thy petition and thyself. May it prosper! May
+it be successful! Let Flätz, this arena of thy little efforts among the
+rest, become a building-space for fair castles and air-castles to two
+hearts, thy own and thy Berga's!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">At the Tiger Inn I alighted.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<p class="center"><a name="div1Ref_day01" href="#div1_day01"><i>First Day in Flätz</i>.</a></p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">No mortal in my situation at this Tiger-hotel would have triumphed much
+in his more immediate prospects. I, as the only man known to me,
+especially in the way of love (of the runaway Dragoon anon!), looked
+out from the windows of the overflowing Inn, and down on the rushing
+sea of marketers, and very soon began to reflect, that, except Heaven
+and the rascals and murderers, none knew how many of the latter two
+classes were floating among the tide; purposing, perhaps, to lay hold
+of the most innocent strangers, and in part cut their purses, in part
+their throats. My situation had a special circumstance against it. My
+brother-in-law, who still comes plump out with everything, had
+mentioned that I was to put up at the Tiger. O Heaven! when will such
+people learn to be secret, and to cover even the meanest pettinesses of
+life under mantles and veils, were it only that a silly mouse may as
+often give birth to a mountain as a mountain to a mouse! The whole
+rabble of the stagecoach stopped at the Tiger; the Harlot, the
+Rat-catcher, <i>Jean Pierre</i>, the Giant, who had dismounted at the Gate
+of the town, and carrying the huge block-head of the Dwarf on his
+shoulders as his own (cloaking over the deception by his cloak), had
+thus, like a ninny, exhibited himself gratis by half a dwarf more
+gigantic than he could be seen for money.</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+158. Governments should not too often change the penny-trumps and
+child's drums of the Poets for the regimental trumpet and fire-drum;
+on the other hand, good subjects should regard many a princely
+drum-tendency simply as a disease, in which the patient, by air
+insinuating under the skin, has got dreadfully swoln.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">And now for each of the Passengers, the question was how he could make
+the Tiger, the heraldic emblem of the Inn, his prototype; and so what
+lamb he might suck the blood of, and tear in pieces, and devour. My
+brother-in-law too left me, having gone in quest of some horse-dealer;
+but he retained the chamber next mine for his sister; this, it
+appeared, was to denote attention on his part. I remained solitary,
+left to my own intrepidity and force of purpose.</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+89. In great towns, a stranger, for the first day or two after his
+arrival, lives purely at his own expense, in an inn; afterwards, in the
+houses of his friends, without expense; on the other hand, if you
+arrive at the Earth, as for instance I have done, you are courteously
+maintained, precisely for the first few years, free of charges; but in
+the next and longer series--for you often stay sixty--you are actually
+obliged (I have the documents in my hands) to pay for every drop and
+morsel, as if you were in the great Earth Inn, which indeed you are.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">Yet among so many villains, encompassing if not even beleaguring me, I
+thought warmly of one far distant, faithful soul, of my Berga in
+Neusattel; a true heart of pith, which perhaps with many a weak
+marriage-partner might have given protection rather than sought it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Appear, then, quickly to-morrow at noon, Berga,&quot; said my heart; &quot;and
+if possible before noon, that I may lengthen thy market paradise so
+many hours as thou arrivest earlier!&quot;</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+107. Germany is a long lofty mountain--under the sea.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">144. The Reviewer does not in reality employ his pen for writing; but
+he burns it, to awaken weak people from their swoons with the smell; he
+tickles with it the throat of the plagiary, to make him render back;
+and he picks with it his own teeth. He is the only individual in the
+whole learned lexicon that can never exhaust himself, never write
+himself out, let him sit before the ink-glass for centuries, or tens of
+centuries. For while the Scholar, the Philosopher, and the Poet produce
+their new book solely from new materials and growth, the Reviewer
+merely lays his old gauge of taste and knowledge on a thousand new
+works; and his light, in the ever-passing, ever-differently-cut
+glass-world, which he <i>elucidates</i>, is still refracted into new colors.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">A clergyman, amid the tempests of the world, readily makes for a free
+harbor, for the church; the church-wall is his casement-wall and
+fortification; and behind are to be found more peaceful and more
+accordant souls than on the market-place; in short, I went into the
+High Church. However, in the course of the psalm, I was somewhat
+disturbed by a Heiduc, who came up to a well-dressed young gentleman
+sitting opposite me, and tore the double opera-glass from his nose, it
+being against rule in Flätz, as it is in Dresden, to look at the Court
+with glasses which diminish and approximate. I myself had on a pair of
+spectacles, but they were magnifiers. It was impossible for me to
+resolve on taking them off; and here again, I am afraid, I shall pass
+for a foolhardy person and a desperado; so much only I reckoned fit, to
+look invariably into my psalm-book; not once lifting my eyes while the
+Court was rustling and entering, thereby to denote that my glasses were
+ground convex. For the rest, the sermon was good, if not always finely
+conceived for a Court-church; it admonished the hearers against
+innumerable vices, to whose counterparts, the virtues, another preacher
+might so readily have exhorted us. During the whole service, I made it
+my business to exhibit true, deep reverence, not only towards God, but
+also towards my illustrious Prince. For the latter reverence I had my
+private reason. I wished to stamp this sentiment strongly and openly as
+with raised letters on my countenance, and so give the lie to any
+malicious imp about Court, by whom my contravention of the <i>Panegyric
+on Nero</i>, and my free German satire on this real tyrant himself, which
+I had inserted in the <i>Plätz Weekly Journal</i>, might have been perverted
+into a secret characteristic portrait of my own Sovereign. We live in
+such times at present, that scarcely can we compose a pasquinade on the
+Devil in Hell, but some human Devil on Earth will apply it to an angel.</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+71. The Youth is singular from caprice, and takes pleasure in it; the
+Man is so from constraint, unintentionally, and feels pain in it.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">When the Court at last issued from church, and were getting into their
+carriages, I kept at such a distance that my face could not possibly be
+noticed, in case I had happened to assume no reverent look, but an
+indifferent or even proud one. God knows, who has kneaded into me those
+mad, desperate fancies and crotchets, which perhaps would sit better on
+a Hero Schabacker, than on an Army-chaplain under him. I cannot here
+forbear recording to you, my Friends, one of the maddest among them,
+though at first it may throw too glaring a light on me. It was at my
+ordination to be Army-chaplain, while about to participate in the
+Sacrament, on the first day of Easter. Now, here while I was standing,
+moved into softness, before the balustrade of the altar, in the middle
+of the whole male congregation,--nay, I perhaps more deeply moved than
+any among them, since, as a person going to war, I might consider
+myself a half-dead man, that was now partaking in the last Feast of
+Souls, as it were like a person to be hanged on the morrow,--here,
+then, amid the pathetic effects of the organ and singing, there rose
+something--were it the first Easter-day which awoke in me what
+primitive Christians call their Easter-laughter, or merely the contrast
+between the most devilish predicaments and the most holy,--in short,
+there rose something in me (for which reason I have ever since taken
+the part of every simple person who might ascribe such things to the
+Devil), and this something started the question: &quot;Now, could there be
+aught more diabolical than if thou, just in receiving the Holy Supper,
+wert madly and blasphemously to begin laughing?&quot; Instantly I took to
+wrestling with this hell-dog of a thought; neglected the most precious
+feelings, merely to keep the dog in my eye, and scare him away; yet was
+forced to draw back from him, exhausted and unsuccessful, and arrived
+at the step of the altar with the mournful certainty that in a little
+while I should, without more ado, begin laughing, let me weep and moan
+inwardly as I liked. Accordingly, while I and a very worthy old
+Burgermeister were bowing down together before the long parson, and the
+latter (perhaps kneeling on the low cushion, I fancied him too long)
+put the wafer in my clenched mouth, I felt all the muscles of laughter
+already beginning sardonically to contract; and these had not long
+acted on the guiltless integument, till an actual smile appeared there;
+and as we bowed the second time, I was grinning like an ape. My
+companion the Burgermeister justly expostulated with me, in a low
+voice, as we walked round behind the altar: &quot;In Heaven's name, are you
+an ordained Preacher of the Gospel, or a Merry-Andrew? Is it Satan that
+is laughing out of you?&quot;</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+198. The Populace and Cattle grow giddy on the edge of no abyss; with
+the Man it is otherwise.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">11. The Golden Calf of Self-love soon waxes to be a burning Phalaris's
+Bull, which reduces its father and adorer to ashes.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">103. The male Beau-crop, which surrounds the female Roses and Lilies,
+must (if I rightly comprehend its flatteries) most probably presuppose
+in the fair the manners of the Spaniards and Italians, who offer any
+valuable, by way of present, to the man who praises it excessively.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Ah, Heaven! who else?&quot; said I; and this being over, I finished my
+devotions in a more becoming fashion.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">From the church (I now return to the Flätz one) I proceeded to the
+Tiger Inn, and dined at the <i>table-d'hôte</i>, being at no time shy of
+encountering men. Previous to the second course, a waiter handed me an
+empty plate, on which, to my astonishment, I noticed a French verse
+scratched in with a fork, containing nothing less than a lampoon on the
+Commandant of Flätz. Without ceremony, I held out the plate to the
+company; saying, I had just, as they saw, got this lampooning cover
+presented to me, and must request them to bear witness that I had
+nothing to do with the matter. An officer directly changed plates with
+me. During the fifth course, I could not but admire the chemico-medical
+ignorance of the company; for a hare, out of which a gentleman
+extracted and exhibited several grains of shot, that is to say,
+therefore, of lead alloyed with arsenic, and then cleaned by hot
+vinegar, did, nevertheless, by the spectators (I expected) continue to
+be pleasantly eaten.</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+199. But not many existing Governments, I believe, do behead under
+pretext of trepanning; or sew (in a more choice allegory) the people's
+lips together, under pretence of sewing the harelips in them.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">In the course of our table-talk, one topic seized me keenly by my weak
+side, I mean by my honor. The law custom of the city happened to be
+mentioned, as it affects natural children; and I learned that here a
+loose girl may convert any man she pleases to select into the father of
+her brat, simply by her oath. &quot;Horrible!&quot; said I, and my hair stood on
+end. &quot;In this way may the worthiest head of a family, with a wife and
+children, or a clergyman lodging in the Tiger, be stript of honor and
+innocence, by any wicked chambermaid whom he may have seen, or who may
+have seen him, in the course of her employment!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">An elderly officer observed: &quot;But will the girl swear herself to the
+Devil so readily?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">What logic! &quot;Or suppose,&quot; continued I, without answer, &quot;a man happened
+to be travelling with that Vienna Locksmith, who afterwards became a
+mother, and was brought to bed of a baby son; or with any disguised
+Chevalier d'Eon, who often passes the night in his company, whereby the
+Locksmith or the Chevalier can swear to their private interviews; no
+delicate man of honor will in the end risk travelling with another;
+seeing he knows not how soon the latter may pull off his boots, and
+pull on his women's-pumps, and swear his companion into Fatherhood, and
+himself to the Devil!&quot;</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+67. Hospitable Entertainer, wouldst thou search into thy Guest?
+Accompany him to another Entertainer, and listen to him. Just so,
+wouldst thou become better acquainted with Mistress in an hour, than by
+living with her for a month? Accompany her among her female friends and
+female enemies (if that is no pleonasm), and look at her!</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">Some of the company, however, misunderstood my oratorical fire so much,
+that they, sheep-wise, gave some insinuations as if I myself were not
+strict in this point, but lax. By Heaven! I no longer knew what I was
+eating or speaking. Happily, on the opposite side of the table, some
+lying story of a French defeat was started. Now, as I had read on the
+street corners that French and German Proclamation, calling before the
+Court Martial any one who had heard war rumors (disadvantageous,
+namely), without giving notice of them,--I, as a man not willing ever
+to forget himself, had nothing more prudent to do in this case, than to
+withdraw with empty ears, telling none but the landlord why.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">It was no improper time; for I had previously determined to have my
+beard shaven about half past four, that so, towards five, I might
+present myself with a chin just polished by the razor smoothing-iron,
+and sleek as wove-paper, without the smallest root-stump of a hair left
+on it. By way of preparation, like Pitt before Parliamentary debates, I
+poured a devilish deal of Pontac into my stomach, with true disgust,
+and contrary to all sanitary rules; not so much for fronting the light
+stranger Barber, as the Minister and General von Schabacker, with whom
+I had it in view to exchange perhaps more than one fiery statement.</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+80. In the Summer of life, men keep digging and filling ice-pits, as
+well as circumstances will admit; that so, in their Winter, they may
+have something in store to give them coolness.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">28. It is impossible for me, amid the tendril-forest of allusions (even
+this again is a tendril-twig), to state and declare on the spot whether
+all the Courts or Heights, the (Bougouer) <i>Snowline</i> of Europe, have
+ever been mentioned in my writings or not; but I could wish for
+information on the subject, that, if not, I may try to do it still.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">The common Hotel Barber was ushered in to me; but at first view you
+noticed in his polygonal, zigzag visage, more of a man that would
+finally go mad, than of one growing wiser. Now, madmen are a class of
+persons whom I hate incredibly; and nothing can take me to see any
+madhouse, simply because the first maniac among them may clutch me in
+his giant fists if he like; and bet cause, owing to infection, I cannot
+be sure that I shall ever get out again with the sense which I brought
+in. In a general way, I sit (when once I am lathered) in such a posture
+on my chair as to keep both my hands (the eyes I fix intently on the
+bartering countenance) lying clenched along my sides, and pointed
+directly at the midriff of the barber; that so, on the smallest
+ambiguity of movement, I may dash in upon him, and overset him in a
+twinkling.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I scarce know rightly how it happened; but here, while I am anxiously
+studying the foolish, twisted visage of the shaver, and he just then
+chanced to lay his long whetted weapon a little too abruptly against my
+bare throat, I gave him such a sudden bounce on the abdominal viscera,
+that the silly varlet had wellnigh suicidally slit his own windpipe.
+For me, truly, nothing remained but to indemnify the man; and then,
+contrary to my usual principles, to tie round a broad stuffed cravat,
+by way of cloak to what remained unshorn.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And now at last I sallied forth to the General, drinking out the
+remnant of the Pontac, as I crossed the threshold.</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+36. And so I should like, in all cases, to be the First, especially in
+Begging. The first prisoner-of-war, the first cripple, the first man
+ruined by burning (like him who brings the first fire-engine), gains
+the head-subscription and the heart; the next comer finds nothing but
+Duty to address; and at last, in this melodious <i>mancando</i> of sympathy,
+matters sink so far, that the last (if the last but one may at least
+have retired laden with a rich &quot;God help you!&quot;) obtains from the
+benignant hand nothing more than its fist. And as in Begging the first,
+so in Giving I should like to be the last; one obliterates the other,
+especially the last the first. So, however, is the world ordered.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">I hope there were plans lying ready within me for answering rightly,
+nay for asking. The Petition I carried in my pocket, and in my right
+hand. In the left, I had a duplicate of it. My fire of spirit easily
+helped over the living fence of ministerial obstructions; and soon I
+unexpectedly found myself in the ante-chamber, among his most
+distinguished lackeys; persons, so far as I could see, not inclined to
+change flour for bran with any one. Selecting the most respectable
+individual of the number, I delivered him my paper request, accompanied
+with the verbal one that he would hand it in. He took it, but
+ungraciously. I waited in vain till far in the sixth hour, at which
+season alone the gay General can safely be applied to. At last I pitch
+upon another lackey, and repeat my request; he runs about seeking his
+runaway brother, or my Petition, to no purpose; neither of them
+could be found. How happy was it that in the midst of my Pontac,
+before shaving, I had written out the duplicate of this paper; and
+therefore--simply on the principle that you should always keep a second
+wooden leg packed into your knapsack when you have the first on your
+body--and out of fear, that, if the original petition chanced to drop
+from me in the way between the Tiger and Schabacker's, my whole journey
+and hope would melt into water,--and therefore, I say, having stuck the
+repeating work of that original paper into my pocket, I had, in any
+case, something to hand in, and that something truly a Ditto. I handed
+it in.</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+136. If you mount too high above your time, your ears (on the side of
+Fame) are little better off than if you sink too deep below it; in
+truth, Charles up in his Balloon, and Halley down in his Diving-bell,
+felt equally the same strange pain in their ears.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">Unhappily six o'clock was already past. The lackey, however, did not
+keep me long waiting; but returned with--I may say, the text of this
+whole Circular--the almost rude answer (which you, my Friends, out of
+regard for me and Schabacker, will not divulge), that: &quot;In case I
+were the Attila Schmelzle of Schabacker's Regiment, might lift my
+pigeon-liver flag again, and fly to the Devil, as I did at
+Pimpelstadt.&quot; Another man would have dropt dead on the spot; I,
+however, walked quite stoutly off, answering the fellow: &quot;With great
+pleasure indeed, I fly to the Devil; and so Devil a fly I care.&quot; On the
+road home, I examined myself, whether it had not been the Pontac that
+spoke out of me (though the very examination contradicted this, for
+Pontac never examines); but I found that nothing but I, my heart, my
+courage perhaps, had spoken; and why, after all, any whimpering? Does
+not the patrimony of my good wife endow me better than ten Catechetical
+Professorships? And has she not furnished all the corners of my book of
+Life with so many golden clasps, that I can open it forever without
+wearing it? Let henhearts cackle and pip; I flapped my pinions, and
+said: &quot;Dash boldly through it, come what may!&quot; I felt myself excited
+and exalted; I fancied Republics, in which I, as a hero, might be at
+home; I longed to be in that noble Grecian time, when one hero readily
+put up with bastinadoes from another, and said, &quot;Strike, but hear!&quot; and
+out of this ignoble one, where men will scarcely put up with hard
+words, to say nothing of more. I painted out to my mind how I
+should feel, if, in happier circumstances, I were uprooting hollow
+Thrones, and before whole nations mounting on mighty deeds as on the
+Temple-steps of Immortality; and, in gigantic ages, finding quite other
+men to outman and outstrip, than the mite-populace about me, or, at the
+best, here and there a Vulcanello. I thought and thought, and grew
+wilder and wilder, and intoxicated myself (no Pontac intoxication
+therefore, which, you know, increases more by continuance than
+cessation of drinking), and gesticulated openly, as I put the
+question to myself: &quot;Wilt thou be a mere state-lapdog? A dog's-dog,
+a <i>pium desiderium</i> of an <i>impium desiderium</i>, an Ex-Ex, a
+Nothing's-Nothing?--Fire and Fury!&quot; With this, however, I dashed down
+my hat into the mud of the market. On lifting and cleaning this old
+servant, I could not but perceive how worn and faded it was; and I
+therefore determined instantly to purchase a new one, and carry the
+same home in my hand.</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+25. In youth, like a blind man just couched (and what is birth but a
+couching of the sight?), you take the Distant for the Near, the starry
+heaven for tangible room-furniture, pictures for objects; and, to the
+young man, the whole world is sitting on his very nose, till repeating
+bandaging and unbandaging have at last taught him, like the blind
+patient, to estimate <i>Distance</i> and <i>Appearance</i>.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">I accomplished this. I bought one of the finest cut. Strangely enough,
+by this hat, as if it had been a Graduation-hat, was my head tried and
+examined in the Ziegengasse or Goat-gate of Flätz. For as General
+Schabacker came driving along that street in his carriage, and I (it
+need not be said) was determined to avenge myself, not by vulgar
+clownishness, but by courtesy, I had here got one of the most ticklish
+problems imaginable to solve on the spur of the instant. You observe,
+if I swung only the fine hat which I carried in my hand, and kept the
+faded one on my head,--I might have the appearance of a perfect clown,
+who does not doff at all; if, on the other hand, I pulled the old hat
+from my head, and therewith did my reverence, then two hats, both in
+play at once (let me swing the other at the same time or not), brought
+my salute within the verge of ridicule. Now do you, my Friends, before
+reading further, bethink you how a man was to extricate himself from
+such a plight, without losing his presence of mind! I think, perhaps,
+by this means; by merely losing his hat. In one word, then, I simply
+dropped the new hat from my hand into the mud, to put myself in a
+condition for taking off the old hat by itself, and swaying it in
+needful courtesy, without any shade of ridicule.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Arrived at the Tiger,--to avoid misconstructions, I first had the
+glossy, fine, and superfine hat cleaned, and some time afterwards the
+mud-hat or rubbis-hat.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And now, weighing my momentous Past in the adjusting balance within me,
+I walked in fiery mood to and fro. The Pontac must--I know that there
+is no unadulterated liquor here below--have been more than usually
+adulterated; so keenly did it chase my fancy out of one fire into the
+other. I now looked forth into a wide, glittering life, in which I
+lived without post, merely on money; and which I beheld, as it were,
+sowed with the Delphic caves, and Zenonic walks, and Muse-hills of all
+the Sciences, which I might now cultivate at my ease. In particular,
+I should have it in my power to apply more diligently to writing
+Prize-essays for Academies; of which (that is to say, of the
+Prize-essays) no author need ever be ashamed, since, in all cases,
+there is a whole crowning Academy to stand and blush for the crownee.
+And even if the Prize-marksman does not hit the crown, he still
+continues more unknown and more anonymous (his Device not being
+unsealed) than any other author, who indeed can publish some nameless
+Long-ear of a book, but not hinder it from being, by a Literary
+Ass-burial (<i>sepultura asinina</i>), publicly interred, in a short time,
+before half the world.</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+126. In the long run, out of mere fear and necessity, we shall become
+the warmest cosmopolites I know of; so rapidly do ships shoot to and
+fro, and, like shuttles, weave Islands and Quarters of the World
+together. For let but the political weather-glass fall to-day in South
+America, to-morrow we in Europe have storm and thunder.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">19. It is easier, they say, to climb a hill when you ascend back
+foremost. This, perhaps, might admit of application to political
+eminences; if you still turned towards them that part of the body on
+which you sit, and kept your face directed down to the people; all the
+while, however, removing and mounting.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">Only one thing grieved me by anticipation; the sorrow of my Berga, for
+whom, dear tired wayfarer, I on the morrow must overcloud her arrival,
+and her shortened market-spectacle, by my negatory intelligence. She
+would so gladly (and who can take it ill of a rich farmer's Daughter?)
+have made herself somebody in Neusattel, and overshone many a female
+dignitary! Every mortal longs for his parade-place, and some earlier
+living honor than the last honors. Especially so good a lowly-born
+housewife as my Berga, conscious perhaps rather of her metallic than of
+her spiritual treasure, would still wish at banquets to be mistress of
+some seat or other, and so in place to overtop this or that plucked
+goose of the neighborhood.</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+26. Few German writers are not original, if we may ascribe originality
+(as is at least the conversational practice of all people) to a man who
+merely dishes out his own thoughts without foreign admixture. For as,
+between their Memory, where their reading or foreign matter dwells, and
+their Imagination or Productive Power, where their writing or own
+peculiar matter originates, a sufficient space intervenes, and the
+boundary-stones are fixed in so conscientiously and firmly that nothing
+foreign may pass over into their own, or inversely, so that they may
+really read a hundred works without losing their own primitive flavor,
+or even altering it,--their individuality may, I believe, be considered
+as secured; and their spiritual nourishment, their pancakes, loaves,
+fritters, caviare, and meat-balls, are not assimilated to their system,
+but given back pure and unaltered. Often in my own mind, I figure such
+writers as living but thousand-fold more artificial Ducklings from
+Vaucasson's Artificial Duck of Wood. For in fact they are not less
+cunningly put together than this timber Duck, which will gobble meat
+and apparently void it again, under show of having digested it, and
+derived from it blood and juices; though the secret of the business is,
+the artist has merely introduced an ingenious compound ejective matter
+behind, with which concoction and nourishment have nothing to do, but
+which the Duck illusorily gives forth and publishes to the world.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">It is in this point of view that husbands are so indispensable. I
+therefore resolved to purchase for myself, and consequently for her,
+one of the best of those titles which our Courts in Germany (as in a
+Leipzig saleroom) stand offering to buyers, in all sizes and sorts,
+from Noble and Half-noble down to Rath or Councillor; and once
+invested therewith, to reflect from my own Quarter-nobility such an
+Eighth-part-nobility on this true soul, that many a Neusattelitess (I
+hope) shall half burst with envy, and say and cry: &quot;Pooh, the stupid
+farmer thing! See how it wabbles and bridles! It has forgot how matters
+stood when it had no money-bag and no Hofrath!&quot; For to the Hofrathship
+I shall before this have attained.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But in the cold solitude of my room, and the fire of my remembrances, I
+longed unspeakably for my Bergelchen; I and my heart were wearied with
+the foreign busy day; no one here said a kind word to me, which he did
+not hope to put in the bill. Friends! I languished for my friend, whose
+heart would pour out its blood as a balsam for a second heart; I cursed
+my over-prudent regulations, and wished, that, to have the good Berga
+at my side, I had given up the stupid houseware to all thieves and
+fires whatsoever. As I walked to and fro, it seemed to me easier and
+easier to become all things, an Exchequer-Rath, an Excise-Rath, any
+Rath in the world, and whatever she required when she came.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;See thou take thy pleasure in the town!&quot; had Bergelchen kept saying
+the whole week through. But how, without her, can I take any? Our tears
+of sorrow friends dry up, and accompany with their own; but our tears
+of joy we find most readily repeated in the eyes of our wives. Pardon
+me, good Friends, these libations of my sensibility; I am but showing
+you my heart and my Berga. If I need an Absolution-merchant, the
+Pontac-merchant is the man.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<p class="center"><a name="div1Ref_night01" href="#div1_night01"><i>First Night in Flätz</i>.</a></p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">Yet the wine did not take from me the good sense to look under the bed,
+before going into it, and examine whether any one was lurking there;
+for example, the Dwarf, or the Rat-catcher, or the Legations-Rath; also
+to shove the key under the latch (which I reckon the best bolting
+arrangement of all), and then, by way of further assurance, to bore my
+night-screws into the door, and pile all the chairs in a heap behind
+it; and, lastly, to keep on my breeches and shoes, wishing absolutely
+to have no care upon my mind.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But I had still other precautions to take in regard to sleep-walking.
+To me it has always been incomprehensible how so many men can go to
+bed, and lie down at their ease there, without reflecting that perhaps,
+in the first sleep, they may get up again as Somnambulists, and crawl
+over the tops of roofs and the like; awakening in some spot where they
+may fall in a moment and break their necks. While at home, there is
+little risk in my sleep; because, my right toe being fastened every
+night with three ells of tape (I call it in jest our marriage tie) to
+my wife's left hand, I feel a certainty that, in case I should start up
+from this bed-arrest, I must with the tether infallibly awaken her, and
+so by my Berga, as by my living bridle, be again led back to bed. But
+here in the Inn, I had nothing for it but to knot myself once or twice
+to the bed-foot, that I might not wander; though in this way, an
+irruption of villains would have brought double peril with it.--Alas!
+so dangerous is sleep at all times, that every man, who is not lying on
+his back a corpse, must be on his guard lest with the general system
+some limb or other also fall asleep; in which case the sleeping limb
+(there are not wanting examples of it in Medical History) may next
+morning be lying ripe for amputation. For this reason, I have myself
+frequently awakened, that no part of me fall asleep.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Having properly tied myself to the bed-posts, and at length got under
+the coverlid, I now began to be dubious about my Pontac Fire-bath, and
+apprehensive of the valorous and tumultuous dreams too likely to ensue;
+which, alas, did actually prove to be nothing better than heroic and
+monarchic feats, castle-stormings, rock-throwings, and the like. This
+point also I am sorry to see so little attended to in medicine. Medical
+gentlemen, as well as their customers, all stretch themselves quietly
+in their beds, without one among them considering whether a furious
+rage (supposing him also directly after to drink cold water in his
+dream), or a heart-devouring grief, all which he may undergo in vision,
+does harm to life or not.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Shortly before midnight, I awoke from a heavy dream, to encounter a
+ghost-trick much too ghostly for my fancy. My brother-in-law, who
+manufactured it, deserves for such vapid cookery to be named before you
+without reserve, as the maltmaster of this washy brewage. Had suspicion
+been more compatible with intrepidity, I might perhaps, by his moral
+maxim about this matter, on the road, as well as by his taking up the
+side-room, at the middle door of which stood my couch, have easily
+divined the whole. But now, on awakening, I felt myself blown upon by a
+cold ghost-breath, which I could nowise deduce from the distant bolted
+window; a point I had rightly decided, for the Dragoon was producing
+the phenomenon through the key-hole by a pair of bellows. Every sort
+of coldness in the night-season reminds you of clay-coldness and
+spectre-coldness. I summoned my resolution, however, and abode the
+issue; but now the very coverlid began to get in motion; I pulled it
+towards me; it would not stay; sharply I sit upright in my bed, and
+cry, &quot;What is that?&quot; No answer; everywhere silence in the Inn; the
+whole room full of moonshine. And now my drawing-plaster, my coverlid,
+actually rose up, and let in the air; at which I felt like a wounded
+man whose cataplasm you suddenly pull off. In this crisis, I made a
+bold leap from this Devil's-torus, and leaping, snapped asunder my
+somnambulist tether. &quot;Where is the silly human fool,&quot; cried I, &quot;that
+dares to ape the unseen sublime him?&quot; But on, above, under the bed,
+there was nothing to be heard or seen, I looked out of the window;
+everywhere spectral moonlight and street-stillness; nothing moving
+except (probably from the wind), on the distant Gallows-hill, a person
+lately hanged.</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+15. After the manner of the fine polished English folding-knives, there
+are now also folding-war-swords, or, in other words--Treaties of Peace.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">Any man would have taken it for self-deception as well as I; therefore
+I again wrapped myself in my passive <i>lit de justice</i> and air-bed, and
+waited with calmness to see whether my fright would subside or not.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In a few minutes the coverlid, the infernal Faust's-mantle, again began
+flying and towing; also, by way of change, the invisible bed-maker
+again lifted me up. Accursed hour!--I should beg to know whether, in
+the whole of cultivated Europe, there is one cultivated or uncultivated
+man, who, in a case of this kind, would not have lighted on
+ghost-devilry? I lighted on it, under my piece of (self) movable
+property, my coverlid; and thought Berga had died suddenly, and was
+now, in spirit, laying hold of my bed. However, I could not speak to
+her, nor as little to the Devil, who might well be supposed to have a
+hand in the game; but I turned myself solely to Heaven, and prayed
+aloud: &quot;To thee I commit myself; thou alone heretofore hast cared for
+thy weak servant; and I swear that I will turn a new leaf,&quot;--a promise
+which shall be kept nevertheless, though the whole was but stupid
+treachery and trick.</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+13. <i>Omnibus una</i> salus <i>Sanctis, sed</i> gloria <i>dispar</i>; that is
+to say
+(as Divines once taught), according to Saint Paul, we have all the same
+Beatitude in Heaven, but different degrees of Honor. Here, on Earth, we
+find a shadow of this in the writing world; for the Beatitude of
+authors once beatified by Criticism, whether they be genial, good,
+mediocre, or poor, is the same throughout; they all obtain the same
+pecuniary Felicity, the same slender profit. But, Heavens! in regard to
+the degrees of Fame, again, how far (in spite of the same emolument and
+sale) will a Dunce, even in his lifetime, be put below a Genius! Is not
+a shallow writer frequently forgotten in a single Fair? while a deep
+writer, or even a writer of genius, will blossom through fifty Fairs,
+and so may celebrate his Twenty-five Years' Jubilee, before, late
+forgotten, he is lowered into the German Temple of Fame; a Temple
+imitating the peculiarity of the <i>Padri Lucchesi</i> churches in Naples,
+which (according to Volkmann) permit <i>burials</i> under their roofs, but
+no <i>tombstone</i>.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">My prayer had no effect with the unchristian Dragoon, who now, once for
+all, had got me prisoner in the dragnet of a coverlid; and heeded
+little whether a guest's bed were, by his means, made a state-bed and
+death-bed or not. He span out my nerves, like gold-wire through
+smaller and smaller holes, to utter inanition and evanition, for the
+bed-clothes at last literally marched off to the door of the room.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Now was the moment to rise into the sublime, and to trouble myself no
+longer about aught here below, but softly to devote myself to death.
+&quot;Snatch me away,&quot; cried I, and, without thinking, cut three crosses;
+&quot;quick, dispatch me, ye ghosts; I die more innocent than thousands of
+tyrants and blasphemers, to whom ye yet appear not, but to unpolluted
+me.&quot; Here I heard a sort of laugh, either on the street or in the
+side-room. At this warm human tone, I suddenly bloomed up again, as at
+the coming of a new Spring, in every twig and leaf. Wholly despising
+the winged coverlid, which was not now to be picked from the door, I
+laid myself down uncovered, but warm and perspiring from other causes,
+and soon fell asleep. For the rest, I am not the least ashamed, in the
+face of all refined capital cities,--though they were standing here at
+my hand,--that, by this Devil-belief and Devil-address, I have attained
+some likeness to our great German Lion, to Luther.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<p class="center"><a name="div1Ref_day02" href="#div1_day02"><i>Second Day in Flätz</i>.</a></p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">Early in the morning, I felt myself awakened by the well-known
+coverlid; it had laid itself on me like a nightmare; I gaped up; quiet,
+in a corner of the room, sat a red, round, blooming, decorated girl,
+like a full-blown tulip in the freshness of life, and gently rustling
+with gay ribbons as with leaves.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Who's there--how came you in?&quot; cried I, half-blind.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I covered thee softly, and thought to let thee sleep,&quot; said
+Bergelchen; &quot;I have walked all night to be here early; do but look!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She showed me her boots, the only remnant of her travelling-gear which,
+in the moulting process of the toilette, she had not stript at the gate
+of Flätz.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Is there,&quot; said I, alarmed at her coming six hours sooner, and the
+more, as I had been alarmed all night and was still so, at her
+mysterious entrance; &quot;is there some fresh woe come over us, fire,
+murder, robbery?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She answered: &quot;The old Rat thou hast chased so long, died yesterday;
+further there was nothing of importance.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;And all has been managed rightly, and according to my Letter of
+Instructions, at home?&quot; inquired I.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, truly,&quot; answered she; &quot;only I did not see the Letter; it is lost;
+thou hast packed it among thy clothes.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Well, I could not but forgive the blooming, brave pedestrian all
+omissions. Her eye, then her heart was bringing fresh cool morning air
+and morning red into my sultry hours. And yet, for this kind soul,
+looking into life with such love and hope, I must in a little while
+overcloud the merited Heaven of to-day, with tidings of my failure in
+the Catechetical Professorship! I dallied and postponed to the utmost.
+I asked how she had got in, as the whole <i>chevaux-de-frise</i> barricado
+of chairs was still standing fast at the door. She laughed heartily,
+courtesying in village fashion, and said, she had planned it with her
+brother the day before yesterday, knowing my precautions in locking,
+that he should admit her into my room, that so she might cunningly
+awaken me. And now bolted the Dragoon with loud laughter into the
+apartment, and cried: &quot;Slept well, brother?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In this wise truly the whole ghost-story was now solved and expounded,
+as if by the pen of a Biester or a Hennings. I instantly saw through
+the entire ghost-scheme which our Dragoon had executed. With some
+bitterness I told him my conjecture, and his sister my story. But
+he lied and laughed; nay, attempted shamelessly enough to palm
+spectre-notions on me a second time, in open day. I answered coldly,
+that in me he had found the wrong man, granting even that I had some
+similarity with Luther, with Hobbes, with Brutus, all of whom had seen
+and dreaded ghosts. He replied, tearing the facts away from their
+originating causes: &quot;All he could say was, that last night he had heard
+some poor sinner creaking and lamenting dolefully enough; and from this
+he had inferred it must be an unhappy brother set upon by goblins.&quot;</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+79. Weak and wrong heads are the hardest to change; and their inward
+man acquires a scanty covering; thus capons never moult.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">In the end, his sister's eyes also were opened to the low character
+which he had tried to act with me; she sharply flew at him, pushed
+him with both hands out of his and my door, and called after him:
+&quot;Wait, thou villain, I will mind it!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Then hastily turning round, she fell on my neck, and (at the wrong
+place) into laughter, and said: &quot;The wild fool! But I could not keep my
+laugh another minute, and he was not to see it. Forgive the ninny, thou
+a learned man, his ass-pranks; what can one expect?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I inquired whether she, in her nocturnal travelling, had not met any
+spectral persons; though I knew that to her a wild beast, a river, a
+half abyss, are nothing. No, she had not; but the gay-dressed
+town's-people, she said, had scared her in the morning. O, how I do
+love these soft Harmonica-quiverings of female fright!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">At last, however, I was forced to bite or cut the coloquinta-apple, and
+give her the half of it; I mean the news of my rejected petition for
+the Catechetical Professorship. Wishing to spare this joyful heart the
+rudeness of the whole truth, and to subtract something from a heavy
+burden, more fit for the shoulders of a man, I began: &quot;Bergelchen, the
+Professorship affair is taking another, though still a good enough
+course; the General, whom may the Devil and his Grandmother teach
+sense, will not be taken except by storm; and storm he shall have, as
+certainly as I have on my nightcap.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Then thou art nothing yet?&quot; inquired she.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;For the moment, indeed, not!&quot; answered I.</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+89. In times of misfortune, the Ancients supported themselves with
+Philosophy or Christianity; the moderns again (for example, in the
+reign of Terror) take to Pleasure; as the wounded Buffalo, for bandage
+and salve, rolls himself in the mire.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">181. God be thanked that we live nowhere forever except in Hell or
+Heaven; on Earth otherwise we should grow to be the veriest rascals,
+and the World a House of Incurables, for want of the dog-doctor (the
+Hangman), and the issue-cord (on the Gallows), and the sulphur and
+chalybeate medicines (on Battle-fields). So that we too find our
+gigantic moral force dependent on the <i>Debt of Nature</i> which we have to
+pay, exactly as your politicians (for example, the author of the <i>New
+Leviathan</i>) demonstrate that the English have their <i>National Debt</i> to
+thank for their superiority.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But before Saturday night?&quot; said she.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Not quite,&quot; said I.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Then am I sore stricken, and could leap out of the window,&quot; said she,
+and turned away her rosy face, to hide its wet eyes, and was silent
+very long. Then, with painfully quivering voice, she began: &quot;Good
+Christ, stand by me at Neusattel on Sunday, when these high-prancing
+prideful dames look at me in church, and I grow scarlet for shame!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Here in sympathetic woe I sprang out of bed to the dear soul, over
+whose brightly blooming cheeks warm tears were rolling, and cried:
+&quot;Thou true heart, do not tear me in pieces so! May I die, if yet in
+these dog-days I become not all and everything that thou wishest!
+Speak, wilt thou be Mining-räthin, Build-räthin, Court-räthin,
+War-räthin, Chamber-räthin, Commerce-räthin, Legations-räthin, or Devil
+and his Dam's räthin; I am here, and will buy it, and be it. To-morrow
+I send riding posts to Saxony and Hessia, to Prussia and Russia, to
+Friesland and Katzenellenbogen, and demand patents. Nay, I will carry
+matters further than another, and be all things at once, Flachsenfingen
+Court-rath, Scheerau Excise-rath, Haarhaar Building-rath, Pestitz<a name="div2Ref_76" href="#div2_76"><sup>[76]</sup></a>
+Chamber-rath (for we have the cash); and thus, alone and singlehanded,
+represent with one <i>podex</i> and <i>corpus</i> a whole Rath-session of select
+Raths; and stand, a complete Legion of Honor, on one single pair of
+legs; the like no man ever did.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;O, now thou art angel-good!&quot; said she, and gladder tears rolled down;
+&quot;thou shalt counsel me thyself which are the finest Raths, and these we
+will be.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No,&quot; continued I, in the fire of the moment, &quot;neither shall this serve
+us; to me it is not enough that to Mrs. Chaplain thou canst announce
+thyself as Building-räthin, to Mrs. Town-parson as Legations-räthin, to
+Mrs. Burgermeister as Court-räthin, to Mrs. Road-and-toll-surveyor as
+Commerce-räthin, or how and where thou pleasest----&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Ah! my own too good Attelchen!&quot; said she.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;--But,&quot; continued I, &quot;I shall likewise become corresponding member of
+the several Learned Societies in the several best capital cities (among
+which I have only to choose); and truly no common actual member, but a
+whole honorary member; then thee, as another honorary member, growing
+out of my honorary-membership, I uplift and exalt.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Pardon me, my Friends, this warm cataplasm, or deception-balsam for a
+wounded breast, whose blood is so pure and precious, that one may
+be permitted to endeavor, with all possible stanching-lints and
+spider-webs, to drive it back into the fair heart, its home.</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+63. To apprehend danger from the Education of the People is like
+fearing lest the thunderbolt strike into the house because it has
+<i>windows</i>; whereas the lightning never comes through these, but through
+their <i>lead</i> framing, or down by the smoke of the chimney.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">But now came bright and brightest hours. I had conquered Time, I had
+conquered myself and Berga; seldom does a conqueror, as I did, bless
+both the victorious and the vanquished party. Berga called back her
+former Heaven, and pulled off her dusty boots, and on her flowery
+shoes. Precious morning beverage, intoxicating to a heart that loves! I
+felt (if the low figure may be permitted) a double-beer of courage in
+me, now that I had one being more to protect. In general it is my
+nature--which the honorable Premier seems not to be fully aware of--to
+grow bolder not among the bold, but fastest among poltroons, the bad
+example acting on me by the rule of contraries. Little touches may in
+this case shadow forth man and wife without casting them into the
+shade. When the trim waiter with his green silk apron brought up
+cracknels for breakfast, and I told him, &quot;Johann, for two!&quot; Berga said:
+&quot;He would oblige her very much,&quot; and called him Herr Johann.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Bergelchen, more familiar with rural burghs than capital cities, felt a
+good deal amazed and alarmed at the coffee-trays, dressing-tables,
+paper-hangings, sconces, alabaster inkholders, with Egyptian emblems,
+as well as at the gilt bell-handle, lying ready for any one to pull out
+or to push in. Accordingly, she had not courage to walk through
+the hall, with its lustres, purely because a whistling, whiffling
+Cap-and-feather was gesturing up and down in it. Nay, her poor heart
+was like to fail when she peeped out of the window at so many gay,
+promenading town's people (I was briskly that in a little while, at my
+side, she must break into whistling a Gascon air down over them); and
+thought the middle of this dazzling courtly throng. In a case like
+this, reasons are of less avail than examples. I tried to elevate
+my Bergelchen, by reciting some of my nocturnal dream-feats; for
+example, how, riding on a whale's back, with a three-pronged fork, I
+had pierced and eaten three eagles; and by more of the like sort; but I
+produced no effect; perhaps, because to the timid female heart the
+battle-field was presented rather than the conqueror, the abyss rather
+than the overleaper of it.</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+76. Your economical, preaching Poetry apparently supposes that a
+surgical Stone-cutter is an Artistical one; and a Pulpit or a Sinai a
+Hill of the Muses.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">At this time a sheaf of newspapers was brought me, full of gallant,
+decisive victories. And though these happen only on one side, and on
+the other are just so many defeats, yet the former somehow assimilate
+more with my blood than the latter, and inspire me (as Schiller's
+<i>Robbers</i> used to do) with a strange inclination to lay hold of some
+one, and thrash and curry him on the spot. Unluckily for the waiter,
+he had chanced even now, like a military host, to stand a triple
+bell-order for march, before he would leave his ground and come up.
+&quot;Sir,&quot; began I, my head full of battle-fields, and my arm of
+inclination to baste him; and Berga feared the very worst, as I gave
+her the well-known anger and alarm signal, namely, shoved up my cap to
+my hindhead,--&quot;Sir, is this your way of treating guests? Why don't you
+come promptly? Don't come so again; and now be going, friend!&quot; Although
+his retreat was my victory, I still kept briskly cannonading on the
+field of action, and fired the louder (to let him hear it), the more
+steps he descended in his flight. Bergelchen,--who felt quite
+horror-struck at my fury, particularly in a quite strange house, and
+at a quality waiter with silk apron, mustered all her soft words
+against the wild ones of a man-of-war, and spoke of dangers that might
+follow. &quot;Dangers,&quot; answered I, &quot;are just what I seek; but for a man
+there are none; in all cases he will either conquer or evade them,
+either show them front or back.&quot;</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+115. According to Smith, the universal measure of economical value is
+Labor. This fact, at least in regard to spiritual and poetical value,
+we Germans had discovered before Smith; and to my knowledge, we have
+always preferred the learned poet to the poet of genius, and the heavy
+book full of labor to the light one full of sport.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">I could scarcely lay aside this indignant mood, so sweet was it to me,
+and so much did I feel refreshed by the fire of rage, and quickened in
+my breast as by a benignant stimulant. It belongs certainly to the
+class of Unrecognized Mercies (on which, in ancient times, special
+sermons were preached), that one is never more completely in his Heaven
+and <i>Monplaisir</i> (a pleasure-palace), than while in the midst of right
+hearty storming and indignation. Heavens! what might not a man of
+weight accomplish in this new walk of charity! The gall bladder is for
+us the chief swimming-bladder and Montgolfier; and the filling of it
+costs us nothing but a contumelious word or two from some bystander.
+And does not the whirlwind Luther, with whom I nowise compare myself,
+confess, in his <i>Table-Talk</i>, that he never preached, sung, or prayed
+so well, as while in a rage? Truly, he was a man sufficient of himself
+to rouse many others into rage.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The whole morning till noon now passed in viewing sights, and
+trafficking for wares; and indeed, for the greatest part, in the broad
+street of our Hotel. Berga needed but to press along with me into the
+market throng; needed but to look, and see that she was decorated more
+according to the fashion than hundreds like her. But soon, in her care
+for household gear, she forgot that of dress, and in the potter-market
+the toilette-table faded from her thoughts.</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+4. The Hypocrite does not imitate the old practice, of cutting fruit by
+a knife poisoned only on the one side, and giving the poisoned side to
+the victim, the cutter eating the sound side himself; on the contrary,
+he so disinterestedly inverts this practice, that to others he shows
+and gives the sound moral half, or side, and retains for himself the
+poisoned one. Heavens! compared with such a man, how wicked does the
+Devil seem!</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">I, for my share, full of true tedium, while gliding after her through
+her various marts, with their long cheapenings and chafferings, merely
+acted the Philosopher hid within me. I weighed this empty Life, and the
+heavy value which is put upon it, and the daily anxiety of man lest it,
+this lightest down-feather of the Earth, fly off', and feather him, and
+take him with it. These thoughts, perhaps, I owe to the street-fry of
+boys, who were turning their market-freedom to account, by throwing
+stones at one another all round me; for in the midst of this tumult I
+vividly figured myself to be a man who had never seen war; and who,
+therefore, never having experienced that often of a thousand bullets
+not one will hit, feels apprehensive of these few silly stones lest
+they beat in his nose and eyes. O, it is the battle-field alone that
+sows, manures, and nourishes true courage, courage even for daily,
+domestic, and smallest perils. For not till he comes from the
+battle-field can a man both sing and cannonade; like the canary-bird,
+which, though so melodious, so timid, so small, so tender, so solitary,
+so soft-feathered, can yet be trained to fire off cannon, though cannon
+of smaller calibre.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">After dinner (in our room) we issued from the Purgatory of the
+market-tumult,--where Berga, at every booth, had something to order,
+and load her attendant maid with,--into Heaven, into the Dog Inn, as
+the best Flätz public and pleasure-house without the gates is named,
+where, in market time, hundreds turn in, and see thousands going by. On
+the way thither, my little wife, my elbow-tendril, as it were, had
+extracted from me such a measure of courage, that, while going through
+the Gate (where I, aware of the military order, that you must not pass
+near the sentry, threw myself over to the other side), she quietly
+glided on, close by the very guns and fixed bayonets of the City Guard.
+Outside the wall, I could direct her, with my finger to the bechained,
+begrated, gigantic Schabacker-Palace, mounting up even externally on
+stairs, where I last night had called and (it may be) stormed: &quot;I had
+rather take a peep at the Giant,&quot; said she, &quot;and the Dwarf; why else
+are we under one roof with them?&quot;</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+67. Individual Minds, nay, Political Bodies, are like organic bodies;
+extract the interior air from them, the atmosphere crushes them
+together; pump off under the bell the exterior resisting air, the
+interior inflates and bursts them. Therefore let every State keep up
+its internal and its external resistance both at once.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">In the pleasure-house itself we found sufficient pleasure; encircled as
+we were, with blooming faces and meadows. In my secret heart, I all
+along kept looking down, with success, on Schabacker's refusal; and
+till midnight made myself a happy day of it. I had deserved it, Berga
+still more. Nevertheless, about one in the morning, I was destined to
+find a windmill to tilt with; a windmill, which truly lays about it
+with somewhat longer, stronger, and more numerous arms than a giant,
+for which Don Quixote might readily enough have taken it. On the market
+place, for reasons more easily fancied than specified in words, I let
+Berga go along some twenty paces before me; and I myself, for these
+foresaid reasons, retire without malice behind a covered booth, the
+tent most probably of some rude trader; and lingered there a moment
+according to circumstances. Lo! steering hither with dart and spear,
+comes the Booth-watcher, and coins and stamps me on the spot, into a
+filcher and housebreaker of his Booth-street; though the simpleton sees
+nothing but that I am standing in the corner, and doing anything
+but--taking. A sense of honor without callosity is never blunted for
+such attacks. But how in the dead of night was a man of this kind, who
+had nothing in his head--at the utmost beer, instead of brains--to be
+enlightened on the truth of the matter?</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I shall not conceal my perilous resource; I seized the fox by the tail,
+as we say; in other words, I made as if I had been muddled, and knew
+not rightly, in my liquor, what I was about. I therefore mimicked
+everything I was master of in this department; staggered hither and
+thither; splayed out my feet like a dancing-master; got into zigzag in
+spite of all efforts at the straight line; nay, I knocked my good head
+(perhaps one of the clearest and emptiest of the night) like a full
+one, against real posts.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">However, the Booth-bailiff, who probably had been oftener drunk than I,
+and knew the symptoms better, or even felt them in himself at this
+moment, looked upon the whole exhibition as mere craft, and shouted
+dreadfully: &quot;Stop, rascal; thou art no more drunk than I! I know thee
+of old. Stand, I say, till I speak to thee! Wouldst have thy long
+finger in the market, too? Stand, dog, or I'll make thee!&quot;</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">8. In great Saloons, the real stove is masked into a pretty ornamented
+sham stove; so, likewise, it is fit and pretty that a virgin <i>Love</i>
+should always hide itself in an interesting virgin <i>Friendship</i>.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">You see the whole <i>nodus</i> of the matter. I whisked away zigzag among
+the booths as fast as possible, from the claws of this rude Tosspot;
+yet he still hobbled after me. But my Teutoberga, who had heard
+somewhat of it came running back; clutched the tipsy market-warder by
+the collar, and said (shrieking, it is true, in village wise): &quot;Stupid
+sot, go sleep the drink out of thy head, or I'll teach thee! Dost know,
+then, whom thou art speaking to? My husband, Army-chaplain Schmelzle
+under General and Minister von Schabacker at Pimpelstadt, thou
+blockhead!--Fie! Take shame, fellow!&quot; The watchman mumbled, &quot;Meant no
+harm,&quot; and reeled about his business. &quot;O thou Lioness!&quot; said I, in the
+transport of love, &quot;why hast thou never been in any deadly peril, that
+I might show thee the Lion in thy husband!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Thus lovingly we both reached home; and perhaps in the sequel of this
+Fair day might still have enjoyed a glorious after-midnight, had not
+the Devil led my eye to the ninth volume of Lichtenberg's Works, and
+the 206th page, where this passage occurs: &quot;It is not impossible, that,
+at a future period, our Chemists may light on some means of suddenly
+decomposing the Atmosphere by a sort of Ferment. In this way the world
+may be destroyed.&quot; Ah! true indeed! Since the Earth-ball is lapped up
+in the larger Atmospheric ball, let but any chemical scoundrel, in the
+remotest scoundrel-island, say in New Holland, devise some decomposing
+substance for the Atmosphere, like what a spark of fire would be for a
+powder-wagon; in a few seconds, the monstrous devouring world-storm
+catches me and you in Flätz by the throat; my breathing, and the like,
+in this choke-air is over, and the whole game ended! The Earth becomes
+a boundless gallows, where the very cattle are hanged; worm-powder, and
+bug-liquor, Bradly ant-ploughs, and rat-poison, and wolf-traps are, in
+this universal world-trap and world-poison, no longer specially
+needful; and the Devil takes the whole, in the Bartholomew-night, when
+this cursed &quot;Ferment&quot; is invented.</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+12. Nations--unlike rivers, which precipitate their impurities in level
+places and when at rest--drop their baseness just whilst in the most
+violent motion; and become the dirtier the farther they flow along
+through lazy flats.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">From the true soul, however, I concealed these deadly Night Thoughts;
+seeing she would either painfully have sympathized in them, or else
+mirthfully laughed at them. I merely gave orders that next morning
+(Saturday) she was to be standing booted and ready, at the outset of
+the returning coach; if so were she would have me speedily fulfil her
+wishes in regard to that stock of Rathships which lay so near her
+heart. She rejoiced in my purpose, gladly surrendering the market for
+such prospects. I too slept sound, my great toe tied to her finger the
+whole night through.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The Dragoon next morning twitched me by the ear, and secretly whispered
+into it that he had a pleasant fairing to give his sister; and so would
+ride off somewhat early, on the nag he had yesterday purchased of the
+horse-dealer. I thanked him beforehand.</p>
+
+<div style="background-color:yellow; margin-top:12px; margin-bottom:12px; font-size:90%">
+<p class="normal">
+28. When Nature takes the huge old Earth-round, the Earth-loaf and
+kneads it up again, for the purpose of introducing, under this
+piecrust, new stuffing and Dwarfs--she then, for most part, as a mother
+when baking will do to her daughters, gives in jest a little fraction
+of the dough (two or three thousand square leagues of such dough are
+enough for a child) to some Poetical or Philosophical, or Legislative
+polisher, that so the little elf may have something to be shaping and
+manufacturing beside its mother. And when the other young ones get a
+taste of sisterkin's baking, they all clap hands, and cry, &quot;Aha,
+Mother! canst bake like <i>Suky</i> here?&quot;</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">At the appointed hour all gayly started from the Staple, I excepted;
+for I still retained, even in the fairest daylight, that nocturnal
+Devil's-Ferment and Decomposition (of my cerebral globe as well as of
+the Earth-globe) fermenting in my head; a proof that the night had not
+affected me, or exaggerated my fear. The Blind Passenger, whom I liked
+so ill, also mounted along with us, and looked at me as usual, but
+without effect; for on this occasion, when the destruction not of
+myself only, but of worlds, was occupying my thoughts, the Passenger
+was nothing to me but a joke and a show; as a man, while his leg is
+a-sawing off, does not feel the throbbing of his heart; or amid the
+humming of cannon, does not guard himself from that of wasps; so to me
+any Passenger, with all the firebrands he might throw into my near or
+distant Future, could appear but ludicrous, at a time when I was
+reflecting that the &quot;Ferment&quot; might, even in my journey between Flätz
+and Neusattel, be, by some American or European man of science, quite
+guiltlessly experimenting and decomposing, lighted upon by accident and
+let loose. The question, nay prize-question now, however, were this:
+&quot;In how far, since Lichtenberg's threatening, it may not appear
+world-murderous and self-murderous, if enlightened Potentates of
+chemical nations do not enjoin it on their chemical subjects,--who in
+their decompositions and separations may so easily separate the soul
+from their body and unite Heaven with Earth,--not in future to make any
+other chemical experiments than those already made, which hitherto have
+profited the State rather than harmed it?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Unfortunately, I continued sunk in this Doomsday of the Ferment with
+all my thoughts and meditations, without, in the whole course of our
+return from Flätz to Neusattel, suffering or observing anything, except
+that I actually arrived there, and at the same time saw the Blind
+Passenger once more go his ways.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">My Bergelchen alone had I constantly looked at by the road, partly
+that I might still see her, so long as life and eyes endured; partly
+that, even at the smallest danger to her, be it a great, or even
+all-over-sweeping Deluge and World's-doom, I might die, if not <i>for</i>
+her, at least <i>by</i> her, and so, united with that stanch, true heart,
+cast away a plagued and plaguing life, in which, at any rate, not half
+of my wishes for her have been fulfilled.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">So then were my Journey over--crowned with some <i>Historiola</i>; and in
+time coming, perhaps, still more rewarded through you, ye Friends about
+Flätz, if in these pages you shall find any well-ground pruning-knives,
+whereby you may more readily outroot the weedy tangle of Lies, which
+for the present excludes me from the gallant Schabacker--Only this
+cursed Ferment still sits in my head. Farewell, then, so long as there
+are Atmospheres left us to breathe. I wish I had that Ferment out of my
+head. <span style="letter-spacing:20px">&nbsp;&nbsp;</span>Yours always,</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="sc">Attila Schmelzle</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">P. S.--My brother-in-law has kept his promise well, and Berga is
+dancing. Particulars in my next!</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<div style="line-height:300%">
+<h1><a name="div1Ref_analects" href="#div1_analects">Analects From Richter.</a></h1>
+
+
+<h4>TRANSLATED BY</h4>
+
+<h3>THOMAS DE QUINCEY.</h3>
+</div>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>ANALECTS FROM RICHTER.</h2>
+
+<hr class="W10">
+
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_a.happy" href="#div1_a.happy">THE HAPPY LIFE OF A PARISH PRIEST IN SWEDEN.</a></h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">Sweden apart, the condition of a parish priest is in itself
+sufficiently happy: in Sweden, then, much more so. There he enjoys
+summer and winter pure and unalloyed by any tedious interruptions: a
+Swedish spring, which is always a late one, is no repetition, in a
+lower key, of the harshness of winter, but anticipates, and is a
+prelibation of, perfect summer,--laden with blossoms,--radiant with the
+lily and the rose: insomuch, that a Swedish summer night represents
+implicitly one half of Italy, and a winter night one half of the world
+beside.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I will begin with winter, and I will suppose it to be Christmas. The
+priest, whom we shall imagine to be a German, and summoned from the
+southern climate of Germany upon presentation to the church of a
+Swedish hamlet lying in a high polar latitude, rises in cheerfulness
+about seven o'clock in the morning; and till half past nine he burns
+his lamp. At nine o'clock, the stars are still shining, and the
+unclouded moon even yet longer. This prolongation of star-light into
+the forenoon is to him delightful; for he is a German, and has a sense
+of something marvellous in a starry forenoon. Methinks, I behold the
+priest and his flock moving towards the church with lanterns: the
+lights dispersed amongst the crowd connect the congregation into the
+appearance of some domestic group or larger household, and carry the
+priest back to his childish years during the winter season and
+Christmas matins, when every hand bore its candle. Arrived at the
+pulpit, he declares to his audience the plain truth, word for word, as
+it stands in the Gospel: in the presence of God, all intellectual
+pretensions are called upon to be silent; the very reason ceases to be
+reasonable; nor is anything reasonable in the sight of God but a
+sincere and upright heart.</p>
+
+<hr class="W20">
+
+<p class="normal">Just as he and his flock are issuing from the church the bright
+Christmas sun ascends above the horizon, and shoots his beams upon
+their faces. The old men, who are numerous in Sweden, are all tinged
+with the colors of youth by the rosy morning-lustre; and the priest, as
+he looks away from them to mother earth lying in the sleep of winter,
+and to the churchyard, where the flowers and the men are all in their
+graves together, might secretly exclaim with the poet: &quot;Upon the dead
+mother, in peace and utter gloom, are reposing the dead children. After
+a time, uprises the everlasting sun; and the mother starts up at the
+summons of the heavenly dawn with a resurrection of her ancient
+bloom:--And her children?--Yes: but they must wait awhile.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">At home he is awaited by a warm study, and a &quot;long-levelled rule&quot; of
+sunlight upon the book-clad wall.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The afternoon he spends delightfully; for, having before him such
+perfect flower-stand of pleasures, he scarcely knows where he
+should settle. Supposing it to be Christmas-day, he preaches again:
+he preaches on a subject which calls up images of the beauteous
+eastern-land, or of eternity. By this time, twilight and gloom
+prevailed through the church: only a couple of wax-lights upon the
+altar throw wondrous and mighty shadows through the aisles: the angel
+that hangs down from the roof above the baptismal font is awoke into a
+solemn life by the shadows and the rays, and seems almost in the act of
+ascension: through the windows, the stars or the moon are beginning to
+peer: aloft, in the pulpit, which is now hid in gloom, the priest is
+inflamed and possessed by the sacred burden of glad tidings which he is
+announcing: he is lost and insensible to all besides; and from amidst
+the darkness which surrounds him, he pours down his thunders, with
+tears and agitation, reasoning of future worlds, and of the heaven of
+heavens, and whatsoever else can most powerfully shake the heart and
+the affections.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Descending from his pulpit in these holy fervors, he now, perhaps,
+takes a walk: it is about four o'clock: and he walks beneath a sky lit
+up by the shifting northern lights, that to his eye appear but an
+Aurora striking upwards from the eternal morning of the south, or as a
+forest composed of saintly thickets, like the fiery bushes of Moses,
+that are round the throne of God.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Thus, if it be the afternoon of Christmas-day: but if it be any other
+afternoon, visitors, perhaps, come and bring their well-bred, grown-up
+daughters; like the fashionable world in London, he dines at sunset;
+that is to say, like the <i>un</i>-fashionable world of London, he dines at
+two o'clock; and he drinks coffee by moonlight; and the parsonage-house
+becomes an enchanted palace of pleasure gleaming with twilight,
+starlight, and moonlight. Or, perhaps, he goes over to the
+schoolmaster, who is teaching his afternoon school: there by the
+candlelight, he gathers round his knees all the scholars, as if--being
+the children of his spiritual children--they must therefore be his own
+grandchildren; and with delightful words he wins their attention, and
+pours knowledge into their docile hearts.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">All these pleasures failing, he may pace up and down in his library,
+already, by three o'clock, gloomy with twilight, but fitfully enlivened
+by a glowing fire, and steadily by the bright moonlight; and he needs
+do no more than taste at every turn of his walk a little orange
+marmalade,--to call up images of beautiful Italy, and its gardens and
+orange groves, before all his five senses, and as it were to the very
+tip of his tongue. Looking at the moon, he will not fail to recollect
+that the very same silver disk hangs at the very same moment between
+the branches of the laurels in Italy. It will delight him to consider
+that the Æolian harp, and the lark, and indeed music of all kinds, and
+the stars, and children, are just the same in hot climates and in cold.
+And when the post-boy, that rides in with news from Italy, winds his
+horn through the hamlet, and with a few simple notes raises up on the
+frozen window of his study a vision of flowery realms; and when he
+plays with treasured leaves of roses and of lilies from some departed
+summer, or with plumes of a bird of paradise, the memorial of some
+distant friend; when, further, his heart is moved by the magnificent
+sounds of Lady-day, Salad-season, Cherry-time, Trinity-Sundays, the
+rose of June, &amp;c., how can he fail to forget that he is in Sweden by
+the time that his lamp is brought in; and then, indeed, he will be
+somewhat disconcerted to recognize his study in what had now shaped
+itself to his fancy as a room in some foreign land. However, if he
+would pursue this airy creation, he need but light at his lamp a
+wax-candle-end, to gain a glimpse through the whole evening into
+that world of fashion and splendor, from which he purchased the
+said wax-candle-end. For I should suppose, that at the court of
+Stockholm, as elsewhere, there must be candle-ends to be bought of the
+state-footmen.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But now, after the lapse of half a year, all at once there strikes upon
+his heart something more beautiful than Italy, where the sun sets so
+much earlier in summertime than it does at our Swedish hamlet: and what
+is <i>that</i>? It is the longest day, with the rich freight that it carries
+in its bosom, and leading by the hand the early dawn blushing with rosy
+light, and melodious with the carolling of larks at one o'clock in the
+morning. Before two, that is, at sunrise, the elegant party that we
+mentioned last winter arrive in gay clothing at the parsonage; for they
+are bound on a little excursion of pleasure in company with the priest.
+At two o'clock they are in motion; at which time all the flowers are
+glittering, and the forests are gleaming with the mighty light. The
+warm sun threatens them with no storm nor thunder-showers; for both are
+rare in Sweden. The priest, in common with the rest of the company, is
+attired in the costume of Sweden; he wears his short jacket with a
+broad scarf, his short cloak above that, his round hat with floating
+plumes, and shoes tied with bright ribbons: like the rest of the men,
+he resembles a Spanish knight, or a Provençal, or other man of the
+south: more especially when he and his gay company are seen flying
+through the lofty foliage luxuriant with blossom, that within so short
+a period of weeks has shot forth from the garden plots and the naked
+boughs.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">That a longest day like this, bearing such a cornucopia of sunshine, of
+cloudless ether, of buds and bells, of blossoms and of leisure, should
+pass away more rapidly than the shortest,--is not difficult to suppose.
+As early as eight o'clock in the evening the party breaks up; the sun
+is now burning more gently over the half-closed sleepy flowers: about
+nine he has mitigated his rays, and is beheld bathing as it were naked
+in the blue depths of heaven: about ten, at which hour the company
+reassemble at the parsonage, the priest is deeply moved, for throughout
+the hamlet, though the tepid sun, now sunk to the horizon, is still
+shedding a sullen glow upon the cottages and the window-panes,
+everything reposes in profoundest silence and sleep: the birds even are
+all slumbering in the golden summits of the woods: and at last, the
+solitary sun himself sets, like a moon, amidst the universal quiet of
+nature. To our priest, walking in his romantic dress, it seems as
+though rosy-colored realms were laid open, in which fairies and spirits
+range; and he would scarcely feel an emotion of wonder, if, in this
+hour of golden vision, his brother, who ran away in childhood, should
+suddenly present himself as one alighting from some blooming heaven of
+enchantment.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The priest will not allow his company to depart: he detains them in the
+parsonage garden,--where, says he, every one that chooses may slumber
+away in beautiful bowers the brief, warm hours until the reappearance
+of the sun. This proposal is generally adopted: and the garden is
+occupied: many a lovely pair are making believe to sleep, but, in fact,
+are holding each other by the hand. The happy priest walks up and
+down through the parterres. Coolness comes, and a few stars. His
+night-violets and gillyflowers open and breathe out their powerful
+odors. To the north, from the eternal morning of the pole, exhales as
+it were a golden dawn. The priest thinks of the village of his
+childhood far away in Germany; he thinks of the life of man, his hopes,
+and his aspirations: and he is calm and at peace with himself. Then all
+at once starts up the morning sun in his freshness. Some there are in
+the garden who would fain confound it with the evening sun, and close
+their eyes again: but the larks betray all, and awaken every sleeper
+from bower to bower.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Then again begin pleasure and morning in their pomp of radiance; and
+almost I could persuade myself to delineate the course of this day
+also, though it differs from its predecessor hardly by so much as the
+leaf of a rose-bud.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_a.dream" href="#div1_a.dream">DREAM UPON THE UNIVERSE.</a></h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">I had been reading an excellent dissertation of Krüger's upon the old
+vulgar error which regards the space from one earth and sun to another
+as empty. Our sun together with all its planets fills only the
+31,419,460,000,000,000th part of the whole space between itself and the
+next solar body. Gracious Heavens! thought I,--in what an unfathomable
+abyss of emptiness were this universe swallowed up and lost, if all
+were void and utter vacuity except the few shining points of dust which
+we call a planetary system! To conceive of our earthly ocean as the
+abode of death, and essentially incapable of life, and of its populous
+islands as being no greater than snail-shells, would be a far less
+error in proportion to the compass of our planet than that which
+attributes emptiness to the great mundane spaces: and the error would
+be far less if the marine animals were to ascribe life and fulness
+exclusively to the sea, and to regard the atmospheric ocean above them
+as empty and untenanted. According to Herschel, the most remote of the
+galaxies which the telescope discovers lie at such a distance from us,
+that their light, which reaches us at this day, must have set out on
+its journey two millions of years ago; and thus by optical laws it is
+possible that whole squadrons of the starry hosts may be now reaching
+us with their beams which have themselves perished ages ago. Upon this
+scale of computation for the dimensions of the world, what heights and
+depths and breadths must there be in this universe--in comparison of
+which the positive universe would be itself a nihility, were it
+crossed--pierced--and belted about by so illimitable a wilderness of
+nothing! But is it possible that any man can for a moment overlook
+those vast forces which must pervade these imaginary deserts with
+eternal surges of flux and reflux, to make the very paths to those
+distant starry coasts voyageable to our eyes? Can you lock up in a sun
+or in its planets their reciprocal forces of attraction? Does not the
+light stream through the immeasurable spaces between our earth and the
+nebula which is farthest removed from us? And in this stream of light
+there is as ample an existence of the positive, and as much a home for
+the abode of a spiritual world, as there is a dwelling-place for thy
+own spirit in the substance of the brain. To these and similar
+reflections succeeded the following dream:--</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Methought my body sank down in ruins, and my inner form stepped out
+apparelled in light: and by my-side there stood another form which
+resembled my own, except that it did not shine like mine, but lightened
+unceasingly. &quot;Two thoughts,&quot; said the form, &quot;are the wings with which I
+move; the thought of <i>Here</i>, and the thought of <i>There</i>. And behold! I
+am yonder&quot;;--pointing to a distant world. &quot;Come, then, and wait on me
+with thy thoughts and with thy flight, that I may show to thee the
+universe under a veil.&quot; And I flew along with the Form. In a moment our
+earth fell back, behind our consuming flight, into an abyss of
+distance; a faint gleam only was reflected from the summits of the
+Cordilleras; and a few moments more reduced the sun to a little star;
+and soon there remained nothing visible of our system except a comet
+which was travelling from our sun with angelic speed in the direction
+of Sirius. Our flight now carried us so rapidly through the flocks
+of solar bodies--flocks, past counting unless to their heavenly
+Shepherd,--that scarcely could they expand themselves before us into
+the magnitude of moons, before they sank behind us into pale nebular
+gleams; and their planetary earths could not reveal themselves for a
+moment to the transcendent rapidity of our course. At length Sirius and
+all the brotherhood of our constellations and the galaxy of our heavens
+stood far below our feet as a little nebula amongst other yet more
+distant nebulae. Thus we flew on through the starry wildernesses: one
+heaven after another unfurled its immeasurable banners before us, and
+then rolled up behind us: galaxy behind galaxy towered up into solemn
+altitudes before which the spirit shuddered; and they stood in long
+array through which the Infinite Being might pass in progress.
+Sometimes the Form that lightened would outfly my weary thoughts; and
+then it would be seen far off before me like a coruscation amongst the
+stars--till suddenly I thought again to myself the thought of <i>There</i>,
+and then I was at its side. But, as we were thus swallowed up by one
+abyss of stars after another, and the heavens above our eyes were not
+emptier--neither were the heavens below them fuller; and as suns
+without intermission fell into the solar ocean like water-spouts of a
+storm which fall into the ocean of waters;--then at length the human
+heart within me was overburdened and weary, and yearned after some
+narrow cell or quiet oratory in this metropolitan cathedral of the
+universe. And I said to the Form at my side, &quot;O Spirit! has then this
+universe no end?&quot; And the Form answered and said, &quot;Lo! it has no
+beginning.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Suddenly, however, the heavens above us appeared to be emptied, and not
+a star was seen to twinkle in the mighty abyss,--no gleam of light to
+break the unity of the infinite darkness. The starry hosts behind us
+had all contracted into an obscure nebula: and at length <i>that</i> also
+had vanished. And I thought to myself, &quot;At last the universe has
+ended&quot;: and I trembled at the thought of the illimitable dungeon of
+pure,--pure darkness which here began to imprison the creation: I
+shuddered at the dead sea of nothing, in whose unfathomable zone of
+blackness the jewel of the glittering universe seemed to be set and
+buried forever; and through the night in which we moved I saw the Form
+which still lightened as before, but left all around it unilluminated.
+Then the Form said to me in my anguish, &quot;O creature of little faith!
+Look up! the most ancient light is coming!&quot; I looked; and in a moment
+came a twilight,--in the twinkling of an eye a galaxy,--and then with a
+choral burst rushed in all the company of stars. For centuries gray
+with age, for millennia hoary with antiquity, had the starry light been
+on its road to us; and at length out of heights inaccessible to thought
+it had reached us. Now then, as through some renovated century, we flew
+through new cycles of heavens. At length again came a starless
+interval; and far longer it endured, before the beams of a starry host
+again had reached us.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">As we thus advanced forever through an interchange of nights and solar
+heavens, and as the interval grew still longer and longer before the
+last heaven we had quitted contracted to a point,--and as once we
+issued suddenly from the middle of thickest night into an Aurora
+Borealis,--the herald of an expiring world, and we found throughout
+this cycle of solar systems that a day of judgment had indeed arrived;
+the suns had sickened, and the planets were heaving--rocking, yawning
+in convulsions, the subterraneous waters of the great deeps were
+breaking up, and lightnings that were ten diameters of a world in
+length ran along--from east to west--from Zenith to Nadir; and here and
+there, where a sun should have been, we saw instead through the misty
+vapor a gloomy--ashy--leaden corpse of a solar body, that sucked in
+flames from the perishing world--but gave out neither light nor heat;
+and as I saw, through a vista which had no end, mountain towering above
+mountain, and piled up with what seemed glittering snow from the
+conflict of solar and planetary bodies;--then my spirit bent under the
+load of the universe, and I said to the Form, &quot;Rest, rest: and lead me
+no farther: I am too solitary in the creation itself; and in its
+deserts yet more so: the full world is great, but the empty world is
+greater; and with the universe increase its Zaarahs.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Then the Form touched me like the flowing of a breath, and spoke more
+gently than before: &quot;In the presence of God there is no emptiness:
+above, below, between, and round about the stars, in the darkness and
+in the light, dwelleth the true and very Universe, the sum and fountain
+of all that is. But thy spirit can bear only earthly images of the
+unearthly; now then I cleanse thy sight with euphrasy; look forth, and
+behold the images.&quot; Immediately my eyes were opened; and I looked, and
+I saw as it were an interminable sea of light,--sea immeasurable, sea
+unfathomable, sea without a shore. All spaces between all heavens were
+filled with happiest light: and there was a thundering of floods: and
+there were seas above the seas, and seas below the seas: and I saw all
+the trackless regions that we had voyaged over: and my eye comprehended
+the farthest and the nearest: and darkness had become light, and the
+light darkness: for the deserts and wastes of the creation were now
+filled with the sea of light, and in this sea the suns floated like
+ash-gray blossoms, and the planets like black grains of seed. Then my
+heart comprehended that immortality dwelled in the spaces between the
+worlds, and death only amongst the worlds. Upon all the suns there
+walked upright shadows in the form of men: but they were glorified when
+they quitted these perishable worlds, and when they sank into the sea
+of light: and the murky planets, I perceived, were but cradles for the
+infant spirits of the universe of light. In the Zaarahs of the creation
+I saw--I heard--I felt--the glittering--the echoing--the breathing of
+life and creative power. The suns were but as spinning-wheels, the
+planets no more than weavers' shuttles, in relation to the infinite web
+which composes the veil of Isis; which veil is hung over the whole
+creation, and lengthens as any finite being attempts to raise it. And
+in sight of this immeasurability of life, no sadness could endure; but
+only joy that knew no limit, and happy prayers.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But in the midst of this great vision of the Universe the Form that
+lightened eternally had become invisible, or had vanished to its home
+in the unseen world of spirits: I was left alone in the centre of a
+universe of life, and I yearned after some sympathizing being. Suddenly
+from the starry deeps there came floating through the ocean of light a
+planetary body; and upon it there stood a woman whose face was as the
+face of a Madonna; and by her side there stood a child, whose
+countenance varied not--neither was it magnified as he drew nearer.
+This child was a king, for I saw that he had a crown upon his head: but
+the crown was a crown of thorns. Then also I perceived that the
+planetary body was our unhappy earth: and, as the earth drew near, this
+child who had come forth from the starry deeps to comfort me threw upon
+me a look of gentlest pity and of unutterable love--so that in my heart
+I had a sudden rapture of joy such as passes all understanding; and I
+awoke in the tumult of my happiness.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I awoke: but my happiness survived my dream: and I exclaimed, O how
+beautiful is death, seeing that we die in a world of life and of
+creation without end! and I blessed God for my life upon earth, but
+much more for the life in those unseen depths of the universe which are
+emptied of all but the Supreme Reality, and where no earthly life nor
+perishable hope can enter.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_a.complaint" href="#div1_a.complaint">COMPLAINT OF THE BIRD IN A DARKENED CAGE.</a></h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Ah!&quot; said the imprisoned bird, &quot;how unhappy were I in my eternal
+night, but for those melodious tones which sometimes make their way to
+me like beams of light from afar, and cheer my gloomy day. But I will
+myself repeat these heavenly melodies like an echo, until I have
+stamped them in my heart; and then I shall be able to bring comfort to
+myself in my darkness!&quot; Thus spoke the little warbler, and soon had
+learned the sweet airs that were sung to it with voice and instrument.
+That done, the curtain was raised; for the darkness had been purposely
+contrived to assist in its instruction. O man! how often dost thou
+complain of overshadowing grief and of darkness resting upon thy days!
+And yet what cause for complaint, unless indeed thou hast failed to
+learn wisdom from suffering? For is not the whole sum of human life a
+veiling and an obscuring of the immortal spirit of man? Then first,
+when the fleshly curtain falls away, may it soar upwards into a region
+of happier melodies!</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_a.ondeath" href="#div1_a.ondeath">ON THE DEATH OF YOUNG CHILDREN.</a></h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">Ephemera die all at sunset, and no insect of this class has ever
+sported in the beams of the morning sun. Happier are ye, little human
+ephemera! Ye played only in the ascending beams, and in the early dawn,
+and in the eastern light; ye drank only of the prelibations of life;
+hovered for a little space over a world of freshness and of blossoms;
+and fell asleep in innocence before yet the morning dew was exhaled!</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_a.prophetic" href="#div1_a.prophetic">THE PROPHETIC DEW-DROPS.</a></h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">A delicate child, pale and prematurely wise, was complaining on a hot
+morning that the poor dewdrops had been too hastily snatched away and
+not allowed to glitter on the flowers like other happier dewdrops that
+live the whole night through and sparkle in the moonlight, and through
+the morning onwards to noonday: &quot;The sun,&quot; said the child, &quot;has chased
+them away with his heat--or swallowed them in his wrath.&quot; Soon after
+came rain and a rainbow; whereupon his father pointed upwards: &quot;See,&quot;
+said he, &quot;there stand thy dew-drops gloriously re-set--a glittering
+jewelry--in the heavens; and the clownish foot tramples on them no
+more. By this, my child, thou art taught that what withers upon earth
+blooms again in heaven.&quot; Thus the father spoke, and knew not that he
+spoke prefiguring words: for soon after the delicate child, with the
+morning brightness of his early wisdom, was exhaled, like a dewdrop,
+into heaven.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_a.death" href="#div1_a.death">ON DEATH.</a></h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">We should all think of death as a less hideous object, if it simply
+untenanted our bodies of a spirit, without corrupting them; secondly,
+if the grief which we experience at the spectacle of our friends'
+graves were not by some confusion of the mind blended with the image of
+our own; thirdly, if we had not in this life seated ourselves in a warm
+domestic nest, which we are unwilling to quit for the cold blue regions
+of the unfathomable heavens; finally,--if death were denied to us. Once
+in dreams I saw a human being of heavenly intellectual faculties, and
+his aspirations were heavenly; but he was chained (methought) eternally
+to the earth. The immortal old man had five great wounds in his
+happiness--five worms that gnawed forever at his heart: he was unhappy
+in springtime, because <i>that</i> is a season of hope--and rich with
+phantoms of far happier days than any which this aceldama of earth
+can realize. He was unhappy at the sound of music, which dilates the
+heart of man into its whole capacity for the infinite, and he cried
+aloud,--&quot;Away, away! Thou speakest of things which throughout my
+endless life I have found not, and shall not find!&quot; He was unhappy at
+the remembrance of earthly affections and dissevered hearts: for love
+is a plant which may bud in this life, but it must flourish in another.
+He was unhappy under the glorious spectacle of the starry host, and
+ejaculated forever in his heart,--&quot;So then I am parted from you to all
+eternity by an impassable abyss: the great universe of suns is above,
+below, and round about me: but I am chained to a little ball of dust
+and ashes.&quot; He was unhappy before the great ideas of Virtue--of
+Truth--and of God; because he knew how feeble are the approximations to
+them which a son of earth can make. But this was a dream: God be
+thanked, that in reality there is no such craving and asking eye
+directed upwards to heaven--to which death will not one day bring an
+answer!</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_a.imagin" href="#div1_a.imagin">IMAGINATION UNTAMED BY THE COARSER<br>
+REALITIES OF LIFE.</a></h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">Happy is every actor in the guilty drama of life, to whom the higher
+illusion within supplies or conceals the external illusion; to whom, in
+the tumult of his part and its intellectual interest, the bungling
+landscapes of the stage have the bloom and reality of nature, and whom
+the loud parting and shocking of the scenes disturb not in his dream!</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_a.satirical" href="#div1_a.satirical">SATIRICAL NOTICE OF REVIEWERS.</a></h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">In Swabia, in Saxony, in Pomerania, are towns in which are stationed a
+strange sort of officers,--valuers of author's flesh, something like
+our old market-lookers in this town. They are commonly called tasters
+(or <i>Prægustatores</i>) because they eat a mouthful of every book
+beforehand, and tell the people whether its flavor be good. We authors,
+in spite, call them <i>reviewers</i>: but I believe an action of defamation
+would lie against us for such bad words. The tasters write no books
+themselves; consequently they have the more time to look over and tax
+those of other people. Or, if they do sometimes write books, they are
+bad ones: which again is very advantageous to them: for who can
+understand the theory of badness in other people's books so well as
+those who have learned it by practice in their own? They are reputed
+the guardians of literature and the literati for the same reason that
+St. Nepomuk is the patron saint of bridges and of all who pass over
+them,--namely, because he himself once lost his life from a bridge.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_a.female" href="#div1_a.female">FEMALE TONGUES.</a></h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">Hippel, the author of the book &quot;Upon Marriage,&quot; says, &quot;A woman, that
+does not talk, must be a stupid woman.&quot; But Hippel is an author whose
+opinions it is more safe to admire than to adopt. The most intelligent
+women are often silent amongst women; and again the most stupid and the
+most silent are often neither one nor the other except amongst men. In
+general the current remark upon men is valid also with respect to
+women,--that those for the most part are the greatest thinkers who are
+the least talkers; as frogs cease to croak when <i>light</i> is brought to
+the water edge. However, in fact, the disproportionate talking of
+women arises out of the sedentariness of their labors: sedentary
+artisans,--as tailors, shoemakers, weavers,--have this habit as well as
+hypochondriacal tendencies in common with women. Apes do not talk, as
+savages say, that they may not be set to work: but women often talk
+double their share--even <i>because</i> they work.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_a.forgive" href="#div1_a.forgive">FORGIVENESS.</a></h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">Nothing is more moving to man than the spectacle of reconciliation: our
+weaknesses are thus indemnified, and are not too costly--being the
+price we pay for the hour of forgiveness: and the archangel, who has
+never felt anger, has reason to envy the man who subdues it. When thou
+forgivest,--the man, who has pierced thy heart, stands to thee in the
+relation of the sea-worm that perforates the shell of the muscle, which
+straightway closes the wound with a pearl.</p>
+
+<hr class="W10">
+
+<p class="normal">The graves of the best of men, of the noblest martyrs, are like the
+graves of the Herrnhuters (the Moravian brethren)--level, and
+undistinguishable from the universal earth: and, if the earth could
+give up her secrets, our whole globe would appear a Westminster Abbey
+laid flat. Ah! what a multitude of tears, what myriads of bloody drops
+have been shed in secrecy about the three corner-trees of earth,--the
+tree of life, the tree of knowledge, and the tree of freedom,--shed,
+but never reckoned! It is only great periods of calamity that reveal to
+us our great men, as comets are revealed by total eclipses of the sun.
+Not merely upon the field of battle, but also upon the consecrated soil
+of virtue--and upon the classic ground of truth, thousands of
+<i>nameless</i> heroes must fall and struggle to build up the footstool
+from which history surveys the <i>one</i> hero, whose name is embalmed,
+bleeding--conquering--and resplendent. The grandest of heroic deeds are
+those which are performed within four walls and in domestic privacy.
+And, because history records only the self-sacrifices of the male sex,
+and because she dips her pen only in blood,--therefore is it that in
+the eyes of the unseen spirit of the world our annals appear doubtless
+far more beautiful and noble than in our own.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_a.grandeur" href="#div1_a.grandeur">THE GRANDEUR OF MAN IN HIS LITTLENESS.</a></h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">Man upon this earth would be vanity and hollowness, dust and ashes,
+vapor and a bubble,--were it not that he felt himself to be so. That it
+is possible for him to harbor such a feeling,--<i>this</i>, by implying a
+comparison of himself with something higher in himself, <i>this</i> is it
+which makes him the immortal creature that he is.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_a.night" href="#div1_a.night">NIGHT.</a></h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">The earth is every day overspread with the veil of night for the same
+reason as the cages of birds are darkened,--namely, that we may the
+more readily apprehend the higher harmonies of thought in the hush and
+quiet of darkness. Thoughts, which day turns into smoke and mist, stand
+about us in the night as lights and flames: even as the column which
+fluctuates above the crater of Vesuvius, in the daytime appears a
+pillar of cloud, but by night a pillar of fire.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_a.stars" href="#div1_a.stars">THE STARS.</a></h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">Look up, and behold the eternal fields of light that lie round about
+the throne of God. Had no star ever appeared in the heavens, to man
+there would have been no heavens; and he would have laid himself down
+to his last sleep, in a spirit of anguish, as upon a gloomy earth
+vaulted over by a material arch--solid and impervious.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_a.martyr" href="#div1_a.martyr">MARTYRDOM.</a></h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">To die for the truth--is not to die for one's country, but to die for
+the world. Truth, like the <i>Venus del Medici</i>, will pass down in thirty
+fragments to posterity: but posterity will collect and recompose them
+into a goddess. Then also thy temple, O eternal Truth! that now stands
+half below the earth--made hollow by the sepulchres of its witnesses,
+will raise itself in the total majesty of its proportions; and will
+stand in monumental granite; and every pillar on which it rests will be
+fixed in the grave of a martyr.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_a.quarrel" href="#div1_a.quarrel">THE QUARRELS OF FRIENDS.</a></h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">Why is it that the most fervent love becomes more fervent by brief
+interruption and reconciliation? and why must a storm agitate our
+affections before they can raise the highest rainbow of peace? Ah! for
+this reason it is--because all passions feel their object to be as
+eternal as themselves, and no love can admit the feeling that the
+beloved object should die. And under this feeling of imperishableness
+it is that we hard fields of ice shock together so harshly, whilst all
+the while under the sunbeams of a little space of seventy years we are
+rapidly dissolving.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_a.dreaming" href="#div1_a.dreaming">DREAMING.</a></h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">But for dreams, that lay Mosaic worlds tessellated with flowers and
+jewels before the blind sleeper, and surround the recumbent living with
+the figures of the dead in the upright attitude of life, the time would
+be too long before we are allowed to rejoin our brothers, parents,
+friends: every year we should become more and more painfully sensible
+of the desolation made around us by death, if sleep--the ante-chamber
+of the grave--were not hung by dreams with the busts of those who live
+in the other world.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_a.2div" href="#div1_a.2div">TWO DIVISIONS OF PHILOSOPHIC MINDS.</a></h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">There are two very different classes of philosophical heads--which,
+since Kant has introduced into philosophy the idea of positive and
+negative quantities, I shall willingly classify by means of that
+distinction. The positive intellect is, like the poet, in conjunction
+with the outer world, the father of an inner world; and, like the poet
+also, holds up a transforming mirror in which the entangled and
+distorted members as they are seen in our actual experience enter into
+new combinations which compose a fair and luminous world: the
+hypothesis of Idealism (i. e. the Fichtéan system) the Monads and the
+Pre-established Harmony of Leibnitz--and Spinozism are all births of a
+genial moment, and not the wooden carving of logical toil. Such men
+therefore as Leibnitz, Plato, Herder, &amp;c., I call positive intellects;
+because they seek and yield the positive; and because their inner
+world, having raised itself higher out of the water than in others,
+thereby overlooks a larger prospect of island and continents. A
+negative head, on the other hand, discovers by its acuteness--not any
+positive truths, but the negative (i. e. the errors) of other people.
+Such an intellect, as for example Bayle, one of the greatest of that
+class,--appraises the funds of others, rather than brings any fresh
+funds of his own. In lieu of the obscure ideas which he finds he gives
+us clear ones: but in this there is no positive accession to our
+knowledge; for all that the clear idea contains in development exists
+already by implication in the obscure idea. Negative intellects of
+every age are unanimous in their abhorrence of everything positive.
