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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces, by Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world 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. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces;
+ or, the Wedded Life, Death, and Marriage of Firmian Stanislaus Siebenkaes, Parish Advocate in the Burgh of Kuhschnappel.
+
+Author: Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
+
+Translator: Alexander Ewing
+
+Release Date: May 19, 2011 [eBook #36164]
+[Most recently updated: November 8, 2021]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: Charles Bowen
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FLOWER, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES ***
+
+
+
+
+ BOHN'S STANDARD LIBRARY.
+
+ * * *
+
+ RICHTER'S
+
+ FLOWER, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ GEORGE BELL & SONS
+
+ LONDON: YORK ST., COVENT GARDEN
+ NEW YORK 66 FIFTH AVENUE, AND
+ BOMBAY: 53 ESPLANADE ROAD
+ CAMBRIDGE: DEIGHTON BELL & CO.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ FLOWER, FRUIT AND THORN
+ PIECES;
+
+ OR, THE
+
+ WEDDED LIFE, DEATH, AND MARRIAGE
+
+ OF
+
+ FIRMIAN STANISLAUS SIEBENKÆS,
+
+ PARISH ADVOCATE
+
+ IN THE BURGH OF KUHSCHNAPPEL.
+
+
+
+ (_A GENUINE THORN PIECE_.)
+
+
+
+ BY
+
+ JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER.
+
+
+
+ Translated from the German
+
+ BY
+
+ ALEXANDER EWING.
+
+
+
+
+ LONDON
+
+ GEORGE BELL AND SONS
+
+ 1897
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ [_Reprinted from Stereotype plates_.]
+
+
+
+
+ PREFACE
+
+ TO THE
+
+ SECOND EDITION.
+
+
+What advantage shall I reap in giving to the world this, my new edition
+of 'Siebenkæs,' embellished and perfected as it is with all the
+additions, corrections, and improvements which it has been in my power
+to make? Can I expect to be any the better for it? People will, I
+daresay, buy it and read it; but not give much of their time to the
+study of it, nor be sufficiently detailed and thorough in their
+criticism of it. The Pythia of Criticism has hitherto been chary of her
+oracles to me, as the Greek Pythia was to other inquirers; she has
+chewed up my laurels, instead of crowning me with them, and prophesied
+little or nothing. The author very distinctly remembers setting to
+work, for instance, at the second edition of his 'Hesperus,'[1] with
+his pruning-saw in his left hand and his oculist's knife in his right,
+and applying both instruments to the work to an extraordinary extent;
+it was in vain, however, that he looked for anything like an
+appreciative notice of it, either in literary or non-literary
+publications. Similarly, in all his new editions (those of 'Fixlein,'
+the 'Preparatory School,' and 'Levana,' are proofs and witnesses[2]),
+however he may set to work, hanging up new pictures, turning some of
+the old ones' faces to the wall--marching off some ideas, relieving
+them by others--making characters conduct themselves better, or worse,
+or hit upon better, or upon worse, ideas, as the case may be,--the
+deuce a reviewer takes the least notice of it, or says a word to the
+world on the subject. But in this way I learn little, am not told where
+I have done pretty well, or the reverse, and am _minus_, perhaps, some
+little bit of praise and encouragement which I may deserve.
+
+This is how the question stands, and several consequences follow as
+matters of course; the indifferent class of readers consider the author
+incapable of making any critical emendations, while the enthusiastic
+class think none are necessary--their common point of agreement being
+the supposition that he absorbs and emits the whole thing with the same
+natural, matter of course, ease and absence of effort as the Aphides,
+the plant-lice, do the honey-dew, which is in such request with the
+bees, though, unlike the said bees, he is not very clever at making the
+wax for it.
+
+Then there are a good many who think every line should be left in the
+condition in which it first flowed, or burst, spontaneously from its
+author's fancy--just as if corrections were not themselves spontaneous
+outbursts as well as the other. Other readers prefer to belong to none
+of the above factions and consequently belong, to some extent, to all.
+Were it my object to express myself briefly, I should merely have to do
+so as follows:--firstly, they say, it would be much better if he simply
+spoke artlessly out whatever he finds it in his heart to say! and (if
+this is just what one happens to have done), secondly, how much better
+would be the effect of that which he finds it in that heart of his to
+say, and how much it would be improved, were it to be done according to
+the canons of taste and criticism! I can express these ideas likewise
+in a more roundabout form, as follows:--If a writer curbs himself too
+closely, if he thinks less about the strong throb of his heart than
+about the delicate arterial network and plexus of taste, and breaks up
+its broad stream into fine, minute, dew-drops of the invisible
+perspiration of criticism--then they say--"the fact is, that the
+thicker and more powerful a jet of water is, the higher it shoots,
+penetrating the atmosphere, and overcoming its resistance; whilst a
+more delicate jet is dissipated before it gets half as far." But, when
+the author does just the reverse of the above; when he presses out all
+his overflowing heart in one gush, and lets the blood-billows flow when
+and how they will, then the critics point the _following_ moral--doing
+it, however, in a metaphor other than I should have expected of
+them--"A work of art is like a paper kite, which rises the higher the
+more the boy pulls and holds back the string, but falls the moment he
+lets it go."
+
+We return at last to our book. The most important of the emendations
+made upon it are, perhaps, the historical; for, since the first edition
+appeared, I have had the good fortune--partly because I have had an
+opportunity of visiting and seeing Kuhschnappel itself, the scene of
+the story (as was some time since stated in Jean Paul's letters),
+partly from my correspondence with the hero of it himself--of becoming
+acquainted with family circumstances and occurrences which, probably, I
+could not have got at in any other way, unless I had sat down and
+coolly invented them. I have even made prize of some fresh
+Leibgeberiana, which I am happy to be able now to communicate to the
+public.
+
+The new edition is also improved by the banishment of all those
+foreigners of words which occupied places more appropriately to be
+filled by natives of the country; also by a critical cleansing away of
+all the genitive final s's of compound words. But really the labour of
+sweeping and striking out letters and words all through four long
+volumes can be estimated so highly by nobody, not even by Posterity, as
+by the sweeper and striker-out himself.
+
+Another of the improvements made in the Second Edition is, that I have
+placed both the "Flower-pieces" at the end of the second volume[3] (for
+in the former edition they came both at the beginning of the first),
+and that it is no longer the first volume, but, much more
+appropriately, the second, which closes with the first Fruit-piece.
+
+And lastly, it may, perhaps, be reckoned as one of the minor
+improvements, that in the two Flower-pieces--particularly in that of
+the Dead Christ--I have not _made_ any improvements, but left
+everything as it was, and not attempted to scrape away any of the
+golden writing-sand with which I had made the letters a little rough
+and illegible.
+
+The above are the principal alterations, concerning which I should be
+so glad to be favoured with the opinions of able reviewers, to the
+increasing of my information, perhaps also of my reputation. But, as
+there could not be a more troublesome business than the comparing of
+the old book with the improved one, page by page, as it were, I have
+deposited in the school-book shop the printed copy of the old edition,
+in which all the writing-ink emendations of the printing-ink, that is
+to say, all the places which have been written or stroked through, can
+be easily seen at a glance, often half and whole pages done to death,
+so that it would really astonish you. Critics not on the spot must,
+indeed, content themselves with laying the volumes of each of the
+editions into the opposite scales of a grocer's balance, and then
+looking, when they will see how much the new edition outweighs the old.
+From my strict and anxious treatment of my Second Edition, then, all
+critics may form an idea of my strict and anxious treatment of my
+first; they may also form an idea how much I struck out of my
+manuscript before printing, when they observe how much I have struck
+out after printing.
+
+ Dr. Jean Paul Fr. Richter.
+
+Bayreuth, _September_, 1817.
+
+
+
+
+ CONTENTS.
+
+
+ PREFACE to the Second Edition
+
+ PREFACE, with which I was obliged to put Jacob Oehrmann, General
+ Dealer, to sleep, because I wished to narrate the "Dog Post Days,"
+ and these present "Flower-Pieces," &c., &c., to his Daughter
+
+ Wedded Life, Death, And Marriage of F. S. Siebenkæs.
+
+ A Genuine Thorn Piece.