+Impulse, feeling, instinct--everything, in short, which is
+incomprehensible, they can endure just once--that is, at the summit of
+their chain of arguments as a sort of hook on which they may hang
+them,--but never afterwards.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_a.dignity" href="#div1_a.dignity">DIGNITY OF MAN IN SELF-SACRIFICE.</a></h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">That for which man offers up his blood or his property must be more
+valuable than they. A good man does not fight with half the courage
+for his own life that he shows in the protection of another's. The
+mother, who will hazard nothing for herself, will hazard all in defence
+of her child:--in short, only for the nobility within us--only for
+virtue, will man open his veins and offer up his spirit: but this
+nobility--this virtue--presents different phases: with the Christian
+martyr, it is faith; with the savage, it is honor; with the republican,
+it is liberty.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_a.fancy" href="#div1_a.fancy">FANCY.</a></h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">Fancy can lay only the past and the future under her copying-paper: and
+every actual presence of the object sets limits to her power: just as
+water distilled from roses, according to the old naturalists, lost its
+power exactly at the periodical blooming of the rose.</p>
+
+<hr class="W10">
+
+<p class="normal">THE older, the more tranquil, and pious a man is, so much the more holy
+does he esteem all that is <i>innate</i>, that is, <i>feeling</i> and <i>power</i>;
+whereas in the estimate of the multitude whatsoever is <i>self-acquired</i>,
+the ability of practice and science in general has an undue
+pre-eminence; for the latter is universally appreciated, and therefore
+even by those who have it not, but the former not at all. In the
+twilight and the moonshine the fixed stars, which are suns, retire and
+veil themselves in obscurity; whilst the planets, which are simply
+earths, preserve their borrowed light unobscured. The elder races of
+men, amongst whom man <i>was</i> more, though he had not yet <i>become</i> so
+much, had a childlike feeling of sympathy with all the gifts of the
+Infinite--for example, with strength--beauty--and good fortune; and
+even the <i>involuntary</i> had a sanctity in their eyes, and was to them a
+prophecy and a revelation: hence the value they ascribed, and the
+art of interpretation they applied, to the speeches of children--of
+madmen--of drunkards--and of dreamers.</p>
+
+<hr class="W10">
+
+<p class="normal">As the blind man knows not light, and through that ignorance also of
+necessity knows not darkness,--so likewise, but for disinterestedness
+we should know nothing of selfishness, but for slavery nothing of
+freedom: there are perhaps in this world many things which remain
+obscure to us for want of alternating with their opposites.</p>
+
+<hr class="W10">
+
+<p class="normal">Derham remarks in his Physico-theology that the deaf hear best in the
+midst of noise, as, for instance, during the ringing of bells, &amp;c. This
+must be the reason, I suppose, that the thundering of drums, cannons,
+&amp;c., accompany the entrance into cities of princes and ministers, who
+are generally rather deaf, in order that they may the better hear the
+petitions and complaints of the people.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h1><span class="sc"><a name="div1Ref_misc" href="#div1_misc">Miscellaneous Pieces</a></span>.</h1>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_misc01" href="#div1_misc01">REMINISCENCES<br>
+OF THE BEST HOURS OF LIFE FOR THE HOUR OF DEATH.</a></h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Give me,&quot; said Herder to his son, as he lay in the parched weariness
+of his last illness,--&quot;give me a great thought, that I may quicken
+myself with it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">It marks a strange perversity in human nature, that we are wont to
+offer nothing but images of terror--no stars of cheering light--to
+those who lie imprisoned in the darkness of a sick-bed, when the
+glitter of the dew of life is waxing gray and dim before them. It is
+indeed hard that lamentations and emotions are frequently vented upon
+the dying, which would be withheld from the living in all their vigor;
+as if the sick patient was to console those in health. There stands no
+spirit in the closeness of a sick-chamber to awaken a cheering smile on
+that nerveless, colorless countenance; but only confessors, lawyers,
+and doctors, who order everything, and relatives who lament at
+everything. There stands no lofty spirit, elevated above the
+circumstance of sorrow, to conduct the prostrate soul of the sufferer,
+thirsty for the refreshment of joy, back to the old springtide waters
+of pious recollection; and so to mingle these with the last ecstasies
+of life, as to give the dying man a foreboding of his transition to
+another state. On the contrary, the death-bed is narrowed into a coffin
+without a lid. The value of life is enhanced to the departing one by
+lies which promise cure, or words which proffer consolation; the bier
+is represented as a scaffold, the harsh discord of life is trumpeted
+into the ears which survive long after the eyes are dead, instead of
+letting life ebb away like an echo in sounds ever deeper, though
+fainter. Nevertheless, man has this of good in him, that he recalls the
+slightest joy which he has shared with a dying person, far rather than
+a thousand greater pleasures given to a person in health; perhaps
+because, in the latter case, we hope to repeat and redouble our
+attentions,--so little do mortals reflect that every pleasure they give
+or they receive may be the last.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Our exit from life would therefore be greatly more painful than our
+entrance into it, were it not that our good mother Nature had
+previously mitigated its sufferings, by gently bearing her children
+from one world into another when they are already heavy with sleep. For
+in the hour before the last she allows a breastplate of indifference
+toward the survivors to freeze about the heart of the lamented one; and
+in the hour immediately preceding dissolution (as we learn from those
+who have recovered from apparent death, and from the demeanor of many
+dying persons), the brain is, as it were, inundated and watered by
+faint eddies of bliss, comparable to nothing upon earth better than to
+the ineffable sensations felt by a patient under magnetic treatment.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">We can by no means know how high these sensations of dying may reach,
+as we have accounts of them from none but those in whom the process has
+been interrupted; nor can we ascertain whether it is not these
+ecstatical transports which exhaust life more than the convulsions of
+pain, and which loosen the tie of this terrestrial state in some
+unknown heaven.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The history of the dying is a serious and prodigious history, but on
+earth its leaves will never be unrolled.</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">In the little village of Heim, Gottreich Hartmann resided with his old
+father, who was a curate; and although the old man had wellnigh
+outlived all those whom he had loved, he was made happy by his son.
+Gottreich discharged his duties for him in the parish, not so much in
+aid of his parent's unflinching vigor, as to satisfy his own energy,
+and to give his father the exquisite gratification of being edified by
+his child and companion.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In Gottreich there thrilled a spirit of true poetry; he was not, like
+the greater number of poetical young men, a bulbous plant, which, when
+it has sent forth its own flower, fattens its unseemly fruit
+underground; but he was a tree which crowned its variegated blossoms
+with sweet and beautiful fruits; and these buds were as yet coiled up
+from the warmth of the earliest springtide of a poet's life.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">His father had had in his youth a poet's ardor of like intensity, but
+it was not favored by the times; for in the last century many a spirit
+which might have soared was engaged to the pulpit or the law-court,
+because the old-fashioned middle classes were convinced that their
+offspring would find richer pasture on the meadow and in the valley
+than on the peaks of the mountain of the Muses.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Nevertheless, the repressed spirit of a poet, when it cannot exhale
+itself in creation, recoils but the more closely into the depths of his
+heart. His unuttered feelings speak in his motions as with a voice, and
+his actions express his imagery, and in this manner the poet may live
+as long as the man; just as the short-lived butterfly may last out the
+long, hard winter in its chrysalis state, if it has not burst its
+prison in the preceding summer.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Such had been the life of the elder Hartmann; and yet more beautiful
+was it, because the virginal soul of the poet lives in the offices of
+religion, as in a nun's cell; and the twin sisters Piety and Poetry are
+wont to dwell together and stand by one another.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">How beautiful and how pure is the position of God's ministers! All that
+is good dwells around them,--religion, poetry, and the life of a
+shepherd of souls; whilst other professions oft serve only to choke up
+this goodly neighborhood. Son and father seemed to live in one another,
+and on the site of filial and paternal love there arose the structure
+of a rare and singular friendship. Gottreich not only cheered his
+father by the new birth of his lost poet's youth, but by the still more
+beautiful similarity of their faith. In days gone by, a minister who
+sent his son to the public theological schools might expect him to
+return the sworn antagonist of all that he had himself daily prayed to
+at the altar in the discharge of his office: the son returned to his
+father's roof as a missionary sent to convert the heathen, or as an
+antichrist. There may have been sorrows of a father, which, though all
+unspoken, were deeper than a mother's sorrows. But times are perhaps
+better now.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Gottreich, though he entered the high schools with his share of the
+uppish, quibbling of early youth, returned with the faith of his
+ancestors and of his father. For he had studied under instructors who
+had taught him to cling rather to the teachings of the old faith than
+to the ingenious explanations of the commentators, and who had exposed
+to the light alone what is serviceable to man, as to a plant, and to
+its outward growth, but not the roots perniciously. Thus the father
+found again his old Christian heart sending forth new shoots in the
+bosom of his Gottreich, and moreover the best justification of the
+convictions of his life and of his love.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">If it be pain to us to love and at the same time to contradict, to
+refuse with the head what the heart grants, it is all the sweeter to us
+to find ourselves and our faith transplanted forwards in a younger
+being. Life is then a beautiful night, in which not one star goes down
+but another rises in its place.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Gottreich possessed a paradise, in which he labored as his father's
+gardener; he was at once the wife, the brother, the friend, the all
+that is to be loved by man, of his parent. Every Sunday brought him a
+new pleasure, that of preaching a sermon before his father. He
+displayed so much power in his pulpit eloquence, that he seemed to
+labor more for the elevation and edification of his father than for the
+enlightenment of the common people; though he held a maxim, which I
+take to be far from erroneous, that the highest subjects of
+intellectual speculation are good for the people as for children, and
+that <i>man can only learn to rise, from the consideration of that which
+he cannot surmount</i>. If the eye of the old man was moistened, or if his
+hands were suddenly folded in an attitude of prayer, the Sunday became
+the holiest of festivals; and many a festival has there been in that
+quiet little parsonage, whose festivity no one understood and no one
+perceived. He who looks upon sermon-preaching and sermon-hearing as a
+dull pleasure, will but little understand the zest with which the two
+friends conversed on discourses delivered, and on those yet to come, as
+if pulpit-criticism was as engrossing as the criticism of the stage.
+The approbation and the love of an energetic old man like Hartmann,
+whose spiritual limbs had by no means stiffened on the chilly ridge of
+years, could not but exercise a powerful influence on a young man like
+Gottreich, who, more tenderly and delicately formed both in body and
+mind, was wont to shoot forth in loftier and more rapid flame.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">To these two happy men was added a happy woman also. Justa, an
+orphan, sole mistress of her property, had entirely left and sold the
+trading-house which had been her father's, in the town, and had removed
+into the upper part of a good peasant's cottage, to live entirely in
+the country. Justa did nothing in the world by halves, but she often
+did things more than most would deem completely, at least in all that
+touched her generosity. She had not long resided in the village of
+Heim, and had seen the meek Gottreich, and listened to some of his
+springtide sermons, ere she discovered that he had won her heart,
+filled as it was with the love of virtue; she nevertheless refused to
+grant him her hand until the conclusion of the great peace, after
+which they were to be married. She was ever fonder of doing what is
+difficult than what is easy. I wish that it was here the place to
+tell of the May-time life they led, which seemed to blossom in the low
+parsonage-house hard by the church-door under Justa's hand; how she came
+in the morning from her own cottage, to order matters in the little
+dwelling for the day; how the evenings were passed in the garden,
+ornamented with few, but pretty flower-beds, and commanding a view of
+many a well-watered meadow and distant hill, and stars without number;
+how these three hearts played into one another, no one of which in this
+most pure and intimate intercourse knew or felt anything which was not
+of the fairest; and how good and gay intention marked the passage of
+their lives. Every bench was a church chair, all was peaceful and holy,
+and the firmament above an infinite church dome.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In many a village and in many a house a true Eden may be hid, which has
+neither been named nor marked down; for joy is fond of covering over
+and concealing her tenderest flowers. Gottreich reposed in such a
+fulness of bliss and love, of poetry and religion, of springtime, of
+the past and of the future, that he feared in the bottom of his heart
+to speak his happiness out, save in prayer. In prayer, thought he, man
+may say all, his happiness and his misery. His father was very happy
+also; there came over him a warm old age,--no winter night, but a
+summer evening, without frost or darkness: albeit the sun of his life
+was sunk pretty deep below the mound of earth under which his wife was
+lain down to sleep.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Nothing recalls the close of life to a noble-hearted young man so much
+as precisely the happiest and fairest hours which he passes. Gottreich,
+in the midst of the united fragrance and beauty of the flowers of joy,
+even with the morning-star of life above him, could not but think on
+the time when the same should appear to him as the evening star,
+warning him of sleep. Then said he to himself: &quot;All is now so certain
+and so clear before me,--the beauty and the holiness of life, the
+splendor of the universe, the Creator, the dignity and the greatness of
+man's heart, the bright images of eternal truth, the whole starry
+firmament of ideas, which enlightens, instructs, and upholds man! But
+when I am grown old, and in the obstruction of death, will not all that
+now rustles so bloomingly and livingly about me appear gray and dull?
+Just when man is approaching that heaven which he has so long
+contemplated, Death holds the telescope inverted before his dim eye,
+and lets him see only what is empty, distant, shadowy. But is this
+indeed true? Shall I be more likely to be right when I only feel and
+think and hope, with half a life, incapable of a keen glance or an
+intense sensation,--or am I right now, that my whole heart is warm,
+that my whole head is clear, and my strength fresh? I acknowledge that
+the present is the fittest season, and that precisely because I do
+acknowledge it to be the fittest. I will then live through this daytime
+of truth attentively, and bear it away with me to the evening dusk,
+that it may lighten my end.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In these sweetest May-hours of youth, when heaven and earth and his own
+heart were beating together in harmony, he gave ardent words to his
+ardent thoughts, and kept them written down under the title of
+&quot;<i>Reminiscences of the best Hours of Life for the Hour of Death</i>.&quot; He
+meant to cheer himself at his last hour with these views of his happy
+life, and to look back from the glow of the evening to the brightness
+of the morning of his youth.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Thus lived these three beings, ever rejoicing more deeply in one
+another and in their genial happiness, when at last the chariots of the
+struggle and the victories of the holy War<a name="div2Ref_77" href="#div2_77"><sup>[77]</sup></a>
+began to roll over the
+land.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Now Gottreich became another man; like a young bird of passage, which,
+though it know nothing of summer climates, frets in its warm cage that
+it cannot fly away with the older birds of its kind. The active powers
+of his nature, which had heretofore been the quiet audience of his
+poetical and oratorical powers, arose; and it seemed to him as if the
+spirit of energy, which hitherto had wasted itself like the flames of a
+bituminous soil on the empty air, were now seeking an object to lay
+hold of. He dared not, however, risk to propose a separation to his
+father, but he by turns tormented and refreshed himself inwardly with
+the idea of laboring and combating with the rest. To Justa alone he
+confided his wishes, but she did not give them encouragement, because
+she thought the old man's solitude would be too great for him to bear.
+At last the old man himself, inspirited for war by Gottreich and his
+betrothed one, said that his son had better go, that he had long
+desired it, and had only been silent through love for him. He hoped,
+with God's aid, to be able to discharge his pastoral duties for a
+twelvemonth; so that he, too, should be doing something for his
+country.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Gottreich departed, trusting to the autumnal strength of his father's
+life. He enlisted as a common soldier, and preached also wherever he
+was able. The entrance on a new career awakens new energies and powers,
+which rapidly unfold into life and vigor. Although fortune spared him
+the wounds which he would so willingly have brought back with him into
+the peaceful future of his life, in memory as it were of the focus of
+his youth, yet it was happiness enough to take part in the battles,
+and, like an old republican, to fight together with a whole nation for
+the common cause.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">When at length, in the most beautiful month of May which ever Germany
+had won by conquest, the festivals of victory and of peace began in
+more than one nation. Gottreich was unwilling to pass those days of
+rejoicing so far from those who were dearest to him; he longed for
+their company, that his joy might be doubled: so he took the road to
+Heim. Thousands, before and after him, journeyed at that time over the
+liberated land, from a happy past to a happy future; but few there were
+who saw, like Gottreich, so pure a firmament over the mountains of his
+native valleys, in which not a star was missing, but every one of them
+was twinkling and bright. Justa had already sent him the little annals
+of the parsonage; had told him how she longed for his return, and how
+his father rejoiced; how well the old man stood the labors of his
+office, and how she had still better secrets of joy in store for him.
+To these latter belonged, perhaps, one which he had not forgotten,
+namely, her promise to give him her hand after the great peace.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">With such prospects he enjoyed in thought, ever from Whitsuntide
+forwards, that holy evening when he should unexpectedly relieve the old
+man from all his labors, and begin to prepare the tranquil festivities
+of the village.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">As he was thus thinking upon that day's meeting, and as the mountains
+above his father's village, in which he was so soon to clasp those fond
+hearts to his own, were seen more and more clearly in relief against
+the blue sky, his &quot;Reminiscences of the best Hours of Life for the Hour
+of Death&quot; re-echoed in his soul, and he could not refrain from noting
+amongst them, as he went along, the joy of meeting again here below.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Behind him there was coming up a storm from the east, in the direction
+of his home, before which he seemed to come a happy messenger; for the
+storms of war, which he had seen upon the earth, had reconciled to him
+and made him love those of heaven; and the parched ground, the dropping
+flowers, and the ears of corn had long been thirsting for the waters of
+the warm clouds. A parishioner of Heim, who was laboring in the fields,
+saluted him as he passed, and expressed his joy that the rain and
+Gottreich had both come at last together.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And now he caught sight of the low church-steeple, peeping from the
+clustered trees, and he entered upon that tract of the valley where the
+parsonage lay, all reddened by the evening sun. At every window he
+hoped to see his betrothed one, if perchance she might be looking out
+on the sunset before the storm came on; and as he came nearer, he hoped
+to see the lattice open, and Whitsuntide brooms in the chief apartment;
+but he found nothing of all this.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">At last he entered quietly the parsonage-house, and slowly opened the
+well-known door. The room was empty, but he heard a noise overhead.
+When he opened the door of his upper chamber, which was filled with a
+glow from the west, Justa was kneeling before the bed of his father,
+who, sitting half upright, was looking with a haggard, stiff, and bony
+countenance toward the setting sun before him. A clasp of her lover to
+her breast, and one exclamation, was all his reception. But his father
+stretched his wizened hand slowly out, and said, with difficulty, &quot;Thou
+art come at the right time!&quot; without adding whether he spoke of the
+preachings or of their separation.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Justa hastily related how the old man had overworked himself, till body
+and spirit had given way together,--so that he no longer took a share
+in anything, though he longed to be with the sharers,--and how he lay
+prostrate with broken wings, looking upwards like a needy child. The
+old man was grown hard of hearing, and she could say all this in his
+presence.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Gottreich soon confirmed it to himself. He would fain have infused the
+fire of conquest, reflected in his own bosom, which, like a red evening
+cloud, was announcing a fair dawn to Europe, into that old and once
+strong heart; but he heard neither wish nor question of it. The old
+man gazed steadily upon the sun, until at last it was hid by the storm.
+Nevertheless the war of the elements seemed to touch him but little;
+the glare of life broke dimly through the thickening ice of death. A
+dying man knows no present,--nothing but the future and the past.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">On a sudden the landscape grew dark, all the winds stood pent, the
+earth oppressed; then there came a gush of rain and a crash of thunder.
+The lightning streamed around the old man, and he looked up altered and
+astonished. &quot;Hist!&quot; said he; &quot;I hear the rain once more;--speak
+quickly, children, for I shall soon depart.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Both his children clung to him, but he was too weak to embrace them.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And now, as the warm, healing springs of the clouds bathed the sick
+earth, down from the dripping tree to the blades of grass, and as the
+sky glistened mildly as with a tear of joy, and the thunder went
+warring away behind the distant mountains, the sick man pointed
+upwards, and said, &quot;Seest thou the lordliness of God? My son,
+strengthen now at the last my weary soul with something holy, in the
+spirit of love, and not of penance; for if our hearts condemn us not,
+then have we confidence toward God. Say something rich in love to me of
+God and of his works.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Then the eyes of his son overflowed, to think that he should read the
+Reminiscences which he had prepared for his own death-bed at the
+death-bed of his father. When he said this to him, the old man
+answered, &quot;Hasten, my son!&quot; and with a faltering voice, Gottreich began
+to read:--</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Remember, in the darkening hour, that the glow of the universe once
+filled thy breast, and that thou hast acknowledged the magnitude of
+existence. Hast thou not looked forth into one half of infinity by
+night, and into the other half by day? Think away the nothingness of
+space, and the earth which is around thee; worlds above, around, and
+beneath arch thee about as a centre, all impelling and impelled,
+splendor within splendor, magnitude within magnitude; all brightness
+centring in the universal Sun. Carry thy thoughts forwards through
+eternity, toward that universal Sun; thou shalt not arrive at darkness
+nor emptiness. What is empty dwells only between the worlds, not around
+the world.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Remember, in the dark hour, those times when thou hast prayed to God
+in ecstasy, and when thou hast thought on him,--the greatest thought of
+finite man,--the Infinite One!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Here the old man clasped his hands, and prayed low.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Hast thou not known and felt the existence of that Being, whose
+infinity consists not only in his strength, in his wisdom, and his
+eternity, but also in his love and in his justice? Canst thou forget
+the time when the blue sky by day and the blue sky by night opened on
+thee, as if the mildness of God was looking down on thee? Hast thou not
+felt the love of the Infinite, when it veiled itself in its image, in
+loving hearts of men; as the sun, which casts its light not on our moon
+alone, for our nights, but on the morning and evening star also, and on
+every little twinkler, even to the farthest from the earth?</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Remember, in the dark hour, how in the spring of thy life the mounds
+of earth which are graves appeared to thee only as the mountain-tops of
+another far and new world; and how in the midst of the fulness of life
+thou didst acknowledge the value of death. The snow of the grave shall
+warm the frost-bitten limbs of age to life again. As a navigator who
+suddenly disembarks from the cold, wintry, and lonely sea, upon a coast
+which is laden with the warm, rich blossoms of spring, so with one leap
+from our little bark we pass at once from winter to an eternal
+springtime.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Rejoice, in this dark hour, that thy life dwells in the midst of a
+wider and larger life. The earth-clod of the globe has been divinely
+breathed upon. A world swarms with life,--for the leaf of every tree is
+a land of souls; and every little life would freeze and perish, if it
+were not warmed and borne up by the eddies of life about it. The sea
+of time glitters, like the sea of space, with countless beings of
+light: death and resurrection are the valleys and mountains of the
+ever-swelling ocean. There exists no dead anatomy; what seems to be
+such is only another body. Without a universal living existence, there
+would be nothing but a wide, all-encompassing death. We cling like
+mosses to the Alps of nature, drawing life from the high clouds. Man is
+the butterfly which flutters up to Chimborazo, but above the butterfly
+soars the condor: however many, small or great, the giant and the child
+are free wanderers in one garden; and the fly of a day may retrace its
+infinite series of progenitors to those first beings of its kind which
+played over the waters of Paradise before the evening sun.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Never forget the thought, which is now so clear to thee, that the
+individuality of man lasts out the greatest suffering and the most
+entrancing joy alike unscathed, while the body crumbles away in the
+pains and pleasures of the flesh. Herein are souls like marsh-lights,
+which shine in the storm and the rain unextinguishable.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Canst thou forget, in the dark hour, that there have been mighty men
+amongst us, and that thou art following after them? Raise thyself like
+the spirits which stood upon their mountains, having the storm of life
+only about and never above them. Call back to thee the kingly race of
+sages and of poets, who have inspirited and enlightened nation after
+nation.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Speak of our Redeemer!&quot; said the father.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Remember Jesus Christ, in the dark hour,--remember Him who also passed
+through life,--remember that soft Moon of the infinite Sun, given to
+enlighten the night of the world. Let life be hallowed to thee, and
+death also, for he shared both of them with thee. May his calm and
+lofty form look down on thee in the last darkness, and show thee his
+Father!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">A low roll of thunder was now heard to pass over the dun clouds which
+the tempest had left, and the setting sun filled the entire vault of
+heaven with the magnificence of his fire.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Remember, in the last hour, how the heart of man can love. Canst thou
+forget the love wherewith one heart repays a thousand hearts, and the
+soul during life is nourished and vivified from another soul, as the
+oak of a hundred years clings fast to the same spot with its roots, and
+derives new strength, and sends forth new buds during its hundred
+springs?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Dost thou mean me?&quot; said the father.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I mean my mother also,&quot; replied the son.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Justa wept, when she heard how her lover would console himself in his
+last hours with the reminiscence of the days of her love; and the
+father said, but very gently, thinking on his wife, &quot;To meet again, to
+meet again!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Remember then, in the last hour,&quot; continued Gottreich, &quot;that pure
+being with whom thy life was beautiful and great,--with whom thou hast
+wept tears of joy, with whom thou hast prayed to God, and in whom God
+appeared unto thee, in whom thou didst find the first and last heart of
+love,--and then close thine eyes in peace!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">On a sudden the clouds were cleft into two huge, black mountains,
+and the deep sun looked forth from between them, as it were out of
+a valley between buttresses of rock, gazing upon the earth with its
+joy-glistening eye.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;See!&quot; said the dying man, &quot;what a glare!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It is the evening sun, father.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Ay, this day shall we see one another again!&quot; continued the old man;
+but he spoke of his wife, who was long since dead.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The son was unable, from his emotion, to paint to his father the
+blessedness of meeting again upon the earth, which he had that very day
+enjoyed by anticipation and described upon his journey; or to say to
+him how it comes, that meeting again is a renewal of love in a better
+state; and that, if the first meeting was apt to overflow into the
+future, reminiscence binds the flowers of the present and the fruits of
+the past upon one stem.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Who could have courage to speak of the joys of earthly meeting to one
+who seemed to be already in the contemplation of a meeting in heaven?</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Startled, he asked, &quot;Father, what ails thee?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I <i>do</i> think thereon in the dark hour; ay, thereon and thereupon
+again; and death is also beautiful, and the parting in Christ,&quot;
+murmured to himself the old man, as he tried to take Gottreich's hand,
+which he had not strength to press. It was but the usual nervous
+snatching of the fingers of the dying. He continued to think that his
+son was still speaking to him, and said, more and more distinctly and
+emphatically, &quot;O thou blessed God!&quot; until all the other luminaries of
+life were extinguished, and in his soul there stood nothing but the one
+sun,--God!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">At length he raised himself, and, stretching out his arm forcibly,
+exclaimed: &quot;There are three fair rainbows over the evening sun; I must
+go after the sun, and pass through with him!&quot; He then fell back, and
+all was over.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">At that moment the sun went down, and there glimmered at his setting a
+broad rainbow in the east.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;He is gone!&quot; said Gottreich to Justa, in a voice choked with grief;
+&quot;but he is gone from us unto his God, in the midst of great, pious, and
+unmingled joy; then weep no more, Justa!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">At that moment his own hitherto restrained tears found a vent, and he
+pressed the dead hand against his face.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">It grew dark, and a warm rain distilled gently over the earth. The
+children left his motionless form alone, and wept more tranquilly for
+that sun of their love, which, with its pure light, had withdrawn from
+the clouds and tempests of the world to another dawn.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_misc02" href="#div1_misc02">THE NEW-YEAR'S NIGHT OF AN UNHAPPY MAN.</a></h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">An old man stood in the New-Year's night at the window, and gazed with
+a look of restless despair upon the immutable, ever-blooming heaven,
+and out over the still pure white earth whereupon there was now no one
+so joyless and sleepless as he. For his grave stood near to him. It was
+covered only with the snow of age, not with the green of youth; and he
+brought with him thither out of his whole rich life nothing but errors
+and sins and sickness; a ruined body, a desolated soul, a breast full
+of poison, an old age full of remorse. The fair days of his youth
+wandered about him now like ghosts, and they bore him back again to
+that clear morning when his father first placed him at the cross-road
+of life, the right hand leading by the sunny ways of virtue into a
+wide, peaceful land, full of light and of harvests; the left, down into
+the mole-ways of vice towards a black cavern, full of down-dropping
+poison, full of darting serpents and dark sultry damps.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Ah! the serpents hung about his breast, and the poison-drops upon his
+tongue, and he knew now where he was.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Knowing not what he did, and with unspeakable grief, he cried out to
+Heaven: &quot;Give me my youth once more! O father, place me again upon the
+cross-road, that I may choose otherwise!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But his father and his youth were long gone. He saw wandering lights
+dancing on the marshes, and dying out upon <i>God's Acre</i>, and he said,
+&quot;These are my sinful days!&quot; He saw a star fly out from heaven, to
+glimmer in its fall, and to be extinguished on the earth. &quot;That is I,&quot;
+said his bleeding heart; and the serpent-teeth of remorse gnawed again
+into his wounds.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">His burning fancy showed him creeping night-wanderers upon the roofs,
+and the windmill threw up its arms threatening to crush him, and a mask
+left behind in the dead-house assumed by degrees his own feature.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Suddenly, in the midst of this tumult, music for the New Year flowed
+down from the tower, like distant church-song. He was deeply moved. He
+looked around the horizon and over the wide earth, and thought of his
+youthful friends, who now, happier and better than he, were teachers
+for the world, fathers of happy children, and favored men, and he
+said, &quot;O, I also could be happy, dear parents, had I fulfilled your
+New-Year's wishes and instructions.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In the feverish memories of his youth, it seemed to him that the mask
+with his features raised itself up in the dead-house; finally, through
+the superstition which discerns spirits and the future on New-Year's
+night, it became a living youth, in the position of the beautiful boy
+of the Capitol, pulling out a thorn, and his formerly blooming face
+danced weird and bitter before him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He could look no more: he covered his eyes: hot tears streamed down
+upon the snow;--again he softly sighed, hopeless and unconscious, &quot;Come
+again, O youth, come again!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And it came again; for on that New-Year's night he had only dreamed
+thus fearfully. He was still a youth; yet his errors had been no dream.
+But he thanked God that he, still young, might turn aside from the foul
+ways of vice, and could follow the sunny path which leads to the fair
+land of harvests. Turn aside with him, O youth, if thou standest upon
+his wandering way. This frightful dream will in future be thy judge;
+but if thou shouldst one day call out, full of grief, &quot;Come again, O
+beautiful youth!&quot; so shall it never return again.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_misc03" href="#div1_misc03">THE DEATH OF AN ANGEL.</a></h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">The tenderest and kindest angel, the Angel of the <i>last</i> hour, whom we
+harshly call Death, is sent to us, that he may mildly and gently pluck
+away the sinking heart of man from life, and bear it unhurt in his warm
+hands out of the cold breast into high, warming Eden. His brother is
+the Angel of the first hour, who twice kisses man,--once when he begins
+this life; and again, when he awakes on high, without wounds, and
+enters smiling upon the other life, as he came weeping into this.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">As the Angel of the last hour saw the battle-fields stretched before
+him, full of blood and tears, and drew the trembling souls away, his
+mild eyes melted, and he said: &quot;Ah! I will once die like man, that I
+may enter into his last agony, and soothe it when I dissolve the ties
+of life!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The boundless circle of angels, who love each other above, pressed
+around the sympathetic one, and promised their beloved to surround him
+with heavenly rays after the instant of his death; thereby he might
+know that death had been; and his brother, whose kiss opens our cold
+lips, as the morning light does the chill flowers, gently touched his
+forehead, and said: &quot;When I kiss thee again, my brother, thou shalt
+have died upon the earth, and will be again with us.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Loving and moved, the Angel descended to the battlefield, where only
+one beautiful, ardent Youth still panted, and heaved his shattered
+breast. Near the hero stood his Betrothed alone. He could no longer
+feel her hot tears, and her sorrow passed him unrecognized, like a
+distant battle-cry.--Then the Angel quickly clothed himself in her dear
+form, rested by him, drew the wounded soul with one hot kiss out of the
+cloven breast, and gave it to his brother on high, who kissed it for
+the second time, when suddenly it smiled.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The Angel of the last hour passed like a lightning-flash into
+the deserted frame, shone through the body, and stirred the warm
+life-stream again with the strengthened heart. But how was he affected
+by this new clothing of the body! His clear eye became confused in the
+whirl of unwonted, nervous life;--his once flying thought waded now
+slowly through the atmosphere of his brain,--the moist, faint-hued
+vapor dried away from all objects which formerly hung, autumnal-like,
+floating over them; now they pierced him out of the hot air with
+burning, painful spots of color,--all sensations became more gloomy,
+yet stormier and more nearly allied to <i>self</i>; and they seemed to him
+to be like instinct, as those of the beasts appear to us. Hunger tore
+him, thirst consumed him, pain stabbed him. Alas! his breast, torn and
+bleeding, heaved upward, and his first breath drawn was his first sigh
+after the heaven he had left! &quot;Is this the death of man?&quot; he thought;
+but as he did not see the promised token of death, neither angel nor
+the surrounding heavenly flame, therefore he perceived this to be only
+the life of man.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In the evening, the earthly strength of the Angel declined, and a
+crushing globe seemed to revolve about his head. Then Sleep sent his
+messengers. Images of the mind shifted out of the sunshine into a misty
+fire; the shadows of the day were thrown upon his brain; they came
+confused, and colossal, one upon another, and the world of sense reared
+itself uncontrolled and poured in upon him. Then Dream sent his
+messengers. Finally the funereal veil of Sleep wrapped itself thickly
+about him, and, sunk in the vault of night, he lay there lonely and
+motionless, like us poor mortals. But then, thou, heavenly Dream! didst
+descend, with thy thousand reflecting-glasses before his soul, and
+didst show in all of them a circle of angels and a radiant heaven; and
+the earthly body seemed to fall away from him with all its thorns.
+&quot;Ah!&quot; said he, in vain rapture, &quot;my sleep was also my death.&quot; Yet when
+he awoke again, with his compressed heart full of heavy human blood,
+and looked out upon the earth and upon the night, he cried, &quot;I saw the
+angels and the starry heavens; but it was only the image of Death, and
+not his presence.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The Betrothed of the translated hero did not mark that an angel only
+dwelt in the breast of her beloved; yet she loved the purified aspect
+of the wounded soul, and still gladly held the hand of him who had past
+so far away. But the Angel loved her deceived heart with the love of a
+man's soul in return; jealous of his own nature, he wished that he
+might not die before her, but love her so long that she might forgive
+him, when they met again in heaven, for having clasped together upon
+her breast an angel and a lover. Yet she died sooner; the late sorrow
+had bowed the head of this flower too low, and it lay broken upon the
+grave. She sank before the weeping Angel, not like the sun, who before
+all-beholding Nature casts himself so gorgeous into the sea that its
+red waves strike the very heaven, but like the tranquil moon, who, in
+the midnight, silvers the vaporous air, and sinks down unseen behind
+its dim veil. Death sent his gentler sister Unconsciousness before; she
+touched the heart of the Betrothed, and chilled the warm countenance;
+the flowers of her cheek withered; the pale snow of winter, under which
+the spring of eternity grows green, clothed her forehead and her hands.
+Then a burning tear broke from the swelling eye of the Angel, and,
+while he thought his heart loosed itself in the form of a tear as a
+pearl from the brittle shell, his Betrothed, awaked to the last
+delirium, moved her eyes once again, drew him close to her heart, and
+died as she kissed him, and said, &quot;Now I am with thee, my brother!&quot;
+Then the Angel believed his heavenly brother had given him the sign of
+the kiss and death. Yet no radiant heaven surrounded him, nor aught but
+funereal darkness, and he sighed because this was not his death, only
+the anguish of man over the death of another.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;O ye afflicted mortals!&quot; he cried, &quot;how can ye weary ones survive
+this! How can ye become old when the circle of youthful forms breaks
+and lies at length altogether scattered around,--when the graves of
+your friends lead down like steps to your own,--and when age becomes
+like the silent, blank evening hour of a cold battle-field! O ye poor
+mortals! how can your hearts endure it?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The body of the translated hero-soul placed the gentle Angel among hard
+men, their injustice, and the distortions of Vice and of Passion; about
+his figure, also, was laid the thorny girdle of sceptres bound
+together, which compresses the hemispheres with its stings, and
+which is always laced more tightly by the great; he saw the claws of
+crowned and emblazoned beasts fasten themselves on their displumed
+prey, and heard it panting with enfeebled beating of the wings; he saw
+the whole terrestrial globe encircled in the winding swarthy folds of
+the giant-serpent, Vice, plunging and concealing its poisonous head
+deep in the breast of man. Then the hot sting of enmity was made to
+shoot through that tender heart, which, during a long eternity, had
+lain in the warmth of angelic love, and the holy love-fed spirit was
+forced to shudder over an inward dissolution. &quot;Ah!&quot; said he, &quot;the death
+of man is full of woe!&quot; Yet this was not death; for no angel appeared.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Thus in a few days he became weary of this life which we bear for half
+a hundred years, and he longed to go back. The evening sun attracted
+his kindred spirit. The wounds of his shattered breast exhausted him
+with pain. He went out with the evening glow upon his pale cheeks to
+&quot;God's Acre,&quot; that green background of our life, where the forms which
+he had once stripped of all their beautiful souls were now crumbling
+away. He placed himself with sorrowful longing upon the bare grave of
+his unspeakably beloved and departed bride, and looked towards the
+fading evening sun. Seated on this dear knoll, he regarded his
+suffering body, and thought: Thou also, tender breast, wouldst be lying
+here in decay, and wouldst give no more pain, did I not support thee.
+Then he reflected upon the grievous life of man, and the throbs of the
+wounded breast showed him the pangs with which mortals purchase their
+virtue and their death, and which he had joyfully spared the noble soul
+of this body. Deeply touched by human virtue, he wept out of his
+boundless love for men, who, amid the craving of their own needs, under
+low-hung clouds, behind mists which stream over the sharp-cutting paths
+of life, never turn away from the lofty star of duty, but in their
+darkness stretch out loving arms towards every suffering breast they
+encounter, while around them nothing glimmers but the hope of setting
+like the sun in the old world, in order to arise in the new.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Just then the ecstasy opened his wounds, and blood, the tear of the
+soul, flowed from his heart upon the cherished knoll,--the dissolving
+body sank quietly towards his beloved,--tears of rapture broke the
+sunset light into, a rosy, swimming sea,--distant echoing tones, as of
+the earth passing wide through ringing ether, played in the vaporous
+lustre. Then a dark cloud or short night shot by the Angel, and was
+full of sleep; and now a radiant heaven opened and overspread him, and
+a thousand angels shone around. &quot;Art thou again here, thou deceiving
+dream?&quot; he said. But the Angel of the first hour stepped through the
+rays to him, and gave the sign of the kiss, and said: &quot;That was death,
+thou immortal brother and heavenly friend!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And the Youth and his beloved softly repeated the words.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_misc04" href="#div1_misc04">A DREAM AND THE TRUTH.</a></h2>
+
+<h3>WRITTEN ON THE DEATH OF A MOTHER FOLLOWING<br>
+THAT OF HER HUSBAND.</h3>
+
+<p class="normal">Sleep buries the first world, its nights and sorrows, and brings to us
+a second world, with the forms we have loved and lost, and scenes too
+vast for this little earth.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I was in the Isle of the Blest, in the second world. This I dreamed.
+The stars were nearer; the heaven-blue lay on the flowers; all the
+breezes were melodious tones; and repose and ravishment, which with us
+are sundered, there dwelt conjoined. And the dead, from around whom had
+fallen that mist of life which veiled the higher heaven before, rested
+like mild evening suns in the azure ether.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Then, behold, the earth rose out of the deep beneath, on her course,
+and the Spring had covered her with his blossoms and buds. As she drew
+nearer to the Isle of the Blest, a voice full of love cried, &quot;Look
+down, ye dead, on your old home, and see the beloved who have lost, but
+not forgotten you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">For in the spring the earth always passes by the eternal World of the
+Blest, whose off-cast husk sinks into its clods; and therefore it is,
+that in the spring poor mortals experience such a profound longing, so
+powerful a presentiment, and so many haunting recollections of their
+lost beloved.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">After the voice, all the Blest stepped forward on the shore of the
+Supernal Isle, and each one sought on the wan earth the heart which had
+remembered him. One noble being gazed down, seeking after his spouse
+and after his children, around whom the glad spring-tide of earth was
+flowing; but <i>they</i> had no spring.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Alas! the father now saw his wife racked with anguish, and his children
+dissolved in tears. He discerned, in the strangling hand of Pain, the
+pallid form whose convulsed heart now reposes, and whose moistened eyes
+are now shut and cold; and beside it he recognized the loving companion
+of his former life fatally bleeding on the thorns of earthly martyrdom.
+And as sorrow, with glowing iron stylus, graved in the crumbling image
+life's farewell letter, and as she lost hope, but not yet patience, and
+as her fading eye desired no further happiness save that of her
+children, and as these could only share, but not remove, the sleepless
+nights of their mother, the affectionate father sank down, weeping, and
+prayed: &quot;Eternal One, suffer her to die! Break the agonized bosom, and
+give me my friend again, and heal the wounded form at last under the
+earth. Eternal One, suffer her to die!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And as he prayed, the weary heart here in its martyr-life heard him,
+and his faithful wife returned forever to his heart. Why weep ye,
+tender children, that your parents, after the same sufferings,
+should now have the same joys? that now, after their winter of life,
+an everlasting May has dawned on their souls? Does the painted
+spring-house under the earth trouble you, or the black boundary-hill on
+the earth, or the dread hand of decay, which extinguishes earthly scars
+and wounds and the whole body?</p>
+
+<p class="normal">No, let the Spring scatter his flowers on their cold faces, and dry the
+tears on yours; and when you think painfully of them, comfort
+yourselves with saying, &quot;We tenderly loved them, and no one has
+wounded, save He who now heals them.&quot;</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_misc05" href="#div1_misc05">THE BEAUTY OF DEATH IN THE<br>
+BLOOM OF YOUTH.</a></h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">In the lives both of men and of women, the period of the deepest
+happiness will be found to be, not that of childhood, but of youth. The
+joys of childhood are like the spring flowers,--beautiful, but small;
+like the tinted forget-me-not,--pretty, but without fragrance. The
+higher and more brilliant joys of knowledge and the affections are as
+yet undeveloped; the world of the ideal lies wrapped, as it were, in a
+dark-green bud.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">With what other and what brighter radiance is the period of youth
+encircled!--that heavenly time of our first friendship and our first
+love,--of our first poem and our first philosophy,--of our first full
+enjoyment of nature and music and the drama,--of our first castles in
+the air, and our first vigorous training for active life. And this
+period is not simply irrecoverable,--that is the case with all past
+time,--but for the very reason that in its perfect bloom its only
+office is to minister to the fruits it so beautifully enfolds, it is
+the highest and the culminating period; for there is necessarily a
+greater productive force present in the process than in the results of
+development, in the flower of youth than in the ripeness of manhood. In
+his more advanced years, one is seldom led to enter upon a new path of
+knowledge or a higher moral life; but in his youth, one gives himself
+up, with inextinguishable fire, to some system of philosophy, or some
+total change in his moral life. It calls for more strength in a man to
+be converted than to stand still.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">As the highest bodily strength and the most perfect health, the
+probability of the longest life and the greatest beauty,--in short, the
+best bodily attributes,--belong to the period of youth, so, and for
+that very reason, the intellectual wealth which comes not by
+acquisition, but by inheritance, is the largest. Great attainments,
+experience, and skill are certainly the fruits of age and of labor; but
+what are these things, compared with the ideal enjoyments which come of
+the first sciences we study, when the tree of knowledge, grafted upon
+the tree of life, puts forth its branches,--compared with the delight
+with which the new truths of geometry, or of philosophy, or of any
+favorite science new-born to us, fill the soul? For even in science,
+however far its limits may be pushed, one is ever descending from the
+height of the ideal to the vulgar level of reality.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Youth is the full moon, illumined by the magic light of the sun. Age is
+the new moon, upon which the day-earth (life) throws a meagre light.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>A DREAM OF A BATTLE-FIELD.</h2>
+<br>
+<p class="normal">I dreamed that from far off in the darkness I heard groans which seemed
+to come from every quarter to which I turned. At length they came only
+out of the gate of a valley which led between two, rocky ridges, where
+the darkness was illumined only by the red light of a comet, with its
+sparkling eye, and its tail sweeping back and forth like that of a
+tiger thirsty for blood. Then several wagons, filled with amputated
+hands grasping one the other either in prayer or struggle, came softly
+towards me on unrevolving wheels; and one small wagon also, full of
+eyes without eyelids, which grimly gazed upon and mirrored one another.
+A long metal coffin, mounted on the wheels of a gun-carriage, was with
+difficulty pulled along by iron elephants. On it was inscribed, &quot;The
+ashes of the tenth army.&quot; With frightful exertion it was dragged like a
+tall tree round the corner of the narrow, rocky valley,--forced to bend
+by the weight of its contents, and the end of it seeming never to come.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Over the earth, and the sorrow of it, was a round ball of fire like a
+sun, whence came incessant flashes of lightning. And thirsty people
+opened vessels full of vipers, which darted out, and stung them to more
+burning thirst.... A crown, great like a shield, and red-hot, came
+whirling down with circular motion into a group of soldiers dancing,
+and scattered them. Upon still-gaping wounds it rained down thistles,
+which took root quickly and grew; and upon every fallen corpse struck a
+thunderbolt, and slew it again. I looked up to the heavens for
+consolation; but there, in the place of the sunset's glow, and the
+colors of the dawn, and the northern lights, was smoking blood. Swift
+as an arrow, villages and cities shot through the air like long clouds
+of ashes; some few streets only, which had been blown up by mining,
+hanging fast in the sky, with the remnants of houses and of men
+clinging to them. On a neighboring mountain were glaciers and ice-peaks,
+upon which children were transfixed; and on the distant summits, whence
+one could look down upon the battle-field, were parents and children
+and brides, eagerly gazing upon a mirror held over it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">At length the gate sprang open, and broke in pieces on the
+battle-field, and the storm of woe burst forth. Then I looked in upon
+that terrible world, and fell senseless to the earth; for what I saw
+was too horrible for man to look upon or to remember.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Gradually it seemed to me in my swoon as if this frightful field was
+moving further and further off, while its sounds of horror died away
+into songs of swans. And out of the distance floated up to me, on the
+gentle breezes, the tones of shepherd's flutes,--now far off, now
+near,--breaking, at length, with full sound upon my ear. And then I was
+lifted up and borne along on wings of ether, with the light breaking
+through my closed eyelids. And a creative finger touched me, and high
+in heaven, upon a green cloud, I opened my eyes. Above me was the blue
+abyss of the stars; below me stretched a blue ocean, on whose horizon
+glittered, in the glow of the sunset, the countless islands of the
+blessed; around me floated scattered cloudlets, tinted with the red and
+white of roses and of lilies, and with the many colors of manifold
+flowers.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Who, O God, has brought me to life out of my woe?&quot; I cried.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Child of man, it is my Father who has done it,&quot; answered a soft voice
+very near me. But I saw no form of any person; only a halo of glory
+hovering near me indicated the place of the invisible being.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Under the stare now, on high, rose again, like the songs of the
+spheres, the old mournful tones. The islands on the horizon began to
+move, and swim in joy around one another. Many of them dipped into the
+dark waves, and came up again brilliant as the colors of the morning.
+Some went down into the sea, and reappeared covered with pearls. But
+one of them, crowned with cedars and palms and oaks, with strong young
+giants on its shores, went straight out into the ocean, toward the
+east.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Am I upon earth?&quot; I inquired.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Ask me not,&quot; replied the voice, &quot;for I know all thy thoughts, and will
+answer thee in thy heart. Thou wilt be upon the earth when it rises in
+the east from the sea; beneath the sea it circles swiftly round the
+sun. The sea of time is the wave on the ocean of eternity.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">As if borne upon a stream, the cedar island came ever nearer to the
+green cloud. Youths greater than those of earth looked down upon the
+blue sea, and sang songs of gladness,--or gazed in rapture upon the
+heavens, and folded their hands in prayer,--or slumbered in arbors of
+rainbows and tears of joy. Behind them stood lions; above them circled
+eagles.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Upon the cedar island dwell men <i>who, like me</i>, have died for the
+earth; but in earthly faces shall it be revealed to thee how the
+Infinite Father rewards those who have shed their blood for their
+country. The youths who are looking down into the waves have a nearer
+view of their old earth moving in the waters, as the island moves with
+it. They see only happy countries, and their friends who rejoice in
+their deeds, and posterity which praises them. And every flower which
+sprang from their blood is shown to them of God.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Those who are gazing up to heaven, and praying, see an altar upon
+every sun,--and greater brethren who make higher sacrifices to the
+Highest; and they are entreating the Father to summon them also to
+still higher sacrifices. And when he thunders, he calls them.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Those who are slumbering in tears of joy are seeing their brother
+soldiers dying bravely, and are comforting them in death, and welcoming
+them in tearful recognition as they pass from the earth to the island.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And now white flowers floated up from the earth to the surface of the
+sea, and all the sleepers awoke. The flowers were the souls of their
+mothers, who in death were following their sons fallen upon the
+battle-field; and the flowers became angels and flew towards the youths.
+It was an endless dying of endless joy. The soft murmurs of love from
+those who thus again found one another stirred the lilies and the roses
+to sounds as of harps. But as the mothers breathed the vibrating air
+and their hearts beat tremulously in harmony with the sound, they died
+away and exhaled into a flower-cloud. And the cloud arose and floated
+along the heavens to the distant islands where dwell the good mothers
+and the happy brides, longing still for the time when all the islands
+of the blessed were one fixed land of promise.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Ye sons of men, joy is an eternity older than pain, and ever will be
+so,--for that has scarcely existed. Sacrifice ye, then, time to
+eternity.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">A noble old man with the martyr's crown on his head looked up to the
+green cloud and prayed to the voice near me. Then saw I mirrored in the
+old man's eyes the form of the being near me. And my heart was humbled
+before the greatest man of earth as he repeated to me again the words,
+&quot;Sacrifice time to eternity.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And now there came up from the sea near the cedar island a smoke as of
+a volcano, but throwing out only crowns of oak-leaves and palm-branches
+and streams of light. And at length a vast altar covered with young men
+and old, sleeping, rose from the waves. But when the light of heaven
+touched the sleepers they awoke suddenly, and, rushing upon the island,
+fell upon the breasts of their old comrades in arms. And the stars of
+heaven shone over them in glad, undying token of their union. The
+oak-forests rustled and the lions roared and the eagles, circling in
+the air, bathed themselves for joy in the fire and the lightning which
+shot from the stars. And the storm spread itself over the universe, and
+scattered balls of fire like suns, and thundered as with the noise of
+many worlds, and mingled its hot tears of joy with those of the heroes.
+And from below the sea came a dull echo from the earth. Then the cloud
+sank upon the island, and with a rushing sound received up into itself
+the heroes who had prayed to the Father to permit them to sacrifice in
+higher worlds.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">When the storm had disappeared with them behind the stars, the vastness
+of creation appeared. All being rejoiced in eternity. The worlds lay
+along the heavens like an Alpine chain; the suns encircled the primal
+source of light; and covering all was the Throne of God.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Pray before thou wakest, for the earth, too, will disappear,&quot; said the
+voice near me. And my whole heart was filled with prayer by the very
+nearness of this higher being. But the green cloud now moved more
+rapidly with me eastward toward the approaching earth; and the cedar
+island floated with its happy multitudes towards the other islands. The
+sea glowed in the east as with the colors of the dawn; and deeper and
+deeper sank the green cloud into the aurora of earth.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Suddenly, then, the halo of glory round the head of the invisible being
+became as a great rainbow, and was absorbed in an infinite radiance
+which filled the heavens.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And the earth passed away like a summer night.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I awoke, and instead of the cloud there was a green meadow around me,
+and above me glittered the stars. The first night of summer had
+followed the last night of spring. The moon was rising like a silver
+bow in the ghostly air. And in the north the sunset colors of the
+spring were changing upon the mountain-tops into the morning glow of
+the summer. My heart still clung to the eternal stars, where now awake
+I lingered in my dream, and I sighed, &quot;Alas! each day above is the
+beginning of spring.&quot; Then I heard the voice in me repeat the old
+words, &quot;Child of man, sacrifice time to eternity,&quot;--and I sighed no
+more.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+<br>
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_01" href="#div2Ref_01">Footnote 1</a>: I need not
+tell any one that the valley itself is situated
+in the departments of the Upper Pyrenees.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_02" href="#div2Ref_02">Footnote 2</a>: It is well
+known that the Symplegadian rocks continually
+dashed against each other, and destroyed every passing ship, until
+Orpheus's lyre subdued and tranquillized them.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_03" href="#div2Ref_03">Footnote 3</a>: Alluding
+to a painting by Reynolds, in which Garrick,
+invited by both Muses, follows Thalia.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_04" href="#div2Ref_04">Footnote 4</a>: A kind of
+jelly-fish.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_05" href="#div2Ref_05">Footnote 5</a>: Ten drops
+of this instantly sweeten half a pound of sour
+beer.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_06" href="#div2Ref_06">Footnote 6</a>: The cave
+is twenty feet high, but the entrance only five
+feet.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_07" href="#div2Ref_07">Footnote 7</a>: French
+miles. The valley is about two German miles--ten
+English miles--long.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_08" href="#div2Ref_08">Footnote 8</a>: The
+Höfersche heaven-path, or how to learn the way to
+eternal salvation in twenty-four hours.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_09" href="#div2Ref_09">Footnote 9</a>: A
+market-place in Rome where deformed beings were sold,
+and fetched a higher price the uglier they were.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_10" href="#div2Ref_10">Footnote 10</a>: A
+Parisian dentist wrote this over his door.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_11" href="#div2Ref_11">Footnote 11</a>: In the
+same § Kant says: &quot;Everything that Newton has
+written in his immortal <i>Principia</i>, though such a large head was
+required to invent it, can be learned; but to compose spirited poems
+cannot be taught, however complete the instructions for learning the
+art may be. The reason is, that Newton can explain all the steps he had
+to take, from the first elements of geometry to his grandest and most
+profound inventions; he can explain them, not alone to himself, but to
+others, even to the remote descendants, while no Homer or Wieland can
+show how his ideally rich, and yet thoughtful characters, came forth
+from his brain; for he knows it not himself, and therefore cannot teach
+it others.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="hang2">I had hoped that I could depend upon Kant, who has a million
+times more
+intelligence than I have, as upon a mental <i>Chargé d'Affaires</i>; but
+when I came to this passage (and to those upon repentance, music, the
+origin of evil, &amp;c), I saw I must myself follow him, and not only pray
+after him, as I had before done, but reflect. But to return! Certainly
+Newton's &quot;Principles&quot; can be learned, that is, the new ones may be
+repeated, but that also can happen to the invented poems; yet you can
+be taught to invent them as little as Newton's Principles. A new
+philosophic idea seems, after its birth, to lie more clearly in its
+former seed-vessels and organic molecules than a poetic one; but why
+was Newton the first to see it? He and Kant can discover, no better
+than Shakespeare or Leibnitz, how the beginning of a new idea suddenly
+bursts from the cloud of old ones; they can show their <i>Nexus</i> (else
+they would not be human ones) with the old ones, but not their
+conception from it; the same holds of the poetic. Let Kant teach us to
+<i>invent systems</i> and truths (not to prove them, though, strictly
+speaking, the one is closely allied to the other), then he shall be
+taught to invent epics, and I will be responsible for it. He seems to
+me to confound the difficulty of forming ideas with the less important
+one of forming new ones; the difficulty of transition with the
+inexplicability of the matter. I fear and wonder at the latent
+almightiness with which man orders, that is, creates his range of
+ideas. I know no better symbol of creation than the regularity and
+causality of the creation of ideas in us, which no will and no mind can
+regulate and create, for any such arrangement and intention would
+presuppose the unborn idea. And in this creation the grand enigma of
+our moral freedom is veiled.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_12" href="#div2Ref_12">Footnote 12</a>: Gold
+dissolved in strong acid, mixed with a small
+quantity of quicksilver in a vial, forms a tree with foliage.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_13" href="#div2Ref_13">Footnote 13</a>: The male
+glowworms are black.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_14" href="#div2Ref_14">Footnote 14</a>: Rameses
+caused his son to be fastened to the topmost
+point of an obelisk, that they who had to raise it should risk a more
+valuable life than their own.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_15" href="#div2Ref_15">Footnote 15</a>: It lives
+more than two years, though it does not long
+survive the period of its leaving the grub-state, just as other
+insects, to whom nature has given the rose period of youth, only
+<i>after</i> the thorny age of reproduction.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_16" href="#div2Ref_16">Footnote 16</a>: It is
+well known that the sight of blood damps courage,
+and that the Jews are not permitted to eat blood.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_17" href="#div2Ref_17">Footnote 17</a>: Beauty in
+this connection, I adopt in the same sense
+which Schiller gives to it in his æsthetic critique, a prize essay of
+his genius on Beauty, which here, like Longinus, is at once the subject
+and the delineator of the exalted.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_18" href="#div2Ref_18">Footnote 18</a>: If he had
+been, I would have read page 224 in the third
+part of Hesperus to him.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_19" href="#div2Ref_19">Footnote 19</a>: The sun
+reflected in the water.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_20" href="#div2Ref_20">Footnote 20</a>: At a
+circumcision, the Jews place one chair for the
+operator, and another for the prophet Elias, who is supposed invisibly
+to occupy it.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_21" href="#div2Ref_21">Footnote 21</a>: These
+animals shine by night. Care must be taken not to
+draw them into the brain from the flower calyxes with the perfume.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_22" href="#div2Ref_22">Footnote 22</a>: The
+Guernsey lily from Japan has its name from the Island
+of Guernsey, on which some roots of it were cast by a wrecked vessel.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_23" href="#div2Ref_23">Footnote 23</a>: For the
+climatic dissimilarity of the planets must
+produce, as the climatic difference between the zones, Negroes, Greeks,
+Indians, etc., but always human beings.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_24" href="#div2Ref_24">Footnote 24</a>: One
+ought, therefore, not to say <i>mundus intelligibilis</i>,
+but <i>mundus intellectus</i>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_25" href="#div2Ref_25">Footnote 25</a>: It may be
+said, that in this manner every Utopia, which
+is also a copy, must be realized, for the original of all dreams and
+Utopias does indeed exist,--though partially and disconnectedly; but
+the Original of the Eternal cannot exist in pieces and by parcels.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_26" href="#div2Ref_26">Footnote 26</a>: This
+applies chiefly to the higher and richer orders,
+with whom the saturation of the five camel stomachs, the senses, and
+the starving of Psyche or the soul, at last determines into a horrible
+horror of life, and into a repulsive mingling of <i>high aspirations and
+grovelling desires</i>. The savage, the beggar, and the provincialist far
+surpass the rich and high in spiritual enjoyment, for in these, as in
+the houses of the Jews, (in memory of the destruction of Jerusalem)
+there must always be something incomplete, and the poor have too many
+of their earthly wants assuaged to be overwhelmed and pained by the
+demands of their ethereal nature.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_27" href="#div2Ref_27">Footnote 27</a>: The new
+moon always rises with the sun, although dark and
+invisible.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_28" href="#div2Ref_28">Footnote 28</a>: There are
+three kinds of men. To some, a heaven is
+granted even on this earth; to others, a <i>limbus patrum</i> in which joy
+and sorrow reign equally; and, lastly, to some a hell in which grief
+predominates. Beings who have suffered for twenty years on the sick-bed
+of bodily pain, which is not, like mental sorrow, worn out by time,
+have certainly had more unhappiness than happiness, and, but for
+immortality, would be an eternal reproach to the highest moral being.
+And if there exists no such unhappy being, it is yet in the power of a
+tyrant to make one, on a clinical torture-bed, with the assistance of a
+physician and a philosopher. Such a one, at least, has a right to
+demand a future indemnity for his sufferings, because the Creator
+cannot have formed a creature to mourn more than it can rejoice.</p>
+
+<p class="hang2">Besides, though the object of our grief may seem but a
+deception in the
+eyes of the Eternal One, our grief itself cannot. Human suffering is
+also distinguished from brutish pain, because the animal only feels the
+wound, as we perhaps do in sleep, but it sees it not. Its pain is not
+trebled and increased by <i>anticipation</i>, <i>recollection</i>, and
+<i>sensibility</i>; it is an evanescent sting, and nothing more. Therefore
+tears were only given to human eyes.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_29" href="#div2Ref_29">Footnote 29</a>: Ignorance
+concerning our connection with the body and our
+connection with the second world.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_30" href="#div2Ref_30">Footnote 30</a>: The
+yearly destruction of the slowly developed, beautiful
+flower-world does not argue against this; for to the tangible world
+each condition of its parts is as indifferent and perfect as the other,
+and rose-ashes are as good as rose-buds (without, of course,
+considering the organic soul). Nothing is beautiful but our
+appreciation of the beautiful, not the object itself. If it should be
+said that nature destroys so many developments, for whose growth she
+had already provided, that she breaks many thousand eggs, tears so many
+buds, crushes men in all stages of life with her blind tread, I would
+reply that the interrupted development is yet a condition of the
+perfected one, and that every position of its parts is indifferent to
+material objects, and, as coverings of the spiritual being, they still
+testify to a compensating immortality of the latter.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_31" href="#div2Ref_31">Footnote 31</a>: Methinks
+the folly of spiritual mortality has not been
+sufficiently considered from this point of view. The living or
+spiritual whole (for the lifeless one has no other object than to be a
+means for the living), as such, can attain no object which each portion
+of it does not attain, for each one is one whole, and every other whole
+can only exist as a collective idea, and not as a reality. To consider
+the untenability of a progress contained in a course of vanishing
+shadows more vividly, one might shorten the life of a soul so that he,
+e. g. could only read one page of Kant's Critic, and then die. For the
+second page another soul must be created, and so for the new edition
+884 souls. The mistake will perhaps become perceptible to most people
+by the increasing moonlight of liberality which has gradually risen
+over the past centuries; but the necessity for compensation demands
+immortality.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_32" href="#div2Ref_32">Footnote 32</a>: Raphael
+died when he had finished the painting of the
+resurrection, and Haman died while his essay on resurrection and
+disembodiment was being printed.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_33" href="#div2Ref_33">Footnote 33</a>: So are
+the Vampires called.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_34" href="#div2Ref_34">Footnote 34</a>: <i>
+Fixlein</i> stands in the middle of the volume; preceded by
+<i>Einer Mustheil für Mädchen</i> (A Jelly-course for young Ladies); and
+followed by <i>Some</i> Jus De Tablette <i>for Men</i>. A small portion of the
+Preface relating to the first I have already omitted. Neither of the
+two have the smallest relation to <i>Fixlein</i>.--<span class="sc2">Ed</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_35" href="#div2Ref_35">Footnote 35</a>: <i>J. P.
+H</i>., <i>Jean Paul</i> Hasus, <i>Jean Paul</i>, &amp;c., have in
+succession been Richter's signatures. At present even, his German
+designation, either in writing or speech, is never <i>Richter</i>, but <i>Jean
+Paul</i>.--<span class="sc2">Ed</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_36" href="#div2Ref_36">Footnote 36</a>: For
+understanding many little hints which occur in this
+<i>Life of Fixlein</i>, it will be necessary to bear in mind the following
+particulars: A German <i>Gymnasium</i>, in its complete state, appears to
+include eight Masters; Rector, Conrector, Subrector, Quintus, Quartus,
+Tertius, &amp;c., to the <i>first</i> or lowest. The <i>forms</i>, or classes,
+again,
+are arranged in an inverse order; the <i>Primaner</i> (boys of the <i>Prima</i>,
+or first form) being the most advanced, and taught by the Rector; the
+<i>Secundaner</i>, by the Conrector, &amp;c.; and therefore the <i>Quartaner</i> by
+the Quintus. In many cases, it would seem, the number of Teachers is
+only six; but in this Flachsenfingen Gymnasium we have express evidence
+that there was no curtailment.--<span class="sc2">Ed</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_37" href="#div2Ref_37">Footnote 37</a>: A
+university beer.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_38" href="#div2Ref_38">Footnote 38</a>: From
+Peter I will copy one or two of these privileges;
+the whole of which were once, at the origin of universities, in full
+force. For instance, a student can compel a citizen to let him his
+house and his horse; an injury, done even to his relations, must be
+made good fourfold; he is not obliged to fulfil the written commands of
+the Pope; the neighborhood must indemnify him for what is stolen from
+him; if he and a non-student are living at variance, the latter only
+can be expelled from the boarding-house; a Doctor is obliged to support
+a poor student; if he is killed, the next ten houses are laid under
+interdict till the murderer is discovered; his legacies are not
+abridged by <i>falcidia</i>, &amp;c., &amp;c.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_39" href="#div2Ref_39">Footnote 39</a>: <i>
+Literary Germany</i>, a work (I believe of no great merit)
+which Richter often twitches in the same style.--<span class="sc2">Ed</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_40" href="#div2Ref_40">Footnote 40</a>: See <i>
+Schmelzle's Journey</i>, p. 289--<span class="sc2">Ed</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_41" href="#div2Ref_41">Footnote 41</a>: As in the
+State.--[V. or Von, <i>de</i>, <i>of</i>, being the
+symbol of the nobility, the middle order of the State.--<span class="sc2">Ed</span>.]</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_42" href="#div2Ref_42">Footnote 42</a>: In
+Erlang, my petition has been granted. The <i>Bible
+Institution</i> of that town have found instead of the 116,301 As,
+which Fixlein at first pretended with such certainty to find in the
+Bible-books (which false number was accordingly given in the first
+Edition of this Work, p. 81), the above-mentioned 323,015; which
+(uncommonly singular) is precisely the sum of all the letters in the
+Koran put together. See <i>Lüdeke's Beschr. des Turk. Reichs</i> (Lüdeke's
+Description of the Turkish Empire. New edition, 1780).</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_43" href="#div2Ref_43">Footnote 43</a>: <i>
+Paravicini Singularia de viris claris</i>, Cent. I. 2.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_44" href="#div2Ref_44">Footnote 44</a>: <i>Ejusd</i>.,
+Cent. II. Philelphus quarrelled with the Greek
+about the quantity of a syllable; the prize or bet was the beard of the
+vanquished. Timotheus lost his.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_45" href="#div2Ref_45">Footnote 45</a>: Their
+prayer-barrel, Kürüdu, is a hollowed shell, a
+calabash, full of unrolled formulas of prayer; they sway it from side
+to side, and then it works. More philosophically viewed, since in
+prayer the feeling only is of consequence, it is much the same whether
+this express itself by motion of the mouth or of the calabash.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_46" href="#div2Ref_46">Footnote 46</a>: In
+German, as in some other languages, the common mode of
+address is by the <i>third</i> person; plural, it indicates respect;
+singular, command; the <i>second</i> person is also used; plural, it
+generally denotes indifference; singular, great familiarity, and
+sometimes its product, contempt. <i>Dutzenfreund</i>, <i>Thouing-friend</i>, is
+the strictest term of intimacy; and among the wild <i>Burschen</i>
+(Students) many a duel (happily however, often ending like the
+<i>Polemo-Middinia</i> in one drop of blood) has been fought, in consequence
+of saying <i>Du</i> (thou) and <i>Sie</i> (they) in the wrong place.--<span class="sc2">Ed</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_47" href="#div2Ref_47">Footnote 47</a>: These
+antique Christmas festivities Richter describes
+with equal <i>gusto</i> in another work (<i>Briefe und Zukünftige
+Lebenslemf</i>); where the Christ-child (falsely reported to the young
+ones to have been seen flying through the air, with gold wings); the
+Birch-bough fixed in a corner of the room, and by him made to grow; the
+fruit of gilt sweetmeats, apples, nuts, which (for good boys) it
+suddenly produces, &amp;c., &amp;c., are specified with the same fidelity as
+here.--<span class="sc2">Ed</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_48" href="#div2Ref_48">Footnote 48</a>: Which he
+purposed to make for his Island of St. Pierre in
+the Bienne Lake.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_49" href="#div2Ref_49">Footnote 49</a>:
+Borrowed from the &quot;Imperial Mine-product-sale-Commission,&quot; in Vienna.
+In their very names these Vienna people show taste.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_50" href="#div2Ref_50">Footnote 50</a>: As, by
+the evidence at present before us, we can found on
+no other presumption, than that he must die in his thirty-second year;
+it would follow, that, in case he died two-and-thirty years after the
+death of the testatrix, no farthing could be claimed by him; since,
+according to our fiction, at the making of the testament he was not
+even one year old.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_51" href="#div2Ref_51">Footnote 51</a>: In St.
+Paul's Church at London, where the slightest
+whisper sounds over, across a space of 143 feet.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_52" href="#div2Ref_52">Footnote 52</a>: So much,
+according to Political Economists, a man yearly
+requires in Germany.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_53" href="#div2Ref_53">Footnote 53</a>: This
+singular tone of my address to a Prince can only be
+excused by the equally singular relation wherein the Biographer stands
+to the Flachsenfingen Sovereign, and which I would willingly unfold
+here were it not that, in my Book, which, under the title of
+<i>Dog-post-days</i>, I mean to give to the world at Easter-fair, 1795, I
+hoped to expound the matter to universal satisfaction.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_54" href="#div2Ref_54">Footnote 54</a>: His <i>
+Clerical Law</i>, p. 551.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_55" href="#div2Ref_55">Footnote 55</a>:
+Eichhorn's <i>Einleitung ins A. T</i>. (Introduction to the
+Old Testament), Vol. II.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_56" href="#div2Ref_56">Footnote 56</a>: Both have
+the same sound. <i>Füchslein</i> means Foxling,
+Fox-whelp.--<span class="sc2">Ed</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_57" href="#div2Ref_57">Footnote 57</a>: Campe, a
+German philologist, who, along with several
+others of that class, has really proposed, as represented in the text,
+to substitute for all Greek or Latin derivatives corresponding German
+terms of the like import. <i>Geography</i>, which may be <i>Erdbeschreibung</i>
+(Earth-description), was thenceforth to be nothing else; a <i>Geometer</i>
+became an <i>Earth-measurer</i>, &amp;c., &amp;c. <i>School-undergovernor</i>, instead
+of
+<i>Subrector</i>, is by no means the happiest example of the system, and
+seems due rather to the Schadeck Lawyer than to Campe, whom our Author
+has elsewhere more than once eulogized for his project in similar
+style.--<span class="sc2">Ed</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_58" href="#div2Ref_58">Footnote 58</a>: <i>New
+Universal German Library</i>, a reviewing periodical,
+in those days conducted by Nicolai, a sworn enemy to what has since
+been called the New School.--<span class="sc2">Ed</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_59" href="#div2Ref_59">Footnote 59</a>:
+Superstition declares, that on the spot where the rainbow
+rises a golden key is left.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_60" href="#div2Ref_60">Footnote 60</a>: To the
+Spring, namely, which begins with snow-drops, and
+ends with roses and pinks.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_61" href="#div2Ref_61">Footnote 61</a>: This
+Christian superstition is not only a Rabbinical, but
+also a Roman one. <i>Cicero de Senectute</i>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_62" href="#div2Ref_62">Footnote 62</a>: For,
+according to the Jurists, fifteen persons make a
+people.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_63" href="#div2Ref_63">Footnote 63</a>: A long
+philosophical elucidation is indispensably
+requisite; which will be found in this Book, under the title, <i>Natural
+Magic of the Imagination</i>. [A part of the <i>Jus de Tablette</i> appended to
+this Biography, unconnected with it, and not given here.--<span class="sc2">Ed</span>.]</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_64" href="#div2Ref_64">Footnote 64</a>: This
+pygmy piece of ordnance, with its cunningly devised
+burning-glass, is still to be seen on the south side of the Paris
+Vanity-Fair; and in fine weather, to be heard, on all sides thereof,
+proclaiming the conversion (so it seems to Richter) of the Day from
+Forenoon to Afternoon.--<span class="sc2">Ed</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_65" href="#div2Ref_65">Footnote 65</a>: The Wild
+Hunter, <i>Wilde Jäger</i>, is a popular spectre of
+Germany.--<span class="sc2">Ed</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_66" href="#div2Ref_66">Footnote 66</a>:
+Indicating to the congregation what Psalm is to be
+sung.--<span class="sc2">Ed</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_67" href="#div2Ref_67">Footnote 67</a>: Salerno
+was once famous for its medical science; but
+here, as in many other cases, we could desire the aid of Herr Reinhold
+with his <i>Lexicon-Commentary</i>.--<span class="sc2">Ed</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_68" href="#div2Ref_68">Footnote 68</a>: This
+hospitable Potentate is as unknown to me as to any
+of my readers.--<span class="sc2">Ed</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_69" href="#div2Ref_69">Footnote 69</a>: A little
+work printed in manuscript types; and seldom
+given by him to any but Princes. This piece of print-writing he
+intentionally passes off to the great as a piece of hand-writing; these
+persons being both more habituated and inclined to the reading of
+manuscript than of print.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_70" href="#div2Ref_70">Footnote 70</a>: Thus
+defined by Adelung in his Lexicon: &quot;<i>Kräutermütze</i>,
+in Medicine, a cap with various dried herbs sewed into it, and which is
+worn for all manner of troubles in the head.&quot;--<span class="sc2">Ed</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_71" href="#div2Ref_71">Footnote 71</a>: Linné
+formed in Upsal a flower-clock, the flowers of
+which, by their different times of falling asleep, indicated the hours
+of the day.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_72" href="#div2Ref_72">Footnote 72</a>: The good
+Professor of Catechetics is out here. <i>Indignor
+quandoque bonus dormitat Schmelzle</i>.--<span class="sc2">Ed</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_73" href="#div2Ref_73">Footnote 73</a>: Passenger
+so placed in the huge German Postwagen, that he
+cannot look out.--<span class="sc2">Ed</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_74" href="#div2Ref_74">Footnote 74</a>: <i>Titan</i>
+is also the title of this Legations-Rath Jean
+Pierre or Jean Paul (Friedrich Richter)'s chief novel.--<span class="sc2">Ed</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_75" href="#div2Ref_75">Footnote 75</a>: Brühl, I
+suppose; but the historical edition of the
+matter is, that Brühl's treasonable secrets were come at by the more
+ordinary means of wax impressions of his keys.--<span class="sc2">Ed</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_76" href="#div2Ref_76">Footnote 76</a>: Cities of
+Richter's romance kingdom. Flachsenfingen he
+sometimes calls <i>Klein-Wien</i>, Little Vienna.--<span class="sc2">Ed</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_77" href="#div2Ref_77">Footnote 77</a>: The
+campaign of 1813-14 was the holy war of Germany, or
+Freiheitskampf, to which Jean Paul here alludes.--<span class="sc2">Translator</span>.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h3>THE END</h3>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h5>Cambridge: Stereotyped and Printed by Welch, Bigelow, &amp; Co.</h5>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Campaner Thal and Other Writings, by
+Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
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+</pre>
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+</body>
+</html>
+
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+++ b/35948.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,11796 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Campaner Thal and Other Writings, by
+Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Campaner Thal and Other Writings
+
+Author: Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
+
+Release Date: April 24, 2011 [EBook #35948]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CAMPANER THAL AND OTHER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Bowen, from page scans provided by Google Books.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Google Books:
+http://books.google.com/books?id=3muLoyVE2ecC&source=gbs_navlinks_s
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ RICHTER'S WRITINGS.
+
+
+TITAN. A Romance. 2 vols. 16mo. $3.00.
+
+FLOWER, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 2 vols. 16mo. $2.75.
+
+LEVANA; Or, The Doctrine of Education. 1 vol. 16mo. $1.50.
+
+THE CAMPANER THAL, and Other Writings. 1 vol. 16mo. $1.50.
+
+HESPERUS. 2 vols. 16mo. _Preparing_.
+
+ _The above volumes are printed in uniform size and style_.
+
+
+ IN PRESS.
+
+LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. By Eliza Buckminster Lee. New Edition, Revised. 1
+volume.
+
+
+ TICKNOR AND FIELDS, Publishers.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ THE
+
+
+ CAMPANER THAL,
+
+
+ AND
+
+
+ OTHER WRITINGS.
+
+
+
+ _From the German of_
+
+ JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER.
+
+
+
+
+
+ BOSTON:
+ TICKNOR AND FIELDS.
+ 1864.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ University Press:
+ Welch, Bigelow, and Company,
+ Cambridge.
+
+
+
+
+
+ CONTENTS.
+
+
+ _THE CAMPANER THAL_.
+
+Introduction.
+
+
+ 501st STATION.
+
+The Diversities of Life.--The Dirge as Billet-Doux.--The Cavern.--The
+Surprise.
+
+
+ 502d STATION.
+
+The Thundering Morning.--The Short Trip after the Long One.--The
+Sofa-Cushions.
+
+
+ 503d STATION.
+
+Lampoon on the Chaplain.--Praise of Him.--The Diamond.--Opinions
+against Immortality.--Eden Jokes.
+
+
+ 504th STATION.
+
+Flower Toying.
+
+
+ 505th STATION.
+
+The Ephemera.--Relative Conclusions.--Doubts of the Length of the Chain
+of Living Beings.--The Wart-Eaters.--The Cure.
+
+
+ 506th STATION.
+
+Objections to Immortality.--The Second Childhood of the Outer and Inner
+Man.
+
+
+ 507th STATION.
+
+The Theft of the Souvenir.--Answers to previous Stations.--On the
+Emigration of the Dead to the Planets.--The Threefold World in
+Man.--Grief without Hope.--The Seal of Immortality.--The
+Country-Seat.--The Balloons.--Ecstasy.
+
+
+
+
+ LIFE OF QUINTUS FIXLEIN.
+
+
+Letter to my Friends, instead of Preface.
+
+
+ FIRST LETTER-BOX.
+
+Dog-Day's' Vacation.--Visits.--An Indigent of Quality.
+
+
+ SECOND LETTER-BOX.
+
+Frau von Aufhammer.--Childhood-Resonance.--Authorcraft.
+
+
+ THIRD LETTER-BOX.
+
+Christmas Recollections.--New Occurrence.
+
+
+ FOURTH LETTER BOX.
+
+Office-Brokage.--Discovery of the promised Secret.--Hans von Fuechslein.
+
+
+ FIFTH LETTER-BOX.
+
+Cantata-Sunday.--Two Testaments.--Pontac; Blood; Love.
+
+
+ SIXTH LETTER-BOX.
+
+Office-Impost.--One of the most important of Petitions.
+
+
+ SEVENTH LETTER-BOX.
+
+Sermon.--School Exhibition.--Splendid Mistake.
+
+
+ EIGHTH LETTER-BOX.
+
+Instalment in the Parsonage.
+
+
+ NINTH LETTER-BOX.
+
+Or to the Marriage.
+
+
+ TENTH LETTER BOX.
+
+St. Thomas's-Day and Birthday.
+
+
+ ELEVENTH LETTER BOX.
+
+Spring; Investiture; and Childbirth.
+
+
+ TWELFTH LETTER-BOX.
+
+Steeple-Ball Ascension.--The Toy-Press.
+
+
+ THIRTEENTH LETTER BOX.
+
+Christening.
+
+
+ FOURTEENTH LETTER-BOX.
+
+ CHAPTER LAST.
+
+
+
+
+ _SCHMELZLE'S JOURNEY TO FLAeTZ_.
+
+
+Preface.
+
+Circular Letter of the proposed Catechetical Professor Attila Schmelzel
+to his Friends; containing some Account of a Holidays' Journey to
+Flaetz, with an Introduction, touching his Flight, and his Courage as
+former Army-Chaplain.
+
+Journey to Flaetz.
+
+First Stage; from Neusattel to Vierstaedten.
+
+Second Stage; from Vierstaedten to Niederschoena.
+
+Third Stage; from Niederschoena to Flaetz.
+
+First Day in Flaetz.
+
+First Night in Flaetz.
+
+Second Day in Flaetz.
+
+
+
+
+ _ANALECTS FROM RICHTER_.
+
+
+The Happy Life of a Parish Priest in Sweden.
+
+Dream upon the Universe.
+
+Complaint of the Bird in a darkened Cage.
+
+On the Death of Young Children.
+
+The prophetic Dew-Drops.
+
+On Death.
+
+Imagination untamed by the coarser Realities of Life.
+
+Satirical Notice of Reviewers.
+
+Female Tongues.
+
+Forgiveness.
+
+The Grandeur of Man in his Littleness.
+
+Night.
+
+The Stars.
+
+Martyrdom.
+
+The Quarrels of Friends.
+
+Dreaming.
+
+Two Divisions of Philosophic Minds.
+
+Dignity of Man in Self-Sacrifice.
+
+Fancy.
+
+
+
+
+ _MISCELLANEOUS PIECES_.
+
+
+Reminiscences of the best Hours of Life for the Hour of Death.
+
+The New-Year's Night of an Unhappy Man.
+
+The Death of an Angel.
+
+A Dream and the Truth.
+
+The Beauty of Death in the Bloom of Youth.
+
+
+
+
+
+ THE
+
+ CAMPANER THAL;
+
+ OR,
+
+ DISCOURSES ON THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL.
+
+ TRANSLATED BY JULIETTE BAUER.
+
+
+
+
+
+"Report also, we regret to say, is all that we know of the _Campaner
+Thal_, one of Richter's beloved topics, or rather the life of his whole
+philosophy, glimpses of which look forth on us from almost every one of
+his writings. He died while engaged, under recent and almost total
+blindness, in enlarging and remodelling this _Campaner Thal_. The
+unfinished manuscript was borne upon his coffin to the burial vault;
+and Klopstock's hymn, _Auferstehen wirst du!_ 'Thou shalt arise, my
+soul!' can seldom have been sung with more appropriate application than
+over the grave of Jean Paul."--From _Carlyle's Miscellanies_.
+
+
+
+
+ INTRODUCTION.
+
+
+In my distilling processes, I frequently precipitated the phlegma
+of our earthball--its polar deserts, its Russian forests, its
+icebergs--and from the sediments extracted a beautiful by-earth, a
+small satellite. If we extract and regulate the charms of this old
+world, we can form a delightful though minutely condensed world.
+
+For the caves of this miniature or ditto-earth, we will take the
+caves of Antiparos and of Baumann, for its plains, the Rhine
+provinces--Hybla, Thabor, and Mont Blanc shall be its mountains--its
+islands, the Friendly, the Holy, and the Palm isles. Wentworth's park
+and Daphne's grotto, and some corner-pieces from the Paphian, we have
+for its forests--for a charming valley, the Seifer's-dorfer and that of
+Campan. Thus we possess, besides this dirty, weary world, the most
+beautiful by or after-world--an important dessert service--an
+Ante-Heaven between Ante-Hells.
+
+I have purposely included this valley of Campan in my extract and
+decoction, as I know none other in which I would rather awake, or die,
+or love than in this one; if I had to command, I would not permit my
+valley to be mixed up or placed beside the vale of Tempe or the Rose
+Valley, perhaps with Utopia. The reader must have known this valley in
+his geographical lessons, or in the works of Arthur Young, who praises
+it even more than I do.[1]
+
+I must take for granted, that in July, 1796, the Goddess of Fortune
+descended from her throne to our earth, and placed in my hand--not
+mammon, nor garters, nor golden sheep--nothing but her own, and led
+me--by this I recognized the goddess--to the Campan vale. Truly, man
+needs but look into it, and he will have--as I had--more than the Devil
+_offered_ to Christ and Louis XIV., and _gave_ to the popes.
+
+The test of enjoyment is memory. Only the paradises of the imagination
+willingly remain, and are never lost, but always conquered. Poetry
+alone reconciles the past to the future, and is the Orpheus's lyre
+which commands these two destroying rocks to rest.[2]
+
+As stated, in the year 1796, I made a trip through France, with my
+friend H. Karlson. He is honorary master of horse in the * * * service.
+The wise public cares little for true names, it always treats them as
+fictitious ones, by way of literary taxation; and the existing
+characters, at least those of any importance, may prefer not to be torn
+over the wheel of criticism, and dragged piecemeal through libraries
+and reading-clubs. At almost every milestone, I despatched the best
+hourly bulletin to my friend Victor: when I had sent him the following
+valley-piece, he persecuted me until I promised to grant this
+illuminated portrait of nature, not alone to the letter, but also to
+the printing-press. Therefore I do it. I know already, my poor Victor
+sees, that in our days no green branch is left as a spinning-hut
+for the man-caterpillar, and that inimical divers try to cut our
+anchor-rope, sunk in the sea of death. Therefore he thinks more of the
+conversations on immortality, than of the valley in which they took
+place. I know this, because he calls me the counterpart of Claude
+Lorraine, who only drew the landscape, while another drew the human
+beings in it. Truly such a valley deserves that the mining and
+sabbath-lamp of truth should be lowered into the suffocating air of the
+grave, in place of our _self_, merely to see if that _self_ can breathe
+at such a depth.
+
+I have jokingly divided my letters into stations. I of course omit 500,
+and commence at the 501st, wherein I appear in the valley.
+
+
+
+
+ CAMPANER THAL.
+
+ 501st STATION.
+
+ The Diversities of Life.--The Dirge as Billet-Doux.--The
+ Cavern.--The Surprise.
+
+
+ _Campan, 23d July_.
+
+Here have I been since the day before yesterday. After descent into
+hell and purgatory, and passage through _limbos infantum et patrum_,
+man must at last reach heaven. But I owe you yet our exit from our inn
+on the 20th. Never can the head have a harder couch than when we hold
+it in our hands. The reason that this happened to Karlson and myself
+was, that in the rooms adjoining ours a wedding-dance was taking place,
+and that below, the youngest daughter of our _maitre d'hotel_, who had
+not only the name, but also the charms of _Corday_, with two white
+roses on her cheeks, and two red ones in her hair, was being interred,
+and that human beings with pale faces and heavy hearts waited on happy
+and blooming ones. When fate harnesses to Psyche's car, the merry and
+the mourning steed together, the mourning one ever takes the lead;
+i. e. if the muses of Mirth and Sorrow play on the same stage in the
+same hour, man does not, like Garrick,[3] follow the former; he does
+not even remain neuter, but takes the side of the mourning one. Thus we
+always paint, like Milton, our lost Paradise more glowing than the
+regained one,--like Dante, hell better than purgatory. In short, the
+silent corpse made us cold to the warm, joyful influence of the
+dancers. But is it not absurd, my dear Victor, that a man who, like
+myself, knows nothing better than that every hour unfolds at once
+morning bloom and evening clouds; that here an Ash Wednesday and there
+a black Monday commence; that such a man, who grieves little that
+dancing music and funeral marches should sound at the same time on the
+broad national theatre of humanity, should yet hang his head and grow
+pale, when, in a side scene, this double music sounds in his ears? Is
+not this as absurd as all his other doings?
+
+Into Karlson's eyes something of this cloud had fallen. It was to him
+the restirred ashes of a funeral urn. He can withstand all sorrows, but
+not their recollection. He has replaced his years by lands, and the
+space he has travelled over must be called his time. But the firm youth
+changed color when he came to tell that the lover of the pale Corday
+had torn her folded taper hands asunder, and, on his knees, had dragged
+them to his burning lips.
+
+He perceived his paleness in the glass; and to explain it, he imparted
+the last and most secret leaf of his life's Robinsonade to me. You see
+what an opaque gem this youth is, who follows his friends through all
+France, without opening to his communicative friend and travelling
+companion, even a fold or a loophole in his relation to them. Now only
+from emotion on entering the Campan Vale, he draws the key from the
+keyhole, which shall become a prompter's hole for you.
+
+That he had accompanied the Baron Wilhelmi and his betrothed Gione,
+with her sister Nadine, to Lausanne, in order to celebrate their
+Arcadian marriage in the Campan Vale, you know already; that he had
+left them suddenly at Lausanne, and returned to the Rhine fall at
+Shaffhausen, you know also, but not the reason, which will now be
+related to you by me and by him.
+
+By daily contact Karlson had at last penetrated the thickly-woven veil,
+magically colored by betrothed love, thrown over the strong, firm, and
+kindred mind of Gione. Probably others discovered him ere he had
+discovered himself. His heart became like the so-called world's eye[4]
+in water, first bright, then varying its colors, then dull and misty,
+and at last transparent. Not to cloud their beautiful intimacy, he
+addressed the suspicious part of his attentions to Nadine. He did not
+explain to me clearly whether he had led her into a beautiful error,
+without taking a beautiful truth from Gione.
+
+The sword of death seemed likely to separate all these stage knots.
+Gione, the healthy and calm Gione, was suddenly attacked by a nervous
+disorder. One evening, Wilhelmi, with his usual poetic ardor, entered
+Karlson's chamber weeping, and, embracing him, could only sob forth the
+words, "She is no more."
+
+Karlson said not a word, but in the tumult of his own and others'
+griefs, departed that night for Shaffhausen, and probably fled at the
+same time from a beloved and a loving one,--from Gione and from Nadine.
+By this eternal waterspout of the Rhine, this onward pressing, molten
+avalanche, this gleaming perpendicular milky-way, his soul was slowly
+healed; but he was long imprisoned in the dark, cold, serpent's-nest of
+envenomed pains; they entwined and crawled over him, even to his
+heart. For he believed, as most world-men among whom he had grown up
+do,--perhaps, also, too much accustomed to analyzed ideas and opinions
+by his favorite study, chemistry,--that our last sleep is annihilation,
+as in the epopee the first man imagined the first sleep to be the first
+death.
+
+To Wilhelmi he only sent the name of his retreat and a poem, entitled,
+"Grief-without Hope," which declared his disbelief, for he had never
+broken the Ambrosia, whose delights a trust in immortality affords. But
+just that strengthened his enfeebled heart, that the muses led him to
+Hippocrene's spring of health.
+
+Wilhelmi answered, that he had read his beautiful requiem to the
+deceased, or the immortal one. A long swoon had occasioned the painful
+mistake. Gione and he entreated him to follow speedily. Karlson
+replied: "Fate had separated him from their beautiful feast by the
+Alpine Wall, but as it would, like the Campan Vale, ever renew its
+springs, he hoped to lose nothing but time by his delay."
+
+Now that the next world had cast its supernatural light on Gione's
+countenance, Karlson loved her too much to be capable of assisting at
+the ceremony of losing her forever. I will give you the opinion I
+formed of her by listening to his description.
+
+Even by a love and a praise in a person's absence we may be won; how
+much more, then, if both are thrown to us as farewell kisses after the
+ascent to Heaven! Therefore the idea of the future funeral procession
+behind my gay, richly decorated dust, onion and relic box is only
+another incentive, not only to drug, but also to absolve myself, for
+when older we are less missed. And even you, who so seldom hang us, or
+drive us all to the Devil, I mean, how seldom soever the tempest of
+anger sours the beer-barrel of your breast! Even you have no more
+efficacious morsel of white chalk, no better _oleum tartari per
+deliquium_,[5] with which you can sweeten your internal fluids, than
+the thought how we shall all turn pale round your death-bed, and be
+dumb at your grave-mound, and how none will forget you! I cannot
+possibly believe that there exists one being who, when death draws him
+into the diving-bell of the grave, will not leave _one_ weeping eye,
+_one_ bending head behind, and therefore each one can love the soul
+which will some time weep for him.