+
+
+
+ BOOK I.
+
+ CHAPTER I.
+
+ A Wedding Day, succeeding a day of respite--The Counterparts--Dish
+ Quintette in two Courses--Table-talk--Six Arms and Hands.
+
+
+ CHAPTER II.
+
+ Home Fun--Sundry formal Calls--The Newspaper Article--A Love
+ Quarrel, and a few hard words--Antipathetic ink on the wall--
+ Friendship of the Satirists--Government of Kuhschnappel.
+
+
+ APPENDIX to CHAPTER II.
+
+ Government of the Imperial Market Borough of Kuhschnappel.
+
+
+ CHAPTER III.
+
+ Lenette's Honeymoon--Book Brewing--Schulrath Stiefel--Mr.
+ Everard--A Day before the Fair--The Red Cow--St. Michael's Fair--
+ The Beggars' Opera--Diabolical Temptation in the Wilderness, or
+ the Mannikin of Fashion--Autumn Joys--A New Labyrinth.
+
+
+ CHAPTER IV.
+
+ A Matrimonial Partie à la Guerre--Letter to that Hair Collector,
+ the Venner--Self-deceptions--Adam's Marriage Sermon--Shadowing
+ and Over-shadowing.
+
+ End of the Preface and of the First Book.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+ PREFACE to the Second, Third and Fourth Books.
+
+ PREFACE by the Author of 'Hesperus'.
+
+
+
+ BOOK II.
+
+
+ CHAPTER V.
+
+ The Broom and the Besom as Passion Implements--The Importance of a
+ Bookwriter--Diplomatic Negotiations and Discussions on the subject
+ of Candle Snuffing--The Pewter Cupboard--Domestic Hardships and
+ Enjoyments.
+
+
+ CHAPTER VI.
+
+ Matrimonial Jars--Extra Leaflet on the Loquacity of Women--More
+ Pledging--The Mortar and the Snuff-mill--A Scholar's Kiss--On
+ the Consolations of Humanity.
+
+ Continuation and Conclusion Of Chapter VI.
+
+ The Checked Calico Dress--More Pledges--Christian Neglect of the
+ Study of Judaism--A Helping Arm (of Leather) stretched forth from
+ the Clouds--The Auction.
+
+
+ CHAPTER VII.
+
+ The Shooting-Match--Rosa's Autumnal Campaign--Considerations
+ concerning Curses, Kisses, and the Militia.
+
+
+ CHAPTER VIII.
+
+ Scruples as to Payment of Debts--The Rich Pauper's Sunday
+ Throne-ceremonial--Artificial Flowers on the Grave--New Thistle
+ Seedlings of Contention.
+
+ First Flower Piece.
+
+ The Dead Christ proclaims that there is no God.
+
+ Second Flower piece.
+
+ A Dream within a Dream.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+ BOOK III.
+
+
+ CHAPTER IX.
+
+ A Potato War with Women--and with Men--A Walk in December--Tinder
+ for Jealousy--A War of Succession on the subject of a piece of
+ checked calico--Rupture with Stiefel--Sad Evening Music.
+
+
+ CHAPTER X.
+
+ A Lonely New-Year's Day--The Learned Schalaster--Wooden-leg of
+ Appeal--Chamber Postal Delivery--The 11th of February, and
+ Birth-day of the year 1786.
+
+
+ CHAPTER XI.
+
+ Leibgeber's Disquisition on Fame--Firmian's "Evening Paper".
+
+
+ CHAPTER XII.
+
+ The Flight out of Egypt--The Glories of Travel?--The Unknown
+ Bayreuth--Baptism in a Storm--Nathalie and the Hermitage--The
+ most important Conversation in all this Book--An Evening of
+ Friendship.
+
+
+ CHAPTER XIII.
+
+ A Clock of Human Beings--A Cold Shoulder--The Venner.
+
+
+ CHAPTER XIV.
+
+ A Lover's Dismissal--Fantaisie--The Child with the Bouquet--The
+ Eden of the Night, and the Angel at the Gate of Paradise.
+
+ First Fruit Piece.
+
+ Letter of Dr. Victor to Cato the Elder, on the Conversion of _I_
+ into _Thou_, _He_, _She_, _Ye_, and _They_; or the Feast of
+ Kindness of the 20th March.
+
+ Postscript by Jean Paul.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+ BOOK IV.
+
+
+ CHAPTER XV.
+
+ Rosa von Meyern--Tone-Echoes and After-Breezes from the loveliest
+ of all Nights--Letters of Nathalie and Firmian--Table-talk by
+ Leibgeber.
+
+
+ CHAPTER XVI.
+
+ The Homeward Journey, with all its Pleasures--The Arrival at Home.
+
+
+ CHAPTER XVII.
+
+ The Butterfly Rosa in the Form of Mining Caterpillar--Thorn-crowns,
+ and Thistle-heads of Jealousy.
+
+
+ CHAPTER XVIII.
+
+ After-Summer of Marriage--Preparations for Death.
+
+
+ CHAPTER XIX.
+
+ The Apparition--Homecoming of the Storms in August, or the last
+ Quarrel--The Raiment of the Children of Israel.
+
+
+ CHAPTER XX.
+
+ Apoplexy--The President of the Board of Health--The Notary-Public--
+ The last Will and Testament--The Knight's Move--Revel, the Morning
+ Preacher--The Second Apoplectic Attack.
+
+
+ CHAPTER XXI.
+
+ Dr. [Oe]lhafen and Medical Boot and Shoemaking--The Burial Society--
+ A Death's Head in the Saddle--Frederick II. and his Funeral
+ Oration.
+
+
+ CHAPTER XXII.
+
+ Journey through Fantaisie--Re-union on the Bindlocher Mountain--
+ Berneck--Man-doubling--Gefrees--Exchange of Clothes--Münchberg--
+ Solo-whistling--Hof--The Stone of Gladness and Double-parting.
+
+
+ CHAPTER XXIII.
+
+ Days in Vaduz--Nathalie's Letter--A New Year's Wish--Wilderness
+ of Destiny and the Heart.
+
+
+ CHAPTER XXIV.
+
+ News from Kuhschnappel--Woman's Anticlimax--Opening of the Seventh
+ Seal.
+
+
+ CHAPTER XXV., AND LAST.
+
+ The Journey--The Churchyard--The Spectre--The End of the Trouble,
+ and of the Book.
+
+
+
+
+ PREFACE,
+
+ WITH WHICH I WAS OBLIGED TO PUT JACOB OEHRMANN, GENERAL DEALER, TO
+ SLEEP, BECAUSE I WISHED TO NARRATE THE "DOG POST DAYS"[4] AND
+ THESE PRESENT "FLOWER-PIECES," &C., &C., TO HIS DAUGHTER.
+
+
+On Christmas Eve of 1794, when I came from the publishers of the two
+works in question, and from Berlin, to the town of Scheerau, I went
+straight from the mail coach to the house of Mr. Jacob Oehrmann (whose
+law affairs I had formerly attended to), having with me letters from
+Vienna which might be of considerable service to him. A child can see
+at a glance that at that time there was no idea of anything connected
+with such a matter as a Preface in my head. It was very cold--being the
+24th of December--the street lamps were lighted, and I was frozen as
+stiff as the fawn which had been my fellow-passenger (a "blind" one[5]),
+by the coach. In the shop itself, which was full of draughts and other
+kinds of wind, it was impossible for a preface-maker of any sense,
+such as myself, to set to work, because there was a young lady
+preface-maker--Oehrmann's daughter and shop-girl--already at work making
+oral prefaces to the little books she was selling--Christmas almanacs
+of the best of all kinds--duodecimo books, printed on unsized paper
+indeed, but full of real fragments of the golden and silver
+ages--I mean, the little books of mottoes, all gold and silver leaf,
+with which the blessed Christmas gilds its gifts like the autumn, or
+silvers them over like the winter. I don't blame the poor shop-wench
+that, besieged as she was by such a crowd of Christmas Eve customers,
+she hardly had a nod to throw at me, old acquaintance as I was; and,
+although I had only that moment arrived from Berlin, she showed me in
+to her father at once.