+
+When I think now of the convalescent Gione, with her wounded heart,
+which had received a new sensitiveness in the hot electric atmosphere
+of the sinking thunderbolt of Death, I need not measure her emotion at
+Karlson's poem, by the dew and hygrometer, nor with the loadstone of
+her love. But not Wilhelmi's brilliant riches, nor his still more
+brilliant conduct, her first choice, her first promise, forbade her
+even to touch the diamond scales.
+
+When Karlson told me all this, he turned Gione's ring-portrait upwards
+on his finger, and pressed the hard edge of the ring-finger with his
+tearful eyes, till the adorned hand was unconsciously touched by the
+lip's kiss. The bashfulness of his grief moved me so much, that I
+offered to take another route into the Vale, under the pretence that
+the dreams of it had lessened the desire for the reality, and that we
+should disturb the newly-affianced in their first rose-honey days, as
+they had probably waited for the mild late spring. He divined my
+intention; but his promise to come to-morrow dragged him by chains.
+Right gladly would I have missed the new spring-filled Eden, and drawn
+from my friend's feet the Jacob's ladder from which he might gaze on
+his former glad heaven, but could not ascend to it. On the other hand,
+I rejoiced at his firm, promise-keeping character, which opposed its
+strong nature to the thorns and boring-worms of sorrow; as with the
+increase of moonlight, tempests decrease. Unperceived, I now added
+Gione, not only Karlson, to the list of rare beings, who, like
+Raphael's and Plato's works, uncloud themselves only on earnest
+contemplation, and who, as both, resemble the Pleiades, which to the
+naked eye seems only to have seven suns, but with a telescope discloses
+more than forty.
+
+On the 20th, we started towards the Vale. On the way, I looked too
+often into Karlson's faithful, heavenly, deep-blue eyes. I descended
+into his heart, and sought the scene of the day on which the holy
+church tie would tear the noble Gione forever from out his pure muse
+and goddess-warmed heart. I confess I can imagine no day on which I
+regard my friend with deeper emotion that on that never-to-be-forgotten
+one, on which Fate gives him the brother kiss, the hand-pressure, the
+land of love and Philadelphia and Vaucluse's spring, united in one
+female heart.
+
+The day before yesterday, at ten in the evening, we arrived at
+Wilhelmi's Arcadian dwelling, which pressed its straw roof against a
+green marble wall. Karlson found it easily from its proximity to the
+famed Campan Cave, from which he had often broken stalactites. The sky
+was clouded with colored shadows, and on the green cradle of slumbering
+children night threw her star-embroidered cradle-cover, fastened to the
+summits of the Pyrenees. From out Wilhelmi's hermitage advanced some
+men in _black_ attire, with torches in their hands, who seemed to be
+waiting for us, and told us the baron was in the Cave. By heaven, under
+such circumstances, it is easier to imagine the most circumscribed,
+than the _largest_ and most _beautiful_ Cave! The sable attendants
+carried the flame before them, and drew the flying smoke-picture from
+oak-top to oak-top, and led us, stooping, through the catacomb
+entrance. But how splendidly was arched the high and wide grotto,[6]
+with its crystal sides, shining like an illumined ice Louvre, a
+gleaming sub-terrestrial heaven vault. Wilhelmi threw away a handful of
+gathered spars, and joyfully hastened into his friend's arms. Gione,
+with her sister, advanced from behind a connected stalactite and
+stalagmite. The gleaming of the torches gave her an undecided outline,
+but at length Wilhelmi advanced to her, and said, "Here is our friend."
+Bending low, Karlson kissed the warm living hand, and was dumb with
+emotion. But the firm features of Gione's earnest face, which wanted
+but Nadine's juvenile bloom, changed into a shining joy, greater than
+he dared to return or reward. "We have long expected and missed you in
+this paradise," she said, with unshaken voice; and her clear, calm eye
+opened a view into a richly-gifted, steadfast soul. "Welcome to the
+infernal regions," said Nadine; "you believe in reunion and Elysium
+now?" Though she received him with an assemblage or Flora of wit, or
+was it grace? for they were difficult to distinguish, this cheerfulness
+of character and acquirement seemed not to be the cheerfulness of a
+contented or reposeful mind.
+
+My friend introduced me properly, that no supermember or _hors
+d'[oe]uvre_ should remain in this corporation of friendship.
+
+To all of us--even to me--for around me never before seen beings
+floated in silver reflections--it seemed as if the world had ceased,
+Elysium had opened, and the separated, covered, sub-terrestrial regions
+cradled only tranquil, but happy souls.
+
+There was a certain heartfulness in the joyous interest which this
+affectionate trinity took in Karlson's appearance, which generally
+accompanies the last step before the disclosure of some hidden plan,
+but this plan was concealed. To speak something also to me, Nadine
+said, that there was a critical philosopher and arguer with them, who
+would rejoice to hear any one _for_ or _against_ his opinions,--namely,
+the house-chaplain. When we stepped from the illumined diamond and
+magic cave into the dark night, we saw the cloak of Erebus hang in
+thick cloudy folds over the earth, and pale lightning shot from the
+nightly mist, the flowers breathed from covered calysses, and under the
+fast approaching storm the nightingales raised their melodious voices
+behind their blooming hedges.
+
+Suddenly Gione walked more slowly by Karlson's side, and said, with
+much warmth, but without hesitation: "I heartily love truth, even at
+the expense of stage-like effect: I must, in the name of the Baron,
+discover to you that he and I will to-morrow be forever united. You
+must forgive _your_ friend that he would not celebrate this ceremony
+without _his_."
+
+I think that now, in Karlson's heart, the cooled lava immediately
+became fluid and glowing. Suddenly lightning flashed from a cloud
+around the rising moon, and illumined the rain-drops, intended for
+darkness, in Gione's and in Karlson's eyes. Wilhelmi asked, "Can you
+not forgive me?" Karlson pressed him warmly and lovingly to his
+grateful heart: this lofty confidence of friendship, and this
+affectionate proof of it, raised his strengthened soul above all
+desires, and another's virtue spread in his breast the calm
+tranquillity of his own. We took shelter for the night in three Thabor
+huts,--the ladies in the first, Wilhelmi with the critical philosopher
+in the second, Karlson and myself in the third,--which the Baron had
+hired for us. The fatigue of the journey, and even of our feelings,
+deferred our joys and confidences for another night. But I cannot tell
+you how nobly sorrow changed into exaltation in my friend's
+countenance, how grief fell like a cloud from his heaven, and
+discovered the serene blue beneath. The sacrifices and virtues of our
+beloved ones belong to the inexpressible joys which the soul at least
+can count and appreciate; which it can imitate.
+
+His and my eyes overflowed with holy gladness from a singularly elysian
+mood of harmony in anticipation of the coming day. Ah, my Victor!
+nations and men are only the _best_ when they are the gladdest, and
+deserve Heaven when they enjoy it. The tear of grief is but a diamond
+of the second water, but the tear of joy of the first. And therefore
+fatherly fate, thou spreadest the flowers of joy, as nurses do lilies
+in the nursery of life, that the awakening children may sleep the
+sounder! O, let philosophy, which grudges our _pleasures_, and blots
+them out from the plans of Providence, say by what right did torturing
+_pain_ enter into our frail life? Have we not already an eternal right
+to a warm down bed? I think not now of the deepest mattress in the
+earth, because we are so pierced with stigmas of the past, so covered
+with its wounds.
+
+You once said to me: "In your early years, you have been drawn and
+driven from the stoic philosophy by Sorites; for if the sensation of
+pleasure be as little as the stoics pretend, it were wiser to convert
+than to benefit your neighbor,--wiser to preach morality from pulpit
+and desk than to practise it in the work-rooms,--wiser to turn towards
+your neighbor the dirt-balls and _soap-pills_ of moral philosophy, than
+the enlarged marble _soap-bubbles_ of joy. Further, that it is a
+mistake to assert that virtue makes more worthy of happiness, if
+happiness possessed not an eternal, independent value in itself; for
+else it might be maintained that virtue would make the possessor of a
+straw, &c. worthy--"
+
+You said this once. Do you believe it yet?--I do.
+
+
+
+
+ 502d STATION.
+
+ The Thundering Morning.--The Short Trip after the
+ Long One.--The Sofa-cushions.
+
+
+Through the whole night, a half-lost thundering was heard, as though it
+murmured in its sleep. In the morning, before sunrise, Karlson and
+myself stepped out into the wide cloud-tapestried bridal-chamber of
+nature. The moon approached the double moment of its waning and its
+fulness. The sun, standing on America as on a burning altar, drove the
+cloudy incense of its _feu de joie_ high and red into the air; but a
+morning tempest boiled angrily above it, and darted its fierce
+lightnings to meet his ascending rays. The oppressive heat of nature
+drew longer and louder plaints from the nightingales, and evanescent
+aroma from the long flower-meads. Heavy warm drops were pressed from
+the clouds, and beat loudly on the stream and on the foliage. Only the
+Mittagshorn, the pinnacle of the Pyrenees, stood brightly and clearly
+in the heavenly blue. Now a gust of wind from the waning moon dispersed
+the raging storm, and the sun stood victoriously under a triumphal arch
+of lightnings. The wind restored the heaven's blue, and dashed the rain
+behind the earth, and around the dazzling sun-diamond there lay only
+the silvered fringes of the once threatening clouds.
+
+O my Victor, what a new-born day was now on earth, encamped in the
+glorious valley. The nightingales and the larks loudly sung its
+welcome, the rosechafers rustled round its lily garlands, and the
+eagle, riding on the highest cloud, surveyed it from mountain
+to mountain. How rurally all things surrounded the serpentine
+field-embracing Adour. The marble walls, not raised by human skill,
+surround its flower-beds like large vases, and the Pyrenees, with their
+high tops, watch over and protect the lowly scattered shepherd huts.
+Tranquil Tempe! May a storm never disturb thy gardens and thy murmuring
+Adour. May a stronger one never visit thee, than would gently rock the
+cradle of nature, or dash a bee from the honey-dew of the wheat-sheaf,
+or force but a single drop from the waterfall upon the flowers of thy
+shores.
+
+You must not think that I am placing my paintbrushes at my side to copy
+the heavenly rounded valley by the measure of art for you; I will let
+you peep into this picture-book of nature as chance shall turn each
+succeeding page. My stations will lead you through its different
+chambers, in which the rich dowry of Spring, like that of a king's
+daughter, is placed for show. But truly it is a more glorious thing to
+see the whole dowry disposed over the person of the royal bride
+herself.
+
+A servant seeking the chaplain, roused us both from our reverie. We saw
+him advance towards a gentleman standing on the banks of the Adour, who
+slowly turned down his rolled-up shirt-sleeves. It was the chaplain,
+who had been catching crabs during the storm, and had subsequently
+fished. As I knew that his hairy hand had worked for the food of the
+critical, as well as his own philosophy, with trowel and mortar, with
+pen and ink, I boldly advanced towards him, and told him what I was
+writing. But the coarse, obstinate, yet timid free-mason, coldly
+welcomed me in a language as broad as his own frosty visage.
+
+He despises biographers; for the windows of a philosophical audience
+are too high,--perhaps, as in ancient temples, in the roof,--so that
+they cannot see into the streets of real life, as, according to
+Winkelmann, the Roman windows were architecturally as high. Lord
+Rochester is said to have been continually drunk during a whole
+quintennium; but such a chaplain is capable of being _sober_ for an
+entire decennium. A man like this bites the buds of all powerful
+truths, experiences, and fictions, as ants bite the buds from
+corn-seeds, that they may not fructify, but wither and die and form
+building materials.
+
+When the Chaplain left me to join the Baron, as consecrator of the
+marriage sacrament, I found Karlson in the dustrain of a near cascade.
+Round him, almost close to our windows, the hermitages of the farmers
+waded in green foliage, with the fresh harvest wreath roofed by faded
+ones; and inside, there bloomed families, outside, elms. He showed me
+Gione's card, which, he said, she had given him before her marriage.
+But it was not so; he had found it on the moss near the cascade. It
+represented a Roman landscape, and beside the living fountain was the
+pictured one of Tivoli, and on a stone in the foreground Gione's name
+was written. Such a printed trifle, a beloved name shortly before its
+sublunar annihilation, moves the whole heart with a succession of
+pleasing reflections.
+
+Karlson went to the ceremony. I remained alone under the splendid blue
+heaven, and rejoiced that all the inhabitants of Campan wore its
+livery, the blue, which we had yesterday mistaken for black.
+
+I will not hide from you that during the coupling, softened by the many
+beauties of spring, I lost myself in Nadine's equally charming ones,
+which were an undiscovered Central Africa for me, while I wished she
+were as warm. After eight or ten dreams, I saw the beautiful couples
+cross my path. How earnestly glad and serene we all stood under the
+spring music of flutes and pipes, and harps and warbling, which were
+living around us, with and without wings. Gione and Karlson concealed
+an equal emotion, as at an almost equal fate. Wilhelmi, who is, as a
+comet, sometimes in the burning, sometimes in the freezing point of a
+sun, requires no joys than those of others to make him happy. But a
+tear stood in Nadine's bright eye, which could not be smiled or looked
+away. Her heart seemed to me to resemble the earth, whose exterior is
+cold, but which carries in its centre a latent heat. And yesterday her
+whole being seemed so mirthful and so gay!
+
+We never make more erroneous conclusions in our opinions on any subject
+than on woman's cheerfulness. Oh! how many of these charming beings
+there are, who decay unvalued, who, while jesting, despair, and while
+joking, bleed to death; who hide their merry laughing eyes behind a
+wall, as behind a fan, to give glad vent to their long-restrained
+tears; who pay for a merry day by a tearful night, just as an unusually
+clear, transparent, and fogless air betokens rain. Remember the
+beautiful N. N., and also her youngest sister. In the mean time, the
+charming, sun-variegated dew-drop under Nadine's eye was balanced by a
+wart of half the size, the solitaire among her personal charms.
+
+Wilhelmi's lyric and dithyrambic head was filled with projects for
+pleasure, and with the eagerness of delight, he demanded a hasty
+determination concerning the proper use and enjoyment of the day. "O
+yes," said I, quickly and impertinently, "life flies to-day on a
+minute-hand, like an alarum it winds off; but how shall we form a plan,
+a good plan?" Nadine, who had arranged everything beforehand with the
+bridegroom, replied: "I think we need none for such a delightful day,
+and such a charming valley. We will pilgrimize carelessly along the
+banks of the Adour, the length of the Vale, and rest at every new
+flower, and at every bud, and in the evening we will sail back by
+moonlight! That would be quite Arcadian and shepherd-like in this
+Arcadia. Will you all? You certainly will, dearest sister?" "O yes,"
+said Gione, "for I think we are as yet all strangers to the charms of
+this paradise." The Baron seemed to hesitate before giving his consent,
+and said: "It depends whether the ladies can walk two and a quarter
+miles in one day."[7] I was mad with joy, and cried, "Charming!" Such a
+long horizontal heaven-journey, such a melodious Arpeggio through the
+chords of delight was an old innate wish of my youth. I imparted my
+delight to the Chaplain, to whose feelings this _voyage pitturesque_
+was as repugnant as a Good Friday procession, and to whom, instead of
+this heaven-way, that of Hoefer[8] would have been more acceptable,
+because he would rather have remained at home to read, and because he
+did not enjoy the Epopee of nature as a man, nor scan it as a
+naturalist, but like an usher, separated and divided it, for practice
+in building up again. I said to him: "If we two will be shepherds,
+representing the old Myrtil and Phylax, it would be interesting. You
+know best that whims should be ten times less bold before ladies and
+refined ears than on print, and that for such people it has to be
+filtered through so many filtering-papers and strainers, that I would
+not give a proof-sheet for it after the process."
+
+A hired country-house, at the end of the valley, was the architectural
+Eden with which Wilhelmi intended to surprise and delight his bride in
+this botanic one. But Nadine alone knew it.
+
+In as many moments as a swan would take to spread his wings and rise,
+we were all ready. I do not blame man for making preparations for the
+examination for death, but for no (shorter) journey. The long _hunt_
+destroys the game of enjoyment. I, for my part, never think of starting
+until I am on the road.
+
+Wilhelmi loaded himself with his bride's guitar; Karlson carried a
+portable ice-cellar. The ladies had their parasols; the Chaplain and I
+had nothing. I whispered to the shallow Phylax,--so I can now call him,
+and myself the old Myrtil,--"Sir Chaplain, we rebel against all good
+manners if we follow empty-handed." He immediately offered himself to
+Gione, as pack-horse, wagon, and carrier for her--parasol. But clever
+genius prompted me to return to Karlson's chamber, and bring two
+cushions from the sofa, and I returned with these twins in my arms;
+nothing could have been more appropriate, as the ladies sat down a
+thousand times on the way, and could not have dipped their silken
+elbows in the juicy paint of the flowers. To his vexation, Phylax was
+obliged to carry the soft block in his arms; I hung the other one, like
+a stick, to my thumb. At last we started.
+
+We advanced towards the Pyrenees. Corn-fields, waterfalls, shepherd
+huts, marble blocks, woods and grottoes, animated by the vascular
+system of the many-branched Adour, passed beautifully before our eyes,
+and we were forced to leave them behind, like the bright years of youth
+changed into dreams by the stern hand of Time.
+
+Ah, Victor, travelling alone is life, as life, on the contrary, is only
+a journey. And if, like certain shell-fish, I could only push myself on
+with one foot, or, like sea-nettles and women, I could only progress
+six lines in a quarter of an hour, or if I lived under Fritz II. or
+Fritz I. (Lycurgus), who both forbade a long journey, I would make a
+short one, that I might not perish like the loach, which languishes in
+every vessel, if not shaken.
+
+How spirited, how poetical, how inventive can we not be while we run
+onwards. As Montaigne, Rousseau, and the sea-nettle only shine when
+they move on. By Heaven! it is no wonder that man rises and will go on;
+for does not the sun follow the pedestrian from tree to tree? does not
+its reflected likeness swim after him in the water? do not landscapes,
+mountains, hills, men, rapidly changing, come and go? and does not
+Freedom's breath blow on the ever-varying Eden, when, released from the
+neck and heart-breaking chains of narrow circumstances, we fly freely
+and gladly, as in dreams, over ever-new scenes.
+
+For unfortunately the bell-glass over men and melons, which at first is
+covered by a broken bottle, must always be raised higher and higher,
+and at last removed entirely. At first, a man will go into the next
+town, then to the university, then to an important residency, then--if
+he has only written twenty lines--to Weimar, and finally, to Italy or
+to heaven. And if the planets were stringed together on a cord, and
+near each other, or if the rays of light were roads, and the atoms of
+light bridges, then surely would post-houses be erected in Uranus, and
+the insatiable inner man--for the outer one is so very satiable--would
+go longing and roaming from planet to planet.----
+
+Therefore, my Victor, nothing is confined in so many prison-walls as is
+this our human self. And our cages are enclosed, onion-like, one in the
+other. Tour and my _self_ are imprisoned not only on this earth, but in
+this King's Bench are the town walls; in these our four walls surround
+us; in the four walls, the arm-chair or the bed; in this again, the
+shirt or the coat, or both; and lastly, the body. And, to be minute
+(according to Soemmering), in the brain crevices, the duck's
+pond.---- Start at the fatal many-sided suite of houses of correction
+which surround thy_self_?----
+
+
+
+
+ 503d STATION.
+
+ Lampoon on the Chaplain.--Praise of Him.--The Diamond.--Opinions
+ against Immortality.--Eden Jokes.
+
+
+We two fellow-carriers formed the rear-guard. I wished to enter into
+discourse, but Phylax had a very poor opinion of me; at most he thought
+me a fickle sentimentalist who only portrays feelings. Yet feelings are
+the sponge of atmospheric air, which the poet, on his high Parnassus,
+as well as the philosophical diver in his depths, _must_ hold in his
+mouth, and yet poetry has cast an earlier light on many obscure works
+of nature than philosophy, as the dark _new moon_ borrows light from
+_Venus_.
+
+But the philosopher sins against poets more than you sin against the
+followers of Kant, from whom you seem to expect that they shall write
+pleasingly. Your arguments are ideas, not reasonings, when you say that
+philosophy's attendants are like those of Turkish ladies, mute, black,
+and deformed; that the philosophical market-place is a _forium
+morionum_,[9] and that beauty is forbidden to philosophers, as it was
+to the Helots, who were killed for possessing it. Is it not evident
+that a certain barbarous, un-German, far-fetched language is more an
+ornament than a detriment to it. Oracles despise grace, _vox dei
+sol[oe]cismus_, i. e. a Kantist cannot be read,--he must be studied.
+Further, it is not beneath a philosopher to enrich the language instead
+of the science. For some other may seek the ideas for the terms, and
+find them, as animals were found for the Ammonites. Therefore the
+Greeks have the same term for _word_ and _knowledge_, which combination
+was at last deified. The philosopher should always write over his door
+_pour l'oudalgie_,[10] instead of "here lives a dentist." This is the
+best reason, except a second one, why the philosopher, especially the
+Kantist, as I saw in Phylax, needs not books, nor men, nor experience,
+nor chemistry, botany, the fine arts, nor natural history. He can and
+must decipher the positive, the material, the given number, the unknown
+X. He creates the term, and sucks, as children often do,--it may
+suffocate them,--his own blistered tongue.
+
+I must return to the company! As the Chaplain carried his
+walking-stick, or rather walking-tree of a cushion, with the greatest
+indifference towards me, I wished to prejudice him for me by a
+panegyric at the expense of Kant. I said to him: "It surprised me that
+the philosophers should have suffered Kant to have made so great a
+distinction between them and artists, and only allowed the merit of
+genius to the latter. He says, in Sec. 47 of his 'Kritik der
+Urtheilkraft,' 'In sciences, the greatest inventor is only
+distinguished from the most labored imitator and apprentice by
+gradation; but from, those whom nature has gifted for beautiful nature,
+he is specifically distinguished.' This is derogatory, Sir Chaplain,
+and besides, not true. Why can Kant, then, only make Kantists, but no
+Kants?[11] Are new systems discovered by syllogisms, yet they are
+proved and tried by them? Can, then, the connection of a new
+philosophical idea with the old one better explain or facilitate its
+comprehension than the same connection which each new poetic one must
+have with old ones, which are the means of its creation. Sir Chaplain,
+I know not whom Kant has most sinned against, Truth, himself, or his
+school. Leibnitz's 'Monadology,' _harmonia praestabilita_, &c., are as
+much pure, brilliant emanations of genius, as any beaming form in
+Shakespeare or Homer. Besides, Leibnitz is a genial almighty Demiurg in
+the philosophical world, its greatest and first circumnavigator, and
+who, happier than Archimedes, found in his genius the standing-point
+from which he might move the philosophical _universa_, and play with
+worlds. He was an extraordinary spirit, he threw new chains on the
+earth, but he himself bore none: I think you agree with me, Sir
+Chaplain!" He replied, He did not, that the critical philosophy knew
+what to make of Leibnitz's experiments, his immaterial world, the
+asserted approximation of the definite to the indefinite line, and how
+to honor genius. In short, I had rather angered than conquered him.
+
+Karlson, whom even Amor's torch could not blind to the philosophical
+one, took as much interest in our war as could be taken with the ears.
+Fortunately we all stood still. A small diamond had fallen from
+Nadine's necklace, and she sought for the silver petrified spark in the
+grass. Strange that a man always hopes to find a thing on the spot
+where he perceives his loss. Nadine looked for her hardened dew-drop on
+the sparkling, spangled mead. As a bright diamond of the first water,
+it was so easily mistaken for a dew-drop, that I remarked, seeing one
+in Nadine's breast-rose, "Everything is covered with soft diamonds, and
+who will find the hard one? The dew in your rose sparkles as brightly
+as the lost stone." She looked down, and in the rose-cup lay the
+sought-for gem! It was thought I had been clever, and I was angry with
+myself for having been so stupid. But Nadine liked me no less for it,
+and that was reward enough.
+
+As the Adour bent, not an arm, but a finger, around this gay moss-bank
+and bees' sugar-field, the whole company sat among the bees and the
+flowers, and the cushion-bearers laid down their burdens. Nadine said,
+playfully, "If flowers have souls, the bees, whose nurses they are,
+must seem to them like dear sucking children." "They have," said
+Karlson, "souls like frozen window flowers, or like the tree of
+Petit,[12] which I once showed to you, or like pyramids of alum." "O,
+you always destroy, sir," said Gione. "Nadine and I once painted to
+ourselves an elysium for the souls of faded flowers." "I believe in a
+middle path for flowers after their death," said Wilhelmi, seriously;
+"the souls of lilies probably go into woman's forehead; hyacinth and
+forget-me-not souls into woman's eyes, and rose souls into lips and
+cheeks." I added, "It is a fortunate coincidence for this hypothesis,
+that a girl has perceptibly more color from the departing soul at the
+moment when she breaks or kills a rose."
+
+Joyfully and affectionately we continued our journey. Only into my
+carrier-companion the souls of thistles and sloes seemed to have
+entered. This play of ideas and this politeness in argument provoked
+him. Only Karlson pleased him.
+
+At last the Chaplain said to me: "No immortality but that of moral
+beings can be discussed, and with them it is a postulate or
+apprenticeship of practical sense. For as a full conformity of the
+human will to the moral law, with which the just Creator never can
+dispense, is quite unattainable by a finite being, an eternally
+continuing progress, i. e. an unceasing duration, must contain and
+prove this conformity in God's eyes, who overlooks the everlasting
+course. Therefore our immortality is necessary."
+
+Karlson stood still at Gione's side, that we might approach, and said:
+"Dear philosopher, pray take from this proof the boldness or the
+indistinctness which it has for laymen. How can we imagine the
+supervision, i. e. the termination, of an infinite, a never-ending
+course? or how will you make the eternity of time harmonize with the
+eternity of the moral requirements. How can a righteousness, scattered
+and dispersed over an interminable period of time, satisfy Divine
+Justice, which must require this righteousness in each portion of the
+period. And has the constant approximation of man towards this state of
+purity been proved? And will not the number, if not the grossness of
+faults, in this infinite space, increase with the number of virtues?
+And what comparison will the list of faults bear to that of the virtues
+at the examination? But let us leave that also. Will, in the sight of
+the Divine eye, the moral purity of two different beings--for instance,
+a seraph and a man, or of two different men, as Robespierre and
+Socrates--be equally contained in two equally long, i. e. eternal,
+courses of time? If on comparing the two, a difference appear, then one
+of them cannot have attained the so-called perfection, and must still
+be mortal."
+
+The Chaplain answered: "But Kant does not intend to demonstrate
+immortality by this argument. He says even, that it has been left so
+uncertain in order that free, pure will, and no selfish views, shall
+prompt our aspirations to immortality." "Strange," said Karlson. "But
+as we have now discovered this intention, its object would be defeated.
+Philosophers ought then to imitate me, and attack immortality to the
+advantage of virtue. It is a strange axiom to presuppose the truth of
+an opinion from its indemonstrability. Either immortality can be
+proved, then one half of your argument is right, or it cannot, then the
+whole of it is wrong. Besides, if the belief in immortality makes
+virtue selfish, the experience of it in the next world would make it
+more so. Does the belief in it deter the common man from doing what his
+confessor forbids, and forgives him? As little as the first stroke of
+apoplexy deters the drunkard from rushing to the second."
+
+
+
+
+ 504th STATION.
+
+ Flower Toying.
+
+
+Karlson joined the others in conversation, and Phylax was enraged that
+he could not triumph,--not even dispute. I said to him, that my
+opinions agreed with his, though not on the same grounds, and that,
+uniting, we would subsequently together issue forth and attack Karlson.
+
+I then went with my silken club to Nadine, and on a rose-bush showed
+her the flying light-magnets, the shining will-o'-the-wisps of night,
+the brown glowworms which she had never seen by day. I colonized a box
+with them for a living firework in the evening. Chance had romantically
+bent a bright rose-bush between graceful bluebells, on a green marble
+boundary stone; its foliage had the appearance of being seamed with
+black glowworms;[13] the lily-chafer hung like gold embroidery on the
+pale, ripe roses; long-legged, shining gnats ran glittering over the
+thorns; the flower-divers and nectary treasure-diggers, the bees,
+covered the rose-cups with new thorns; the butterflies, like moving
+tints, like Epicurean colors, gently floated round the branch's gay
+world. I cannot tell you how this glance, turned from the vast whole on
+to a beautiful small portion, gave a warmer glow to our hearts and to
+nature. Instead of the hand, we could only hold, like children, the
+fingers of the great mother of life, and reverently kiss them. By the
+creation, God became human for men, as therefore for angels an
+angel,--like the sun whose bright immensity the painter gently divides
+into the beauties of a human face.
+
+Wilhelmi said, that, to rise into Eden or Arcadia, he would need no
+larger wings than the four of a butterfly. What a poetical,
+paradisaical existence, like the papilio, to roam without stomach or
+hunger, among buds and flowers, to suffer no long night, no winter, and
+no storm, to toy away one's life in a delightful chase for another
+papilio, or to nestle, like the flower-colored bird of paradise, among
+lemon-blossoms, to float round blooming honey-cups, and to be rocked in
+silken cradles!
+
+Blissfully we proceeded on our way, and each new step drove an exciting
+blood-drop to our warmed hearts. I said to the Chaplain, that the
+temple of nature had been changed into a concert-hall for me, and every
+vocal into instrumental music. Victor! should not philosophy and the
+philosophers imitate electric bodies, which not only enlighten, but
+also attract? The soul's wine will indeed ever taste of the bodily
+barrel-hoops, but the soul is scarcely spirit-like enough only to serve
+as a body to another soul.
+
+
+
+
+ 505th STATION.
+
+ The Ephemera.--Relative Conclusions.--Doubts of the Length of the
+ Chain of Living Beings.--The Wart-Eaters.--The Cure.
+
+
+The sun and the valley surrounded us with their burning-glasses, and it
+was pleasant to sit down in a shady spot, and eat; and as just opposite
+to us was a marble-quarry, and close to the iron rock-wall a sap-green
+meadow, and beside us a group of elms and a little shining solitary
+white house, we asked at it for as much food as a roaming, contented
+quintet requires. The mistress of the house was alone, the husband was
+at work (as most Campanians are, in Spain), four children waited on us;
+our ice-cellar was opened, and with its contents the soul was warmed
+and the body cooled. The white glowing keystone of the heaven arch
+awoke with its flames the noonday wind, which slept on the cold summit
+of the Pyrenees.
+
+Little or nothing would taste well to poor Phylax, to whom it was more
+important to prove that he would be eternal. Fortunately, the French
+wine armed him more with French customs, and he asked the Baron
+politely: "I believe I owe M. Karlson some proofs of our immortality.
+Might I be allowed to give them?" Wilhelmi sent him to Gione, saying,
+"Ask there." Gione willingly granted his request, and said, "Why should
+not recollections of immortality ornament our joys as much as monuments
+do English gardens?" Nadine threw in the question, "But if men quarrel
+about the hopes of humanity, what remains for women?" "Her heart and
+its hopes, Nadine," said Gione. Wilhelmi said, smiling: "The owl of
+Minerva, as all other owls, is said to forebode destruction to a
+household, by settling on its roof. But I hope it is not so." I added,
+"The lives of all our beloved ones are tied to the obelisk of
+immortality, as to that of Rameses,[14] that the danger may double our
+strength; for they will be destroyed if it rebound."
+
+In the mean time, Karlson had taken an ephemeral fly from a neighboring
+elm, to which it had clung, in order to cast off its super body before
+death. The ephemera should not be an embodiment of our immortality,[15]
+but of our unfolding; for, unlike other insects, after all its
+transformations, and when already furnished with wings, it changes its
+shape once more before death. He held it before us, and said: "In my
+opinion, a philosophical ephemera would argue thus. What! I should have
+uselessly accomplished all my various changes, and the Creator had no
+other intention in calling me from the egg to the grub, then to a
+chrysalis, and at last to a flying being, whose wings must burst
+another covering before death, with this long range of spiritual and
+corporeal developments, he should have had no other aim than a six
+hours' existence, and the grave must be the only goal of so long a long
+a course?" The Chaplain opportunely answered, "Your argument proves
+against yourself, for it is _petitio principii_ to presuppose mortality
+amongst ephemera."
+
+I confess I am an enemy to these relative conclusions, because they
+take as much from truth as they give to eloquence, for contrary
+opinions can be proved by them. To one whose eyes are hurt by a grain
+of sand, I can prove that he is comparatively happy, as there are many
+in the world who suffer from sand-blisters and gravel; and also that he
+is unfortunate, as Sultanic eyes are never pressed by anything harder
+than Circassian eyelids--or two rosy lips. Thus I can make the world
+immense in comparison to bullets, grains of poison, or round puddings,
+or minute, if placed beside Jupiter, the sun, or the milky-way. If the
+ephemera on the ladder of existence would turn its back on the
+brilliant development of the beings above it, and only count the
+important ones on the steps beneath it, it would increase in its own
+importance. In short, our oratorical fantasy continually mistakes the
+distinction between more and less for that of something or nothing; but
+every relative conclusion must be based on something positive, which
+only eternal eyes, which can measure the whole range of innumerable
+degrees, can truly weigh. Indeed, there must be some bodily substance,
+and were it even the earth; for every comparison, every measurement,
+presupposes a fixed, unchanging standard. Therefore, the ephemeral
+development is a true one, and the conclusions on it are the same as on
+a seraphic one. The difference in the degrees can only bring forth
+_relative_, not _opposite_ conclusions. And here, in this letter--for
+in print I would not dare to do it--I will acknowledge a doubt. No one
+has ever _seen_ the steps of the ladder of beings above us,--no one has
+_counted_ those beneath us. What if the former were less, the latter
+greater, than we have hitherto imagined. The eternal promotion of souls
+from angels to archangels, in short, the nine philosophical hierarchies
+have only been asserted, but not proved. The common opinion, that the
+immense difference between man and the Eternal must be filled up by a
+chain of spiritual giants, is false; as no chain can shorten the
+distance, much less fill it, for it will ever retain the same width;
+and the seraph, i. e. the highest finite being according to human
+thoughts, must imagine just as many, if not more, beings above him, as
+I do beneath me. Astronomy, this sawing machine of suns, this ship's
+wharf and laboratory of earths, would persuade us that the
+_enlargement_ of worlds and beings is a sign of their improvement. But
+over the whole sky there hang only earth and fire-balls, and all things
+on them, from milk-way to milk-way, are less than the wishes and
+longings of our hearts. Then why should our earth alone, why not every
+other also, be progressing? why should they, rather than we, have the
+start in this inaugural eternity? In short, it may be disputed if in
+the whole universe there are other angels and archangels than Victor
+and Jean Paul. It seems scarcely credible to me. But truly the
+_melodious_ progression to sublime beings has hitherto been merely
+taken for granted. I believe in a _harmonious_ one, in an eternal
+ascension, but in no created culmination.
+
+I presume Karlson intended to answer my argument, not on the seraphs,
+but on ephemera, when Nadine, who had borrowed the fly in order to
+examine it, held it too near her eyes, and thereby disturbed and
+extinguished our Mendelssohn-Platonic conversation. For Madame Berlier
+(such was the noble name of our temporary hostess) stepped up to
+Nadine, and said: "It is a pity for the pain. You must take the
+wart-locust, I have proofs," do you understand? It is this. The
+so-called wart-eater, a locust with light brown spots, takes away a
+wart in a very short time by a single bite. Dame Berlier, over whom, as
+over most Southrons, beauty had greater power than self-love and sex,
+had falsely imagined that Nadine wished to annihilate the only fault in
+her charming form with the fly. The Chaplain had scarcely heard the
+wart-eater mentioned, when he vanished among the green, and commenced a
+hunt for wart-locusts. I was vexed that I had known the remedy as well
+as Dame Berlier, and never thought of it. For a shabby simile I should
+have easily recollected it, but not for a useful cure. Fortune
+permitted him soon to return with the winged wart-operator; this
+excited my envy. When he gave it to Nadine, the officious Phylax had
+squeezed, with the letter and paper press of his hands, like in a good
+calendar-press, the brown spotted vegetable-eater to--death. The animal
+could bite no more; I immediately darted off in search of another, and
+soon returned, holding one by the tips of its wings, and said, I would
+myself hold it over the wart until he would operate on it. While
+performing the action I praised it. Every great deed, I said, is only
+accomplished in the soul, at the moment of determination; when it comes
+outward and is repeated by the body,--which holds the locust,--it
+disperses into insignificant movements and thirds; but when it is done,
+as now the operation, it becomes great again, and, ever increasing,
+flows onward through all time. Thus the Rhine rushes like a giant from
+its summit, disperses in the fog, falls as rain upon the plain, then it
+forms itself into clouds, and roams over the sands, and carries suns
+instead of rainbows.
+
+It need not be concealed from you that it affected me to look into the
+retina of two such bright and warm, upturned eyes, without mentioning
+the whole warlike array of curls and lips, and forehead, and the
+Waterloo landscapes of the cheeks. Nadine's terror at the teeth of the
+brown little doctor made her more charming, and the danger of my
+situation greater. After holding it for some time, when I thought the
+operation was finished, she told me the locust had not yet touched her,
+as I held it two or three Parisian feet too far from the wart. It is
+true, I had lost myself in her net skin; but I remarked that the cure
+could not be accomplished, if I did not rest the ball of my right hand
+slightly on her cheek, in order to hold the wart-eater more firmly over
+the wart. Now he bit the required wound, and propelled into it as much
+of his corrosive fluid as he carried with him. I artfully diverted
+Nadine's pain, which resembled that of a pin pricking, by
+philosophizing. Man, I said, finds the stoic theory true and forcible
+for all pain, only not for the present. And when he bleeds from cut
+wounds, he imagines bruises heal more easily. He therefore defers his
+practice of the stoic-school until his own schooling is over. O, but
+then he stands by a running stream, waiting until the waters shall have
+passed. True firmness bears the bite of a locust, and rejoices at the
+trial!
+
+Now the operation was happily accomplished, which could easily excite
+an illness in me. It is true that her countenance had inflicted a
+deeper wound on me than the wart-eater upon it,--I should fear and
+examine whether mine, which was just as near to hers, had done as much
+damage; but Nadine is exceedingly--young. The hearts of young girls,
+like new waterbutts, at first let everything drop through, until in
+time, the vessels swell and thus retain their contents.
+
+
+
+
+ 506th STATION.
+
+ Objections To Immortality.--The Second Childhood of the
+ Outer and Inner Man.
+
+
+We broke up and proceeded. On high, light feathers floated through the
+sky, like the loose-flowing hair of the sun, which could not veil it.
+The day became hotter and stiller. But our path lay beneath a green
+roof, and each branch spread over us a parasol of broad fresh leaves.
+
+Gione asked, "Can we not continue our conversation in walking?" O, your
+Clotilde should know her; she has, excepting her charms, half her soul.
+No discord exists between her outer and inner harmony; her earnest,
+generous soul resembles the palm-tree, which has neither bark nor
+branches, but which bears broad foliage and buds on its summit.
+"Gione," said Nadine, "these arguments unsettle our minds, instead of
+removing our doubts." "No one," she replied, "has yet given his
+opinion; if we even have the firmest convictions, still by their
+beautiful conformity with another's convictions our own become more
+beautiful and firm." "Just as water-plants, surrounded by their water,
+are yet as much refreshed by rain as land plants are," said Myrtil (I
+am Myrtil).
+
+Wilhelmi said, just as we were passing through the Midsummer's-day
+night of a grotto cooled by oakshade and cascades: "Our conversation
+would better suit a total eclipse of the sun. I would that I could see
+one, when the moon hangs beauteously before the midday sun, when the
+noisy day is suddenly hushed, when the nightingales sing, the flowers
+fade, and when nightly mists and shuddering cold and dew fall." Phylax
+had now let slip his sofa-cushion into a murmuring spring; Nadine saw
+it, and, not to confuse him in the act of drawing it out, she, with
+charming zeal, drove us back to our conversation. Her intercourse with
+the world had given her a playful, light, ever-joyous exterior. But
+Gione's style, like the highest Grecian, is, artistically speaking,
+somewhat meagre and spare,--and the ball-rooms had made her, as
+mahogany presses make dresses, more agreeable. But her exterior charms
+did not contradict or injure her interior beauty.
+
+I said to Karlson, "Pray, prove to us the spiritual mortality, this
+soul's death." "M. Karlson needs not do that," answered the stupid
+Phylax, vexed at the wet cushion, "only the assertor must prove."
+
+"Very well," I said, "I call proofs objections, but I shall certainly
+give you only two;--firstly, the proof or objection: the simultaneous
+decay and destruction of the body and of the soul; secondly, the
+absolute impossibility of ascertaining the mode of life of a future
+existence, or as the Chaplain would say, to see into the spiritual
+world from the sensuous one. Now, M. Karlson, throw your two bombs into
+the greatest possible angles, which, according to Hennert, is 40
+degrees, but according to Bezout, 43 degrees."
+
+He aimed well. He showed how the spiritual Dryad flowered, burst and
+dispersed with the corporeal bark, how the noblest impulses are chained
+to the lead--earth, revolving wheel of the body; how memory,
+imagination, and madness only feed on the egg-yolk of the brain,--how
+bravery and mildness stand in as opposite degree to blood as leeches
+and Jews;[16] how, in age, the inner and outer man together bend
+towards the grave, together petrify, together, like metal compositions,
+_slowly_ cool, and at last together die!
+
+He then asked why, with the continual experience that every bodily
+down-bending digs a spiritual wound, and with this unceasing parallel
+of body and soul, we give to the latter, after death, everything which
+we have seen annihilated in the former. He said, and I believe it, that
+neither Bonnet's underbody, nor the incorporated soul corsets of
+Plattner (the "second soul organ") can diminish the difficulty of the
+question, for as both soul's under-garments or night-gowns and
+pinafores, always share, in life, the good and bad fate of the coarse,
+corporeal coat and martyr-cloak, and as in us double-cased English
+watches, the works, and the first and second cases (Bonnet's and
+Plattner's) always suffered and gained together, it would be absurd to
+seek the Iliad of the future world in the narrow hazel-nut shell of the
+_revived_ little body which has first stood and fallen with the coarse
+outward one.
+
+I then asked him to aim his second ball in the angle of forty degrees
+also. I added, that "I would have begged leave to give a long
+parliamentary speech on it, but that long speeches have a life and
+reproducing power, as, according to Reaumuer, long animals more easily
+re-form themselves, when cut, than short ones." Though certainly it
+occurs to me, that Unzer says, tall persons do not live as long as
+short ones. But Karlson needed little time or power to prove the
+uncertainty of the next world. The Sun-land behind the hillocks of the
+God's acre, behind the pest-cloud of Death, is covered by a complete,
+an impenetrable darkness of twelve inches, or of as many holy nights.
+He showed, and not badly, what an immense leap beyond all terrestrial
+analogies and experiences it is, to hope for, i. e. to create, a world,
+a transcendent Arcadia, a world of which we know neither copy nor
+original, which wants no less than a form and a name, map and globe,
+another Vespucius Americus, of which neither chemistry nor astronomy
+can give us the compounds or the quarters; a universe of air, on which,
+from the leaf-stripped, faded soul, a new body will bud forth, i. e. a
+nothing on which nothing is to embody itself.
+
+O, my good Karlson! how could your noble soul omit a second world which
+is already contained in this physical first one, like bright crystals
+in dark earth, namely, the sun-world of _Virtue_, _Truth_, and
+_Beauty_,[17] glowing in our souls, whose golden vein inexplicably
+extends its ramification through the dark, dirty clump of the sensuous
+world.
+
+It was now my turn to answer: "I will lessen your two difficulties, and
+then I will give my innumerable proofs. You are no materialist,[18] you
+therefore take for granted that bodily and mental activity only
+accompany and mutually excite each other. Yes, the body represents the
+keys of the inner Harmonica through all its scales. Hitherto only the
+corporeal outward signs have been called feelings, as the swelling
+heart and the slowly-beating pulse--longing; the outpouring of gall,
+anger, and so on. But the net-like texture, the anastomy between the
+inner and outer man, is so life-full, so warm, that to every _picture_,
+every _thought_,--a nerve, a fibre must move. We should also observe,
+and put into the notes of speech all the bodily after sounds of
+poetic, algebraic, artistic, numismatic, and anatomic ideas. But the
+sounding-board of the body is neither the soul's scale nor its
+harmony. Grief has no resemblance to a tear,--shame, none to the
+cheek-imprisoned blood,--wit, none to champagne,--the idea of this
+valley, none to its portrait on the retina. The inner man, this God,
+hidden in the statue, is not of marble as it is, but in the stony
+limbs, the living ones grow and ripen in an unknown life. We do not
+sufficiently mark how the inner man even tames and forms the outer one;
+how, for example, the passionate body which, according to physiology,
+should ever increase in heat, is gradually cooled and extinguished by
+principles,--how terror, anger, holds the dividing texture of the body
+in a spiritual grasp. When the whole brain is paralyzed, every nerve
+rusty and exhausted, and the soul carrying leaden weights, man needs
+but to _will_ (which he can do every moment), he needs only a letter, a
+striking idea, and the fibre-work of the soul's mechanism proceeds
+again without help from the body."
+
+Wilhelmi said, "Then the soul is but a watch which winds itself."
+"There must always be some _perpetuum mobile_," I said, "for all things
+have moved for an eternity already. The question is, either the soul
+never winds off, or it is its own watchmaker. I return to the subject.
+If a ruptured life-vein in the fourth brain-chamber of a Socrates place
+the whole land of his ideas and moral tendencies in a blood-bath, these
+ideas and moral tendencies will surely be covered with blood-water, but
+not spoilt by it; because not the drowned brains were virtuous and
+wise, but his _self_ was, and because the dependence of a watch on its
+case for protection from dust, &c. does not prove the identity of the
+two, or that the watch consists only of cases. As spiritual exertions
+are not bodily ones, but only _precede_ or _follow_ them; and as every
+spiritual activity leaves traces, not only in the soul, but also in the
+body; must, then, if apoplexy or age destroy corporeal activity,--must
+the soul's fire be therefore quenched? Is there no difference between
+the soul of a _childish_ old man, and that of a _child_? Must the soul
+of Socrates, imprisoned in Borgia's body as in a mud-bath, lose its
+moral powers, and does it suddenly change its virtuous qualities for
+vicious ones? Or shall in left-handed wedlock (which has no common
+property of body and soul) the one conjugal half only share the gains,
+not also the losses of the other? Shall the ablactated soul feel only
+the blooming, not also the faded body? And if it does, the earth
+surrounding it must, as our earth does to the superior planets, give it
+the reflection of our advancing and retrograding. If we shall ever be
+disembodied, the slow hand of time, that is, ever encroaching age, must
+do it. If our course is not to be concluded in one world, the gulf
+between it and the second must always appear to us a grave. The _short_
+interruption to our progress by age, and the _longer_ one by death,
+destroy this progress as little as the _shortest_ interruption by
+sleep. We anxiously suppose--as the first man did--the _total_
+sun-eclipse of sleep to be the _night_ of death, and this again the
+_doomsday_ of the world."
+
+"That must yet be proved, although I believe it," replied Phylax.
+
+New beauties prevented my answering, and closed the 506th Station.
+
+(P. S.--I have been told the Chaplain has declared that he had
+purposely not replied to several of my arguments, but he hoped he could
+see them in print, and then he would publish his opinions. But he will
+scarcely live until this letter is printed, and he will answer it.)
+
+
+
+
+ 507th STATION.
+
+ The Theft of the Souvenir.--Answers to Previous Stations.--On the
+ Emigration of the Dead to the Planets.--The Threefold World in
+ Man.--Grief without Hope.--The Seal of Immortality.--The
+ Country-seat.--The Balloons.--Ecstasy.
+
+
+When it is three o'clock, and a wandering Arcadian council is very well
+but somewhat warm, when the narrowing Adour, which has its source at
+the end of the Valley, flows round a projecting tongue of land, and
+draws its silver gauze cover over the pale moon reposing on its
+breast,[19] when round this slip of earth, this flowery anchoring
+place, half water scene, half bowling green, a broadleaved oak arcade
+grows, beneath which trembles a sun-gilt shadow, gliding from between
+the branches of the trees, on to the grass, embroidered by the
+restless, roving, gay-colored sand, on the book of nature--its insects,
+when the hammering in the shining marble blocks, the living Alp-horns,
+the bleating pasture-sheep, and the murmuring of waves fill the heart
+to its topmost branches and up to the brim with life-balsam, and the
+head with life-spirit; and when so many beauties are heard and
+seen,--living beauties who walk are inclined to sit down on the slip of
+earth, after the cushion-carriers have placed their burdens as
+resting-places for their arms.
+
+My dear Victor! all this came to pass.
+
+While sitting, long speeches were not as practicable as while walking.
+Even before, when we, from some distance, were choosing this spot for a
+resting-place, they had suffered considerably. I remained on the shore
+near Nadine, whose cheeks, reflected in the shadow-painted waves,
+appeared a charming pale red, as though a cochineal had bled to death
+on them. The walk and her red parasol had been too great colorists.
+
+My dear brother, I am preparing to fall in love. The operation on the
+wart was unimportant as a corner-piece of vexation, as negative
+electricity; but warts have their good points.
+
+Nadine plucked roses and other flowers. I drew an empty jewel-box from
+my pocket,--it was empty, like the 9th Kurstuhl, the Elias chair,[20]
+or the _limbus patrum_,--and held it under them, begging her to shake
+the flowers, that I might catch the millipeds,[21] which, like tallow
+candles, are more suitable for the eye than the nose. I caught a whole
+germanic diet of these creatures from the fragrant flower-cups, and
+imprisoned them in the box.
+
+During the flower-toying, which brought us nearer to each other, a
+small cockchafer fell on my skin. I looked round for the flowers and
+could find nothing till I saw, protruding from Nadine's left pocket, a
+souvenir, filled with sweet-smelling herbs. To steal from a beautiful
+woman is often nothing else than to give to her. I thought it
+fit, secretly to take the scented pocket-book in order to make a
+scent-bottle, and a joke of it in future. I so arranged the theft, that
+the Baron perceived my hand, holding the book, retreating from the
+pocket.
+
+The souvenir, thought I, may occasion some scene; meanwhile I can smell
+at it. I indemnified her for the loss of the scent-bag by the
+millipeds, whose prison I immediately insinuated into her pocket. The
+Baron was witness.
+
+Wilhelmi said, when we rose: "In the evening we shall be separated and
+deafened by the carriages. If something has yet to be decided--"
+
+"Something?" replied Phylax,--"everything has to be decided. M. Jean
+Paul, you have yet to raise M. Karlson's second difficulty." "Raise?" I
+asked, "I am to raise the cover of the whole future world? I am but
+going _towards_ it, not coming _from_ it. But this dissimilarity
+between the present and the future world, its inconceivable magnitude,
+has made many apostates. Not the bursting of our bodily doll-skin in
+death, but the wide disparity between the present autumn and the future
+spring, raises such overwhelming doubts in our poor, timid breasts.
+This is shown by the savages, who consider the future life merely as
+the second volume, the new testament of the first, and make no greater
+distinction between the first and second life than between youth and
+age: they easily believe in all their hopes; your _first_ difficulty,
+the bursting and fading of the bodily polish, does not deprive the
+savage of the hope to bud anew in another flower-vase. But your second
+difficulty daily increases itself, and its advocates, for by the
+increasing proofs and apparatus of chemistry and physiology, the future
+world is daily more effectually annihilated and dispersed, as it cannot
+be brought within play of a sun-microscope or of a chemical furnace. In
+fact, not only the reality, but also the theory of the body, not only
+the practised measurement of its longings, but also the pure moral
+philosophy of its spirit-world, must darken and make difficult the
+prospect on the inner world from the outer one. Only the moralist, the
+physiologist, the poet, and the artist more readily comprehend our
+inner world; but the chemist, the physician, and the mathematician want
+both seeing and hearing faculties for it, and in time, even eyes and
+ears.
+
+"On the whole, I find fewer men than one would imagine who decidedly
+believe in, or deny, the existence of a future world. Few dare to deny
+it, as for them this life would then lose all unity, form, peace, and
+hope;--few dare to believe it, for they are startled at their own
+purification and at the destruction of the lessened earth. The
+majority, according to the promptness of alternating feelings, waver
+poetically between both beliefs.
+
+"As we paint Devils more easily than Gods, Furies than Venus Urania,
+Hell than Heaven, we can more easily believe in the former than in the
+latter,--in the greatest misfortune than in the greatest happiness.
+Must not our spirit, used to misgivings and earth chains, be startled
+at a Utopia against which earth will be shipwrecked, that the lilies of
+it, like the Guernsey lilies,[22] may find the shore to bloom on, which
+saves and satisfies, elevates and makes blessed, our much tormented
+humanity.
+
+"I now come to your difficulty. I imagine, if even we were to take the
+grave to be merely the moat of communication between allied globes, our
+ignorance concerning the second world should not terrify us, and we
+need not take for granted that the mountain ridge of humanity does not
+continue under the Dead Sea, merely because we cannot see through its
+waters, for do not all mountain ridges continue on the bottom of the
+ocean? What! man will guess at _worlds_, when he cannot even guess
+_world-quarters_! Would the Greenlander paint a Negro, a Dane, a Greek,
+in his mind's eye, without ever having seen one? Can the political
+genius divine the inner versifications of the poetic one, without
+experience? Can the Abderite imagine the architecture of the sage?
+Would we have guessed the existence of but one of the animal creations
+of Anthropomorphism which copy the human figure in all animals, and yet
+change it? Or could a bodiless self, placed in a vacuum, with all
+existing logic and metaphysic, ever have conceived but a single vein of
+its present embodification and humanification?"
+
+"But what are you asserting or denying?" asked Wilhelmi.
+
+"I only assert that a second life on another planet cannot be denied,
+merely because we are unable to map out the planet, and portray its
+inhabitants. But we need no other planet."
+
+The Baron said: "O, I have often dreamed delicious dreams of this
+'_grande tour_' through the stars! It seemed the progression of a
+student from one class to another,--the classes being worlds."
+
+"But," replied Karlson, "to all these worlds, as upon our own, you will
+be refused admittance if you arrive without a body. By what miracle
+will you obtain one?"
+
+"_By a repeated one_," I answered. "For by a miracle we have our
+present body. But we can say in favor of this planet wandering, that
+our eyes too widely separate the worlds of which each one is but an
+_element_ of the infinite _integral whole_. The different worlds
+and their satellites above and around us, are only far removed
+world-quarters. The moon is but a smaller, more distant America, and
+space is the ocean."
+
+Nadine said: "One day I so pictured the inhabitants of a lemon-tree to
+myself. The worm on the leaf may think it is on the green earth, the
+second worm on the white bud is on the moon, and the one on the lemon
+believes itself to be upon the sun."
+
+"And yet this," said I, "is but a tree of immeasurable life. As around
+the earth-kernel cling wider and finer covers,--the earth, the seas,
+the air and space,--so the giant of one world is surrounded by
+increasingly large ones, with ever larger arms. The longest shell is
+the finest one, as light and the attractive power. The beauteous
+covering elongates and rarefies itself from iron bands to pearl ties,
+from flower-chains to rainbows and milky-ways."
+
+"Will we not now descend from the milky-way," said Karlson, "for we
+cannot ascend it. It is precisely this uniformity of the universe which
+forbids the rambling of emigrants from the earth. Every planet already
+has its own crew; more dense ones, as for instance Mercury, may be
+peopled with real sailors."
+
+"Precisely as Kant supposes!" said Phylax.
+
+"Finer, less solid ones, as e. g. Uranus, only with the most tender
+beings, perhaps only with women and nuns who love not the sun. He who
+intends to rectify the so-called soul or spirit by distilling it from
+one planet to the other, may with as much justice assert, that the
+spirits of the slacked Mercury receive their dephlegmation in a
+distilling process through our earth,--in short, that the earth is the
+second world for Mercury and Venus. The dead of the arctic zones could
+even pass into the temperate ones (it would be _distillatio per
+latus_), for on all planets there can be no other than coarser or finer
+_human beings_[23] like ourselves."
+
+Karlson waited for an answer and a contradiction, but I said his
+opinion was also mine. "I have still a stronger reason," I continued,
+"against emigration to, and voyage picturesque through, the planets,
+because we carry and lock up a heaven of starry light in our own
+breasts, for which no dirty earth-ball is clean or large enough. But on
+this subject I must have permission to speak uninterruptedly, at least
+until we have passed all these cornfields."
+
+Our pleasure-trip now was an alley of magic gardens, our passage
+through a golden sea of corn-blades, was accompanied and surrounded on
+all sides by a promised land, in which solitary houses reposed beneath
+picturesquely grouped leaf groves, as in Italy sleepers take their
+siestas on shaded meads. I was permitted to speak.
+
+"There is an inner, heart-contained spirit-world, which breaks through
+the dark clouds of the body-world as a warm sun. I mean the inner
+universe of _virtue_, _beauty_, and _truth_; three soul-worlds and
+heavens, which are neither parts, nor shoots, nor cuttings, nor copies
+of the outer one. We are less astonished at the inexplicable existence
+of these three transcendent heavens, because they are ever floating
+before us, and because we foolishly imagine we _create_ them, while we
+merely _recognize_ them. After which copy, with what plastic material,
+and of what, could we create and insert in ourselves[24] this same
+spirit-world? Let the atheist ask himself how he conceived the giant
+ideal of a God, which he either denies or embodies? An idea which has
+not been built upon comparative greatness and degrees, for it is the
+contrary of every measure and of every created greatness. In short, the
+atheist denies the great _original_ of the _copy_.[25]
+
+"As there are idealists of the outer world who believe that perception
+makes objects, instead of that objects cause perception, so there are
+idealists of the inner world, who deduct the _being_ from the
+_seeming_, the _sound_ from the _echo_, the _fact_ from its
+_appearance_; instead of, on the contrary, the seeming from the being,
+our consciousness from the objects of it. We mistake our power of
+analyzing our inner world, for its preformation, i. e. the genealogist
+thinks himself both originator and founder.
+
+"This inner universe, which is still more glorious and admirable than
+the outer one, needs another heaven than the one above us, and a higher
+world than one a sun now shines upon. Therefore we rightly say, not a
+second earth or globe, but a second _world_,--another beyond the
+universe."
+
+Gione already interrupted me: "And every virtuous and wise being is in
+himself a proof of immortality." "And every one," added Nadine,
+quickly, "who suffers innocently."
+
+"Yes, it is that," said I, with emotion, "which extends our line of
+life through countless ages. The chord of _Virtue_, _Truth_, and
+_Beauty_, taken from the music of the spheres, calls us from this dark
+oppressive earth, and announces to us the nearness of a more melodious
+existence. _Why_, and _from whence_ were these _super-earthly_ wants
+and longings created in us, if only, like swallowed diamonds, slowly to
+cut through our earthy shell. Why was a being endowed with wings of
+light chained to this dirty clump of earth, if it were to rot in its
+birth-clod, without ever being freed from it by means of its ethereal
+wings?"
+
+Wilhelmi said, "I also like to dream the dream of a second life in the
+sleep of this first one. But may not our beautiful spiritual powers
+have been given to us for the _enjoyment_ and _preservation_ of the
+present life?"
+
+"For its preservation?" I said. "Then an angel has been locked in the
+body to be the mute servant and fire-lighter, butler, cook, and porter
+of the stomach? Would not brutish souls have sufficed to drive
+man-bodies to the fruit-tree and the spring? Shall the pure ethereal
+flame only dry and bake the bodily patent stove with life-warmth, while
+it now slakes and dissolves it? For every tree of knowledge is the
+poison-tree of the body, and every mental refinement a slow-poison
+chalice. But, on the contrary, want is the iron key of freedom, the
+stomach is the manure-filled hot-house or manufactory of human blood,
+and the various animal instincts are but the earthy, soiled steps to
+the Grecian temple of our spiritual elevation.
+
+"For _enjoyment_ you said also. That means, we received the palate and
+appetite of a god, with the food for an animal. That portion of us
+which is of earth, and creeps on worm-folds, may and can, like the
+earthworm, be fed and fattened on earth. Exertion, bodily pain, the
+burning hunger of necessity, and the tumult of our senses exclude and
+choke the spiritual autumn bloom of humanity in nations and classes.
+All these conditions of terrestrial existence must be fulfilled ere the
+soul may claim its due. To the unhappy, therefore, who must be the
+business men and carriers of their bodily wants, the whole inner world
+seems but as an imaginary gilt cobweb, like the man who, breathing only
+the electrical _atmosphere_, instead of feeling the spark, thinks to
+grasp an invisible web. But when our necessary _animal servitude_ is
+over, when the barking inner dog-kennel is fed, and the dog-fight
+finished, then the inner man demands his nectar and ambrosia, and if he
+is turned off with earth-food only, he changes to an angel of Death,
+and a Hellfiend, driving himself to suicide, or makes of him a
+poison-mixer who destroys all joy.[26] The eternal hunger _in_ man, the
+insatiability of his heart, wants not a _richer_, but a _different_
+food, fruit, not grass. If our wants referred but to the degree, not to
+the quality, then the imagination, at least, might paint a _degree of
+satiety_. But imagination cannot make us happy, by showing us
+innumerable heaps of treasures, if they be other than _Virtue_,
+_Truth_, and _Beauty_."
+
+"But the more beautiful soul?" asked Nadine. I answered, "This
+discrepancy between our wishes and our circumstances, the heart and the
+earth, will remain, an _enigma_, if we are immortal, and would be a
+blasphemy if we decay. Ah! how could the beautiful soul be happy?
+Strangers, born on mountains and living in lowland places, pine in an
+incurable homesickness. We belong to a higher place, and therefore an
+eternal longing consumes us, and every music is our soul's Swiss _ranz
+des vaches_. In the morning of life, the joys which hearken to the
+anxious wishes of our hearts are seen blooming for us in later years.
+When we have attained these years, we turn on the deceitful spot, and
+see behind us, pleasure blooming in the strong hopeful youth, and we
+enjoy instead of our _hopes_, the _recollections of our hopes_. Joy in
+this also resembles the rainbow, which in the morning shines over
+evening, and in the evening arches over the east. The _eye_ may reach
+the _light_, but the arm is short, and holds but the fruit of the
+soil."
+
+"And this proves?" asked the Chaplain.
+
+"Not that we are unhappy, but that we are immortal, and that the second
+world in us demands, and proves a second world beyond us. O, how much
+might not be said of this second life whose commencement is so clearly
+shown in the first one, and which so strangely doubles us! Why is
+Virtue too exalted to make us, and, what is more, others (sensually)
+happy? Why does the incapability of being useful on earth (as the
+expression is) increase with a certain higher purity of character, as,
+according to Herschel, there are suns which have no earth? Why is our
+heart tortured, dried, consumed, and at last broken by a slow burning
+fever of ceaseless love for an unattainable object, only alleviated by
+the hope that this _consumption_, like a physical one, must one day be
+sheltered and raised by the _ice cover_ of death?"
+
+"No," said Gione, with more emotion in her eye than in her voice, "it
+is not ice, but lightning. When our heart lies a sacrifice on the
+altar, fire from heaven consumes it as a proof that the offering is
+accepted."
+
+I know not why her calm voice so painfully disturbed my whole soul (not
+only my argument). Even Nadine's eyes, which triumphed over her own
+sorrows, were suffused with tears by her sister's, and, although she is
+generally more timid and fastidious than Gione, in passing a little
+garden, she raised from a projecting hairy potato-stalk, a large moth,
+and showed it to us with a firm mouth, which should have been softened
+by a smile.
+
+It was the so-called Death's-head. I stroked the flat, drooping wings,
+and said, "It come? from Egypt, the land of mummies and graves; it
+bears a _memento mori_ on its back, and a _miserere_ in its plaintive
+voice." "In the mean time it is a butterfly, and visits the nectaries,
+which we day-birds will do also," appropriately observed Wilhelmi; but
+he took the words out of my mouth.
+
+Gione's countenance again expressed thoughtful calmness, and to me she
+became immeasurably beautiful and grand by the stillness of her grief.
+You once said that the female soul, though it be pierced with burning
+shafts, must never beat its wings convulsively together, else, like
+other butterflies, it would destroy their beauty. How true is this!
+
+Nadine's eyes seldom shone without at last overflowing, and every
+sorrowful emotion remained long in her heart, because she tried to
+guard against it. She resembled those springs which take a temperature
+opposed to the time of day, and which are warmest in the cool evening.
+She turned to me and said, putting her hand in her left pocket, "I will
+show you some poetry which will prove your prose." While she was
+seeking it, she stood still with her companion Wilhelmi. He guessed
+before I did, that she intended to give me something from the Souvenir,
+and when, in its stead, she took the milliped's prison from her pocket,
+he obligingly said, "If not with my hands yet with my eyes I assisted
+at the theft, and as accomplice I beg for mercy." The serious apology
+for this foolishness scarcely suited our earnest tone of mind. I said,
+"I wished to cause a more useless, than pardonable joke, but I--" She
+did not allow me to conclude, but mildly and unchanged (except by a
+reproving and a forgiving smile) she showed me in the aromatic book the
+noble Karlson's requiem on the death of the exalted Gione. I willingly
+give you the prosaic echo of it, from my prosaic memory.
+
+
+ GRIEF WITHOUT HOPE.
+
+What cloud is that, which like the clouds of the tropics, passes from
+morn to eve, and then sets? It is humanity. Is that the magnet-mountain
+covered with the nails of wrecked ships? No, it is the great Earth,
+strewed with the bones of fallen men.
+
+Ah! why did I love? I had not then lost so much!
+
+Nadine, give me thy grief, for it contains hope. Thou standest by thy
+crushed sister, who dissolves even beneath the winding-sheet, and
+lookest upwards to the trembling stars, and thinkest: Above, O dearest
+one, thou dost reside, and on the suns we find again our hearts, and
+the small tears of life will be over.
+
+But mine remain, and burn in the dim eye. My cypress alley is not open,
+and discloses no heaven. Human blood paints the fluid figure called man
+on the monument, as oil on marble forms forests; Death wipes away the
+man, and leaves the stone. O Gione! I would have some consolation, if
+thou wert but far away from us all, on a clouded forest, in a cave of
+the Earth, or on the most distant world in space. But thou art gone,
+thy soul is dead, not only thy life and thy body.
+
+See, Nadine, on the judgment-seat of Time lies the crushed angel, with
+the death color of the spirit-world. Gione has lost all her virtues,
+her love, her patience, her strength, her all-embracing heart, and her
+rich mind: the thunderbolt of Death has destroyed the diamond, and now
+the wax statue of the body slowly melts beneath the soil.
+
+Serpent of Eternity, quickly take away the beautiful form, as the
+larger serpent first poisons and then devours man. But I, Gione, stand
+beside your ruins with unalleviated pain, with undestroyed soul; and
+grieving, think of you until I also dissolve. And my grief is noble and
+deep, for I have no hope! May thy invisible shadow-picture, like the
+new moon with the sun,[27] arise to heaven in my soul! And may the
+creative wheel of Time, which raises innumerable hearts, and fills them
+with blood, only to pour them again into the grave, and let them die,
+pour out my life slowly, for long time would I mourn for thee, thou
+lost one!
+
+
+I cannot tell you, dearest Victor, how horrible and fearful the eternal
+snow of annihilating death seemed to me, placed beside the noble form
+it should have covered; how frightful the thought: if Karlson is right,
+the last day has torn this never happy, innocent soul from the prisons
+upon the earth to the closer ones beneath it: man too often carries his
+errors as his truths only as word arguments, not as feelings. But let
+the disbeliever of immortality imagine a life of sixty minutes instead
+of sixty years, and let him try if he can bear to see loved, noble, or
+wise men only aimless, hour-long air-phantoms, hollow thin shadows
+which fly towards the light and are consumed by it, and who, without
+path, trace, or aim, after a short flight, dissolve into their former
+night. No; even over him steals a supposition of immortality. Else a
+black cloud would forever hang over his soul, and the earth would quake
+beneath him when he trod on it, as if he were a Cain.
+
+I continued, but all arguments were poetized into feelings. "Yes, if
+all forests of this earth were pleasure grottoes, all valleys Campan,
+all islands holy, all fields Elysian, and all eyes sparkling, yes,
+then--no, even then the Eternal One would have given to our souls the
+promise of a future life, even in the blessedness of the present one.
+But now, O God! when so many houses are mourning ones, so many fields
+battle-fields, so many cheeks pale, and when we pass so many sunken,
+red, torn, closed eyes,--O, can death be but the last destroying
+whirlwind? And when at last, after thousand, thousand years, our earth
+is dried up by the sun's heat, and every living sound on its surface
+silenced, will an immortal spirit look down on the silent globe, and,
+gazing on the empty hearse moving slowly on, say: 'There the churchyard
+of humanity flies into the crater of the sun; on that burning heap many
+shadows, and dreamers, and wax-figures, have wept and bled, but now
+they are all melted and consumed: Fly into the sun, which will also
+dissolve thee, thou silent desert with thy swallowed tears, with thy
+dried-up blood!' No, the crushed worm dares raise himself to his
+Creator, and say: 'Thou canst not have made me only to suffer.'"
+
+"And who gives the worm the right to this demand?" asked Karlson.
+
+Gione answered, gently, "The Eternal One himself, who gives us charity
+and who speaks in all our souls to calm us, and who alone has created
+in us our demands to Him and our hope in Him."
+
+This good sweet word could still not calm all the waves of my excited
+soul. From a distant house, turtle-doves sent after us trembling,
+soul-felt plaints. About my tear-filled inward eye assembled all those
+forms whose hearts were without guilt and without joy,[28] who attained
+no single wish here below, and who, sinking under the frost and
+snow-storm of fate, only longed, like persons freezing to death, to
+sleep; and all those forms who have loved too deeply, and lost too
+much, and whose wounds were never cured until death had widened them,
+like a cracked bell which retains its hollow sound until the crevice is
+made larger, and the beings nearest me, and many other female ones,
+whose exquisitely tender souls fate most consecrates to torture, as
+Narcissus is consecrated to the God of Hell. I also remembered your
+true remark, that you had never pronounced the words _pain_ and _the
+past_ before a woman, without hearing an almost inaudible sigh at the
+union of the two words, from the suffering heart; for woman on the
+narrower stage of her plans, with idealized wishes and desires built on
+others' worth, rather than on her own, has a thousand times more
+disappointments to suffer than we men.
+
+The sun sank deeper behind the mountains, and giant shadows, like
+mighty birds of prey, came coldly down upon us from the eternal snow. I
+took Karlson's hand in mine, and looked with tearful eyes into his
+manly, beautiful countenance, and said, "O Karlson! on what a blooming,
+grand world you throw an immeasurable gravestone, which no time can
+lift! Are two difficulties,[29] based too on the _necessary ignorance_
+of man, sufficient to overthrow a belief, which explains thousand
+greater difficulties, without which our existence is without aim, our
+sufferings without explanation, and the holy Trinity in our breast
+three furies, and three terrible contradictions? A tending God's hand,
+leading and feeding the inner man (the child of the outer one),
+teaching him to go and to speak, educating, refining him, is shown in
+all things, from the shapeless earthworm to the brilliant human face,
+from the chaotic nations of the primitive ages to the present century,
+from the first faint pulsation of the invisible heart to its full,
+bold, throbbing pulse in manhood,--and why? That when man stands
+upright and exalted, a beautiful demi-god, even amid the ruins of his
+old body temple, the club of Death may annihilate the demi-god forever?
+And on the eternal sea, on which the least drop throws immeasurable
+rings, on this sea a life-long rising and a life-long falling of the
+soul should have the same termination, namely, the end of all
+things,--annihilation?[30] And as, from the same cause, the souls of
+all other worlds must fall and die with ours, and of this shroud and
+crape-veiled immeasurability nothing remain but the ever-sowing and
+never-reaping solitary world-spirit, who sees one eternity mourn for
+another, there can be no aim and no object in the whole spiritual
+universum, for the purpose of the development of succeeding or
+successive ephemera is no progress for the vanished ephemera, scarcely
+even for the last one which can never exist.[31] And you take for
+granted all these enigmas and contradictions by which all the strings
+of creation, not only its harmony, are torn, because two difficulties
+present themselves to you, which _cannot any better_ explain mortality
+... Dearest Karlson, you would bring your eternally jarring discord
+into this harmony of the spheres! See how calmly the day goes, how
+grandly the night sets in; did you not think that our spirit will rise
+one day from its grave of ashes, when you saw the mild pale moon rise
+grandly from the crater of Vesuvius?" ... The sun stood on the
+mountains, about to plunge into the sea and swim to the new world.
+Nadine embraced her sister with emotion, and said, "O, we love each
+other forever and immortally, dearest sister." Karlson accidentally
+touched the chords of the lyre which he carried: Gione took it from him
+with one hand, gave him the other, and said, "You are the only one
+among us who is tormented by this melancholy belief,--and you deserve
+to have one so beautiful!"
+
+This word of concealed love overpowered his long-filled heart, and two
+burning drops fell from the blinded eyes, and the sun gilded the holy
+tears, and he said, looking towards the mountains: "I can bear no
+annihilation but my own,--my whole heart is of your opinion, and my
+head must slowly follow."
+
+I will not again mention a man whom I have blamed so often.
+
+We now stood before a mansion, the windows of which were silvered, and,
+when it was darker, gilt by girandoles. Aloft over its Italian balcony
+hung two balloons, one at its eastern, the other at its western
+extremity. Without those beautiful globes, the counterpart, as it were,
+of the two glorious ones in heaven, the sun and the moon, I should have
+scarcely paid heed to the scene on earth, in the splendor of the one on
+high.
+
+Dearest friend, how beautiful was the place and the time. Around us,
+in their majesty, reposed the Pyrenees, half robed in night and half
+in day, not stooping, like man, beneath the load of years, but
+erect--forever; and I felt why the great ancients had thought the
+mountains were a breed of giants. On the mountain heads hung wreaths of
+roses cloud-woven; but each time that a star appeared upon the clear,
+deep sea of ether and sparkled on its azure waves, a rose from the
+mountain's chaplet faded and dropped away. The Mittaghorn, alone, like
+a higher spirit, gazed long after the sinking lonely sun, and glowed
+with ecstasy. Down beneath us an amphitheatre of lemon-trees, by its
+perfumes, brought us back to the veiled earth, and made a dusky
+paradise of it. And Gione, in calm rapture, struck the chords of her
+guitar, and softly did Nadine's voice accompany the gliding tones. The
+nightingale in the rose-hedges by the lake awoke, and the plaintive
+tones from its tiny heart pierced deep into the great heart of man; and
+shining glowworms flew from rose-bush to rose-bush, but in the mirror
+of the lake they were but as golden sparks, floating over pale yellow
+flowers. But when we looked again towards the heavens, lo! all its
+stars were gleaming, and in place of rose-woven wreaths, the mountains
+were clad in extinguished rainbows, and the giant of the Pyrenees was
+crowned with stars instead of roses. O my beloved Victor! in this
+moment it was with each of our enraptured souls as if from its
+oppressed heart earth's load had dropped away; as if from her mother's
+arms, the earth were giving us, matured in the Father arms of the
+infinite Creator; as if our little life were over! To ourselves, we
+seemed the immortal, the exalted. We fancied that our speech of man's
+immortality had been the prophecy of our own, as with two great and
+noble men.[32] But though we entered the brilliant rooms, the storm of
+new joys could not destroy the old ones. We were not yet able to be
+without the great night around us, and we ascended the platform, that
+from this little throne we might better contemplate the higher throne
+of creation beneath the eternal canopy; although kneeling would have
+been a higher ascension for the moved soul.
+
+There were night-violets in a glass box, which traced Gione's name in
+blooming colors. I remembered the glowworms and millipeds. I let the
+former fly down upon the rose-bushes in confused star-pictures; with
+the latter I fired Gione's beautiful flower namesake.
+
+Gione looked longingly towards the eastern Mongolfiere. Wilhelmi
+understood her. Her soul was as bold as it was calm, she had already
+visited many of the magic caves of earth, and had ascended to the
+summits of the highest Alps; she wished now to rise in the air, and to
+float in the heavens above this beautiful country, and on this
+beauteous night; but the enjoyment of the prospect was not her only
+motive. Wilhelmi asked who should be her companion. Solitude was her
+chief desire. The breadth and depth of the boat under the globe, a
+chair in it, and the cords by which she would be raised and lowered,
+secured the trip from all danger.
+
+Like a celestial being she rose beneath the stars,--the night and the
+height threw a mist over her rising form. A slight zephyr rocked the
+blooming Aurora, and crowned the moving goddess with alternate
+constellations. Now her countenance appeared surrounded by pale
+supernatural rays. It seemed bright as an angel rising towards its
+kindred stars through the rich dark blue space. An unusual tremor
+seized on Wilhelmi and Karlson; it was as if they saw their beloved one
+again carried from them on the wings of the angel of Death.
+
+When she returned to us her eyes were red with weeping; she had
+ascended, that she might in an unseen moment, shed her old heavy tears
+near the stars. O the Celestial one! She smiled strangely in the
+slumber of this life at higher joys than earthly ones, as sleeping
+children smile when they see Angels.
+
+It was now impossible to repress my longing for the stars, and my
+petition to be allowed to ascend. Permission to use the western
+Mongolfiere was willingly bestowed. Nadine, emboldened by the safe
+return of her sister, and by the companion in the danger, skipped into
+the boat, with her usual impulsive warmth, to refresh her thirsting
+soul with the majestic immeasurability of night.
+
+And now the suns raised us. The heavy earth sank down as the past;
+wings such as man has in happy dreams bore us upwards.
+
+The mighty vacancy and silence of space lay stretched before us even up
+into the stars;--as we rose higher, the dark forests seemed but clouds,
+and snow-girt mountaintops like snow-flakes. The ascending globe bore
+us nearer to the harmless, silent lightning of the moon, in whose
+bright satellite we seemed cradled, and which stood as a calm Elysium
+beneath the heavens, and high above the thick fog air, the light heart
+beating more quickly, seemed to pant with ethereal gladness to have
+left the earth with out discarding its shell covering. Our ascent was
+suddenly arrested--we looked down into the valley, half concealed by
+distance and the darkness of the night. Only the lights from the
+mansion were visible to us,--a western cloud hung like a white fog
+before us, and a black eagle flew like an angel of death from the east
+through the cloud pillar, seeking its summit, and a cool breeze
+playfully drew us towards the mist-island. The evening red had already
+passed the earth at midnight, and wandered over charming France as its
+future Aurora. O, how the soul was raised towards the stars, and how
+lightly did our hearts beat above the earth!
+
+But now from the bright mansion arose sweet harmony, and the subdued
+echo of the voices of our beloved ones calling upon us. And when Nadine
+looked down, her lonely heart broke with longing after those dear ones;
+and when she glanced into the silvered valley, over which the moon had
+risen, and where the trembling waterfalls danced beside the flowing
+archings of the stream and the green marble caves, and the white paths
+between poplars and wheat-ears, and the whole enchanting path of our
+day's journey lay silvered beneath her inconstant rays,--bright,
+shining tears flowed unrestrained from her mild eyes, and she looked
+imploringly to me, as if begging for consideration and secrecy, and
+said expressively, "We are yet so far from the cruel earth."
+
+When our little globe was drawn back to the shining meadows and the
+merry music, she looked inquiringly at me, to ask if the traces of
+tears yet remained in her eyes. She dried them more quickly, but in
+vain. Silently we descended; I took her burning hand in mine, and
+looked into her weeping eyes, but could not speak.... --And how could I
+speak better now, dearest friend!
+
+
+
+
+
+ LIFE
+
+ OF
+
+ QUINTUS FIXLEIN.
+
+ EXTRACTED FROM
+
+ FIFTEEN LETTER-BOXES.
+
+ TRANSLATED BY THOMAS CARLYLE.
+
+
+
+
+ LETTER TO MY FRIENDS,
+ INSTEAD OF PREFACE.
+
+
+Merchants, Authors, young Ladies, and Quakers, call all persons, with
+whom they have any business, Friends; and my readers accordingly are my
+table and college Friends. Now, at this time, I am about presenting so
+many hundred Friends with just as many hundred gratis copies; and my
+Bookseller has orders to supply each on request, after the Fair, with
+his copy--in return for a trifling consideration and _don gratuit_ to
+printers, pressmen, and other such persons. But as I could not, like
+the French authors, send the whole Edition to the binder, the blank
+leaf in front was necessarily wanting; and thus to write a
+complimentary word or two upon it was out of my power. I have therefore
+caused a few white leaves to be inserted directly after the title-page;
+on these we are now printing.
+
+My Book contains the Life of a Schoolmaster, extracted and compiled
+from various public and private documents. With this Biography, dear
+Friends, it is the purpose of the Author not so much to procure you a
+pleasure as to teach you how to enjoy one. In truth, King Xerxes should
+have offered his prize-medals, not for the invention of new pleasures,
+but for a good methodology and directory to use the old ones.
+
+Of ways for becoming happier (not happy) I could never inquire out more
+than three. The first, rather an elevated road, is this: to soar away
+so far above the clouds of life, that you see the whole external world,
+with its wolf-dens, charnel-houses, and thunder-rods, lying far down
+beneath you, shrunk into a little child's garden. The second is: simply
+to sink down into this little garden; and there to nestle yourself so
+snugly, so homewise, in some furrow, that, in looking out from your
+warm lark-nest, you likewise can discern no wolf-dens, charnel-houses,
+or thunder-rods, but only blades and ears, every one of which, for the
+nest-bird, is a tree, and a sun-screen, and a rain-screen. The third,
+finally, which I look upon as the hardest and cunningest, is that of
+alternating between the other two.
+
+This I shall now satisfactorily expound to men at large.
+
+The Hero, the Reformer, your Brutus, your Howard, your Republican, he
+whom civic storm, or genius poetic storm, impels; in short, every
+mortal with a great Purpose, or even a perennial Passion (were it but
+that of writing the largest folios); all these men fence themselves in
+by their internal world against the frosts and heats of the external,
+as the madman in a worse sense does; every _fixed_ idea, such as rules
+every genius, every enthusiast, at least periodically, separates and
+elevates a man above the bed and board of this Earth, above its
+Dog's-grottoes, buckthorns, and Devil's-walls; like the Bird of
+Paradise, he slumbers flying; and, on his outspread pinions, oversleeps
+unconsciously the earthquakes and conflagrations of Life, in his long,
+fair dream of his ideal Mother-land.--Alas! To few is this dream
+granted; and these few are so often awakened by Flying Dogs![33]
+
+This skyward track, however, is fit only for the winged portion of the
+human species, for the smallest. What can it profit poor quill-driving
+brethren, whose souls have not even wing-shells, to say nothing of
+wings? Or these tethered persons with the best back, breast, and
+neck-fins, who float motionless in the wicker Fish-box of the State,
+and are not allowed to swim, because the Box or State, long ago tied to
+the shore, itself swims in the name of the Fishes? To the whole
+standing and writing host of heavy-laden State-domestics, Purveyors,
+Clerks of all departments, and all the lobsters packed together heels
+over head into the Lobster-basket of the Government office-rooms, and
+for refreshments, sprinkled over with a few nettles; to these persons,
+what way of becoming happy _here_ can I possibly point out?
+
+My _second_ merely; and that is as follows: to take a compound
+microscope, and with it to discover, and convince themselves, that
+their drop of Burgundy is properly a Red Sea, that butterfly-dust is
+peacock-feathers, mouldiness a flowery-field, and sand a heap of
+jewels. These microscopic recreations are more lasting than all
+costly watering-place recreations.--But I must explain these metaphors
+by new ones. The purpose for which I have sent _Fixlein's Life_
+into the Messrs. Luebeks' Warehouse, is simply that in this same
+_Life_--therefore in this Preface it is less needful--I may show to the
+whole Earth that we ought to value little joys more than great ones, the
+night-gown more than the dress-coat; that Plutus's heaps are worth less
+than his handfuls, the plum than the penny for a rainy day; and that
+not great, but little good-haps can make us happy.--Can I accomplish
+this, I shall, through means of my Book, bring up for Posterity a race
+of men finding refreshment in all things; in the warmth of their rooms
+and of their night-caps; in their pillows; in the three High Festivals;
+in mere Apostles' days; in the Evening Moral Tales of their wives, when
+these gentle persons have been forth as ambassadresses visiting some
+Dowager Residence, whither the husband could not be persuaded; in the
+bloodletting-day of these their newsbringers; in the day of
+slaughtering, salting, potting against the rigor of grim winter; and in
+all such days. You perceive, my drift is, that man must become a little
+Tailor-bird, which, not amid the crashing boughs of the storm-tost,
+roaring, immeasurable tree of Life, but on one of its leaves, sews
+itself a nest together, and there lies snug. The most essential sermon
+one could preach to our century were a sermon on the duty of staying at
+home.
+
+The _third_ skyward road is the alternation between the other two. The
+foregoing _second_ way is not good enough for man, who here on Earth
+should take into his hand not the Sickle only, but also the Plough. The
+_first_ is too good for him. He has not always the force, like
+Rugendas, in the midst of the Battle to compose Battle-pieces; and,
+like Backhuisen in the Shipwreck, to clutch at no board but the
+drawing-board to paint it on. And then his pains are not less lasting
+than his _fatigues_. Still oftener is Strength denied its Arena; it is
+but the smallest portion of life that, to a working soul, offers Alps,
+Revolutions, Rhine-falls, Worms Diets, and Wars with Xerxes; and for
+the whole it is better so; the longer portion of life is a field beaten
+flat as a threshing-floor, without lofty Gothard Mountains; often it is
+a tedious ice-field, without a single glacier tinged with dawn.
+
+But even by walking, a man rests and recovers himself for climbing; by
+little joys and duties, for great. The victorious Dictator must
+contrive to plough down his battle Mars-field into a flax and carrot
+field; to transform his theatre of war into a parlor theatre, on which
+his children may enact some good pieces from the _Children's Friend_.
+Can he accomplish this, can he turn so softly from the path of poetical
+happiness into that of household happiness,--then is he little
+different from myself, who even now, though modesty might forbid me to
+disclose it--who even now, I say, amid the creation of this Letter,
+have been enabled to reflect, that, when it is done, so also will the
+Roses and Elder-berries of pastry be done, which a sure hand is
+seething in butter for the Author of this Work.
+
+As I purpose appending to this Letter a Postscript (at the end of the
+Book), I reserve somewhat which I had to say about the Third[34]
+half-satirical, half-philosophical part of the Work till that
+opportunity.
+
+Here, out of respect for the rights of a Letter, the Author drops his
+half anonymity,[35] and for the first time subscribes himself with his
+whole true name,
+
+ Jean Paul Friedrich Richter.
+
+_Hof in Voigtland, 29th June_, 1795.
+
+
+
+
+
+ LIFE OF QUINTUS FIXLEIN,
+ DOWN TO OUR OWN TIMES.
+ IN FIFTEEN LETTER-BOXES.
+
+
+ FIRST LETTER-BOX.
+
+ Dog-days' Vacation.--Visits.--An Indigent of Quality.
+
+
+Egidius Zebedaeus Fixlein had just for eight days been Quintus,[36] and
+fairly commenced teaching duties, when Fortune tabled out for him four
+refreshing courses and collations, besprinkled with flowers and sugar.
+These were the four canicular weeks. I could find in my heart, at this
+hour, to pat the cranium of that good man who invented the Dog-days'
+Vacation. I never go to walk in that season, without thinking how a
+thousand down-pressed pedagogic persons are now erecting themselves in
+the open air; and the stiff knapsack is lying unbuckled at their feet,
+and they can seek whatsoever their soul desires; butterflies,--or roots
+of numbers,--or roots of words,--or herbs,--or their native villages.
+
+The last did our Fixlein. He moved not, however, till Sunday,--for you
+like to know how holidays taste in the city; and then, in company with
+his Shock and a Quintaner, or Fifth-Form boy, who carried his Green
+nightgown, he issued through the gate in the morning. The dew was still
+lying; and as he reached the back of the gardens, the children of the
+Orphan Hospital were uplifting with clear voices their morning hymn.
+The city was Flachsenfingen, the village Hukelum, the dog Schil, and
+the year of Grace 1791.
+
+"Manikin," said he, to the Quintaner, for he liked to speak, as Love,
+children, and the people of Vienna do, in diminutives, "Manikin, give
+me the bundle to the village; run about, and seek thee a little
+bird, as thou art thyself, and so have something to pet too in
+vacation-time." For the manikin was at once his page, lackey,
+room-comrade, train-bearer, and gentleman in waiting; and the Shock
+also was his manikin.
+
+He stept slowly along, through the crisped cole-beds, overlaid with
+colored beads of dew; and looked at the bushes, out of which, when the
+morning wind bent them asunder, there seemed to start a flight of
+jewel-colibri, so brightly did they glitter. From time to time he
+drew the bell-rope of his--whistle, that the manikin might, not skip
+away too far; and he shortened his league and half of road, by
+measuring it not in leagues, but in villages. It is more pleasant for
+pedestrians--for geographers it is not--to count by wersts than by
+miles. In walking, our Quintus furthermore got by heart the few fields
+on which the grain was already reaped.
+
+But now roam slower, Fixlein, through His Lordship's garden of Hukelum;
+not, indeed, lest thy coat sweep away any tulip-stamina, but that thy
+good mother may have time to lay her Cupid's-band of black taffeta
+about her smooth brow. I am grieved to think my fair readers take it
+ill of her, that she means first to iron this same band; they cannot
+know that she has no maid; and that to-day the whole Preceptorial
+dinner--the money purveyances the guest has made over to her three days
+before--is to be arranged and prepared by herself, without the aid of
+any Mistress of the Household whatever; for indeed she belongs to the
+_Tiers Etat_, being neither more nor less than a gardener's widow.