+
+All was in a glow in there, Jacob Oehrmann as well as his
+counting-house. He, too, was sitting over a book, not as a
+preface-maker, however, but as a registrator and epitomator; he was
+balancing his ledger. He had added up his balance-sheet twice over
+already, but, to his horror, the credit side was always a Swiss
+oertlein (that is, 13½ kreuzers, Zürich currency) more than the debit
+side. The man's attention was wholly fixed upon the driving-wheel of
+the calculating machine inside his head; he hardly noticed me, well as
+he knew me, and though I had Vienna letters. To mercantile people, who,
+like the carriers they employ, are at home all the world over, and to
+whom the remotest trading powers are daily sending ambassadors and
+envoyés, namely, commercial travellers--to them, I say, it makes little
+difference whether it be Berlin, Boston, or Byzance, that one happens
+to arrive from.
+
+Being well accustomed to this commercial indifference to fellow
+mortals, I stood quietly by the fire, and had my thoughts, which shall
+here be made the reader's property.
+
+I cogitated, as I stood at the fire, on the subject of the public in
+general, and found that I could divide it, like man himself, into three
+parts--into the Buying-public, the Reading-public, and the Art-public,
+just as speculative persons have assumed that man consists of Body,
+Soul, and Spirit. The Body, or Buying-public, which consists of
+scholars by trade, professional teachers, and people engaged in
+business--that true _corpus callosum_ of the German empire--buys and
+uses the very biggest and most corpulent books (works of _body_), and
+deals with them as women do with cookery books, it opens them and
+consults them in order to be guided by them. In the eyes of this class
+the world contains two kinds of utter idiots, differing from each other
+only in the direction taken by their crack-brained fancies, those of
+the one going too much downward, those of the other too much upward; in
+a word, philosophers and poets. Naudæus, in his 'Enumeration of the
+Learned Men who were supposed to be Necromancers in the Middle Ages,'
+has admirably remarked that this never was the case with jurists or
+theologians, but always with philosophers. It is the case to this day
+with the wise of the world, only that, the noble idea of "wizard" and
+"witchmaster,"--whose _spiritus rector_ and grand master seems to have
+been the devil himself--having got degraded to a name applied to great
+and clever men and conjurors, the philosopher must be content to put up
+with the latter signification of the term. Poets are in a more pitiable
+case still; the philosopher is a member of the fourth faculty, has
+recognised official positions--can lecture on his own subjects; but the
+poet is nothing at all, holds no state appointment--(if he did he would
+no longer be "born," he would be "made" by the Imperial Chancery), and
+people who can criticise him and pass their opinions upon him throw it
+in his teeth without ceremony that he makes plentiful use of
+expressions which are current neither in commerce, nor in synodal
+edicts, nor in general regulations, nor in decisions of the high court
+of justiciary, nor in medical opinions or histories of diseases--and
+that he visibly walks on stilts, is turgid and bombastic, and never
+_copious_ enough or _condensed_ enough. At the same time, I at once
+admit that, in the rank thus assigned to the poet, he is treated very
+much as the nightingale was by Linnæus, which (as he was not taking its
+song into account) he, no doubt properly, classed among the funny,
+jerking water-wagtails.
+
+The second part of the public, the Soul, the Reading-public, is
+composed of girls, lads, and idle persons in general. I shall praise it
+in the sequel; it reads us all, at any rate, and skips obscure pages,
+where there's nothing but talk and argument, sticking, like a just and
+upright judge, or historical inquirer, to matters of pure fact.
+
+The Art-public, the Spirit, I might, perhaps, leave altogether out of
+consideration; the few who have a taste, not only for all kinds of
+taste, and for the taste of all nations, but for higher, almost
+cosmopolitan beauties, such as Herder, Goethe, Lessing, Wieland and one
+or two more--an author has little need to trouble himself about _their_
+votes, they are in such a minority, and moreover, they don't read him.
+At all events, they don't deserve the dedication with which I, at
+the fireside, came to the conclusion that I would bribe the great
+Buying-public, which is, of course, what keeps the book trade going. I
+resolved, in fact, regularly to dedicate my 'Hesperus,' or the
+'Kuhschnappler Siebenkæs,' to Jacob Oehrmann; and through him, as it
+were, to the Buying-public. To wit, in this way:--
+
+Jacob Oehrmann is not a man to be despised, I can tell you. He served
+as porter of the Stock Exchange in Amsterdam for four years, and rang
+the Exchange bell from 11.45 till 12 o'clock. Soon after this, by
+scraping and pinching, he _became_ a "pretty rich house" (though he
+_kept_ a very poor one), and rose to the dignity of seal-keeper of a
+whole collection of knightly seals pasted on to noble, escheated,
+promises to pay. True, like celebrated authors, he assumed no municipal
+offices, preferring to do nothing but write; but the town militia of
+Scheerau, whose hearts are always in the right place (that is to say,
+the safest), and who bravely exhibit themselves to passing troops as a
+watchful corps of _observation_, insisted upon making him their
+captain, though he would have been quite content to have been nothing
+but their cloth contractor. He is honest enough, particularly in his
+dealings with the mercantile world; and, far from burning the laws of
+the Church, like Luther, all he burns even of the municipal law is a
+title or two of the Seventh Commandment, indeed, he only _makes_ a
+_beginning_ at burning them, as the Vienna censorship does with
+prohibited books; and even this only in the cases of carriers, debtors,
+and people of rank. Before a man of this stamp I can, without any
+qualms of conscience, burn a little sweet-smelling incense, and make
+his Dutch face appear magnified, to some extent, like a spectre's
+through magic vapour.
+
+Now I thought I should portray, in his likeness, some of the more
+striking features of the great Buying-public; for he is a sort of
+portable miniature of it--like itself, he cares only for bread-studies,
+and beer-studies, for no talk but table-talk, no literature but
+politics--he knows that the magnet was only created to hold up his
+shop-door key if he chooses to stick it on to it--the tourmaline only
+to collect his tobacco ashes, his daughter Pauline to take the place of
+both (although she attracts stronger things, and with greater
+attractive power than either)--he knows no higher thing in the world
+than bread, and detests the town painter, who uses it to rub out pencil
+marks with. He and his three sons, who are immured in three of the
+Hanse towns, read or write no other, and no less important, books than
+the waste-book and the ledger.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+"May I be d--d," thought I, as I was warming myself at the stove, "if I
+can paint the Buying-public to greater perfection than under the name
+of Jacob Oehrmann, who is but a twig, or fibre, of it; but then it
+couldn't possibly know what I meant" it occurred to me; and on account
+of this error in my calculations, I have to-day hit upon quite another
+plan.
+
+Just as I had committed my error the daughter came in, rectified her
+father's, and brought out the balance correctly. Oehrmann looked at me
+now, and became to some extent conscious of my existence; and, on my
+presenting the Vienna epistles by way of credentials (epistles of this
+kind are more to him than poetical, or St. Pauline, epistles)--from
+being a mere fresco figure on the wall, as I had been up to that time,
+I became a something possessed of a mind and a stomach, and I was asked
+(together with the latter) to stay to supper.
+
+Now, although the critics may set all the cliques and circles of
+Germany about my ears--aye, and have a new Turkish bell cast specially
+for the purpose--I mean to make a clean breast of it here, and state in
+plain words that it was solely on account of the daughter that I came,
+and that I stayed, there. I knew that the darling would have read all
+my recent books, if the old man had given her time to do it; and for
+that very reason it was impossible for me to blink the fact that it was
+incumbent upon me as a simple duty to talk, if not to sing, her father
+to sleep, and then tell his daughter all that I had been telling the
+world, though the agency of the press. This, as of course you perceive,
+was why I usually came there to have a talk on the evenings of his
+foreign mail days, when it didn't take much to put him to sleep.
+
+On the Christmas Eve, then, what I had to do was to condense and
+abridge my "45 Dog Post Days" into the space of about the same number
+of minutes; a longish business, rendering a sleep of no brief duration
+necessary.
+
+I wish Messrs. the Editors and Reviewers, who find much to blame in
+this proceeding of mine, could have just sat down, for once in their
+lives, on the sofa beside my namesake Johanna Paulina; they would have
+related to her most of my biographical histories in those cleverly
+epitomised forms in which they communicate them in their magazines and
+papers to audiences of a very different type. They would have been
+beside themselves with rapture at the truth and felicity of her
+remarks, at the natural, unaffected, simplicity and sincerity of her
+manner, at the innocence of her heart, and at her lively sense of
+humour, and they would have taken hold of her hand, and cried "let the
+author treat us to comedies half as delicious as this one which is
+sitting beside us now, and he is the man for us." Indeed, had these
+gentlemen, the editors and reviewers, got to know a little more than
+they do about the art of briefly extracting the pith and marrow of a
+book, and had they been able to move Pauline just a little more than I
+think such great critical functionaries could be expected to do; and
+had they then seen, or more properly, nearly _lost_ sight of, that
+gentle face of hers as it melted away in a dew of tears (because girls
+and gold are the _softer_ and the more _impressionable_ the _purer_
+they are), and had they, as of course they would have done, in the
+heavenliness of their emotion, well-nigh clean forgotten themselves,
+and the snoring father----
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Good gracious! I have got into a tremendous state over it myself, and
+shall keep the preface till to-morrow. It is clear that it must be gone
+on with in a calmer mood.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+I thought I might take it for granted that the master of the house
+would have tired himself so much with letter-writing on the Christmas
+Eve, that all that would be wanted to put him to sleep would be some
+person who should hasten the process by talking in a long-winded and
+tedious style. I considered myself to be that person. However, at
+first, while supper was going on, I only introduced subjects which he
+would understand. While he was plying his spoon and fork, and till
+grace had been said, a sleep of any duration was more than could be
+expected of him. Wherefore I entertained him with matter of interest
+and amusement, such as my blind fellow-passenger (the fawn), one or two
+stoppages of payment--my opinions on the French War, and the high
+prices of everything--that Frederick Street, Berlin, was half a mile in
+length--that there was great freedom, both of the press and of trade,
+in that city. I also mentioned that in most parts of Germany which I
+had visited, I had found that the beggar boys were the "revising
+barristers" of and "lodgers of appeals" against the newspaper writers;
+that is to say, that the newspaper makers bring to life, with their
+ink, the people who are killed in battle, and are able to avail
+themselves of these resurrected ones in the next "affaire;" whilst the
+soldiers' children, on the other hand, like to kill their fathers and
+then beg upon the lists of killed: they shoot their fathers dead for a
+halfpenny each, and the newspaper evangelists bring them to life again
+for a penny. And thus these two classes of the community are, in a
+beautiful manner, by reciprocity of lying, the one the antidote to the
+other. This is the reason why neither a newspaper writer, nor an
+orthographer, can strictly adhere to Klopstock's orthographical rule,
+only to _write_ what you _hear_.
+
+When the cloth was off, I saw that it was time for me to set my foot to
+work at the rocking of Captain Oehrmann's cradle. My 'Hesperus' is too
+big a book. On other occasions I should have had time enough. On these
+occasions all I had to do to get the great Dutch tulip to close its
+petals in sleep was, to begin with wars and rumours of wars--then
+introduce the Law of Nature, or rather the _Laws_ of Nature, seeing
+that every fair and every war provides a fresh supply--from this point
+I had but a short step to arrive at the most sublime axioms of moral
+science, thus dipping the merchant before he knew where he was into the
+deepest centre of the health-giving mineral well of truth. Or I lighted
+up sundry new systems (of my own invention), held them under his nose,
+attacked and refuted them, benumbing and narcotising him with the smoke
+till he fell down senseless. Then came freedom! Then his daughter and I
+would open the window to the stars and the flowers outside, while I
+placed before the poor famished soul a rich supply of the loveliest
+poetical honey-bearing blossoms. Such had been my process on previous
+occasions. But this evening I took a shorter path. As soon as grace was
+said, I got as near as I could to complete unintelligibility, and
+proposed to the house of business of Oehrmann's soul (his body) the
+following query: whether there were not more Kartesians than Newtonists
+among the princes of Germany. "I do not mean as regards the animal
+world," I continued slowly and tediously. "Kartesius, as we know, is of
+opinion that the animals are insentient machines, and consequently,
+man, the noblest of animals, would be improperly comprehended in this
+dictum; what my meaning is, and what I want to know, is this--do not
+the majority (of the princes of Germany) consider that the essentiality
+of a realm consists in EXTENSION, as Kartesius holds that of matter to
+do, only the minority of them holding, as Newton (a greater man) does
+of matter, that its essentiality consists in SOLIDITY."
+
+He terrified me by answering with the greatest liveliness, and as broad
+awake as you please, "There are only two of them that can pay their
+way--the Prince of Flachsenfingen and the Prince of----"
+
+At this point his daughter placed a basket of clothes come from the
+wash upon the table, and a little box of letters upon the basket, and
+set to work printing her brothers' names at full length upon their
+shirts. As she took out of the basket a tall white festival tiara for
+her father, and took away from him the base Saturday cowl which he had
+on, I was incited to become as obscure and as long-winded as the
+night-cap and my own designs called upon me to be.
+
+Now, as there is nothing about which he is so utterly indifferent as my
+books, and polite literature in all its branches, I determined to
+settle him, once for all, with this detested stuff. I succeeded in
+pumping out what follows.
+
+"I almost fear, Captain, that you must have rather wondered that I have
+never enabled you to make acquaintance in anything like a very detailed
+or explicit manner with my two latest _opuscula_, or little works; the
+elder of the two is, curiously enough, called 'Dog Post Days,' and the
+later 'Flower-pieces.' Perhaps, if I just give you a slight idea
+to-night of the principal points of my forty-five Dog Post Days, and
+then fetch up with the Flower-pieces this day week, I shall be doing a
+little towards making amends for my negligence. Of course, it's my
+fault alone, and nobody else's, if you find you don't quite know what
+the first of the two may be _about_--whether you are to suppose it to
+be a work on heraldry or on insects--or a dictionary of some particular
+dialect--or an ancient codex--or a Lexicon Homericum--or a collection
+of inaugural disputations--or a ready reckoner--or an epic poem--or a
+volume of funeral sermons. It really _is_ nothing but an interesting
+story, with threads of all the above subjects woven into it, however. I
+should be very glad myself, Captain, if it were better than it is; and
+particularly I wish it were written with that degree of lucidity that
+one could half read it, and half compose it even, in his sleep. I do
+not know, Captain, quite what your canons of criticism may be, and
+hence I cannot say whether your taste is British or Greek. I must admit
+that I shrewdly suspect that it is not much in the book's favour that
+there are parts of it to be found--I hope not very many--in which there
+are more meanings than one, of all kinds of metaphors and flowery
+styles hashed up together, or an outside semblance of gravity with no
+reality behind it, but only mere fun (you see Germans insist upon a
+businesslike style), and (which I am most of all afraid is the case),
+though the book is of some considerable extent, my attempts at
+imitating the romances of chivalry so popular in the present day (which
+so often _seem_ as if they really must have been written by the old
+_artless_ knights themselves, fellows who were better at wielding the
+heavy two-handed sword than the light goose quill)--that my attempts, I
+say, at imitating these romances have scarcely been attended with that
+amount of success at which I have aimed at attaining. Perhaps, too, I
+might oftener have offended the modesty and the ears of the ladies, as
+many men of the world have thought I might; for, indeed, books which do
+not offend the ears of the great--but only those of the chaste--are not
+considered the most objectionable."
+
+I saw here, when too late, that I had struck on a subject which
+enlivened him up prodigiously. I did, indeed, instantly make a jump to
+a quite different topic, saying, "it is probably the safest way of all,
+to have improper books deposited in _public_ libraries, where the
+librarians are of the usual type, because the rudeness of their manners
+and their disagreeable behaviour, does more to prevent these books from
+being read than an edict of the censorship." But Jacobus would speak
+out his thought, "Pauline, don't let me forget that the woman Stenzin
+hasn't paid her fine yet."
+
+It was uncommonly annoying that, just when I got sleep lured on to
+within a step or two of him, the Captain should all of a sudden draw
+his trigger and let off a thing calculated to blow all my sleeping
+powder to the four winds of heaven. There is nobody more difficult to
+weary than a person who wearies everybody else. I would rather
+undertake to weary out a lady who happens to have nothing to do in five
+minutes' time, than a man of business in as many hours.