+
+You can figure how this true, warm-hearted mother may have lain in wait
+all morning for her Schoolman, whom she loved as the apple of her eye;
+since, on the whole populous Earth, she had not (her first son, as well
+as her husband, was dead) any other for her soul, which indeed
+overflowed with love; not any other but her Zebedaeus. Could she ever
+tell you aught about him, I mean aught joyful, without ten times wiping
+her eyes? Nay, did she not once divide her solitary Kirmes (or
+Churchale) cake between two mendicant students, because she thought
+Heaven would punish her for so feasting, while her boy in Leipzig had
+nothing to feast on, and must pass the cake-garden like other gardens,
+merely smelling at it?
+
+"Dickens! Thou already, Zebedaeus!" said the mother, giving an
+embarrassed smile, to keep from weeping, as the son, who had ducked
+past the window, and crossed the grassy threshold without knocking,
+suddenly entered. For joy she forgot to put the heater into the
+smoothing-iron, as her illustrious scholar, amid the loud boiling of
+the soup, tenderly kissed her brow, and even said Mamma; a name
+which lighted on her breast like downy silk. All the windows were open;
+and the garden, with its flower-essences, and bird-music, and
+butterfly-collections, was almost half within the room. But I
+suppose I have not yet mentioned that the little garden-house, rather a
+chamber than a house, was situated on the western cape of the Castle
+garden. The owner had graciously allowed the widow to retain this
+dowager-mansion; as indeed the mansion would otherwise have stood
+empty, for he now kept no gardener.
+
+But Fixlein, in spite of his joy, could not stay long with her; being
+bound for the Church, which, to his spiritual appetite, was at all
+times a king's kitchen; a mother's. A sermon pleased him simply because
+it was a sermon, and because he himself had once preached one. The
+mother was contented he should go; these good women think they enjoy
+their guests, if they can only give them aught to enjoy.
+
+In the choir, this Free-haven and Ethnic Forecourt of stranger
+church-goers, he smiled on all parishioners; and, as in his childhood,
+standing under the wooden wing of an archangel, he looked down on the
+coifed _parterre_. His young years now enclosed him like children in
+their smiling circle; and a long garland wound itself in rings among
+them, and by fits they plucked flowers from it, and threw them in his
+face. Was it not old Senior Astman that stood there on the pulpit
+Parnassus, the man by whom he had been so often flogged, while
+acquiring Greek with him from a grammar written in Latin, which he
+could not explain, yet was forced to walk by the light of? Stood there
+not behind the pulpit-stairs the sacristy-cabin, and in this was there
+not a church-library of consequence--no school-boy could have buckled
+it wholly in his book-strap--lying under the minever cover of pastil
+dust? And did it not consist of the Polyglot in folio, which he,
+spurred on by Pfeiffer's _Critica Sacra_, had turned up leaf by leaf,
+in his early years, excerpting therefrom the _literae inversae majusculae
+minusculae_, and so forth, with an immensity of toil? And could he not
+at present, the sooner the more readily, have wished to cast this
+alphabetic soft-fodder into the Hebrew letter-trough, whereto your
+Oriental Rhizophagi (Rooteaters) are tied, especially as here they get
+so little vowel hard-fodder to keep them in heart?--Stood there not
+close by him the organ-stool, the throne to which, every Apostle-day,
+the Schoolmaster had by three nods elevated him, thence to fetch down
+the sacred hyssop, the sprinkler of the Church?
+
+My readers themselves will gather spirits when they now hear that our
+Quintus, during the outshaking of the poor-bag, was invited by the
+Senior to come over in the afternoon; and to them it will be little
+less gratifying than if he had invited themselves. But what will they
+say, when they get home with him to mother and dinner-table, both
+already clad in their white Sunday dress; and behold the large cake
+which Fraeulein Thiennette (Stephanie) has rolled from her peel? In the
+first place, however, they will wish to know who _she_ is.
+
+She is,--for if (according to Lessing), in the very excellence of the
+Iliad, we neglect the personalities of its author; the same thing will
+apply to the fate of several authors, for instance, to my own; but an
+authoress of cakes must not be forgotten in the excellence of her
+baking,--Thiennette is a poor, indigent, insolvent young lady; has not
+much, except years, of which she counts five-and-twenty; no near
+relations living now; no acquirements (for in literature she does not
+even know _Werter_) except economical; reads no books, not even mine;
+inhabits, that is, watches like a wardeness, quite alone, the thirteen
+void, disfurnished chambers of the Castle of Hukelum, which belongs to
+the Dragoon Rittmeister Aufhammer, at present resident in his other
+mansion of Schadeck; on occasion, she commands and feeds his soccagers
+and handmaids; and can write herself By the grace of God--which, in the
+thirteenth century, the country nobles did as well as princes,--for she
+lives by the grace of man, at least of woman, the Lady Rittmeisterinn
+Aufhammer's grace, who, at all times, blesses those vassals whom her
+husband curses. But, in the breast of the orphaned Thiennette, lay a
+sugared marchpane heart, which, for very love, you could have devoured;
+her fate was hard, but her soul was soft; she was modest, courteous,
+and timid, but too much so;--cheerfully and coldly she received the
+most cutting humiliations in Schadeck, and felt no pain, and not till
+some days after did she see it all clearly, and then these cuts began
+sharply to bleed, and she wept in her loneliness over her lot.
+
+It is hard for me to give a light tone, after this deep one, and to
+add, that Fixlein had been almost brought up beside her, and that she,
+his school-moiety over with the Senior, while the latter was training
+him for the dignities of the Third Form, had learned the _Verba
+Anomala_ along with him.
+
+The Achilles'-shield of the cake, jagged and embossed with carved work
+of brown scales, was whirling round in the Quintus like a swing-wheel
+of hungry and thankful ideas. Of that philosophy which despises eating,
+and of that high breeding which wastes it, he had not so much about him
+as belongs to the ungratefulness of such cultivated persons; but for
+his platter of meat, for his dinner of herbs, he could never give
+thanks enough.
+
+Innocent and contented, the quadruple dinner-party--for the Shock with
+his cover under the stove cannot be omitted--now began their Feast of
+Sweet Bread, their Feast of Honor for Thiennette, their Grove-feast in
+the garden. It may truly be a subject of wonder how a man who has not,
+like the King of France, four hundred and forty-eight persons (the
+hundred and sixty-one _Garcons de la Maisonbouche_ I do not reckon) in
+his kitchen, nor a _Fruiterie_ of thirty-one human bipeds, nor a
+Pastry-cookery of three-and-twenty, nor a daily expenditure of 387
+Livres 21 Sous,--how such a man, I say, can eat with any satisfaction.
+Nevertheless, to me, a cooking mother is as dear as a whole royal
+cooking household, given rather to feed upon me than to feed me.--The
+most precious fragments which the Biographer and the World can
+gather from this meal consist of here and there an edifying piece of
+table-talk. The mother had much to tell. Thiennette is this night, she
+mentions, for the first time, to put on her morning promenade-dress of
+white muslin, as also a satin girdle and steel buckle; but, adds she,
+it will not sit her; as the Rittmeisterinn (for this lady used to hang
+her cast clothes on Thiennette, as Catholics do their cast crutches and
+sores on their patron Saints) was much thicker. Good women grudge each
+other nothing save only clothes, husbands, and flax. In the fancy of
+the Quintus, by virtue of this apparel, a pair of angel pinions were
+sprouting forth from the shoulder-blades of Thiennette; for him a
+garment was a sort of hollow half-man, to whom only the nobler parts
+and the first principles were wanting; he honored these wrappages and
+hulls of our interior, not as an Elegant, or a Critic of Beauty, but
+because it was not possible for him to despise aught which he saw
+others honoring. Further, the good mother read to him, as it were, the
+monumental inscription of his father, who had sunk into the arms of
+Death in the thirty-second year of his age, from a cause which I
+explain not here, but in a future Letter-box, having too much affection
+for the reader. Our Quintus could not sate himself with hearing of his
+father.
+
+The fairest piece of news was, that Fraeulein Thiennette had sent word
+to-day, "he might visit Her Ladyship to-morrow, as My Lord, his
+godfather, was to be absent in town." This, however, I must explain.
+Old Aufhammer was called _Egidius_, and was Fixlein's godfather; but
+he--though the Rittmeisterinn duly covered the cradle of the child with
+nightly offerings, with flesh-tithes and grain-tithes--had frugally
+made him no christening present, except that of his name, which
+proved to be the very balefullest. For, our _Egidius_ Fixlein, with his
+Shock, which, by reason of the French convulsions, had, in company with
+other emigrants, run off from Nantes, was but lately returned from
+college--when he and his dog, as ill-luck would have it, went to walk
+in the Hukelum wood. Now, as the Quintus was ever and anon crying out
+to his attendant: "Coosh, Schil" (_Couche Gilles_), it must apparently
+have been the Devil that had just then planted the Lord of Aufhammer
+among the trees and bushes in such a way, that this whole travestying
+and docking of his name--for Gilles means Egidius--must fall directly
+into his ear. Fixlein could neither speak French, nor any offence to
+mortal; he knew not head or tail of what _couche_ signified; a word,
+which, in Paris, even the plebeian dogs are now in the habit of saying
+to their _valets de chiens_. But there were three things which Von
+Aufhammer never recalled,--his error, his anger, and his word. The
+provokee, therefore, determined that the plebeian provoker and
+honor-stealer should never more speak to him, or--get a doit from him.
+
+I return. After dinner he gazed out of the little window into the
+garden, and saw his path of life dividing into four branches, leading
+towards just as many skyward Ascensions; towards the Ascension into the
+Parsonage, and that into the Castle to Thiennette, for this day; and
+towards the third into Schadeck for the morrow; and lastly, into every
+house in Hukelum as the fourth. And now, when the mother had long
+enough kept cheerfully gliding about on tiptoe, "not to disturb him in
+studying his Latin Bible" (the _Vulgata_), that is, in reading the
+_Litteraturzeitung_, he at last rose to his own feet; and the humble
+joy of the mother ran long after the courageous son, who dared to go
+forth and speak to a Senior, quite unappalled. Yet it was not without
+reverence that he entered the dwelling of his old, rather gray than
+bald-headed, teacher, who was not only Virtue itself, but also Hunger,
+eating frequently, and with the appetite of Pharaoh's lean kine. A
+schoolman that expects to become a professor will scarcely deign to
+cast an eye on a pastor; but one who is himself looking up to a
+parsonage as to his working-house and breeding-house, knows how to
+value such a character. The new parsonage--as if it had, like a _Casa
+Santa_, come flying out of Erlang, or the Berlin Friedrichs-strasse,
+and alighted in Hukelum--was for the Quintus a Temple of the Sun, and
+the Senior a Priest of the Sun. To be Parson there himself was a
+thought overlaid with virgin honey; such a thought as occurs but one
+other time in History, namely, in the head of Hannibal, when he
+projected stepping over the Alps, that is to say, over the threshold of
+Rome.
+
+The landlord and his guest formed an excellent _bureau d'esprit_;
+people of office, especially of the same office, have more to tell each
+other, namely, their own history, than your idle May-chafers and
+Court-celestials, who must speak only of other people's.--The Senior
+made a soft transition from his iron-ware (in the stable furniture), to
+the golden age of his Academic life, of which such people like as much
+to think, as poets do of their childhood. So good as he was, he still
+half joyfully recollected that he had once been less so; but joyful
+remembrances of wrong actions are their half repetition, as repentant
+remembrances of good ones are their half abolishment.
+
+Courteously and kindly did Zebedaeus (who could not even enter in his
+Notebook the name of a person of quality without writing an H. for Herr
+before it) listen to the Academic Saturnalia of the old gentleman, who
+in Wittenberg had toped as well as written, and thirsted not more for
+the Hippocrene than for Gukguk.[37]
+
+Herr Jerusalem has observed that the barbarism, which often springs up
+close on the brightest efflorescence of the sciences, is a sort of
+strengthening mud-bath, good for averting the over-refinement wherewith
+such efflorescence always threatens us. I believe that a man who
+considers how high the sciences have mounted with our upper
+classes,--for instance with every Patrician's son in Nuernberg, to whom
+the public must present 1000 florins for studying with,--I believe that
+such a man will not grudge the Son of the Muses a certain barbarous
+Middle-age (the Burschen or Student Life, as it is called), which may
+again so case-harden him that his refinement shall not go beyond the
+limits. The Senior, while in Wittenberg, had protected the one hundred
+and eighty Academic Freedoms--so many of them has Petrus Rebuffus
+summed up[38]--against prescription, and lost none except his moral
+one, of which truly a man, even in a convent, can seldom make much.
+This gave our Quintus courage to relate certain pleasant somersets of
+his own, which at Leipzig, under the Incubus-pressure of poverty, he
+had contrived to execute. Let us hear him. His landlord, who was at the
+same time Professor and Miser, maintained in his enclosed court a whole
+community of hens. Fixlein, in company with three room-mates, without
+difficulty mastered the rent of a chamber, or closet. In general their
+main equipments, like Ph[oe]nixes, existed but in the singular number:
+one bed, in which always the one pair slept before midnight, the other
+after midnight, like nocturnal watchmen; one coat, in which one after
+the other they appeared in public, and which, like a watch-coat, was
+the national uniform of the company; and several other _ones_,
+Unities both of Interest and Place. Nowhere can you collect the
+stress-memorials and siege-medals of Poverty more pleasantly and
+philosophically than at College; the Academic burgher exhibits to us
+how many humorists and Diogeneses Germany has in it. Our Unitarians had
+just one thing four times, and that was hunger. The Quintus related,
+perhaps with a too pleasurable enjoyment of the recollection, how one
+of this famishing _coro_ invented means of appropriating the
+Professor's hens as just tribute, or subsidies. He said (he was a
+Jurist), they must once for all borrow a legal fiction from the Feudal
+code, and look on the Professor as the soccage tenant, to whom the
+usufruct of the hen-yard and hen-house belonged; but on themselves as
+the feudal superiors of the same, to whom accordingly the vassal was
+bound to pay his feudal dues. And now, that the Fiction might follow
+Nature, continued he--"_fictio sequitur naturam_,"--it behooved them to
+lay hold of said Yule-hens, by direct personal distraint. But into the
+court-yard there was no getting. The feudalist, therefore, prepared a
+fishing-line; stuck a bread-pill on the hook, and lowered his
+fishing-tackle, anglewise, down into the court. In a few seconds the
+barb stuck in a hen's throat, and the hen, now communicating with its
+feudal superior, could silently, like ships by Archimedes, be heaved
+aloft to the hungry air-fishing society, where, according to
+circumstances, the proper feudal name and title of possession failed
+not to be awaiting her; for the updrawn fowls were now denominated
+Christmas-fowls, now Forest-hens, Bailiff-hens, Pentecost and
+Summer-hens. "I begin," said the angling lord of the manor, "with
+taking _Rutcher-dues_, for so we call the triple and quintuple of the
+original quitrent, when the vassal, as is the case here, has long
+neglected payment." The Professor, like any other prince, observed with
+sorrow the decreasing population of his hen-yard, for his subjects,
+like the Hebrews, were dying by enumeration. At last he had the
+happiness, while reading his lecture--he was just come to the subject
+of _Forest Salt and Coin Regalities_--to descry through the window of
+his auditorium a quitrent hen suspended, like Ignatius Loyola in
+prayer, or Juno in her punishment, in middle-air. He followed the
+incomprehensible direct ascension of the aeronautic animal, and
+at last descried at the upper window the attracting artist, and
+animal-magnetizer, who had drawn his lot for dinner from the hen-yard
+below. Contrary to all expectation, he terminated this fowling sport
+sooner than his Lecture on Regalities.
+
+Fixlein walked home, amid the vesperal melodies of the steeple
+sounding-holes; and by the road courteously took off his hat before the
+empty windows of the Castle. Houses of quality were to him like persons
+of quality, as in India the Pagoda at once represents the temple and
+the god. To the mother he brought feigned compliments, which she repaid
+with authentic ones; for this afternoon she had been over, with
+her historical tongue and nature-interrogating eye, visiting the
+white-muslin Thiennette. The mother was wont to show her every
+spare-penny which he dropped into her large empty purse, and so raise
+him in the good graces of the Fraeulein; for women feel their hearts
+much more attracted towards a son, who tenderly reserves for a mother
+some of their benefits, than we do to a daughter anxiously caring for
+her father; perhaps from a hundred causes, and this among the rest,
+that in their experience of sons and husbands they are more used to
+find these persons mere six-feet thunder-clouds, forked waterspouts, or
+even reposing tornadoes.
+
+Blessed Quintus! on whose Life this other distinction, like an order of
+nobility, does also shine, that thou canst tell it over to thy mother;
+as, for example, this past afternoon in the parsonage. Thy joy flows
+into another heart, and streams back from it, redoubled, into thy own.
+There is a closer approximating of hearts, and also of sounds, than
+that of the _Echo_; the highest approximation melts Tone and Echo into
+_Resonance_ together.
+
+It is historically certain that both of them supped this evening; and
+that instead of the whole dinner fragments which to-morrow might
+themselves represent a dinner, nothing but the cake-offering or pudding
+was laid upon the altar of the table. The mother, who for her own child
+would willingly have neglected not herself only, but all other people,
+now made a motion that to the Quintaner, who was sporting out of doors
+and baiting a bird instead of himself, there should no crumb of the
+precious pastry be given, but only table-bread without the crust. But
+the Schoolman had a Christian disposition, and said that it was Sunday,
+and the young man liked something delicate to eat as well as he.
+Fixlein--the counterpart of great men and geniuses--was inclined to
+treat, to gift, to gratify a serving housemate, rather than a man who
+is for the first time passing through the gate, and at the next
+post-stage will forget both his hospitable landlord and the last
+postmaster. On the whole, our Quintus had a touch of honor in him, and
+notwithstanding his thrift and sacred regard for money, he willingly
+gave it away in cases of honor, and unwillingly in cases of
+overpowering sympathy, which too painfully filled the cavities of his
+heart, and emptied those of his purse. Whilst the Quintaner was
+exercising the _jus compascui_ on the cake, and six arms were
+peacefully resting on Thiennette's free-table, Fixlein read to himself
+and the company the Flachsenfingen Address-calendar; any higher thing,
+except Meusel's _Gelehrtes Deutschland_,[39] he could not figure; the
+Kammerherrs and Raths of the Calendar went tickling over his tongue
+like the raisins of the cake; and of the more rich church-livings he,
+by reading, as it were levied a tithe.
+
+He purposely remained his own Edition in Sunday Wove-paper; I mean, he
+did not lay away his Sunday coat, even when the Prayer-bell tolled; for
+he had still much to do.
+
+After supper he was just about visiting the Fraeulein, when he descried
+her in person, like a lily dipped in the red twilight, in the Castle
+garden, whose western limit his house constituted, the southern one
+being the Chinese wall of the Castle.... By the way, how I got to the
+knowledge of all this, what Letter-boxes are, whether I myself was ever
+there, &c., &c.--the whole of this shall, upon my life, be soon and
+faithfully communicated to the reader, and that too in the present
+Book.
+
+Fixlein hopped forth like a Will-o'-wisp into the garden, whose
+flower-perfume was mingling with his supper-perfume. No one bowed
+lower to a nobleman than he, not out of plebeian servility, nor of
+self-interested cringing, but because he thought "a nobleman was a
+nobleman." But in this case his bow, instead of falling forwards, fell
+obliquely to the right, as it were after his hat; for he had not risked
+taking a stick with him; and hat and stick were his proppage and
+balance-wheel, in short, his bowing-gear, without which it was out of
+his power to produce any courtly bow, had you offered him the High
+Church of Hamburg for so doing. Thiennette's mirthfulness soon unfolded
+his crumpled soul into straight form, and into the proper tone. He
+delivered her a long, neat Thanksgiving and Harvest sermon for the
+scaly cake; which appeared to her at once kind and tedious. Young women
+without the polish of high life reckon tedious pedantry, merely like
+snuffing, one of the necessary ingredients of a man; they reverence us
+infinitely; and as Lambert could never speak to the King of Prussia, by
+reason of his sun-eyes, except in the dark, so they, I believe, often
+like better--also by reason of our sublime air--if they can catch us in
+the dark too. _Him_ Thiennette edified by the Imperial History of Herr
+von Aufhammer and Her Ladyship his spouse, who meant to put him, the
+Quintus, in her will; _her_ he edified by his Literary History, as
+relating to himself and the Subrector; how, for instance, he was at
+present vicariating in the Second Form, and ruling over scholars as
+long in stature as himself. And thus did the two in happiness, among
+red bean-blossoms, red May-chafers, before the red of the twilight
+burning lower and lower on the horizon, walk to and fro in the garden;
+and turn always with a smile as they approached the head of the ancient
+gardeneress, standing like a window-bust through the little lattice,
+which opened in the bottom of a larger one.
+
+To me it is incomprehensible he did not fall in love. I know his
+reasons, indeed. In the first place, she had nothing; secondly, he had
+nothing, and school-debts to boot; thirdly, her genealogical tree was a
+boundary tree and warning-post; fourthly, his hands were tied up by
+another nobler thought, which, for good cause, is yet reserved from the
+reader. Nevertheless--Fixlein! I durst not have been in thy place!
+I should have looked at her, and remembered her virtues and our
+school-years, and then have drawn forth my too fusible heart, and
+presented it to her as a bill of exchange, or insinuated it as a
+summons. For I should have considered that she resembled a nun in two
+senses, in her good heart and in her good pastry; that, in spite of her
+intercourse with male vassals, she was no Charles Genevieve Louise
+Auguste Timothe Eon de Beaumont,[40] but a smooth, fair-haired,
+white-capped dove; that she sought more to please her own sex than
+ours; that she showed a melting heart, not previously borrowed from the
+Circulating Library, in tears, for which in her innocence she rather
+took shame than credit.--At the very first cheapening, I should, on
+these grounds, have been out with my heart.--Had I fully reflected,
+Quintus! that I knew her as myself; that her hands and mine (to wit,
+had I been thou) had both been guided by the same Senior to Latin
+penmanship; that we two, when little children, had kissed each other
+before the glass, to see whether the two image-children would do it
+likewise in the mirror; that often we had put hands of both sexes into
+the same muff, and there played with them in secret; had I, lastly,
+considered that we were here standing before the glass-house, now
+splendent in the enamel of twilight, and that on the cold panes of this
+glass-house we two (she within, I without) had often pressed our warm
+cheeks together, parted only by the thickness of the glass,--then had I
+taken this poor gentle soul, pressed asunder by Fate, and seeing, amid
+her thunder-clouds, no higher elevation to part them and protect her
+than the grave, and had drawn her to my own soul, and warmed her on my
+heart, and encompassed her about with my eyes.
+
+In truth, the Quintus would have done so too, had not the
+above-mentioned nobler thought, which I yet disclose not, kept him
+back. Softened, without knowing the cause,--(accordingly he gave his
+mother a kiss,)--and blessed without having had a literary
+conversation; and dismissed with a freight of humble compliments, which
+he was to disload on the morrow before the Dragoon Rittmeisterinn, he
+returned to his little cottage, and looked yet a long while out of its
+dark windows, at the light ones of the Castle. And then, when the first
+quarter of the moon was setting, that is, about midnight, he again, in
+the cool sigh of a mild, fanning, moist, and directly heart-addressing
+night-breeze, opened the eyelids of a sight already sunk in
+dreaming....
+
+Sleep, for to-day thou hast done naught ill! I, whilst the drooping,
+shut flower-bell of thy spirit sinks on thy pillow, will look into the
+breezy night over thy morning footpath, which, through the translucent
+little wood, is to lead thee to Schadeck, to thy patroness. All
+prosperity attend thee, thou foolish Quintus!--
+
+
+
+
+ SECOND LETTER-BOX.
+
+ Frau von Aufhammer.--Childhood-resonance.--Authorcraft.
+
+
+The early piping which the little thrush, last night adopted by the
+Quintaner from its nest, started for victual about two o'clock,
+soon drove our Quintus into his clothes; whose calender-press and
+parallel-ruler the hands of his careful mother had been, for she would
+not send him to the Rittmeisterinn "like a runagate dog." The Shock was
+incarcerated, the Quintaner taken with him, as likewise many wholesome
+rules from Mother Fixlein, how to conduct himself towards the
+Rittmeisterinn. But the son answered: "Mamma, when a man has been in
+company, like me, with high people, with a Fraeulein Thiennette, he soon
+knows whom he is speaking to, and what polished manners and Saver di
+veaver (_Savoir vivre_) require."
+
+He arrived with the Quintaner, and green fingers (dyed with the leaves
+he had plucked on the path), and with a half-nibbled rose between his
+teeth, in presence of the sleek lackeys of Schadeck. If women are
+flowers--though as often silk and Italian and gum-flowers as botanical
+ones--then was Frau von Aufhammer a ripe flower, with (adipose)
+neck-bulb, and tuberosity (of lard). Already, in the half of her body,
+cut away from life by the apoplexy, she lay upon her lard-pillow but as
+on a softer grave; nevertheless, the portion of her that remained was
+at once lively, pious, and proud. Her heart was a flowing cornucopia to
+all men, yet this not from philanthropy, but from rigid devotion; the
+lower classes she assisted, cherished, and despised, regarding nothing
+in them, except it were their piety. She received the bowing Quintus
+with the back-bowing air of a patroness; yet she brightened into a look
+of kindliness at his disloading of the compliments from Thiennette.
+
+She began the conversation, and long continued it alone, and said,--yet
+without losing the inflation of pride from her countenance,--"She
+should soon die; but the godchildren of her husband she would remember
+in her will." Further, she told him directly in the face, which stood
+there all over-written with the Fourth Commandment before her, that "he
+must not build upon a settlement in Hukelum; but to the Flachsenfingen
+Conrectorate (to which the Burgermeister and Council had the right of
+nomination) she hoped to promote him, as it was from the then
+Burgermeister that she bought her coffee, and from the Town-Syndic (he
+drove a considerable wholesale and retail trade in Hamburg candles)
+that she bought both her wax and tallow lights."
+
+And now by degrees he arrived at his humble petition, when she asked
+him sick-news of Senior Astmann, who guided himself more by Luther's
+Catechism than by the Catechism of Health. She was Astmann's patroness
+in a stricter than ecclesiastical sense; and she even confessed that
+she would soon follow this true shepherd of souls, when she heard, here
+at Schadeck, the sound of his funeral-bell. Such strange chemical
+affinities exist between our dross and our silver veins; as, for
+example, here between Pride and Love; and I could wish that we would
+pardon this hypostatic union in all persons, as we do it in the
+fair, who, with all their faults, are nevertheless by us--as, according
+to Du Fay, iron, though mixed with any other metal, is by the
+magnet--attracted and held fast.
+
+Supposing even that the Devil _had_, in some idle minute, sown a
+handful or two of the seeds of Envy in our Quintus's soul, yet they had
+not sprouted; and to-day especially they did not, when he heard the
+praises of a man who had been his teacher, and who--what he reckoned a
+Titulado of the Earth, not from vanity, but from piety--was a
+clergyman. So much, however, is, according to History, not to be
+denied; that he now straightway came forth with his petition to the
+noble lady, signifying that "indeed he would cheerfully content himself
+for a few years in the school; but yet in the end he longed to be in
+some small quiet priestly office." To her question, "But was he
+orthodox?" he answered, that "he hoped so; he had, in Leipzig, not only
+attended all the public lectures of Dr. Burscher, but also had taken
+private instructions from several sound teachers of the faith, well
+knowing that the Consistorium, in its examinations as to purity of
+doctrine, was now more strict than formerly."
+
+The sick lady required him to make a proof-shot, namely, to administer
+to her a sick-bed exhortation. By Heaven! he administered to her one of
+the best. Her pride of birth now crouched before his pride of office
+and priesthood; for though he could not, with the Dominican monk,
+Alanus de Rupe, believe that a priest was greater than God, inasmuch as
+the latter could only make a World, but the former a God (in the mass);
+yet he could not but fall in with Hostiensis, who shows that the
+priestly dignity is seven thousand six hundred and forty-four times
+greater than the kingly, the Sun being just so many times greater than
+the Moon. But a Rittmeisterinn--_she_ shrinks into absolute nothing
+before a parson.
+
+In the servants' hall he applied to the lackeys for the last annual
+series of the _Hamburg Political Journal_; perceiving that with these
+historical documents of the time they were scandalously papering the
+buttons of travelling raiment. In gloomy harvest evenings, he could now
+sit down and read for himself what good news were transpiring in the
+political world--twelve months ago.
+
+On a Triumphal Car, full-laden with laurel, and to which Hopes alone
+were yoked, he drove home at night, and by the road advised the
+Quintaner not to be puffed up with any earthly honor, but silently to
+thank God, as himself was now doing.
+
+
+The thickset blooming grove of his four canicular weeks, and the flying
+tumult of blossoms therein, are already painted on three of the sides.
+I will now clutch blindfold into his days, and bring out one of them;
+one smiles and sends forth its perfumes like another.
+
+Let us take, for instance, the Saint's day of his mother, _Clara_, the
+twelfth of August. In the morning, he had perennial, fire-proof joys,
+that is to say, Employments. For he was writing, as I am doing. Truly,
+if Xerxes proposed a prize for the invention of a new pleasure, any man
+who had sat down to write his thoughts on the prize-question had the
+new pleasure already among his fingers. I know only one thing sweeter
+than making a book, and that is, to project one. Fixlein used to write
+little works, of the twelfth part of an alphabet in size, which in
+their manuscript state he got bound by the bookbinder in gilt boards,
+and betitled with printed letters, and then inserted them among the
+literary ranks of his book-board. Every one thought they were novelties
+printed in writing types. He had labored--I shall omit his less
+interesting performances--at a _Collection of Errors of the Press_, in
+German writings; he compared _Errata_ with each other; showed which
+occurred most frequently; observed that important results were to be
+drawn from this, and advised the reader to draw them.
+
+Moreover, he took his place among the German _Masorites_. He observes
+with great justice in his Preface: "The Jews had their _Masora_ to
+show, which told them how often every letter was to be found in their
+Bible; for example, the Aleph (the A) 42,377 times; how many verses
+there are in which all the consonants appear (there are 26 verses), or
+only eighty (there are 3); how many verses we have into which 42 words
+and 160 consonants enter (there is just one, Jeremiah xxi. 7); which is
+the middle letter in certain books (in the Pentateuch, it is in
+Leviticus xi. 42, the noble V[41]), or in the whole Bible itself. But
+where have we Christians any similar Masora for Luther's Bible to show?
+Has it been accurately investigated which is the middle word, or the
+middle letter here, which vowel appears seldomest, and how often each
+vowel? Thousands of Bible-Christians go out of the world, without ever
+knowing that the German A occurs 323,015 times (therefore above 7 times
+oftener than the Hebrew one) in their Bible."
+
+I could wish that inquirers into Biblical Literature among our
+Reviewers would publicly let me know if, on a more accurate summation,
+they find this number incorrect.[42]
+
+Much also did the Quintus _collect_; he had a fine _Almanack
+Collection_, a _Catechism_ and _Pamphlet Collection_; also, a
+_Collection of Advertisements_, which he began, is not so incomplete as
+you most frequently see such things. He puts high value on his
+_Alphabetical Lexicon of German Subscribers for Books_, where my name
+also occurs among the Js.
+
+But what he liked best to produce were Schemes of Books. Accordingly,
+he sewed together a large work, wherein he merely advised the Learned
+of things they ought to introduce in Literary History, which History he
+rated some ells higher than Universal or Imperial History. In his
+Prolegomena to this performance, he transiently submitted to the
+Literary republic that Hommel had given a register of Jurists who were
+sons of wh--, of others who had become Saints; that Baillet enumerates
+the Learned who _meant_ to write something; and Ancillon those who
+wrote nothing at all; and the Luebeck Superintendent Goetze, those who
+were shoemakers, those who were drowned; and Bernhard those whose
+fortunes and history before birth were interesting. This (he could now
+continue) should, as it seems, have excited us to similar muster-rolls
+and matriculations of other kinds of Learned; whereof he proposed a
+few; for example, of the Learned who were unlearned; of those who were
+entire rascals; of such as wore their own hair,--of cue-preachers,
+cue-psalmists, cue-annalists, and so forth; of the Learned who
+had worn black leather breeches, of others who had worn rapiers;
+of the Learned who had died in their eleventh year,--in their
+twentieth,--twenty-first, &c.,--in their hundred and fiftieth, of which
+he knew no instance, unless the Beggar Thomas Parr might be adduced; of
+the Learned who wrote a more abominable hand than the other Learned
+(whereof we know only Rolfinken and his letters, which were as long as
+his hands[43]); or of the Learned who had clipt nothing from each other
+but the beard (whereof no instance is known, save that of Philelphus
+and Timotheus[44]).
+
+Such by-studies did he carry on along with his official labors; but I
+think the State in viewing these matters is actually mad: it compares
+the man who is great in Philosophy and Belles-Lettres at the expense of
+his jog-trot officialities, to _concert-clocks_, which, though striking
+their hours in flute-melodies, are worse time-keepers than your gross,
+stupid steeple-clocks.
+
+To return to St. Clara's day. Fixlein, after such mental exertions,
+bolted out under the music-bushes and rustling trees; and returned not
+again out of warm Nature, till plate and chair were already placed at
+the table. In the course of the repast, something occurred which a
+Biographer must not omit; for his mother had, by request, been wont to
+map out for him, during the process of mastication, the chart of his
+child's-world, relating all the traits which in any way prefigured what
+he had now grown to. This perspective sketch of his early Past he
+committed to certain little leaves which merit our undivided attention.
+For such leaves exclusively, containing scenes, acts, plays of his
+childhood, he used chronologically to file and arrange in separate
+drawers in a little child's-desk of his; and thus to divide his
+Biography, as Moser did his Publicistic Materials, into separate
+_letter-boxes_. He had boxes or drawers for memorial-letters of his
+twelfth, of his thirteenth, fourteenth, &c., of his twenty-first year,
+and so on. Whenever he chose to conclude a day of pedagogic drudgery by
+an evening of peculiar rest, he simply pulled out a letter-drawer, a
+register-bar in his Life-hand-organ, and recollected the whole.
+
+And here must I, in reference to these reviewing Mutes, who may be for
+casting the noose of strangulation round my neck, most particularly
+beg, that, before doing so on account of my Chapters being called
+Letter-boxes, they would have the goodness to look whose blame it was,
+and to think whether I could possibly help it, seeing the Quintus had
+divided his Biography into such Boxes himself: they have Christian
+bowels.
+
+But about his elder brother he put no saddening question to his mother;
+this poor boy a peculiar Fate had laid hold of, and with all his genial
+endowment dashed to pieces on the iceberg of Death. For he chanced to
+leap on an ice-board that had jammed itself among several others; but
+these recoiled, and his shot forth with him; melted away as it floated
+under his feet, and so sunk his heart of fire amid the ice and waves.
+It grieved his mother that he was not found, that her heart had not
+been harrowed by the look of the swoln corpse.--O good mother, rather
+thank God for it!--
+
+After breakfast, to fortify himself with new vigor for his desk,
+he for some time strolled idly over the house, and, like a Police
+Fire-inspector, visited all the nooks of his cottage, to gather from
+them here and there a live ember from the ash-covered rejoicing-fire of
+his childhood. He mounted to the garret, to the empty bird-coops of his
+father, who in winter had been a birder; and he transiently reviewed
+the lumber of his old playthings, which were lying in the netted
+enclosure of a large canary breeding-cage. In the minds of children, it
+is regular _little_ forms, such as those of balls and dies, that
+impress and express themselves most forcibly. From this may the reader
+explain to himself Fixlein's delight in the red acorn-blockhouse,
+in the sparwork glued together out of white chips and husks of
+potato-plums, in the cheerful glasshouse of a cube-shaped lantern, and
+other the like products of his early architecture. The following,
+however, I explain quite differently; he had ventured, without leave
+given from any lord of the manor, to build a clay house; not for
+cottagers, but for flies; and which, therefore, you could readily
+enough have put in your pocket. This fly-hospital had its glass
+windows, and a red coat of coloring, and very many alcoves, and three
+balconies; balconies, as a sort of house within a house, he had loved
+from of old so much, that he could scarcely have liked Jerusalem well,
+where (according to Lightfoot) no such thing is permitted to be
+built. From the glistening eyes with which the architect had viewed
+his tenantry creeping about the windows, or feeding out of the
+sugar-trough,--for, like the Count St. Germain, they ate nothing but
+sugar,--from this joy an adept in the art of education might easily
+have prophesied his turn for household contraction; to his fancy, in
+those times, even gardeners'-huts were like large waste Arks and Halls,
+and nothing bigger than such a fly-Louvre seemed a true, snug
+citizen's-house. He now felt and handled his old high child's-stool,
+which had in former days resembled the _Sedes Exploratoria_ of the
+Pope; he gave his child's-coach a tug and made it run; but he could not
+understand what balsam and holiness so much distinguished it from all
+other child's-coaches. He wondered that the real sports of children
+should not so delight him as the emblems of these sports, when the
+child that had carried them on was standing grown up to manhood in his
+presence.
+
+Before one article in the house he stood heart-melted and sad; before a
+little angular clothes-press, which was no higher than my table, and
+which had belonged to his poor drowned brother. When the boy with the
+key of it was swallowed by the waves, the excruciated mother had made a
+vow that this toy-press of his should never be broken up by violence.
+Most probably there is nothing in it but the poor soul's playthings.
+Let us look away from this bloody urn.----
+
+Bacon reckons the remembrances of childhood among wholesome, medicinal
+things; naturally enough, therefore, they acted like a salutary
+digestive on the Quintus. He could now again betake him with new heart
+to his desk, and produce something quite peculiar,--petitions for
+church livings. He took the Address-calendar, and, for every country
+parish that he found in it, got a petition in readiness; which he then
+laid aside, till such time as the present incumbent should decease. For
+Hukelum alone he did not solicit.--It is a pretty custom in
+Flachsenfingen, that, for every office which is vacant, you are
+required, if you want it, to sue. As the higher use of Prayer consists,
+not in its fulfilment, but in its accustoming you to pray; so likewise
+petitionary papers ought to be given in, not indeed that you may get
+the office,--this nothing but your money can do,--but that you may
+learn to write petitions. In truth, if, among the Calmucks, the turning
+of a calabash[45] stands in place of Prayer, a slight movement of the
+purse may be as much as if you supplicated in words.
+
+Towards evening--it was Sunday--he went out roving over the village; he
+pilgrimed to his old sporting-places, and to the common where he had so
+often driven his snails to pasture; visited the peasant who, from
+school-times upwards, had been wont, to the amazement of the rest, to
+_thou_[46] him; went, an Academic Tutor, to the Schoolmaster; then to
+the Senior; then to the Episcopal-barn or church. This last no mortal
+understands, till I explain it. The case was this. Some three-and-forty
+years ago a fire had destroyed the church (not the steeple), the
+parsonage, and, what was not to be replaced, the church-records. (For
+this reason it was only the smallest portion of the Hukelum people that
+knew exactly how old they were; and the memory of our Quintus himself
+vibrated between adopting the thirty-third year and the thirty-second.)
+In consequence, the preaching had now to be carried on where formerly
+there had been threshing; and the seed of the divine word to be
+turned over on the same threshing-floor with natural corn-seed. The
+Chanter and the School-boys took up the threshing-floor; the female
+mother-church-people stood on the one sheaves-loft, the Schadeck
+womankind on the other; and their husbands clustered pyramidically,
+like groschen and farthing-gallery men; about the barn-stairs; and far
+up on the straw-loft, mixed souls stood listening. A little flute was
+their organ, an upturned beer-cask their altar, round which they had to
+walk. I confess, I myself could have preached in such a place, not
+without humor. The Senior (at that time still a Junior), while the
+parsonage was building, dwelt and taught in the Castle; it was here,
+accordingly, that Fixlein had learned the _Irregular Verbs_ with
+Thiennette.
+
+These voyages of discovery completed, our Hukelum voyager could still,
+after evening prayers, pick leaf-insects, with Thiennette, from the
+roses; worms from the beds, and a Heaven of joy from every minute.
+Every dew-drop was colored as with oil of cloves and oil of gladness;
+every star was a sparkle from the sun of happiness; and in the closed
+heart of the maiden, there lay near to him, behind a little wall of
+separation, (as near to the Righteous man behind the thin wall of
+Life,) an outstretched blooming Paradise.... I mean, she loved him a
+little.
+
+He might have known it, perhaps. But to his compressed delight he gave
+freer vent, as he went to bed, by early recollections on the stair. For
+in his childhood he had been accustomed, by way of evening-prayer, to
+go over, under his coverlet, as it were, a rosary, including fourteen
+Bible Proverbs, the first verse of the Psalm, "All people that on
+Earth," the Tenth Commandment, and, lastly, a long blessing. To get the
+sooner done with it, he had used to begin his devotion, not only on the
+stair, but before leaving that place where Alexander studied men, and
+Semler stupid books. Moored in the haven of the down-waves, he was
+already over with his evening supplication; and could now, without
+further exertion, shut his eyes and plump into sleep.----Thus does
+there lurk, in the smallest _homunculus_, the model of--the Catholic
+Church.
+
+So far the Dog-days of Quintus Zebedaeus Egidius Fixlein.--I, for the
+second time, close a Chapter of this _Life_, as Life itself is closed,
+with a sleep.
+
+
+
+
+ THIRD LETTER-BOX.
+
+ Christmas Recollections.--New Occurrence.
+
+
+For all of us the passage to the grave is, alas! a string of empty,
+insipid days, as of glass pearls, only here and there divided by an
+orient one of price. But you die murmuring, unless, like the Quintus,
+you regard your existence as a drum; this has only one single _tone_,
+but variety of _time_ gives the sound of it cheerfulness enough. Our
+Quintus taught in the Fourth Class; vicariated in the Second; wrote at
+his desk by night; and so lived on the usual monotonous fashion--all
+the time from the Holidays--till Christmas eve, 1791; and nothing was
+remarkable in his history except this same eve, which I am now about to
+paint.
+
+But I shall still have time to paint it, after, in the first place,
+explaining shortly how, like birds of passage, he had contrived to soar
+away over the dim, cloudy Harvest. The secret was, he set upon the
+_Hamburg Political Journal_, with which the lackeys of Schadeck had
+been for papering their buttons. He could now calmly, with his back at
+the stove, accompany the winter campaigns of the foregoing year; and
+fly after every battle, as the ravens did after that of Pharsalia. On
+the printed paper he could still, with joy and admiration, walk round
+our German triumphal arches and scaffoldings for fireworks; while to
+the people in the town, who got only the newest newspapers, the very
+fragments of these our trophies, maliciously torn down by the French,
+were scarcely discernible; nay, with old plans he could drive back and
+discomfit the enemy, while later readers in vain tried to resist them
+with new ones.
+
+Moreover, not only did the facility of conquering the French prepossess
+him in favor of this journal; but also the circumstance that it--cost
+him nothing. His attachment to gratis reading was decided. And does not
+this throw light on the fact that he, as Morhof advised, was wont
+sedulously to collect the separate leaves of wastepaper books as they
+came from the grocer, and to rake among the same, as Virgil did in
+Ennius? Nay, for him the grocer was a Fortius (the scholar), or a
+Frederick (the king), both which persons were in the habit of simply
+cutting from complete books such leaves as contained anything. It was
+also this respect for all waste-paper that inspired him with such
+esteem for the aprons of French cooks, which it is well known consist
+of printed paper; and he often wished some German would translate these
+aprons; indeed, I am willing to believe that a good version of more
+than one of such paper aprons might contribute to elevate our
+Literature (this Muse _a belles fesses_), and serve her in place of
+drivel-bib.--On many things a man puts a _pretium affectionis_, simply
+because he hopes he may have half stolen them; on this principle,
+combined with the former, our Quintus adopted into his belief anything
+he could snap away from an open Lecture, or as a visitor in
+class-rooms; opinions only for which the Professor must be paid, he
+rigorously examined.--I return to the Christmas eve.
+
+At the very first, Egidius was glad, because out of doors millers and
+bakers were at fisticuffs (as we say of drifting snow in large flakes),
+and the ice-flowers of the window were blossoming; for external frost,
+with a snug warm room, was what he liked. He could now put fir wood
+into his stove, and Mocha coffee into his stomach; and shove his right
+foot (not into the slipper, but) under the warm side of his Shock, and
+also on the left keep swinging his pet Starling, which was pecking at
+the snout of old Schil; and then with the right hand--with the left he
+was holding his pipe--proceed, so undisturbed, so intrenched, so
+cloud-capt, without the smallest breath of frost, to the highest
+enterprise which a Quintus can attempt,--to writing the Class-prodromus
+of the Flachsenfingen Gymnasium, namely, the eighth part thereof. I
+hold the _first printing_ in the history of a literary man to be more
+important than the _first printing_ in the history of Letters. Fixlein
+could not sate himself with specifying what he purposed, God willing,
+in the following year, to treat of; and accordingly, more for the sake
+of printing than of use, he further inserted three or four pedagogic
+glances at the plan of operations to be followed by his schoolmaster
+colleagues as a body.
+
+He lastly introduced a few dashes, by way of hooking his thoughts
+together; and then laid aside the _Opus_, and would no longer look at
+it, that so, when printed, he might stand astonished at his own
+thoughts. And now he could take the Leipzig Fair Catalogue, which he
+purchased yearly, instead of the books therein, and open it without a
+sigh; he too was in print, as well as I am.
+
+The happy fool, while writing, had shaken his head, rubbed his hands,
+hitched about on his chair, puckered his face, and sucked the end of
+his cue.--He could now spring up about five o'clock in the evening to
+recreate himself; and across the magic vapor of his pipe, like a
+new-caught bird, move up and down in his cage. On the warm smoke the
+long galaxy of street-lamps was gleaming; and red on his bed-curtains
+lay the fitful reflection of the blazing windows and illuminated trees
+in the neighborhood. And now he shook away the snow of Time from the
+winter-green of Memory; and beheld the fair years of his childhood,
+uncovered, fresh, green, and balmy, standing afar off before him. From
+his distance of twenty years, he looked into the quiet cottage of his
+parents, where his father and his brother had not yet been reaped away
+by the sickle of Death. He said to himself: "I will go through the
+whole Christmas eve, from the very dawn, as I had it of old."
+
+At his very rising he finds spangles on the table; sacred spangles from
+the gold-leaf and silver-leaf with which the Christ-child[47] has been
+emblazoning and coating his apples and nuts, the presents of the
+night.--On the mint-balance of joy, this metallic foam pulls heavier
+than the golden cars, and golden Pythagoras-legs, and golden
+Philistine-mice of wealthier capitalists.--Then came his mother,
+bringing him both Christianity and clothes; for in drawing on his
+trousers, she easily recapitulated the Ten Commandments, and in tying
+his garters, the Apostles' Creed. So soon as candle-light was over,
+and daylight come, he clambers to the arm of the settle, and
+then measures the nocturnal growth of the yellow wiry grove of
+Christmas-Birch; and devotes far less attention than usual to the
+little white winter-flowerage, which the seeds shaken from the
+bird-cage are sending forth in the wet joints of the window-panes.--I
+nowise grudge J. J. Rousseau his _Flora Petrinsularis_;[48] but let him
+also allow our Quintus his _Window-flora_.--There was no such thing as
+school all day; so he had time enough to seek his Flescher (his
+brother), and commence (when could there be finer frost for it?) the
+slaughtering of their winter-meat. Some days before, the brother,
+at the peril of his life and of a cudgelling, had caught their
+stalled-beast--so they called the sparrow--under a window-sill in the
+Castle. Their slaughtering wants not an axe (of wood), nor puddings,
+nor potted meat.--About three o'clock the old Gardener, whom neighbors
+must call the Professor of Gardening, takes his place on his large
+chair, with his Cologne tobacco-pipe; and after this no mortal
+shall work a stroke. He tells nothing but lies; of the aeronautic
+Christ-child, and the jingling Ruprecht with his bells. In the dusk,
+our little Quintus takes an apple; divides it into all the figures of
+stereometry, and spreads the fragments in two heaps on the table; then
+as the lighted candle enters, he starts up in amazement at the
+unexpected present, and says to his brother, "Look what the good
+Christ-child has given thee and me; and I saw one of his wings
+glittering." And for this same glittering he himself lies in wait the
+whole evening.
+
+About eight o'clock--here he walks chiefly by the chronicle of his
+letter-drawer--both of them, with necks almost excoriated with washing,
+and in clean linen, and in universal anxiety lest the Holy Christ-child
+find them up, are put to bed. What a magic night! What tumult of
+dreaming hopes!--The populous, motley, glittering cave of Fancy opens
+itself, in the length of the night, and in the exhaustion of dreamy
+effort, still darker and darker, fuller and more grotesque; but the
+awakening gives back to the thirsty heart its hopes. All accidental
+tones, the cries of animals, of watchmen, are, for the timidly devout
+Fancy, sounds out of Heaven; singing voices of Angels in the air,
+church-music of the morning worship.--
+
+Ah! it was not the mere Lubberland of sweetmeats and playthings, which
+then, with its perspective, stormed like a river of joy against the
+chambers of our hearts; and which yet in the moonlight of memory, with
+its dusky landscapes, melts our souls in sweetness. Ah! this was it,
+that then for our boundless wishes there were still boundless hopes;
+but now reality is round us, and the wishes are all that we have left!
+
+At last came rapid lights from the neighborhood playing through the
+window on the walls, and the Christmas trumpets, and the crowing from
+the steeple, hurries both the boys from their bed. With their clothes
+in their hands, without fear for the darkness, without feeling for the
+morning-frost, rushing, intoxicated, shouting, they hurry down-stairs
+into the dark room. Fancy riots in the pastry and fruit perfume of the
+still eclipsed treasures, and paints her air-castles by the glimmering
+of the Hesperides-fruit with which the Birch-tree is loaded. While
+their mother strikes a light, the falling sparks sportfully open and
+shroud the dainties on the table, and the many-colored grove on the
+wall; and a single atom of that fire bears on it a hanging garden of
+Eden.----
+
+--On a sudden all grew light; and the Quintus got--the Conrectorship,
+and a table-clock.
+
+
+
+
+ FOURTH LETTER-BOX.
+
+ Office-brokage.--Discovery of the Promised Secret.--Hans
+ von Fuechslein.
+
+
+For while the Quintus, in his vapory chamber was thus running over the
+sounding-board of his early years, the Rathsdiener, or City-officer,
+entered with a lantern and the Presentation; and behind him the courier
+of the Frau von Aufhammer with a note and a table-clock. The
+Rittmeisterinn had transformed her payment for the Dog-days sick-bed
+exhortation into a Christmas present; which consisted, _first_, of a
+table-clock, with a wooden ape thereon, starting out when the hour
+struck, and drumming along with every stroke; _secondly_, of the
+Conrectorate, which she had procured for him.
+
+As in the public this appointment from the private Flachsenfingen
+Council has not been judged of as it deserved, I consider it my duty to
+offer a defence for the body corporate; and that rather here than in
+the _Reichsanzeiger_, or _Imperial Indicator_.--I have already
+mentioned, in the Second Letter-Box, that the Town-Syndic drove a trade
+in Hamburg candles; and the then Burgermeister in coffee-beans, which
+he sold as well whole as ground. Their joint traffic, however, which
+they carried on exclusively, was in the eight School-offices of
+Flachsenfingen; the other members of the Council acting only as
+bale-wrappers, shopmen, and accountants in the Council wareroom. A
+Council-house, indeed, is like an India-house, where not only
+resolutions or appointments, but also shoes and cloth, are exposed to
+sale. Properly speaking, the Councillor derives his freedom of
+office-trading from that principle of the Roman law, _Cui jus est
+donandi, eidem et vendendi jus est_; that is to say, He who has the
+right of giving anything away has also a right to dispose of it for
+money, if he can. Now as the Council-members have palpably the right of
+conferring offices gratis, the right of selling them must follow of
+course.
+
+
+ _Short Extra-word on Appointment-brokers in general_.
+
+My chief anxiety is lest the Academy-product-sale-Commission[49] of the
+State carry on its office-trade too slackly. And what but the
+commonweal must suffer in the long run, if important posts are
+distributed, not according to the current cash which is laid down for
+them, but according to connections, relationships, party
+recommendations, and bowings and cringings? Is it not a contradiction,
+to charge titulary offices dearer than real ones? Should one not rather
+expect that the real Hofrath would pay higher by the _alterum tantum_
+than the mere titulary Hofrath?--Money, among European nations, is now
+the equivalent and representative of value in all things, and
+consequently in understanding; the rather as a _head_ is stamped on it;
+to pay down the purchase-money of an office is therefore neither more
+nor less than to stand an _examen rigorosum_, which is held by a good
+_schema examinandi_. To invert this, to pretend exhibiting your
+qualifications, in place of these their surrogates, and assignates, and
+_monnoie de confiance_, is simply to resemble the crazy philosophers in
+_Gulliver's Travels_, who, for social converse, instead of names of
+things, brought the things themselves tied up in a bag; it is, indeed,
+plainly as much as trying to fall back into the barbarous times of
+trade by barter, when the Romans, instead of the figured cattle on
+their leather money, drove forth the beeves themselves.
+
+From all such injudicious notions I myself am so far removed, that
+often, when I used to read that the King of France was devising new
+offices, to stand and sell them under the booth of his Baldaquin, I
+have set myself to do something of the like. This I shall now at least
+calmly propose; not vexing my heart whether Governments choose to adopt
+it or not. As our Sovereign will not allow us to multiply offices
+purely for sale, nay, on the contrary, is day and night (like managers
+of strolling companies) meditating how to give more parts to one
+State-actor; and thus to the Three Stage Unities to add a Fourth, that
+of Players; as the above French method, therefore, will not apply, could
+we not at least contrive to invent some Virtues harmonizing with the
+offices, along with which they might be sold as titles? Might we not,
+for instance, with the office of a Referendary, put off at the same
+time a titular Incorruptibility, for a fair consideration; and so that
+this virtue, as not belonging to the office, must be separately paid
+for by the candidate? Such a market-title and patent of nobility could
+not but be ornamental to a Referendary. We forget that in former times
+such high titles were appended to all posts whatsoever. The scholastic
+Professor then wrote himself (besides his official designation) "The
+Seraphic," "The Incontrovertible," "The Penetrating"; the King wrote
+himself, "The Great," "The Bald," "The Bold," and so also did the
+Rabbins. Could it be unpleasant to gentlemen in the higher stations of
+Justice, if the titles of Impartiality, Rapidity, &c., might be
+conferred on them by sale, as well as the posts themselves? Thus with
+the appointment of a Kammerrath, or Councillor of Revenue, the virtue
+of Patriotism might fitly be conjoined; and I believe few Advocates
+would grudge purchasing the title of Integrity (as well as their common
+one of Government-advocacy), were it to be had in the market. If,
+however, any candidate chose to take his post without the virtues, then
+it would stand with himself to do so, and in the adoption of this
+reflex morality Government should not constrain him.
+
+It might be that, as, according to Tristram Shandy, clothes, according
+to Walter Shandy and Lavater, proper names, exert an influence on men,
+appellatives would do so still more; since, on us, as on testaceous
+animals, _the foam so often hardens into shell_; but such internal
+morality is not a thing the State can have an eye to; for, as in the
+fine arts, it is not this, but the _representation_ of it, which forms
+her true aim.
+
+I have found it rather difficult to devise for our different offices
+different verbal-virtues; but I should think there might many such
+divisions of Virtue (at this moment, Love of Freedom, Public-spirit,
+Sincerity, and Uprightness occur to me) be hunted out; were but some
+well-disposed minister of state to appoint a Virtue-board or Moral
+Address Department, with some half-dozen secretaries, who, for a small
+salary, might devise various virtues for the various posts. Were I in
+their place, I should hold a good prism before the white ray of Virtue,
+and divide it completely. Pity that it were not crimes we wanted--their
+subdivision I mean;--our country Judges might then be selected for this
+purpose. For in their tribunals, where only inferior jurisdiction, and
+no penalty above five florins Frankish, is admitted, they have a daily
+training how out of every mischief to make several small ones, none of
+which they ever punish to a greater amount than their five florins.
+This is a precious moral _Rolfinkenism_, which our Jurists have learned
+from the great Sin-cutters, St. Augustin and his Sorbonne, who together
+have carved more sins on Adam's Sin-apple than ever Rolfinken did faces
+on a cherry-stone. How different one of our Judges from a Papal
+Casuist, who, by side-scrapings, will rasp you down the best deadly sin
+into a venial!--
+
+School-offices (to come to these) are a small branch of traffic
+certainly; yet still they are monarchies,--school-monarchies, to
+wit,--resembling the Polish crown, which, according to Pope's verse, is
+twice exposed to sale in the century; a statement, I need hardly say,
+arithmetically false, Newton having settled the average duration of a
+reign at twenty-two years. For the rest, whether the city Council bring
+the young of the community a Hamel's _Rat_-and-Child-_catcher_; or a
+Weissen's _Child's-friend_,--this to the Council can make no
+difference; seeing the Schoolmaster is not a horse, for whose secret
+defects the horse-dealer is to be responsible. It is enough if
+Town-Syndic and Co. cannot reproach themselves with having picked out
+any fellow of genius; for a genius, as he is useless to the State,
+except for recreation and ornament, would at the very least exclude the
+duller, cooler head, who properly forms the true care and profit of the
+State; as your costly carat-pearl is good for show alone, but coarse
+grain-pearls for medicine. On the whole, if a schoolmaster be adequate
+to flog his scholars, it should suffice; and I cannot but blame our
+Commission of Inspectors, when they go examining schools, that they do
+not make the schoolmaster go through the duty of firking one or two
+young persons of his class in their presence, by way of trial, to see
+what is in him.
+
+
+ _End of the Extra-word on Appointment-brokers in general_.
+
+Now again to our history! The Councillor Heads of the Firm had
+conferred the Conrectorate on my hero, not only with a view to the
+continued consumpt of candles and beans, but also on the strength of a
+quite mad notion: they believed the Quintus would very soon die.
+
+--And here I have reached a most important circumstance in this
+History, and one into which I have yet let no mortal look; now,
+however, it no longer depends on my will whether I shall shove aside
+the folding-screen from it or not; but I must positively lay it open,
+nay, hang a reverberating-lamp over it.
+
+In medical history, it is a well-known fact, that in certain families
+the people all die precisely at the same age, just as in these families
+they are all born at the same age (of nine months); nay, from Voltaire,
+I recollect one family, the members of which at the same age all killed
+themselves. Now, in the Fixleinic lineage, it was the custom that the
+male ascendants uniformly on Cantata-Sunday, in their thirty-second
+year, took to bed and died; every one of my readers would do well to
+insert in his copy of the _Thirty Years' War_, Schiller having entirely
+omitted it, the fact, that, in the course thereof, one Fixlein died of
+the plague, another of hunger, another of a musket-bullet; all in their
+thirty-second year. True Philosophy explains the matter thus: "The
+first two or three times, it happened purely by accident; and the other
+times, the people died of sheer fright: if not so, the whole fact is
+rather to be questioned."
+
+But what did Fixlein make of the affair? Little or nothing; the only
+thing he did was, that he took little or no pains to fall in love with
+Thiennette; that so no other might have cause for fear on his account.
+He himself, however, for five reasons, minded it so little, that he
+hoped to be older than Senior Astmann before he died. First, because
+three Gypsies, in three different places, and at three different times,
+had each shown him the same long vista of years in her magic mirror.
+Secondly, because he had a sound constitution. Thirdly, because his own
+brother had formed an exception, and perished before the thirties.
+Fourthly, on this ground: When a boy he had fallen sick of sorrow, on
+the very Cantata-Sunday when his father was lying in the winding-sheet,
+and only been saved from death by his playthings; and with this
+Cantata-sickness, he conceived that he had given the murderous Genius
+of his race the slip. Fifthly, the church-books being destroyed, and
+with them the certainty of his age, he could never fall into a right
+definite deadly fear: "It may be," said he, "that I have got whisked
+away over this whoreson year, and no one the wiser." I will not deny
+that last year he had fancied he was two-and-thirty; "however," said
+he, "if I am not to be so till, God willing, the next (1792), it may
+run away as smoothly as the last; am I not always in _His_ keeping? And
+were it unjust if the pretty years that were broken off from the life
+of my brother should be added to mine?" Thus, under the cold snow of
+the Present, does poor man strive to warm himself, or to mould out of
+it a fair snow-man.
+
+The Councillor Oligarchy, however, built upon the opposite opinion;
+and, like a Divinity, elevated our Quintus all at once from the
+Quintusship to the Conrectorate; swearing to themselves that he would
+soon vacate it again. Properly speaking, by school-seniority, this holy
+chair should have belonged to the Subrector Hans von Fuechslein; but he
+wished it not; being minded to become Hukelum Parson; especially, as
+Astmann's Death-angel, according to sure intelligence, was opening more
+and more widely the door of this spiritual sheepfold. "If the fellow
+weather another year, 't is more than I expect," said Hans.
+
+This Hans was such a churl, that it is pity he had not been a
+Hanoverian Post-boy; that so, by the Mandate of the Hanoverian
+Government, enjoining on all its Post-officers an elegant style of
+manners, he might have somewhat refined himself. To our poor Quintus,
+whom no mortal disliked, and who again could hate no mortal, he alone
+bore a grudge; simply because _Fixlein_ did not write himself
+_Fuechslein_, and had not chosen along with him to purchase a Patent of
+Nobility. The Subrector, on this his Patent triumphal chariot, drawn by
+a team of four specified ancestors, was obliged to see the Quintus, who
+was related to him, clutching by the lackey-straps behind the carriage;
+and to hear him, in the most despicable raiment, saying to the train:
+"He that rides there is my cousin, and a mortal, and I always remind
+him of it." The mild, compliant Quintus never noticed this large
+wasp-poison-bag in the Subrector, but took it for a honey-bag; nay, by
+his brotherly warmness, which the nobleman regarded as mere show, he
+concreted these venomous juices into still feller consistency. The
+Quintus, in his simplicity, took Fuechslein's contempt for envy of his
+pedagogic talents.
+
+A Catherinenhof, an Annenhof, an Elizabethhof, Stralenhof, and
+Petershof, all these Russian pleasure palaces, a man can dispense with
+(if not despise), who has a room, in which on Christmas eve he walks
+about with a Presentation in his hand. The new Conrector now longed for
+nothing but--daylight; joys always (cares never) nibbled from him, like
+sparrows, his sleep-grains; and to-night, moreover, the registrator of
+his glad time, the clock-ape, drummed out every hour to him, which,
+accordingly, he spent in gay dreaming, rather than in sound snoring.
+
+On Christmas morn he looked at his Class-prodromus, and thought but
+little of it; he scarcely knew what to make of his last night's foolish
+inflation about his Quintusship. "The Quintus-post," said he to
+himself, "is not to be named in the same day with the Conrectorate; I
+wonder how I could parade so last night before my promotion; at
+present, I had more reason." To-day he eat, as on all Sundays and
+holidays, with the Master-Butcher Steinberger, his former Guardian. To
+this man Fixlein was, what common people are _always_, but polished,
+philosophical, and sentimental people very _seldom_ are,--_thankful_; a
+man thanks you the less for presents, the more inclined he is to give
+presents of his own; and the beneficent is rarely a grateful person.
+Meister Steinberger, in the character of storemaster, had introduced
+into the wire-cage of a garret, where Fixlein, while a Student
+at Leipzig, was suspended, many a well-filled trough with good
+canary-meat, of hung-beef, of household bread, and _Sauerkraut_. Money
+indeed was never to be wrung from him; it is well known that he often
+sent the best calf-skins gratis to the tanner, to be boots for our
+Quintus; but the tanning-charges the Ward himself had to bear.--On
+Fixlein's entrance, as was at all times customary, a smaller damask
+table-cloth was laid upon the large coarser one; the arm-chair, silver
+implements, and a wine-soup were handed him; mere waste, which, as the
+Guardian used to say, suited well enough for a Scholar; but for a
+Flescher not at all. Fixlein first took his victuals, and then
+signified that he was made Conrector. "Ward," said Steinberger, "if you
+are made that, it is well.--Seest thou, Eva, I cannot buy a tail of thy
+cows now; I must have smelt it beforehand." He was hereby informing his
+daughter that the cash set apart for the fatted cattle must now be
+applied to the Conrectorate; for he was in the habit of advancing all
+instalment-dues to his Ward, at an interest of four and a half per
+cent. Fifty gulden he had already lent the Quintus on his advancement
+to the Quintusship; of these the interest had to be duly paid; yet, on
+the day of payment, the Quintus always got some abatement; being wont
+every Sunday after dinner to instruct his guardian's daughter in
+arithmetic, writing, and geography. Steinberger with justice required
+of his own grown-up daughter that she should know all the towns where
+he in his wanderings as a journeyman had slain fat oxen; and if she
+slipped, or wrote crookedly, or subtracted wrong, he himself, as
+Academical Senate and Justiciary, was standing behind her chair, ready,
+so to speak, with the forge-hammer of his fist to beat out the dross
+from her brain, and at a few strokes hammer it into right ductility.
+The soft Quintus, for his part, had never struck her. On this account
+she had perhaps, with a few glances, appointed him executor and
+assignee of her heart. The old Flescher--simply because his wife was
+dead--had constantly been in the habit of searching with mine-lamps and
+pokers into all the corners of Eva's heart; and had in consequence long
+ago observed--what the Quintus never did--that she had a mind for the
+said Quintus. Young women conceal their sorrows more easily than their
+joys; to-day, at the mention of this Conrectorate, Eva had become
+unusually _red_.
+
+When she went after breakfast to bring in coffee, which the Ward had to
+drink down to the grounds: "I beat Eva to death if she but look at
+him," said he. Then addressing Fixlein: "Hear you, Ward, did you never
+cast an eye on my Eva? She can suffer you, and if you want her, you get
+her; but _we_ have done with one another; for a learned man needs quite
+another sort of thing."
+
+"Herr Regiments-Quartermaster," said Fixlein, (for this post
+Steinberger filled in the Provincial Militia,) "such a match were far
+too rich, at any rate, for a Schoolman." The Quartermaster nodded fifty
+times; and then said to Eva, as she returned,--at the same time taking
+down from the shelf a wooden crook, on which he used to rack out and
+suspend his slain calves: "Stop!--Hark, dost wish the present Herr
+Conrector here for thy husband?"
+
+"Ah, good Heaven!" said Eva.
+
+"Mayst wish him or not," continued the Flescher; "with this crook thy
+father knocks thy brains out, if thou but think of a learned man. Now
+make his coffee." And so by the dissevering stroke of this wooden crook
+was a love easily smitten asunder, which in a higher rank, by such
+cutting through it with the sword, would only have foamed and hissed
+the keenlier.
+
+Fixlein might now, at any hour he liked, lay hold of fifty florins
+Frankish, and clutch the pedagogic sceptre, and become coadjutor of the
+Rector, that is, Conrector. We may assert, that it is with debts, as
+with proportions in Architecture; of which Wolf has shown that those
+are the best which can be expressed in the smallest numbers.
+Nevertheless, the Quartermaster cheerfully took learned men under his
+arm; for the notion that his debtor would decease in his thirty-second
+year, and that so Death, as creditor in the first rank, must be paid
+his Debt of Nature, before the other creditors could come forward with
+their debts--this notion he named stuff and old-wifery; he was neither
+Superstitious nor Fanatical, and he walked by firm principles of
+action, such as the common man much oftener has than your vaporing man
+of letters, or your empty, dainty man of rank.
+
+As it is but a few clear Ladydays, warm Mayday-nights, at the most a
+few odorous Rose-weeks, which I am digging from this Fixleinic Life,
+embedded in the dross of week-day cares; and as if they were so many
+veins of silver, am separating, stamping, smelting, and burnishing for
+the reader,--I must now travel on with the stream, his history to
+Cantata-Sunday, 1792, before I can gather a few handfuls of this
+gold-dust, to carry in and wash in my biographical gold-hut. That
+Sunday, on the contrary, is very metalliferous; do but consider that
+Fixlein is yet uncertain (the ashes of the Church-books not being
+legible) whether it is conducting him into his thirty-second or his
+thirty-third year.
+
+From Christmas till then he did nothing, but simply became Conrector.
+The new chair of office was a Sun-altar, on which, from his
+Quintus-ashes, a young Ph[oe]nix combined itself together. Great
+changes--in offices, marriages, travels--make us younger; we always
+date our history from the last revolution, as the French have done from
+theirs. A colonel, who first set foot on the ladder of seniority as
+corporal, is five times younger than a king, who in his whole life has
+never been aught else except a--crown-prince.
+
+
+
+
+ FIFTH LETTER-BOX.
+
+ Cantata-Sunday.--Two Testaments.--Pontac; Blood; Love.
+
+
+The spring months clothe the earth in new variegated hues; but man they
+usually dress in black. Just when our icy regions are becoming
+fruitful, and the flower-waves of the meadows are rolling together over
+our quarter of the globe, we on all hands meet with men in sables, the
+beginning of whose Spring is full of tears. But, on the other hand,
+this very upblooming of the renovated earth is itself the best balm for
+sorrow over those who lie under it; and graves are better hid by
+blossoms than by snow.
+
+In April, which is no less deadly than it is fickle, old Senior
+Astmann, our Conrector's teacher, was overtaken by death. His departure
+it was meant to hide from the Rittmeisterinn; but the unusual ringing
+of funeral peals carried his swan-song to her heart; and gradually set
+the curfew-bell of her life into similar movement. Age and sufferings
+had already marked out the first incisions for Death, so that he
+required but little effort to cut her down; for it is with men as with
+trees, they are notched long before felling, that their life-sap may
+exude. The second stroke of apoplexy was soon followed by the last; it
+is strange that Death, like criminal courts, cites the apoplectic
+thrice.
+
+Men are apt to postpone their _last_ will as long as their _better_
+one; the Rittmeisterinn would perhaps have let all her hours, till the
+speechless and deaf one, roll away without testament, had not
+Thiennette, during the last night before from sick-nurse she became
+corpse-watcher, reminded the patient of the poor Conrector, and
+of his meagre, hunger-bitten existence, and of the scanty aliment and
+board-wages which Fortune had thrown him, and of his empty Future,
+where, like a drooping, yellow plant in the parched deal-box of the
+school-room, between scholars and creditors, he must languish to the
+end. Her own poverty offered her a model of his; and her inward tears
+were the fluid tints with which she colored her picture. As the
+Rittmeisterinn's testament related solely to domestics and dependants,
+and as she began with the male one, Fixlein stood at the top; and
+Death, who must have been a special friend of the Conrector's, did not
+lift his scythe and give the last stroke, till his _protege_ had
+been with audible voice declared testamentary heir; then he cut all
+away,--life, testament, and hopes.
+
+When the Conrector, in a wash-bill from his mother, received these two
+Death's-posts and Job's-posts in his class, the first thing he did was
+to dismiss his class-boys, and break into tears before reaching home.
+Though the mother had informed him that he had been remembered in the
+will (I could wish, however, that the Notary had blabbed how much it
+was), yet almost with every O which he masoretically excerpted from his
+German Bible, and entered in his Masoretic Work, great drops fell down
+on his pen, and made his black ink pale. His sorrow was not the
+gorgeous sorrow of the Poet, who veils the gaping wounds of the
+departed in the winding-sheet, and breaks the cry of anguish in soft
+tones of plaintiveness; nor the sorrow of the Philosopher, who, through
+one open grave, must look into the whole catacomb-Necropolis of the
+Past, and before whom the spectre of a friend expands into the spectral
+Shadow of this whole Earth; but it was the woe of a child, of a mother,
+whom this thought itself, without subsidiary reflections, bitterly
+cuts asunder: "So I shall never more see thee; so must thou moulder
+away, and I shall never see thee, thou good soul, never, never any
+more!"--And even because he neither felt the philosophical nor the
+poetical sadness, every trifle could make a division, a break in his
+mourning; and, like a woman, he was that very evening capable of
+sketching some plans for the future employment of his legacy.
+
+Four weeks after, to wit, on the 5th of May, the testament was
+unsealed; but not till the 6th (Cantata-Sunday) did he go down to
+Hukelum. His mother met his salutations with tears; which she shed,
+over the corpse for grief, over the testament for joy.--To the now
+Conrector Egidius Zebedaeus was left: _In the first place_, a large
+sumptuous bed, with a mirror-tester, in which the giant Goliath might
+have rolled at his ease, and to which I and my fair readers will by and
+by approach nearer, to examine it; _secondly_, there was devised to
+him, as unpaid Easter-godchild-money, for every year that he had lived,
+one ducat; _thirdly_, all the admittance and instalment dues, which his
+elevation to the Quintate and Conrectorate had cost him, were to be
+made good to the utmost penny. "And dost thou know, then," proceeded
+the mother, "what the poor Fraeulein has got? Ah Heaven! Nothing! Not
+one brass farthing!" For Death had stiffened the hand, which was just
+stretching itself out to reach the poor Thiennette a little rain-screen
+against the foul weather of life. The mother related this perverse
+trick of Fortune with true condolence; which in women dissipates envy,
+and comes easier to them than congratulation, a feeling belonging
+rather to men. In many female hearts sympathy and envy are such near
+door-neighbors that they could be virtuous nowhere except in Hell,
+where men have such frightful times of it; and vicious nowhere except
+in Heaven, where people have more happiness than they know what to do
+with.
+
+The Conrector was now enjoying on Earth that Heaven to which his
+benefactress had ascended. First of all, he started off--without
+so much as putting up his handkerchief, in which lay his
+emotion--up-stairs to see the legacy-bed unshrouded; for he had a
+_female_ predilection for furniture. I know not whether the reader ever
+looked at or mounted any of these ancient chivalric beds, into which,
+by means of a little stair without balustrades, you can easily ascend;
+and in which you, properly speaking, sleep always at least one story
+above ground. Nazianzen informs us (_Orat_. XVI.) that the Jews, in old
+times, had high beds with cock-ladders of this sort; but simply because
+of vermin. The legacy bed-Ark was quite as large as one of these; and a
+flea would have measured it, not in Diameters of the Earth, but in
+Distances of Sirius. When Fixlein beheld this colossal dormitory, with
+the curtains drawn asunder, and its canopy of looking-glass, he could
+have longed to be in it; and had it been in his power to cut from the
+opaque hemisphere of Night, at that time in America, a small section,
+he would have established himself there along with it, just to swim
+about, for one half-hour, with his thin lath figure, in this sea of
+down. The mother, by longer chains of reasoning and chains of
+calculation than the bed was, had not succeeded in persuading him to
+have the broad mirror on the top cut in pieces, though his large
+dressing-table had nothing to see itself in but a mere shaving-glass;
+he let the mirror lie where it was for this reason: "Should I ever, God
+willing, get married," said he, "I shall then, towards morning, be able
+to look at my sleeping wife, without sitting up in bed."
+
+As to the second article of the testament, the godchild Easter-pence,
+his mother had, last night, arranged it perfectly. The Lawyer took her
+evidence on the years of the heir; and these she had stated at exactly
+the teeth-number, two-and-thirty. She would willingly have lied, and
+passed off her son, like an Inscription, for older than he was; but
+against this _venia aetatis_, she saw too well the authorities would
+have taken exception, "that it was falsehood and cozenage; had the son
+been two-and-thirty, he must have been dead some time ago, as it could
+not but be presumed that he then was."
+
+And just as she was recounting this, a servant from Schadeck called;
+and delivered to the Conrector, in return for a discharge and
+ratification of the birth-certificate given out by his mother, a gold
+bar of two-and-thirty ducat age-counters, like a helm-bar for the
+voyage of his life; Herr von Aufhammer was too proud to engage in any
+pettifogging discussion over a plebeian birth-certificate.
+
+And thus, by a proud open-handedness, was one of the best lawsuits
+thrown to the dogs; seeing this gold bar might, in the wire-mill of the
+judgment-bench, have been drawn out into the finest threads. From such
+a tangled lock, which was not to be unravelled--for in the first place,
+there was no document to prove Fixlein's age; in the second place, so
+long as he lived, the necessary conclusion was, that he was not yet
+thirty-two[50]--from such a lock might not only silk and hanging-cords,
+but whole drag nets, have been spun and twisted? Clients in general
+would have less reason to complain of their causes, if these lasted
+longer. Philosophers contend for thousands of years over philosophical
+questions; and it seems an unaccountable thing, therefore, that
+Advocates should attempt to end their juristical questions in a space
+of eighty, or even sometimes of sixty years. But the professors of Law
+are not to blame for this; on the other hand, as Lessing asserts of
+Truth, that not the _finding_, but the _seeking_ of it profits men, and
+that he himself would willingly make over his claim to all truths in
+return for the sweet labor of investigation, so is the professor of Law
+not profited by the finding and deciding, but by the investigation of a
+juridical truth,--which is called pleading and practising,--and he
+would willingly consent to approximate to Truth forever, like an
+hyperbola to its asymptote, without ever meeting it, seeing he can
+subsist as an honorable man with wife and child, let such approximation
+be as tedious as it likes.
+
+The Schadeck servant had, besides the gold legacy, a further commission
+from the Lawyer, whereby the testamentary heir was directed to sum up
+the mint-dues which he had been obliged to pay while lying under the
+coining-press of his superiors, as Quintus and Conrector; the which,
+properly documented and authenticated, were forthwith to be made good
+to him.
+
+Our Conrector, who now rated himself among the great capitalists of the
+world, held his short gold-roll like a sceptre in his hand; like a
+basket-net lifted from the sea of the Future, which was now to run on,
+and bring him all manner of fed-fishes, well-washed, sound, and in good
+season.
+
+I cannot relate all things at once; else I should ere now have told the
+reader, who must long have been waiting for it, that to the moneyed
+Conrector his two-and-thirty godchild-pennies but too much prefigured
+the two-and-thirty years of his age; besides which, to-day the
+Cantata-Sunday, this Bartholomew-night and Second of September of his
+family, came in as a further aggravation. The mother, who should have
+known the age of her child, said she had forgotten it; but durst wager
+he was thirty-two a year ago; only the Lawyer was a man you could not
+speak to. "I could swear it myself," said the capitalist; "I recollect
+how stupid I felt Cantata-Sunday last year." Fixlein beheld Death, not
+as the poet does, in the uptowering, asunder-driving concave-mirror of
+Imagination; but as the child, as the savage, as the peasant, as the
+woman does, in the plane octavo-mirror on the board of a Prayer-book;
+and Death looked to him like an old white-headed man, sunk down into
+slumber in some latticed pew.--
+
+And yet he thought oftener of him than last year; for joy readily melts
+us into softness; and the lackered Wheel of Fortune is a cistern-wheel
+that empties its water in our eyes.... But the friendly Genius of this
+terrestrial, or rather aquatic Ball--for, in the physical and in the
+moral world, there are more tear-seas than firm land--has provided for
+the poor water-insects that float about in it, for us, namely, a quite
+special elixir against spasms in the soul; I declare this same Genius
+must have studied the whole pathology of man with care; for to the poor
+devil who is no Stoic, and can pay no Soul-doctor, that for the
+fissures of his cranium and his breast might prepare costly
+prescriptions of simples, he has stowed up cask-wise in all cellarages
+a precious wound-water, which the patient has only to take and pour
+over his slashes and bone-breakages--gin-twist, I mean, or beer, or a
+touch of wine.... By Heaven! it is either stupid ingratitude towards
+this medicinal Genius on the one hand, or theological confusion of
+permitted tippling with prohibited drunkenness on the other, if men do
+not thank God that they have something at hand, which, in the nervous
+vertigoes of life, will instantly supply the place of Philosophy,
+Christianity, Judaism, Paganism, and _Time_;--liquor, as I said.
+
+The Conrector had long before sunset given the village post three
+groschens of post-money, and commissioned--for he had a whole cabinet
+of ducats in his pocket, which all day he was surveying in the dark
+with his hand--three thalers' worth of Pontac from the town. "I must
+have a Cantata merry-making," said he; "if it be my last day, let it be
+my gayest too!" I could wish he had given a larger order; but he kept
+the bit of moderation between his teeth at all times; even in a
+threatened sham-death-night, and in the midst of jubilee. The question
+is, whether he would not have restricted himself to a single bottle, if
+he had not wished to treat his mother and the Fraeulein. Had he lived in
+the tenth century, when the Day of Judgment was thought to be at hand,
+or in other centuries, when new Noah's Deluges were expected, and when,
+accordingly, like sailors in a shipwreck, people boused up all,--he
+would not have spent one kreuzer more on that account. His joy was,
+that with his legacy he could now satisfy his head-creditor
+Steinberger, and leave the world an honest man. Just people, who make
+much of money, pay their debts the most punctually.
+
+The purple Pontac arrived at a time when Fixlein could compare the
+red-chalk-drawings and red-letter-titles of joy, which it would
+bring out on the cheeks of its drinker and drinkeresses,--with the
+Evening-carnation of the last clouds about the Sun....
+
+I declare, among all the spectators of this History, no one can be
+thinking more about poor Thiennette than I; nevertheless, it is not
+permitted me to bring her out from her tiring-room to my historical
+scene before the time. Poor girl! The Conrector cannot wish more warmly
+than his Biographer, that, in the Temple of Nature as in that of
+Jerusalem, there were a special door--besides that of Death--standing
+open, through which only the afflicted entered, that a Priest might
+give them solace. But Thiennette's heart-sickness over all her vanished
+prospects, over her entombed benefactress, over a whole life enwrapped
+in the pall, had hitherto, in a grief which the stony Rittmeister
+rather made to bleed than alleviated, swept all away from her,
+occupations excepted; had fettered all her steps which led not to some
+task, and granted to her eyes nothing to dry them or gladden them, save
+down-falling eyelids full of dreams and sleep.
+
+All sorrow raises us above the civic Ceremonial-law, and makes the
+Prosaist a Psalmist; in sorrow alone have women courage to front
+opinion. Thiennette walked out only in the evening, and then only in
+the garden.
+
+The Conrector could scarcely wait for the appearance of his fair
+friend, to offer his thanks,--and to-night also--his Pontac. Three
+Pontac decanters and three wineglasses were placed outside on the
+projecting window-sill of his cottage; and every time he returned from
+the dusky covered-way amid the flower forests, he drank a little from
+his glass,--and the mother sipped now and then from within through the
+opened window.
+
+I have already said, his Life-laboratory lay in the southwest corner of
+the garden or park, over against the Castle-Escurial, which stretched
+back into the village. In the northwest corner bloomed an acacia grove,
+like the floral crown of the garden. Fixlein turned his steps in that
+direction also; to see if, perhaps, he might not cast a happy glance
+through the wide-latticed grove over the intervening meads to
+Thiennette. He recoiled a little before two stone steps leading down
+into a pond before this grove, which were sprinkled with fresh blood.
+On the flags, also, there was blood hanging. Man shudders at this oil
+of our life's lamp where he finds it shed; to him it is the red
+death-signature of the Destroying Angel. Fixlein hurried apprehensively
+into the grove; and found here his paler benefactress leaning on the
+flower-bushes; her hands with her knitting-ware sunk into her bosom,
+her eyes lying under their lids as if in the bandage of slumber; her
+left arm in the real bandage of bloodletting; and with cheeks to which
+the twilight was lending as much red, as late woundings--this day's
+included--had taken from them. Fixlein, after his first terror--not at
+this flower's sleep, but at his own abrupt entrance--began to unroll
+the spiral butterfly's-sucker of his vision, and to lay it on the
+motionless leaves of this same sleeping flower. At bottom, I may
+assert, that this was the first time he had ever looked at her; he was
+now among the thirties; and he still continued to believe, that, in a
+young lady, he must look at the clothes only, not the person, and wait
+on her with his ears, not with his eyes.
+
+I impute it to the elevating influences of the Pontac, that the
+Conrector plucked up courage to--turn, to come back, and employ the
+resuscitating means of coughing, sneezing, trampling, and calling to
+his Shock, in stronger and stronger doses on the fair sleeper. To take
+her by the hand, and with some medical apology, gently pull her out of
+sleep, this was an audacity of which the Conrector, so long as he could
+stand for Pontac, and had any grain of judgment left, could never
+dream.
+
+However, he did awake her, by those other means.
+
+Wearied, heavy-laden Thiennette! how slowly does thy eye open! The
+warmest balsam of this earth, soft sleep has shifted aside, and the
+night-air of memory is again blowing on thy naked wounds!--and yet was
+the smiling friend of thy youth the fairest object which thy eye could
+light on, when it sank from the hanging-garden of Dreams into this
+lower one round thee.
+
+She herself was little conscious,--and the Conrector not at all,--that
+she was bending her flower-leaves imperceptibly towards a terrestrial
+body, namely, towards Fixlein. She resembled an Italian flower, that
+contains cunningly concealed within it a new-year's gift, which the
+receiver knows not at first how to extract. But now the golden chain of
+her late kind deed attracted her as well towards him, as him towards
+her. She at once gave her eye and her voice a mask of joy; for she did
+not put her tears, as Catholics do those of Christ, in relic-vials,
+upon altars, to be worshipped. He could very suitably preface his
+invitation to the Pontac festival with a long acknowledgment of thanks
+for the kind intervention which had opened to him the sources for
+procuring it. She rose slowly, and walked with him to the banquet of
+wine; but he was not so discreet, as at first to attempt leading her,
+or rather not so courageous; he could more easily have offered a young
+lady his hand (that is, with marriage ring) than offered her his arm.
+One only time in his life had he escorted a female, a Lombard Countess
+from the theatre; a thing truly not to be believed, were not this the
+secret of it, that he was obliged; for the lady, a foreigner, parted in
+the press from all her people, in a bad night, had laid hold of him as
+a sable Abbe by the arm, and requested him to take her to her inn. He,
+however, knew the fashions of society, and attended her no farther than
+the porch of his Quintus-mansion, and there directed her with his
+finger to her inn, which, with thirty blazing windows, was looking down
+from another street.
+
+These things he cannot help. But to-night he had scarcely, with his
+fair, faint companion, reached the bank of the pond, into which some
+superstitious dread of water-spirits had lately poured the pure blood
+of her left arm,--when, in his terror lest she fell in, with the rest
+of her blood, over the brink, he quite valiantly laid hold of the sick
+arm. Thus will much Pontac and a little courage at all times put a
+Conrector in case to lay hold of a Fraeulein. I aver that at the
+banquet-board of the wine, at the window-sill, he continued in the same
+conducting position. What a soft group in the penumbra of the Earth,
+while Night, with its dusky waters, was falling deeper and deeper, and
+the silver-light of the Moon was already glancing back from the copper
+ball of the steeple! I call the group soft, because it consists of a
+maiden that in two senses has been bleeding; of a mother again with
+tears giving her thanks for the happiness of her child; and of a pious,
+modest man, pouring wine, and drinking health to both, and who traces
+in his veins a burning lava-stream, which is boiling through his heart,
+and threatening piece by piece to melt it and bear it away. A candle
+stood without among the three bottles, like Reason among the Passions;
+on this account the Conrector looked without intermission at the
+window-panes, for on them (the darkness of the room served as
+mirror-foil) was painted, among other faces which Fixlein liked, the
+face he liked best of all, and which he dared to look at only in
+reflection, the face of Thiennette.
+
+Every minute was a Federation-festival, and every second a
+Preparation-Sabbath for it. The Moon was gleaming from the evening dew,
+and the Pontac from their eyes, and the bean-stalks were casting a
+shorter grating of shadow. The quicksilver-drops of stars were hanging
+more and more continuous in the sable of night. The warm vapor of the
+wine set our two friends (like steam-engines) again in motion.
+
+Nothing makes the heart fuller and bolder than walking to and fro in
+the night. Fixlein now led the Fraeulein in his arm without scruple. By
+reason of her lancet-wound, Thiennette could only put her hand, in a
+clasping position, in his arm; and he, to save her the trouble of
+holding fast, held fast himself, and pressed her fingers as well as
+might be with his arm to his heart. It would betray a total want of
+polished manners to censure his. At the same time, trifles are the
+provender of Love; the fingers are electric discharges of a fire
+sparkling along every fibre; sighs are the guiding tones of two
+approximating hearts; and the worst and most effectual thing of all in
+such a case is some misfortune; for the fire of Love, like that of
+naphtha, likes to swim on water. Two tear-drops, one in another's, one
+in your own eyes, compose, as with two convex lenses, a microscope
+which enlarges everything, and changes all sorrows into charms. Good
+sex! I too consider every sister in misfortune as fair; and, perhaps,
+thou wouldst deserve the name of the Fair, even because thou art the
+Suffering sex!
+
+And if Professor Hunczogsky in Vienna modelled all the wounds of the
+human frame in wax, to teach his pupils how to cure them, I also, thou
+good sex, am representing in little figures the cuts and scars of thy
+spirit, though only to keep away rude hands from inflicting new
+ones....
+
+Thiennette felt not the loss of the inheritance, but of her that should
+have left it; and this more deeply for one little trait, which she had
+already told his mother, as she now told him. In the last two nights of
+the Rittmeisterinn, when the feverish watching was holding up to
+Thiennette's imagination nothing but the winding-sheet and the
+mourning-coaches of her protectress; while she was sitting at the foot
+of the bed, looking on those fixed eyes, unconsciously quick drops
+often trickled over her cheeks, while in thought she prefigured the
+heavy, cumbrous dressing of her benefactress for the coffin. Once after
+midnight, the dying lady pointed with her finger to her own lips.
+Thiennette understood her not; but rose and bent over her face. The
+Enfeebled tried to lift her head, but could not,--and only rounded her
+lips. At last, a thought glanced through Thiennette, that the
+Departing, whose dead arms could now press no beloved heart to her own,
+wished that she herself should embrace her. O then, that instant, keen
+and tearful, she pressed her warm lips on the colder,--and she was
+silent like her that was to speak no more,--and she embraced alone and
+was not embraced. About four o'clock, the finger waved again; she sank
+down on the stiffened lips,--but this had been no signal, for the lips
+of her friend under the long kiss had grown stiff and cold....