+
+Pauline, the darling, anxious to hear the stories which I had
+accompanied in manuscript to Berlin, put slowly into my hand one by one
+the following letters from her letterbox: "STORY"--i. e. she wanted to
+be told the "Dog Post Days" that evening.
+
+So I set to work again, and, with a sigh, began in this way: "The fact
+is, Mr. Oehrmann, that your humble servant here will soon be setting
+letters of this sort flying about in Berlin, by his new book, and my
+'Post Days' may be printed on shirts quite as fine as those your sons'
+names are being printed upon, if the people happen to have made their
+paper from such. But, indeed, I must admit to you that as I was sitting
+on the coach on my way to Berlin, with my right foot under my
+manuscripts, and my left beneath a bale of petitions on their way to
+the Prince of Scheerau, with the army, the only thing I had in the way
+of a comforting thought was this very natural one, 'Devil make a better
+of it all!' Only he's just the very last person to _do it_. For, good
+heavens! in an age like this present age of ours, when the instruments
+of universal world history are only _being tuned_ in the orchestra
+before the concert begins, that is to say, are all grumbling and
+squeaking together in confusion (which was why on one occasion the
+tuning of the orchestra pleased a Morocco Ambassador at Vienna much
+better than the opera itself)--in such an age, when it is so hard to
+tell the coward from the brave man--him who lets everything go as it
+pleases from him who strives to do something great and good--those who
+are withering up from those who are flourishing and promising fruit,
+just as in winter the fruit-bearing trees look much the same as the
+dead ones--in such an age, there is only one consolation for an author,
+one which I have not yet spoken of to-night, and it is this: that,
+after all, though it be an age in which the nobler kinds of virtue,
+love, and freedom, are the rarest of Phœnixes and birds of the sun,
+he can manage to put up with it, and can go on drawing vivid pictures
+and writing lively descriptions of all the birds in question, until
+they wing their way to us in the body. Doubtless, when the originals of
+the pictures _have_ fairly come and taken up their abode here on earth,
+then will all our panegyrics of them be out of place, and loathsome to
+the palate, and a mere threshing of empty straw. People who are
+_incapable of business_ can work for the press."
+
+"There's work, and there's work," the merchant, wide awake, struck in;
+"it all depends---- Now TRADE keeps a man; but book-writing isn't much
+better than spinning cotton, and spinning is next door to begging--not
+meaning anything personal to yourself. But all the broken-down
+book-keepers and bankrupt tradesmen take to the making of
+books--arithmetic books, and so on."
+
+The public sees what a poor opinion this shopkeeper-captain had of me,
+because _my_ business was only the making of books, though in old days
+I had been continually running in to him day and night, as notary
+depute, for the protesting of bills. I know the sort of view many
+people take of the _convenances_ of society; but I think anyone on
+earth will consider that, after being treated in this style, I was to
+be excused for going quite wild on the spot, and responding to the
+fellow's impertinence, although he was no longer quite in his five
+senses, in no less formidable a manner than by repeating, accurately
+and without abridgment, my "extra leaflets" from my 'Hesperus.'
+
+This, of course, was bound to put him to death--sleep, I mean.
+
+And then thousands of propitious stars arose for the daughter and the
+author--then commenced our feast of unleavened bread--then I could sit
+down with her at the front window, and tell her all that which the
+public has for some time had in its hands. Truly there can be nothing
+sweeter than to some kind tender heart, hemmed in on all sides and
+besieged by sermons--which cannot refresh itself at so much as a
+birthday ball, were it only the superintendent's and his wife's, nor
+with a novel, though its author be the family legal adviser: to such a
+beleaguered famishing heart, I say, it is more delicious than virgin
+honey to march up with a strong army of relief, and, taking hold of
+some mesh in the nun's veil which is over the soul, tear it wider, let
+her peep through and look out at the glimmer of some flowery eastern
+land--to wile the tears of her dreams to her waking eyes--to lift her
+beyond her own longings, and at a stroke set free the fond tender
+heart, long heavy with yearning, and bound in bitter slavery--to set it
+free, and to rock it softly up and down in the fresh spring breeze of
+poesy, while the dewy warmth gives birth to flowers therein of fairer
+growth than those of the country round.
+
+I had just finished by one o'clock. I had taken only three hours to the
+three volumes of my story, because I had torn out all the "extra
+leaves." "If the father is the Buying-public, the daughter is the
+Reading-public, and we must not plague her with anything that's not
+purely historical," I said, and sacrificed my most precious
+digressions, for which, moreover, such an enchanting neighbourhood is
+not quite the proper soil.
+
+Then the old man coughed, got up from his chair, asked what o'clock it
+was, wished me good night, and opening the door saw me out (thereby
+depriving me of a good one), and saw me no more till that night week,
+on New Year's Eve.
+
+My readers will remember that I had promised to come on that evening,
+because I had to make a brief report to my client concerning my
+"Flower-pieces"--this very book.
+
+I assure the gentle reader that I shall report the events of the
+evening exactly as they occurred.
+
+I appeared again, then, on the last evening of the year 1794, on the
+red waves of which so many bodies, bled to death, were borne away to
+the Ocean of Eternity. My client received me with a coldness which I
+attributed partly to that of the temperature outside (for both men and
+wolves are most ferocious in hard frost), partly to the Vienna letters
+which I had--NOT with me; and on the whole, I had but little to say to
+the fellow on this occasion. As, besides, I was going to leave Scheerau
+on the New Year's Day by the Thursday coach, and was very anxious to
+lay before my dear Pauline some more _Paulina_, namely these sketches,
+because I knew that whatever other wares she might find upon her
+counter, these wouldn't be among them--I consider that no editor who
+has any principles whatever can possibly get into a passion at my
+_having_ duly appeared. Let any hot-headed person of the sort just
+listen to the plan I had. I wanted first to give to this silent
+soul-flower the FLOWER-PIECES, two dreams made of flowers put together
+mosaic-fashion--next the Thorn-pieces,[6] from which I had to break
+away the thorns, that is, the satires, so that nothing remained but a
+mere curious story and lastly, the Fruit-piece was to be served up
+last, as it is in the book itself, by way of dessert; and in this ripe
+fruit (from which I had previously orally expressed all the chilling
+ice-apple juice of philosophy, which the press has, however, left in) I
+meant to appear at the end of the day, myself as Appleworm. This would
+have led by easy steps to my departure or farewell; for I did not
+know whether I should ever again see or hear of Pauline, this
+flower-polypus, stretching out eyeless, palpitating, tentacula, from
+mere INSTINCT towards the LIGHT. With the old decayed wood on which the
+polyp was blooming I, of course, having no Vienna letters, had little
+to do.
+
+But near as it was to the time for wishing new year's wishes, the old
+year was doomed to end with wishes unfulfilled.
+
+Yet I have little to blame myself about; for, as soon as ever I came
+in, I did my best to tire out the live East India House and put him to
+sleep, and I continued to do so while he sat there. The only agreeable
+remarks I made to him were, that when he had said some insulting things
+about my successor, his present legal adviser, I extended them so as to
+apply them to the legal profession in general, thus elevating the mere
+pasquinade into the nobler satire: "I always picture lawyers and
+clients as two strings of people with buckets or purses near a kind of
+engine for quenching money thirst--the one row, the clients, always
+passing away with their buckets, or purses, empty, and the other row
+standing and handing each other buckets or purses full," said I.
+
+I think it was not otherwise than on purpose, that I painted to him the
+great Buying-public with lineaments much like his own--for he is a
+small Buying-public, only a few feet long and broad. In fact, I made on
+him an experiment to ascertain what the Buying-public itself would say
+to the following ideas.