+
+How deeply now, before the infinite Eternity's-countenance of Night,
+did the cutting of this thought pass through Fixlein's warm soul: "O
+thou forsaken one beside me! No happy accident, no twilight hast thou,
+like that now glimmering in the heavens, to point to the prospect of a
+sunny day; without parents art thou, without brother, without friend;
+here alone on a disblossomed, emptied corner of the Earth; and thou,
+left Harvest-flower, must wave lonely and frozen over the withered
+stubble of the Past." That was the meaning of his thoughts, whose
+internal words were: "Poor young lady! Not so much as a half-cousin
+left; no nobleman will seek her, and she grows old so forgotten, and
+she is so good from the very heart,--Me she has made happy,--Ah, had I
+the presentation to the parish of Hukelum in my pocket, I should make a
+trial." ... Their mutual lives, which a straitcutting bond of Destiny
+was binding so closely together, now rose before him overhung with
+sable,--and he forthwith conducted his friend (for a bashful man may in
+an hour and a half be transformed into the boldest, and then continues
+so) back to the last flask, that all these upsprouting thistles and
+passion-flowers of sorrow might therewith be swept away. I remark, in
+passing, that this was stupid; the torn vine is full of water-veins as
+well as grapes; and a soft oppressed heart the beverage of joy can melt
+only into tears.
+
+If any man disagree with me, I shall desire him to look at the
+Conrector, who demonstrates my experimental maxim like a very
+syllogism.--One might arrive at some philosophic views, if one traced
+out the causes, why liquors--that is to say, in the long run, more
+plentiful secretion of the nervous spirits--make men at once pious,
+soft, and poetical. The Poet, like Apollo his father, is _forever a
+youth_; and is, what other men are only once, namely, in love,--or only
+after Pontac, namely, intoxicated,--all his life long. Fixlein, who had
+been no poet in the morning, now became one at night; wine made him
+pious and soft; the Harmonica-bells in man, which sound to the tones of
+a higher world, must, like the glass Harmonica-bells, if they are to
+act, be kept _moist_.
+
+He was now standing with her again beside the wavering pond, in which
+the second blue hemisphere of heaven, with dancing stars and amid
+quivering trees, was playing; over the green hills ran the white,
+crooked footpaths dimly along; on the one mountain was the twilight
+sinking together, on the other was the mist of night rising up;
+and over all these vapors of life hung motionless and naming the
+thousand-armed lustre of the starry heaven, and every arm held in it a
+burning galaxy....
+
+It now struck eleven.... Amid such scenes, an unknown hand stretches
+itself out in man, and writes in foreign language on his heart, a dread
+_Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin_. "Perhaps by twelve I am dead," thought our
+friend, in whose soul the Cantata-Sunday, with all its black funeral
+piles, was mounting up.
+
+The whole future Crucifixion of his friend lay prickly and bethorned
+before him; and he saw every bloody trace from which she lifted her
+foot,--she who had made his own way soft with flowers and leaves. He
+could no longer restrain himself; trembling in his whole frame, and
+with a trembling voice, he solemnly said to her: "If the Lord this
+night call me away, let the half of my fortune be yours; for it is your
+goodness I must thank that I am free of debts, as few Teachers are."
+
+Thiennette, unacquainted with our sex, naturally mistook this speech
+for a proposal of marriage; and the fingers of her wounded arm to-night
+for the first time pressed suddenly against the arm in which they lay;
+the only living mortal's arm by which Joy, Love, and the Earth were
+still united with her bosom. The Conrector, rapturously terrified
+at the first pressure of a female hand, bent over his right to take
+hold of her left; and Thiennette, observing his unsuccessful movement,
+lifted her fingers, and laid her whole wounded arm in his, and
+her whole left hand in his right. Two lovers dwell in the
+Whispering-gallery,[51] where the faintest breath bodies itself forth
+into a sound. The good Conrector received and returned this blissful
+love-pressure, wherewith our poor, powerless soul, stammering, hemmed
+in, longing, distracted, seeks for a warmer language, which exists not;
+he was overpowered; he had not the courage to look at her; but he
+looked into the gleam of the twilight, and said (and here for
+unspeakable love the tears were running warm over his cheeks): "Ah, I
+will give you all; fortune, life, and all that I have, my heart and my
+hand."
+
+She was about to answer, but, casting a side glance, she cried, with a
+shriek: "Ah, Heaven!" He started round, and perceived the white muslin
+sleeve all dyed with blood; for in putting her arm into his, she had
+pushed away the bandage from the open vein. With the speed of
+lightning, he hurried her into the acacia-grove; the blood was already
+running from the muslin; he grew paler than she, for every drop of it
+was coming from his heart. The blue-white arm was bared; the bandage
+was put on: he tore a piece of gold from his pocket; clapped it, as one
+does with open arteries, on the spouting fountain, and bolted with this
+golden bar, and with the bandage over it, the door out of which her
+afflicted life was hurrying.--
+
+When it was over, she looked up to him; pale, languid, but her eyes
+were two glistening fountains of an unspeakable love, full of sorrow
+and full of gratitude.--The exhausting loss of blood was spreading her
+soul asunder in sighs. Thiennette was dissolved into inexpressible
+softness; and the heart lacerated by so many years, by so many arrows,
+was plunging with all its wounds in warm streams of tears, to be
+healed, as chapped flutes close together by lying in water, and get
+back their tones. Before such a magic form, before such a pure,
+heavenly love, her sympathizing friend was melted between the flames of
+joy and grief; and sank, with stifled voice, and bent down by love and
+rapture, on the pale, angelic face, the lips of which he timidly
+pressed, but did not kiss, till all-powerful Love bound its girdles
+round them, and drew the two closer and closer together, and their two
+souls, like two tears, melted into one. O now, when it struck twelve,
+the hour of death, did not the lover fancy that her lips were drawing
+his soul away, and all the fibres and all the nerves of his life closed
+spasmodically round the last heart in this world, round the last
+rapture of existence.... Yes, happy man, thou didst express thy love;
+for in thy love thou thoughtest to die....
+
+However, he did not die. After midnight, there floated a balmy morning
+air through the shaken flowers, and the whole spring was breathing.
+The blissful lover, setting bounds even to his sea of joy, reminded
+his delicate beloved, who was now his bride, of the dangers from
+night-cold; and himself of the longer night-cold of Death, which was
+now for long years passed over.--Innocent and blessed, they rose
+from the grove of their betrothment, from its dust broken by white
+acacia-flowers and straggling moonbeams. And without, they felt as if a
+whole wide Past had sunk away in a convulsion of the world; all was
+new, light, and young. The sky stood full of glittering dew-drops from
+the everlasting Morning; and the stars quivered joyfully asunder, and
+sank, resolved into beams, down into the hearts of men.--The Moon, with
+her fountain of light, had overspread and kindled all the garden, and
+was hanging above in a starless blue, as if she had consumed the
+nearest stars; and she seemed like a smaller wandering Spring, like a
+Christ's-face smiling in love of man.--
+
+Under this light they looked at one another for the first time after
+the first words of love; and the sky gleamed magically down on the
+disordered features with which the first rapture of love was still
+standing written on their faces....
+
+Dream, ye beloved, as ye wake, happy as in Paradise, innocent as in
+Paradise!
+
+
+
+
+ SIXTH LETTER-BOX.
+
+ Office-impost.--One of the Most Important of Petitions.
+
+
+The finest thing was his awakening in his European Settlement in the
+giant Schadeck bed!--With the inflammatory, tickling, eating fever of
+love in his breast; with the triumphant feeling that he had now got the
+introductory programme of love put happily by; and with the sweet
+resurrection from his living, prophetic burial; and with the joy that
+now, among his thirties, he could, for the first time, cherish hopes of
+a longer life (and did not longer mean at least till seventy?) than he
+could ten years ago;--with all this stirring life-balsam, in which the
+living fire-wheel of his heart was rapidly revolving, he lay here, and
+laughed at his glancing portrait in the bed-canopy; but he could not do
+it long; he was obliged to move. For a less happy man, it would have
+been gratifying to have measured--as pilgrims measure with the length
+of their pilgrimage, not so much by steps as by body-lengths, like
+Earth-diameters--the superficial content of the bed. But Fixlein, for
+his own part, had to launch from his bed into warm, billowy life; he
+had now his dear good Earth again to look after, and a Conrectorship
+thereon, and a bride to boot. Besides all this, his mother down-stairs
+now admitted that he had last night actually glided through beneath the
+scythe of Death, like supple grass, and that yesterday she had not told
+him, merely out of fear of his fear. Still a cold shudder went over
+him--especially as he was sober now--when he looked round at the high
+Tarpeian Rock, four hours' distance behind him, on the battlements of
+which he had last night walked hand in hand with Death.
+
+The only thing that grieved him was, that it was Monday, and that he
+must back to the Gymnasium. Such a freightage of joys he had never
+taken with him on his road to town. After four, he issued from his
+house, satisfied with coffee (which he drank in Hukelum merely for his
+mother's sake, who, for two days after, would still have portions of
+this woman's-wine to draw from the lees of the pot-sediment), into the
+_cooling_ dawning May-morning (for joy needs coolness, sorrow sun); his
+Betrothed comes--not indeed to meet him, but still--into his hearing,
+by her distant morning hymn; he makes but one momentary turn into the
+blissful haven of the blooming acacia-grove, which still, like the
+covenant sealed in it, has no thorns; he dips his warm hand in the
+cold-bath of the dewy leaves; he wades with pleasure through the
+beautifying-water of the dew, which, as it imparts color to faces, eats
+it away from boots ("but with thirty ducats, a Conrector may make shift
+to keep two pairs of boots on the hook"). And now the Moon, as it were
+the hanging seal of his last night's happiness, dips down into the
+West, like an emptied bucket of light, and in the East the other
+overrunning bucket, the Sun, mounts up, and the gushes of light flow
+broader and broader.
+
+The city stood in the celestial flames of Morning. Here his
+divining-rod (his gold-roll, which, excepting one sixteenth of an inch
+broken off from it, he carried along with him) began to quiver over all
+the spots where booty and silver-veins of enjoyment were concealed; and
+our rod-diviner easily discovered that the city and the future were a
+true entire Potosi of delights.
+
+In his Conrectorate closet he fell upon his knees and thanked God--not
+so much for his heritage and bride as--for his life; for he had gone
+away on Sunday morning with doubts whether he should ever come back;
+and it was purely out of love to the reader, and fear lest he might
+fret himself too much with apprehension, that I cunningly imputed
+Fixlein's journey more to his desire of knowing what was in the will,
+than of making his own will in presence of his mother. Every recovery
+is a bringing back and palingenesia of our youth; one loves the Earth
+and those that are on it with a new love. The Conrector could have
+found in his heart to take all his class by the locks, and press them
+to his breast; but he only did so to his adjutant, the Quartaner, who,
+in the first Letter-box, was still sitting in the rank of a
+Quintaner....
+
+His first expedition, after school-hours, was to the house of Meister
+Steinberger, where, without speaking a word, he counted down fifty
+florins cash in ducats, on the table: "At last I repay you," said
+Fixlein, "the moiety of my debt, and give you many thanks."
+
+"Ey, Herr Conrector," said the Quartermaster, and continued calmly
+stuffing puddings as before, "in my bond it is said, _payable at three
+months' mutual notice_. How could a man like me go on, else? However, I
+will change you the gold-pieces." Thereupon he advised him that it
+might be more judicious to take back a florin or two, and buy himself
+a better hat, and whole shoes. "If you like," added he, "to get a
+calf-skin and half a dozen hare-skins dressed, they are lying
+up-stairs." I should think, for my own part, that to the reader it must
+be as little a matter of indifference as it was to the Butcher, whether
+the hero of such a History appeared before him with an old tattered
+potlid of a hat, and a pump-sucker and leg-harness pair of boots, or in
+suitable apparel. In short, before St. John's day, the man was dressed
+with taste and pomp.
+
+But now came two most peculiarly important papers--at bottom only one,
+the petition for the Hukelum parsonship--to be elaborated; in regard to
+which I feel as if I myself must assist.... It were a simple turn, if
+now at least the assembled public did not pay attention.
+
+In the first place, the Conrector searched out and sorted all the
+Consistorial and Councillor quittances, or rather the toll-bills of the
+road-money, which he had been obliged to pay before the toll-gates at
+the Quintusship and Conrectorship had been thrown open; for the
+executor of the Schadeck testament had to reimburse him the whole, as
+his discharge would express it, "to penny and farthing." Another would
+have summed up his post-excise much more readily; by merely looking
+what he--owed; as these debt-bills and those toll-bills, like parallel
+passages, elucidate and confirm each other. But in Fixlein's case,
+there was a small circumstance of peculiarity at work, which I cannot
+explain till after what follows.
+
+It grieved him a little that for his two offices he had been obliged
+to pay and to borrow no larger a sum than 135 florins, 41 kreuzers,
+and one halfpenny. The legacy, it is true, was to pass directly
+from the hands of the testamentary executor into those of the
+Regiments-Quartermaster; but yet he could have liked well had he--for
+man is a fool from the very foundation of him--had more to pay, and
+therefore to inherit. The whole Conrectorate he had, by a slight
+deposit of 90 florins, plucked, as it were, from the Wheel of Fortune;
+and so small a sum must surprise my reader; but what will he say, when
+I tell him that there are countries where the entry-money into
+school-rooms is even more moderate? In Scherau, a Conrector is charged
+only 88 florins, and perhaps he may have an income triple of this sum.
+Not to speak of Saxony (what, in truth, was to be expected from the
+cradle of the Reformation, in Religion and Polite Literature), where a
+schoolmaster and a parson have _nothing_ to pay,--even in Baireuth, for
+example, in Hof, the progress of improvement has been such that a
+Quartus,--a Quartus, do I say,--a Tertius--a Tertius, do I say,--a
+Conrector,--at entrance on his post, is not required to pay down more
+than:--
+
+
+ Fl.rhen. Kr.rhen.
+ 30 49 For taking the oaths at the Consistorium.
+ 4 0 To the Syndic for the Presentation.
+ 2 0 To the then Burgermeister.
+ 45 71/2 For the Government-sanction.
+ ---------------
+Total, 81 fl. 561/2 kr.
+
+
+If the printing-charges of a Rector do stand a little higher in some
+points, yet, on the other hand, a Tertius, Quartus, &c., come cheaper
+from the press than even a Conrector. Now, it is clear, that in this
+case a schoolmaster can subsist; since, in the course of the very first
+year, he gets an overplus beyond this _dockmoney_ of his office. A
+schoolmaster must, like his scholars, have been advanced from class to
+class, before these his loans to Government, together with the interest
+for delay of payment, can jointly amount to so much as his yearly
+income in the highest class. Another thing in his favor is, that our
+institutions do not--as those of Athens did--prohibit people from
+entering on office while in debt; but every man, with his debt-knapsack
+on his shoulders, mounts up, step after step, without obstruction. The
+Pope, in large benefices, appropriates the income of the first year,
+under the title of _Annates_, or First-Fruits; and accordingly he, in
+all cases, bestows any large benefice on the possessor of a smaller
+one, thereby to augment both his own revenues and those of others; but
+it shows, in my opinion, a bright distinction between Popery and
+Lutheranism, that the Consistoriums of the latter abstract from their
+school-ministers and church-ministers not perhaps above two thirds of
+their first yearly income; though they too, like the Pope, must
+naturally have an eye to vacancies.
+
+It may be that I shall here come in collision with the Elector of
+Mentz, when I confess, that, in Schmausen's _Corp. jur. pub. Germ_., I
+have turned up the Mentz-Imperial-Court-Chancery-tax-ordinance of
+the 6th January, 1659, and there investigated how much this same
+Imperial-Court-Chancery demands, as contrasted with a Consistorium. For
+example, any man that wishes to be baked or sodden into a _Poet
+Laureate_, has 50 florins tax-dues, and 20 florins Chancery-dues, to
+pay down; whereas, for 20 florins more, he might have been made a
+Conrector, who is a poet of this species, as it were by the by and _ex
+officio_. The institution of a Gymnasium is permitted for 1,000
+florins; an extraordinary sum, with which the whole body of the
+teachers in the instituted Gymnasium might with us clear off the
+entry-moneys of their school-rooms. Again, a Freiherr, who, at any
+rate, often enough grows old without knowing how, must purchase the
+_venia aetatis_ with 200 hard florins; while, with the half sum, he
+might have become a schoolmaster, and here _age_ would have come of its
+own accord. And a thousand such things! They prove, however, that
+matters can be at no bad pass in our Governments and Circles, where
+promotions are sold dearer to Folly than to Diligence, and where it
+costs more to institute a school than to serve in one.
+
+The remarks I made on this subject to a Prince, as well as the remarks
+a Town-syndic made on it to myself, are too remarkable to be omitted
+for mere dread of digressiveness.
+
+The Syndic--a man of enlarged views, and of fiery patriotism, the
+warmth of which was the more beneficent that he collected all the beams
+of it into one focus, and directed them to himself and his family--gave
+me (I had perhaps been comparing the School-bench and the School-stair
+to the _bench_ and the _ladder_, on which people are laid when about to
+be tortured) the best reply: "If a schoolmaster consume nothing but 30
+reichsthalers;[52] if he annually purchase manufactured goods,
+according as Political Economists have calculated for each individual,
+namely, to the amount of 5 reichsthalers; and no more hundred-weights
+of victual than these assume, namely, 10; in short, if he live like a
+substantial wood-cutter, then the Devil must be in it if he cannot
+yearly lay by so much net profit as shall, in the long run, pay the
+interest of his entry debts."
+
+The Syndic must have failed to convince me at that time, since I
+afterwards told the Flachsenfingen Prince:[53]
+
+
+"Illustrious sir, you know not, but I do,--not a player in your Theatre
+would act the Schoolmaster in Engel's _Prodigal Son_, three nights
+running, for such a sum as every real Schoolmaster has to take for
+acting it all the days of the year. In Prussia, invalids are made
+Schoolmasters; with us, Schoolmasters are made invalids." ....
+
+
+But to our story! Fixlein wrote out the inventory of his Crown-debts;
+but with quite a different purpose than the reader will guess, who has
+still the Schadeck testament in his head. In one word, he wanted to be
+Parson of Hukelum. To be a clergyman, and in the place where his cradle
+stood, and all the little gardens of his childhood, his mother also,
+and the grove of betrothment,--this was an open gate into a New
+Jerusalem, supposing even that the living had been nothing but a meagre
+penitentiary. The main point was, he might marry, if he were appointed.
+For, in the capacity of lank Conrector, supported only by the
+strengthening-girth of his waistcoat, and with emoluments whereby
+scarcely the purchase-money of a--purse was to be come at; in this way
+he was more like collecting wick and tallow for his burial torch than
+for his bridal one.
+
+For the Schoolmaster class are, in well-ordered states, as little
+permitted to marry as the soldiery. In _Conringius de Antiquitatibus
+Academicis_, where in every leaf it is proved that all cloisters were
+originally schools, I hit upon the reason. Our schools are now
+cloisters, and consequently we endeavor to maintain in our teachers at
+least an imitation of the Three Monastic Vows. The Vow of Obedience
+might perhaps be sufficiently enforced by School-Inspectors; but the
+second vow, that of Celibacy, would be more hard of attainment, were it
+not that, by one of the best political arrangements, the third vow, I
+mean a beautiful equality in Poverty, is so admirably attended to,
+that no man who has made it needs any further _testimonium
+paupertatis_;--and now _let_ this man, if he likes, lay hold of a
+matrimonial half, when of the two halves each has a whole stomach, and
+nothing for it but half-coins and half-beer!...
+
+I know well, millions of my readers would themselves compose this
+Petition for the Conrector, and ride with it to Schadeck to his
+Lordship, that so the poor rogue might get the sheepfold, with the
+annexed wedding-mansion; for they see clearly enough, that directly
+thereafter one of the best Letter-Boxes would be written that ever came
+from such a repository.
+
+Fixlein's Petition was particularly good and striking; it submitted to
+the Rittmeister four grounds of preference: 1. "He was a native of the
+parish; his parents and ancestors had already done Hukelum service;
+therefore he prayed," &c.
+
+2. "The here documented official debts of 135 florins, 41 kreuzers, and
+one halfpenny, the cancelling of which a never-to-be-forgotten
+testament secured him, he himself could clear, in case he obtained the
+living, and so hereby give up his claim to the legacy," &c.
+
+_Voluntary Note by me_. It is plain he means to bribe his Godfather,
+whom the lady's testament has put into a fume. But, gentle reader,
+blame not without mercy a poor, oppressed, heavy-laden school-man and
+school-horse for an indelicate insinuation, which truly was never mine.
+Consider, Fixlein knew that the Rittmeister was a cormorant towards the
+poor, as he was a squanderer towards the rich. It may be, too, the
+Conrector might once or twice have heard, in the Law Courts, of patrons
+by whom not indeed the church and churchyard--though these things are
+articles of commerce in England--so much as the true management of
+them, had been sold, or rather farmed to farming-candidates. I know
+from Lange,[54] that the Church must support its patron, when he has
+nothing to live upon; and might not a nobleman, before he actually
+began begging, be justified in taking a little advance, a fore-payment
+of his alimentary moneys, from the hands of his pulpit-farmer?--
+
+3. "He had lately betrothed himself with Fraeulein von Thiennette, and
+given her a piece of gold, as marriage-pledge; and could therefore wed
+the said Fraeulein, were he once provided for," &c.
+
+_Voluntary Note by me_. I hold this ground to be the strongest in the
+whole Petition. In the eyes of Herr von Aufhammer, Thiennette's
+genealogical tree was long since stubbed, disleaved, worm-eaten, and
+full of millepedes; she was his [Oe]conoma, his Castle-Stewardess, and
+Legatess _a Latere_ for his domestics; and with her pretensions for an
+alms-coffer, was threatening in the end to become a burden to him. His
+indignant wish that she had been provided for with Fixlein's legacy
+might now be fulfilled. In a word, if Fixlein become Parson, he will
+have the third ground to thank for it; not at all the mad fourth....
+
+4. "He had learned with sorrow, that the name of his Shock, which he
+had purchased from an Emigrant at Leipzig, meant Egidius in German; and
+that the dog had drawn upon him the displeasure of his Lordship. Far be
+it from him so to designate the Shock in future; but he would take it
+as a special grace, if for the dog, which he at present called without
+any name, his Lordship would be pleased to appoint one himself."
+
+_My Voluntary Note_. The dog then, it seems, to which the nobleman has
+hitherto been godfather, is to receive its name a _second_ time from
+him!--But how can the famishing gardener's son, whose career never
+mounted higher than from the school-bench to the school-chair, and who
+never spoke with polished ladies, except singing, namely in the church,
+how can he be expected, in fingering such a string, to educe from it
+any finer tone than the pedantic one? And yet the source of it lies
+deeper; not the contracted _situation_, but the contracted _eye_, not a
+favorite science, but a narrow plebeian soul, makes us pedantic,--a
+soul that cannot _measure_ and _separate_ the _concentric_ circles of
+human knowledge and activity, that confounds the focus of universal
+human life, by reason of the focal distance, with every two or three
+converging rays; and that cannot see all, and tolerate all---- In
+short, the true Pedant is the Intolerant.
+
+
+The Conrector wrote out his Petition splendidly in five propitious
+evenings; employed a peculiar ink for the purpose; worked not indeed so
+long over it as the stupid Manucius over a Latin letter, namely, some
+months, if Scioppius's word is to be taken; still less so long as
+another scholar at a Latin epistle, who--truly we have nothing but
+Morhof's word for it--hatched it during four whole months; inserting
+his variations, adjectives, feet, with the authorities for his phrases,
+accurately marked between the lines. Fixlein possessed a more
+thoroughgoing genius, and had completely mastered the whole enterprise
+in sixteen days. While sealing, he thought, as we all do, how this
+cover was the seed-husk of a great entire Future, the rind of many
+sweet or bitter fruits, the swathing of his whole after life.
+
+Heaven bless his cover; but I let you throw me from the Tower of Babel,
+if he get the parsonage; can't you see, then, that Aufhammer's hands
+are tied? In spite of all his other faults, or even because of them, he
+will stand like iron by his word, which he has given so long ago to the
+Subrector. It were another matter had he been resident at Court; for
+there, where old German manners still are, no promise is kept; for as,
+according to Moeser, the Ancient Germans kept only such promises as they
+made in the _forenoon_ (in the afternoon they were all dead-drunk),--so
+the Court Germans likewise keep no afternoon promise; forenoon ones
+they would keep if they made any, which, however, cannot possibly
+happen, as at those hours they are--sleeping.
+
+
+
+
+ SEVENTH LETTER-BOX.
+
+ Sermon.--School-Exhibition.--Splendid Mistake.
+
+
+The Conrector received his 135 florins, 43 kreuzers, one halfpenny
+Frankish; but no answer; the dog remained without name, his master
+without parsonage. Meanwhile the summer passed away; and the
+Dragoon Rittmeister had yet drawn out no pike from the Candidate
+_breeding-pond_, and thrown him into the _feeding-pond_ of the Hukelum
+parsonage. It gratified him to be behung with prayers like a Spanish
+guardian Saint; and he postponed (though determined to prefer the
+Subrector) granting any one petition, till he had seven-and-thirty
+dyers', button-makers', tinsmiths' sons, whose petitions he could at
+the same time refuse. Grudge not him of Aufhammer this outlengthening
+of his electorial power! He knows the privileges of rank; feels that a
+nobleman is like Timoleon, who gained his greatest victories on his
+birthday, and had nothing more to do than name some squiress, countess,
+or the like, as his mother. A man, however, who has been exalted to the
+Peerage, while still a f[oe]tus, may with more propriety be likened to
+the _spinner_, which, contrariwise to all other insects, passes from
+the chrysalis state, and becomes a perfect insect in its mother's
+womb.--
+
+But to proceed! Fixlein was at present not without cash. It will be the
+same as if I made a present of it to the reader, when I reveal to him,
+that of the legacy, which was clearing off old scores, he had still 35
+florins left to himself, as _allodium_ and pocket-money, wherewith he
+might purchase whatsoever seemed good to him. And how came he by so
+large a sum, by so considerable a competence? Simply by this means;
+every time he changed a piece of gold, and especially at every payment
+he received, it had been his custom to throw in, blindly at random,
+two, three, or four small coins, among the papers of his trunk. His
+purpose was to astonish himself one day, when he summed up and took
+possession of this sleeping capital. And, by Heaven! he reached it too,
+when, on mounting the throne of his Conrectorate, he drew out these
+funds from his papers, and applied them to the coronation charges. For
+the present, he sowed them in again among his waste letters. Foolish
+Fixlein! I mean, had he not luckily exposed his legacy to jeopardy,
+having offered it as bounty-money and luckpenny to the patron, this
+false clutch of his at the knocker of the Hukelum church door, would
+certainly have vexed him; but now, if he had missed the knocker, he had
+the luckpenny again, and could be merry.
+
+I now advance a little way in his History, and hit, in the rock of his
+Life, upon so fine a vein of silver, I mean upon so fine a day, that I
+must (I believe) content myself even in regard to the twenty-third of
+Trinity-term, when he preached a vacation sermon in his dear native
+village, with a brief transitory notice.
+
+In itself the sermon was good and glorious; and the day a rich day of
+pleasure; but I should really need to have more hours at my disposal
+than I can steal from May, in which I am at present living and writing;
+and more strength than wandering through this fine weather has left me
+for landscape pictures of the same, before I could attempt, with any
+well-founded hope, to draw out a mathematical estimate of the length
+and thickness, and the vibrations and accordant relations to each
+other, of the various strings, which combined together to form for his
+heart a Music of the Spheres, on this day of Trinity-term, though such
+a thing would please myself as much as another.... Do not ask me! In my
+opinion, when a man preaches on Sunday, before all the peasants, who
+had carried him in their arms when a gardener's boy; further, before
+his mother, who is leading off her tears through the conduit of her
+satin muff; further, before his Lordship, whom he can positively
+command to be blessed; and finally before his muslin bride, who is
+already blessed, and changing almost into stone, to find that the same
+lips can both kiss and preach; in my opinion, I say, when a man effects
+all this, he has some right to require of any Biographer who would
+paint his situation, that he--hold his jaw; and of the reader who would
+sympathize with it, that he open his, and preach himself.----
+
+But what I must _ex officio_ depict, is the day to which this Sunday
+was but the prelude, the vigil, and the whet; I mean the prelude, the
+vigil, and the whet to the _Martini Actus_, or _Martinmas Exhibition_
+of his school. On Sunday was the sermon, on Wednesday the Actus, on
+Tuesday the Rehearsal. This Tuesday shall now be delineated to the
+universe.
+
+I count upon it that I shall not be read by mere people of the world
+alone, to whom a School-Actus cannot truly appear much better, or more
+interesting, than some Investiture of a Bishop, or the _opera seria_ of
+Frankfort Coronation; but that I likewise have people before me, who
+have been at schools, and who know how the School-Drama of an Actus and
+the stage-manager, and the playbill (the programme) thereof are to be
+estimated, still without overrating their importance.
+
+Before proceeding to the Rehearsal of the _Martini Actus_, I impose
+upon myself, as dramaturgist of the play, the duty, if not of
+extracting, at least of recording, the Conrector's Letter of
+Invitation. In this composition he said many things; and (what an
+author likes so well) made proposals rather than reproaches;
+interrogatively reminding the public, whether, in regard to the
+well-known head-breakages of Priscian on the part of the Magnates in
+Pest and Poland, our school-houses were not the best quarantine and
+lazar-houses to protect us against infectious _barbarisms_? Moreover,
+he defended in schools what could be defended (and nothing in the world
+is sweeter or easier than a defence); and said, Schoolmasters, who, not
+quite justifiably, like certain Courts, spoke nothing, and let nothing
+be spoken to them, but Latin, might plead the Romans in excuse, whose
+subjects, and whose kings, at least in their epistles and public
+transactions, were obliged to make use of the Latin tongue. He wondered
+why only our Greek, and not also oar Latin Grammars, were composed in
+Latin, and put the pregnant question, whether the Romans, when they
+taught their little children the Latin tongue, did it in any other than
+in this same. Thereupon he went over to the Actus, and said what
+follows, in his own words:--
+
+"I am minded to prove, in a subsequent Invitation, that everything
+which can be said or known about the great founder of the Reformation,
+the subject of our present Martini Prolusions, has been long ago
+exhausted, as well by Seckendorf as others. In fact, with regard to
+Luther's personalities, his table-talk, incomes, journeys, clothes, and
+so forth, there can now nothing new be brought forward, if at the same
+time it is to be true. Nevertheless, the field of the Reformation
+history is, to speak in a figure, by no means wholly cultivated; and it
+does appear to me as if the inquirer even of the present day might in
+vain look about for correct intelligence respecting the children,
+grandchildren, and children's children, down to our own times, of this
+great Reformer; all of whom, however, appertain, in a more remote
+degree, to the Reformation history, as he himself in a nearer. Thou
+shalt not perhaps be threshing, said I to myself, altogether empty
+straw, if, according to thy small ability, thou bring forward and
+cultivate this neglected branch of History. And so have I ventured,
+with the last male descendant of Luther, namely, with the Advocate
+Martin Gottlob Luther, who practised in Dresden, and deceased there in
+1759, to make a beginning of a more special Reformation history. My
+feeble attempt, in regard to this Reformationary Advocate, will be
+sufficiently rewarded, should it excite to better works on the subject;
+however, the little which I have succeeded in digging up and collecting
+with regard to him I here submissively, obediently, and humbly request
+all friends and patrons of the Flachsenfingen Gymnasium to listen to,
+on the 14th of November, from the mouths of six well-conditioned
+perorators. In the first place, shall
+
+"_Gottlieb Spiesglass_, a Flachsenfinger, endeavor to show, in a Latin
+oration, that Martin Gottlob Luther was certainly descended of the
+Luther family. After him strives
+
+"_Friedrich Christian Krabbler_, from Hukelum, in German prose, to
+appreciate the influence which Martin Gottlob Luther exercised on the
+then existing Reformation; whereupon, after him, will
+
+"_Daniel Lorenz Stenzinger_ deliver, in Latin verse, an account of
+Martin Gottlob Luther's lawsuits; embracing the probable merits of
+Advocates generally, in regard to the Reformation. Which then will give
+opportunity to
+
+"_Nikol Tobias Pfizman_ to come forward in French, and recount the most
+important circumstances of Martin Gottlob Luther's school-years,
+university-life, and riper age. And now, when
+
+"_Andreas Eintarm_ shall have endeavored, in German verse, to apologize
+for the possible failings of this representative of the great Luther,
+will
+
+"_Justus Strobel_, in Latin verse according to ability, sing his
+uprightness and integrity in the Advocate profession; whereafter I
+myself shall mount the cathedra, and most humbly thank all the patrons
+of the Flachsenfingen School, and then further bring forward those
+portions in the life of this remarkable man, of which we yet know
+absolutely nothing, they being spared, _Deo volente_, for the speakers
+of the next _Martini Actus_."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The day before the Actus offered as it were the proof-shot and
+sample-sheet of the Wednesday. Persons who on account of dress could
+not be present at the great school-festival, especially ladies, made
+their appearance on Tuesday, during the six proof-orations. No
+one can be readier than I to subordinate the proof-Actus to the
+Wednesday-Actus; and I do anything but need being stimulated suitably
+to estimate the solemn feast of a School; but, on the other hand, I am
+equally convinced that no one, who did not go to the real Actus of
+Wednesday, could possibly figure anything more splendid than the
+proof-day preceding; because he could have no object wherewith to
+compare the pomp in which the Primate of the festival drove in with
+his triumphal chariot and six--to call the six brethren-speakers
+coach-horses--next morning in presence of ladies and Councillor
+gentleman. Smile away, Fixlein, at this astonishment over thy today's
+_Ovation_, which is leading on to-morrow's _Triumph_; on thy dissolving
+countenance quivers happy Self, feeding on these incense-fumes; but a
+vanity like thine, and that only, which enjoys without comparing or
+despising, can one tolerate, will one foster. But what flowed over all
+his heart, like a melting sunbeam over wax, was his mother, who after
+much persuasion had ventured in her Sunday's clothes humbly to place
+herself quite low down, beside the door of the Prima class-room. It
+were difficult to say who is happier, the mother, beholding how he whom
+she has borne under her heart can direct such noble young gentlemen,
+and hearing how he along with them can talk of these really high things
+and understand them too;--or the son, who, like some of the heroes of
+Antiquity, has the felicity of triumphing in the lifetime of his
+mother. I have never in my writings or doings cast a stone upon the
+late Burchardt Grossmann, who, under the initial letters of the stanzas
+in his song "_Brich an, du liebe Morgenroethe_," inserted the letters of
+his own name; and still less have I ever censured any poor herb-woman
+for smoothing out her winding-sheet, while still living, and making
+herself one twelfth of a dozen of grave-shifts. Nor do I regard the man
+as wise--though indeed as very clever and pedantic--who can fret his
+gall-bladder full because every one of us leaf-miners views the leaf
+whereon he is mining as a park-garden, as a fifth Quarter of the World
+(so near and rich is it); the leaf-pores as so many Valleys of Tempe,
+the leaf-skeleton as a Liberty-tree, a Bread-tree, and Life-tree, and
+the dewdrops as the Ocean. We poor day-moths, evening-moths, and
+night-moths fall universally into the same error, only on different
+leaves; and whosoever (as I do) laughs at the important airs with which
+the schoolmaster issues his programmes, the dramaturgist his playbills,
+the classical variation-alms-gatherer his alphabetic letters,--does it,
+if he is wise (as is the case here), with the consciousness of his own
+_similar_ folly; and laughs, in regard to his neighbor, at nothing but
+mankind and himself.
+
+The mother was not to be detained; she must off, this very night, to
+Hukelum, to give the Fraeulein Thiennette at least some tidings of this
+glorious business.--
+
+And now the World will bet a hundred to one, that I forthwith take
+biographical wax, and emboss such a wax-figure cabinet of the Actus
+itself as shall be single of its kind.
+
+But on Wednesday morning, while the hope-intoxicated Conrector was just
+about putting on his fine raiment, something knocked.----
+
+It was the well-known servant of the Rittmeister, carrying the Hukelum
+Presentation for the Subrector _Fuechslein_ in his pocket. To the
+last-named gentleman he had been sent with this call to the parsonage;
+but he had distinguished ill betwixt _Sub_ and _Con_rector; and had
+besides his own good reasons for directing his steps to the latter; for
+he thought, "Who can it be that gets it, but the parson that preached
+last Sunday, and that comes from the village, and is engaged to our
+Fraeulein Thiennette, and to whom I brought a clock and a roll of ducats
+already?" That his Lordship could pass over his own godson never
+entered the man's head.
+
+Fixlein read the address of the Appointment: "To the Reverend the
+Parson _Fixlein_ of Hukelum." He naturally enough made the same mistake
+as the lackey; and broke up the Presentation as his own; and finding
+moreover in the body of the paper no special mention of persons, but
+only of a _Schul-unterbefehlshaber_, or School-undergovernor (instead
+of Subrector), he could not but persist in his error.
+
+Before I properly explain why the Rittmeister's Lawyer, the framer of
+the Presentation, had so designated a Subrector--we two, the reader
+and myself, will keep an eye for a moment on Fixlein's joyful
+salutations--on his gratefully-streaming eyes--on his full hands so
+laden with bounty--on the present of two ducats, which he drops into
+the hands of the mitre-bearer, as willingly as he will soon drop his
+own pedagogic office. Could he tell what to think (of the Rittmeister),
+or to write (to the same), or to table (for the lackey)? Did he not
+ask tidings of the noble health of his benefactor over and over,
+though the servant answered him with all distinctness at the very
+first? And was not this same man, who belonged to the nose-upturning,
+shoulder-shrugging, shoulder-knotted, toad-eating species of men, at
+last so moved by the joy which he had imparted, that he determined, on
+the spot, to bestow his presence on the new clergyman's School-Actus,
+though no person of quality whatever was to be there? Fixlein, in the
+first place, sealed his letter of thanks; and courteously invited this
+messenger of good news to visit him frequently in the Parsonage; and to
+call this evening, in passing, at his mother's, and give her a lecture
+for not staying last night, when she might have seen the Presentation
+from his Lordship arrive to-day.
+
+The lackey being gone, Fixlein for joy began to grow sceptical--and
+timorous (wherefore, to prevent filching, he stowed his Presentation
+securely in his coffer, under keeping of two padlocks); and devout and
+softened, since he thanked God without scruple for all good that
+happened to him, and never wrote this Eternal Name but in pulpit
+characters, and with colored ink; as the Jewish copyists never wrote it
+except ornamental letters and when newly washed;[55]--and deaf also did
+the parson, grow, so that he scarcely heard the soft wooing-hour of the
+Actus--for a still softer one beside Thiennette, with its rose-bushes
+and rose-honey, would not leave his thoughts. He who of old, when
+Fortune made a wry face at him, was wont, like children in their sport
+at one another, to laugh at her so long till she herself was obliged to
+begin smiling--he was now flying as on a huge seesaw higher and higher,
+quicker and quicker aloft.
+
+But before the Actus, let us examine the Schadeck Lawyer. _Fixlein_
+instead of _Fuechslein_[56] he had written from uncertainty about the
+spelling of the name; the more naturally as in transcribing the
+Rittmeisterinn's will the former had occurred so often. _Von_, this
+triumphal arch, he durst not set up before Fuechslein's new name,
+because Aufhammer forbade it, considering Hans Fuechslein as a mushroom,
+who had no right to _vons_ and titles of nobility, for all his patents.
+In fine, the Presentation-writer was possessed with Campe's[57] whim of
+Germanizing everything, minding little though when Germanized it should
+cease to be intelligible;--as if a word needed any better act of
+naturalization than that which universal unintelligibility imparts to
+it. In itself it is the same--the rather as all languages, like all
+men, are cognate, intermarried and intermixed--whether a word was
+invented by a savage or a foreigner; whether it grew up like moss amid
+the German forests, or like street-grass, in the pavement of the Roman
+Forum. The Lawyer, on the other hand, contended that it was different;
+and accordingly he hid not from any of his clients that _Tagefarth_
+(Day-turn) meant _Term_, and that _Appealing_ was _Berufen_
+(Becalling). On this principle, he dressed the word _Subrector_ in the
+new livery of _School-undergovernor_. And this version further
+converted the Schoolmaster into Parson; to such a degree does our
+_civic_ fortune--not our _personal_ well-being, which supports
+itself on our own internal soil and resources--grow merely on the
+_drift-mould_ of accidents, connections, acquaintances, and Heaven or
+the Devil knows what!--
+
+By the by, from a Lawyer, at the same time a Country Judge, I should
+certainly have looked for more sense; I should (I may be mistaken) have
+presumed he knew that the _Acts_, or Reports, which in former times
+(see Hoffmann's _German or un-German Law-practice_) were written in
+Latin, as before the times of Joseph the Hungarian,--are now, if
+we may say so without offence, perhaps written fully more in the
+German dialect than in the Latin; and in support of this opinion,
+I can point to whole lines of German language to be found in these
+Imperial-Court-Confessions. However, I will not believe that the Jurist
+is endeavoring, because Imhofer declares the Roman tongue to be the
+mother tongue in the other world, to disengage himself from a language,
+by means of which, like the Roman _Eagle_, or later, like the Roman
+_Fish-heron_ (Pope), he has clutched such abundant booty in his
+talons.----
+
+Toll, toll your bell for the Actus; stream in, in to the ceremony; who
+cares for it? Neither I nor the Ex-Conrector. The six pygmy Ciceros
+will in vain set forth before us in sumptuous dress their thoughts and
+bodies. The draught-wind of Chance has blown away from the Actus its
+powder-nimbus of glory; and the Conrector that was has discovered how
+small a matter a cathedra is, and how great a one a pulpit. "I should
+not have thought," thought he now, "when I became Conrector, that there
+could be anything grander, I mean a parson." Man, behind his
+everlasting blind, which he only colors differently, and makes no
+thinner, carries his pride with him from one step to another; and on
+the higher step, blames only the pride of the lower.
+
+The best of the Actus was, that the Regiments-Quartermaster and Master
+Butcher, Steinberg, attended there, embaled in a long woollen shag.
+During the solemnity, the Subrector Hans von Fuechslein cast several
+gratified and inquiring glances on the Schadeck servant, who did not
+once look at him. Hans would have staked his head, that, after the
+Actus, the fellow would wait upon him. When at last the sextuple
+cockerel-brood had on their dunghill done crowing, that is to say,
+had perorated, the scholastic cocker, over whom a higher banner
+was now waving, himself came upon the stage; and delivered to the
+School-Inspectorships, to the Subrectorship, to the Guardianship, and
+the lackeyship, his most grateful thanks for their attendance; shortly,
+announcing to them at the same time, "that Providence had now called
+him from his post to another; and committed to him, unworthy as he was,
+the cure of souls in the Hukelum parish, as well as in the Schadeck
+chapel of ease."
+
+This little address, to appearance, wellnigh blew up the then Subrector
+Hans von Fuechslein from his chair; and his face looked of a mingled
+color, like red bole, green chalk, tinsel-yellow, and _vomissement de
+la reine_.
+
+The tall Quartermaster erected himself considerably in his shag, and
+hummed loud enough in happy forgetfulness: "The Dickens!--Parson?"----
+
+The Subrector dashed by like a comet before the lackey; ordered him to
+call and take a letter for his master; strode home, and prepared for
+his patron, who at Schadeck was waiting for a long thanksgiving psalm,
+a short satirical epistle, as nervous as haste would permit, and
+mingled a few nicknames and verbal injuries along with it.
+
+The courier handed in to his master Fixlein's song of gratitude and
+Fuechslein's invectives with the same hand. The dragoon Rittmeister,
+incensed at the ill-mannered churl, and bound to his word, which
+Fixlein had publicly announced in his Actus, forthwith wrote back to
+the new Parson an acceptance and ratification; and Fixlein is and
+remains, to the joy of us all, incontestible ordained parson of
+Hukelum.
+
+His disappointed rival has still this consolation, that he holds a seat
+in the wasp-nest of the _Neue Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek_.[58]
+Should the Parson ever chrysalize himself into an author, the
+watch-wasp may then buzz out, and dart its sting into the chrysalis,
+and put its own brood in the room of the murdered butterfly. As the
+Subrector everywhere went about, and threatened in plain terms that he
+would review his colleague, let not the public be surprised that
+Fixlein's _Errata_, and his Masoretic _Exercitationes_, are to this
+hour withheld from it.
+
+In spring, the widowed church receives her new husband; and how it will
+be, when Fixlein, under a canopy of flower-trees, takes the _Sponsa
+Christi_ in one hand, and his own _Sponsa_ in the other,--this without
+an Eighth Letter-Box, which, in the present case, may be a true
+jewel-box and rainbow-key,[59] can no mortal figure, except the
+_Sponsus_ himself.
+
+
+
+
+ EIGHTH LETTER-BOX.
+
+ Instalment in the Parsonage.
+
+
+On the 15th of April, 1793, the reader may observe, far down in the
+hollow, three baggage-wagons groaning along. These baggage-wagons are
+transporting the house-gear of the new Parson to Hukelum; the
+proprietor himself, with a little escort of his parishioners, is
+marching at their side, that of his china sets and household furniture
+there may be nothing broken in the eighteenth century, as the whole
+came down to him unbroken from the seventeenth. Fixlein hears the
+School-bell ringing behind him; but this chime now sings to him,
+like a curfew, the songs of future rest; he is now escaped from the
+Death-valley of the Gymnasium, and admitted into the abodes of the
+Blessed. Here dwells no envy, no colleague, no Subrector; here, in the
+heavenly country, no man works in the _New Universal German Library_;
+here in the heavenly Hukelumic Jerusalem, they do nothing but sing
+praises in the church; and here the Perfected requires no more increase
+of knowledge.... Here, too, one needs not sorrow that Sunday and
+Saint's day so often fall together into one.
+
+Truth to tell, the parson goes too far; but it was his way from of old
+never to paint out the whole and half shadows of a situation till he
+was got into a new one; the beauties of which he could then enhance by
+contrast with the former. For it requires little reflection to discover
+that the torments of a Schoolmaster are nothing so extraordinary; but,
+on the contrary, as in the Gymnasium, he mounts from one degree to
+another, not very dissimilar to the common torments of Hell, which, in
+spite of their eternity, grow weaker from century to century. Moreover,
+since, according to the saying of a Frenchman, _deux afflictions mises
+ensemble peuvent devener une consolation_, a man gets afflictions
+enow in a school to console him; seeing out of eight combined
+afflictions--reckon only one for every teacher--certainly more
+comfort is to be extracted than out of two. The only pity is, that
+school-people will never act towards each other as court-people do:
+none but polished men and polished glasses will readily cohere. In
+addition to all this, in schools--and in offices generally--one is
+always recompensed; for, as in the second life a greater virtue is the
+recompense of an earthly one, so, in the Schoolmaster's case, his
+merits are always rewarded by more opportunities for new merits; and
+often enough he is not dismissed from his post at all.--
+
+Eight Gymnasiasts are trotting about in the Parsonage, setting up,
+nailing to, hauling in. I think, as a scholar of Plutarch, I am right
+to introduce such seeming _minutiae_. A man whom grown-up people love,
+children love still more. The whole school had smiled on the smiling
+Fixlein, and liked him-in their hearts, because he did not thunder, but
+sport with them; because he said _Sie_ (They), to the Secundaners, and
+the Subrector said _Ihr_ (Ye); because his uprearing forefinger was his
+only sceptre and baculus; because in the Secunda he had interchanged
+Latin epistles with his scholars; and in the Quinta had taught not with
+Napier's Rods (or rods of a sharper description), but with sticks of
+barley-sugar.
+
+To-day his churchyard appeared to him so solemn and festive, that he
+wondered (though it was Monday) why his parishioners were not in their
+holiday, but merely in their week-day drapery. Under the door of the
+Parsonage stood a weeping woman; for she was too happy, and he was
+her--son. Yet the mother, in the height of her emotion, contrives quite
+readily to call upon the carriers, while disloading, not to twist off
+the four corner globes from the old Frankish chest of drawers. Her son
+now appeared to her as venerable as if he had sat for one of the
+copperplates in her pictured Bible; and that simply because he had cast
+off his pedagogue hair-cue, as the ripening tadpole does its tail; and
+was now standing in a clerical periwig before her; he was now a Comet,
+soaring away from the profane Earth, and had accordingly changed from a
+_stella caudata_ into a _stella crinita_.
+
+His bride also had, on former days, given sedulous assistance in this
+new improved edition of his house, and labored faithfully among the
+other furnishers and furbishers. But to-day she kept aloof; for she was
+too good to forget the maiden in the bride. Love, like men, dies
+oftener of excess than of hunger; it lives on love, but it resembles
+those Alpine flowers which feed themselves by _suction_ from the wet
+clouds, and die if you _besprinkle_ them.
+
+At length the Parson is settled, and of course he must--for I know my
+fair readers, who are bent on it as if they were bridemaids--without
+delay get married. But he may not; before Ascension-day there can
+nothing be done, and till then are full four weeks and a half.
+The matter was this. He wished in the first place to have the
+murder-Sunday, the Cantata, behind him; not indeed because he doubted
+of his earthly continuance, but because he would not (even for the
+bride's sake) that the slightest apprehension should mingle with these
+weeks of glory.
+
+The main reason was, he did not wish to marry till he were betrothed;
+which latter ceremony was appointed, with the Introduction Sermon, to
+take place next Sunday. It is the Cantata-Sunday. Let not the reader
+afflict himself with fears. Indeed, I should not have molested an
+enlightened century with this Sunday-_Wauwau_ at all, were it not that
+I delineate with such extreme fidelity. Fixlein himself--especially as
+the Quartermaster asked him if he was a baby--at last grew so sensible
+that he saw the folly of it; nay, he went so far that he committed a
+greater folly. For as dreaming that you die signifies, according to the
+exegetic _rule of false_, nothing else than long life and welfare, so
+did Fixlein easily infer that his death-imagination was just such a
+lucky dream; the rather as it was precisely on this Cantata-Sunday that
+Fortune had turned up her cornucopia over him, and at once showered
+down out of it a bride, a presentation, and a roll of ducats. Thus can
+Superstition imp its wings, let Chance favor it or not.
+
+A Secretary of State, a Peace-Treaty writer, a Notary, any such
+incarcerated Slave of the Desk, feels excellently well how far he is
+beneath a Parson composing his inaugural sermon. The latter (do but
+look at my Fixlein) lays himself heartily over the paper,--injects the
+venous system of his sermon-preparation with colored ink,--has a
+Text-Concordance on the right side, and a Song-Concordance on the
+left; is there digging out a marrowy sentence, here clipping off a
+song-blossom, with both to garnish his homiletic pastry;--sketches out
+the finest plan of operations, not, like a man of the world, to subdue
+the heart of one woman, but the hearts of all women that hear him, and
+of their husbands to boot; draws every peasant passing by his window
+into some niche of his discourse, to co-operate with the result;--and,
+finally, scoops out the butter of the smooth, soft hymn-book, and
+therewith exquisitely fattens the black broth of his sermon, which is
+to feed five thousand men.----
+
+At last, in the evening, as the red sun is dazzling him at the desk, he
+can rise with heart free from guilt; and, amid twittering sparrows and
+finches, over the cherry-trees encircling the parsonage, look toward
+the west, till there is nothing more in the sky but a faint gleam among
+the clouds. And then when Fixlein, amid the tolling of the evening
+prayer-bell, _slowly_ descends the stair to his cooking mother, there
+must be some miracle in the case, if for him whatever has been done or
+baked, or served up in the lower regions, is not right and good.... A
+bound, after supper, into the Castle; a look into a pure loving eye; a
+word without falseness to a bride without falseness; and then under the
+coverlet, a soft-breathing breast, in which there is nothing but
+Paradise, a sermon, and evening prayer.... I swear, with this I will
+satisfy a Mythic God, who has left his Heaven, and is seeking a new one
+among us here below!
+
+Can a mortal, can a Me in the wet clay of Earth, which Death will soon
+dry into dust, ask more in one week than Fixlein is gathering into his
+heart? I see not how. At least I should suppose, if such a dust-framed
+being, after such a twenty-thousand prize from the Lottery of Chance,
+could require aught more, it would at most be the twenty-one-thousand
+prize, namely, the inaugural discourse itself.
+
+And this prize our Zebedaeus actually drew on Sunday; he preached,--he
+preached with unction,----he did it before the crowding, rustling press
+of people; before his Guardian, and before the Lord of Aufhammer, the
+godfather of the priest and the dog;--a flock, with whom in Childhood
+he had driven out the Castle herds about the pasture, he was now,
+himself a spiritual sheep-smearer, leading out to pasture;--he was
+standing to the ankles among Candidates and Schoolmasters, for to-day
+(what none of them could) at the altar, with the nail of his finger, he
+might scratch a large cross in the air, baptisms and marriages not once
+mentioned.... I believe I should feel less scrupulous than I do to
+checker this sunshiny esplanade with that thin shadow of the grave
+which the preacher threw over it, when, in the application, with wet,
+heavy eyes, he looked round over the mute, attentive church, as if in
+some corner of it he would seek the mouldering teacher of his youth and
+of this congregation, who without, under the white tombstone, the
+wrong-side of life, had laid away the garment of his pious spirit. And
+when he, himself hurried on by the internal stream, inexpressibly
+softened by the further recollections of his own fear of death on this
+day, of his life now overspread with flowers and benefits, of his
+entombed benefactress resting here in her narrow bed,--when he now,
+before the dissolving countenance of her friend, his Thiennette,
+overpowered, motionless, and weeping, looked down from the pulpit to
+the door of the Schadeck vault, and said: "Thanks, thou pious soul, for
+the good thou hast done to this flock and to their new teacher; and, in
+the fulness of time, may the dust of thy god-fearing and man-loving
+breast gather itself, transfigured as gold-dust, round thy reawakened
+heavenly heart,"--was there an eye in the audience dry? Her husband
+sobbed aloud, and Thiennette, her beloved, bowed her head, sinking down
+with inconsolable remembrances, over the front of the seat, like
+kindred mourners in a funeral train.
+
+No fairer forenoon could prepare the way for an afternoon in which a
+man was to betroth himself forever, and to unite the exchanged rings
+with the Ring of Eternity. Except the bridal pair, there was none
+present but an ancient pair; the mother and the long Guardian. The
+bridegroom wrote out the marriage-contract or marriage-charter with his
+own hand; hereby making over to his bride, from this day, his whole
+movable property (not, as you may suppose, his pocket-library, but his
+whole library; whereas, in the Middle Ages, the daughter of a noble was
+glad to get one or two books for marriage-portion);--in return for
+which, she liberally enough contributed--a whole nuptial coach or car,
+laden as follows: with nine pounds of feathers, not feathers for the
+cap such as we carry, but of the lighter sort such as carry us;--with a
+sumptuous dozen of godchild-plates and godchild-spoons (gifts from
+Schadeck), together with a fish-knife;--of silk, not only stockings
+(though even King Henry II. of France could dress no more than his legs
+in silk), but whole gowns;--with jewels and other furnishings of
+smaller value. Good Thiennette! in the chariot of thy spirit lies the
+true dowry; namely, thy noble, soft, modest heart, the morning-gift of
+Nature!
+
+The Parson--who, not from mistrust, but from "the uncertainty of life,"
+could have wished for a notary's seal on everything; to whom no
+security but a hypothecary one appeared sufficient; and who, in the
+depositing of every barleycorn, required quittances and contracts--had
+now, when the marriage-charter was completed, a lighter heart; and
+through the whole evening the good man ceased not to thank his bride
+for what she had given him. To me, however, a marriage-contract were a
+thing as painful and repulsive,--I confess it candidly, though you
+should in consequence upbraid me with my great youth,--as if I had to
+take my love-letter to a Notary Imperial, and make him docket and
+countersign it before it could be sent. Heavens! to see the light
+flower of Love, whose perfume acts not on the balance, so laid like
+tulip-bulbs on the hay-beam of Law; two hearts on the cold councillor
+and flesh-beam of relatives and Advocates, who are heaping on the
+scales nothing but houses, fields, and tin,--this, to the interested
+party, maybe as delightful as, to the intoxicated suckling and nursling
+of the Muses and Philosophy, it is to carry the evening and morning
+sacrifices he has offered up to his goddess into the book-shop, and
+there to change his devotions into money, and sell them by weight and
+measure.----
+
+From Cantata-Sunday to Ascension, that is, to marriage-day, are one and
+a half weeks--or one and a half blissful eternities. If it is pleasant
+that nights or winter separate the days and seasons of joy to a
+comfortable distance; if, for example, it is pleasant that birthday,
+Saint's-day, betrothment, marriage, and baptismal day, do not all occur
+on the same day (for with very few do those festivities, like Holiday
+and Apostle's day, commerge),--then is it still more pleasant to make
+the interval, the flower-border, between betrothment and marriage, of
+an extraordinary breadth. Before the marriage-day are the true
+honey-weeks; then come the wax-weeks; then the honey-vinegar-weeks.
+
+In the Ninth Letter-Box our Parson celebrates his wedding; and here, in
+the Eighth, I shall just briefly skim over his way and manner of
+existence till then; an existence, as might have been expected,
+celestial enough. To few is it allotted, as it was to him, to have at
+once such wings and such flowers (to fly over) before his nuptials;
+to few is it allotted, I imagine, to purchase flour and poultry
+on the same day, as Fixlein did;--to stuff the wedding-turkey
+with hangman-meals;--to go every night into the stall, and see
+whether the wedding-pig, which his Guardian had given him by way of
+marriage-present, is still standing and eating;--to spy out for his
+future wife the flax-magazines and clothes-press-niches in the
+house;--to lay in new wood-stores in the prospect of winter;--to obtain
+from the Consistorium directly, and for little smart-money, their Bull
+of Dispensation, their remission of the threefold proclamation of
+banns;--to live not in a city, where you must send to every fool
+(because you are one yourself), and disclose to him that you are going
+to be married; but in a little angular hamlet, where you have no one to
+tell aught, but simply the Schoolmaster that he is to ring a little
+later, and put a knee-cushion before the altar.----
+
+O, if the Ritter Michaelis maintains that Paradise was little, because
+otherwise the people would not have found each other,--a hamlet and its
+joys are little and narrow, so that some shadow of Eden may still
+linger on our Ball.----
+
+I have not even hinted that, the day before the wedding, the
+Regiments-Quartermaster came uncalled, and killed the pig, and made
+puddings gratis, such as were never eaten at any Court.
+
+And besides, dear Fixlein, on this soft, rich oil of joy there
+was also floating gratis a vernal sun,--and red twilights,--and
+flower-garlands,--and a bursting half-world of buds!...
+
+How didst thou behave thee in these hot whirlpools of pleasure?--Thou
+movedst thy Fishtail (Reason), and therewith describedst for thyself a
+rectilineal course through the billows. For even half as much would
+have hurried another Parson from his study; but the very crowning
+felicity of ours was, that he stood as if rooted to the boundary-hill
+of Moderation, and from thence looked down on what thousands flout
+away. Sitting opposite the Castle-windows, he was still in a condition
+to reckon up that _Amen_ occurs in the Bible one hundred and thirty
+times. Nay, to his old learned laboratory he now appended a new
+chemical stove; he purposed writing to Nuernberg and Baireuth, and there
+offering his pen to the Brothers Senft, not only for composing
+practical _Receipts_ at the end of their _Almanacs_, but also for
+separate _Essays_ in front under the copperplate title of each Month,
+because he had a thought of making some reformatory cuts at the common
+people's mental habitudes ... And now, when in the capacity of Parson
+he had less to do, and could add to the holy resting-day of the
+congregation six literary creating-days, he determined (even in these
+Carnival weeks) to strike his plough into the hitherto quite fallow
+History of Hukelum, and soon to follow the plough with his drill....
+
+Thus roll his minutes, on golden wheels-of-fortune, over the twelve
+days, which form the glancing star-paved road to the third heaven of
+the thirteenth, that is, to the
+
+
+
+
+ NINTH LETTER-BOX.
+
+ Or to the Marriage.
+
+
+Rise, fair Ascension and Marriage day, and gladden readers also! Adorn
+thyself with the fairest jewel, with the bride, whose soul is as pure
+and glittering as its vesture; like pearl and pearl-muscle, the one, as
+the other, lustrous and ornamental! And so over the espalier, whose
+fruit-hedge has hitherto divided our darling from his Eden, every
+reader now presses after him!--
+
+On the 9th of May, 1793, about three in the morning, there came a sharp
+peal of trumpets, like a light-beam, through the dim-red May-dawn; two
+twisted horns, with a straight trumpet between them, like a note of
+admiration between interrogation-points, were clanging from a house in
+which only a parishioner (not the Parson) dwelt and blew; for this
+parishioner had last night been celebrating the same ceremony which the
+pastor had this day before him. The joyful tallyho raised our Parson
+from his broad bed (and the Shock from beneath it, who some weeks ago
+had been exiled from the white, sleek coverlet), and this so early,
+that in the portraying tester, where on every former morning he had
+observed his ruddy visage, and his white bedclothes, all was at present
+dim and crayoned.
+
+I confess, the new-painted room, and a gleam of dawn on the wall, made
+it so light, that he could see his knee-buckles glancing on the chair.
+He then softly awakened his mother (the other guests were to lie for
+hours in the sheets), and she had the city cook-maid to awaken, who,
+like several other articles of wedding-furniture, had been borrowed for
+a day or two from Flachsenfingen. At two doors he knocked in vain, and
+without answer; for all were already down at the hearth, cooking,
+blowing; and arranging.
+
+How softly does the Spring day gradually fold back its nun-veil,
+and the Earth grow bright, as if it were the morning of a
+Resurrection!--The quicksilver-pillar of the barometer, the guiding
+Fire-pillar of the weather-prophet, rests firmly on Fixlein's Ark
+of the Covenant. The Sun raises himself, pure and cool, into the
+morning-blue, instead of into the morning-red. Swallows, instead of
+clouds, shoot skimming through the melodious air ... O, the good
+Genius of Fair Weather, who deserves many temples and festivals
+(because without him no festival could be held), lifted an ethereal,
+azure Day, as it were, from the well-clear atmosphere of the Moon,
+and sent it down, on blue butterfly-wings,--as if it were a _blue_
+Monday,--glittering below the Sun, in the zigzag of joyful, quivering
+descent, upon the narrow spot of Earth, which our heated fancies are
+now viewing .... And on this balmy, vernal spot stand, amid flowers,
+over which the trees are shaking blossoms instead of leaves, a bride
+and a bridegroom.... Happy Fixlein! how shall I paint thee without
+deepening the sighs of longing in the fairest souls?
+
+But soft! we will not drink the magic cup of Fancy to the bottom at six
+in the morning; but keep sober till towards night!
+
+At the sound of the morning prayer-bell, the bridegroom, for the din of
+preparation was disturbing his quiet orison, went out into the
+churchyard, which (as in many other places), together with the church,
+lay round his mansion like a court. Here on the moist green, over whose
+closed flowers the churchyard wall was still spreading broad shadows,
+did his spirit cool itself from the warm dreams of Earth; here, where
+the white flat gravestone of his Teacher lay before him like the
+fallen-in door on the Janus's-temple of Life, or like the windward side
+of the narrow house, turned towards the tempests of the world; here,
+where the little shrunk metallic door on the grated cross of his father
+uttered to him the inscriptions of death, and the year when his parent
+departed, and all the admonitions and mementos, graven on the
+lead;--there, I say, his mood grew softer and more solemn; and he now
+lifted up by heart his morning prayer, which usually he read; and
+entreated God to bless him in his office, and to spare his mother's
+life, and to look with favor and acceptance on the purpose of to-day.
+Then over the graves he walked into his fenceless little angular
+flower-garden; and here, composed and confident in the Divine keeping,
+he pressed the stalks of his tulips deeper into the mellow earth.
+
+But on returning to the house, he was met on all hands by the
+bell-ringing and the Janizary-music of wedding-gladness;--the
+marriage-guests had all thrown off their nightcaps, and were
+drinking diligently;--there was a clattering, a cooking, a
+frizzling;--tea-services, coffee-services, and warm beer-services, were
+advancing in succession; and plates full of bride-cakes were going
+round like potters' frames or cistern-wheels.--The Schoolmaster, with
+three young lads, was heard rehearsing from his own house an _Arioso_,
+with which, so soon as they were perfect, he purposed to surprise his
+clerical superior.--But now rushed all the arms of the foaming
+joy-streams into one, when the sky-queen besprinkled with blossoms, the
+bride, descended upon Earth in her timid joy, full of quivering, humble
+love;--when the bells began;--when the procession-column set forth with
+the whole village round and before it;--when the organ, the
+congregation, the officiating priest, and the sparrows on the trees of
+the church-window, struck louder and louder their rolling peals on the
+drum of the jubilee-festival.... The heart of the singing bridegroom
+was like to leap from its place for joy, "that on his bridal-day it was
+all so respectable and grand."--Not till the marriage benediction could
+he pray a little.
+
+Still worse and louder grew the business during dinner, when
+pastry-work and marchpane-devices were brought forward,--when glasses
+and slain fishes (laid under the napkins to frighten the guests) went
+round;--and when the guests rose, and themselves went round, and at
+length danced round; for they had instrumental music from the city
+there.
+
+One minute handed over to the other the sugar-bowl and bottle-case of
+joy; the guests heard and saw less and less, and the villagers began to
+see and hear more and more, and towards night they penetrated like a
+wedge into the open door,--nay, two youths ventured even, in the middle
+of the parsonage-court, to mount a plank over a beam, and commence
+seesawing. Out of doors, the gleaming vapor of the departed Sun was
+encircling the Earth, the evening star was glittering over parsonage
+and churchyard; no one heeded it.
+
+However, about nine o'clock,--when the marriage-guests had wellnigh
+forgotten the marriage-pair, and were drinking or dancing along for
+their own behoof; when poor mortals, in this sunshine of Fate, like
+fishes in the sunshine of the sky, were leaping up from their wet, cold
+element; and when the bridegroom, under the star of happiness and love,
+casting like a comet its long train of radiance over all his heaven,
+had in secret pressed to his joy-filled breast his bride and his
+mother,--then did he lock a slice of wedding-bread privily into a
+press, in the old superstitious belief, that this residue secured
+continuance of bread for the whole marriage. As he returned, with
+greater love for the sole partner of his life, she herself met him with
+his mother, to deliver him in private the bridal-nightgown and
+bridal-shirt, as is the ancient usage. Many a countenance grows pale in
+violent emotions, even of joy; Thiennette's wax-face was bleaching
+still whiter under the sunbeams of Happiness. O never fall, thou lily
+of Heaven, and may four springs instead of four seasons open and shut
+thy flower-bells to the sun! All the arms of his soul as he floated on
+the sea of joy were quivering to clasp the soft, warm heart of his
+beloved, to encircle it gently and fast, and draw it to his own....
+
+He led her from the crowded dancing-room into the cool evening. Why
+does the evening, does the night, put warmer love in our hearts? Is it
+the nightly pressure of helplessness; or is it the exalting separation
+from the turmoil of life; that veiling of the world, in which for the
+soul nothing more remains but souls;--is it therefore, that the letters
+in which the loved name stands written on our spirit appear, like
+phosphorus-writing, by night _in fire_, while by day in their _cloudy_
+traces they but smoke?
+
+He walked with his bride into the Castle-garden; she hastened quickly
+through the castle, and past its servants'-hall, where the fair flowers
+of her young life had been crushed broad and dry, under a long, dreary
+pressure; and her soul expanded, and breathed in the free open garden,
+on whose flowery soil destiny had cast forth the first seeds of the
+blossoms which to-day were gladdening her existence. Still Eden! Green
+flower-checkered _chiaroscuro_!--The moon is sleeping under ground like
+a dead one; but beyond the garden the sun's red evening-clouds have
+fallen down like rose-leaves; and the evening-star, the brideman of the
+sun, hovers, like a glancing butterfly, above the rosy red, and, modest
+as a bride, deprives no single starlet of its light.
+
+The wandering pair arrived at the old gardener's hut; now standing
+locked and dumb, with dark windows in the light garden, like a fragment
+of the Past surviving in the Present. Bared twigs of trees were
+folding, with clammy, half-formed leaves, over the thick, intertwisted
+tangles of the bushes.--The Spring was standing, like a conqueror,
+with Winter at his feet.--In the blue pond, now bloodless, a dusky
+evening-sky lay hollowed out, and the gushing waters were moistening
+the flower-beds.--The silver sparks of stars were rising on the altar
+of the East, and falling down extinguished in the red sea of the West.
+
+The wind whirred, like a night-bird, louder through the trees; and gave
+tones to the acacia-grove, and the tones called to the pair who had
+first become happy within it: "Enter, new mortal pair, and think of
+what is past, and of my withering and your own; and be holy as
+Eternity, and weep not only for joy, but for gratitude also!"--And the
+wet-eyed bridegroom led his wet-eyed bride under the blossoms, and laid
+his soul, like a flower, on her heart, and said: "Best Thiennette, I am
+unspeakably happy, and would say much, and cannot.--Ah, thou Dearest,
+we will live like angels, like children together! Surely I will do all
+that is good to thee; two years ago I had nothing, no nothing; ah, it
+is through thee, best love, that I am happy. I call thee Thou, now,
+thou dear good soul!" She drew him closer to her, and said, though
+without kissing him: "Call me Thou always, Dearest!"
+
+And as they stept forth again from the sacred grove into the
+magic-dusky garden, he took off his hat; first, that he might
+internally thank God, and secondly, because he wished to look into this
+fairest evening sky.
+
+They reached the blazing, rustling marriage-house, but their softened
+hearts sought stillness; and a foreign touch, as in the blossoming
+vine, would have disturbed the flower-nuptials of their souls. They
+turned rather, and winded up into the churchyard to preserve their
+mood. Majestic on the groves and mountains stood the Night before man's
+heart, and made it also great. Over the _white_ steeple-obelisk the sky
+rested _bluer_ and _darker_; and behind it wavered the withered summit
+of the May-pole with faded flag. The son noticed his father's grave, on
+which the wind was opening and shutting, with harsh noise, the little
+door of the metal cross, to let the year of his death be read on the
+brass plate within. An overpowering sadness seized his heart with
+violent streams of tears, and drove him to the sunk hillock, and he led
+his bride to the grave, and said: "Here sleeps he, my good father; in
+his thirty-second year he was carried hither to his long rest. O Thou
+good, dear father, couldst thou to-day but see the happiness of thy
+son, like my mother! But thy eyes are empty, and thy breast is full of
+ashes, and thou seest us not."--He was silent. The bride wept aloud;
+she saw the mouldering coffins of her parents open, and the two dead
+arise and look round for their daughter, who had stayed so long behind
+them, forsaken on the Earth. She fell upon his heart, and faltered: "O
+beloved, I have neither father nor mother; do not forsake me!"
+
+O thou who hast still a father and a mother, thank God for it, on the
+day when thy soul is full of joyful tears, and needs a bosom wherein to
+shed them....
+
+And with this embracing at a father's grave, let this day of joy be
+holily concluded.--
+
+
+
+
+ TENTH LETTER-BOX.
+
+ St. Thomas's-Day and Birthday.
+
+
+An Author is a sort of bee-keeper for his reader-swarm; in whose behalf
+he separates the Flora kept for their use into different seasons, and
+here accelerates, and there retards, the blossoming of many a flower,
+that so in all chapters there be blooming.
+
+The goddess of Love and the angel of Peace conducted our married pair
+on tracks running over full meadows, through the Spring; and on
+footpaths hidden by high corn-fields, through the Summer; and Autumn,
+as they advanced towards Winter, spread her marble leaves under their
+feet. And thus they arrived before the low, dark gate of Winter, full
+of life, full of love, trustful, contented, sound, and ruddy.
+
+On St. Thomas's-day was Thiennette's birthday as well as Winter's.
+About a quarter past nine, just when the singing ceases in the church,
+we shall take a peep through the window into the interior of the
+parsonage. There is nothing here but the old mother, who has all day
+(the son having restricted her to rest, and not work) been gliding
+about, and brushing, and burnishing, and scouring, and wiping; every
+carved chair-leg, and every brass nail of the waxcloth-covered table,
+she has polished into brightness;--everything hangs, as with all
+married people who have no children, in its right place, brushes,
+fly-flaps, and almanacs;--the chairs are stationed by the room-police
+in their ancient corners;--a flax-rock, encircled with a diadem, or
+scarf of azure riband, is lying in the Schadeck-bed, because, though it
+is a half-holiday, some spinning may go on;--the narrow slips of paper,
+whereon heads of sermons are to be arranged, lie white beside the
+sermons themselves, that is, beside the octavo paper-book which
+holds them, for the Parson and his work-table, by reason of the cold,
+have migrated from the study to the sitting-room;--his large furred
+doublet is hanging beside his clean bridegroom-nightgown; there is
+nothing wanting in the room but He and She. For he had preached her
+with him to-night into the empty Apostle's-day church, that so
+her mother, without witnesses,--except the two or three thousand
+readers who are peeping with me through the window,--might arrange
+the provender-baking, and whole commissariat department of the
+birthday-festival, and spread out her best table-gear and
+victual-stores without obstruction.
+
+The soul-curer reckoned it no sin to admonish, and exhort, and
+encourage, and threaten his parishioners, till he felt pretty
+certain that the soup must be smoking on the plates. Then he led
+his birthday helpmate home, and suddenly placed her before the altar
+of meat-offering, before a sweet title-page of bread-tart, on which
+her name stood baked, in true _monastic characters_, in tooth-letters
+of almonds. In the background of time and of the room, I yet conceal
+two--bottles of Pontac. How quickly, under the sunshine of joy, do thy
+cheeks grow ripe, Thiennette, when thy husband solemnly says: "This is
+thy birthday; and may the Lord bless thee, and watch over thee, and
+cause his countenance to shine on thee, and send thee, to the joy of
+our mother and thy husband especially, a happy, glad _recovery_.
+Amen!"--And when Thiennette perceived that it was the old mistress who
+had cooked and served up all this herself, she fell upon her neck, as
+if it had been not her husband's mother, but her own.
+
+Emotion conquers the appetite. But Fixlein's stomach was as strong as
+his heart; and with him no species of movement could subdue the
+peristaltic. Drink is the friction-oil of the tongue, as eating is its
+drag. Yet, not till he had eaten and spoken much, did the pastor fill
+the glasses. Then indeed he drew the corksluice from the bottle, and
+set forth its streams. The sickly mother, of a being still hid beneath
+her heart, turned her eyes, in embarrassed emotion, on the old
+woman only; and could scarcely chide him for sending to the city
+wine-merchant on her account. He took a glass in each hand, for each of
+the two whom he loved, and handed them to his mother and his wife, and
+said: "To thy long, long life, Thiennette!--And your health and
+happiness, Mamma!--And a glad arrival to our little one, if God so
+bless us!" "My son," said the gardeneress, "it is to thy long life that
+we must drink; for it is by thee we are supported. God grant thee
+length of days!" added she, with stifled voice, and her eyes betrayed
+her tears.
+
+I nowhere find a livelier emblem of the female sex, in all its
+boundless levity, than in the case where a woman is carrying the angel
+of Death beneath her heart, and yet in these nine months full of mortal
+tokens thinks of nothing more important than of who shall be the
+gossips, and what shall be cooked at the christening. But thou,
+Thiennette, hadst nobler thoughts, though these too along with them.
+The still hidden darling of thy heart was resting before thy eyes like
+a little angel sculptured on a gravestone, and pointing with its small
+finger to the hour when thou shouldst die; and every morning and every
+evening thou thoughtest of death with a certainty of which I yet knew
+not the reasons; and to thee it was as if the Earth were a dark mineral
+cave, where man's blood, like stalactitic water, drops down, and in
+dropping raises shapes which gleam so transiently, and so quickly fade
+away! And that was the cause why tears were continually trickling from
+thy soft eyes, and betraying all thy anxious thoughts about thy child;
+but thou repaidst these sad effusions of thy heart by the embrace in
+which, with new-awakened love, thou fellest on thy husband's neck, and
+saidst: "Be as it may, God's will be done, so thou and my child are
+left alive!--But I know well that thou, Dearest, lovest me as I do
+thee." ... Lay thy hand, good mother, full of blessings, on the two;
+and thou, kind Fate, never lift thine away from them!--
+
+It is with emotion and good wishes that I witness the kiss of two fair
+friends, or the embracing of two virtuous lovers; and from the fire of
+their altar sparks fly over to me; but what is this to our sympathetic
+exaltation when we see two mortals, bending under the same burden,
+bound to the same duties, animated to the same care for the same little
+darlings, fall on one another's overflowing hearts, in some fair hour?
+And if these, moreover, are two mortals who already wear the mourning
+weeds of life, I mean old age, whose hair and cheeks are now grown
+colorless, and eyes grown dim, and whose faces a thousand thorns have
+marred into images of Sorrow;--when these two clasp each other with
+such wearied, aged arms, and so near to the precipice of the grave, and
+when they say or think: "All in us is dead, but not our love--O we have
+lived and suffered long together, and now we will hold out our hands to
+Death together also, and let him carry us away together,"--does not all
+within us cry: O Love, thy spark is superior to Time; it burns neither
+in joy nor in the cheek of roses; it dies not, neither under a
+thousand tears nor under the snow of old age, nor under the ashes of
+thy--beloved. It never dies; and Thou, All-good! if there were no
+eternal love, there were no love at all....
+
+To the Parson it was easier than it is to me to pave for himself a
+transition from the heart to the digestive faculty. He now submitted to
+Thiennette (whose voice at once grew cheerful, while her eyes time
+after time began to sparkle) his purpose to take advantage of the
+frosty weather and have the winter meat slaughtered and salted. "The
+pig can scarcely rise," said he; and forthwith he fixed the
+determination of the women, further the butcher, and the day, and all
+_et ceteras_; appointing everything with a degree of punctuality,
+such as the war-college (when it applies the cupping-glass, the
+battle-sword, to the overfull system of mankind) exhibits on the
+previous day, in its arrangements, before it drives a province into the
+baiting-ring and slaughter-house.
+
+This settled, he began to talk and feel quite joyously about the course
+of winter, which had commenced to-day at two-and-twenty minutes past
+eight in the morning; "for," said he, "new-year is close at hand; and
+we shall not need so much candle to-morrow night as to-night." His
+mother, it is true, came athwart him with the weapons of her five
+senses; but he fronted her with his Astronomical Tables, and proved
+that the lengthening of the day was no less undeniable than
+imperceptible. In the last place, like most official and married
+persons, heeding little whether his women took him or not, he informed
+them, in juristico-theological phrase: "That he would put off no
+longer, but write this very afternoon to the venerable Consistorium,
+in whose hands lay the _jus circa sacra_, for a new Ball to the
+church-steeple; and the rather, as he hoped before new-year's day to
+raise a bountiful subscription from the parish for this purpose. If God
+spare us till spring," added he, with peculiar cheerfulness, "and thou
+wert happily recovered, I might so arrange the whole that the ball
+should be set up at thy first churchgoing, dame!"
+
+Thereupon he shifted his chair from the dinner and dessert table to the
+work-table; and spent the half of his afternoon over the petition for
+the steeple-ball. As there still remained a little space till dusk, he
+clapped his tackle to his new learned _Opus_, of which I must now
+afford a little glimpse. Out of doors among the snow, there stood near
+Hukelum an old Robber-Castle, which Fixlein, every day in Autumn, had
+hovered round like a _revenant_, with a view to gauge it,
+ichnographically to delineate it, to put every window-bar and every
+bridle-hook of it correctly on paper. He believed he was not expecting
+too much, if thereby--and by some drawings of the not so much vertical
+as horizontal walls--he hoped to impart to his "_Architectural
+Correspondence of two Friends concerning the Hukelum Robber-Castle_"
+that last polish and labor _limae_ which contents Reviewers. For towards
+the critical Star-chamber of the Reviewers he entertained not that
+contempt which some authors actually feel--or only affect, as, for
+instance, I. From this mouldered Robber-_Louvre_, there grew for him
+more flowers of joy than ever in all probability had grown from it of
+old for its owners.--To my knowledge, it is an anecdote not hitherto
+made public, that for all this no man but _Buesching_ has to answer.
+Fixlein had, not long ago, among the rubbish of the church letter-room,
+stumbled on a paper wherein the Geographer had been requesting special
+information about the statistics of the village. Buesching, it is true,
+had picked up nothing,--accordingly, indeed, Hukelum, in his
+_Geography_, is still omitted altogether;--but this pestilential letter
+had infected Fixlein with the spring-fever of Ambition, so that his
+palpitating heart was no longer to be stilled or held in check, except
+by the assaf[oe]tida-emulsion of a review. It is with authorcraft as
+with love; both of them for decades long one may equally desire and
+forbear; but is the first spark once thrown into the powder-magazine,
+it burns to the end of the chapter.
+
+Simply because winter had commenced by the Almanac, the fire must be
+larger than usual; for warm rooms, like large furs and bear-skin caps,
+were things which he loved more than you would figure. The dusk, this
+fair _chiaroscuro_ of the day, this colored foreground of the night, he
+lengthened out as far as possible, that he might study Christmas
+discourses therein; and yet could his wife, without scruple, just as he
+was pacing up and down the room, with the sowing-sheet full of divine
+word-seeds hung round his shoulder,--hold up to him a spoonful of
+alegar, that he might try the same in his palate, and decide whether
+she should yet draw it off. Nay, did he not in all cases, though
+fonder of roe-fishes himself, order a milter to be drawn from the
+herring-barrel, because his good-wife liked it better?--
+
+Here light was brought in; and as Winter was just now commencing
+his glass-painting on the windows, his ice flower-pieces, and his
+snow-foliage, our Parson felt that it was time to read something cold,
+which he pleasantly named his cold collation; namely, the description
+of some unutterably frosty land. On the present occasion, it was the
+winter history of the four Russian sailors on Nova Zembla. I, for my
+share, do often in summer, when the sultry zephyr is inflating the
+flower-bells, append certain charts and sketches of Italy, or the East,
+as additional landscapes to those among which I am sitting. And yet
+to-night he further took up the _Weekly Chronicle_ of Flachsenfingen;
+and amid the bombshells, pestilences, famines, comets with long tails,
+and the roaring of all the Hell-floods of another Thirty Years' War, he
+could still listen with the one ear towards the kitchen, where the
+salad for his roast-duck was just a-cutting.
+
+Good-night, old Fixlein! I am tired. May kind Heaven send thee, with
+the young year 1794, when the Earth shall again carry her people, like
+precious night-moths, on leaves and flowers, the new steeple-ball, and
+a thick, handsome--boy, to boot!
+
+
+
+
+ ELEVENTH LETTER-BOX.
+
+ Spring; Investiture; and Childbirth.
+
+
+I have just risen from a singular dream; but the foregoing Box makes it
+natural. I dreamed that all was verdant, all full of odors; and I was
+looking up at a steeple-ball glittering in the sun, from my station
+in the window of a little white garden-house, my eyelids full of
+flower-pollen, my shoulders full of thin cherry-blossoms, and my ears
+full of humming from the neighboring beehives. Then, methought,
+advancing slowly through the beds, came the Hukelum Parson, and stept
+into the garden-house, and solemnly said to me: "Honored Sir, my wife
+has just brought me a little boy; and I make bold to solicit _your
+Honor_ to do the holy office for the same, when it shall be received
+into the bosom of the church."
+
+I naturally started up, and there was--Parson Fixlein standing bodily
+at my bedside, and requesting me to be godfather; for Thiennette had
+given him a son last night about one o'clock. The confinement had been
+as light and happy as could be conceived; for this reason, that the
+father had, some months before, been careful to provide one of those
+_Klappersteins_, as we call them, which are found in the aerie of the
+eagle, and therewith to alleviate the travail; for this stone performs,
+in its way, all the service which the bonnet of that old Minorite monk
+in Naples, of whom Gorani informs us, could accomplish for people in
+such circumstances, who put it on....
+
+--I might vex the reader still longer; but I willingly give up, and
+show him how the matter stood.
+
+Such a May as the present (of 1794) Nature has not, in the memory of
+man--begun; for this is but the fifteenth of it. People of reflection
+have for centuries been vexed once every year, that our German singers
+should indite May-songs, since several other months deserve such a
+poetical night-music much better; and I myself have often gone so far
+as to adopt the idiom of our market-women, and instead of May butter,
+to say June butter, as also June, March, April songs.--But thou, kind
+May of this year, thou deservest to thyself all the songs which were
+ever made on thy rude namesakes!--By Heaven! when I now issue from the
+wavering, checkered acacia-grove of the Castle-garden, in which I am
+writing this Chapter, and come forth into the broad, living day, and
+look up to the warming Heaven, and over its Earth budding out beneath
+it,--the Spring rises before me like a vast full cloud, with a splendor
+of blue and green. I see the Sun standing amid roses in the western
+sky, into which he has thrown his ray-brush, wherewith he has to-day
+been painting the Earth;--and when I look round a little in our
+picture-exhibition, his enamelling is still hot on the mountains; on
+the moist chalk of the moist Earth, the flowers full of sap-colors are
+laid out to dry, and the forget-me-not with miniature colors; under the
+varnish of the streams, the skyey Painter has pencilled his own eye;
+and the clouds, like a decoration-painter, he has touched off with wild
+outlines and single tints; and so he stands at the border of the Earth,
+and looks back upon his stately Spring, whose robe-folds are valleys,
+whose breast-bouquet is gardens, and whose blush is a vernal evening,
+and who, when she arises, shall be--Summer.
+
+But to proceed! Every spring--and especially in such a spring--I
+imitate on foot our birds of passage; and travel off the
+hypochondriacal sediment of winter; but I do not think I should have
+seen even the steeple-ball of Hukelum, which is to be set up one of
+these days, to say nothing of the Parson's family, had not I happened
+to be visiting the Flachsenfingen Superintendent and Consistorialrath.
+From him I got acquainted with Fixlein's history,--every Candidatus
+must deliver an account of his life to the Consistorium,--and with his
+still madder petition for a steeple-ball. I observed, with pleasure,
+how gayly the cob was diving and swashing about in his duck-pool and
+milk-bath of life; and forthwith determined on a journey to his shore.
+It is singular, that is to say, manlike, that when we have for years
+kept prizing and describing some original person or original book, yet
+the moment we see such, they anger us; we would have them fit us and
+delight us in all points, as if any originality could do this but our
+own.
+
+It was Saturday, the third of May, when I, with the Superintendent, the
+_Senior Capituli_, and some temporal Raths, mounted and rolled off, and
+in two carriages were driven to the Parson's door. The matter was, he
+was not yet--_invested_, and to-morrow this was to be done. I little
+thought, while we whirled by the white espalier of the Castle-garden,
+that there I was to write another book.
+
+I still see the Parson, in his peruke-minever and head-case, come
+springing to the coach-door and lead us out; so smiling--so
+courteous--so vain of the disloaded freight, and so attentive to it. He
+looked as if in the journey of life he had never once put on the
+_travelling-gauze_ of Sorrow; Thiennette again seemed never to have
+thrown hers back. How neat was everything in the house, how dainty,
+decorated, and polished! And yet so quiet, without the cursed
+alarm-ringing of servants' bells, and without the bass-drum tumult of
+stair-pedalling. Whilst the gentlemen, my road-companions, were sitting
+in state in the upper room, I flitted, as my way is, like a smell over
+the whole house, and my path led me through the sitting-room over the
+kitchen, and at last into the churchyard beside the house. Good
+Saturday! I will paint thy hours as I may, with the black asphaltos of
+ink, on the tablets of other souls! In the sitting-room, I lifted from
+the desk a volume gilt on the back and edges, and bearing this title:
+"_Holy Sayings, by Fixlein. First Collection_." And as I looked to see
+where it had been printed, the Holy Collection turned out to be in
+writing. I handled the quills, and dipped into the negro-black of the
+ink, and I found that all was right and good. With your fluttering
+gentlemen of letters, who hold only a department of the foreign, and
+none of the home affairs nothing (except some other things about them)
+can be worse than their ink and pens. I also found a little
+copperplate, to which I shall in due time return.
+
+In the kitchen, a place not more essential for the writing of an
+English novel than for the acting of a German one, I could plant myself
+beside Thiennette, and help her to blow the fire, and look at once into
+her face and her burning coals. Though she was in wedlock, a state in
+which white roses on the cheeks are changed for red ones, and young
+women are similar to a similitude given in my Note;[60]--and although
+the blazing wood threw a false rouge over her, I guessed how pale she
+must have been; and my sympathy in her paleness rose still higher at
+the thought of the burden which Fate had now not so much taken from
+her, as laid in her arms and nearer to her heart. In truth, a man must
+never have reflected on the Creation-moment, when the Universe first
+rose from the bosom of an Eternity, if he does not view with
+philosophic reverence a woman, whose thread of life a secret,
+all-wondrous Hand is spinning to a second thread, and who veils within
+her the transition from Nothingness to Existence, from Eternity to
+time;--but still less can a man have any heart of flesh, if his soul,
+in presence of a woman, who, to an unknown, unseen being, is
+sacrificing more than we will sacrifice when it is seen and known,
+namely, her nights, her joys, often her life, does not bow lower, and
+with deeper emotion, than in presence of a whole nun-orchestra on their
+Sahara-desert;--and worse than either is the man for whom his own
+mother has not made all other mothers venerable.
+
+"It is little serviceable to thee, poor Thiennette," thought I, "that
+now, when thy bitter cup of sickness is made to run over, thou must
+have loud festivities come crowding round thee." I meant the
+Investiture and the Ball-raising. My rank, the diploma of which the
+reader will find stitched in with the _Dog-post-days_, and which had
+formerly been hers, brought about my ears a host of repelling,
+embarrassed, wavering titles of address from her; which people, to whom
+they have once belonged, are at all times apt to parade before
+superiors or inferiors, and which it now cost me no little trouble to
+disperse. Through the whole Saturday and Sunday I could never get into
+the right track either with her or him, till the other guests were
+gone. As for the mother, she acted, like obscure ideas, powerfully and
+constantly, but out of view; this arose in part from her idolatrous
+fear of us; and partly also from a slight shade of care (probably
+springing from the state of her daughter), which had spread over her
+like a little cloud.
+
+I cruised about, so long as the moon-crescent glimmered in the sky,
+over the churchyard; and softened my fantasies, which are at any rate
+too prone to paint with the brown of crumbling mummies, not only by the
+red of twilight, but also by reflecting how easily our eyes and our
+hearts can become reconciled even to the ruins of Death; a reflection
+which the Schoolmaster, whistling as he arranged the charnel-house for
+the morrow, and the Parson's maid singing, as she reaped away the grass
+from the graves, readily enough suggested to me. And why should not
+this habituation to all forms of Fate in the other world, also, be a
+gift reserved for us in our nature by the bounty of our great
+Preserver?--I perused the gravestones; and I think even now that
+Superstition[61] is right in connecting with the reading of such things
+a loss of _memory_; at all events, one does _forget_ a thousand things
+belonging to this world....
+
+The Investiture on Sunday (whose Gospel, of the Good Shepherd,
+suited well with the ceremony) I must despatch in few words; because
+nothing truly sublime can bear to be treated of in many. However, I
+shall impart the most memorable circumstances, when I say that
+there was--drinking (in the Parsonage),--music-making (in the
+Choir),--reading (of the Presentation by the Senior, and of the
+Ratification-rescript by the lay Rath),--and preaching, by the
+Consistorialrath, who took the soul-curer by the hand, and presented,
+made over, and guaranteed him to the congregation, and them to him.
+Fixlein felt that he was departing as a high-priest from the church
+which he had entered as a country parson, and all day he had not once
+the heart to ban. When a man is treated with solemnity, he looks upon
+himself as a higher nature, and goes through his solemn feasts
+devoutly.
+
+This indenturing, this monastic profession, our Head-Rabbis and
+Lodge-masters (our Superintendents) have usually a taste for putting
+off till once the pastor has been some years ministering among the
+people, to whom they hereby present him; as the early Christians
+frequently postponed their consecration and investiture to
+Christianity, their baptism namely, till the day when they died. Nay, I
+do not even think this clerical Investiture would lose much of its
+usefulness, if it and the declaring-vacant of the office were reserved
+for the same day; the rather, as this usefulness consists entirely in
+two items; what the Superintendent and his Raths can eat, and what they
+can pocket.
+
+Not till towards evening did the Parson and I get acquainted. The
+Investiture officials and elevation pulley-men had, throughout the
+whole evening, been very violently--breathing. I mean thus; as these
+gentlemen could not but be aware, by the most ancient theories and the
+latest experiments, that air was nothing else than a sort of rarefied
+and exploded water, it became easy for them to infer, that, conversely,
+water was nothing else than a denser sort of air. Wine-drinking,
+therefore, is nothing else but the breathing of an air pressed together
+into proper spissitude, and sprinkled over with a few perfumes. Now, in
+our days, by clerical persons too much (fluid) breath can never be
+inhaled through the mouth; seeing the dignity of their station excludes
+them from that breathing through the _smaller_ pores which Abernethy so
+highly recommends under the name of _air-bath_; and can the Gullet in
+their case be aught else than door-neighbor to the Windpipe, the
+_consonant_ and fellow-shoot of the Windpipe?--I am running astray; I
+meant to signify that I this evening had adopted the same opinion; only
+that I used air or ether, not like the rest for loud laughter, but for
+the more quiet contemplation of life in general. I even shot forth at
+my gossip certain speeches which betrayed devoutness. These he at first
+took for jests, being aware that I was from Court, and of quality. But
+the concave mirror of the wine-mist at length suspended the images of
+my soul, enlarged and embodied like spiritual shapes, in the air before
+me.--Life shaded itself off to my eyes like a hasty summer night, which
+we little fireflies shoot across with transient gleam;--I said to him
+that man must turn himself like the leaves of the great mallow, at the
+different day-seasons of his life, now to the rising sun, now to the
+setting, now to the night, towards the Earth and its graves;--I said,
+the omnipotence of Goodness was driving us and the centuries of the
+world towards the gates of the City of God, as, according to Euler, the
+resistance of the _Ether_ leads the circling Earth towards the Sun,
+&c., &c.
+
+On the strength of these entremets, he considered me the first
+theologian of his age; and had he been obliged to go to war, would
+previously have taken my advice on the matter, as belligerent powers
+were wont of old from the theologians of the Reformation. I hide not
+from myself, however, that what preachers call vanity of the world is
+something altogether different from what philosophy so calls. When I,
+moreover, signified to him that I was not ashamed to be an Author; but
+had a turn for working up this and the other biography; and that I had
+got a sight of his _Life_ in the hands of the Superintendent; and might
+be in case to prepare a printed one therefrom, if so were he would
+assist me with here and there a tint of flesh-color,--then was my silk,
+which, alas! not only isolates one from electric fire, but also from a
+kindlier sort of it, the only grate which rose between his arms and me;
+for, like the most part of poor country parsons, it was not in his
+power to forget the rank of any man, or to vivify his own on a higher
+one. He said: "He would acknowledge it with veneration, if I should
+mention him in print; but he was much afraid his life was too common
+and too poor for a biography." Nevertheless, he opened me the drawer of
+his Letter-boxes, and said, perhaps he had hereby been paving the way
+for me.
+
+The main point, however, was, he hoped that his _Errata_, his
+_Exercitationes_, and his _Letters on the Robber-Castle_, if I should
+previously send forth a Life of the Author, might be better received;
+and that it would be much the same as if I accompanied them with a
+Preface.
+
+In short, when on Monday the other dignitaries with their nimbus of
+splendor had dissipated, I alone, like a precipitate, abode with him;
+and am still abiding, that is, from the fifth of May (the Public should
+take the Almanac of 1794, and keep it open beside them) to the
+fifteenth; to-day is Thursday, to-morrow is the sixteenth and Friday,
+when comes the Spinat-Kirmes, or Spinage-Wake, as they call it, and the
+uplifting of the steeple-ball, which I just purposed to await before I
+went. Now, however, I do not go so soon; for on Sunday I have to assist
+at the baptismal ceremony, as baptismal agent for my little future
+godson. Whoever pays attention to me, and keeps the Almanac open, may
+readily guess why the christening is put off till Sunday; for it is
+that memorable Cantata-Sunday, which once, for its mad, narcotic
+hemlock-virtues, was of importance in our History; but is now so only
+for the fair betrothment, which after two years we mean to celebrate
+with a baptism.
+
+Truly it is not in my power--for want of colors and presses--to paint
+or print upon my paper the soft, balmy flower-garland of a fortnight
+which has here wound itself about my sickly life; but with a single day
+I shall attempt it. Man, I know well, cannot prognosticate either his
+joys or his sorrows, still less repeat them, either in living or
+writing.
+
+The black hour of coffee has gold in its mouth for us and honey; here,
+in the morning coolness, we are all gathered; we maintain popular
+conversation, that so the parsoness and the gardeneress may be able to
+take share in it. The morning service in the church, where often the
+whole people[62] are sitting and singing, divides us. While the bell is
+sounding, I march with my writing-gear into the singing Castle-garden;
+and seat myself in the fresh acacia-grove, at the dewy two-legged
+table. Fixlein's Letter-boxes I keep by me in my pocket; and I
+have only to look and abstract from his what can be of use In my
+own.--Strange enough! so easily do we forget a thing in describing it,
+I really did not recollect for a moment that I am now sitting at the
+very grove-table of which I speak, and writing all this.--
+
+My gossip in the mean time is also laboring for the world. His study is
+a sort of sacristy, and his printing-press a pulpit, wherefrom he
+preaches to all men; for an Author is the Town-chaplain of the
+Universe. A man who is making a book will scarcely hang himself; all
+rich lords'-sons, therefore, should labor for the press; for, in that
+case, when you awake too early in bed, you have always a _plan_, an
+aim, and therefore a cause before you why you should get out of it.
+Better off, too, is the author who collects rather than invents,--for
+the latter with its eating fire calcines the heart; I praise the
+Antiquary, the Heraldist, Note-maker, Compiler; I esteem the
+_Title-perch_ (a fish called _Perca-Diagramma_, because of the letters
+on its scales), and the _Printer_ (a chafer, called _Scarabaeus
+Typographus_, which eats letters in the bark of fir),--neither of them
+needs any greater or fairer arena in the world than a piece of
+rag-paper, or any other laying apparatus than a pointed pencil,
+wherewith to lay his four-and-twenty letter-eggs.--In regard to the
+_catalogue raisonne_, which my gossip is now drawing up of German
+_Errata_, I have several times suggested to him, "that it were good if
+he extended his researches in one respect, and revised the rule by
+which it has been computed, that, e. g. for a hundred-weight of pica
+black-letter, four hundred and fifty semicolons, three hundred periods,
+&c., are required; and to recount, and see whether, in Political
+writings and Dedications, the fifty notes of admiration for a
+hundred-weight of pica black-letter were not far too small an
+allowance, and if so, what the real quantity was."
+
+Several days he wrote nothing; but wrapped himself in the slough of his
+parson's-cloak; and so in his canonicals, beside the Schoolmaster, put
+the few A-b-c shooters which were not, like forest-shooters, absent on
+furlough by reason of the spring, through their platoon firing in the
+Hornbook. He never did more than his duty, but also never less. It
+brought a soft, benignant warmth over his heart, to think that he, who
+had once ducked under a School-inspectorship, was now one himself.
+
+About ten o'clock we meet from our different museums, and examine the
+village, especially the Biographical furniture and holy places, which I
+chance that morning to have had under my pen or pentagraph; because I
+look at them with more interest _after_ my description than _before_
+it.
+
+Next comes dinner.--
+
+After the concluding grace, which is too long, we both of us set to
+entering the charitable subsidies and religious donations, which our
+parishioners have remitted to the sinking or rather rising fund of the
+church-box for the purchase of the new steeple-globe, into two ledgers;
+the one of these, with the names of the subscribers, or (in case they
+have subscribed for their children) with their children's names
+also, is to be inurned in a leaden capsule, and preserved in the
+steeple-ball; the other will remain below among the parish Registers.
+You cannot fancy what contributions the ambition of getting into the
+Ball brings us in; I declare, several peasants, who had given and well
+once already, contributed again when they had baptisms; must not little
+Hans be in the Ball too?
+
+After this book-keeping by double entry, my gossip took to engraving on
+copper. He had been so happy as to elicit the discovery, that, from a
+certain stroke resembling an inverted Latin S, the capital letters of
+our German Chancery-hand, beautiful and intertwisted as you see them
+stand in Law-deeds and Letters-of-nobility, may every one of them be
+composed and spun out.
+
+"Before you can count sixty," said he to me, "I take my
+fundamental-stroke and make you any letter out of it."
+
+I merely inverted this fundamental-stroke, that is, gave him a German
+S, and counted sixty till he had it done. This line of beauty, when
+once it has been twisted and flourished into all the capitals, he
+purposes, by copperplates which he is himself engraving, to make more
+common for the use of Chanceries; and I may take upon me to give the
+Russian, the Prussian, and a few other smaller Courts, hopes of proof
+impressions from his hand; to under-secretaries they are indispensable.
+
+Now comes evening; and it is time for us both, here forking about with
+our fruit-hooks on the literary Tree of Knowledge, at the risk of our
+necks, to clamber down again into the meadow-flowers and pasturages of
+rural joy. We wait, however, till the busy Thiennette, whom we are now
+to receive into our communion, has no more walks to take but the one
+between us. Then slowly we stept along (the sick lady was weak) through
+the office-houses; that is to say, through stalls and their population,
+and past a horrid lake of ducks, and past a little milk-pond of carps,
+to both of which colonies, I and the rest, like princes, gave bread,
+seeing we had it in view, on the Sunday after the christening, to--take
+them for bread for ourselves.
+
+The sky is still growing kindlier and redder, the swallows and the
+blossom-trees louder, the house-shadows broader, and men more happy.
+The clustering blossoms of the acacia-grove hang down over our cold
+collation; and the ham is not stuck (which always vexes me) with
+flowers, but beshaded with them from a distance....
+
+And now the deeper evening and the nightingale conspire to soften me;
+and I soften in my turn the mild beings round me, especially the pale
+Thiennette, to whom, or to whose heart, after the apoplectic crushings
+of a down-pressed youth, the most violent pulses of joy are heavier
+than the movements of pensive sadness. And thus beautifully runs our
+pure transparent life along, under the blooming curtains of May; and in
+our modest pleasure, we look with timidity neither behind us nor
+before; as people who are lifting treasure gaze not round at the road
+they came, or the road they are going.
+
+So pass our days. To-day, however, it was different; by this time,
+usually, the evening meal is over; and the Shock has got the
+osseous-preparation of our supper between his jaws; but to-night
+I am still sitting here alone in the garden, writing the Eleventh
+Letter-Box, and peeping out every instant over the meadows, to see if
+my gossip is not coming.
+
+For he is gone to town, to bring a whole magazine of spiceries; his
+coat-pockets are wide. Nay, it is certain enough that oftentimes
+he brings home with him, simply in his coat-pocket, considerable
+flesh-tithes from his Guardian, at whose house he alights; though
+truly, intercourse with the polished world and city, and the refinement
+of manners thence arising--for he calls on the bookseller, on
+school-colleagues, and several respectable shop-keepers--does, much
+more than flesh-fetching, form the object of these journeys to the
+city. This morning he appointed me regent-head of the house, and
+delivered me the _fasces_ and _curule chair_. I sat the whole day
+beside the young, pale mother; and could not but think, simply because
+the husband had left me there as his representative, that I liked the
+fair soul better. She had to take dark colors, and paint out for me the
+winter landscape and ice region of her sorrow-wasted youth; but often,
+contrary to my intention, by some simple elegiac word, I made her still
+eye wet; for the too full heart, which had been crushed with other than
+sentimental woes, overflowed at the smallest pressure. A hundred times
+in the recital I was on the point of saying: "O yes, it was with
+winter that your life began, and the course of it has resembled
+winter!"--Windless, cloudless day! Three more words about thee the
+world will still not take amiss from me!
+
+I advanced nearer and nearer to the heart-central-fire of the woman;
+and at last they mildly broke forth in censure of the Parson; the best
+wives will complain of their husbands to a stranger, without in the
+smallest liking them the less on that account. The mother and the wife,
+during dinner, accused him of buying lots at every book-auction; and,
+in truth, in such places, he does strive and bid, not so much for good
+or for bad books--or old ones--or new ones--or such as he likes to
+read--or any sort of favorite books--but simply for books. The mother
+blamed especially his squandering so much on copperplates; yet some
+hours after, when the Schultheis, or Mayor, who wrote a beautiful hand,
+came in to subscribe for the steeple-ball, she pointed out to him how
+finely her son could engrave, and said that it was well worth while to
+spend a groschen or two on such capitals as these.
+
+They then handed me--for when once women are in the way of a full,
+open-hearted effusion, they like (only you must not turn the stop-cock
+of inquiry) to pour out the whole--a ring-case, in which he kept a
+Chamberlain's key that he had found, and asked me if I knew who had
+lost it. Who could know such a thing, when there are almost more
+Chamberlains than picklocks among us?--
+
+At last I took heart, and asked after the little toy-press of the
+drowned son, which hitherto I had sought for in vain over all the
+house. Fixlein himself had inquired for it, with as little success.
+Thiennette gave the old mother a persuading look full of love; and the
+latter led me up-stairs to an outstretched hoop-petticoat, covering the
+poor press as with a dome. On the way thither, the mother told me she
+kept it hid from her son because the recollection of his brother would
+pain him. When this deposit-chest of Time (the lock had fallen off) was
+laid open to me, and I had looked into the little charnel-house, with
+its wrecks of a childlike, sportful Past, I, without saying a word,
+determined, some time ere I went away, to unpack these playthings of
+the lost boy before his surviving brother. Can there be aught finer
+than to look at these ash-buried, deep-sunk, Herculanean ruins of
+childhood, now dug up and in the open air?
+
+Thiennette sent twice to ask me whether he was come. He and she,
+precisely because they do not give their love the weakening expression
+of phrases, but the strengthening one of actions, have a boundless
+feeling of it towards one another. Some wedded pairs eat each others
+lips and hearts and love away by kisses; as in Rome, the statues of
+Christ (by Angelo) have lost their feet by the same process of kissing,
+and got leaden ones instead; in other couples, again, you may see, by
+mere inspection, the number of their conflagrations and eruptions, as
+in Vesuvius you can discover his, of which there are now forty-three;
+but in these two beings rose the Greek fire of a moderate and
+everlasting love, and gave warmth without casting forth sparks, and
+flamed straight up without crackling. The evening-red is flowing back
+more magically from the windows of the gardener's cottage into my
+grove; and I feel as if I must say to Destiny: "Hast thou a sharp
+sorrow, then throw it rather into my breast, and strike not with it
+three good souls, who are too happy not to bleed by it, and too
+sequestered in their little dim village not to shrink back at the
+thunderbolt which hurries a stricken spirit from its earthly
+dwelling."----
+
+Thou good Fixlein! Here comes he hurrying over the parsonage-green.
+What languishing looks full of love already rest in the eye of thy
+Thiennette!--What news wilt thou bring us to-night from the town!--How
+will the ascending steeple-ball refresh thy soul to-morrow!--
+
+
+
+
+ TWELFTH LETTER-BOX.
+
+ Steeple-Ball Ascension.--The Toy-Press.
+
+
+How, on this sixteenth of May, the old steeple-ball was twisted off
+from the Hukelum steeple, and a new one put on in its stead, will I now
+describe to my best ability; but in that simple historical style of the
+Ancients, which, for great events, is perhaps the most suitable.
+
+At a very early hour, a coach arrived, containing Messrs. Court-Guilder
+Zeddel and Locksmith Waechser, and the new Peter's-cupola of the
+steeple. Towards eight o'clock the community, consisting of subscribers
+to the Globe, was visibly collecting. A little later came the Lord
+Dragoon Rittmeister von Aufhammer, as Patron of the church and steeple,
+attended by Mr. Church-Inspector Streichert. Hereupon my Reverend
+Cousin Fixlein and I repaired, with the other persons whom I have
+already named, into the Church, and there celebrated, before
+innumerable hearers, a week-day prayer-service. Directly afterwards,
+my Reverend Friend made his appearance above in the pulpit, and
+endeavored to deliver a speech which might correspond to the solemn
+transaction;--and immediately thereafter, he read aloud the names of
+the patrons and charitable souls, by whose donations the Ball had been
+put together; and showed to the congregation the leaden box in which
+they were specially recorded; observing that the book from which he had
+recited them was to be reposited in the Parish Register-office. Next he
+held it necessary to thank them and God, that he, above his deserts,
+had been chosen as the instrument and undertaker of such a work. The
+whole he concluded with a short prayer for Mr. Stechmann the Slater
+(who was already hanging on the outside on the steeple, and loosening
+the old shaft); and entreated that he might not break his neck, or any
+of his members. A short hymn was then sung, which the most of those
+assembled without the church-doors sang along with us, looking up at
+the same time to the steeple.
+
+All of us now proceeded out likewise; and the discarded ball, as it
+were the amputated cock's-comb of the church, was lowered down and
+untied. Church-Inspector Streichert drew a leaden case from the
+crumbling ball, which my Reverend Friend put into his pocket, purposing
+to read it at his convenience; I, however, said to some peasants: "See,
+thus will your names also be preserved in the new Ball, and when, after
+long years, it shall be taken down, the box lies within it, and the
+then parson becomes acquainted with you all."--And now was the new
+steeple-globe, with the leaden cup in which lay the names of the
+by-standers, at length full-laden, so to speak, and saturated, and
+fixed to the pulley-rope;--and so did this the whilom cupping-glass of
+the community ascend aloft....
+
+By Heaven! the unadorned style is here a thing beyond my power: for
+when the Ball moved, swung, mounted, there rose a drumming in the
+centre of the steeple; and the Schoolmaster, who, till now, had looked
+down through a sounding-hole directed towards the congregation, now
+stepped out with a trumpet at a side sounding-hole, which the mounting
+Ball was not to cross.--But when the whole Church rung and pealed, the
+nearer the capital approached its crown,--and when the Slater clutched
+it and turned it round, and happily incorporated the spike of it, and
+delivered down, between Heaven and Earth, and leaning on the Ball, a
+Topstone-speech to this and all of us,--and when my gossip's eyes, in
+his rapture at being Parson on this great day, were running over, and
+the tears trickling down his priestly garment;--I believe I was the
+only man--as his mother was the only woman--whose souls a common grief
+laid hold of to press them even to bleeding; for I and the mother had
+yesternight, as I shall tell more largely afterwards, discovered in the
+little chest of the drowned boy, from a memorial in his father's hand,
+that, on the day after the morrow, on Cantata-Sunday and his baptismal
+Sunday, he would be--two-and-thirty-years of age. "Oh!" thought I,
+while I looked at the blue heaven, the green graves, the glittering
+ball, the weeping priest, "so, at all times, stands poor man with
+bandaged eyes before thy sharp sword, incomprehensible Destiny! And
+when thou drawest it and brandishest it aloft, he listens with pleasure
+to the whizzing of the stroke before it falls!"--
+
+Last night I was aware of it; but to the reader, whom I was preparing
+for it afar off, I would tell nothing of the mournful news, that, in
+the press of the dead brother, I had found an old Bible which the boys
+had used at school, with a white blank leaf in it, on which the father
+had written down the dates of his children's birth. And even this it
+was that raised in thee, thou poor mother, the shade of sorrow which of
+late we have been attributing to smaller causes; and thy heart was
+still standing amid the rain, which seemed to us already past over and
+changed into a rainbow!--Out of love to him, she had yearly told one
+falsehood, and concealed his age. By extreme good luck, he had not been
+present when the press was opened. I still purpose, after this fatal
+Sunday, to surprise him with the party-colored relics of his childhood,
+and so of these old Christmas-presents to make him new ones. In the
+mean while, if I and his mother can but follow him incessantly,
+like fishhook-floats, and foot clogs, through to-morrow and next
+day, that no murderous accident lift aside the curtain from his
+birth-certificate,--all may yet be well. For now, in truth, to his
+eyes, this birthday, in the metamorphotic mirror of his superstitious
+imagination, and behind the magnifying magic vapor of his present joys,
+would burn forth like a red death-warrant.... But besides all this, the
+leaf of the Bible is now sitting higher than any of us, namely, in the
+new steeple-ball, into which I this morning prudently introduced it.
+Properly speaking, there is indeed no danger.
+
+
+
+
+ THIRTEENTH LETTER-BOX.
+
+ Christening.
+
+
+To-day is that stupid Cantata-Sunday; but nothing now remains of it
+save an hour.--By Heaven! in right spirits were we all to-day. I
+believe I have drunk as faithfully as another.--In truth, one
+should be moderate in all things, in writing, in drinking, in
+rejoicing; and as we lay straws into the honey for our bees, that
+they may not drown in their sugar, so ought one at all times to lay a
+few firm Principles and twigs from the tree of Knowledge into the
+Syrup of life, instead of those same bee-straws, that so one may cling
+thereto, and not drown like a rat. But now I do purpose in earnest
+to--write (and also live) with steadfastness; and therefore, that I may
+record the christening ceremony with greater coolness,--to besprinkle
+my fire with the night-air, and to roam out for an hour into the
+blossom-and-wave-embroidered night, where a lukewarm breath of air,
+intoxicated with soft odors, is sinking down from the blossom-peaks to
+the low-bent flowers, and roaming over the meadows, and at last
+launching on a wave, and with it sailing down the moonshiny brook. O,
+without, under the stars, under the tones of the nightingale, which
+seem to reverberate, not from the echo, but from the far-off
+down-glancing worlds; beside that moon, which the gushing brook, in its
+flickering, watery band, is carrying away, and which creeps under the
+little shadows of the bank as under clouds,--O, amid such forms and
+tones, the heart of man grows serious; and as of old an evening bell
+was rung to direct the wanderer through the deep forests to his nightly
+home, so in our Night are such voices within us and about us, which
+call to us in our strayings, and make us calmer, and teach us to
+moderate our own joys, and to conceive those of others.
+
+
+ * * *
+
+
+I return, peaceful and cool enough, to my narrative. All yesternight I
+left not the worthy Parson half an hour from my sight, to guard him
+from poisoning the well of his life. Full of paternal joy, and with the
+skeleton of the sermon (he was committing it to memory) in his hand, he
+set before me all that he had; and pointed out to me the fruit-baskets
+of pleasures which Cantata-Sunday always plucked and filled for him. He
+recounted to me, as I did not go away, his baptisms, his accidents of
+office; told me of his relatives; and removed my uncertainty with
+regard to the public revenues--of his parish, to the number of his
+communicants and expected catechumens. At this point, however, I am
+afraid that many a reader will in vain endeavor to transport himself
+into my situation, and still be unable to discover why I said to
+Fixlein, "Worthy gossip, better no man could wish himself." I lied not,
+for so it is.... But look in the Note.[63]
+
+At last rose the Sunday, the present; and on this holy day, simply
+because my little godson was for going over to Christianity, there was
+a vast racket made; every time a conversion happens, especially of
+nations, there is an uproaring and a shooting; I refer to the two
+Thirty Years' Wars, to the more recent one, and to the earlier, which
+Charlemagne so long carried on with the heathen Saxons; thus, in the
+_Palais Royal_, the Sun, at his transit over the meridian, fires off a
+cannon.[64] But this morning the little Unchristian, my godson, was
+precisely the person least attended to; for, in thinking of the
+conversion, they had no time left to think of the convert. Therefore I
+strolled about with him myself half the forenoon; and in our walk,
+hastily conferred on him a private baptism; having named him _Jean
+Paul_ before the priest did so. At midday, we sent the beef away as it
+had come; the Sun of happiness having desiccated all our gastric
+juices. We now began to look about us for pomp; I for scientific
+decorations of my hair, my godson for his christening-shirt, and his
+mother for her dress-cap. Yet before the child's-rattle of the
+christening-bell had been jingled, I and the midwife, in front of the
+mother's bed, instituted Physiognomical Travels on the countenance of
+the small Unchristian, and returned with the discovery, that some
+features had been embossed by the pattern of the mother, and many firm
+portions resembled me; a double similarity, in which my readers can
+take little interest. _Jean Paul_ looks very sensible for his years, or
+rather for his minutes, for it is the small one I am speaking of.----
+
+But now I would ask, what German writer durst take it upon him to
+spread out and paint a large historic sheet, representing the whole of
+us as we went to church? Would he not require to draw the father, with
+swelling canonicals, moving forward slowly, devoutly, and full of
+emotion? Would he not have to sketch the godfather, minded this day to
+lend out his names, which he derived from two Apostles (John and Paul),
+as Julius Caesar lent out his names to two things still living even now
+(to a month and a throne)?--And must he not put the godson on his
+sheet, with whom even the Emperor Joseph (in his need of nurse-milk)
+might become a foster-brother, in his old days, if he were still in
+them?--
+
+In my chamber, I have a hundred times determined to smile at
+solemnities, in the midst of which I afterwards, while assisting at
+them, involuntarily wore a petrified countenance, full of dignity and
+seriousness. For, as the Schoolmaster, just before the baptism,
+began to sound the organ--an honor never paid to any other child in
+Hukelum,--and when I saw the wooden christening-angel, like an alighted
+Genius, with his painted timber arm spread out under the baptismal
+ewer, and I myself came to stand close by him, under his gilt wing, I
+protest the blood went slow and solemn, warm and close, through my
+pulsing head, and my lungs full of sighs; and to the silent darling
+lying in my arms, whose unripe eyes Nature yet held closed from the
+full perspective of the Earth, I wished, with more sadness than I do to
+myself, for his Future also as soft a sleep as to-day; and as good an
+angel as to-day, but a more living one, to guide him into a more living
+religion, and, with invisible hand, conduct him unlost through the
+forest of Life, through its falling trees, and Wild Hunters,[65] and
+all its storms and perils.... Will the world not excuse me, if when, by
+a side-glance, I saw on the paternal countenance prayers for the son,
+and tears of joy trickling down into the prayer; and when I noticed on
+the countenance of the grandmother far darker and fast-hidden drops,
+which she could not restrain, while I, in answer to the ancient
+question, engaged to provide for the child if its parents died,--am I
+not to be excused if I then cast my eyes deep down on my little godson,
+merely to hide their running over?--For I remembered that his father
+might perhaps this very day grow pale and cold before a suddenly
+arising mask of Death; I thought how the poor little one had only
+changed his bent posture in the womb with a freer one, to bend and
+cramp himself erelong more harshly in the strait arena of life; I
+thought of his inevitable follies, and errors, and sins; of these
+soiled steps to the Grecian Temple of our Perfection; I thought that
+one day his own fire of genius might reduce himself to ashes, as a man
+that is electrified can kill himself with his own lightning.... All the
+theological wishes, which, on the godson-billet printed over with them,
+I placed in his young bosom, were glowing written in mine.... But the
+white feathered-pink of my joy had then, as it always has, a bloody
+point within it,--I again, as it always is, went to nest, like a
+woodpecker, in a skull.... And as I am doing so even now, let the
+describing of the baptism be over for to-day, and proceed again
+to-morrow....
+
+
+
+
+ FOURTEENTH LETTER-BOX.
+
+
+Oh, so it is ever! So does Fate set fire to the theatre of our little
+plays, and our bright-painted curtain of Futurity! So does the
+Serpent of Eternity wind round us and our joys, and crush, like the
+royal-snake, what it does not poison! Thou good Fixlein!--Ah! last
+night, I little thought that thou, mild soul, while I was writing
+beside thee, wert already journeying into the poisonous Earth-shadow of
+Death.
+
+Last night, late as it was, he opened the lead box found in the old
+steeple-ball; a catalogue of those who had subscribed to the last
+repairing of the church was there; and he began to read it now; my
+presence and his occupations having prevented him before. O, how shall
+I tell that the record of his birth-year, which I had hidden in the new
+Ball, was waiting for him in the old one; that in the register of
+contributions he found his father's name, with the appendage, "given
+for his new-born son Egidius?"--
+
+This stroke sunk deep into his bosom, even to the rending of it
+asunder; in this warm hour, full of paternal joy, after such fair days,
+after such fair employments, after dread of death so often survived,
+here, in the bright, smooth sea, which is rocking and bearing him
+along, starts snorting, from the bottomless abyss, the sea-monster
+Death; and the monster's throat yawns wide, and the silent sea rushes
+into it in whirlpools, and hurries him along with it.
+
+But the patient man, quietly and slowly, and with a heart silent,
+though deadly cold, laid the leaves together; looked softly and firmly
+over the churchyard, where, in the moonshine, the grave of his father
+was to be distinguished; gazed timidly up to the sky, full of stars,
+which a white overarching laurel-tree screened from his sight;--and
+though he longed to be in bed, to settle there and sleep it off, yet he
+paused at the window to pray for his wife and child, in case this night
+were his last.
+
+At this moment the steeple-clock struck twelve; but, from the breaking
+of a pin, the weights kept rolling down, and the clock-hammer struck
+without stopping,--and he heard with horror the chains and wheels
+rattling along; and he felt as if Death were hurling forth in a heap
+all the longer hours which he might yet have had to live,--and now, to
+his eyes, the churchyard began to quiver and heave, the moonlight
+flickered on the church-windows, and in the church there were lights
+flitting to and fro, and in the charnel-house was a motion and a
+tumult.
+
+His heart fainted within him, and he threw himself into bed, and closed
+his eyes that he might not see;--but Imagination in the gloom now blew
+aloft the dust of the dead, and whirled it into giant shapes, and
+chased these hollow, fever-born masks alternately into lightning and
+shadow. Then at last from transparent thoughts grew colored visions,
+and he dreamed this dream. He was standing at the window looking out
+into the churchyard; and Death, in size as a scorpion, was creeping
+over it, and seeking for his bones. Death found some arm-bones and
+thigh-bones on the graves, and said, "They are my bones"; and he took a
+spine and the bone-legs, and stood with them, and the two arm-bones and
+clutched with them, and found on the grave of Fixlein's father a skull,
+and put it on. Then he lifted a scythe beside the little flower-garden,
+and cried: "Fixlein, where art thou? My finger is an icicle and no
+finger, and I will tap on thy heart with it." The Skeleton, thus piled
+together, now looked for him who was standing at the window, and
+powerless to stir from it; and carried in the one hand, instead of a
+sand-glass, the ever-striking steeple-clock, and held out the finger of
+ice, like a dagger, far into the air....
+
+Then he saw his victim above at the window, and raised himself
+as high as the laurel-tree to stab straight into his bosom with the
+finger,--and stalked towards him. But as he came nearer, his pale bones
+grew redder, and vapors floated woolly round his haggard form. Flowers
+started up from the ground; and he stood transfigured and without the
+clamm of the grave, hovering above them, and the balm-breath from the
+flower-cups wafted him gently on;--and as he came nearer, the scythe
+and clock were gone, and in his bony breast he had a heart, and on his
+bony head red lips;--and nearer still, there gathered on him soft,
+transparent, rosebalm-dipped flesh, like the splendor of an Angel
+flying hither from the starry blue;--and close at hand, he was an Angel
+with shut snow-white eyelids....
+
+The heart of my friend, quivering like a Harmonica-bell, now melted in
+bliss in his clear bosom;--and when the Angel opened its eyes, his were
+pressed together by the weight of celestial rapture, and his dream fled
+away.----
+
+But not his life; he opened his hot eyes, and--his good wife had hold
+of his feverish hand, and was standing in room of the Angel.
+
+The fever abated towards morning; but the certainty of dying still
+throbbed in every artery of the hapless man. He called for his fair
+little infant into his sick-bed, and pressed it silently, though it
+began to cry, too hard against his paternal, heavy-laden breast. Then
+towards noon his soul became cool, and the sultry thunder-clouds within
+it drew back. And here he described to us the previous (as it were,
+arsenical) fantasies of his usually quiet head. But it is even those
+tense nerves, which have not quivered at the touch of a poetic hand
+striking them to melody of sorrow, that start and fly asunder more
+easily under the fierce hand of Fate, when with sweeping stroke it
+smites into discord the firm-set strings.
+
+But towards night his ideas again began rushing in a torch-dance, like
+fire-pillars round his soul; every artery became a burning-rod, and the
+heart drove flaming naphtha-brooks into the brain. All within his soul
+grew bloody; the blood of his drowned brother united itself with the
+blood which had once flowed from Thiennette's arm, into a bloody
+rain;--he still thought he was in the garden in the night of
+betrothment, he still kept calling for bandages to stanch blood, and
+was for hiding his head in the ball of the steeple. Nothing afflicts
+one more than to see a reasonable, moderate man, who has been so even
+in his passions, raving in the poetic madness of fever. And yet if
+nothing save this mouldering corruption can soothe the hot brain; and
+if, while the reek and thick vapor of a boiling nervous-spirit and the
+hissing water-spouts of the veins are encircling and eclipsing the
+stifled soul, a higher Finger presses through the cloud, and suddenly
+lifts the poor bewildered spirit from amid the smoke to a sun,--is it
+more just to complain, than to reflect that Fate is like the oculist,
+who, when about to open to a blind eye the world of light, first
+bandages and darkens the other eye that sees?
+
+But the sorrow does affect me, which I read on Thiennette's pale lips,
+though do not hear. It is not the distortion of an excruciating agony,
+nor the burning of a dried-up eye, nor the loud lamenting or violent
+movement of a tortured frame, that I see in her; but what I am forced
+to see in her, and what too keenly cuts the sympathizing heart, is a
+pale, still, unmoved, undistorted face, a pale, bloodless head, which
+Sorrow is as it were holding up after the stroke, like a head just
+severed by the axe of the headsman; for oh! on this form the wounds,
+from which the three-edged dagger had been drawn, are all fallen firmly
+together, and the blood is flowing from them in secret into the choking
+heart. O Thiennette, go away from the sick-bed, and hide that face
+which is saying to us: "Now do I know that I shall not have any
+happiness on Earth; now do I give over hoping,--would this life were
+but soon done!"
+
+You will not comprehend my sympathy, if you know not what, some hours
+ago, the too loud lamenting mother told me. Thiennette, who of old had
+always trembled for his thirty-second year, had encountered this
+superstition with a nobler one; she had purposely stood farther back at
+the marriage-altar, and in the bridal-night fallen sooner asleep than
+he; thereby--as is the popular belief--so to order it that she might
+also die sooner. Nay, she has determined, if he die, to lay with his
+corpse a piece of her apparel, that so she may descend the sooner to
+keep him company in his narrow house. Thou good, thou faithful wife,
+but thou unhappy one!--
+
+
+
+
+ CHAPTER LAST.
+
+
+I have left Hukelum, and my gossip his bed; and the one is as sound as
+the other. The cure was as foolish as the malady. It first occurred to
+me, that, as Boerhaave used to remedy convulsions by convulsions, one
+fancy might in my gossip's case be remedied by another; namely, by the
+fancy that he was yet no man of thirty-two, but only a man of six or
+nine. Deliriums are dreams not encircled by sleep; and all dreams
+transport us back into youth, why not deliriums too? I accordingly
+directed every one to leave the patient; only his mother, while the
+fiercest meteors were darting, hissing before his fevered soul, was to
+sit down by him alone, and speak to him as if he were a child of eight
+years. The bed-mirror also I directed her to cover. She did so; she
+spoke to him as if he had the small-pox fever; and when he cried,
+"Death is standing with two-and-thirty pointed teeth before me,
+to eat my heart," she said to him, "Little dear, I will give thee thy
+roller-hat, and thy copy-book, and thy case, and thy hussar-cloak
+again, and more too if thou wilt be good." A reasonable speech he would
+have taken up and heeded much less than he did this foolish one.
+
+At last she said,--for to women in the depth of sorrow dissimulation
+becomes easy,--"Well, I will try it this once, and give thee thy
+playthings; but do the like again, thou rogue, and roll thyself about
+in the bed so, with the smallpox on thee!" And with this, from her full
+apron she shook out on the bed the whole stock of playthings and
+dressing-ware, which I had found in the press of the drowned brother.
+First of all his copy-book, where Egidius in his eighth year had put
+down his name, which he necessarily recognized as his own handwriting;
+then the black velvet _fall-hat_ or roller-cap; then the red and white
+leading-strings; his knife-case, with a little pamphlet of tin leaves;
+his green hussar-cloak, with its stiff facings; and a whole _orbis
+pictus_ or _fictus_ of Nuernberg puppets....
+
+The sick man recognized in a moment these projecting peaks of a
+spring-world sunk in the stream of Time,--these half shadows, this dusk
+of down-gone days,--this conflagration-place and Golgotha of a heavenly
+time, which none of us forgets, which we love forever, and look back to
+even from the grave.... And when he saw all this, he slowly turned
+round his head, as if he were awakening from a long, heavy dream; and
+his whole heart flowed down in warm showers of tears, and he said,
+fixing his full eyes on the eyes of his mother: "But are my father and
+brother still living then?"--"They are dead lately," said the wounded
+mother; but her heart was overpowered, and she turned away her eyes,
+and bitter tears fell unseen from her down-bent head. And now at once
+that evening, when he lay confined to bed by the death of his father,
+and was cured by his playthings, overflowed his soul with splendor and
+lights, and presence of the Past.
+
+And so Delirium dyed for itself rosy wings in the Aurora of life, and
+fanned the panting soul,--and shook down golden butterfly-dust from its
+plumage on the path, on the flowerage of the suffering man;--in the far
+distance rose lovely tones, in the distance floated lovely clouds--O
+his heart was like to fall in pieces, but only into fluttering
+flower-stamina, into soft sentient nerves; his eyes were like to melt
+away, but only into dew-drops for the cups of joy-blossoms, into
+blood-drops for loving hearts; his soul was floating, palpitating,
+drinking, and swimming in the warm, relaxing rose-perfume of the
+brightest delusion....
+
+The rapture bridled his feverish heart; and his mad pulse grew calm.
+Next morning his mother, when she saw that all was prospering, would
+have had the church-bells rung, to make him think that the second
+Sunday was already here. But his wife (perhaps out of shame in my
+presence) was averse to the lying; and said it would be all the same if
+we moved the month-hand of his clock (but otherwise than Hezekiah's
+Dial) eight days forward; especially as he was wont rather to rise and
+look at his clock for the day of the month, then to turn it up in the
+almanac. I for my own part simply went up to the bedside, and asked
+him: "If he was cracked--what in the world he meant with his mad
+death-dreams, when he had lain so long, and passed clean over the
+Cantata-Sunday, and yet, out of sheer terror, was withering to a lath?"
+
+A glorious reinforcement joined me; the Flesher or Quartermaster. In
+his anxiety, he rushed into the room, without saluting the women, and I
+forthwith addressed him aloud: "My gossip here is giving me trouble
+enough, Mr. Regiments-Quartermaster; last night, he let them persuade
+him he was little older than his own son; here is the child's fall-hat
+he was for putting on." The Guardian deuced and devilled, and said:
+"Ward, are you a parson or a fool?--Have not I told you twenty times,
+there was a maggot in your head about this?"--
+
+At last he himself perceived that he was not rightly wise, and so grew
+better; besides the guardian's invectives, my oaths contributed a good
+deal; for I swore I would hold him as no right gossip, and edit no word
+of his Biography, unless he rose directly and got better....
+
+--In short, he showed so much politeness to me that he rose and got
+better.--He was still sickly, it is true, on Saturday; and on Sunday
+could not preach a sermon (something of the sort the Schoolmaster read,
+instead); but yet he took Confessions on Saturday, and at the altar
+next day he dispensed the Sacrament. Service ended, the feast of his
+recovery was celebrated, my farewell-feast included; for I was to go in
+the afternoon.
+
+This last afternoon I will chalk out with all possible breadth, and
+then, with the pentagraph of free garrulity, fill up the outline and
+draw on the great scale.
+
+During the Thanksgiving-repast, there arrived considerable personal
+tribute from his catechumens, and fairings by way of bonfire for his
+recovery; proving how much the people loved him, and how well he
+deserved it; for one is oftener hated without reason by the many, than
+without reason loved by them. But Fixlein was friendly to every
+child; was none of those clergy who never pardon their enemies except
+in--God's stead; and he praised at once the whole world, his wife, and
+himself.
+
+I then attended at his afternoon's catechizing; and looked down (as he
+did in the first Letter-Box) from the choir, under the wing of the
+wooden cherub. Behind this angel, I drew out my note-book, and
+shifted a little under the cover of the Black Board, with its white
+Psalm-ciphers,[66] and wrote down what I was there--thinking. I was
+well aware, that when I to-day, on the twenty-fifth of May retired from
+this _Salernic_[67] spinning-school, where one is taught to spin out
+the thread of life, in fairer wise, and without wetting it by foreign
+mixtures,--I was well aware, I say, that I should carry off with me far
+more elementary principles of the Science of Happiness than the whole
+Chamberlain piquet ever muster all their days. I noted down my first
+impression, in the following Rules of Life for myself and the press.
+
+"Little joys refresh us constantly like house-bread, and never bring
+disgust; and great ones, like sugar-bread, briefly, and then bring
+it.--Trifles we should let, not plague us only, but also gratify us; we
+should seize not their poison-bags only, but their honey-bags also; and
+if flies often buzz about our room, we should, like Domitian, amuse
+ourselves with flies, or, like a certain still living Elector,[68] feed
+them.--For _civic_ life and its micrologies, for which the Parson has a
+natural taste, we must acquire an artificial one; must learn to love
+without esteeming it; learn, far as it ranks beneath _human_ life, to
+enjoy it like another twig of this human life, as poetically as we do
+the pictures of it in romances. The loftiest mortal loves and seeks the
+_same sort_ of things with the meanest; only from higher grounds and by
+higher paths. Be every minute, Man, a full life to thee!--Despise
+anxiety and wishing, the Future and the Past!--If the _Second-pointer_
+can be no road-pointer into an Eden for thy soul, the _Month-pointer_
+will still less be so, for thou livest not from month to month, but
+from second to second! Enjoy thy Existence more than thy Manner of
+Existence, and let the dearest object of thy Consciousness be this
+Consciousness itself!--Make not the Present a means of thy Future;
+for this Future is nothing but a coming Present; and the Present,
+which thou despisest, was once a Future which thou desiredst!--Stake
+in no lotteries,--keep at home,--give and accept no pompous
+entertainments,--travel not abroad every year!--Conceal not from
+thyself, by long plans, thy household goods, thy chamber, thy
+acquaintance!--Despise Life, that thou mayst enjoy it!--Inspect the
+neighborhood of thy life; every shelf, every nook of thy abode; and
+nestling in, quarter thyself in the farthest and most domestic winding
+of thy snail-house!--Look upon a capital but as a collection of
+villages, a village as some blind-alley of a capital; fame as the talk
+of neighbors at the street-door; a library as a learned conversation,
+joy as a second, sorrow as a minute, life as a day; and three things as
+all in all: God, Creation, Virtue!"----
+
+And if I would follow myself and these rules, it will behoove me not to
+make so much of this Biography; but once for all, like a moderate man,
+to let it sound out.
+
+After the Catechizing, I stept down to my wide-gowned and black-gowned
+gossip. The congregation gone, we clambered up to all high places,
+perused the plates on the pews--I took a lesson on the altar on its
+inscription incrusted with the _sediment of Time_ (I speak not
+metaphorically); I organed, my gossip managing the bellows; I mounted
+the pulpit, and was happy enough there to alight on one other
+rose-shoot, which in the farewell minute, I could still plant in the
+rose-garden of my Fixlein. For I descried aloft, on the back of a
+wooden Apostle, the name _Lavater_, which the Zurich Physiognomist had
+been pleased to leave on this sacred Torso in the course of his
+wayfaring. Fixlein did not know the hand, but I did, for I had seen it
+frequently in Flachsenfingen, not only on the tapestry of a Court Lady
+there, but also in his _Hand-Library_;[69] and met with it besides in
+many country churches, forming, as it were, the Directory and
+Address-Calendar of this wandering name, for Lavater likes to inscribe
+in pulpits, as a shepherd does in trees, the name of his beloved. I
+could now advise my gossip prudently to cut away the name, with the
+chip of wood containing it, from the back of the Apostle, and to
+preserve it carefully among his _curiosa_.
+
+On returning to the parsonage, I made for my hat and stick; but the
+design, as it were the projection and contour of a supper in the
+acacia-grove, had already been sketched by Thiennette. I declared that
+I would stay till evening, in case the young mother went out with us to
+the proposed meal.... and truly the Biographer at length got his way,
+all doctors' regulations notwithstanding.
+
+I then constrained the Parson to put on his Kraeutermuetze,[70] or
+Herb-cap, which he had stitched together out of simples for the
+strengthening of his memory: "Would to Heaven," said I, "that Princes
+instead of their Princely Hats, Doctors and Cardinals instead
+of theirs, and Saints instead of martyr-crowns, would clap such
+memory-bonnets on their heads!"--Thereupon, till the roasting and
+cooking within doors were over, we marched out alone over the parsonage
+meadows, and talked of learned matters, we packed ourselves into the
+ruined Robber-Castle, on which my gossip, as already mentioned,
+has a literary work in hand. I deeply approved, the rather as this
+Kidnapper-tower had once belonged to an Aufhammer, his intention of
+dedicating the description to the Rittmeister; that nobleman, I think,
+will sooner give his name to the Book than to the Shock. For the rest,
+I exhorted my fellow-craftsman to pluck up literary heart, and said to
+him: "A fearless pen, good gossip! Let Subrector Hans von Fuechslein be,
+if he like, the Dragon of the Apocalypse, lying in wait for the
+delivery of the fugitive Woman, to swallow the offspring; I am there
+too, and have my friend the Editor of the _Litteraturzeitung_ at my
+side, who will gladly permit me to give an _anticritique_ on paying the
+insertion-dues!"--I especially excited him to new fillings and
+return-freights of his Letter-Boxes. I have not taken oath that into
+this biographical chest-of-drawers I will not in the course of time
+introduce another Box. "Neither to my godson, worthy gossip, will it do
+any harm that he is presented, poor child, even now to the reading
+public, when he does not count more months than, as Horace will have
+it, a literary child should count years, namely, _nine_."
+
+In walking homewards, I praised his wife. "If marriage," said I to him,
+"is the madder which in maids, as in cotton, makes the colors visible,
+then I contend, that Thiennette, when a maid, could scarcely be so good
+as she is now when a wife. By Heaven! in such a marriage, I should
+write Books of quite another sort, divine ones; in a marriage, I mean,
+where beside the writing-table (as beside the great voting-table at the
+Regensburg Diets, there are little tables of confectionery); where in
+like manner, I say, a little jar of marmalade were standing by me,
+namely, a sweetened, dainty, lovely face, and out of measure fond of
+the Letter-Box-writer, gossip! Your marriage will resemble the
+acacia-grove we are now going to, the leaves of which grow thicker with
+the heat of summer, while other shrubs are yielding only shrunk and
+porous shade."
+
+As we entered through the upper garden-door into this same bower, the
+supper and the good mistress were already there. Nothing is more pure
+and tender than the respect with which a wife treats the benefactor or
+comrade of her husband; and happily the Biographer himself was this
+comrade, and the object of this respect. Our talk was cheerful, but my
+spirit was oppressed. The fetters, which bind the mere reader to my
+heroes, were in my case of triple force; as I was at once their guest
+and their portrait-painter. I told the Parson that he would live to a
+greater age than I, for that his temperate temperament was balanced, as
+if by a doctor, so equally between the nervousness of refinement and
+the hot thick-bloodedness of the rustic. Fixlein said that if he lived
+but as long as he had done, namely, two-and-thirty years, it would
+amount, exclusive of the leap-year-days, to 280,320 seconds, which in
+itself was something considerable; and that he often reckoned up with
+satisfaction the many thousand persons of his own age that would have a
+life equally long.
+
+At last I tried to get in motion; for the red lights of the falling sun
+were mounting up over the grove, and dipping us still deeper in the
+shadows of night; the young mother had grown chill in the evening dew.
+In confused mood, I invited the Parson to visit me soon in the city,
+where I would show him not only all the chambers of the Palace, but the
+Prince himself. Gladder there was nothing this day on our old world
+than the face to which I said so; and than the other one which was
+the mild reflection of the former.--For the Biographer it would
+have been too hard, if now in that minute, when his fancy, like
+mirror-telescopes, was representing every object in a _tremulous_ form,
+he had been obliged to cut and run; if, I will say, it had not occurred
+to him that to the young mother it could do little harm (but much good)
+were she to take a short walk, and assist in escorting the Author and
+architect of the present Letter-Box out of the garden to his road.
+
+In short, I took this couple one in each hand, instead of under each
+arm, and moved with them through the garden to the Flachsenfingen
+highway. I often abruptly turned round my head between them, as if I
+had heard some one coming after us; but in reality I only meant once
+more, though mournfully, to look back into the happy hamlet, whose
+houses were all dwellings of contented still Sabbath-joy, and which is
+happy enough, though over its wide-parted pavement-stones there passes
+every week but one barber, every holiday but one dresser of hair, and
+every year but one hawker of parasols. Then truly I had again to turn
+round my head, and look at the happy pair beside me. My otherwise
+affectionate gossip could not rightly suit himself to these tokens of
+sorrow; but in thy heart, thou good, so oft afflicted sex, every
+mourning-bell soon finds its unison; and Thiennette, ennobled with the
+thin trembling _resonance_ of a reverberating soul, gave me back all my
+tones with the beauties of an echo.---- At last we reached the
+boundary, over which Thiennette could not be allowed to walk; and now
+must I part from my gossip, with whom I had talked so gayly every
+morning (each of us from his bed), and from the still circuit of modest
+hope where he dwelt, and return once more to the rioting, fermenting
+Court-sphere, where men in bull-beggar tone demand from Fate a root of
+Life-Licorice, thick as the arm, like the botanical one on the Wolga,
+not so much that they may chew the sweet bean themselves, as fell
+others to earth with it.
+
+As I thought to myself that I would say, Farewell! to them, all the
+coming plagues, all the corpses, and all the marred wishes of this
+good pair, arose before my heart; and I remembered that little, save
+the falling asleep of joy-flowers, would mark the current of their
+Life-day, as it does of mine and of every one's.--And yet is it fairer,
+if they measure their years not by the _Water-clock_ of falling tears,
+but by the _Flower-clock_[71] of asleep-going flowers, whose bells in
+our short-lived garden are sinking together before us from hour to
+hour.--
+
+I would even now--for I still recollect how I hung with streaming eyes
+over these two loved ones, as over their corpses--address myself, and
+say: Far too soft, _Jean Paul_, whose chalk still sketches the models
+of Nature on a ground of Melancholy; harden thy heart like thy frame,
+and waste not thyself and others by such thoughts. Yet why should I do
+it, why should I not confess directly what, in the softest emotion, I
+said to these two beings? "May all go right with you, ye mild beings,"
+I said, for I no longer thought of courtesies, "may the arm of
+Providence bear gently your lacerated hearts, and the good Father,
+above all these suns which are now looking down on us, keep you ever
+united, and exalt you still undivided to his bosom and his lips!" "Be
+you, too, right happy and glad!" said Thiennette. "And to you,
+Thiennette," continued I, "Ah! to your pale cheeks, to your oppressed
+heart, to your long cold maltreated youth, I can never, never wish
+enough. No! But all that can soothe a wounded soul, that can please a
+pure one, that can still the hidden sigh--O, all that you deserve--may
+this be given you; and when you see me again, then say to me, 'I am now
+much happier!'"
+
+We were all of us too deeply moved. We at last tore ourselves asunder
+from repeated embraces; my friend retired with the soul whom he
+loves,--I remained alone behind him with the Night.
+
+And I walked without aim through woods, through valleys, and over
+brooks, and through sleeping villages, to enjoy the great Night like a
+Day. I walked, and still looked like the magnet to the region of
+midnight, to strengthen my heart at the gleaming twilight, at
+this upstretching Aurora of a morning beneath our feet. White
+night-butterflies flitted, white blossoms fluttered, white stars fell,
+and the white snow-powder hung silvery in the high Shadow of the Earth,
+which reaches beyond the Moon, and which is our Night. Then began the
+AEolian Harp of the Creation to tremble and to sound, blown on from
+above, and my immortal soul was a string in this Harp.--The heart
+of a brother everlasting Man swelled under the everlasting Heaven,
+as the seas swell under the Sun and under the Moon.--The distant
+village-clocks struck midnight, mingling, as it were, with the
+ever-pealing tone of ancient Eternity.--The limbs of my buried ones
+touched cold on my soul, and drove away its blots, as dead hands heal
+eruptions of the skin.--I walked silently through little hamlets, and
+close by their outer churchyards, where crumbled upcast coffin-boards
+were glimmering, while the once bright eyes that had lain in them were
+mouldered into gray ashes.--Cold thought! clutch not like a cold
+spectre at my heart; I look up to the starry sky, and an everlasting
+chain stretches thither, and over and below; and all is Life, and
+Warmth, and Light, and all is godlike or God....
+
+Towards morning I descried thy late lights, little city of my dwelling,
+which I belong to on this side the grave; I return to the Earth; and in
+thy steeples, behind the by-advanced great Midnight, it struck half
+past two; about this hour, in 1794, Mars went down in the west, and the
+Moon rose in the east; and my soul desired, in grief for the noble
+warlike blood which is still streaming on the blossoms of Spring: "Ah,
+retire, bloody War, like red Mars; and thou, still Peace, come forth
+like the mild divided Moon!"--
+
+
+
+
+
+ ARMY-CHAPLAIN SCHMELZLE'S
+ JOURNEY TO FLAeTZ;
+
+ WITH
+
+ A RUNNING COMMENTARY OF NOTES.
+
+ TRANSLATED BY THOMAS CARLYLE.
+
+
+
+
+ PREFACE
+
+
+This, I conceive, may be managed in two words. The _first_ word must
+relate to the Circular Letter of Army-Chaplain Schmelzle, wherein he
+describes to his friends his Journey to the metropolitan city of Flaetz;
+after having, in an Introduction, premised some proofs and assurances
+of his valor. Properly speaking, the _Journey_ itself has been written
+purely with a view that his courageousness, impugned by rumor, may be
+fully evinced and demonstrated by the plain facts which he therein
+records. Whether, in the mean time, there shall not be found certain
+quick-scented readers, who may infer, directly contrariwise, that his
+breast is not everywhere bomb-proof, especially in the left side,--on
+this point I keep my judgment suspended.
+
+For the rest, I beg the judges of literature, as well as their
+satellites, the critics of literature, to regard this _Journey_, for
+whose literary contents I, as Editor, am answerable, solely in the
+light of a Portrait (in the French sense), a little Sketch of
+Character. It is a voluntary or involuntary comedy-piece, at which I
+have laughed so often, that I purpose in time coming to paint some
+similar Pictures of Character myself. And, for the present, when could
+such a little comic toy be more fitly imparted and set forth to the
+world than in these very days, when the sound both of heavy money and
+of light laughter has died away from among us,--when, like the Turks,
+we count and pay merely with sealed _purses_, and the coin within them
+has vanished?
+
+Despicable would it seem to me, if any clownish squire of the
+goose-quill should publicly and censoriously demand of me in what way
+this self-cabinet-piece of Schmelzle's has come into my hands. I know
+it well, and do not disclose it. This comedy-piece, for which I, at all
+events, as my Bookseller will testify, draw the profit myself, I got
+hold of so unblamably, that I await, with unspeakable composure, what
+the Army-Chaplain shall please to say against the publication of it, in
+case he say anything at all. My conscience bears me witness, that I
+acquired this article at least by more honorable methods than are those
+of the learned persons who steal with their ears, who, in the character
+of spiritual auditory-thieves, and class-room cut-purses and pirates,
+are in the habit of disloading their plundered Lectures, and vending
+them up and down the country as productions of their own. Hitherto, in
+my whole life, I have stolen little, except now and then in youth
+some--glances.
+
+The _second_ word must explain or apologize for the singular form of
+this little Work, standing as it does on a substratum of Notes. I
+myself am not contented with it. Let the world open, and look, and
+determine, in like manner. But the truth is, this line of demarcation,
+stretching through the whole book, originated in the following
+accident: certain thoughts (or digressions) of my own, with which it
+was not permitted me to disturb those of the Army-Chaplain, and which
+could only be allowed to fight behind the lines, in the shape of Notes,
+I, with a view to conveniency and order, had written down in a separate
+paper; at the same time, as will be observed, regularly providing every
+Note with its Number, and thus referring it to the proper page of the
+main Manuscript. But, in the copying of the latter, I had forgotten to
+insert the corresponding numbers in the Text itself. Therefore, let no
+man, any more than I do, cast a stone at my worthy Printer, inasmuch as
+he (perhaps in the thought that it was my way, that I had some purpose
+in it) took these Notes, just as they stood, pellmell, without
+arrangement of Numbers, and clapped them under the Text; at the same
+time, by a praiseworthy, artful computation, taking care, at least,
+that at the bottom of every page in the Text there should some portion
+of this glittering Note-precipitate make its appearance. Well, the
+thing at any rate is done, nay, perpetuated, namely, printed. After
+all, I might almost partly rejoice at it. For, in good truth, had I
+meditated for years (as I have done for the last twenty) how to provide
+for my digression-comets new orbits, if not focal suns, for my episodes
+new epopees,--I could scarce possibly have hit upon a better or more
+spacious Limbo for such Vanities than Chance and Printer here
+accidentally offer me ready-made. I have only to regret that the thing
+has been printed before I could turn it to account. Heavens! what
+remotest allusions (had I known it before printing) might not have been
+privily introduced in every Text-page and Note-number; and what
+apparent incongruity in the real congruity between this upper and under
+side of the cards! How vehemently and devilishly might one not have cut
+aloft, and to the right and left, from these impregnable casemates and
+covered-ways; and what _laesio ultra dimidium_ (injury beyond the half
+of the Text) might not, with these satirical injuries, have been
+effected and completed!
+
+But Fate meant not so kindly with me; of this golden harvest-field of
+satire I was not to be informed till three days before the Preface.
+
+Perhaps, however, the writing world, by the little blue flame of this
+accident, may be guided to a weightier acquisition, to a larger
+subterranean treasure, than I, alas! have dug up. For, to the writer,
+there is now a way pointed out of producing in one marbled volume a
+group of altogether different works; of writing in one leaf, for both
+sexes at the same time, without confounding them, nay, for the five
+faculties all at once, without disturbing their limitations; since
+now, instead of boiling up a vile, fermenting shove-together,
+fit for nobody, he has nothing to do but draw his note-lines or
+partition-lines; and so on his five-story leaf give board and lodging
+to the most discordant heads. Perhaps one might then read many a book
+for the fourth time, simply because every time one had read but a
+fourth part of it.
+
+On the whole, this Work has at least the property of being a short one;
+so that the reader, I hope, may almost run through it, and read it at
+the bookseller's counter, without, as in the case of thicker volumes,
+first needing to buy it. And why, indeed, in this world of Matter
+should anything whatever be great, except only what belongs not to it,
+the world of Spirit?
+
+ Jean Paul Fr. Richter.
+
+_Bayreuth, in the Bay and Peace Month_, 1707.
+
+
+
+
+ SCHMELZLE'S
+ JOURNEY TO FLAeTZ.
+
+ _Circular Letter of the proposed Catechetical Professor_ Attila
+ Schmelzle _to his Friends; containing some Account of a Holidays'
+ Journey to Flaetz, with an Introduction, touching his Flight, and
+ his Courage as former Army-Chaplain_.
+
+
+Nothing can be more ludicrous, my esteemed Friends, than to hear people
+stigmatizing a man as cowardly and hare-hearted, who perhaps is
+struggling all the while with precisely the opposite faults, those of a
+lion; though indeed the African lion himself, since the time of
+Sparrmann's Travels, passes among us for poltroon. Yet this case is
+mine, worthy Friends; and I purpose to say a few words thereupon,
+before describing my journey.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+108. Good princes easily obtain good subjects; not so easily good
+subjects good princes; thus Adam, in the state of innocence, ruled over
+animals all tame and gentle, till simply through his means they fell
+and grew savage.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+You in truth are all aware that, directly in the teeth of this calumny,
+it is courage, it is desperadoes (provided they be not braggarts
+and tumultuous persons), whom I chiefly venerate; for example, my
+brother-in-law, the Dragoon, who never in his life bastinadoed one man,
+but always a whole social circle at the same time. How truculent was my
+fancy, even in childhood, when I, as the parson was toning away to the
+silent congregation, used to take it into my head: "How now, if thou
+shouldst start up from thy pew, and shout aloud, I am here too, Mr.
+Parson!" and to paint out this thought in such glowing colors, that,
+for very dread, I have often been obliged to leave the church! Anything
+like Rugenda's battle-pieces; horrid murder-tumults, sea-fights or
+Stormings of Toulon, exploding fleets; and, in my childhood, Battles of
+Prague on the harpsichord; nay, in short, every map of any remarkable
+scene of war; these are perhaps too much my favorite objects; and I
+read--and purchase nothing sooner; and doubtless they might lead me
+into many errors, were it not that my circumstances restrain me. Now,
+if it be objected that true courage is something higher than mere
+thinking and willing, then you, my worthy friends, will be the first to
+recognize mine, when it shall break forth into not barren and empty,
+but active and effective words, while I strengthen my future
+Catechetical Pupils, as well as can be done in a course of College
+Lectures, and steel them into Christian heroes.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+5. For a good Physician saves, if not always from the disease, at least
+from a bad Physician.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+It is well known that, out of care for the preservation of my life, I
+never walk within at least ten fields of any shore full of bathers or
+swimmers; merely because I foresee to a certainty, that, in case one of
+them were drowning, I should that moment (for the heart overbalances
+the head) plunge after the fool to save him, into some bottomless depth
+or other, where we should both perish. And if dreaming is the reflex of
+waking, let me ask you, true Hearts, if you have forgotten my relating
+to you dreams of mine, which no Caesar, no Alexander or Luther, need
+have felt ashamed of? Have I not, to mention a few instances, taken
+Rome by storm; and done battle with the Pope and the whole elephantine
+body of the Cardinal College, at one and the same time? Did I
+not once on horseback, while simply looking at a review of military,
+dash headlong into a _bataillon quarre_; and then capture, in
+Aix-la-Chapelle, the Peruke of Charlemagne, for which the town pays
+yearly ten reichsthalers of barber-money; and carrying it off to
+Halberstadt von Gleim, there in like manner seize the Great Frederick's
+Hat; put both Peruke and Hat on my head, and yet return home, after I
+had stormed their batteries and turned the cannon against the
+cannoneers themselves? Did I not once submit to be made a Jew of, and
+then be regaled with hams; though they were ape-hams on the Orinoco
+(see Humboldt)? And a thousand such things; for I have thrown the
+Consistorial President of Flaetz out of the Palace window; those
+alarm-fulminators, sold by Heinrich Backofen in Gotha, at six groschen
+the dozen, and each going off like a cannon, I have listened to so
+calmly that the fulminators did not even awaken me; and more of the
+like sort.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+100. In books lie the Phoenix-ashes of a past Millennium and Paradise;
+but War blows, and much ashes are scattered away.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+But enough! It is now time briefly to touch that further slander of my
+chaplainship, which unhappily has likewise gained some circulation in
+Flaetz, but which, as Caesar did Alexander, I shall now by my touch
+dissipate into dust. Be what truth in it there can, it is still little
+or nothing. Your great Minister and General in Flaetz (perhaps the very
+greatest in the world, for there are not many Schabackers) may indeed,
+like any other great man, be turned against me; but not with the
+Artillery of Truth; for this Artillery I here set before you, my good
+Hearts, and do you but fire it off for my advantage! The matter is
+this. Certain foolish rumors are afloat in the Flaetz country, that I,
+on occasion of some important battles, took leg-bail (such is their
+plebeian phrase), and that afterwards, on the Chaplain's being called
+for to preach a Thanksgiving sermon for the victory, no chaplain
+whatever was to be found. The ridiculousness of this story will best
+appear, when I tell you that I never was in any action; but have always
+been accustomed, several hours prior to such an event, to withdraw so
+many miles to the rear, that our men, so soon as they were beaten,
+would be sure to find me. A good retreat is reckoned the masterpiece in
+the art of war; and at no time can a retreat be executed with such
+order, force, and security as just before the battle, when you are not
+yet beaten.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+102. Dear Political or Religious Inquisitor! Art thou aware that Turin
+tapers never rightly begin shining till thou breakest them, and then
+they take fire?
+
+------------------------
+
+
+It is true, I might perhaps, as expectant Professor of Catechetics, sit
+still and smile at such nugatory speculations on my courage; for if by
+Socratic questioning I can hammer my future Catechist Pupils into the
+habit of asking questions in their turn, I shall thereby have tempered
+_them_ into heroes, seeing they have nothing to fight with but
+children--(Catechists at all events, though dreading fire, have no
+reason to dread light, since in our days, as in London illuminations,
+it is only the _unlighted_ windows that are battered in; whereas, in
+other ages, it was with nations and light as it is with dogs and water;
+if you give them none for a long time, they at last get a horror at
+it);--and on the whole, for Catechists, any park looks kindlier, and
+smiles more sweetly, than a sulphurous park of artillery; and the
+Warlike Foot, which the age is placed on, is to them the true Devil's
+cloven-foot of human nature.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+86. Very true! In youth we love and enjoy the most ill-assorted
+friends, perhaps more than, in old age, the best assorted.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+But for my part I think not so; almost as if the party spirit of my
+Christian name, Attila, had passed into me more strongly than was
+proper, I feel myself impelled still further to prove my
+courageousness; which, dearest Friends! I shall here in a few lines
+again do. This proof I could manage by mere inferences and learned
+citations. For example, if Galen remarks that animals with large
+hind-quarters are timid, I have nothing to do but turn round, and show
+the enemy my back and what is under it, in order to convince him that I
+am not deficient in valor, but in flesh. Again, if by well-known
+experiences it has been found that flesh-eating produces courage, I can
+evince that in this particular I yield to no officer of the service;
+though it is the habit of these gentlemen not only to run up long
+scores of roast-meat with their landlords, but also to leave them
+unpaid, that so at every hour they may have an open document in the
+hands of the enemy himself (the landlord), testifying that they have
+eaten their own share (with some of other people's too), and so put
+common butcher-meat on a War-footing, living not like others _by_
+bravery, but _for_ bravery. As little have I ever, in my character of
+chaplain, shrunk from comparison with any officer in the regiment, who
+may be a true lion, and so snatch every sort of plunder, but yet, like
+this King of the Beasts, is afraid of _fire_; or who,--like King James
+of England,[72] that scampered off at sight of drawn swords, yet so
+much the more gallantly, before all Europe, went out against the
+storming Luther with book and pen,--does, from a similar idiosyncrasy,
+attack all warlike armaments, both by word and writing. And here I
+recollect, with satisfaction, a brave sub-lieutenant, whose confessor I
+was (he still owes me the confession-money), and who, in respect of
+stout-heartedness, had in him perhaps something of that Indian dog
+which Alexander had presented to him as a sort of Dog-Alexander. By way
+of trying this crack dog, the Macedonian made various heroic or
+heraldic beasts be let loose against him; first a stag; but the dog lay
+still; then a sow; he lay still; then a bear; he lay still. Alexander
+was on the point of condemning him; when a lion was let forth; the dog
+rose, and tore the lion in pieces. So likewise the sub-lieutenant. A
+challenger, a foreign enemy, a Frenchman, are to him only stag, and
+sow, and bear, and he lies still in his place; but let his oldest
+enemy, his creditor, come and knock at his gate, and demand of him
+actual smart-money for long bygone pleasures, thus presuming to rob him
+both of past and present; the sub-lieutenant rises, and throws his
+creditor down-stairs. I, alas! am still standing by the sow; and thus,
+naturally enough, misunderstood.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+128. In Love there are Summer Holidays; but in Marriage also there are
+Winter Holidays, I hope.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+_Quo_, says Livy, xii. 5, and with great justice, _quo timoris minus
+est, eo minus ferme periculi est_, The less fear you have, the less
+danger you are likely to be in. With equal justice I invert the maxim,
+and say, The less the danger, the smaller the fear; nay, there may be
+situations in which one has absolutely no knowledge of fear; and among
+these mine is to be reckoned. The more hateful, therefore, must that
+calumny about hare-heartedness appear to me.
+
+To my Holidays' Journey I shall prefix a few facts, which prove how
+easily foresight--that is to say, when a person would not resemble the
+stupid marmot, that will even attack a man out on horseback--may pass
+for cowardice. For the rest, I wish only that I could with equal ease
+wipe away a quite different reproach, that of being a foolhardy
+desperado; though I trust, in the sequel, I shall be able to advance
+some facts which invalidate it.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+143. Women have weekly at least one active and passive day of glory,
+the holy day, the Sunday. The higher ranks alone have more Sundays than
+work-days; as, in great towns, you can celebrate your Sunday on Friday
+with the Turks, on Saturday with the Jews, and on Sunday with yourself.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+What boots the heroic arm, without a hero's eye? The former readily
+grows stronger and more nervous; but the latter is not so soon ground
+sharper, like glasses. Nevertheless, the merits of foresight obtain
+from the mass of men less admiration (nay, I should say, more ridicule)
+than those of courage. Whoso, for instance, shall see me walking under
+quite cloudless skies with a wax-cloth umbrella over me, to him I shall
+probably appear ridiculous, so long as he is not aware that I carry
+this umbrella as a thunder-screen, to keep off any bolt out of the blue
+heaven (whereof there are several examples in the history of the Middle
+Ages) from striking me to death. My thunder-screen, in fact, is exactly
+that of Reimarus. On a long walking-stick I carry the wax-cloth roof;
+from the peak of which depends a string of gold-lace as a conductor;
+and this, by means of a key fastened to it, which it trails along the
+ground, will lead off every possible bolt, and easily distribute it
+over the whole superficies of the Earth. With this _Paratonnerre
+Portatif_ in my hand, I can walk about for weeks under the clear sky,
+without the smallest danger. This Diving-bell, moreover, protects me
+against something else; against shot. For who, in the latter end of
+Harvest, will give me black on white that no lurking ninny of a
+sportsman somewhere, when I am out enjoying Nature, shall so fire off
+his piece, at an angle of 45 deg., that, in falling down again, the shot
+needs only light directly on my crown, and so come to the same as if I
+had been shot through the brain from a side?
+
+It is bad enough, at any rate, that we have nothing to guard us from
+the Moon; which at present is bombarding us with stones like a very
+Turk; for this paltry little Earth's train-bearer and errand-maid
+thinks, in these rebellious times, that she too must begin, forsooth,
+to sling somewhat against her Mother! In good truth, as matters stand,
+any young Catechist of feeling may go out o' nights, with whole limbs,
+into the moonshine, a meditating; and erelong (in the midst of his
+meditation the villanous Satellite hits him) come home a pounded jelly.
+By Heaven! new proofs of courage are required of us on every hand! No
+sooner have we, with great effort, got thunder-rods manufactured, and
+comet-tails explained away, than the enemy opens new batteries in the
+Moon, or somewhere else in the Blue!
+
+
+------------------------
+
+21. Schiller and Klopstock are Poetic Mirrors held up to the Sun-god;
+the Mirrors reflect the Sun with such dazzling brightness, that you
+cannot find the Picture of the World imaged forth in them.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+Suffice one other story to manifest how ludicrous the most serious
+foresight, with all imaginable inward courage, often externally appears
+in the eyes of the many. Equestrians are well acquainted with the
+dangers of a horse that runs away. My evil star would have it that
+I should once in Vienna get upon a hack-horse; a pretty enough
+honey-colored nag, but old and hard-mouthed as Satan; so that the
+beast, in the next street, went off with me; and this in truth--only at
+a _walk_. No pulling, no tugging, took effect; I at last, on the back
+of this Self-riding-horse, made signals of distress, and cried: "Stop
+him, good people! for God's sake stop him! my horse is off!" But these
+simple persons seeing the beast move along as slowly as a Reichshofrath
+lawsuit, or the Daily Postwagen, could not in the least understand the
+matter, till I cried as if possessed: "Stop him then, ye blockheads and
+joltheads! don't you see that I cannot hold the nag?" But now, to these
+noodles the sight of a hard-mouthed horse going off with its rider step
+by step seemed ridiculous rather than otherwise; half Vienna gathered
+itself like a comet-tail behind my beast and me. Prince Kaunitz, the
+best horseman of the century (the last), pulled up to follow me. I
+myself sat and swam like a perpendicular piece of drift-ice on my
+honey-colored nag, which stalked on, on, step by step; a many-cornered,
+red-coated letter-carrier was delivering his letters, to the right and
+left, in the various stories, and he still crossed over before me
+again, with satirical features, because the nag went along too slowly.
+The Schwanzschleuderer, or Train-dasher (the person, as you know, who
+drives along the streets with a huge barrel of water, and besplashes
+them with a leathern pipe of three ells long from an iron trough), came
+across the haunches of my horse, and, in the course of his duty, wetted
+both these and myself in a very cooling manner, though, for my part, I
+had too much cold sweat on me already to need any fresh refrigeration.
+On my infernal Trojan Horse (only I myself was Troy, not beridden, but
+riding to destruction), I arrived at Malzlein (a suburb of Vienna), or
+perhaps, so confused were my senses, it might be quite another range of
+streets. At last, late in the dusk, I had to turn into the Prater; and
+here, long after the Evening Gun, to my horror, and quite against the
+police-rules, keep riding to and fro on my honey-colored nag; and
+possibly I might even have passed the night on him, had not my
+brother-in-law, the Dragoon, observed my plight, and so found me still
+sitting firm as a rock on my runaway steed. He made no ceremonies;
+caught the brute; and put the pleasant question, why I had not vaulted,
+and come off by ground-and-lofty tumbling; though he knew full well
+that for this a wooden horse, which stands still, is requisite.
+However, he took me down; and so, after all this riding, horse and man
+got home with whole skins and unbroken bones.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+84. Women are like precious carved works of ivory: nothing is whiter
+and smoother, and nothing sooner grows yellow.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+But now at last to my Journey!
+
+
+
+
+ JOURNEY TO FLAeTZ.
+
+
+
+------------------------
+
+72. The Half-learned is adored by the Quarter-learned; the latter by
+the Sixteenth-part-learned; and so on: but not the Whole-learned by the
+Half-learned.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+You are aware, my friends, that this Journey to Flaetz was necessarily
+to take place in Vacation time; not only because the Cattle-market, and
+consequently the Minister and General von Schabacker, was there then;
+but more especially because the latter (as I had it positively from a
+private hand) did annually, on the 23d of July, the market-eve, about
+five o'clock, become so full of gaudium and graciousness, that in many
+cases he did not so much snarl on people as listen to them, and grant
+their prayers. The cause of this gaudium I had rather not trust to
+paper. In short, my Petition, praying that he would be pleased to
+indemnify and reward me, as an unjustly deposed army-chaplain, by a
+Catechetical Professorship, could plainly be presented to him at no
+better season than exactly about five o'clock in the evening of the
+first dog-day. In less than a week I had finished writing my Petition.
+As I spared neither summaries nor copies of it, I had soon got so far
+as to see the relatively best lying completed before me; when, to my
+terror, I observed that in this paper I had introduced above thirty
+_dashes_, or breaks, in the middle of my sentences! Now-a-days, alas!
+these stings shoot forth involuntarily from learned pens, as tails of
+wasps. I debated long within myself whether a private scholar could
+justly be entitled to approach a minister with dashes,--greatly as this
+level interlineation of thoughts, these horizontal note-marks of
+poetical _music_-pieces, and these rope-ladders or Achilles'-tendons of
+philosophical _see_-pieces, are at present fashionable and
+indispensable; but, at last, I was obliged (as erasures may offend
+people of quality) to write my best proof-petition over again; and then
+to afflict myself for another quarter of an hour over the name Attila
+Schmelzle, seeing it is always my principle that this and the address
+of the letter, the two cardinal points of the whole, can never be
+written legibly enough.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+85. _Bien ecouter c'est presque repondre_, says Marivaux justly of
+social circles; but I extend it to round Councillor-tables and
+Cabinet-tables, where reports are made, and the Prince listens.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+
+
+ _First Stage; from Neusattel to Vierstaedten_.
+
+
+The 22d of July, or Wednesday, about five in the afternoon, was now, by
+the way-bill of the regular Post-coach, irrevocably fixed for my
+departure. I had still half a day to order my house; from which, for
+two nights and two days and a half, my breast, its breastwork and
+palisado, was now, along with my Self, to be withdrawn. Besides this,
+my good wife Bergelchen, as I call my Teutoberga, was immediately to
+travel after me, on Friday the 24th, in order to see and to make
+purchases at the yearly Fair; nay, she was ready to have gone along
+with me, the faithful spouse. I therefore assembled my little knot of
+domestics, and promulgated to them the Household Law and Valedictory
+Rescript, which, after my departure, in the first place _before_ the
+outset of my wife, and in the second place _after_ this outset, they
+had rigorously to obey; explaining to them especially whatever, in case
+of conflagrations, housebreakings, thunder-storms, or transits of
+troops, it would behoove them to do. To my wife I delivered an
+inventory of the best goods in our little Registership; which goods
+she, in case the house took fire, had, in the first place, to secure. I
+ordered her in stormy nights (the peculiar thief-weather) to put our
+AEolian harp in the window, that so any villanous prowler might imagine
+I was fantasying on my instrument, and therefore awake; for like
+reasons, also, to take the house-dog within doors by day, that he might
+sleep then, and so be livelier at night. I further counselled
+her to have an eye on the focus of every knot in the panes of the
+stable-window, nay, on every glass of water she might set down in the
+house; as I had already often recounted to her examples of such
+accidental burning-glasses having set whole buildings in flames. I then
+appointed her the hour when she was to set out on Friday morning to
+follow me; and recapitulated more emphatically the household precepts
+which, prior to her departure, she must afresh inculcate on her
+domestics. My dear, heart-sound, blooming Berga answered her faithful
+lord, as it seemed very seriously: "Go thy ways, little old one; it
+shall all be done as smooth as velvet. Wert thou but away! There is no
+end of thee!" Her brother, my brother-in-law, the Dragoon, for whom,
+out of complaisance, I had paid the coach-fare, in order to have in the
+vehicle along with me a stout swordsman and hector, as spiritual
+relative and bully-rock, so to speak; the Dragoon, I say, on hearing
+these my regulations, puckered up (which I easily forgave the wild
+soldier and bachelor) his sun-burnt face considerably into ridicule,
+and said: "Were I in thy place, sister, I should do what I liked, and
+then afterwards take a peep into these regulation-papers of his."
+
+
+------------------------
+
+17. The Bed of Honor, since so frequently whole regiments lie on it,
+and receive their last unction, and last honor but one, really ought
+from time to time be new-filled, beaten, and sunned.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+"Oh!" answered I, "misfortune may conceal itself like a scorpion in any
+corner; I might say, we are like children, who, looking at their gayly
+painted toy-box, soon pull off the lid, and, pop! out springs a mouse
+who has young ones."
+
+"Mouse, mouse!" said he, stepping up and down. "But, good brother, it
+is five o'clock; and you will find, when you return, that all looks
+exactly as it does to-day; the dog like the dog, and my sister like a
+pretty woman; _allons donc_!" It was purely his blame that I, fearing
+his misconceptions, had not previously made a sort of testament.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+120. Many a one becomes a free-spoken Diogenes, not when he dwells in
+the Cask, but when the Cask dwells in him.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+I now packed in two different sorts of medicines, heating as well as
+cooling, against two different possibilities; also my old splints for
+arm or leg breakages, in case the coach overset; and (out of foresight)
+two times the money I was likely to need. Only here I could have
+wished, so uncertain is the stowage of such things, that I had been an
+Ape with cheek-pouches, or some sort of Opossum with a natural bag,
+that so I might have reposited these necessaries of existence in
+pockets which were sensitive. Shaving is a task I always go through
+before setting out on journeys; having a rational mistrust against
+stranger bloodthirsty barbers; but, on this occasion, I retained my
+beard; since, however close shaved, it would have grown again by the
+road to such a length that I could have fronted no Minister and General
+with it.
+
+With a vehement emotion, I threw myself on the pith-heart of my Berga,
+and with a still more vehement one, tore myself away; in her, however,
+this our first marriage-separation seemed to produce less lamentation
+than triumph, less consternation than rejoicing; simply because she
+turned her eye not half so much on the parting, as on the meeting, and
+the journey after me, and the wonders of the Fair. Yet she threw and
+hung herself on my somewhat long and thin neck and body, almost
+painfully, being, indeed, a too fleshy and weighty load, and said to
+me: "Whisk thee off quick, my charming Attel (Attila), and trouble thy
+head with no cares by the way, thou singular man! A whiff or two of ill
+luck we can stand, by God's help, so long as my father is no beggar.
+And for thee, Franz," continued she, turning with some heat to her
+brother, "I leave my Attel on thy soul; thou well knowest, thou wild
+fly, what I wilt do, if thou play the fool, and leave him anywhere in
+the lurch." Her meaning here was good, and I could not take it ill; to
+you, also, my Friends, her wealth and her open-heartedness are nothing
+new.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+8. Culture makes whole lands, for instance Germany, Gaul, and others,
+physically warmer, but spiritually colder.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+Melted into sensibility, I said: "Now, Berga, if there be a reunion
+appointed for us, surely it is either in Heaven or in Flaetz; and I hope
+in God, the latter." With these words, we whirled stoutly away. I
+looked round through the back-window of the coach at my good little
+village of Neusattel, and it seemed to me, in my melting mood, as if
+its steeples were rising aloft like an epitaphium over my life,
+or over my body, perhaps to return a lifeless corpse. "How will it all
+be," thought I, "when thou at last, after two or three days, comest
+back?" And now I noticed my Bergelchen looking after us from the
+garret-window; I leaned far out from the coach-door, and her falcon eye
+instantly distinguished my head; kiss on kiss she threw with both
+hands after the carriage, as it rolled down into the valley. "Thou
+true-hearted wife," thought I, "how is thy lowly birth, by thy
+spiritual new-birth, made forgetable, nay, remarkable!"
+
+
+------------------------
+
+1. The more Weakness the more Lying. Force goes straight; any
+cannon-ball with holes or cavities in it goes crooked.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+I must confess, the assemblage and conversational picnic of the
+stage-coach was much less to my taste; the whole of them suspicious,
+unknown rabble, whom (as markets usually do) the Flaetz cattle-market
+was alluring by its scent. I dislike becoming acquainted with
+strangers; not so my brother-in-law, the Dragoon; who now, as he always
+does, had in a few minutes elbowed himself into close quarters with the
+whole ragamuffin posse of them. Beside me sat a person, who, in all
+human probability, was a Harlot; on her breast a Dwarf intending to
+exhibit himself at the Fair; on the other side was a Rat-catcher gazing
+at me; and a Blind Passenger,[73] in a red mantle, had joined us down
+in the valley. No one of them, except my brother-in-law, pleased me.
+That rascals among these people would not study me and my properties
+and accidents, to entangle me in their snares, no man could be my
+surety. In strange places, I even, out of prudence, avoid looking long
+up at any jail-window; because some losel, sitting behind the bars, may
+in a moment call down out of mere malice: "How goes it, comrade
+Schmelzle?" or, further, because any lurking catchpole may fancy I am
+planning a rescue for some confederate above. From another sort of
+prudence, little different from this, I also make a point of never
+turning round when any booby calls, Thief! after me.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+88. Epictetus advises us to travel, because our old acquaintances, by
+the influence of shame, impede our transition to higher virtues; as a
+bashful man will rather lay aside his provincial accent in some foreign
+quarter, and then return wholly purified to his own countrymen. In our
+days, people of rank and virtue follow this advice, but inversely; and
+travel because their old acquaintances, by the influence of shame,
+would too much deter them from new sins.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+As to the Dwarf himself, I had no objection to his travelling with me
+whithersoever he pleased; but he thought to raise a particular
+delectation in our minds, by promising that his Pollux and Brother in
+Trade, an extraordinary Giant who was also making for the Fair to
+exhibit himself, would by midnight, with his elephantine pace,
+infallibly overtake the coach, and plant himself among us, or behind on
+the outside. Both these noodies, it appeared, are in the habit of going
+in company to fairs, as reciprocal exaggerators of opposite magnitudes;
+the Dwarf is the convex magnifying-glass of the Giant, the Giant the
+concave diminishing-glass of the Dwarf. Nobody expressed much joy at
+the prospective arrival of this Anti-dwarf, except my brother-in-law,
+who (if I may venture on a play of words) seems made, like a clock,
+solely for the purpose of _striking_, and once actually said to me,
+that "if in the Upper world he could not get a soul to curry and towzle
+by a time, he would rather go to the Under, where most probably there
+would be plenty of cuffing and to spare." The Rat-catcher--besides the
+circumstance that no man can prepossess us much in his favor, who
+lives solely by poisoning, like this Destroying Angel of rats, this
+mouse-Atropos; and also, which is still worse, that such a fellow bids
+fair to become an increaser of the vermin kingdom the moment he may
+cease to be a lessener of it--besides all this, I say, the present
+Rat-catcher had many baneful features about him. First, his stabbing
+look, piercing you like a stiletto; then the lean, sharp, bony visage,
+conjoined with his enumeration of his considerable stock of poisons;
+then (for I hated him more and more) his sly stillness, his sly smile,
+as if in some corner he noticed a mouse, as he would notice a man! To
+me, I declare, though usually I take not the slightest exception
+against people's looks, it seemed at last as if his throat were a
+Dog-grotto, a _Grotta del cane_, his cheekbones cliffs and breakers,
+his hot breath the wind of a calcining furnace, and his black, hairy
+breast, a kiln for parching and roasting.
+
+Nor was I far wrong, I believe; for soon after this, he began quite
+coolly to inform the company, in which were a dwarf and a female, that,
+in his time, he had, not without enjoyment, run ten men through the
+body; had with great convenience hewed off a dozen men's arms; slowly
+split four heads, torn out two hearts, and more of the like sort; while
+none of them, otherwise persons of spirit, had in the least resisted.
+"But why?" added he with a poisonous smile, and taking the hat from his
+odious baldpate; "I am invulnerable. Let any one of the company that
+chooses lay as much fire on my bare crown as he likes, I shall not mind
+it."
+
+My brother-in-law, the Dragoon, directly kindled his tinder-box, and
+put a heap of the burning matter on the Rat-catcher's pole; but the
+fellow stood it, as if it had been a mere picture of fire, and the two
+looked expectingly at one another; and the former smiled very
+foolishly, saying: "It was simply pleasant to him, like a good
+warming-plaster; for this was always the wintry region of his body."
+
+Here the Dragoon groped a little on the naked scull, and cried with
+amazement, that "it was as cold as a knee-pan."
+
+
+------------------------
+
+32. Our Age (by some called the Paper Age, as if it were made from the
+rags of some better dressed one) is improving in so far as it now
+tears, its rags rather into Bandages than into Papers; although,
+or because, the Rag-hacker (the Devil as they call it) will not
+altogether be at rest. Meanwhile, if Learned Heads transform themselves
+into Books, Crowned Heads transform and coin themselves into
+Government-paper. In Norway, according to the _Universal Indicator_,
+the people have even paper-houses; and in many good German States, the
+Exchequer Collegium (to say nothing of the Justice Collegium) keeps
+its own paper-mills, to furnish wrappage enough for the meal of its
+wind-mills. I could wish, however, that our Collegiums would take
+pattern from that Glass Manufactory at Madrid, in which (according to
+Baumgaertner) there were indeed nineteen clerks stationed, but also
+eleven workmen.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+But now the fellow, to our horror, after some preparations, actually
+lifted off the quarter-skull and held it out to us, saying: "He had
+sawed it off a murderer, his own having accidentally been broken"; and
+withal explained, that the stabbing and arm-cutting he had talked of
+was to be understood as a jest, seeing he had merely done it in the
+character of Famulus at an Anatomical Theatre. However, the jester
+seemed to rise little in favor with any of us; and for my part, as he
+put his brain-lid and sham-skull on again, I thought to myself: "This
+dung-bed-bell has changed its place, indeed, but not the hemlock it was
+made to cover."