+
+"The public of the present day, Captain, is gradually getting to be a
+flourishing North India Company, and, it seems to me, it will soon
+rival the Dutch, amongst whom butter and books are articles of _export_
+trade only; the attic salt _they_ have a taste for, is that which
+BENKELSZOON used for pickling fish with. Though they have provided
+Erasmus, in consideration of _his_ salt (of a better quality), with a
+statue (he never _ate_ salt, by the way), yet I think this was
+excusable in them, when we remember that they first had one erected to
+the fish-curer in question. Even CAMPE, who by no means classes the
+inventors of the spinning-wheel and of Brunswick beer beneath the
+constructors and brewers of epic poems, will coincide with me when I
+say that the German is really being made something of at the present
+day; that he is positively becoming a serious, solid, well-grounded
+fellow--a tradesman, a man of business; a man getting past his youthful
+follies, who knows _edible_ from _cogitable_ matter (when he sees it),
+and can winnow out the latter from the former; who can distinguish the
+printer from the publisher, and the bookseller (as the more important)
+from both; he is becoming a speculative individual who, like the hens
+who run from a harp string with fox-gut, can't bear the noise of
+any poet's harp whatever, were it strung with the harper's own
+heart-strings--and who will soon come to suffer no pictorial art to
+exist, except upon bales of merchandise,[7] nor any printing except
+calico-printing."
+
+Here I saw, to my amazement, that the merchant was asleep already, and
+had shut the window-shutters of his senses. I was a good deal annoyed
+that I had been standing in awe of him, as well as talking to him, all
+this time unnecessarily; I had been playing the part of the Devil, and
+he that of King Solomon, supposed by the evil one to be alive when he
+was dead.[8]
+
+Meantime, with the view of not waking him up by means of a sudden
+change of key, I went on talking to him as if nothing had happened,
+speaking to him all the time I was slipping away from him further and
+further towards the window with an exceedingly gradual _diminuendo_ of
+my tone, as follows:--"And of such a public as this, I quite expect
+that a time will come when it will value shoe leather much above
+altar-pieces,[9] and that, when the moral and philosophical credit of
+any philosopher chances to be in question, its first inquiry of all
+will be, 'is the fellow _solvent_?' And further, my beloved listener (I
+continued in the same tone, so as not to run the risk of waking the
+sleeper by any change in the _kind_ of sound), it is to be hoped and
+expected that I shall now have an opportunity of going through, for
+your entertainment, my Flower-pieces, which have not even been
+committed to paper as yet, and which I can quite easily finish this
+evening, if _he_ (father Jacobus) will have the goodness to sleep long
+enough."
+
+
+I commenced, accordingly, as follows:--
+
+
+P.S. But it would be too utterly ridiculous altogether, if I were to
+have the whole of the Flower and Thorn pieces, which are all in the
+book itself, printed over again in the _preface_! At the end of book
+the first, however, I shall give the continuation and conclusion of
+this preface, and of the New Year's Eve, and shall then go on with the
+second book, so that it may be ready for the Easter fair.
+
+ JEAN PAUL FR. RICHTER.
+
+HOF, _7th November_, 1796.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ WEDDED LIFE, DEATH AND MARRIAGE
+
+ OF
+
+ F. S. SIEBENKÆS,
+
+ PARISH ADVOCATE IN THE ROYAL BURGH OF KUHSCHNAPPEL.
+
+ * * *
+
+ A GENUINE THORN PIECE.
+
+
+
+
+
+ BOOK I.
+
+
+
+
+ CHAPTER I.
+
+ A WEDDING DAY, SUCCEEDING A DAY OF RESPITE--THE COUNTERPARTS--DISH
+ QUINTETTE IN TWO COURSES--TABLE-TALK--SIX ARMS AND HANDS.
+
+
+Siebenkæs, parish advocate[10] for the royal borough of Kuhschnappel,
+had spent the whole of Monday at his attic-window watching for his wife
+that was to be, who had been expected to arrive from Augspurg a little
+before service-time, so as to get a sip of something warm before going
+to church for the wedding.
+
+The Schulrath of the place, happening to be returning from Augspurg,
+had promised to bring the bride with him as return cargo, strapping her
+wedding outfit on to his trunk behind.
+
+She was an Augspurger by birth--only daughter of the deceased
+Engelkraut, clerk of the Lutheran Council--and she lived in the
+Fuggery, in a roomy mansion which was probably bigger than many
+drawing-rooms are. She was by no means portionless, for she lived by
+her own work, not on other people's, as penisoned court-ladies'-maids
+do. She had all the newest fashions in bonnets and other headgear in
+her hands earlier than the richest ladies of the neighbourhood, albeit
+in such miniature editions that not even a duck could have got them on;
+and she erected edifices for the female head at a few days' notice, on
+a large scale, after these miniature sketches and small-scale plans of
+them.
+
+All that Siebenkæs did during his long wait was to depose on oath (more
+than once) that it was the devil who invented _seeking_, and his
+grandmother who devised _waiting_. At length, while it was still pretty
+early, came, not the bride, but a night post from Augspurg, with an
+epistle from the Schulrath to say that he and the lady "could
+not possibly arrive before Tuesday. She was still busy at her
+wedding-clothes, and he in the libraries of the ex-Jesuits, and of
+Privy Councillor Zopf, and (among the antiquities) at the city gates."
+
+Siebenkæs's butterfly-proboscis, however, found plenty of open honey
+cells in every blue thistle blossom of his fate; he could now, on this
+idle Monday, make a final application of the arm file and agate
+burnisher to his room, brush out the dust and the writing-sand with the
+feather of a quill from his table, rout out the accumulations of bits
+of paper and other rubbish from behind the mirror, wash, with
+unspeakable labour, the white porcelain inkstand into a more dazzling
+whiteness, and bring the butter-boat and the coffee-pot into a more
+advanced and prominent position (drawing them up in rank and file on
+the cupboard), and polish the brass nails on the grandfather's leather
+arm-chair till they shone again. This new temple-purification of his
+chamber he undertook merely by way of something to do; for a scholar
+considers the mere _arranging_ of his books and papers to _be_ a
+purification as of the temple, at least so maintained the parish
+advocate, saying further, "orderliness is, properly defined, nothing
+but a happy knack which people acquire of putting a thing for twenty
+years in the _old_ place, let that place be where it will."
+
+Not only was he tenant of a pleasant room, but also of a long red
+dining-table, which he had hired and placed beside a commoner one; also
+of some high-backed arm-chairs: moreover the landlords or proprietors
+of the furniture and of the lodgings (who all lived in the house) had
+all been invited by him to dinner on this his play Monday, which was an
+excellent arrangement, inasmuch as--most of the people of the house
+being working-men--their play Monday and his fell together; for it was
+only the landlord who was anything superior, and he was a wig-maker.
+
+I should have had cause to feel ashamed of myself had I gone and used
+my precious historical colours in portraying a mere advocate of the
+poor (a fit candidate for his _own_ services in that capacity). But I
+have had access to the documents and accounts relating to my hero's
+guardianship during his minority, and from these I can prove, at any
+hour, in a court of justice, that he was a man worth at least 1200
+Rhenish guldens (_i.e_. 100_l_.), to say nothing of the interest. Only,
+unfortunately, the study of the ancients, added to his own natural turn
+of mind, had endowed him with an invincible contempt for money, that
+metallic mainspring of the machinery of our human existence, that dial
+plate on which our value is read off, although people of sense,
+tradespeople for example, have quite as high an opinion of the man who
+acquires, as of him who gets rid of it; just as a person who is
+electrified gets a shining glory round his head whether the fluid be
+passing into or out of him. Indeed, Siebenkæs even said (and on one
+occasion he did it) that we ought sometimes to put on the beggar's
+scrip in jest, simply to accustom the back to it against more serious
+times. And he considered that he justified (as well as complimented)
+himself in going on to say, "It is easier to bear poverty like
+Epictetus than to choose it like Antoninus; in the same way that it is
+easier for a slave to stick out his own leg to be cut off, than for a
+man who wields a sceptre a yard long to leave the legs of his slaves
+alone." Wherefore he made shift to live for ten years in foreign parts,
+and for half a year in the imperial burgh, without asking his guardian
+for a single halfpenny of the interest of his capital. But as it was
+his idea to introduce his orphan, moneyless bride as mistress and
+overseer into a silver mine all ready opened and timbered for her
+reception (for such he considered his 100_l_. with the accumulated
+interest to be), it had pleased him to give her to understand, while he
+was in Augspurg, that he had nothing but his bare bread, and that what
+little he _could_ scrape together by the sweat of his brow, went from
+hand to mouth, though he worked as hard as any man, and cared little
+about the Upper House of Parliament or the Lower. "I'll be handed," he
+had long ago said, "if I ever marry a woman who knows how much I have a
+year. As it is, women often look upon a husband as a species of demon,
+to whom they sign away their souls--often their child--that the evil
+one may give them money and eatables."