+
+Further, I could not but reckon it a suspicious circumstance, that he
+as well as all the company (the Blind Passenger too) were making for
+this very Flaetz, to which I myself was bound. Much good I could not
+expect of this; and, in truth, turning home again would have been as
+pleasant to me as going on, had I not rather felt a pleasure in defying
+the future.
+
+I come now to the red-mantled Blind Passenger; most probably an
+_Emigre_ or _Refugie_; for he speaks German not worse than he does
+French; and his name, I think, was _Jean Pierre_ or _Jean Paul_, or
+some such thing, if indeed he had any name. His red cloak,
+notwithstanding this his identity of color with the Hangman, would in
+itself have remained heartily indifferent to me; had it not been for
+this singular circumstance, that he had already five times, contrary to
+all expectation, come upon me in five different towns (in great Berlin,
+in little Hof, in Coburg, Meiningen, and Bayreuth), and, each of these
+times, had looked at me significantly enough, and then gone his ways.
+Whether this _Jean Pierre_ is dogging me with hostile intent or not, I
+cannot say; but to our fancy, at any rate, no object can be gratifying
+that thus, with corps of observation, or out of loop-holes, holds and
+aims at us with muskets, which for year after year it shall move to
+this side and that, without our knowing on whom it is to fire. Still
+more offensive did Redcloak become to me, when he began to talk about
+his soft mildness of soul; a thing which seemed either to betoken
+pumping you or undermining you.
+
+I replied: "Sir, I am just come, with my brother-in-law here, from the
+field of battle (the last affair was at Pimpelstadt), and so perhaps am
+too much of a humor for fire, pluck, and war-fury; and to many a one,
+who happens to have a roaring waterspout of a heart, it may be well if
+his clerical character (which is mine) rather enjoins on him mildness
+than wildness. However, all mildness has its iron limit. If any
+thoughtless dog chance to anger me, in the first heat of rage I kick my
+foot through him; and after me, my good brother here will perhaps drive
+matters twice as far, for he is the man to do it. Perhaps it may be
+singular; but I confess, I regret to this day, that once when a boy I
+received three blows from another, without tightly returning them; and
+I often feel as if I must still pay them to his descendants. In sooth,
+if I but chance to see a child running off like a dastard from the weak
+attack of a child like himself, I cannot for my life understand his
+running, and can scarcely keep from interfering to save him by a
+decisive knock."
+
+The Passenger meanwhile was smiling, not in the best fashion. He gave
+himself out for a Legations-Rath, and seemed fox enough for such a
+post; but a mad fox will, in the long run, bite me as rabidly as a mad
+wolf will. For the rest, I calmly went on with my eulogy on courage;
+only that, instead of ludicrous gasconading, which directly betrays the
+coward, I purposely expressed myself in words at once cool, clear, and
+firm.
+
+"I am altogether for Montaigne's advice," said I: "'Fear nothing but
+fear.'"
+
+"I again," replied the Legations-man, with useless wire-drawing, "I
+should fear again that I did not sufficiently fear fear, but continued
+too dastardly."
+
+"To this fear also," replied I, coldly, "I set limits. A man, for
+instance, may not in the least believe in or be afraid of ghosts; and
+yet by night may bathe himself in cold sweat, and this purely out of
+terror at the dreadful fright he should be in (especially with what
+whiffs of epilepsies, falling-sicknesses, and so forth, he might be
+visited), in case simply his own too vivid fancy should create any wild
+fever-image, and hang it up in the air before him."
+
+"One should not, therefore," added my brother-in-law the Dragoon,
+contrary to his custom, moralizing a little,--"one should not bamboozle
+the poor sheep, man, with any ghost-tricks; the henheart may die on the
+spot."
+
+
+------------------------
+
+2. In his Prince, a soldier reverences and obeys at once his Prince and
+his Generalissimo; a Citizen, only his Prince.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+A loud storm of thunder overtaking the stage-coach altered the
+discourse. You, my Friends, knowing me as a man not quite destitute of
+some tincture of Natural Philosophy, will easily guess my precautions
+against thunder. I place myself on a chair in the middle of the room
+(often, when suspicious clouds are out, I stay whole nights on it), and
+by careful removal of all conductors, rings, buckles, and so forth, I
+here sit thunder-proof, and listen with a cool spirit to this elemental
+music of the cloud-kettledrum. These precautions have never harmed me,
+for I am still alive at this date; and to the present hour I
+congratulate myself on once hurrying out of church, though I had
+confessed but the day previous; and running, without more ceremony,
+and before I had received the sacrament, into the charnel-house,
+because a heavy thunder-cloud (which did, in fact, strike the
+churchyard linden-tree) was hovering over it. So soon as the cloud had
+disloaded itself, I returned from the charnel-house into the church,
+and was happy enough to come in after the Hangman (usually the last),
+and so still participate in the Feast of Love.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+45. Our present writers shrug their shoulders most at those on whose
+shoulders they stand; and exalt those most who crawl up along them.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+Such, for my own part, is my manner of proceeding; but in the full
+stage-coach I met with men to whom Natural Philosophy was no philosophy
+at all. For when the clouds gathered dreadfully together over our
+coach-canopy, and sparkling, began to play through the air, like so
+many fireflies, and I at last could not but request that the sweating
+coach-conclave would at least bring out their watches, rings, money,
+and such like, and put them all into one of the carriage-pockets, that
+none of us might have a conductor on his body; not only would no one of
+them do it, but my own brother-in-law the Dragoon even sprang out, with
+naked drawn sword, to the coach-box, and swore that he would conduct
+the thunder all away himself. Nor do I know whether this desperate
+mortal was not acting prudently; for our position within was frightful,
+and any one of us might every moment be a dead man. At last, to crown
+all, I got into a half altercation with two of the rude members of our
+leathern household, the Poisoner and the Harlot; seeing, by their
+questions, they almost gave me to understand, that, in our
+conversational picnic, especially with the Blind Passenger, I had not
+always come off with the best share. Such an imputation wounds your
+honor to the quick; and in my breast there was a thunder louder than
+that above us. However, I was obliged to carry on the needful exchange
+of sharp words as quietly and slowly as possible; and I quarrelled
+softly, and in a low tone, lest in the end a whole coachful of people,
+set in arms against each other, might get into heat and perspiration;
+and so, by vapor steaming through the coach-roof, conduct the too near
+thunderbolt down into the midst of us. At last I laid before the
+company the whole theory of Electricity in clear words, but low and
+slow (striving to avoid all emission of vapor); and especially
+endeavored to frighten them away from fear. For, indeed, through fear,
+the stroke--nay, two strokes, the electric or the apoplectic--might hit
+any one of us; since in Erxleben and Reimarus it is sufficiently proved
+that violent fear, by the transpiration it causes, may attract the
+lightning. I accordingly, in some fear of my own and other people's
+fear, represented to the passengers that now, in a coach so hot and
+crowded, with a drawn sword on the coach-box piercing the very
+lightning, with the thunder-cloud hanging over us, and even with so
+many transpirations from incipient fear; in short, with such visible
+danger on every hand, they must absolutely fear nothing, if they would
+not, all and sundry, be smitten to death in a few minutes.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+103. The Great perhaps take as good charge of their posterity as the
+Ants; the eggs once laid, the male and female Ants fly about their
+business, and confide them to the trusty _working-Ants_.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+"O Heaven!" cried I, "Courage! only courage! No fear, not even fear of
+fear! Would you have Providence to shoot you here sitting, like so many
+hares hunted into a pinfold? Fear, if you like, when you are out of the
+coach; fear to your heart's content in other places, where there is
+less to be afraid of; only not here, not here!"
+
+I shall not determine--since among millions scarcely one man dies by
+thunder-clouds, but millions perhaps by snow-clouds, and rain-clouds,
+and thin mist--whether my Coach-sermon could have made any claim to a
+prize for man-saving; however, at last, all uninjured, and driving
+towards a rainbow, we entered the town of Vierstaedten, where dwelt a
+Postmaster, in the only street which the place had.
+
+
+
+
+ _Second Stage; from Vierstaedten to Niederschoena_.
+
+
+The Postmaster was a churl and a striker; a class of mortals whom I
+inexpressibly detest, as my fancy always whispers to me, in their
+presence, that by accident or dislike I might happen to put on a
+scornful or impertinent look, and hound these mastiffs on my own
+throat; and so, from the very first, I must incessantly watch them.
+Happily, in this case (supposing I even had made a wrong face), I could
+have shielded myself with the Dragoon; for whose giant force such
+matters are a tidbit. This brother-in-law of mine, for example, cannot
+pass any tavern where he hears a sound of battle, without entering,
+and, as he crosses the threshold, shouting, "Peace, dogs!"--and
+therewith, under show of a peace deputation, he directly snatches
+up the first chair-leg in his hand, as if it were an American
+peace-calumet, and cuts to the right and left among the belligerent
+powers, or he gnashes the hard heads of the parties together (he
+himself takes no side), catching each by the hind-lock. In such cases
+the rogue is in Heaven!
+
+
+------------------------
+
+10. And does Life offer us, in regard to our ideal hopes and purposes,
+anything but a prosaic, unrhymed, unmetrical Translation?
+
+78. Our German frame of Government, cased in its harness, had much
+difficulty in moving, for the same reason why Beetles cannot fly,
+when their _wings_ have _wing-shells_, of very sufficient strength,
+and--grown together.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+I, for my part, rather avoid discrepant circles than seek them; as I
+likewise avoid all dead or killed people. The prudent man easily
+foresees what is to be got by them; either vexatious and injurious
+witnessing, or often even (when circumstances conspire) painful
+investigation, and suspicions of your being an accomplice.
+
+In Vierstaedten nothing of importance presented itself, except--to my
+horror--a dog without tail, which came running along the town or
+street. In the first fire of passion at this sight, I pointed it out to
+the passengers, and then put the question, whether they could reckon a
+system of Medical Police well arranged, which, like this of
+Vierstaedten, allowed dogs openly to scour about, when their tails were
+wanting. "What am I to do," said I, "when this member is cut away, and
+any such beast comes running towards me, and I cannot, either by the
+tail being cocked up or being drawn in, since the whole is snipt off,
+come to any conclusion whether the vermin is mad or not? In this way,
+the most prudent man may be bit, and become rabid, and so make
+shipwreck purely for want of a tail compass."
+
+
+------------------------
+
+8. Constitutions of Government are like highways; on a new and quite
+untrodden one, where every carriage helps in the process of bruising
+and smoothing, you are as much jolted and pitched, as an old worn-out
+one, full of holes. What is to be done then? Travel on.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+The Blind Passenger (he now got himself inscribed as a Seeing one, God
+knows for what objects) had heard my observation; which he now spun out
+in my presence almost into ridicule, and at last awakened in me the
+suspicion, that, by an overdone flattery in imitating my style of
+speech, he meant to banter me. "The Dog-tail," said he, "is, in truth,
+an alarm-beacon, and finger-post for us, that we come not even into the
+outmost precincts of madness; cut away from Comets their tails, from
+Bashaws theirs, from Crabs theirs (outstretched it denotes that they
+are burst); and in the most dangerous predicaments of life, we are left
+without clew, without indicator, without hand _in margine_; and we
+perish not so much as knowing how."
+
+For the rest, this stage passed over without quarreling or peril. About
+ten o'clock, the whole party, including even the Postilion, myself
+excepted, fell asleep. I indeed pretended to be sleeping, that I might
+observe whether some one, for his own good reasons, might not also be
+pretending it. But all continued snoring; the moon threw its
+brightening beams on nothing but downpressed eyelids.
+
+I had now a glorious opportunity of following Lavater's counsel, to
+apply the physiognomical ellwand specially to sleepers, since sleep,
+like death, expresses the genuine form in coarser lines. Other sleepers
+not in stage-coaches I think it less advisable to mete with this
+ellwand; having always an apprehension lest some fellow, but pretending
+to be asleep, may, the instant I am near enough, start up as in a
+dream, and deceitfully plant such a knock on the physiognomical
+mensurator's own facial structure, as to exclude it forever from
+appearing in any Physiognomical Fragments (itself being reduced to
+one), either in the stippled or line style. Nay, might not the most
+honest sleeper in the world, just while you are in hand with his
+physiognomical dissection, lay about him, spurred on by honor in some
+cudgelling-scene he may be dreaming; and in a few instants of
+clapperclawing, and kicking, and trampling, lull you into a much more
+lasting sleep than that out of which he was awakened?
+
+
+------------------------
+
+8. In Criminal Courts, murdered children are often represented as
+still-born; in Anticritiques, still-born as murdered.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+In my _Adumbrating Magic-lantern_, as I have named the Work, the
+whole physiognomical contents of this same sleeping stage-coach will be
+given to the world. There I shall explain to you at large how the
+Poisoner, with the murder-cupola, appeared to me devil-like; the Dwarf
+old-child-like; the Harlot languidly shameless; my Brother-in-law
+peacefully satisfied, with revenge or food; and the Legations-Rath,
+_Jean Pierre_, Heaven only knows why, like a half angel,--though,
+perhaps, it might be because only the fair body, not the other half,
+the soul, which had passed away in sleep, was affecting me.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+101. Not only were the Rhodians, from their Colossus, called
+Colossians; but also innumerable Germans are, from their Luther, called
+Lutherans.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+I had almost forgotten to mention, that, in a little village, while my
+Brother-in-law and the Postilion were sitting at their liquor, I
+happily fronted a small terror, Destiny having twice been on my side.
+Not far from a Hunting Box, beside a pretty clump of trees, I noticed a
+white tablet, with a black inscription on it. This gave me hopes that
+perhaps some little monumental piece, some pillar of honor, some battle
+memento, might here be awaiting me. Over an untrodden flowery tangle I
+reach the black on white; and to my horror and amazement I decipher in
+the moonshine, _Beware of Spring-guns!_ Thus was I standing perhaps
+half a nail's breadth from the trigger, with which, if I but stirred my
+heel, I should shoot myself off, like a forgotten ramrod, into the
+other world, beyond the verge of Time! The first thing I did was to
+slutch down my toe-nails, to bite, and, as it were, eat myself into the
+ground with them; since I might, at least, continue in warm life so
+long as I pegged my body firmly in beside the Atropos-scissors and
+hangman's block, which lay beside me. Then I endeavored to recollect by
+what steps the Fiend had led me hither unshot, but in my agony I had
+perspired the whole of it, and could remember nothing. In the Devil's
+village, close at hand, there was no dog to be seen and called to, who
+might have plucked me from the water; and my Brother-in-law and the
+Postilion were both carousing with full can. However, I summoned my
+courage and determination; wrote down on a leaf of my pocket-book my
+last will, the accidental manner of my death, and my dying remembrance
+of Berga; and then, with full sails, flew helter-skelter through the
+midst of it the shortest way; expecting at every step to awaken the
+murderous engine, and thus to clap over my still long candle of life
+the bonsoir, or extinguisher, with my own hand. However, I got off
+without shot. In the tavern, indeed, there was more than one fool to
+laugh at me; because, forsooth, what none but a fool could know, this
+Notice had stood there for the last ten years without any gun, as guns
+often do without any notice. But so it is, my Friends, with our
+game-police, which warns against all things, only not against warnings.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+88. Hitherto I have always regarded the Polemical writings of our
+present philosophic and aesthetic Idealist Logic-buffers,--in which,
+certainly, a few contumelies, and misconceptions, and misconclusions do
+make their appearance,--rather on the fair side; observing in it merely
+an imitation of classical Antiquity, in particular of the ancient
+Athletes, who (according to Schoettgen) besmeared their bodies with
+_mud_, that they might not be laid hold of; and filled their hands with
+_sand_, that they might lay hold of their antagonists.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+For the rest, throughout the whole stage, I had a constant source of
+altercation with the coachman, because he grudged stopping perhaps
+once in the quarter of an hour, when I chose to come out for a
+natural purpose. Unhappily, in truth, one has little reason to expect
+water-doctors among the postilion class, since Physicians themselves
+have so seldom learned from Haller's large _Physiology_ that a
+postponement of the above operation will precipitate devilish
+stone-ware, and at last precipitate the proprietor himself; this
+stone-manufactory being generally concluded, not by the Lithotomist,
+but by Death. Had postilions read that Tycho Brahe died like a
+bombshell by bursting, they would rather pull up for a moment; with
+such unlooked-for knowledge, they would see it to be reasonable that a
+man, though expecting some time to carry his death-stone _on_ him,
+should not incline, for the time being, to carry it _in_ him. Nay, have
+I not often, at Weimar, in the longest concluding scenes of Schiller,
+run out with tears in my eyes; purely that, while his Minerva was
+melting me on the whole, I might not by the Gorgon's head on her breast
+be partially turned to stone? And did I not return to the weeping
+play-house, and fall into the general emotion so much the more briskly,
+as now I had nothing to give vent to but my heart?
+
+
+------------------------
+
+103. Or are all Mosques, Episcopal-churches, Pagodas, Chapels-of-Ease,
+Tabernacles, and Pantheons, anything else than the Ethnic Forecourt of
+the Invisible Temple and its Holy of Holies?
+
+------------------------
+
+
+Deep in the dark we arrived at Niederschoena.
+
+
+
+
+ _Third Stage; from Niederschoena to Flaetz_.
+
+
+While I am standing at the Posthouse musing, with my eye fixed on my
+portmanteau, comes a beast of a watchman, and bellows and brays in his
+night-tube so close by my ear that I start back in trepidation, I whom
+even a too hasty accosting will vex. Is there no medical police, then,
+against such efflated hour-fulminators and alarm-cannon, by which
+notwithstanding no gunpowder cannon are saved? In my opinion nobody
+should be invested with the watchman-horn but some reasonable man, who
+had already blown himself into an asthma, and who would consequently be
+in case to sing out his hour-verse so low that you could not hear it.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+40. The common man is copious only in narration, not in reasoning; the
+cultivated man is brief only in the former, not in the latter; because
+the common man's reasons are a sort of sensations, which, as well as
+things visible, he merely _looks at_; by the cultivated man, again,
+both reasons and things visible are rather _thought_ than looked at.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+What I had long expected, and the Dwarf predicted, now took place;
+deeply stooping, through the high Posthouse door, issued the Giant,
+and raised in the open air a most unreasonably high figure, heightened
+by the ell-long bonnet and feather on his huge jobbernowl. My
+Brother-in-law, beside him, looked but like his son of fourteen years;
+the Dwarf like his lap-dog waiting for him on its two hind legs. "Good
+friend," said my bantering Brother-in-law, leading him towards me and
+the stagecoach, "just step softly in, we shall all be happy to make
+room for you. Fold yourself neatly together, lay your head on your
+knee, and it will do." The unseasonable banterer would willingly have
+seen the almost stupid Giant (of whom he had soon observed that his
+brain was no active substance, but in the inverse ratio of his trunk)
+squeezed in among us in the post-chest, and lying kneaded together like
+a sand-bag before him. "Won't do! Won't do!" said the Giant, looking
+in. "The gentleman perhaps does not know," said the Dwarf, "how big the
+Giant is; and so he thinks that because _I_ go in-- But that is another
+story; _I_ will creep into any hole, do but tell me where."
+
+In short, there was no resource for the Postmaster and the Giant, but
+that the latter should plant himself behind, in the character of
+luggage, and there lie bending down like a weeping willow over the
+whole vehicle. To me such a back-wall and rear-guard could not be
+particularly gratifying; and I may refer it (I hope) to any one of you,
+ye Friends, if with such ware at your back you would not, as clearly
+and earnestly as I, have considered what manifold murderous projects a
+knave of a Giant behind you, a _pursuer_ in all senses, might not
+maliciously attempt; say, that he broke in and assailed you by the
+back-window, or with Titanian strength laid hold of the coach-roof and
+demolished the whole party in a lump. However, this Elephant (who
+indeed seemed to owe the similarity more to his overpowering mass than
+to his quick light of inward faculty), crossing his arms over the top
+of the vehicle, soon began to sleep and snore above us; an Elephant, of
+whom, as I more and more joyfully observed, my Brother-in-law, the
+Dragoon, could easily be the tamer and bridle-holder, nay, had already
+been so.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+9. In any national calamity the ancient Egyptians took revenge on the
+god Typhon, whom they blamed for it, by hurling his favorites, the
+Asses, down over rocks. In similar wise have countries of a different
+religion now and then taken their revenge.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+As more than one person now felt inclined to sleep, but I, on the
+contrary, as was proper, to wake, I freely offered my seat of honor,
+the front place in the coach (meaning thereby to abolish many little
+flaws of envy in my fellow-passengers), to such persons as wished to
+take a nap thereon. The Legation's man accepted the offer with
+eagerness, and soon fell asleep there sitting, under the Titan.[74] To
+me this sort of coach-sleeping of a diplomatic _charge d'affaires_
+remained a thing incomprehensible. A man, that in the middle of a
+stranger and often barbarously-minded company permits himself to
+slumber, may easily, supposing him to talk in his sleep and coach,
+(think of the Saxon minister[75] before the Seven Years' War!) blab out
+a thousand secrets, and crimes, some of which, perhaps, he has not
+committed. Should not every minister, ambassador, or other man of honor
+and rank, really shudder at the thought of insanity or violent fevers;
+seeing no mortal can be his surety that he shall not in such cases
+publish the greatest scandals, of which, it may be, the half are lies?
+
+
+------------------------
+
+70. Let Poetry veil itself in Philosophy, but only as the latter does
+in the former. Philosophy in poetized Prose resembles those tavern
+drinking-glasses, encircled with party-colored wreaths of figures,
+which disturb your enjoyment both of the drink, and (often awkwardly
+eclipsing and covering each other) of the carving also.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+At last, after the long July night, we passengers, together with
+Aurora, arrived in the precincts of Flaetz. I looked with a sharp
+yet moistened eye at the steeples. I believe, every man who has
+anything decisive to seek in a town, and to whom it is either to be a
+judgment-seat of his hopes, or their anchoring-station, either a
+battle-field or a sugar-field, first and longest directs his eye on the
+steeples of the town, as upon the indexes and balance-tongues of his
+future destiny; these artificial peaks, which, like natural ones, are
+the thrones of our Future. As I happened to express myself on this
+point perhaps too poetically to _Jean Pierre_, he answered with
+sufficient want of taste: "The steeples of such towns are indeed the
+Swiss Alpine peaks, on which we milk and manufacture the Swiss cheese
+of our Future." Did the Legations-Peter mean with this style to make me
+ridiculous, or only himself? Determine!
+
+"Here is the place, the town," said I in secret, "where to-day much and
+for many years is to be determined, where thou this evening, about five
+o'clock, art to present thy petition and thyself. May it prosper! May
+it be successful! Let Flaetz, this arena of thy little efforts among the
+rest, become a building-space for fair castles and air-castles to two
+hearts, thy own and thy Berga's!"
+
+At the Tiger Inn I alighted.
+
+
+
+
+ _First Day in Flaetz_.
+
+
+No mortal in my situation at this Tiger-hotel would have triumphed much
+in his more immediate prospects. I, as the only man known to me,
+especially in the way of love (of the runaway Dragoon anon!), looked
+out from the windows of the overflowing Inn, and down on the rushing
+sea of marketers, and very soon began to reflect, that, except Heaven
+and the rascals and murderers, none knew how many of the latter two
+classes were floating among the tide; purposing, perhaps, to lay hold
+of the most innocent strangers, and in part cut their purses, in part
+their throats. My situation had a special circumstance against it. My
+brother-in-law, who still comes plump out with everything, had
+mentioned that I was to put up at the Tiger. O Heaven! when will such
+people learn to be secret, and to cover even the meanest pettinesses of
+life under mantles and veils, were it only that a silly mouse may as
+often give birth to a mountain as a mountain to a mouse! The whole
+rabble of the stagecoach stopped at the Tiger; the Harlot, the
+Rat-catcher, _Jean Pierre_, the Giant, who had dismounted at the Gate
+of the town, and carrying the huge block-head of the Dwarf on his
+shoulders as his own (cloaking over the deception by his cloak), had
+thus, like a ninny, exhibited himself gratis by half a dwarf more
+gigantic than he could be seen for money.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+158. Governments should not too often change the penny-trumps and
+child's drums of the Poets for the regimental trumpet and fire-drum;
+on the other hand, good subjects should regard many a princely
+drum-tendency simply as a disease, in which the patient, by air
+insinuating under the skin, has got dreadfully swoln.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+And now for each of the Passengers, the question was how he could make
+the Tiger, the heraldic emblem of the Inn, his prototype; and so what
+lamb he might suck the blood of, and tear in pieces, and devour. My
+brother-in-law too left me, having gone in quest of some horse-dealer;
+but he retained the chamber next mine for his sister; this, it
+appeared, was to denote attention on his part. I remained solitary,
+left to my own intrepidity and force of purpose.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+89. In great towns, a stranger, for the first day or two after his
+arrival, lives purely at his own expense, in an inn; afterwards, in the
+houses of his friends, without expense; on the other hand, if you
+arrive at the Earth, as for instance I have done, you are courteously
+maintained, precisely for the first few years, free of charges; but in
+the next and longer series--for you often stay sixty--you are actually
+obliged (I have the documents in my hands) to pay for every drop and
+morsel, as if you were in the great Earth Inn, which indeed you are.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+Yet among so many villains, encompassing if not even beleaguring me, I
+thought warmly of one far distant, faithful soul, of my Berga in
+Neusattel; a true heart of pith, which perhaps with many a weak
+marriage-partner might have given protection rather than sought it.
+
+"Appear, then, quickly to-morrow at noon, Berga," said my heart; "and
+if possible before noon, that I may lengthen thy market paradise so
+many hours as thou arrivest earlier!"
+
+
+------------------------
+
+107. Germany is a long lofty mountain--under the sea.
+
+144. The Reviewer does not in reality employ his pen for writing; but
+he burns it, to awaken weak people from their swoons with the smell; he
+tickles with it the throat of the plagiary, to make him render back;
+and he picks with it his own teeth. He is the only individual in the
+whole learned lexicon that can never exhaust himself, never write
+himself out, let him sit before the ink-glass for centuries, or tens of
+centuries. For while the Scholar, the Philosopher, and the Poet produce
+their new book solely from new materials and growth, the Reviewer
+merely lays his old gauge of taste and knowledge on a thousand new
+works; and his light, in the ever-passing, ever-differently-cut
+glass-world, which he _elucidates_, is still refracted into new colors.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+A clergyman, amid the tempests of the world, readily makes for a free
+harbor, for the church; the church-wall is his casement-wall and
+fortification; and behind are to be found more peaceful and more
+accordant souls than on the market-place; in short, I went into the
+High Church. However, in the course of the psalm, I was somewhat
+disturbed by a Heiduc, who came up to a well-dressed young gentleman
+sitting opposite me, and tore the double opera-glass from his nose, it
+being against rule in Flaetz, as it is in Dresden, to look at the Court
+with glasses which diminish and approximate. I myself had on a pair of
+spectacles, but they were magnifiers. It was impossible for me to
+resolve on taking them off; and here again, I am afraid, I shall pass
+for a foolhardy person and a desperado; so much only I reckoned fit, to
+look invariably into my psalm-book; not once lifting my eyes while the
+Court was rustling and entering, thereby to denote that my glasses were
+ground convex. For the rest, the sermon was good, if not always finely
+conceived for a Court-church; it admonished the hearers against
+innumerable vices, to whose counterparts, the virtues, another preacher
+might so readily have exhorted us. During the whole service, I made it
+my business to exhibit true, deep reverence, not only towards God, but
+also towards my illustrious Prince. For the latter reverence I had my
+private reason. I wished to stamp this sentiment strongly and openly as
+with raised letters on my countenance, and so give the lie to any
+malicious imp about Court, by whom my contravention of the _Panegyric
+on Nero_, and my free German satire on this real tyrant himself, which
+I had inserted in the _Plaetz Weekly Journal_, might have been perverted
+into a secret characteristic portrait of my own Sovereign. We live in
+such times at present, that scarcely can we compose a pasquinade on the
+Devil in Hell, but some human Devil on Earth will apply it to an angel.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+71. The Youth is singular from caprice, and takes pleasure in it; the
+Man is so from constraint, unintentionally, and feels pain in it.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+When the Court at last issued from church, and were getting into their
+carriages, I kept at such a distance that my face could not possibly be
+noticed, in case I had happened to assume no reverent look, but an
+indifferent or even proud one. God knows, who has kneaded into me those
+mad, desperate fancies and crotchets, which perhaps would sit better on
+a Hero Schabacker, than on an Army-chaplain under him. I cannot here
+forbear recording to you, my Friends, one of the maddest among them,
+though at first it may throw too glaring a light on me. It was at my
+ordination to be Army-chaplain, while about to participate in the
+Sacrament, on the first day of Easter. Now, here while I was standing,
+moved into softness, before the balustrade of the altar, in the middle
+of the whole male congregation,--nay, I perhaps more deeply moved than
+any among them, since, as a person going to war, I might consider
+myself a half-dead man, that was now partaking in the last Feast of
+Souls, as it were like a person to be hanged on the morrow,--here,
+then, amid the pathetic effects of the organ and singing, there rose
+something--were it the first Easter-day which awoke in me what
+primitive Christians call their Easter-laughter, or merely the contrast
+between the most devilish predicaments and the most holy,--in short,
+there rose something in me (for which reason I have ever since taken
+the part of every simple person who might ascribe such things to the
+Devil), and this something started the question: "Now, could there be
+aught more diabolical than if thou, just in receiving the Holy Supper,
+wert madly and blasphemously to begin laughing?" Instantly I took to
+wrestling with this hell-dog of a thought; neglected the most precious
+feelings, merely to keep the dog in my eye, and scare him away; yet was
+forced to draw back from him, exhausted and unsuccessful, and arrived
+at the step of the altar with the mournful certainty that in a little
+while I should, without more ado, begin laughing, let me weep and moan
+inwardly as I liked. Accordingly, while I and a very worthy old
+Burgermeister were bowing down together before the long parson, and the
+latter (perhaps kneeling on the low cushion, I fancied him too long)
+put the wafer in my clenched mouth, I felt all the muscles of laughter
+already beginning sardonically to contract; and these had not long
+acted on the guiltless integument, till an actual smile appeared there;
+and as we bowed the second time, I was grinning like an ape. My
+companion the Burgermeister justly expostulated with me, in a low
+voice, as we walked round behind the altar: "In Heaven's name, are you
+an ordained Preacher of the Gospel, or a Merry-Andrew? Is it Satan that
+is laughing out of you?"
+
+
+------------------------
+
+198. The Populace and Cattle grow giddy on the edge of no abyss; with
+the Man it is otherwise.
+
+11. The Golden Calf of Self-love soon waxes to be a burning Phalaris's
+Bull, which reduces its father and adorer to ashes.
+
+103. The male Beau-crop, which surrounds the female Roses and Lilies,
+must (if I rightly comprehend its flatteries) most probably presuppose
+in the fair the manners of the Spaniards and Italians, who offer any
+valuable, by way of present, to the man who praises it excessively.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+"Ah, Heaven! who else?" said I; and this being over, I finished my
+devotions in a more becoming fashion.
+
+From the church (I now return to the Flaetz one) I proceeded to the
+Tiger Inn, and dined at the _table-d'hote_, being at no time shy of
+encountering men. Previous to the second course, a waiter handed me an
+empty plate, on which, to my astonishment, I noticed a French verse
+scratched in with a fork, containing nothing less than a lampoon on the
+Commandant of Flaetz. Without ceremony, I held out the plate to the
+company; saying, I had just, as they saw, got this lampooning cover
+presented to me, and must request them to bear witness that I had
+nothing to do with the matter. An officer directly changed plates with
+me. During the fifth course, I could not but admire the chemico-medical
+ignorance of the company; for a hare, out of which a gentleman
+extracted and exhibited several grains of shot, that is to say,
+therefore, of lead alloyed with arsenic, and then cleaned by hot
+vinegar, did, nevertheless, by the spectators (I expected) continue to
+be pleasantly eaten.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+199. But not many existing Governments, I believe, do behead under
+pretext of trepanning; or sew (in a more choice allegory) the people's
+lips together, under pretence of sewing the harelips in them.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+In the course of our table-talk, one topic seized me keenly by my weak
+side, I mean by my honor. The law custom of the city happened to be
+mentioned, as it affects natural children; and I learned that here a
+loose girl may convert any man she pleases to select into the father of
+her brat, simply by her oath. "Horrible!" said I, and my hair stood on
+end. "In this way may the worthiest head of a family, with a wife and
+children, or a clergyman lodging in the Tiger, be stript of honor and
+innocence, by any wicked chambermaid whom he may have seen, or who may
+have seen him, in the course of her employment!"
+
+An elderly officer observed: "But will the girl swear herself to the
+Devil so readily?"
+
+What logic! "Or suppose," continued I, without answer, "a man happened
+to be travelling with that Vienna Locksmith, who afterwards became a
+mother, and was brought to bed of a baby son; or with any disguised
+Chevalier d'Eon, who often passes the night in his company, whereby the
+Locksmith or the Chevalier can swear to their private interviews; no
+delicate man of honor will in the end risk travelling with another;
+seeing he knows not how soon the latter may pull off his boots, and
+pull on his women's-pumps, and swear his companion into Fatherhood, and
+himself to the Devil!"
+
+
+------------------------
+
+67. Hospitable Entertainer, wouldst thou search into thy Guest?
+Accompany him to another Entertainer, and listen to him. Just so,
+wouldst thou become better acquainted with Mistress in an hour, than by
+living with her for a month? Accompany her among her female friends and
+female enemies (if that is no pleonasm), and look at her!
+
+------------------------
+
+
+Some of the company, however, misunderstood my oratorical fire so much,
+that they, sheep-wise, gave some insinuations as if I myself were not
+strict in this point, but lax. By Heaven! I no longer knew what I was
+eating or speaking. Happily, on the opposite side of the table, some
+lying story of a French defeat was started. Now, as I had read on the
+street corners that French and German Proclamation, calling before the
+Court Martial any one who had heard war rumors (disadvantageous,
+namely), without giving notice of them,--I, as a man not willing ever
+to forget himself, had nothing more prudent to do in this case, than to
+withdraw with empty ears, telling none but the landlord why.
+
+It was no improper time; for I had previously determined to have my
+beard shaven about half past four, that so, towards five, I might
+present myself with a chin just polished by the razor smoothing-iron,
+and sleek as wove-paper, without the smallest root-stump of a hair left
+on it. By way of preparation, like Pitt before Parliamentary debates, I
+poured a devilish deal of Pontac into my stomach, with true disgust,
+and contrary to all sanitary rules; not so much for fronting the light
+stranger Barber, as the Minister and General von Schabacker, with whom
+I had it in view to exchange perhaps more than one fiery statement.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+80. In the Summer of life, men keep digging and filling ice-pits, as
+well as circumstances will admit; that so, in their Winter, they may
+have something in store to give them coolness.
+
+28. It is impossible for me, amid the tendril-forest of allusions (even
+this again is a tendril-twig), to state and declare on the spot whether
+all the Courts or Heights, the (Bougouer) _Snowline_ of Europe, have
+ever been mentioned in my writings or not; but I could wish for
+information on the subject, that, if not, I may try to do it still.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+The common Hotel Barber was ushered in to me; but at first view you
+noticed in his polygonal, zigzag visage, more of a man that would
+finally go mad, than of one growing wiser. Now, madmen are a class of
+persons whom I hate incredibly; and nothing can take me to see any
+madhouse, simply because the first maniac among them may clutch me in
+his giant fists if he like; and bet cause, owing to infection, I cannot
+be sure that I shall ever get out again with the sense which I brought
+in. In a general way, I sit (when once I am lathered) in such a posture
+on my chair as to keep both my hands (the eyes I fix intently on the
+bartering countenance) lying clenched along my sides, and pointed
+directly at the midriff of the barber; that so, on the smallest
+ambiguity of movement, I may dash in upon him, and overset him in a
+twinkling.
+
+I scarce know rightly how it happened; but here, while I am anxiously
+studying the foolish, twisted visage of the shaver, and he just then
+chanced to lay his long whetted weapon a little too abruptly against my
+bare throat, I gave him such a sudden bounce on the abdominal viscera,
+that the silly varlet had wellnigh suicidally slit his own windpipe.
+For me, truly, nothing remained but to indemnify the man; and then,
+contrary to my usual principles, to tie round a broad stuffed cravat,
+by way of cloak to what remained unshorn.
+
+And now at last I sallied forth to the General, drinking out the
+remnant of the Pontac, as I crossed the threshold.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+36. And so I should like, in all cases, to be the First, especially in
+Begging. The first prisoner-of-war, the first cripple, the first man
+ruined by burning (like him who brings the first fire-engine), gains
+the head-subscription and the heart; the next comer finds nothing but
+Duty to address; and at last, in this melodious _mancando_ of sympathy,
+matters sink so far, that the last (if the last but one may at least
+have retired laden with a rich "God help you!") obtains from the
+benignant hand nothing more than its fist. And as in Begging the first,
+so in Giving I should like to be the last; one obliterates the other,
+especially the last the first. So, however, is the world ordered.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+I hope there were plans lying ready within me for answering rightly,
+nay for asking. The Petition I carried in my pocket, and in my right
+hand. In the left, I had a duplicate of it. My fire of spirit easily
+helped over the living fence of ministerial obstructions; and soon I
+unexpectedly found myself in the ante-chamber, among his most
+distinguished lackeys; persons, so far as I could see, not inclined to
+change flour for bran with any one. Selecting the most respectable
+individual of the number, I delivered him my paper request, accompanied
+with the verbal one that he would hand it in. He took it, but
+ungraciously. I waited in vain till far in the sixth hour, at which
+season alone the gay General can safely be applied to. At last I pitch
+upon another lackey, and repeat my request; he runs about seeking his
+runaway brother, or my Petition, to no purpose; neither of them
+could be found. How happy was it that in the midst of my Pontac,
+before shaving, I had written out the duplicate of this paper; and
+therefore--simply on the principle that you should always keep a second
+wooden leg packed into your knapsack when you have the first on your
+body--and out of fear, that, if the original petition chanced to drop
+from me in the way between the Tiger and Schabacker's, my whole journey
+and hope would melt into water,--and therefore, I say, having stuck the
+repeating work of that original paper into my pocket, I had, in any
+case, something to hand in, and that something truly a Ditto. I handed
+it in.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+136. If you mount too high above your time, your ears (on the side of
+Fame) are little better off than if you sink too deep below it; in
+truth, Charles up in his Balloon, and Halley down in his Diving-bell,
+felt equally the same strange pain in their ears.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+Unhappily six o'clock was already past. The lackey, however, did not
+keep me long waiting; but returned with--I may say, the text of this
+whole Circular--the almost rude answer (which you, my Friends, out of
+regard for me and Schabacker, will not divulge), that: "In case I
+were the Attila Schmelzle of Schabacker's Regiment, might lift my
+pigeon-liver flag again, and fly to the Devil, as I did at
+Pimpelstadt." Another man would have dropt dead on the spot; I,
+however, walked quite stoutly off, answering the fellow: "With great
+pleasure indeed, I fly to the Devil; and so Devil a fly I care." On the
+road home, I examined myself, whether it had not been the Pontac that
+spoke out of me (though the very examination contradicted this, for
+Pontac never examines); but I found that nothing but I, my heart, my
+courage perhaps, had spoken; and why, after all, any whimpering? Does
+not the patrimony of my good wife endow me better than ten Catechetical
+Professorships? And has she not furnished all the corners of my book of
+Life with so many golden clasps, that I can open it forever without
+wearing it? Let henhearts cackle and pip; I flapped my pinions, and
+said: "Dash boldly through it, come what may!" I felt myself excited
+and exalted; I fancied Republics, in which I, as a hero, might be at
+home; I longed to be in that noble Grecian time, when one hero readily
+put up with bastinadoes from another, and said, "Strike, but hear!" and
+out of this ignoble one, where men will scarcely put up with hard
+words, to say nothing of more. I painted out to my mind how I
+should feel, if, in happier circumstances, I were uprooting hollow
+Thrones, and before whole nations mounting on mighty deeds as on the
+Temple-steps of Immortality; and, in gigantic ages, finding quite other
+men to outman and outstrip, than the mite-populace about me, or, at the
+best, here and there a Vulcanello. I thought and thought, and grew
+wilder and wilder, and intoxicated myself (no Pontac intoxication
+therefore, which, you know, increases more by continuance than
+cessation of drinking), and gesticulated openly, as I put the
+question to myself: "Wilt thou be a mere state-lapdog? A dog's-dog,
+a _pium desiderium_ of an _impium desiderium_, an Ex-Ex, a
+Nothing's-Nothing?--Fire and Fury!" With this, however, I dashed down
+my hat into the mud of the market. On lifting and cleaning this old
+servant, I could not but perceive how worn and faded it was; and I
+therefore determined instantly to purchase a new one, and carry the
+same home in my hand.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+25. In youth, like a blind man just couched (and what is birth but a
+couching of the sight?), you take the Distant for the Near, the starry
+heaven for tangible room-furniture, pictures for objects; and, to the
+young man, the whole world is sitting on his very nose, till repeating
+bandaging and unbandaging have at last taught him, like the blind
+patient, to estimate _Distance_ and _Appearance_.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+I accomplished this. I bought one of the finest cut. Strangely enough,
+by this hat, as if it had been a Graduation-hat, was my head tried and
+examined in the Ziegengasse or Goat-gate of Flaetz. For as General
+Schabacker came driving along that street in his carriage, and I (it
+need not be said) was determined to avenge myself, not by vulgar
+clownishness, but by courtesy, I had here got one of the most ticklish
+problems imaginable to solve on the spur of the instant. You observe,
+if I swung only the fine hat which I carried in my hand, and kept the
+faded one on my head,--I might have the appearance of a perfect clown,
+who does not doff at all; if, on the other hand, I pulled the old hat
+from my head, and therewith did my reverence, then two hats, both in
+play at once (let me swing the other at the same time or not), brought
+my salute within the verge of ridicule. Now do you, my Friends, before
+reading further, bethink you how a man was to extricate himself from
+such a plight, without losing his presence of mind! I think, perhaps,
+by this means; by merely losing his hat. In one word, then, I simply
+dropped the new hat from my hand into the mud, to put myself in a
+condition for taking off the old hat by itself, and swaying it in
+needful courtesy, without any shade of ridicule.
+
+Arrived at the Tiger,--to avoid misconstructions, I first had the
+glossy, fine, and superfine hat cleaned, and some time afterwards the
+mud-hat or rubbis-hat.
+
+And now, weighing my momentous Past in the adjusting balance within me,
+I walked in fiery mood to and fro. The Pontac must--I know that there
+is no unadulterated liquor here below--have been more than usually
+adulterated; so keenly did it chase my fancy out of one fire into the
+other. I now looked forth into a wide, glittering life, in which I
+lived without post, merely on money; and which I beheld, as it were,
+sowed with the Delphic caves, and Zenonic walks, and Muse-hills of all
+the Sciences, which I might now cultivate at my ease. In particular,
+I should have it in my power to apply more diligently to writing
+Prize-essays for Academies; of which (that is to say, of the
+Prize-essays) no author need ever be ashamed, since, in all cases,
+there is a whole crowning Academy to stand and blush for the crownee.
+And even if the Prize-marksman does not hit the crown, he still
+continues more unknown and more anonymous (his Device not being
+unsealed) than any other author, who indeed can publish some nameless
+Long-ear of a book, but not hinder it from being, by a Literary
+Ass-burial (_sepultura asinina_), publicly interred, in a short time,
+before half the world.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+126. In the long run, out of mere fear and necessity, we shall become
+the warmest cosmopolites I know of; so rapidly do ships shoot to and
+fro, and, like shuttles, weave Islands and Quarters of the World
+together. For let but the political weather-glass fall to-day in South
+America, to-morrow we in Europe have storm and thunder.
+
+19. It is easier, they say, to climb a hill when you ascend back
+foremost. This, perhaps, might admit of application to political
+eminences; if you still turned towards them that part of the body on
+which you sit, and kept your face directed down to the people; all the
+while, however, removing and mounting.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+Only one thing grieved me by anticipation; the sorrow of my Berga, for
+whom, dear tired wayfarer, I on the morrow must overcloud her arrival,
+and her shortened market-spectacle, by my negatory intelligence. She
+would so gladly (and who can take it ill of a rich farmer's Daughter?)
+have made herself somebody in Neusattel, and overshone many a female
+dignitary! Every mortal longs for his parade-place, and some earlier
+living honor than the last honors. Especially so good a lowly-born
+housewife as my Berga, conscious perhaps rather of her metallic than of
+her spiritual treasure, would still wish at banquets to be mistress of
+some seat or other, and so in place to overtop this or that plucked
+goose of the neighborhood.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+26. Few German writers are not original, if we may ascribe originality
+(as is at least the conversational practice of all people) to a man who
+merely dishes out his own thoughts without foreign admixture. For as,
+between their Memory, where their reading or foreign matter dwells, and
+their Imagination or Productive Power, where their writing or own
+peculiar matter originates, a sufficient space intervenes, and the
+boundary-stones are fixed in so conscientiously and firmly that nothing
+foreign may pass over into their own, or inversely, so that they may
+really read a hundred works without losing their own primitive flavor,
+or even altering it,--their individuality may, I believe, be considered
+as secured; and their spiritual nourishment, their pancakes, loaves,
+fritters, caviare, and meat-balls, are not assimilated to their system,
+but given back pure and unaltered. Often in my own mind, I figure such
+writers as living but thousand-fold more artificial Ducklings from
+Vaucasson's Artificial Duck of Wood. For in fact they are not less
+cunningly put together than this timber Duck, which will gobble meat
+and apparently void it again, under show of having digested it, and
+derived from it blood and juices; though the secret of the business is,
+the artist has merely introduced an ingenious compound ejective matter
+behind, with which concoction and nourishment have nothing to do, but
+which the Duck illusorily gives forth and publishes to the world.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+It is in this point of view that husbands are so indispensable. I
+therefore resolved to purchase for myself, and consequently for her,
+one of the best of those titles which our Courts in Germany (as in a
+Leipzig saleroom) stand offering to buyers, in all sizes and sorts,
+from Noble and Half-noble down to Rath or Councillor; and once
+invested therewith, to reflect from my own Quarter-nobility such an
+Eighth-part-nobility on this true soul, that many a Neusattelitess (I
+hope) shall half burst with envy, and say and cry: "Pooh, the stupid
+farmer thing! See how it wabbles and bridles! It has forgot how matters
+stood when it had no money-bag and no Hofrath!" For to the Hofrathship
+I shall before this have attained.
+
+But in the cold solitude of my room, and the fire of my remembrances, I
+longed unspeakably for my Bergelchen; I and my heart were wearied with
+the foreign busy day; no one here said a kind word to me, which he did
+not hope to put in the bill. Friends! I languished for my friend, whose
+heart would pour out its blood as a balsam for a second heart; I cursed
+my over-prudent regulations, and wished, that, to have the good Berga
+at my side, I had given up the stupid houseware to all thieves and
+fires whatsoever. As I walked to and fro, it seemed to me easier and
+easier to become all things, an Exchequer-Rath, an Excise-Rath, any
+Rath in the world, and whatever she required when she came.
+
+"See thou take thy pleasure in the town!" had Bergelchen kept saying
+the whole week through. But how, without her, can I take any? Our tears
+of sorrow friends dry up, and accompany with their own; but our tears
+of joy we find most readily repeated in the eyes of our wives. Pardon
+me, good Friends, these libations of my sensibility; I am but showing
+you my heart and my Berga. If I need an Absolution-merchant, the
+Pontac-merchant is the man.
+
+
+
+
+ _First Night in Flaetz_.
+
+
+Yet the wine did not take from me the good sense to look under the bed,
+before going into it, and examine whether any one was lurking there;
+for example, the Dwarf, or the Rat-catcher, or the Legations-Rath; also
+to shove the key under the latch (which I reckon the best bolting
+arrangement of all), and then, by way of further assurance, to bore my
+night-screws into the door, and pile all the chairs in a heap behind
+it; and, lastly, to keep on my breeches and shoes, wishing absolutely
+to have no care upon my mind.
+
+But I had still other precautions to take in regard to sleep-walking.
+To me it has always been incomprehensible how so many men can go to
+bed, and lie down at their ease there, without reflecting that perhaps,
+in the first sleep, they may get up again as Somnambulists, and crawl
+over the tops of roofs and the like; awakening in some spot where they
+may fall in a moment and break their necks. While at home, there is
+little risk in my sleep; because, my right toe being fastened every
+night with three ells of tape (I call it in jest our marriage tie) to
+my wife's left hand, I feel a certainty that, in case I should start up
+from this bed-arrest, I must with the tether infallibly awaken her, and
+so by my Berga, as by my living bridle, be again led back to bed. But
+here in the Inn, I had nothing for it but to knot myself once or twice
+to the bed-foot, that I might not wander; though in this way, an
+irruption of villains would have brought double peril with it.--Alas!
+so dangerous is sleep at all times, that every man, who is not lying on
+his back a corpse, must be on his guard lest with the general system
+some limb or other also fall asleep; in which case the sleeping limb
+(there are not wanting examples of it in Medical History) may next
+morning be lying ripe for amputation. For this reason, I have myself
+frequently awakened, that no part of me fall asleep.
+
+Having properly tied myself to the bed-posts, and at length got under
+the coverlid, I now began to be dubious about my Pontac Fire-bath, and
+apprehensive of the valorous and tumultuous dreams too likely to ensue;
+which, alas, did actually prove to be nothing better than heroic and
+monarchic feats, castle-stormings, rock-throwings, and the like. This
+point also I am sorry to see so little attended to in medicine. Medical
+gentlemen, as well as their customers, all stretch themselves quietly
+in their beds, without one among them considering whether a furious
+rage (supposing him also directly after to drink cold water in his
+dream), or a heart-devouring grief, all which he may undergo in vision,
+does harm to life or not.
+
+Shortly before midnight, I awoke from a heavy dream, to encounter a
+ghost-trick much too ghostly for my fancy. My brother-in-law, who
+manufactured it, deserves for such vapid cookery to be named before you
+without reserve, as the maltmaster of this washy brewage. Had suspicion
+been more compatible with intrepidity, I might perhaps, by his moral
+maxim about this matter, on the road, as well as by his taking up the
+side-room, at the middle door of which stood my couch, have easily
+divined the whole. But now, on awakening, I felt myself blown upon by a
+cold ghost-breath, which I could nowise deduce from the distant bolted
+window; a point I had rightly decided, for the Dragoon was producing
+the phenomenon through the key-hole by a pair of bellows. Every sort
+of coldness in the night-season reminds you of clay-coldness and
+spectre-coldness. I summoned my resolution, however, and abode the
+issue; but now the very coverlid began to get in motion; I pulled it
+towards me; it would not stay; sharply I sit upright in my bed, and
+cry, "What is that?" No answer; everywhere silence in the Inn; the
+whole room full of moonshine. And now my drawing-plaster, my coverlid,
+actually rose up, and let in the air; at which I felt like a wounded
+man whose cataplasm you suddenly pull off. In this crisis, I made a
+bold leap from this Devil's-torus, and leaping, snapped asunder my
+somnambulist tether. "Where is the silly human fool," cried I, "that
+dares to ape the unseen sublime him?" But on, above, under the bed,
+there was nothing to be heard or seen, I looked out of the window;
+everywhere spectral moonlight and street-stillness; nothing moving
+except (probably from the wind), on the distant Gallows-hill, a person
+lately hanged.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+15. After the manner of the fine polished English folding-knives, there
+are now also folding-war-swords, or, in other words--Treaties of Peace.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+Any man would have taken it for self-deception as well as I; therefore
+I again wrapped myself in my passive _lit de justice_ and air-bed, and
+waited with calmness to see whether my fright would subside or not.
+
+In a few minutes the coverlid, the infernal Faust's-mantle, again began
+flying and towing; also, by way of change, the invisible bed-maker
+again lifted me up. Accursed hour!--I should beg to know whether, in
+the whole of cultivated Europe, there is one cultivated or uncultivated
+man, who, in a case of this kind, would not have lighted on
+ghost-devilry? I lighted on it, under my piece of (self) movable
+property, my coverlid; and thought Berga had died suddenly, and was
+now, in spirit, laying hold of my bed. However, I could not speak to
+her, nor as little to the Devil, who might well be supposed to have a
+hand in the game; but I turned myself solely to Heaven, and prayed
+aloud: "To thee I commit myself; thou alone heretofore hast cared for
+thy weak servant; and I swear that I will turn a new leaf,"--a promise
+which shall be kept nevertheless, though the whole was but stupid
+treachery and trick.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+13. _Omnibus una_ salus _Sanctis, sed_ gloria _dispar_; that is to say
+(as Divines once taught), according to Saint Paul, we have all the same
+Beatitude in Heaven, but different degrees of Honor. Here, on Earth, we
+find a shadow of this in the writing world; for the Beatitude of
+authors once beatified by Criticism, whether they be genial, good,
+mediocre, or poor, is the same throughout; they all obtain the same
+pecuniary Felicity, the same slender profit. But, Heavens! in regard to
+the degrees of Fame, again, how far (in spite of the same emolument and
+sale) will a Dunce, even in his lifetime, be put below a Genius! Is not
+a shallow writer frequently forgotten in a single Fair? while a deep
+writer, or even a writer of genius, will blossom through fifty Fairs,
+and so may celebrate his Twenty-five Years' Jubilee, before, late
+forgotten, he is lowered into the German Temple of Fame; a Temple
+imitating the peculiarity of the _Padri Lucchesi_ churches in Naples,
+which (according to Volkmann) permit _burials_ under their roofs, but
+no _tombstone_.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+My prayer had no effect with the unchristian Dragoon, who now, once for
+all, had got me prisoner in the dragnet of a coverlid; and heeded
+little whether a guest's bed were, by his means, made a state-bed and
+death-bed or not. He span out my nerves, like gold-wire through
+smaller and smaller holes, to utter inanition and evanition, for the
+bed-clothes at last literally marched off to the door of the room.
+
+Now was the moment to rise into the sublime, and to trouble myself no
+longer about aught here below, but softly to devote myself to death.
+"Snatch me away," cried I, and, without thinking, cut three crosses;
+"quick, dispatch me, ye ghosts; I die more innocent than thousands of
+tyrants and blasphemers, to whom ye yet appear not, but to unpolluted
+me." Here I heard a sort of laugh, either on the street or in the
+side-room. At this warm human tone, I suddenly bloomed up again, as at
+the coming of a new Spring, in every twig and leaf. Wholly despising
+the winged coverlid, which was not now to be picked from the door, I
+laid myself down uncovered, but warm and perspiring from other causes,
+and soon fell asleep. For the rest, I am not the least ashamed, in the
+face of all refined capital cities,--though they were standing here at
+my hand,--that, by this Devil-belief and Devil-address, I have attained
+some likeness to our great German Lion, to Luther.
+
+
+
+
+ _Second Day in Flaetz_.
+
+
+Early in the morning, I felt myself awakened by the well-known
+coverlid; it had laid itself on me like a nightmare; I gaped up; quiet,
+in a corner of the room, sat a red, round, blooming, decorated girl,
+like a full-blown tulip in the freshness of life, and gently rustling
+with gay ribbons as with leaves.
+
+"Who's there--how came you in?" cried I, half-blind.
+
+"I covered thee softly, and thought to let thee sleep," said
+Bergelchen; "I have walked all night to be here early; do but look!"
+
+She showed me her boots, the only remnant of her travelling-gear which,
+in the moulting process of the toilette, she had not stript at the gate
+of Flaetz.
+
+"Is there," said I, alarmed at her coming six hours sooner, and the
+more, as I had been alarmed all night and was still so, at her
+mysterious entrance; "is there some fresh woe come over us, fire,
+murder, robbery?"
+
+She answered: "The old Rat thou hast chased so long, died yesterday;
+further there was nothing of importance."
+
+"And all has been managed rightly, and according to my Letter of
+Instructions, at home?" inquired I.
+
+"Yes, truly," answered she; "only I did not see the Letter; it is lost;
+thou hast packed it among thy clothes."
+
+Well, I could not but forgive the blooming, brave pedestrian all
+omissions. Her eye, then her heart was bringing fresh cool morning air
+and morning red into my sultry hours. And yet, for this kind soul,
+looking into life with such love and hope, I must in a little while
+overcloud the merited Heaven of to-day, with tidings of my failure in
+the Catechetical Professorship! I dallied and postponed to the utmost.
+I asked how she had got in, as the whole _chevaux-de-frise_ barricado
+of chairs was still standing fast at the door. She laughed heartily,
+courtesying in village fashion, and said, she had planned it with her
+brother the day before yesterday, knowing my precautions in locking,
+that he should admit her into my room, that so she might cunningly
+awaken me. And now bolted the Dragoon with loud laughter into the
+apartment, and cried: "Slept well, brother?"
+
+In this wise truly the whole ghost-story was now solved and expounded,
+as if by the pen of a Biester or a Hennings. I instantly saw through
+the entire ghost-scheme which our Dragoon had executed. With some
+bitterness I told him my conjecture, and his sister my story. But
+he lied and laughed; nay, attempted shamelessly enough to palm
+spectre-notions on me a second time, in open day. I answered coldly,
+that in me he had found the wrong man, granting even that I had some
+similarity with Luther, with Hobbes, with Brutus, all of whom had seen
+and dreaded ghosts. He replied, tearing the facts away from their
+originating causes: "All he could say was, that last night he had heard
+some poor sinner creaking and lamenting dolefully enough; and from this
+he had inferred it must be an unhappy brother set upon by goblins."
+
+
+------------------------
+
+79. Weak and wrong heads are the hardest to change; and their inward
+man acquires a scanty covering; thus capons never moult.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+In the end, his sister's eyes also were opened to the low character
+which he had tried to act with me; she sharply flew at him, pushed
+him with both hands out of his and my door, and called after him:
+"Wait, thou villain, I will mind it!"
+
+Then hastily turning round, she fell on my neck, and (at the wrong
+place) into laughter, and said: "The wild fool! But I could not keep my
+laugh another minute, and he was not to see it. Forgive the ninny, thou
+a learned man, his ass-pranks; what can one expect?"
+
+I inquired whether she, in her nocturnal travelling, had not met any
+spectral persons; though I knew that to her a wild beast, a river, a
+half abyss, are nothing. No, she had not; but the gay-dressed
+town's-people, she said, had scared her in the morning. O, how I do
+love these soft Harmonica-quiverings of female fright!
+
+At last, however, I was forced to bite or cut the coloquinta-apple, and
+give her the half of it; I mean the news of my rejected petition for
+the Catechetical Professorship. Wishing to spare this joyful heart the
+rudeness of the whole truth, and to subtract something from a heavy
+burden, more fit for the shoulders of a man, I began: "Bergelchen, the
+Professorship affair is taking another, though still a good enough
+course; the General, whom may the Devil and his Grandmother teach
+sense, will not be taken except by storm; and storm he shall have, as
+certainly as I have on my nightcap."
+
+"Then thou art nothing yet?" inquired she.
+
+"For the moment, indeed, not!" answered I.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+89. In times of misfortune, the Ancients supported themselves with
+Philosophy or Christianity; the moderns again (for example, in the
+reign of Terror) take to Pleasure; as the wounded Buffalo, for bandage
+and salve, rolls himself in the mire.
+
+181. God be thanked that we live nowhere forever except in Hell or
+Heaven; on Earth otherwise we should grow to be the veriest rascals,
+and the World a House of Incurables, for want of the dog-doctor (the
+Hangman), and the issue-cord (on the Gallows), and the sulphur and
+chalybeate medicines (on Battle-fields). So that we too find our
+gigantic moral force dependent on the _Debt of Nature_ which we have to
+pay, exactly as your politicians (for example, the author of the _New
+Leviathan_) demonstrate that the English have their _National Debt_ to
+thank for their superiority.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+"But before Saturday night?" said she.
+
+"Not quite," said I.
+
+"Then am I sore stricken, and could leap out of the window," said she,
+and turned away her rosy face, to hide its wet eyes, and was silent
+very long. Then, with painfully quivering voice, she began: "Good
+Christ, stand by me at Neusattel on Sunday, when these high-prancing
+prideful dames look at me in church, and I grow scarlet for shame!"
+
+Here in sympathetic woe I sprang out of bed to the dear soul, over
+whose brightly blooming cheeks warm tears were rolling, and cried:
+"Thou true heart, do not tear me in pieces so! May I die, if yet in
+these dog-days I become not all and everything that thou wishest!
+Speak, wilt thou be Mining-raethin, Build-raethin, Court-raethin,
+War-raethin, Chamber-raethin, Commerce-raethin, Legations-raethin, or Devil
+and his Dam's raethin; I am here, and will buy it, and be it. To-morrow
+I send riding posts to Saxony and Hessia, to Prussia and Russia, to
+Friesland and Katzenellenbogen, and demand patents. Nay, I will carry
+matters further than another, and be all things at once, Flachsenfingen
+Court-rath, Scheerau Excise-rath, Haarhaar Building-rath, Pestitz[76]
+Chamber-rath (for we have the cash); and thus, alone and singlehanded,
+represent with one _podex_ and _corpus_ a whole Rath-session of select
+Raths; and stand, a complete Legion of Honor, on one single pair of
+legs; the like no man ever did.
+
+"O, now thou art angel-good!" said she, and gladder tears rolled down;
+"thou shalt counsel me thyself which are the finest Raths, and these we
+will be."
+
+"No," continued I, in the fire of the moment, "neither shall this serve
+us; to me it is not enough that to Mrs. Chaplain thou canst announce
+thyself as Building-raethin, to Mrs. Town-parson as Legations-raethin, to
+Mrs. Burgermeister as Court-raethin, to Mrs. Road-and-toll-surveyor as
+Commerce-raethin, or how and where thou pleasest----"
+
+"Ah! my own too good Attelchen!" said she.
+
+"--But," continued I, "I shall likewise become corresponding member of
+the several Learned Societies in the several best capital cities (among
+which I have only to choose); and truly no common actual member, but a
+whole honorary member; then thee, as another honorary member, growing
+out of my honorary-membership, I uplift and exalt."
+
+Pardon me, my Friends, this warm cataplasm, or deception-balsam for a
+wounded breast, whose blood is so pure and precious, that one may
+be permitted to endeavor, with all possible stanching-lints and
+spider-webs, to drive it back into the fair heart, its home.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+63. To apprehend danger from the Education of the People is like
+fearing lest the thunderbolt strike into the house because it has
+_windows_; whereas the lightning never comes through these, but through
+their _lead_ framing, or down by the smoke of the chimney.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+But now came bright and brightest hours. I had conquered Time, I had
+conquered myself and Berga; seldom does a conqueror, as I did, bless
+both the victorious and the vanquished party. Berga called back her
+former Heaven, and pulled off her dusty boots, and on her flowery
+shoes. Precious morning beverage, intoxicating to a heart that loves! I
+felt (if the low figure may be permitted) a double-beer of courage in
+me, now that I had one being more to protect. In general it is my
+nature--which the honorable Premier seems not to be fully aware of--to
+grow bolder not among the bold, but fastest among poltroons, the bad
+example acting on me by the rule of contraries. Little touches may in
+this case shadow forth man and wife without casting them into the
+shade. When the trim waiter with his green silk apron brought up
+cracknels for breakfast, and I told him, "Johann, for two!" Berga said:
+"He would oblige her very much," and called him Herr Johann.
+
+Bergelchen, more familiar with rural burghs than capital cities, felt a
+good deal amazed and alarmed at the coffee-trays, dressing-tables,
+paper-hangings, sconces, alabaster inkholders, with Egyptian emblems,
+as well as at the gilt bell-handle, lying ready for any one to pull out
+or to push in. Accordingly, she had not courage to walk through
+the hall, with its lustres, purely because a whistling, whiffling
+Cap-and-feather was gesturing up and down in it. Nay, her poor heart
+was like to fail when she peeped out of the window at so many gay,
+promenading town's people (I was briskly that in a little while, at my
+side, she must break into whistling a Gascon air down over them); and
+thought the middle of this dazzling courtly throng. In a case like
+this, reasons are of less avail than examples. I tried to elevate
+my Bergelchen, by reciting some of my nocturnal dream-feats; for
+example, how, riding on a whale's back, with a three-pronged fork, I
+had pierced and eaten three eagles; and by more of the like sort; but I
+produced no effect; perhaps, because to the timid female heart the
+battle-field was presented rather than the conqueror, the abyss rather
+than the overleaper of it.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+76. Your economical, preaching Poetry apparently supposes that a
+surgical Stone-cutter is an Artistical one; and a Pulpit or a Sinai a
+Hill of the Muses.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+At this time a sheaf of newspapers was brought me, full of gallant,
+decisive victories. And though these happen only on one side, and on
+the other are just so many defeats, yet the former somehow assimilate
+more with my blood than the latter, and inspire me (as Schiller's
+_Robbers_ used to do) with a strange inclination to lay hold of some
+one, and thrash and curry him on the spot. Unluckily for the waiter,
+he had chanced even now, like a military host, to stand a triple
+bell-order for march, before he would leave his ground and come up.
+"Sir," began I, my head full of battle-fields, and my arm of
+inclination to baste him; and Berga feared the very worst, as I gave
+her the well-known anger and alarm signal, namely, shoved up my cap to
+my hindhead,--"Sir, is this your way of treating guests? Why don't you
+come promptly? Don't come so again; and now be going, friend!" Although
+his retreat was my victory, I still kept briskly cannonading on the
+field of action, and fired the louder (to let him hear it), the more
+steps he descended in his flight. Bergelchen,--who felt quite
+horror-struck at my fury, particularly in a quite strange house, and
+at a quality waiter with silk apron, mustered all her soft words
+against the wild ones of a man-of-war, and spoke of dangers that might
+follow. "Dangers," answered I, "are just what I seek; but for a man
+there are none; in all cases he will either conquer or evade them,
+either show them front or back."
+
+
+------------------------
+
+115. According to Smith, the universal measure of economical value is
+Labor. This fact, at least in regard to spiritual and poetical value,
+we Germans had discovered before Smith; and to my knowledge, we have
+always preferred the learned poet to the poet of genius, and the heavy
+book full of labor to the light one full of sport.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+I could scarcely lay aside this indignant mood, so sweet was it to me,
+and so much did I feel refreshed by the fire of rage, and quickened in
+my breast as by a benignant stimulant. It belongs certainly to the
+class of Unrecognized Mercies (on which, in ancient times, special
+sermons were preached), that one is never more completely in his Heaven
+and _Monplaisir_ (a pleasure-palace), than while in the midst of right
+hearty storming and indignation. Heavens! what might not a man of
+weight accomplish in this new walk of charity! The gall bladder is for
+us the chief swimming-bladder and Montgolfier; and the filling of it
+costs us nothing but a contumelious word or two from some bystander.
+And does not the whirlwind Luther, with whom I nowise compare myself,
+confess, in his _Table-Talk_, that he never preached, sung, or prayed
+so well, as while in a rage? Truly, he was a man sufficient of himself
+to rouse many others into rage.
+
+The whole morning till noon now passed in viewing sights, and
+trafficking for wares; and indeed, for the greatest part, in the broad
+street of our Hotel. Berga needed but to press along with me into the
+market throng; needed but to look, and see that she was decorated more
+according to the fashion than hundreds like her. But soon, in her care
+for household gear, she forgot that of dress, and in the potter-market
+the toilette-table faded from her thoughts.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+4. The Hypocrite does not imitate the old practice, of cutting fruit by
+a knife poisoned only on the one side, and giving the poisoned side to
+the victim, the cutter eating the sound side himself; on the contrary,
+he so disinterestedly inverts this practice, that to others he shows
+and gives the sound moral half, or side, and retains for himself the
+poisoned one. Heavens! compared with such a man, how wicked does the
+Devil seem!
+
+------------------------
+
+
+I, for my share, full of true tedium, while gliding after her through
+her various marts, with their long cheapenings and chafferings, merely
+acted the Philosopher hid within me. I weighed this empty Life, and the
+heavy value which is put upon it, and the daily anxiety of man lest it,
+this lightest down-feather of the Earth, fly off', and feather him, and
+take him with it. These thoughts, perhaps, I owe to the street-fry of
+boys, who were turning their market-freedom to account, by throwing
+stones at one another all round me; for in the midst of this tumult I
+vividly figured myself to be a man who had never seen war; and who,
+therefore, never having experienced that often of a thousand bullets
+not one will hit, feels apprehensive of these few silly stones lest
+they beat in his nose and eyes. O, it is the battle-field alone that
+sows, manures, and nourishes true courage, courage even for daily,
+domestic, and smallest perils. For not till he comes from the
+battle-field can a man both sing and cannonade; like the canary-bird,
+which, though so melodious, so timid, so small, so tender, so solitary,
+so soft-feathered, can yet be trained to fire off cannon, though cannon
+of smaller calibre.
+
+After dinner (in our room) we issued from the Purgatory of the
+market-tumult,--where Berga, at every booth, had something to order,
+and load her attendant maid with,--into Heaven, into the Dog Inn, as
+the best Flaetz public and pleasure-house without the gates is named,
+where, in market time, hundreds turn in, and see thousands going by. On
+the way thither, my little wife, my elbow-tendril, as it were, had
+extracted from me such a measure of courage, that, while going through
+the Gate (where I, aware of the military order, that you must not pass
+near the sentry, threw myself over to the other side), she quietly
+glided on, close by the very guns and fixed bayonets of the City Guard.
+Outside the wall, I could direct her, with my finger to the bechained,
+begrated, gigantic Schabacker-Palace, mounting up even externally on
+stairs, where I last night had called and (it may be) stormed: "I had
+rather take a peep at the Giant," said she, "and the Dwarf; why else
+are we under one roof with them?"
+
+
+------------------------
+
+67. Individual Minds, nay, Political Bodies, are like organic bodies;
+extract the interior air from them, the atmosphere crushes them
+together; pump off under the bell the exterior resisting air, the
+interior inflates and bursts them. Therefore let every State keep up
+its internal and its external resistance both at once.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+In the pleasure-house itself we found sufficient pleasure; encircled as
+we were, with blooming faces and meadows. In my secret heart, I all
+along kept looking down, with success, on Schabacker's refusal; and
+till midnight made myself a happy day of it. I had deserved it, Berga
+still more. Nevertheless, about one in the morning, I was destined to
+find a windmill to tilt with; a windmill, which truly lays about it
+with somewhat longer, stronger, and more numerous arms than a giant,
+for which Don Quixote might readily enough have taken it. On the market
+place, for reasons more easily fancied than specified in words, I let
+Berga go along some twenty paces before me; and I myself, for these
+foresaid reasons, retire without malice behind a covered booth, the
+tent most probably of some rude trader; and lingered there a moment
+according to circumstances. Lo! steering hither with dart and spear,
+comes the Booth-watcher, and coins and stamps me on the spot, into a
+filcher and housebreaker of his Booth-street; though the simpleton sees
+nothing but that I am standing in the corner, and doing anything
+but--taking. A sense of honor without callosity is never blunted for
+such attacks. But how in the dead of night was a man of this kind, who
+had nothing in his head--at the utmost beer, instead of brains--to be
+enlightened on the truth of the matter?
+
+I shall not conceal my perilous resource; I seized the fox by the tail,
+as we say; in other words, I made as if I had been muddled, and knew
+not rightly, in my liquor, what I was about. I therefore mimicked
+everything I was master of in this department; staggered hither and
+thither; splayed out my feet like a dancing-master; got into zigzag in
+spite of all efforts at the straight line; nay, I knocked my good head
+(perhaps one of the clearest and emptiest of the night) like a full
+one, against real posts.
+
+However, the Booth-bailiff, who probably had been oftener drunk than I,
+and knew the symptoms better, or even felt them in himself at this
+moment, looked upon the whole exhibition as mere craft, and shouted
+dreadfully: "Stop, rascal; thou art no more drunk than I! I know thee
+of old. Stand, I say, till I speak to thee! Wouldst have thy long
+finger in the market, too? Stand, dog, or I'll make thee!"
+
+
+------------------------
+
+8. In great Saloons, the real stove is masked into a pretty ornamented
+sham stove; so, likewise, it is fit and pretty that a virgin _Love_
+should always hide itself in an interesting virgin _Friendship_.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+You see the whole _nodus_ of the matter. I whisked away zigzag among
+the booths as fast as possible, from the claws of this rude Tosspot;
+yet he still hobbled after me. But my Teutoberga, who had heard
+somewhat of it came running back; clutched the tipsy market-warder by
+the collar, and said (shrieking, it is true, in village wise): "Stupid
+sot, go sleep the drink out of thy head, or I'll teach thee! Dost know,
+then, whom thou art speaking to? My husband, Army-chaplain Schmelzle
+under General and Minister von Schabacker at Pimpelstadt, thou
+blockhead!--Fie! Take shame, fellow!" The watchman mumbled, "Meant no
+harm," and reeled about his business. "O thou Lioness!" said I, in the
+transport of love, "why hast thou never been in any deadly peril, that
+I might show thee the Lion in thy husband!"
+
+Thus lovingly we both reached home; and perhaps in the sequel of this
+Fair day might still have enjoyed a glorious after-midnight, had not
+the Devil led my eye to the ninth volume of Lichtenberg's Works, and
+the 206th page, where this passage occurs: "It is not impossible, that,
+at a future period, our Chemists may light on some means of suddenly
+decomposing the Atmosphere by a sort of Ferment. In this way the world
+may be destroyed." Ah! true indeed! Since the Earth-ball is lapped up
+in the larger Atmospheric ball, let but any chemical scoundrel, in the
+remotest scoundrel-island, say in New Holland, devise some decomposing
+substance for the Atmosphere, like what a spark of fire would be for a
+powder-wagon; in a few seconds, the monstrous devouring world-storm
+catches me and you in Flaetz by the throat; my breathing, and the like,
+in this choke-air is over, and the whole game ended! The Earth becomes
+a boundless gallows, where the very cattle are hanged; worm-powder, and
+bug-liquor, Bradly ant-ploughs, and rat-poison, and wolf-traps are, in
+this universal world-trap and world-poison, no longer specially
+needful; and the Devil takes the whole, in the Bartholomew-night, when
+this cursed "Ferment" is invented.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+12. Nations--unlike rivers, which precipitate their impurities in level
+places and when at rest--drop their baseness just whilst in the most
+violent motion; and become the dirtier the farther they flow along
+through lazy flats.
+
+------------------------
+
+
+From the true soul, however, I concealed these deadly Night Thoughts;
+seeing she would either painfully have sympathized in them, or else
+mirthfully laughed at them. I merely gave orders that next morning
+(Saturday) she was to be standing booted and ready, at the outset of
+the returning coach; if so were she would have me speedily fulfil her
+wishes in regard to that stock of Rathships which lay so near her
+heart. She rejoiced in my purpose, gladly surrendering the market for
+such prospects. I too slept sound, my great toe tied to her finger the
+whole night through.
+
+The Dragoon next morning twitched me by the ear, and secretly whispered
+into it that he had a pleasant fairing to give his sister; and so would
+ride off somewhat early, on the nag he had yesterday purchased of the
+horse-dealer. I thanked him beforehand.
+
+
+------------------------
+
+28. When Nature takes the huge old Earth-round, the Earth-loaf and
+kneads it up again, for the purpose of introducing, under this
+piecrust, new stuffing and Dwarfs--she then, for most part, as a mother
+when baking will do to her daughters, gives in jest a little fraction
+of the dough (two or three thousand square leagues of such dough are
+enough for a child) to some Poetical or Philosophical, or Legislative
+polisher, that so the little elf may have something to be shaping and
+manufacturing beside its mother. And when the other young ones get a
+taste of sisterkin's baking, they all clap hands, and cry, "Aha,
+Mother! canst bake like _Suky_ here?"
+
+------------------------
+
+
+At the appointed hour all gayly started from the Staple, I excepted;
+for I still retained, even in the fairest daylight, that nocturnal
+Devil's-Ferment and Decomposition (of my cerebral globe as well as of
+the Earth-globe) fermenting in my head; a proof that the night had not
+affected me, or exaggerated my fear. The Blind Passenger, whom I liked
+so ill, also mounted along with us, and looked at me as usual, but
+without effect; for on this occasion, when the destruction not of
+myself only, but of worlds, was occupying my thoughts, the Passenger
+was nothing to me but a joke and a show; as a man, while his leg is
+a-sawing off, does not feel the throbbing of his heart; or amid the
+humming of cannon, does not guard himself from that of wasps; so to me
+any Passenger, with all the firebrands he might throw into my near or
+distant Future, could appear but ludicrous, at a time when I was
+reflecting that the "Ferment" might, even in my journey between Flaetz
+and Neusattel, be, by some American or European man of science, quite
+guiltlessly experimenting and decomposing, lighted upon by accident and
+let loose. The question, nay prize-question now, however, were this:
+"In how far, since Lichtenberg's threatening, it may not appear
+world-murderous and self-murderous, if enlightened Potentates of
+chemical nations do not enjoin it on their chemical subjects,--who in
+their decompositions and separations may so easily separate the soul
+from their body and unite Heaven with Earth,--not in future to make any
+other chemical experiments than those already made, which hitherto have
+profited the State rather than harmed it?"
+
+Unfortunately, I continued sunk in this Doomsday of the Ferment with
+all my thoughts and meditations, without, in the whole course of our
+return from Flaetz to Neusattel, suffering or observing anything, except
+that I actually arrived there, and at the same time saw the Blind
+Passenger once more go his ways.
+
+My Bergelchen alone had I constantly looked at by the road, partly
+that I might still see her, so long as life and eyes endured; partly
+that, even at the smallest danger to her, be it a great, or even
+all-over-sweeping Deluge and World's-doom, I might die, if not _for_
+her, at least _by_ her, and so, united with that stanch, true heart,
+cast away a plagued and plaguing life, in which, at any rate, not half
+of my wishes for her have been fulfilled.
+
+So then were my Journey over--crowned with some _Historiola_; and in
+time coming, perhaps, still more rewarded through you, ye Friends about
+Flaetz, if in these pages you shall find any well-ground pruning-knives,
+whereby you may more readily outroot the weedy tangle of Lies, which
+for the present excludes me from the gallant Schabacker--Only this
+cursed Ferment still sits in my head. Farewell, then, so long as there
+are Atmospheres left us to breathe. I wish I had that Ferment out of my
+head. Yours always,
+
+ Attila Schmelzle.
+
+P. S.--My brother-in-law has kept his promise well, and Berga is
+dancing. Particulars in my next!
+
+
+
+
+
+ Analects From Richter.
+
+
+ TRANSLATED BY
+
+ THOMAS DE QUINCEY.
+
+
+
+
+ ANALECTS FROM RICHTER.
+
+
+ THE HAPPY LIFE OF A PARISH PRIEST IN SWEDEN.
+
+
+Sweden apart, the condition of a parish priest is in itself
+sufficiently happy: in Sweden, then, much more so. There he enjoys
+summer and winter pure and unalloyed by any tedious interruptions: a
+Swedish spring, which is always a late one, is no repetition, in a
+lower key, of the harshness of winter, but anticipates, and is a
+prelibation of, perfect summer,--laden with blossoms,--radiant with the
+lily and the rose: insomuch, that a Swedish summer night represents
+implicitly one half of Italy, and a winter night one half of the world
+beside.
+
+I will begin with winter, and I will suppose it to be Christmas. The
+priest, whom we shall imagine to be a German, and summoned from the
+southern climate of Germany upon presentation to the church of a
+Swedish hamlet lying in a high polar latitude, rises in cheerfulness
+about seven o'clock in the morning; and till half past nine he burns
+his lamp. At nine o'clock, the stars are still shining, and the
+unclouded moon even yet longer. This prolongation of star-light into
+the forenoon is to him delightful; for he is a German, and has a sense
+of something marvellous in a starry forenoon. Methinks, I behold the
+priest and his flock moving towards the church with lanterns: the
+lights dispersed amongst the crowd connect the congregation into the
+appearance of some domestic group or larger household, and carry the
+priest back to his childish years during the winter season and
+Christmas matins, when every hand bore its candle. Arrived at the
+pulpit, he declares to his audience the plain truth, word for word, as
+it stands in the Gospel: in the presence of God, all intellectual
+pretensions are called upon to be silent; the very reason ceases to be
+reasonable; nor is anything reasonable in the sight of God but a
+sincere and upright heart.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Just as he and his flock are issuing from the church the bright
+Christmas sun ascends above the horizon, and shoots his beams upon
+their faces. The old men, who are numerous in Sweden, are all tinged
+with the colors of youth by the rosy morning-lustre; and the priest, as
+he looks away from them to mother earth lying in the sleep of winter,
+and to the churchyard, where the flowers and the men are all in their
+graves together, might secretly exclaim with the poet: "Upon the dead
+mother, in peace and utter gloom, are reposing the dead children. After
+a time, uprises the everlasting sun; and the mother starts up at the
+summons of the heavenly dawn with a resurrection of her ancient
+bloom:--And her children?--Yes: but they must wait awhile."
+
+At home he is awaited by a warm study, and a "long-levelled rule" of
+sunlight upon the book-clad wall.
+
+The afternoon he spends delightfully; for, having before him such
+perfect flower-stand of pleasures, he scarcely knows where he
+should settle. Supposing it to be Christmas-day, he preaches again:
+he preaches on a subject which calls up images of the beauteous
+eastern-land, or of eternity. By this time, twilight and gloom
+prevailed through the church: only a couple of wax-lights upon the
+altar throw wondrous and mighty shadows through the aisles: the angel
+that hangs down from the roof above the baptismal font is awoke into a
+solemn life by the shadows and the rays, and seems almost in the act of
+ascension: through the windows, the stars or the moon are beginning to
+peer: aloft, in the pulpit, which is now hid in gloom, the priest is
+inflamed and possessed by the sacred burden of glad tidings which he is
+announcing: he is lost and insensible to all besides; and from amidst
+the darkness which surrounds him, he pours down his thunders, with
+tears and agitation, reasoning of future worlds, and of the heaven of
+heavens, and whatsoever else can most powerfully shake the heart and
+the affections.
+
+Descending from his pulpit in these holy fervors, he now, perhaps,
+takes a walk: it is about four o'clock: and he walks beneath a sky lit
+up by the shifting northern lights, that to his eye appear but an
+Aurora striking upwards from the eternal morning of the south, or as a
+forest composed of saintly thickets, like the fiery bushes of Moses,
+that are round the throne of God.
+
+Thus, if it be the afternoon of Christmas-day: but if it be any other
+afternoon, visitors, perhaps, come and bring their well-bred, grown-up
+daughters; like the fashionable world in London, he dines at sunset;
+that is to say, like the _un_-fashionable world of London, he dines at
+two o'clock; and he drinks coffee by moonlight; and the parsonage-house
+becomes an enchanted palace of pleasure gleaming with twilight,
+starlight, and moonlight. Or, perhaps, he goes over to the
+schoolmaster, who is teaching his afternoon school: there by the
+candlelight, he gathers round his knees all the scholars, as if--being
+the children of his spiritual children--they must therefore be his own
+grandchildren; and with delightful words he wins their attention, and
+pours knowledge into their docile hearts.
+
+All these pleasures failing, he may pace up and down in his library,
+already, by three o'clock, gloomy with twilight, but fitfully enlivened
+by a glowing fire, and steadily by the bright moonlight; and he needs
+do no more than taste at every turn of his walk a little orange
+marmalade,--to call up images of beautiful Italy, and its gardens and
+orange groves, before all his five senses, and as it were to the very
+tip of his tongue. Looking at the moon, he will not fail to recollect
+that the very same silver disk hangs at the very same moment between
+the branches of the laurels in Italy. It will delight him to consider
+that the AEolian harp, and the lark, and indeed music of all kinds, and
+the stars, and children, are just the same in hot climates and in cold.
+And when the post-boy, that rides in with news from Italy, winds his
+horn through the hamlet, and with a few simple notes raises up on the
+frozen window of his study a vision of flowery realms; and when he
+plays with treasured leaves of roses and of lilies from some departed
+summer, or with plumes of a bird of paradise, the memorial of some
+distant friend; when, further, his heart is moved by the magnificent
+sounds of Lady-day, Salad-season, Cherry-time, Trinity-Sundays, the
+rose of June, &c., how can he fail to forget that he is in Sweden by
+the time that his lamp is brought in; and then, indeed, he will be
+somewhat disconcerted to recognize his study in what had now shaped
+itself to his fancy as a room in some foreign land. However, if he
+would pursue this airy creation, he need but light at his lamp a
+wax-candle-end, to gain a glimpse through the whole evening into
+that world of fashion and splendor, from which he purchased the
+said wax-candle-end. For I should suppose, that at the court of
+Stockholm, as elsewhere, there must be candle-ends to be bought of the
+state-footmen.
+
+But now, after the lapse of half a year, all at once there strikes upon
+his heart something more beautiful than Italy, where the sun sets so
+much earlier in summertime than it does at our Swedish hamlet: and what
+is _that_? It is the longest day, with the rich freight that it carries
+in its bosom, and leading by the hand the early dawn blushing with rosy
+light, and melodious with the carolling of larks at one o'clock in the
+morning. Before two, that is, at sunrise, the elegant party that we
+mentioned last winter arrive in gay clothing at the parsonage; for they
+are bound on a little excursion of pleasure in company with the priest.
+At two o'clock they are in motion; at which time all the flowers are
+glittering, and the forests are gleaming with the mighty light. The
+warm sun threatens them with no storm nor thunder-showers; for both are
+rare in Sweden. The priest, in common with the rest of the company, is
+attired in the costume of Sweden; he wears his short jacket with a
+broad scarf, his short cloak above that, his round hat with floating
+plumes, and shoes tied with bright ribbons: like the rest of the men,
+he resembles a Spanish knight, or a Provencal, or other man of the
+south: more especially when he and his gay company are seen flying
+through the lofty foliage luxuriant with blossom, that within so short
+a period of weeks has shot forth from the garden plots and the naked
+boughs.
+
+That a longest day like this, bearing such a cornucopia of sunshine, of
+cloudless ether, of buds and bells, of blossoms and of leisure, should
+pass away more rapidly than the shortest,--is not difficult to suppose.
+As early as eight o'clock in the evening the party breaks up; the sun
+is now burning more gently over the half-closed sleepy flowers: about
+nine he has mitigated his rays, and is beheld bathing as it were naked
+in the blue depths of heaven: about ten, at which hour the company
+reassemble at the parsonage, the priest is deeply moved, for throughout
+the hamlet, though the tepid sun, now sunk to the horizon, is still
+shedding a sullen glow upon the cottages and the window-panes,
+everything reposes in profoundest silence and sleep: the birds even are
+all slumbering in the golden summits of the woods: and at last, the
+solitary sun himself sets, like a moon, amidst the universal quiet of
+nature. To our priest, walking in his romantic dress, it seems as
+though rosy-colored realms were laid open, in which fairies and spirits
+range; and he would scarcely feel an emotion of wonder, if, in this
+hour of golden vision, his brother, who ran away in childhood, should
+suddenly present himself as one alighting from some blooming heaven of
+enchantment.
+
+The priest will not allow his company to depart: he detains them in the
+parsonage garden,--where, says he, every one that chooses may slumber
+away in beautiful bowers the brief, warm hours until the reappearance
+of the sun. This proposal is generally adopted: and the garden is
+occupied: many a lovely pair are making believe to sleep, but, in fact,
+are holding each other by the hand. The happy priest walks up and
+down through the parterres. Coolness comes, and a few stars. His
+night-violets and gillyflowers open and breathe out their powerful
+odors. To the north, from the eternal morning of the pole, exhales as
+it were a golden dawn. The priest thinks of the village of his
+childhood far away in Germany; he thinks of the life of man, his hopes,
+and his aspirations: and he is calm and at peace with himself. Then all
+at once starts up the morning sun in his freshness. Some there are in
+the garden who would fain confound it with the evening sun, and close
+their eyes again: but the larks betray all, and awaken every sleeper
+from bower to bower.
+
+Then again begin pleasure and morning in their pomp of radiance; and
+almost I could persuade myself to delineate the course of this day
+also, though it differs from its predecessor hardly by so much as the
+leaf of a rose-bud.
+
+
+
+
+ DREAM UPON THE UNIVERSE.
+
+
+I had been reading an excellent dissertation of Krueger's upon the old
+vulgar error which regards the space from one earth and sun to another
+as empty. Our sun together with all its planets fills only the
+31,419,460,000,000,000th part of the whole space between itself and the
+next solar body. Gracious Heavens! thought I,--in what an unfathomable
+abyss of emptiness were this universe swallowed up and lost, if all
+were void and utter vacuity except the few shining points of dust which
+we call a planetary system! To conceive of our earthly ocean as the
+abode of death, and essentially incapable of life, and of its populous
+islands as being no greater than snail-shells, would be a far less
+error in proportion to the compass of our planet than that which
+attributes emptiness to the great mundane spaces: and the error would
+be far less if the marine animals were to ascribe life and fulness
+exclusively to the sea, and to regard the atmospheric ocean above them
+as empty and untenanted. According to Herschel, the most remote of the
+galaxies which the telescope discovers lie at such a distance from us,
+that their light, which reaches us at this day, must have set out on
+its journey two millions of years ago; and thus by optical laws it is
+possible that whole squadrons of the starry hosts may be now reaching
+us with their beams which have themselves perished ages ago. Upon this
+scale of computation for the dimensions of the world, what heights and
+depths and breadths must there be in this universe--in comparison of
+which the positive universe would be itself a nihility, were it
+crossed--pierced--and belted about by so illimitable a wilderness of
+nothing! But is it possible that any man can for a moment overlook
+those vast forces which must pervade these imaginary deserts with
+eternal surges of flux and reflux, to make the very paths to those
+distant starry coasts voyageable to our eyes? Can you lock up in a sun
+or in its planets their reciprocal forces of attraction? Does not the
+light stream through the immeasurable spaces between our earth and the
+nebula which is farthest removed from us? And in this stream of light
+there is as ample an existence of the positive, and as much a home for
+the abode of a spiritual world, as there is a dwelling-place for thy
+own spirit in the substance of the brain. To these and similar
+reflections succeeded the following dream:--
+
+Methought my body sank down in ruins, and my inner form stepped out
+apparelled in light: and by my-side there stood another form which
+resembled my own, except that it did not shine like mine, but lightened
+unceasingly. "Two thoughts," said the form, "are the wings with which I
+move; the thought of _Here_, and the thought of _There_. And behold! I
+am yonder";--pointing to a distant world. "Come, then, and wait on me
+with thy thoughts and with thy flight, that I may show to thee the
+universe under a veil." And I flew along with the Form. In a moment our
+earth fell back, behind our consuming flight, into an abyss of
+distance; a faint gleam only was reflected from the summits of the
+Cordilleras; and a few moments more reduced the sun to a little star;
+and soon there remained nothing visible of our system except a comet
+which was travelling from our sun with angelic speed in the direction
+of Sirius. Our flight now carried us so rapidly through the flocks
+of solar bodies--flocks, past counting unless to their heavenly
+Shepherd,--that scarcely could they expand themselves before us into
+the magnitude of moons, before they sank behind us into pale nebular
+gleams; and their planetary earths could not reveal themselves for a
+moment to the transcendent rapidity of our course. At length Sirius and
+all the brotherhood of our constellations and the galaxy of our heavens
+stood far below our feet as a little nebula amongst other yet more
+distant nebulae. Thus we flew on through the starry wildernesses: one
+heaven after another unfurled its immeasurable banners before us, and
+then rolled up behind us: galaxy behind galaxy towered up into solemn
+altitudes before which the spirit shuddered; and they stood in long
+array through which the Infinite Being might pass in progress.
+Sometimes the Form that lightened would outfly my weary thoughts; and
+then it would be seen far off before me like a coruscation amongst the
+stars--till suddenly I thought again to myself the thought of _There_,
+and then I was at its side. But, as we were thus swallowed up by one
+abyss of stars after another, and the heavens above our eyes were not
+emptier--neither were the heavens below them fuller; and as suns
+without intermission fell into the solar ocean like water-spouts of a
+storm which fall into the ocean of waters;--then at length the human
+heart within me was overburdened and weary, and yearned after some
+narrow cell or quiet oratory in this metropolitan cathedral of the
+universe. And I said to the Form at my side, "O Spirit! has then this
+universe no end?" And the Form answered and said, "Lo! it has no
+beginning."
+
+Suddenly, however, the heavens above us appeared to be emptied, and not
+a star was seen to twinkle in the mighty abyss,--no gleam of light to
+break the unity of the infinite darkness. The starry hosts behind us
+had all contracted into an obscure nebula: and at length _that_ also
+had vanished. And I thought to myself, "At last the universe has
+ended": and I trembled at the thought of the illimitable dungeon of
+pure,--pure darkness which here began to imprison the creation: I
+shuddered at the dead sea of nothing, in whose unfathomable zone of
+blackness the jewel of the glittering universe seemed to be set and
+buried forever; and through the night in which we moved I saw the Form
+which still lightened as before, but left all around it unilluminated.
+Then the Form said to me in my anguish, "O creature of little faith!
+Look up! the most ancient light is coming!" I looked; and in a moment
+came a twilight,--in the twinkling of an eye a galaxy,--and then with a
+choral burst rushed in all the company of stars. For centuries gray
+with age, for millennia hoary with antiquity, had the starry light been
+on its road to us; and at length out of heights inaccessible to thought
+it had reached us. Now then, as through some renovated century, we flew
+through new cycles of heavens. At length again came a starless
+interval; and far longer it endured, before the beams of a starry host
+again had reached us.
+
+As we thus advanced forever through an interchange of nights and solar
+heavens, and as the interval grew still longer and longer before the
+last heaven we had quitted contracted to a point,--and as once we
+issued suddenly from the middle of thickest night into an Aurora
+Borealis,--the herald of an expiring world, and we found throughout
+this cycle of solar systems that a day of judgment had indeed arrived;
+the suns had sickened, and the planets were heaving--rocking, yawning
+in convulsions, the subterraneous waters of the great deeps were
+breaking up, and lightnings that were ten diameters of a world in
+length ran along--from east to west--from Zenith to Nadir; and here and
+there, where a sun should have been, we saw instead through the misty
+vapor a gloomy--ashy--leaden corpse of a solar body, that sucked in
+flames from the perishing world--but gave out neither light nor heat;
+and as I saw, through a vista which had no end, mountain towering above
+mountain, and piled up with what seemed glittering snow from the
+conflict of solar and planetary bodies;--then my spirit bent under the
+load of the universe, and I said to the Form, "Rest, rest: and lead me
+no farther: I am too solitary in the creation itself; and in its
+deserts yet more so: the full world is great, but the empty world is
+greater; and with the universe increase its Zaarahs."
+
+Then the Form touched me like the flowing of a breath, and spoke more
+gently than before: "In the presence of God there is no emptiness:
+above, below, between, and round about the stars, in the darkness and
+in the light, dwelleth the true and very Universe, the sum and fountain
+of all that is. But thy spirit can bear only earthly images of the
+unearthly; now then I cleanse thy sight with euphrasy; look forth, and
+behold the images." Immediately my eyes were opened; and I looked, and
+I saw as it were an interminable sea of light,--sea immeasurable, sea
+unfathomable, sea without a shore. All spaces between all heavens were
+filled with happiest light: and there was a thundering of floods: and
+there were seas above the seas, and seas below the seas: and I saw all
+the trackless regions that we had voyaged over: and my eye comprehended
+the farthest and the nearest: and darkness had become light, and the
+light darkness: for the deserts and wastes of the creation were now
+filled with the sea of light, and in this sea the suns floated like
+ash-gray blossoms, and the planets like black grains of seed. Then my
+heart comprehended that immortality dwelled in the spaces between the
+worlds, and death only amongst the worlds. Upon all the suns there
+walked upright shadows in the form of men: but they were glorified when
+they quitted these perishable worlds, and when they sank into the sea
+of light: and the murky planets, I perceived, were but cradles for the
+infant spirits of the universe of light. In the Zaarahs of the creation
+I saw--I heard--I felt--the glittering--the echoing--the breathing of
+life and creative power. The suns were but as spinning-wheels, the
+planets no more than weavers' shuttles, in relation to the infinite web
+which composes the veil of Isis; which veil is hung over the whole
+creation, and lengthens as any finite being attempts to raise it. And
+in sight of this immeasurability of life, no sadness could endure; but
+only joy that knew no limit, and happy prayers.
+
+But in the midst of this great vision of the Universe the Form that
+lightened eternally had become invisible, or had vanished to its home
+in the unseen world of spirits: I was left alone in the centre of a
+universe of life, and I yearned after some sympathizing being. Suddenly
+from the starry deeps there came floating through the ocean of light a
+planetary body; and upon it there stood a woman whose face was as the
+face of a Madonna; and by her side there stood a child, whose
+countenance varied not--neither was it magnified as he drew nearer.
+This child was a king, for I saw that he had a crown upon his head: but
+the crown was a crown of thorns. Then also I perceived that the
+planetary body was our unhappy earth: and, as the earth drew near, this
+child who had come forth from the starry deeps to comfort me threw upon
+me a look of gentlest pity and of unutterable love--so that in my heart
+I had a sudden rapture of joy such as passes all understanding; and I
+awoke in the tumult of my happiness.
+
+I awoke: but my happiness survived my dream: and I exclaimed, O how
+beautiful is death, seeing that we die in a world of life and of
+creation without end! and I blessed God for my life upon earth, but
+much more for the life in those unseen depths of the universe which are
+emptied of all but the Supreme Reality, and where no earthly life nor
+perishable hope can enter.
+
+
+
+
+ COMPLAINT OF THE BIRD IN A DARKENED CAGE.
+
+
+"Ah!" said the imprisoned bird, "how unhappy were I in my eternal
+night, but for those melodious tones which sometimes make their way to
+me like beams of light from afar, and cheer my gloomy day. But I will
+myself repeat these heavenly melodies like an echo, until I have
+stamped them in my heart; and then I shall be able to bring comfort to
+myself in my darkness!" Thus spoke the little warbler, and soon had
+learned the sweet airs that were sung to it with voice and instrument.
+That done, the curtain was raised; for the darkness had been purposely
+contrived to assist in its instruction. O man! how often dost thou
+complain of overshadowing grief and of darkness resting upon thy days!
+And yet what cause for complaint, unless indeed thou hast failed to
+learn wisdom from suffering? For is not the whole sum of human life a
+veiling and an obscuring of the immortal spirit of man? Then first,
+when the fleshly curtain falls away, may it soar upwards into a region
+of happier melodies!
+
+
+
+
+ ON THE DEATH OF YOUNG CHILDREN.
+
+
+Ephemera die all at sunset, and no insect of this class has ever
+sported in the beams of the morning sun. Happier are ye, little human
+ephemera! Ye played only in the ascending beams, and in the early dawn,
+and in the eastern light; ye drank only of the prelibations of life;
+hovered for a little space over a world of freshness and of blossoms;
+and fell asleep in innocence before yet the morning dew was exhaled!
+
+
+
+
+ THE PROPHETIC DEW-DROPS.
+
+
+A delicate child, pale and prematurely wise, was complaining on a hot
+morning that the poor dewdrops had been too hastily snatched away and
+not allowed to glitter on the flowers like other happier dewdrops that
+live the whole night through and sparkle in the moonlight, and through
+the morning onwards to noonday: "The sun," said the child, "has chased
+them away with his heat--or swallowed them in his wrath." Soon after
+came rain and a rainbow; whereupon his father pointed upwards: "See,"
+said he, "there stand thy dew-drops gloriously re-set--a glittering
+jewelry--in the heavens; and the clownish foot tramples on them no
+more. By this, my child, thou art taught that what withers upon earth
+blooms again in heaven." Thus the father spoke, and knew not that he
+spoke prefiguring words: for soon after the delicate child, with the
+morning brightness of his early wisdom, was exhaled, like a dewdrop,
+into heaven.
+
+
+
+
+ ON DEATH.
+
+
+We should all think of death as a less hideous object, if it simply
+untenanted our bodies of a spirit, without corrupting them; secondly,
+if the grief which we experience at the spectacle of our friends'
+graves were not by some confusion of the mind blended with the image of
+our own; thirdly, if we had not in this life seated ourselves in a warm
+domestic nest, which we are unwilling to quit for the cold blue regions
+of the unfathomable heavens; finally,--if death were denied to us. Once
+in dreams I saw a human being of heavenly intellectual faculties, and
+his aspirations were heavenly; but he was chained (methought) eternally
+to the earth. The immortal old man had five great wounds in his
+happiness--five worms that gnawed forever at his heart: he was unhappy
+in springtime, because _that_ is a season of hope--and rich with
+phantoms of far happier days than any which this aceldama of earth
+can realize. He was unhappy at the sound of music, which dilates the
+heart of man into its whole capacity for the infinite, and he cried
+aloud,--"Away, away! Thou speakest of things which throughout my
+endless life I have found not, and shall not find!" He was unhappy at
+the remembrance of earthly affections and dissevered hearts: for love
+is a plant which may bud in this life, but it must flourish in another.
+He was unhappy under the glorious spectacle of the starry host, and
+ejaculated forever in his heart,--"So then I am parted from you to all
+eternity by an impassable abyss: the great universe of suns is above,
+below, and round about me: but I am chained to a little ball of dust
+and ashes." He was unhappy before the great ideas of Virtue--of
+Truth--and of God; because he knew how feeble are the approximations to
+them which a son of earth can make. But this was a dream: God be
+thanked, that in reality there is no such craving and asking eye
+directed upwards to heaven--to which death will not one day bring an
+answer!
+
+
+
+
+ IMAGINATION UNTAMED BY THE COARSER
+ REALITIES OF LIFE.
+
+
+Happy is every actor in the guilty drama of life, to whom the higher
+illusion within supplies or conceals the external illusion; to whom, in
+the tumult of his part and its intellectual interest, the bungling
+landscapes of the stage have the bloom and reality of nature, and whom
+the loud parting and shocking of the scenes disturb not in his dream!
+
+
+
+
+ SATIRICAL NOTICE OF REVIEWERS.
+
+
+In Swabia, in Saxony, in Pomerania, are towns in which are stationed a
+strange sort of officers,--valuers of author's flesh, something like
+our old market-lookers in this town. They are commonly called tasters
+(or _Praegustatores_) because they eat a mouthful of every book
+beforehand, and tell the people whether its flavor be good. We authors,
+in spite, call them _reviewers_: but I believe an action of defamation
+would lie against us for such bad words. The tasters write no books
+themselves; consequently they have the more time to look over and tax
+those of other people. Or, if they do sometimes write books, they are
+bad ones: which again is very advantageous to them: for who can
+understand the theory of badness in other people's books so well as
+those who have learned it by practice in their own? They are reputed
+the guardians of literature and the literati for the same reason that
+St. Nepomuk is the patron saint of bridges and of all who pass over
+them,--namely, because he himself once lost his life from a bridge.
+
+
+
+
+ FEMALE TONGUES.
+
+
+Hippel, the author of the book "Upon Marriage," says, "A woman, that
+does not talk, must be a stupid woman." But Hippel is an author whose
+opinions it is more safe to admire than to adopt. The most intelligent
+women are often silent amongst women; and again the most stupid and the
+most silent are often neither one nor the other except amongst men. In
+general the current remark upon men is valid also with respect to
+women,--that those for the most part are the greatest thinkers who are
+the least talkers; as frogs cease to croak when _light_ is brought to
+the water edge. However, in fact, the disproportionate talking of
+women arises out of the sedentariness of their labors: sedentary
+artisans,--as tailors, shoemakers, weavers,--have this habit as well as
+hypochondriacal tendencies in common with women. Apes do not talk, as
+savages say, that they may not be set to work: but women often talk
+double their share--even _because_ they work.
+
+
+
+
+ FORGIVENESS.
+
+
+Nothing is more moving to man than the spectacle of reconciliation: our
+weaknesses are thus indemnified, and are not too costly--being the
+price we pay for the hour of forgiveness: and the archangel, who has
+never felt anger, has reason to envy the man who subdues it. When thou
+forgivest,--the man, who has pierced thy heart, stands to thee in the
+relation of the sea-worm that perforates the shell of the muscle, which
+straightway closes the wound with a pearl.
+
+ * * *
+
+The graves of the best of men, of the noblest martyrs, are like the
+graves of the Herrnhuters (the Moravian brethren)--level, and
+undistinguishable from the universal earth: and, if the earth could
+give up her secrets, our whole globe would appear a Westminster Abbey
+laid flat. Ah! what a multitude of tears, what myriads of bloody drops
+have been shed in secrecy about the three corner-trees of earth,--the
+tree of life, the tree of knowledge, and the tree of freedom,--shed,
+but never reckoned! It is only great periods of calamity that reveal to
+us our great men, as comets are revealed by total eclipses of the sun.
+Not merely upon the field of battle, but also upon the consecrated soil
+of virtue--and upon the classic ground of truth, thousands of
+_nameless_ heroes must fall and struggle to build up the footstool
+from which history surveys the _one_ hero, whose name is embalmed,
+bleeding--conquering--and resplendent. The grandest of heroic deeds are
+those which are performed within four walls and in domestic privacy.
+And, because history records only the self-sacrifices of the male sex,
+and because she dips her pen only in blood,--therefore is it that in
+the eyes of the unseen spirit of the world our annals appear doubtless
+far more beautiful and noble than in our own.
+
+
+
+
+ THE GRANDEUR OF MAN IN HIS LITTLENESS.
+
+
+Man upon this earth would be vanity and hollowness, dust and ashes,
+vapor and a bubble,--were it not that he felt himself to be so. That it
+is possible for him to harbor such a feeling,--_this_, by implying a
+comparison of himself with something higher in himself, _this_ is it
+which makes him the immortal creature that he is.
+
+
+
+
+ NIGHT.
+
+
+The earth is every day overspread with the veil of night for the same
+reason as the cages of birds are darkened,--namely, that we may the
+more readily apprehend the higher harmonies of thought in the hush and
+quiet of darkness. Thoughts, which day turns into smoke and mist, stand
+about us in the night as lights and flames: even as the column which
+fluctuates above the crater of Vesuvius, in the daytime appears a
+pillar of cloud, but by night a pillar of fire.
+
+
+
+
+ THE STARS.
+
+
+Look up, and behold the eternal fields of light that lie round about
+the throne of God. Had no star ever appeared in the heavens, to man
+there would have been no heavens; and he would have laid himself down
+to his last sleep, in a spirit of anguish, as upon a gloomy earth
+vaulted over by a material arch--solid and impervious.
+
+
+
+
+ MARTYRDOM.
+
+
+To die for the truth--is not to die for one's country, but to die for
+the world. Truth, like the _Venus del Medici_, will pass down in thirty
+fragments to posterity: but posterity will collect and recompose them
+into a goddess. Then also thy temple, O eternal Truth! that now stands
+half below the earth--made hollow by the sepulchres of its witnesses,
+will raise itself in the total majesty of its proportions; and will
+stand in monumental granite; and every pillar on which it rests will be
+fixed in the grave of a martyr.
+
+
+
+
+ THE QUARRELS OF FRIENDS.
+
+
+Why is it that the most fervent love becomes more fervent by brief
+interruption and reconciliation? and why must a storm agitate our
+affections before they can raise the highest rainbow of peace? Ah! for
+this reason it is--because all passions feel their object to be as
+eternal as themselves, and no love can admit the feeling that the
+beloved object should die. And under this feeling of imperishableness
+it is that we hard fields of ice shock together so harshly, whilst all
+the while under the sunbeams of a little space of seventy years we are
+rapidly dissolving.
+
+
+
+
+ DREAMING.
+
+
+But for dreams, that lay Mosaic worlds tessellated with flowers and
+jewels before the blind sleeper, and surround the recumbent living with
+the figures of the dead in the upright attitude of life, the time would
+be too long before we are allowed to rejoin our brothers, parents,
+friends: every year we should become more and more painfully sensible
+of the desolation made around us by death, if sleep--the ante-chamber
+of the grave--were not hung by dreams with the busts of those who live
+in the other world.
+
+
+
+
+ TWO DIVISIONS OF PHILOSOPHIC MINDS.
+
+
+There are two very different classes of philosophical heads--which,
+since Kant has introduced into philosophy the idea of positive and
+negative quantities, I shall willingly classify by means of that
+distinction. The positive intellect is, like the poet, in conjunction
+with the outer world, the father of an inner world; and, like the poet
+also, holds up a transforming mirror in which the entangled and
+distorted members as they are seen in our actual experience enter into
+new combinations which compose a fair and luminous world: the
+hypothesis of Idealism (i. e. the Fichtean system) the Monads and the
+Pre-established Harmony of Leibnitz--and Spinozism are all births of a
+genial moment, and not the wooden carving of logical toil. Such men
+therefore as Leibnitz, Plato, Herder, &c., I call positive intellects;
+because they seek and yield the positive; and because their inner
+world, having raised itself higher out of the water than in others,
+thereby overlooks a larger prospect of island and continents. A
+negative head, on the other hand, discovers by its acuteness--not any
+positive truths, but the negative (i. e. the errors) of other people.
+Such an intellect, as for example Bayle, one of the greatest of that
+class,--appraises the funds of others, rather than brings any fresh
+funds of his own. In lieu of the obscure ideas which he finds he gives
+us clear ones: but in this there is no positive accession to our
+knowledge; for all that the clear idea contains in development exists
+already by implication in the obscure idea. Negative intellects of
+every age are unanimous in their abhorrence of everything positive.
+Impulse, feeling, instinct--everything, in short, which is
+incomprehensible, they can endure just once--that is, at the summit of
+their chain of arguments as a sort of hook on which they may hang
+them,--but never afterwards.
+
+
+
+
+ DIGNITY OF MAN IN SELF-SACRIFICE.
+
+
+That for which man offers up his blood or his property must be more
+valuable than they. A good man does not fight with half the courage
+for his own life that he shows in the protection of another's. The
+mother, who will hazard nothing for herself, will hazard all in defence
+of her child:--in short, only for the nobility within us--only for
+virtue, will man open his veins and offer up his spirit: but this
+nobility--this virtue--presents different phases: with the Christian
+martyr, it is faith; with the savage, it is honor; with the republican,
+it is liberty.
+
+
+
+
+ FANCY.
+
+
+Fancy can lay only the past and the future under her copying-paper: and
+every actual presence of the object sets limits to her power: just as
+water distilled from roses, according to the old naturalists, lost its
+power exactly at the periodical blooming of the rose.
+
+ * * *
+
+The older, the more tranquil, and pious a man is, so much the more holy
+does he esteem all that is _innate_, that is, _feeling_ and _power_;
+whereas in the estimate of the multitude whatsoever is _self-acquired_,
+the ability of practice and science in general has an undue
+pre-eminence; for the latter is universally appreciated, and therefore
+even by those who have it not, but the former not at all. In the
+twilight and the moonshine the fixed stars, which are suns, retire and
+veil themselves in obscurity; whilst the planets, which are simply
+earths, preserve their borrowed light unobscured. The elder races of
+men, amongst whom man _was_ more, though he had not yet _become_ so
+much, had a childlike feeling of sympathy with all the gifts of the
+Infinite--for example, with strength--beauty--and good fortune; and
+even the _involuntary_ had a sanctity in their eyes, and was to them a
+prophecy and a revelation: hence the value they ascribed, and the
+art of interpretation they applied, to the speeches of children--of
+madmen--of drunkards--and of dreamers.
+
+ * * *
+
+As the blind man knows not light, and through that ignorance also of
+necessity knows not darkness,--so likewise, but for disinterestedness
+we should know nothing of selfishness, but for slavery nothing of
+freedom: there are perhaps in this world many things which remain
+obscure to us for want of alternating with their opposites.
+
+ * * *
+
+Derham remarks in his Physico-theology that the deaf hear best in the
+midst of noise, as, for instance, during the ringing of bells, &c. This
+must be the reason, I suppose, that the thundering of drums, cannons,
+&c., accompany the entrance into cities of princes and ministers, who
+are generally rather deaf, in order that they may the better hear the
+petitions and complaints of the people.
+
+
+
+
+
+ MISCELLANEOUS PIECES.
+
+
+
+
+ REMINISCENCES
+ OF THE BEST HOURS OF LIFE FOR THE HOUR OF DEATH.
+
+
+"Give me," said Herder to his son, as he lay in the parched weariness
+of his last illness,--"give me a great thought, that I may quicken
+myself with it."
+
+It marks a strange perversity in human nature, that we are wont to
+offer nothing but images of terror--no stars of cheering light--to
+those who lie imprisoned in the darkness of a sick-bed, when the
+glitter of the dew of life is waxing gray and dim before them. It is
+indeed hard that lamentations and emotions are frequently vented upon
+the dying, which would be withheld from the living in all their vigor;
+as if the sick patient was to console those in health. There stands no
+spirit in the closeness of a sick-chamber to awaken a cheering smile on
+that nerveless, colorless countenance; but only confessors, lawyers,
+and doctors, who order everything, and relatives who lament at
+everything. There stands no lofty spirit, elevated above the
+circumstance of sorrow, to conduct the prostrate soul of the sufferer,
+thirsty for the refreshment of joy, back to the old springtide waters
+of pious recollection; and so to mingle these with the last ecstasies
+of life, as to give the dying man a foreboding of his transition to
+another state. On the contrary, the death-bed is narrowed into a coffin
+without a lid. The value of life is enhanced to the departing one by
+lies which promise cure, or words which proffer consolation; the bier
+is represented as a scaffold, the harsh discord of life is trumpeted
+into the ears which survive long after the eyes are dead, instead of
+letting life ebb away like an echo in sounds ever deeper, though
+fainter. Nevertheless, man has this of good in him, that he recalls the
+slightest joy which he has shared with a dying person, far rather than
+a thousand greater pleasures given to a person in health; perhaps
+because, in the latter case, we hope to repeat and redouble our
+attentions,--so little do mortals reflect that every pleasure they give
+or they receive may be the last.
+
+Our exit from life would therefore be greatly more painful than our
+entrance into it, were it not that our good mother Nature had
+previously mitigated its sufferings, by gently bearing her children
+from one world into another when they are already heavy with sleep. For
+in the hour before the last she allows a breastplate of indifference
+toward the survivors to freeze about the heart of the lamented one; and
+in the hour immediately preceding dissolution (as we learn from those
+who have recovered from apparent death, and from the demeanor of many
+dying persons), the brain is, as it were, inundated and watered by
+faint eddies of bliss, comparable to nothing upon earth better than to
+the ineffable sensations felt by a patient under magnetic treatment.
+
+We can by no means know how high these sensations of dying may reach,
+as we have accounts of them from none but those in whom the process has
+been interrupted; nor can we ascertain whether it is not these
+ecstatical transports which exhaust life more than the convulsions of
+pain, and which loosen the tie of this terrestrial state in some
+unknown heaven.
+
+The history of the dying is a serious and prodigious history, but on
+earth its leaves will never be unrolled.
+
+
+In the little village of Heim, Gottreich Hartmann resided with his old
+father, who was a curate; and although the old man had wellnigh
+outlived all those whom he had loved, he was made happy by his son.
+Gottreich discharged his duties for him in the parish, not so much in
+aid of his parent's unflinching vigor, as to satisfy his own energy,
+and to give his father the exquisite gratification of being edified by
+his child and companion.
+
+In Gottreich there thrilled a spirit of true poetry; he was not, like
+the greater number of poetical young men, a bulbous plant, which, when
+it has sent forth its own flower, fattens its unseemly fruit
+underground; but he was a tree which crowned its variegated blossoms
+with sweet and beautiful fruits; and these buds were as yet coiled up
+from the warmth of the earliest springtide of a poet's life.
+
+His father had had in his youth a poet's ardor of like intensity, but
+it was not favored by the times; for in the last century many a spirit
+which might have soared was engaged to the pulpit or the law-court,
+because the old-fashioned middle classes were convinced that their
+offspring would find richer pasture on the meadow and in the valley
+than on the peaks of the mountain of the Muses.
+
+Nevertheless, the repressed spirit of a poet, when it cannot exhale
+itself in creation, recoils but the more closely into the depths of his
+heart. His unuttered feelings speak in his motions as with a voice, and
+his actions express his imagery, and in this manner the poet may live
+as long as the man; just as the short-lived butterfly may last out the
+long, hard winter in its chrysalis state, if it has not burst its
+prison in the preceding summer.
+
+Such had been the life of the elder Hartmann; and yet more beautiful
+was it, because the virginal soul of the poet lives in the offices of
+religion, as in a nun's cell; and the twin sisters Piety and Poetry are
+wont to dwell together and stand by one another.
+
+How beautiful and how pure is the position of God's ministers! All that
+is good dwells around them,--religion, poetry, and the life of a
+shepherd of souls; whilst other professions oft serve only to choke up
+this goodly neighborhood. Son and father seemed to live in one another,
+and on the site of filial and paternal love there arose the structure
+of a rare and singular friendship. Gottreich not only cheered his
+father by the new birth of his lost poet's youth, but by the still more
+beautiful similarity of their faith. In days gone by, a minister who
+sent his son to the public theological schools might expect him to
+return the sworn antagonist of all that he had himself daily prayed to
+at the altar in the discharge of his office: the son returned to his
+father's roof as a missionary sent to convert the heathen, or as an
+antichrist. There may have been sorrows of a father, which, though all
+unspoken, were deeper than a mother's sorrows. But times are perhaps
+better now.
+
+Gottreich, though he entered the high schools with his share of the
+uppish, quibbling of early youth, returned with the faith of his
+ancestors and of his father. For he had studied under instructors who
+had taught him to cling rather to the teachings of the old faith than
+to the ingenious explanations of the commentators, and who had exposed
+to the light alone what is serviceable to man, as to a plant, and to
+its outward growth, but not the roots perniciously. Thus the father
+found again his old Christian heart sending forth new shoots in the
+bosom of his Gottreich, and moreover the best justification of the
+convictions of his life and of his love.
+
+If it be pain to us to love and at the same time to contradict, to
+refuse with the head what the heart grants, it is all the sweeter to us
+to find ourselves and our faith transplanted forwards in a younger
+being. Life is then a beautiful night, in which not one star goes down
+but another rises in its place.
+
+Gottreich possessed a paradise, in which he labored as his father's
+gardener; he was at once the wife, the brother, the friend, the all
+that is to be loved by man, of his parent. Every Sunday brought him a
+new pleasure, that of preaching a sermon before his father. He
+displayed so much power in his pulpit eloquence, that he seemed to
+labor more for the elevation and edification of his father than for the
+enlightenment of the common people; though he held a maxim, which I
+take to be far from erroneous, that the highest subjects of
+intellectual speculation are good for the people as for children, and
+that _man can only learn to rise, from the consideration of that which
+he cannot surmount_. If the eye of the old man was moistened, or if his
+hands were suddenly folded in an attitude of prayer, the Sunday became
+the holiest of festivals; and many a festival has there been in that
+quiet little parsonage, whose festivity no one understood and no one
+perceived. He who looks upon sermon-preaching and sermon-hearing as a
+dull pleasure, will but little understand the zest with which the two
+friends conversed on discourses delivered, and on those yet to come, as
+if pulpit-criticism was as engrossing as the criticism of the stage.
+The approbation and the love of an energetic old man like Hartmann,
+whose spiritual limbs had by no means stiffened on the chilly ridge of
+years, could not but exercise a powerful influence on a young man like
+Gottreich, who, more tenderly and delicately formed both in body and
+mind, was wont to shoot forth in loftier and more rapid flame.
+
+To these two happy men was added a happy woman also. Justa, an
+orphan, sole mistress of her property, had entirely left and sold the
+trading-house which had been her father's, in the town, and had removed
+into the upper part of a good peasant's cottage, to live entirely in
+the country. Justa did nothing in the world by halves, but she often
+did things more than most would deem completely, at least in all that
+touched her generosity. She had not long resided in the village of
+Heim, and had seen the meek Gottreich, and listened to some of his
+springtide sermons, ere she discovered that he had won her heart,
+filled as it was with the love of virtue; she nevertheless refused to
+grant him her hand until the conclusion of the great peace, after
+which they were to be married. She was ever fonder of doing what is
+difficult than what is easy. I wish that it was here the place to
+tell of the May-time life they led, which seemed to blossom in the low
+parsonage-house hard by the church-door under Justa's hand; how she came
+in the morning from her own cottage, to order matters in the little
+dwelling for the day; how the evenings were passed in the garden,
+ornamented with few, but pretty flower-beds, and commanding a view of
+many a well-watered meadow and distant hill, and stars without number;
+how these three hearts played into one another, no one of which in this
+most pure and intimate intercourse knew or felt anything which was not
+of the fairest; and how good and gay intention marked the passage of
+their lives. Every bench was a church chair, all was peaceful and holy,
+and the firmament above an infinite church dome.
+
+In many a village and in many a house a true Eden may be hid, which has
+neither been named nor marked down; for joy is fond of covering over
+and concealing her tenderest flowers. Gottreich reposed in such a
+fulness of bliss and love, of poetry and religion, of springtime, of
+the past and of the future, that he feared in the bottom of his heart
+to speak his happiness out, save in prayer. In prayer, thought he, man
+may say all, his happiness and his misery. His father was very happy
+also; there came over him a warm old age,--no winter night, but a
+summer evening, without frost or darkness: albeit the sun of his life
+was sunk pretty deep below the mound of earth under which his wife was
+lain down to sleep.
+
+Nothing recalls the close of life to a noble-hearted young man so much
+as precisely the happiest and fairest hours which he passes. Gottreich,
+in the midst of the united fragrance and beauty of the flowers of joy,
+even with the morning-star of life above him, could not but think on
+the time when the same should appear to him as the evening star,
+warning him of sleep. Then said he to himself: "All is now so certain
+and so clear before me,--the beauty and the holiness of life, the
+splendor of the universe, the Creator, the dignity and the greatness of
+man's heart, the bright images of eternal truth, the whole starry
+firmament of ideas, which enlightens, instructs, and upholds man! But
+when I am grown old, and in the obstruction of death, will not all that
+now rustles so bloomingly and livingly about me appear gray and dull?
+Just when man is approaching that heaven which he has so long
+contemplated, Death holds the telescope inverted before his dim eye,
+and lets him see only what is empty, distant, shadowy. But is this
+indeed true? Shall I be more likely to be right when I only feel and
+think and hope, with half a life, incapable of a keen glance or an
+intense sensation,--or am I right now, that my whole heart is warm,
+that my whole head is clear, and my strength fresh? I acknowledge that
+the present is the fittest season, and that precisely because I do
+acknowledge it to be the fittest. I will then live through this daytime
+of truth attentively, and bear it away with me to the evening dusk,
+that it may lighten my end."
+
+In these sweetest May-hours of youth, when heaven and earth and his own
+heart were beating together in harmony, he gave ardent words to his
+ardent thoughts, and kept them written down under the title of
+"_Reminiscences of the best Hours of Life for the Hour of Death_." He
+meant to cheer himself at his last hour with these views of his happy
+life, and to look back from the glow of the evening to the brightness
+of the morning of his youth.
+
+Thus lived these three beings, ever rejoicing more deeply in one
+another and in their genial happiness, when at last the chariots of the
+struggle and the victories of the holy War[77] began to roll over the
+land.
+
+Now Gottreich became another man; like a young bird of passage, which,
+though it know nothing of summer climates, frets in its warm cage that
+it cannot fly away with the older birds of its kind. The active powers
+of his nature, which had heretofore been the quiet audience of his
+poetical and oratorical powers, arose; and it seemed to him as if the
+spirit of energy, which hitherto had wasted itself like the flames of a
+bituminous soil on the empty air, were now seeking an object to lay
+hold of. He dared not, however, risk to propose a separation to his
+father, but he by turns tormented and refreshed himself inwardly with
+the idea of laboring and combating with the rest. To Justa alone he
+confided his wishes, but she did not give them encouragement, because
+she thought the old man's solitude would be too great for him to bear.
+At last the old man himself, inspirited for war by Gottreich and his
+betrothed one, said that his son had better go, that he had long
+desired it, and had only been silent through love for him. He hoped,
+with God's aid, to be able to discharge his pastoral duties for a
+twelvemonth; so that he, too, should be doing something for his
+country.
+
+Gottreich departed, trusting to the autumnal strength of his father's
+life. He enlisted as a common soldier, and preached also wherever he
+was able. The entrance on a new career awakens new energies and powers,
+which rapidly unfold into life and vigor. Although fortune spared him
+the wounds which he would so willingly have brought back with him into
+the peaceful future of his life, in memory as it were of the focus of
+his youth, yet it was happiness enough to take part in the battles,
+and, like an old republican, to fight together with a whole nation for
+the common cause.
+
+When at length, in the most beautiful month of May which ever Germany
+had won by conquest, the festivals of victory and of peace began in
+more than one nation. Gottreich was unwilling to pass those days of
+rejoicing so far from those who were dearest to him; he longed for
+their company, that his joy might be doubled: so he took the road to
+Heim. Thousands, before and after him, journeyed at that time over the
+liberated land, from a happy past to a happy future; but few there were
+who saw, like Gottreich, so pure a firmament over the mountains of his
+native valleys, in which not a star was missing, but every one of them
+was twinkling and bright. Justa had already sent him the little annals
+of the parsonage; had told him how she longed for his return, and how
+his father rejoiced; how well the old man stood the labors of his
+office, and how she had still better secrets of joy in store for him.
+To these latter belonged, perhaps, one which he had not forgotten,
+namely, her promise to give him her hand after the great peace.
+
+With such prospects he enjoyed in thought, ever from Whitsuntide
+forwards, that holy evening when he should unexpectedly relieve the old
+man from all his labors, and begin to prepare the tranquil festivities
+of the village.
+
+As he was thus thinking upon that day's meeting, and as the mountains
+above his father's village, in which he was so soon to clasp those fond
+hearts to his own, were seen more and more clearly in relief against
+the blue sky, his "Reminiscences of the best Hours of Life for the Hour
+of Death" re-echoed in his soul, and he could not refrain from noting
+amongst them, as he went along, the joy of meeting again here below.
+
+Behind him there was coming up a storm from the east, in the direction
+of his home, before which he seemed to come a happy messenger; for the
+storms of war, which he had seen upon the earth, had reconciled to him
+and made him love those of heaven; and the parched ground, the dropping
+flowers, and the ears of corn had long been thirsting for the waters of
+the warm clouds. A parishioner of Heim, who was laboring in the fields,
+saluted him as he passed, and expressed his joy that the rain and
+Gottreich had both come at last together.
+
+And now he caught sight of the low church-steeple, peeping from the
+clustered trees, and he entered upon that tract of the valley where the
+parsonage lay, all reddened by the evening sun. At every window he
+hoped to see his betrothed one, if perchance she might be looking out
+on the sunset before the storm came on; and as he came nearer, he hoped
+to see the lattice open, and Whitsuntide brooms in the chief apartment;
+but he found nothing of all this.
+
+At last he entered quietly the parsonage-house, and slowly opened the
+well-known door. The room was empty, but he heard a noise overhead.
+When he opened the door of his upper chamber, which was filled with a
+glow from the west, Justa was kneeling before the bed of his father,
+who, sitting half upright, was looking with a haggard, stiff, and bony
+countenance toward the setting sun before him. A clasp of her lover to
+her breast, and one exclamation, was all his reception. But his father
+stretched his wizened hand slowly out, and said, with difficulty, "Thou
+art come at the right time!" without adding whether he spoke of the
+preachings or of their separation.
+
+Justa hastily related how the old man had overworked himself, till body
+and spirit had given way together,--so that he no longer took a share
+in anything, though he longed to be with the sharers,--and how he lay
+prostrate with broken wings, looking upwards like a needy child. The
+old man was grown hard of hearing, and she could say all this in his
+presence.
+
+Gottreich soon confirmed it to himself. He would fain have infused the
+fire of conquest, reflected in his own bosom, which, like a red evening
+cloud, was announcing a fair dawn to Europe, into that old and once
+strong heart; but he heard neither wish nor question of it. The old
+man gazed steadily upon the sun, until at last it was hid by the storm.
+Nevertheless the war of the elements seemed to touch him but little;
+the glare of life broke dimly through the thickening ice of death. A
+dying man knows no present,--nothing but the future and the past.
+
+On a sudden the landscape grew dark, all the winds stood pent, the
+earth oppressed; then there came a gush of rain and a crash of thunder.
+The lightning streamed around the old man, and he looked up altered and
+astonished. "Hist!" said he; "I hear the rain once more;--speak
+quickly, children, for I shall soon depart."
+
+Both his children clung to him, but he was too weak to embrace them.
+
+And now, as the warm, healing springs of the clouds bathed the sick
+earth, down from the dripping tree to the blades of grass, and as the
+sky glistened mildly as with a tear of joy, and the thunder went
+warring away behind the distant mountains, the sick man pointed
+upwards, and said, "Seest thou the lordliness of God? My son,
+strengthen now at the last my weary soul with something holy, in the
+spirit of love, and not of penance; for if our hearts condemn us not,
+then have we confidence toward God. Say something rich in love to me of
+God and of his works."
+
+Then the eyes of his son overflowed, to think that he should read the
+Reminiscences which he had prepared for his own death-bed at the
+death-bed of his father. When he said this to him, the old man
+answered, "Hasten, my son!" and with a faltering voice, Gottreich began
+to read:--
+
+"Remember, in the darkening hour, that the glow of the universe once
+filled thy breast, and that thou hast acknowledged the magnitude of
+existence. Hast thou not looked forth into one half of infinity by
+night, and into the other half by day? Think away the nothingness of
+space, and the earth which is around thee; worlds above, around, and
+beneath arch thee about as a centre, all impelling and impelled,
+splendor within splendor, magnitude within magnitude; all brightness
+centring in the universal Sun. Carry thy thoughts forwards through
+eternity, toward that universal Sun; thou shalt not arrive at darkness
+nor emptiness. What is empty dwells only between the worlds, not around
+the world.
+
+"Remember, in the dark hour, those times when thou hast prayed to God
+in ecstasy, and when thou hast thought on him,--the greatest thought of
+finite man,--the Infinite One!"
+
+Here the old man clasped his hands, and prayed low.
+
+"Hast thou not known and felt the existence of that Being, whose
+infinity consists not only in his strength, in his wisdom, and his
+eternity, but also in his love and in his justice? Canst thou forget
+the time when the blue sky by day and the blue sky by night opened on
+thee, as if the mildness of God was looking down on thee? Hast thou not
+felt the love of the Infinite, when it veiled itself in its image, in
+loving hearts of men; as the sun, which casts its light not on our moon
+alone, for our nights, but on the morning and evening star also, and on
+every little twinkler, even to the farthest from the earth?
+
+"Remember, in the dark hour, how in the spring of thy life the mounds
+of earth which are graves appeared to thee only as the mountain-tops of
+another far and new world; and how in the midst of the fulness of life
+thou didst acknowledge the value of death. The snow of the grave shall
+warm the frost-bitten limbs of age to life again. As a navigator who
+suddenly disembarks from the cold, wintry, and lonely sea, upon a coast
+which is laden with the warm, rich blossoms of spring, so with one leap
+from our little bark we pass at once from winter to an eternal
+springtime.
+
+"Rejoice, in this dark hour, that thy life dwells in the midst of a
+wider and larger life. The earth-clod of the globe has been divinely
+breathed upon. A world swarms with life,--for the leaf of every tree is
+a land of souls; and every little life would freeze and perish, if it
+were not warmed and borne up by the eddies of life about it. The sea
+of time glitters, like the sea of space, with countless beings of
+light: death and resurrection are the valleys and mountains of the
+ever-swelling ocean. There exists no dead anatomy; what seems to be
+such is only another body. Without a universal living existence, there
+would be nothing but a wide, all-encompassing death. We cling like
+mosses to the Alps of nature, drawing life from the high clouds. Man is
+the butterfly which flutters up to Chimborazo, but above the butterfly
+soars the condor: however many, small or great, the giant and the child
+are free wanderers in one garden; and the fly of a day may retrace its
+infinite series of progenitors to those first beings of its kind which
+played over the waters of Paradise before the evening sun.
+
+"Never forget the thought, which is now so clear to thee, that the
+individuality of man lasts out the greatest suffering and the most
+entrancing joy alike unscathed, while the body crumbles away in the
+pains and pleasures of the flesh. Herein are souls like marsh-lights,
+which shine in the storm and the rain unextinguishable.
+
+"Canst thou forget, in the dark hour, that there have been mighty men
+amongst us, and that thou art following after them? Raise thyself like
+the spirits which stood upon their mountains, having the storm of life
+only about and never above them. Call back to thee the kingly race of
+sages and of poets, who have inspirited and enlightened nation after
+nation."
+
+"Speak of our Redeemer!" said the father.
+
+"Remember Jesus Christ, in the dark hour,--remember Him who also passed
+through life,--remember that soft Moon of the infinite Sun, given to
+enlighten the night of the world. Let life be hallowed to thee, and
+death also, for he shared both of them with thee. May his calm and
+lofty form look down on thee in the last darkness, and show thee his
+Father!"
+
+A low roll of thunder was now heard to pass over the dun clouds which
+the tempest had left, and the setting sun filled the entire vault of
+heaven with the magnificence of his fire.
+
+"Remember, in the last hour, how the heart of man can love. Canst thou
+forget the love wherewith one heart repays a thousand hearts, and the
+soul during life is nourished and vivified from another soul, as the
+oak of a hundred years clings fast to the same spot with its roots, and
+derives new strength, and sends forth new buds during its hundred
+springs?"
+
+"Dost thou mean me?" said the father.
+
+"I mean my mother also," replied the son.
+
+Justa wept, when she heard how her lover would console himself in his
+last hours with the reminiscence of the days of her love; and the
+father said, but very gently, thinking on his wife, "To meet again, to
+meet again!"
+
+"Remember then, in the last hour," continued Gottreich, "that pure
+being with whom thy life was beautiful and great,--with whom thou hast
+wept tears of joy, with whom thou hast prayed to God, and in whom God
+appeared unto thee, in whom thou didst find the first and last heart of
+love,--and then close thine eyes in peace!"
+
+On a sudden the clouds were cleft into two huge, black mountains,
+and the deep sun looked forth from between them, as it were out of
+a valley between buttresses of rock, gazing upon the earth with its
+joy-glistening eye.
+
+"See!" said the dying man, "what a glare!"
+
+"It is the evening sun, father."
+
+"Ay, this day shall we see one another again!" continued the old man;
+but he spoke of his wife, who was long since dead.
+
+The son was unable, from his emotion, to paint to his father the
+blessedness of meeting again upon the earth, which he had that very day
+enjoyed by anticipation and described upon his journey; or to say to
+him how it comes, that meeting again is a renewal of love in a better
+state; and that, if the first meeting was apt to overflow into the
+future, reminiscence binds the flowers of the present and the fruits of
+the past upon one stem.
+
+Who could have courage to speak of the joys of earthly meeting to one
+who seemed to be already in the contemplation of a meeting in heaven?
+
+Startled, he asked, "Father, what ails thee?"
+
+"I _do_ think thereon in the dark hour; ay, thereon and thereupon
+again; and death is also beautiful, and the parting in Christ,"
+murmured to himself the old man, as he tried to take Gottreich's hand,
+which he had not strength to press. It was but the usual nervous
+snatching of the fingers of the dying. He continued to think that his
+son was still speaking to him, and said, more and more distinctly and
+emphatically, "O thou blessed God!" until all the other luminaries of
+life were extinguished, and in his soul there stood nothing but the one
+sun,--God!
+
+At length he raised himself, and, stretching out his arm forcibly,
+exclaimed: "There are three fair rainbows over the evening sun; I must
+go after the sun, and pass through with him!" He then fell back, and
+all was over.
+
+At that moment the sun went down, and there glimmered at his setting a
+broad rainbow in the east.
+
+"He is gone!" said Gottreich to Justa, in a voice choked with grief;
+"but he is gone from us unto his God, in the midst of great, pious, and
+unmingled joy; then weep no more, Justa!"
+
+At that moment his own hitherto restrained tears found a vent, and he
+pressed the dead hand against his face.
+
+It grew dark, and a warm rain distilled gently over the earth. The
+children left his motionless form alone, and wept more tranquilly for
+that sun of their love, which, with its pure light, had withdrawn from
+the clouds and tempests of the world to another dawn.
+
+
+
+
+ THE NEW-YEAR'S NIGHT OF AN UNHAPPY MAN.
+
+
+An old man stood in the New-Year's night at the window, and gazed with
+a look of restless despair upon the immutable, ever-blooming heaven,
+and out over the still pure white earth whereupon there was now no one
+so joyless and sleepless as he. For his grave stood near to him. It was
+covered only with the snow of age, not with the green of youth; and he
+brought with him thither out of his whole rich life nothing but errors
+and sins and sickness; a ruined body, a desolated soul, a breast full
+of poison, an old age full of remorse. The fair days of his youth
+wandered about him now like ghosts, and they bore him back again to
+that clear morning when his father first placed him at the cross-road
+of life, the right hand leading by the sunny ways of virtue into a
+wide, peaceful land, full of light and of harvests; the left, down into
+the mole-ways of vice towards a black cavern, full of down-dropping
+poison, full of darting serpents and dark sultry damps.
+
+Ah! the serpents hung about his breast, and the poison-drops upon his
+tongue, and he knew now where he was.
+
+Knowing not what he did, and with unspeakable grief, he cried out to
+Heaven: "Give me my youth once more! O father, place me again upon the
+cross-road, that I may choose otherwise!"
+
+But his father and his youth were long gone. He saw wandering lights
+dancing on the marshes, and dying out upon _God's Acre_, and he said,
+"These are my sinful days!" He saw a star fly out from heaven, to
+glimmer in its fall, and to be extinguished on the earth. "That is I,"
+said his bleeding heart; and the serpent-teeth of remorse gnawed again
+into his wounds.
+
+His burning fancy showed him creeping night-wanderers upon the roofs,
+and the windmill threw up its arms threatening to crush him, and a mask
+left behind in the dead-house assumed by degrees his own feature.
+
+Suddenly, in the midst of this tumult, music for the New Year flowed
+down from the tower, like distant church-song. He was deeply moved. He
+looked around the horizon and over the wide earth, and thought of his
+youthful friends, who now, happier and better than he, were teachers
+for the world, fathers of happy children, and favored men, and he
+said, "O, I also could be happy, dear parents, had I fulfilled your
+New-Year's wishes and instructions."
+
+In the feverish memories of his youth, it seemed to him that the mask
+with his features raised itself up in the dead-house; finally, through
+the superstition which discerns spirits and the future on New-Year's
+night, it became a living youth, in the position of the beautiful boy
+of the Capitol, pulling out a thorn, and his formerly blooming face
+danced weird and bitter before him.
+
+He could look no more: he covered his eyes: hot tears streamed down
+upon the snow;--again he softly sighed, hopeless and unconscious, "Come
+again, O youth, come again!"
+
+And it came again; for on that New-Year's night he had only dreamed
+thus fearfully. He was still a youth; yet his errors had been no dream.
+But he thanked God that he, still young, might turn aside from the foul
+ways of vice, and could follow the sunny path which leads to the fair
+land of harvests. Turn aside with him, O youth, if thou standest upon
+his wandering way. This frightful dream will in future be thy judge;
+but if thou shouldst one day call out, full of grief, "Come again, O
+beautiful youth!" so shall it never return again.
+
+
+
+
+ THE DEATH OF AN ANGEL.
+
+
+The tenderest and kindest angel, the Angel of the _last_ hour, whom we
+harshly call Death, is sent to us, that he may mildly and gently pluck
+away the sinking heart of man from life, and bear it unhurt in his warm
+hands out of the cold breast into high, warming Eden. His brother is
+the Angel of the first hour, who twice kisses man,--once when he begins
+this life; and again, when he awakes on high, without wounds, and
+enters smiling upon the other life, as he came weeping into this.
+
+As the Angel of the last hour saw the battle-fields stretched before
+him, full of blood and tears, and drew the trembling souls away, his
+mild eyes melted, and he said: "Ah! I will once die like man, that I
+may enter into his last agony, and soothe it when I dissolve the ties
+of life!"
+
+The boundless circle of angels, who love each other above, pressed
+around the sympathetic one, and promised their beloved to surround him
+with heavenly rays after the instant of his death; thereby he might
+know that death had been; and his brother, whose kiss opens our cold
+lips, as the morning light does the chill flowers, gently touched his
+forehead, and said: "When I kiss thee again, my brother, thou shalt
+have died upon the earth, and will be again with us."
+
+Loving and moved, the Angel descended to the battlefield, where only
+one beautiful, ardent Youth still panted, and heaved his shattered
+breast. Near the hero stood his Betrothed alone. He could no longer
+feel her hot tears, and her sorrow passed him unrecognized, like a
+distant battle-cry.--Then the Angel quickly clothed himself in her dear
+form, rested by him, drew the wounded soul with one hot kiss out of the
+cloven breast, and gave it to his brother on high, who kissed it for
+the second time, when suddenly it smiled.
+
+The Angel of the last hour passed like a lightning-flash into
+the deserted frame, shone through the body, and stirred the warm
+life-stream again with the strengthened heart. But how was he affected
+by this new clothing of the body! His clear eye became confused in the
+whirl of unwonted, nervous life;--his once flying thought waded now
+slowly through the atmosphere of his brain,--the moist, faint-hued
+vapor dried away from all objects which formerly hung, autumnal-like,
+floating over them; now they pierced him out of the hot air with
+burning, painful spots of color,--all sensations became more gloomy,
+yet stormier and more nearly allied to _self_; and they seemed to him
+to be like instinct, as those of the beasts appear to us. Hunger tore
+him, thirst consumed him, pain stabbed him. Alas! his breast, torn and
+bleeding, heaved upward, and his first breath drawn was his first sigh
+after the heaven he had left! "Is this the death of man?" he thought;
+but as he did not see the promised token of death, neither angel nor
+the surrounding heavenly flame, therefore he perceived this to be only
+the life of man.
+
+In the evening, the earthly strength of the Angel declined, and a
+crushing globe seemed to revolve about his head. Then Sleep sent his
+messengers. Images of the mind shifted out of the sunshine into a misty
+fire; the shadows of the day were thrown upon his brain; they came
+confused, and colossal, one upon another, and the world of sense reared
+itself uncontrolled and poured in upon him. Then Dream sent his
+messengers. Finally the funereal veil of Sleep wrapped itself thickly
+about him, and, sunk in the vault of night, he lay there lonely and
+motionless, like us poor mortals. But then, thou, heavenly Dream! didst
+descend, with thy thousand reflecting-glasses before his soul, and
+didst show in all of them a circle of angels and a radiant heaven; and
+the earthly body seemed to fall away from him with all its thorns.
+"Ah!" said he, in vain rapture, "my sleep was also my death." Yet when
+he awoke again, with his compressed heart full of heavy human blood,
+and looked out upon the earth and upon the night, he cried, "I saw the
+angels and the starry heavens; but it was only the image of Death, and
+not his presence."
+
+The Betrothed of the translated hero did not mark that an angel only
+dwelt in the breast of her beloved; yet she loved the purified aspect
+of the wounded soul, and still gladly held the hand of him who had past
+so far away. But the Angel loved her deceived heart with the love of a
+man's soul in return; jealous of his own nature, he wished that he
+might not die before her, but love her so long that she might forgive
+him, when they met again in heaven, for having clasped together upon
+her breast an angel and a lover. Yet she died sooner; the late sorrow
+had bowed the head of this flower too low, and it lay broken upon the
+grave. She sank before the weeping Angel, not like the sun, who before
+all-beholding Nature casts himself so gorgeous into the sea that its
+red waves strike the very heaven, but like the tranquil moon, who, in
+the midnight, silvers the vaporous air, and sinks down unseen behind
+its dim veil. Death sent his gentler sister Unconsciousness before; she
+touched the heart of the Betrothed, and chilled the warm countenance;
+the flowers of her cheek withered; the pale snow of winter, under which
+the spring of eternity grows green, clothed her forehead and her hands.
+Then a burning tear broke from the swelling eye of the Angel, and,
+while he thought his heart loosed itself in the form of a tear as a
+pearl from the brittle shell, his Betrothed, awaked to the last
+delirium, moved her eyes once again, drew him close to her heart, and
+died as she kissed him, and said, "Now I am with thee, my brother!"
+Then the Angel believed his heavenly brother had given him the sign of
+the kiss and death. Yet no radiant heaven surrounded him, nor aught but
+funereal darkness, and he sighed because this was not his death, only
+the anguish of man over the death of another.
+
+"O ye afflicted mortals!" he cried, "how can ye weary ones survive
+this! How can ye become old when the circle of youthful forms breaks
+and lies at length altogether scattered around,--when the graves of
+your friends lead down like steps to your own,--and when age becomes
+like the silent, blank evening hour of a cold battle-field! O ye poor
+mortals! how can your hearts endure it?"
+
+The body of the translated hero-soul placed the gentle Angel among hard
+men, their injustice, and the distortions of Vice and of Passion; about
+his figure, also, was laid the thorny girdle of sceptres bound
+together, which compresses the hemispheres with its stings, and
+which is always laced more tightly by the great; he saw the claws of
+crowned and emblazoned beasts fasten themselves on their displumed
+prey, and heard it panting with enfeebled beating of the wings; he saw
+the whole terrestrial globe encircled in the winding swarthy folds of
+the giant-serpent, Vice, plunging and concealing its poisonous head
+deep in the breast of man. Then the hot sting of enmity was made to
+shoot through that tender heart, which, during a long eternity, had
+lain in the warmth of angelic love, and the holy love-fed spirit was
+forced to shudder over an inward dissolution. "Ah!" said he, "the death
+of man is full of woe!" Yet this was not death; for no angel appeared.
+
+Thus in a few days he became weary of this life which we bear for half
+a hundred years, and he longed to go back. The evening sun attracted
+his kindred spirit. The wounds of his shattered breast exhausted him
+with pain. He went out with the evening glow upon his pale cheeks to
+"God's Acre," that green background of our life, where the forms which
+he had once stripped of all their beautiful souls were now crumbling
+away. He placed himself with sorrowful longing upon the bare grave of
+his unspeakably beloved and departed bride, and looked towards the
+fading evening sun. Seated on this dear knoll, he regarded his
+suffering body, and thought: Thou also, tender breast, wouldst be lying
+here in decay, and wouldst give no more pain, did I not support thee.
+Then he reflected upon the grievous life of man, and the throbs of the
+wounded breast showed him the pangs with which mortals purchase their
+virtue and their death, and which he had joyfully spared the noble soul
+of this body. Deeply touched by human virtue, he wept out of his
+boundless love for men, who, amid the craving of their own needs, under
+low-hung clouds, behind mists which stream over the sharp-cutting paths
+of life, never turn away from the lofty star of duty, but in their
+darkness stretch out loving arms towards every suffering breast they
+encounter, while around them nothing glimmers but the hope of setting
+like the sun in the old world, in order to arise in the new.
+
+Just then the ecstasy opened his wounds, and blood, the tear of the
+soul, flowed from his heart upon the cherished knoll,--the dissolving
+body sank quietly towards his beloved,--tears of rapture broke the
+sunset light into, a rosy, swimming sea,--distant echoing tones, as of
+the earth passing wide through ringing ether, played in the vaporous
+lustre. Then a dark cloud or short night shot by the Angel, and was
+full of sleep; and now a radiant heaven opened and overspread him, and
+a thousand angels shone around. "Art thou again here, thou deceiving
+dream?" he said. But the Angel of the first hour stepped through the
+rays to him, and gave the sign of the kiss, and said: "That was death,
+thou immortal brother and heavenly friend!"
+
+And the Youth and his beloved softly repeated the words.
+
+
+
+
+ A DREAM AND THE TRUTH.
+
+ WRITTEN ON THE DEATH OF A MOTHER FOLLOWING
+ THAT OF HER HUSBAND.
+
+
+Sleep buries the first world, its nights and sorrows, and brings to us
+a second world, with the forms we have loved and lost, and scenes too
+vast for this little earth.
+
+I was in the Isle of the Blest, in the second world. This I dreamed.
+The stars were nearer; the heaven-blue lay on the flowers; all the
+breezes were melodious tones; and repose and ravishment, which with us
+are sundered, there dwelt conjoined. And the dead, from around whom had
+fallen that mist of life which veiled the higher heaven before, rested
+like mild evening suns in the azure ether.
+
+Then, behold, the earth rose out of the deep beneath, on her course,
+and the Spring had covered her with his blossoms and buds. As she drew
+nearer to the Isle of the Blest, a voice full of love cried, "Look
+down, ye dead, on your old home, and see the beloved who have lost, but
+not forgotten you."
+
+For in the spring the earth always passes by the eternal World of the
+Blest, whose off-cast husk sinks into its clods; and therefore it is,
+that in the spring poor mortals experience such a profound longing, so
+powerful a presentiment, and so many haunting recollections of their
+lost beloved.
+
+After the voice, all the Blest stepped forward on the shore of the
+Supernal Isle, and each one sought on the wan earth the heart which had
+remembered him. One noble being gazed down, seeking after his spouse
+and after his children, around whom the glad spring-tide of earth was
+flowing; but _they_ had no spring.
+
+Alas! the father now saw his wife racked with anguish, and his children
+dissolved in tears. He discerned, in the strangling hand of Pain, the
+pallid form whose convulsed heart now reposes, and whose moistened eyes
+are now shut and cold; and beside it he recognized the loving companion
+of his former life fatally bleeding on the thorns of earthly martyrdom.
+And as sorrow, with glowing iron stylus, graved in the crumbling image
+life's farewell letter, and as she lost hope, but not yet patience, and
+as her fading eye desired no further happiness save that of her
+children, and as these could only share, but not remove, the sleepless
+nights of their mother, the affectionate father sank down, weeping, and
+prayed: "Eternal One, suffer her to die! Break the agonized bosom, and
+give me my friend again, and heal the wounded form at last under the
+earth. Eternal One, suffer her to die!"
+
+And as he prayed, the weary heart here in its martyr-life heard him,
+and his faithful wife returned forever to his heart. Why weep ye,
+tender children, that your parents, after the same sufferings,
+should now have the same joys? that now, after their winter of life,
+an everlasting May has dawned on their souls? Does the painted
+spring-house under the earth trouble you, or the black boundary-hill on
+the earth, or the dread hand of decay, which extinguishes earthly scars
+and wounds and the whole body?
+
+No, let the Spring scatter his flowers on their cold faces, and dry the
+tears on yours; and when you think painfully of them, comfort
+yourselves with saying, "We tenderly loved them, and no one has
+wounded, save He who now heals them."
+
+
+
+
+ THE BEAUTY OF DEATH IN THE
+ BLOOM OF YOUTH.
+
+
+In the lives both of men and of women, the period of the deepest
+happiness will be found to be, not that of childhood, but of youth. The
+joys of childhood are like the spring flowers,--beautiful, but small;
+like the tinted forget-me-not,--pretty, but without fragrance. The
+higher and more brilliant joys of knowledge and the affections are as
+yet undeveloped; the world of the ideal lies wrapped, as it were, in a
+dark-green bud.
+
+With what other and what brighter radiance is the period of youth
+encircled!--that heavenly time of our first friendship and our first
+love,--of our first poem and our first philosophy,--of our first full
+enjoyment of nature and music and the drama,--of our first castles in
+the air, and our first vigorous training for active life. And this
+period is not simply irrecoverable,--that is the case with all past
+time,--but for the very reason that in its perfect bloom its only
+office is to minister to the fruits it so beautifully enfolds, it is
+the highest and the culminating period; for there is necessarily a
+greater productive force present in the process than in the results of
+development, in the flower of youth than in the ripeness of manhood. In
+his more advanced years, one is seldom led to enter upon a new path of
+knowledge or a higher moral life; but in his youth, one gives himself
+up, with inextinguishable fire, to some system of philosophy, or some
+total change in his moral life. It calls for more strength in a man to
+be converted than to stand still.
+
+As the highest bodily strength and the most perfect health, the
+probability of the longest life and the greatest beauty,--in short, the
+best bodily attributes,--belong to the period of youth, so, and for
+that very reason, the intellectual wealth which comes not by
+acquisition, but by inheritance, is the largest. Great attainments,
+experience, and skill are certainly the fruits of age and of labor; but
+what are these things, compared with the ideal enjoyments which come of
+the first sciences we study, when the tree of knowledge, grafted upon
+the tree of life, puts forth its branches,--compared with the delight
+with which the new truths of geometry, or of philosophy, or of any
+favorite science new-born to us, fill the soul? For even in science,
+however far its limits may be pushed, one is ever descending from the
+height of the ideal to the vulgar level of reality.
+
+Youth is the full moon, illumined by the magic light of the sun. Age is
+the new moon, upon which the day-earth (life) throws a meagre light.
+
+
+
+
+ A DREAM OF A BATTLE-FIELD.
+
+
+I dreamed that from far off in the darkness I heard groans which seemed
+to come from every quarter to which I turned. At length they came only
+out of the gate of a valley which led between two, rocky ridges, where
+the darkness was illumined only by the red light of a comet, with its
+sparkling eye, and its tail sweeping back and forth like that of a
+tiger thirsty for blood. Then several wagons, filled with amputated
+hands grasping one the other either in prayer or struggle, came softly
+towards me on unrevolving wheels; and one small wagon also, full of
+eyes without eyelids, which grimly gazed upon and mirrored one another.
+A long metal coffin, mounted on the wheels of a gun-carriage, was with
+difficulty pulled along by iron elephants. On it was inscribed, "The
+ashes of the tenth army." With frightful exertion it was dragged like a
+tall tree round the corner of the narrow, rocky valley,--forced to bend
+by the weight of its contents, and the end of it seeming never to come.
+
+Over the earth, and the sorrow of it, was a round ball of fire like a
+sun, whence came incessant flashes of lightning. And thirsty people
+opened vessels full of vipers, which darted out, and stung them to more
+burning thirst.... A crown, great like a shield, and red-hot, came
+whirling down with circular motion into a group of soldiers dancing,
+and scattered them. Upon still-gaping wounds it rained down thistles,
+which took root quickly and grew; and upon every fallen corpse struck a
+thunderbolt, and slew it again. I looked up to the heavens for
+consolation; but there, in the place of the sunset's glow, and the
+colors of the dawn, and the northern lights, was smoking blood. Swift
+as an arrow, villages and cities shot through the air like long clouds
+of ashes; some few streets only, which had been blown up by mining,
+hanging fast in the sky, with the remnants of houses and of men
+clinging to them. On a neighboring mountain were glaciers and ice-peaks,
+upon which children were transfixed; and on the distant summits, whence
+one could look down upon the battle-field, were parents and children
+and brides, eagerly gazing upon a mirror held over it.
+
+At length the gate sprang open, and broke in pieces on the
+battle-field, and the storm of woe burst forth. Then I looked in upon
+that terrible world, and fell senseless to the earth; for what I saw
+was too horrible for man to look upon or to remember.
+
+Gradually it seemed to me in my swoon as if this frightful field was
+moving further and further off, while its sounds of horror died away
+into songs of swans. And out of the distance floated up to me, on the
+gentle breezes, the tones of shepherd's flutes,--now far off, now
+near,--breaking, at length, with full sound upon my ear. And then I was
+lifted up and borne along on wings of ether, with the light breaking
+through my closed eyelids. And a creative finger touched me, and high
+in heaven, upon a green cloud, I opened my eyes. Above me was the blue
+abyss of the stars; below me stretched a blue ocean, on whose horizon
+glittered, in the glow of the sunset, the countless islands of the
+blessed; around me floated scattered cloudlets, tinted with the red and
+white of roses and of lilies, and with the many colors of manifold
+flowers.
+
+"Who, O God, has brought me to life out of my woe?" I cried.
+
+"Child of man, it is my Father who has done it," answered a soft voice
+very near me. But I saw no form of any person; only a halo of glory
+hovering near me indicated the place of the invisible being.
+
+Under the stare now, on high, rose again, like the songs of the
+spheres, the old mournful tones. The islands on the horizon began to
+move, and swim in joy around one another. Many of them dipped into the
+dark waves, and came up again brilliant as the colors of the morning.
+Some went down into the sea, and reappeared covered with pearls. But
+one of them, crowned with cedars and palms and oaks, with strong young
+giants on its shores, went straight out into the ocean, toward the
+east.
+
+"Am I upon earth?" I inquired.
+
+"Ask me not," replied the voice, "for I know all thy thoughts, and will
+answer thee in thy heart. Thou wilt be upon the earth when it rises in
+the east from the sea; beneath the sea it circles swiftly round the
+sun. The sea of time is the wave on the ocean of eternity."
+
+As if borne upon a stream, the cedar island came ever nearer to the
+green cloud. Youths greater than those of earth looked down upon the
+blue sea, and sang songs of gladness,--or gazed in rapture upon the
+heavens, and folded their hands in prayer,--or slumbered in arbors of
+rainbows and tears of joy. Behind them stood lions; above them circled
+eagles.
+
+"Upon the cedar island dwell men _who, like me_, have died for the
+earth; but in earthly faces shall it be revealed to thee how the
+Infinite Father rewards those who have shed their blood for their
+country. The youths who are looking down into the waves have a nearer
+view of their old earth moving in the waters, as the island moves with
+it. They see only happy countries, and their friends who rejoice in
+their deeds, and posterity which praises them. And every flower which
+sprang from their blood is shown to them of God.
+
+"Those who are gazing up to heaven, and praying, see an altar upon
+every sun,--and greater brethren who make higher sacrifices to the
+Highest; and they are entreating the Father to summon them also to
+still higher sacrifices. And when he thunders, he calls them.
+
+"Those who are slumbering in tears of joy are seeing their brother
+soldiers dying bravely, and are comforting them in death, and welcoming
+them in tearful recognition as they pass from the earth to the island."
+
+And now white flowers floated up from the earth to the surface of the
+sea, and all the sleepers awoke. The flowers were the souls of their
+mothers, who in death were following their sons fallen upon the
+battle-field; and the flowers became angels and flew towards the youths.
+It was an endless dying of endless joy. The soft murmurs of love from
+those who thus again found one another stirred the lilies and the roses
+to sounds as of harps. But as the mothers breathed the vibrating air
+and their hearts beat tremulously in harmony with the sound, they died
+away and exhaled into a flower-cloud. And the cloud arose and floated
+along the heavens to the distant islands where dwell the good mothers
+and the happy brides, longing still for the time when all the islands
+of the blessed were one fixed land of promise.
+
+"Ye sons of men, joy is an eternity older than pain, and ever will be
+so,--for that has scarcely existed. Sacrifice ye, then, time to
+eternity."
+
+A noble old man with the martyr's crown on his head looked up to the
+green cloud and prayed to the voice near me. Then saw I mirrored in the
+old man's eyes the form of the being near me. And my heart was humbled
+before the greatest man of earth as he repeated to me again the words,
+"Sacrifice time to eternity."
+
+And now there came up from the sea near the cedar island a smoke as of
+a volcano, but throwing out only crowns of oak-leaves and palm-branches
+and streams of light. And at length a vast altar covered with young men
+and old, sleeping, rose from the waves. But when the light of heaven
+touched the sleepers they awoke suddenly, and, rushing upon the island,
+fell upon the breasts of their old comrades in arms. And the stars of
+heaven shone over them in glad, undying token of their union. The
+oak-forests rustled and the lions roared and the eagles, circling in
+the air, bathed themselves for joy in the fire and the lightning which
+shot from the stars. And the storm spread itself over the universe, and
+scattered balls of fire like suns, and thundered as with the noise of
+many worlds, and mingled its hot tears of joy with those of the heroes.
+And from below the sea came a dull echo from the earth. Then the cloud
+sank upon the island, and with a rushing sound received up into itself
+the heroes who had prayed to the Father to permit them to sacrifice in
+higher worlds.
+
+When the storm had disappeared with them behind the stars, the vastness
+of creation appeared. All being rejoiced in eternity. The worlds lay
+along the heavens like an Alpine chain; the suns encircled the primal
+source of light; and covering all was the Throne of God.
+
+"Pray before thou wakest, for the earth, too, will disappear," said the
+voice near me. And my whole heart was filled with prayer by the very
+nearness of this higher being. But the green cloud now moved more
+rapidly with me eastward toward the approaching earth; and the cedar
+island floated with its happy multitudes towards the other islands. The
+sea glowed in the east as with the colors of the dawn; and deeper and
+deeper sank the green cloud into the aurora of earth.
+
+Suddenly, then, the halo of glory round the head of the invisible being
+became as a great rainbow, and was absorbed in an infinite radiance
+which filled the heavens.
+
+And the earth passed away like a summer night.
+
+I awoke, and instead of the cloud there was a green meadow around me,
+and above me glittered the stars. The first night of summer had
+followed the last night of spring. The moon was rising like a silver
+bow in the ghostly air. And in the north the sunset colors of the
+spring were changing upon the mountain-tops into the morning glow of
+the summer. My heart still clung to the eternal stars, where now awake
+I lingered in my dream, and I sighed, "Alas! each day above is the
+beginning of spring." Then I heard the voice in me repeat the old
+words, "Child of man, sacrifice time to eternity,"--and I sighed no
+more.
+
+
+
+ FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 1: I need not tell any one that the valley itself is situated
+in the departments of the Upper Pyrenees.]
+
+[Footnote 2: It is well known that the Symplegadian rocks continually
+dashed against each other, and destroyed every passing ship, until
+Orpheus's lyre subdued and tranquillized them.]
+
+[Footnote 3: Alluding to a painting by Reynolds, in which Garrick,
+invited by both Muses, follows Thalia.]
+
+[Footnote 4: A kind of jelly-fish.]
+
+[Footnote 5: Ten drops of this instantly sweeten half a pound of sour
+beer.]
+
+[Footnote 6: The cave is twenty feet high, but the entrance only five
+feet.]
+
+[Footnote 7: French miles. The valley is about two German miles--ten
+English miles--long.]
+
+[Footnote 8: The Hoefersche heaven-path, or how to learn the way to
+eternal salvation in twenty-four hours.]
+
+[Footnote 9: A market-place in Rome where deformed beings were sold,
+and fetched a higher price the uglier they were.]
+
+[Footnote 10: A Parisian dentist wrote this over his door.]
+
+[Footnote 11: In the same Sec. Kant says: "Everything that Newton has
+written in his immortal _Principia_, though such a large head was
+required to invent it, can be learned; but to compose spirited poems
+cannot be taught, however complete the instructions for learning the
+art may be. The reason is, that Newton can explain all the steps he had
+to take, from the first elements of geometry to his grandest and most
+profound inventions; he can explain them, not alone to himself, but to
+others, even to the remote descendants, while no Homer or Wieland can
+show how his ideally rich, and yet thoughtful characters, came forth
+from his brain; for he knows it not himself, and therefore cannot teach
+it others."
+
+I had hoped that I could depend upon Kant, who has a million times more
+intelligence than I have, as upon a mental _Charge d'Affaires_; but
+when I came to this passage (and to those upon repentance, music, the
+origin of evil, &c), I saw I must myself follow him, and not only pray
+after him, as I had before done, but reflect. But to return! Certainly
+Newton's "Principles" can be learned, that is, the new ones may be
+repeated, but that also can happen to the invented poems; yet you can
+be taught to invent them as little as Newton's Principles. A new
+philosophic idea seems, after its birth, to lie more clearly in its
+former seed-vessels and organic molecules than a poetic one; but why
+was Newton the first to see it? He and Kant can discover, no better
+than Shakespeare or Leibnitz, how the beginning of a new idea suddenly
+bursts from the cloud of old ones; they can show their _Nexus_ (else
+they would not be human ones) with the old ones, but not their
+conception from it; the same holds of the poetic. Let Kant teach us to
+_invent systems_ and truths (not to prove them, though, strictly
+speaking, the one is closely allied to the other), then he shall be
+taught to invent epics, and I will be responsible for it. He seems to
+me to confound the difficulty of forming ideas with the less important
+one of forming new ones; the difficulty of transition with the
+inexplicability of the matter. I fear and wonder at the latent
+almightiness with which man orders, that is, creates his range of
+ideas. I know no better symbol of creation than the regularity and
+causality of the creation of ideas in us, which no will and no mind can
+regulate and create, for any such arrangement and intention would
+presuppose the unborn idea. And in this creation the grand enigma of
+our moral freedom is veiled.]
+
+[Footnote 12: Gold dissolved in strong acid, mixed with a small
+quantity of quicksilver in a vial, forms a tree with foliage.]
+
+[Footnote 13: The male glowworms are black.]
+
+[Footnote 14: Rameses caused his son to be fastened to the topmost
+point of an obelisk, that they who had to raise it should risk a more
+valuable life than their own.]
+
+[Footnote 15: It lives more than two years, though it does not long
+survive the period of its leaving the grub-state, just as other
+insects, to whom nature has given the rose period of youth, only
+_after_ the thorny age of reproduction.]
+
+[Footnote 16: It is well known that the sight of blood damps courage,
+and that the Jews are not permitted to eat blood.]
+
+[Footnote 17: Beauty in this connection, I adopt in the same sense
+which Schiller gives to it in his aesthetic critique, a prize essay of
+his genius on Beauty, which here, like Longinus, is at once the subject
+and the delineator of the exalted.]
+
+[Footnote 18: If he had been, I would have read page 224 in the third
+part of Hesperus to him.]
+
+[Footnote 19: The sun reflected in the water.]
+
+[Footnote 20: At a circumcision, the Jews place one chair for the
+operator, and another for the prophet Elias, who is supposed invisibly
+to occupy it.]
+
+[Footnote 21: These animals shine by night. Care must be taken not to
+draw them into the brain from the flower calyxes with the perfume.]
+
+[Footnote 22: The Guernsey lily from Japan has its name from the Island
+of Guernsey, on which some roots of it were cast by a wrecked vessel.]
+
+[Footnote 23: For the climatic dissimilarity of the planets must
+produce, as the climatic difference between the zones, Negroes, Greeks,
+Indians, etc., but always human beings.]
+
+[Footnote 24: One ought, therefore, not to say _mundus intelligibilis_,
+but _mundus intellectus_.]
+
+[Footnote 25: It may be said, that in this manner every Utopia, which
+is also a copy, must be realized, for the original of all dreams and
+Utopias does indeed exist,--though partially and disconnectedly; but
+the Original of the Eternal cannot exist in pieces and by parcels.]
+
+[Footnote 26: This applies chiefly to the higher and richer orders,
+with whom the saturation of the five camel stomachs, the senses, and
+the starving of Psyche or the soul, at last determines into a horrible
+horror of life, and into a repulsive mingling of _high aspirations and
+grovelling desires_. The savage, the beggar, and the provincialist far
+surpass the rich and high in spiritual enjoyment, for in these, as in
+the houses of the Jews, (in memory of the destruction of Jerusalem)
+there must always be something incomplete, and the poor have too many
+of their earthly wants assuaged to be overwhelmed and pained by the
+demands of their ethereal nature.]
+
+[Footnote 27: The new moon always rises with the sun, although dark and
+invisible.]
+
+[Footnote 28: There are three kinds of men. To some, a heaven is
+granted even on this earth; to others, a _limbus patrum_ in which joy
+and sorrow reign equally; and, lastly, to some a hell in which grief
+predominates. Beings who have suffered for twenty years on the sick-bed
+of bodily pain, which is not, like mental sorrow, worn out by time,
+have certainly had more unhappiness than happiness, and, but for
+immortality, would be an eternal reproach to the highest moral being.
+And if there exists no such unhappy being, it is yet in the power of a
+tyrant to make one, on a clinical torture-bed, with the assistance of a
+physician and a philosopher. Such a one, at least, has a right to
+demand a future indemnity for his sufferings, because the Creator
+cannot have formed a creature to mourn more than it can rejoice.
+
+Besides, though the object of our grief may seem but a deception in the
+eyes of the Eternal One, our grief itself cannot. Human suffering is
+also distinguished from brutish pain, because the animal only feels the
+wound, as we perhaps do in sleep, but it sees it not. Its pain is not
+trebled and increased by _anticipation_, _recollection_, and
+_sensibility_; it is an evanescent sting, and nothing more. Therefore
+tears were only given to human eyes.]
+
+[Footnote 29: Ignorance concerning our connection with the body and our
+connection with the second world.]
+
+[Footnote 30: The yearly destruction of the slowly developed, beautiful
+flower-world does not argue against this; for to the tangible world
+each condition of its parts is as indifferent and perfect as the other,
+and rose-ashes are as good as rose-buds (without, of course,
+considering the organic soul). Nothing is beautiful but our
+appreciation of the beautiful, not the object itself. If it should be
+said that nature destroys so many developments, for whose growth she
+had already provided, that she breaks many thousand eggs, tears so many
+buds, crushes men in all stages of life with her blind tread, I would
+reply that the interrupted development is yet a condition of the
+perfected one, and that every position of its parts is indifferent to
+material objects, and, as coverings of the spiritual being, they still
+testify to a compensating immortality of the latter.]
+
+[Footnote 31: Methinks the folly of spiritual mortality has not been
+sufficiently considered from this point of view. The living or
+spiritual whole (for the lifeless one has no other object than to be a
+means for the living), as such, can attain no object which each portion
+of it does not attain, for each one is one whole, and every other whole
+can only exist as a collective idea, and not as a reality. To consider
+the untenability of a progress contained in a course of vanishing
+shadows more vividly, one might shorten the life of a soul so that he,
+e. g. could only read one page of Kant's Critic, and then die. For the
+second page another soul must be created, and so for the new edition
+884 souls. The mistake will perhaps become perceptible to most people
+by the increasing moonlight of liberality which has gradually risen
+over the past centuries; but the necessity for compensation demands
+immortality.]
+
+[Footnote 32: Raphael died when he had finished the painting of the
+resurrection, and Haman died while his essay on resurrection and
+disembodiment was being printed.]
+
+[Footnote 33: So are the Vampires called.]
+
+[Footnote 34: _Fixlein_ stands in the middle of the volume; preceded by
+_Einer Mustheil fuer Maedchen_ (A Jelly-course for young Ladies); and
+followed by _Some_ Jus De Tablette _for Men_. A small portion of the
+Preface relating to the first I have already omitted. Neither of the
+two have the smallest relation to _Fixlein_.--Ed.]
+
+[Footnote 35: _J. P. H_., _Jean Paul_ Hasus, _Jean Paul_, &c., have in
+succession been Richter's signatures. At present even, his German
+designation, either in writing or speech, is never _Richter_, but _Jean
+Paul_.--Ed.]
+
+[Footnote 36: For understanding many little hints which occur in this
+_Life of Fixlein_, it will be necessary to bear in mind the following
+particulars: A German _Gymnasium_, in its complete state, appears to
+include eight Masters; Rector, Conrector, Subrector, Quintus, Quartus,
+Tertius, &c., to the _first_ or lowest. The _forms_, or classes, again,
+are arranged in an inverse order; the _Primaner_ (boys of the _Prima_,
+or first form) being the most advanced, and taught by the Rector; the
+_Secundaner_, by the Conrector, &c.; and therefore the _Quartaner_ by
+the Quintus. In many cases, it would seem, the number of Teachers is
+only six; but in this Flachsenfingen Gymnasium we have express evidence
+that there was no curtailment.--Ed.]
+
+[Footnote 37: A university beer.]
+
+[Footnote 38: From Peter I will copy one or two of these privileges;
+the whole of which were once, at the origin of universities, in full
+force. For instance, a student can compel a citizen to let him his
+house and his horse; an injury, done even to his relations, must be
+made good fourfold; he is not obliged to fulfil the written commands of
+the Pope; the neighborhood must indemnify him for what is stolen from
+him; if he and a non-student are living at variance, the latter only
+can be expelled from the boarding-house; a Doctor is obliged to support
+a poor student; if he is killed, the next ten houses are laid under
+interdict till the murderer is discovered; his legacies are not
+abridged by _falcidia_, &c., &c.]
+
+[Footnote 39: _Literary Germany_, a work (I believe of no great merit)
+which Richter often twitches in the same style.--Ed.]
+
+[Footnote 40: See _Schmelzle's Journey_, p. 289--Ed.]
+
+[Footnote 41: As in the State.--[V. or Von, _de_, _of_, being the
+symbol of the nobility, the middle order of the State.--Ed.]]
+
+[Footnote 42: In Erlang, my petition has been granted. The _Bible
+Institution_ of that town have found instead of the 116,301 As,
+which Fixlein at first pretended with such certainty to find in the
+Bible-books (which false number was accordingly given in the first
+Edition of this Work, p. 81), the above-mentioned 323,015; which
+(uncommonly singular) is precisely the sum of all the letters in the
+Koran put together. See _Luedeke's Beschr. des Turk. Reichs_ (Luedeke's
+Description of the Turkish Empire. New edition, 1780).]
+
+[Footnote 43: _Paravicini Singularia de viris claris_, Cent. I. 2.]
+
+[Footnote 44: _Ejusd_., Cent. II. Philelphus quarrelled with the Greek
+about the quantity of a syllable; the prize or bet was the beard of the
+vanquished. Timotheus lost his.]
+
+[Footnote 45: Their prayer-barrel, Kueruedu, is a hollowed shell, a
+calabash, full of unrolled formulas of prayer; they sway it from side
+to side, and then it works. More philosophically viewed, since in
+prayer the feeling only is of consequence, it is much the same whether
+this express itself by motion of the mouth or of the calabash.]
+
+[Footnote 46: In German, as in some other languages, the common mode of
+address is by the _third_ person; plural, it indicates respect;
+singular, command; the _second_ person is also used; plural, it
+generally denotes indifference; singular, great familiarity, and
+sometimes its product, contempt. _Dutzenfreund_, _Thouing-friend_, is
+the strictest term of intimacy; and among the wild _Burschen_
+(Students) many a duel (happily however, often ending like the
+_Polemo-Middinia_ in one drop of blood) has been fought, in consequence
+of saying _Du_ (thou) and _Sie_ (they) in the wrong place.--Ed.]
+
+[Footnote 47: These antique Christmas festivities Richter describes
+with equal _gusto_ in another work (_Briefe und Zukuenftige
+Lebenslemf_); where the Christ-child (falsely reported to the young
+ones to have been seen flying through the air, with gold wings); the
+Birch-bough fixed in a corner of the room, and by him made to grow; the
+fruit of gilt sweetmeats, apples, nuts, which (for good boys) it
+suddenly produces, &c., &c., are specified with the same fidelity as
+here.--Ed.]
+
+[Footnote 48: Which he purposed to make for his Island of St. Pierre in
+the Bienne Lake.]
+
+[Footnote 49: Borrowed from the "Imperial Mine-product-sale-Commission,"
+in Vienna. In their very names these Vienna people show taste.]
+
+[Footnote 50: As, by the evidence at present before us, we can found on
+no other presumption, than that he must die in his thirty-second year;
+it would follow, that, in case he died two-and-thirty years after the
+death of the testatrix, no farthing could be claimed by him; since,
+according to our fiction, at the making of the testament he was not
+even one year old.]
+
+[Footnote 51: In St. Paul's Church at London, where the slightest
+whisper sounds over, across a space of 143 feet.]
+
+[Footnote 52: So much, according to Political Economists, a man yearly
+requires in Germany.]
+
+[Footnote 53: This singular tone of my address to a Prince can only be
+excused by the equally singular relation wherein the Biographer stands
+to the Flachsenfingen Sovereign, and which I would willingly unfold
+here were it not that, in my Book, which, under the title of
+_Dog-post-days_, I mean to give to the world at Easter-fair, 1795, I
+hoped to expound the matter to universal satisfaction.]
+
+[Footnote 54: His _Clerical Law_, p. 551.]
+
+[Footnote 55: Eichhorn's _Einleitung ins A. T_. (Introduction to the
+Old Testament), Vol. II.]
+
+[Footnote 56: Both have the same sound. _Fuechslein_ means Foxling,
+Fox-whelp.--Ed.]
+
+[Footnote 57: Campe, a German philologist, who, along with several
+others of that class, has really proposed, as represented in the text,
+to substitute for all Greek or Latin derivatives corresponding German
+terms of the like import. _Geography_, which may be _Erdbeschreibung_
+(Earth-description), was thenceforth to be nothing else; a _Geometer_
+became an _Earth-measurer_, &c., &c. _School-undergovernor_, instead of
+_Subrector_, is by no means the happiest example of the system, and
+seems due rather to the Schadeck Lawyer than to Campe, whom our Author
+has elsewhere more than once eulogized for his project in similar
+style.--Ed.]
+
+[Footnote 58: _New Universal German Library_, a reviewing periodical,
+in those days conducted by Nicolai, a sworn enemy to what has since
+been called the New School.--Ed.]
+
+[Footnote 59: Superstition declares, that on the spot where the rainbow
+rises a golden key is left.]
+
+[Footnote 60: To the Spring, namely, which begins with snow-drops, and
+ends with roses and pinks.]
+
+[Footnote 61: This Christian superstition is not only a Rabbinical, but
+also a Roman one. _Cicero de Senectute_.]
+
+[Footnote 62: For, according to the Jurists, fifteen persons make a
+people.]
+
+[Footnote 63: A long philosophical elucidation is indispensably
+requisite; which will be found in this Book, under the title, _Natural
+Magic of the Imagination_. [A part of the _Jus de Tablette_ appended to
+this Biography, unconnected with it, and not given here.--Ed.]]
+
+[Footnote 64: This pygmy piece of ordnance, with its cunningly devised
+burning-glass, is still to be seen on the south side of the Paris
+Vanity-Fair; and in fine weather, to be heard, on all sides thereof,
+proclaiming the conversion (so it seems to Richter) of the Day from
+Forenoon to Afternoon.--Ed.]
+
+[Footnote 65: The Wild Hunter, _Wilde Jaeger_, is a popular spectre of
+Germany.--Ed.]
+
+[Footnote 66: Indicating to the congregation what Psalm is to be
+sung.--Ed.]
+
+[Footnote 67: Salerno was once famous for its medical science; but
+here, as in many other cases, we could desire the aid of Herr Reinhold
+with his _Lexicon-Commentary_.--Ed.]
+
+[Footnote 68: This hospitable Potentate is as unknown to me as to any
+of my readers.--Ed.]
+
+[Footnote 69: A little work printed in manuscript types; and seldom
+given by him to any but Princes. This piece of print-writing he
+intentionally passes off to the great as a piece of hand-writing; these
+persons being both more habituated and inclined to the reading of
+manuscript than of print.]
+
+[Footnote 70: Thus defined by Adelung in his Lexicon: "_Kraeutermuetze_,
+in Medicine, a cap with various dried herbs sewed into it, and which is
+worn for all manner of troubles in the head."--Ed.]
+
+[Footnote 71: Linne formed in Upsal a flower-clock, the flowers of
+which, by their different times of falling asleep, indicated the hours
+of the day.]
+
+[Footnote 72: The good Professor of Catechetics is out here. _Indignor
+quandoque bonus dormitat Schmelzle_.--Ed.]
+
+[Footnote 73: Passenger so placed in the huge German Postwagen, that he
+cannot look out.--Ed.]
+
+[Footnote 74: _Titan_ is also the title of this Legations-Rath Jean
+Pierre or Jean Paul (Friedrich Richter)'s chief novel.--Ed.]
+
+[Footnote 75: Bruehl, I suppose; but the historical edition of the
+matter is, that Bruehl's treasonable secrets were come at by the more
+ordinary means of wax impressions of his keys.--Ed.]
+
+[Footnote 76: Cities of Richter's romance kingdom. Flachsenfingen he
+sometimes calls _Klein-Wien_, Little Vienna.--Ed.]
+
+[Footnote 77: The campaign of 1813-14 was the holy war of Germany, or
+Freiheitskampf, to which Jean Paul here alludes.--Translator.]
+
+
+
+ THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ Cambridge: Stereotyped and Printed by Welch, Bigelow, & Co.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Campaner Thal and Other Writings, by
+Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
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