+
+This longest of summer days and Mondays was followed by the longest of
+winter nights (which is impossible only in an astronomical sense).
+Early next morning, the Schulrath Stiefel drove up, and lifted out of
+the carriage (fine manners have twice their charm when they adorn a
+scholar) a bonnet-block instead of the bride, and ordered the rest of
+her belongings, which consisted of a white tinned box, to be unloaded,
+while he, with her head under his arm, ran upstairs to the advocate.
+
+"Your worthy intended," he said, "is coming directly. She is getting
+ready at this moment, in a farm cottage, for the sacred rite, and
+begged me to come on before, lest you should be impatient. A true
+woman, in Solomon's sense of the term, and I congratulate you most
+heartily."
+
+"The Heir Advocate Siebenkæs, my pretty lady?--I can conduct you to him
+myself. He lodges with me, and I will wait upon you this moment," said
+the wig-maker, down at the door, and offered his hand to lead her up:
+but, as she caught sight of her second bonnet-block, still sitting in
+the carriage, she took it on her left arm as if it had been a baby (the
+hairdresser in vain attempting to get hold of it), and followed him
+with a hesitating step into the advocate's room. She held out her right
+hand only, with a deep curtsey and gentle greeting, to her bridegroom,
+and on her full round face (everything in it was round, brow, eyes,
+mouth, and chin) the roses far out-bloomed the lilies, and were all the
+prettier to look upon as seen below the large black silk bonnet; while
+the snow-white muslin dress, the many-tinted nosegay of artificial
+flowers, and the white points of her shoes, added charm upon charm to
+her timid figure. She at once untied her bonnet--there being barely
+time to get one's hair done and be married--and laid her garland, which
+she had hidden at the farm that the people might not see it, down upon
+the table, that her head might be properly put to rights, and powdered
+for the ceremony (as a person's of quality ought to be) by the
+landlord, thus conveniently at hand.
+
+Thou dear Lenette! A bride is, it is true, during many days, for
+everyone whom she's not going to many, a poor meagre piece of
+shewbread--and especially is she so to me. But I except one hour,
+namely, that on the morning of the wedding-day, when the girl, whose
+life has been all freedom hitherto, trembling in her wedding dress,
+overgrown (like an ivied tree) with flowers and feathers, which, with
+others like them, fate is soon to pluck away--and with anxious pious
+eyes overflowing on her mother's heart for the last and loveliest time;
+this hour, I say, moves me, in which, standing all adorned on the
+scaffold of joy, she celebrates so many partings, and one single
+meeting: when the mother turns away from her and goes back to her other
+children, leaving her, all fainthearted, to a stranger. "Thou heart,
+beating high with happiness," I think then, "not always wilt thou throb
+thus throughout the sultry years of wedded life; often wilt thou pour
+out thine own blood, the better to pass along the path to age, as the
+chamois hunter keeps his foot from sliding by the blood from his own
+heel." And then I would fain go out to the gazing, envious virgins by
+the wayside leading to the church, and say to them, "Do not so begrudge
+the poor girl the happiness of a, perhaps fleeting, illusion. Ah, what
+you and she are looking at to-day is the strife- and beauty-apple of
+marriage hanging only on the sunny side of love, all red and soft; no
+one sees the green sour side of the apple hidden in the shade. And if
+ye have ever been grieved to the soul for some luckless wife who has
+chanced, ten years after her wedding, to come upon her old bridal
+dress, in a drawer, while tears for all the sweet illusions she has
+lost in these ten years rise in a moment to her eyes, are you so sure
+it will be otherwise with this envied one who passes before you all joy
+and brightness now?"
+
+I should not, however, have performed this unexpected modulation into
+the "remote key" of tenderheartedness, had it not been that I managed
+to form to myself a picture so irresistibly vivid of Lenette's myrtle
+wreath, beneath her hat (I really had not the slightest intention to
+touch on the subject of my own personal feelings), and her being all
+alone without a mother, and her powdery white-flower face, and (more
+vivid still) of the ready willingness with which she put her young
+delicate arms (she was scarcely past nineteen) into the polished
+handcuffs and chain-rings of matrimony, without so much as looking
+round her to see which way she was going to be led by them----
+
+I could here hold up my hand and take oath that the bridegroom was
+quite as much moved as myself, if not more so; at all events, when he
+gently wiped the Auricula dust from the blossom-face, so that the
+flowers there were seen to bloom unobscured. But he had to be careful
+how he carried about that heart of his--so full to the brim of the
+potion of love, and tears of gladness--lest it should run over in the
+presence of the jovial hairdresser and the serious Schulrath, to his
+shame. Effusion was a thing he never permitted himself. All strong
+feeling, even of the purest, he hid away, and hardened over: he always
+thought of poets and actors, who let on the waterworks of their
+emotions to play for show; and there was no one, on the whole, at whom
+he bantered so much as at himself. For these reasons, his face to-day
+was drawn and crinkled by a queer, laughing, embarrassment, and only
+his eyes, where the moisture gleamed, told of the better side of this
+condition. As he noticed presently that he wasn't masking himself
+sufficiently by merely playing the part of barber's mate, and
+commissary of provisions (of the breakfast), he adopted stronger
+measures, and began to exhibit himself and his movable property in as
+favourable a light as possible to Lenette, inquiring of her whether she
+didn't think her room "nicely situated," and saying, "I can see into
+the senate house window, on to the great table, and all the ink
+bottles. Several of these chairs I got last spring at a third of their
+value, and very handsome they are, don't you think so? My good old
+grandfather's chair here, though" (he had sat down in it, and laid his
+lean arms on the chair's stuffed ones), "does, I think, take the
+precedence in the grandfather dance:[11] 'how they so softly rest,' arm
+upon arm! The flowers upon my table-cloth are rather cleverly done, but
+the coffee-tray is considered the better work of the two, I am given to
+understand, on account of its flora being japanned; however, they both
+do their best in the flower line. My Leyser with his pigskin
+'Meditations' is a great ornament to the room: the kitchen, though,
+is the place--better still than this room; there are pots, all
+ranged side by side--and all sorts of things--the hare-skinner and the
+hare-spit--my father used to shoot the hares for these."
+
+The bride smiled on him so contentedly that I must almost believe she
+had heard the greater part of the story of the 100_l_. (with interest)
+in her Fuggery through twenty united ear- and speaking-trumpets. I
+shall be the more inclined to believe this if the public should happen
+to be looking forward eagerly to the hour when he is to hand it over to
+her.
+
+It may not be otherwise than agreeable to my fair readers to be
+informed that the bridegroom now put on a liver-coloured dress coat,
+and that he walked to the church with his dress-maker without any dress
+cravat, and with no queue in his hair, picturing as he went, to his own
+satirical delight, the slanderous glances with which the fair
+Kuhschnappelers were following the good stranger girl across the market
+to the sacrificial altar of her maiden name. He had said on a previous
+occasion, "We ought rather to facilitate than obstruct backbiting, to a
+moderate extent, in a married woman, as some slight compensation for
+lost flatteries."
+
+The Schulrath Stiefel remained in the bridal chamber, where he sketched
+the outlines of a critique on a school-programme at the writing-table.
+
+I see before me, as I write, the lovers kneeling at the altar steps;
+and I should like to cast wishes at them (as flowers are thrown),
+especially a wish that they may be like the married in Heaven, who,
+according to Swedenborg's vision, always merge into one angel--although
+on earth, too, they are often fused, by warmth, into one angel, and
+that a fallen one--the husband (who is the head of the wife)
+representing the butting head of this evil one; this wish, I say, I
+would fain cast at them; but my attention, in common with that of all
+the wedding company is riveted by an extraordinary circumstance and
+puzzling apparition behind the music desks of the choir.
+
+For there appears there, looking down at us--and we all looking up at
+it--Siebenkæs's _spirit_, as the popular expression has it, _i.e_. his
+body, as it _ought_ to be called. If the bridegroom should look up he
+might turn pale, and think he saw himself. We are all wrong; he only
+turns red. It was his friend Leibgeber who was standing there, having
+many years ago vowed to travel any distance to his marriage, solely
+that he might laugh at him for twelve hours' time.
+
+There has seldom been a case of a royal alliance between two peculiar
+natures like that between these two. The same contempt for the childish
+nonsense held in this life to be noble matter, the same enmity to all
+pettiness and perfect indulgence to the little, the same indignation
+with dishonourable selfishness, the same delight in laughing in this
+lovely madhouse of an earth, the same deafness to the voice of the
+multitude, but not to that of honour; these are but some of the first
+at hand of the similarities which made of these two but one soul doing
+duty in two bodies. And the fact that they were also foster-brothers in
+their studies, having for nurses the same branches of knowledge,
+including the Law herself, I do not reckon among their chief
+resemblances; for it is often the case that the very identity of study
+becomes a dissolving decomponent of friendship. Indeed, it was not even
+the dissimilarity of their opposite poles which determined their mutual
+attraction for each other (Siebenkæs leant towards forgiving, Leibgeber
+towards punishing; the former was more a satire of Horace, the latter a
+street ballad of Aristophanes with unpoetic as well as poetic
+harshnesses). But, as two female friends are fond of being dressed
+alike, these two men's souls had put on just the same frock-coat and
+morning costume of life; I mean, two bodies of identical fashion,
+colour, button-holes, finishings, and cut. Both had the same flash of
+the eyes, the same earthy coloured face, the same tallness, leanness,
+and everything. And indeed, the Nature freak of counterpart faces is
+commoner than we suppose, because we only notice it when some prince or
+great person casts a corporeal reflection.
+
+For which reason I very much wish that Leibgeber had not had a slight
+limp, so that he might not have been thereby distinguishable from
+Siebenkæs, seeing, at least, that the latter had cleverly etched and
+dissolved away his own peculiar mark by causing a live toad to breathe
+its last above it. For there had been a pyramidal mole near his left
+ear, in the shape of a triangle, or of the zodiacal light, or a
+turned-up comet's tail, of an ass's ear in short. Partly from
+friendship, partly from the enjoyment they had in the scenes of
+absurdity which their being confounded with each other gave rise to in
+every-day life, they wished to carry the algebraic equation which
+existed between them yet a step further, by adopting the same Christian
+and surname. But on this point they had a friendly contest, as each
+wanted to be the other's namesake, till at length they settled the
+difference by _exchanging_ names, thus following the example of the
+natives of Otaheite, among whom the lovers exchange names as well as
+hearts.
+
+As it is now several years since my hero was thus lightened of his
+worthy name by this friendly name-stealer receiving the other worthy
+name in exchange, I can't do anything to alter this in my chapters. I
+must go on calling him Firmian Stanislaus Siebenkæs as I did at the
+beginning, and the other Leibgeber; although it is quite unnecessary
+for any reviewer to point out to me that the more comic name of
+Siebenkæs would have been better suited to this more humoristic
+newcomer, with whom, however, the world shall yet be better acquainted
+than I am myself.
+
+When these two counterparts caught sight of one another in the church,
+their blushing faces crinkled and curled oddly, at which the looker-on
+laughed, until he compared the faces with the eyes, which glowed warm
+with the deepest affection. While the wedding-rings were being
+exchanged, Leibgeber in the choir took from his pocket a pair of
+scissors and a quarto sheet of black paper, and cut out a distant view
+of the bride's profile. This cutting out of likenesses he generally
+gave out as being his cookshop and bakery upon his perpetual
+journeyings; and as it appears that this strange man does not choose to
+disclose upon what eminences the waters gather which well up for him
+down in the valleys, I am glad to quote (and express my own belief in)
+a frequent saying of his regarding his profile cutting--"In the process
+of clipping, slices of bread, we know, fall with the cuttings for the
+bookbinder, the letter-writer, and the lawyer, when the paper is white;
+but in clipping _black_ paper, whether profiles or white mourning
+letters with black borders, there fall many more: and if a man is
+versed in the liberal art of painting his fellow Christian blacker than
+he is--with more members than one--the tongue for instance can do it to
+some extent--then Fortune, the Babylonish harlot, will ring that man's
+bells (his dinner bell, and his little altar bell), till her arm is
+half crippled."
+
+While the deacon was laying his hands on the pair, Leibgeber came down
+and stood at the red velvet steps of the altar. And when the ceremony
+was over he made, on the occasion of a meeting such as this, after a
+separation of some half-a-year or so, the following somewhat lengthy
+speech:--
+
+"Good morning, Siebenkæs."
+
+They never said more to each other, though years might have elapsed;
+and at the resurrection of the dead, Siebenkæs will answer him, just as
+he did to-day,--
+
+"Good morning, Leibgeber."
+
+The twelve hours of banter, however, which friends often find it an
+easy matter to threaten each other with in absence, are an
+impossibility to the tender heart, keenly enough alive though it may be
+to the humorous sides of matters, when it is moved (as in this case) at
+the sight of the friend passing into the vestibule of some new
+labyrinth of our subterranean existence.
+
+I have now before my writing-desk the long wedding-table set out; and I
+am sorry that no painting of it occurs on any of the vases buried at
+Herculaneum, as it would have been dug out with the rest, and an exact
+copy of it given in the Herculanean illustrations, so that I could have
+inserted the copy in place of anything else. Few have a higher opinion
+of the powers of my pen than I have myself; but I see quite well that
+it is neither in my power nor in my pen's to _half_ portray, and that
+in a feeble style, how the guests--there were almost as many there as
+there were chairs--enjoyed themselves at the dinner; how, moreover,
+there was not one single rogue among them (for the bridegroom's
+guardian, Heimlicher von Blaise, had sent an excuse, saying he was very
+sick indeed); how the landlord of the house, a jovial, consumptive
+Saxon, did something towards expediting his departure from this life by
+his powdering and his drinking; how they banged the glasses with the
+forks, and the table with the marrowbones, that the former might be
+filled and the latter emptied; how in all the house not a soul, not
+even the shoemaker or the bookbinder, did a stroke of any other work
+but eating, and how even the old woman Sabel (Sabine) who squatted
+under the mouse-coloured town gate, shut up her stall on this one day
+before the closing of the gate; how not only was there _one_ course
+served up, but a second, a "Doppelgänger." To anyone, indeed, who has
+dined at great men's tables, and there remarked how fine dishes, if
+there are two courses, have got to be marshalled according to the laws
+of rank, it will not appear unheard of or over splendid that Siebenkæs
+(the hairdresser's wife had done the cooking on this occasion) provided
+for the first course.
+
+1. In the centre the soup-tub, or broth fishpond, wherein people could
+enjoy the sport of crayfish-catching with their spoons, although the
+crayfish, like the beavers, had in this water no more than Robespierre
+had in the convent--that is to say, merely the tail.
+
+2. In the first quarter of the globe a beautiful beef torso, or cube of
+meat, as pedestal of the entire culinary work of art.
+
+3. In the second, a fricassée, being a complete pattern-card of the
+butcher's shop, _sweetly_ treated.
+
+4. In the third, a Behemoth of pond-carps, which might have swallowed
+the prophet Jonah, but which underwent his fate itself.
+
+5. In the fourth, a baked hen-house of a pie, to which the birds had
+sent their best members, as a community does to parliament.
+
+I cannot deny myself and my fair readers the pleasure of just slightly
+sketching for them a little "cookery-piece" of the second course.
+
+1. In the middle stood, as a basket of garden-flowers might, a pile of
+cress-salad. 2. Then the four corners were occupied by the four
+syllogistic figures, or the four faculties. In the first corner of the
+table was, as first syllogistic figure and faculty, a hare, who, as
+antipode of a barefooted friar, had kept on his natural fur boots in
+the pan, and who, as Leibgeber justly remarked, had come from the field
+with his legs safe and sound in spite of the enemy's fire, more
+fortunate, in this respect, than many a soldier. The second syllogistic
+figure consisted of a calf's tongue, which was black, not from arguing,
+but from being smoked. The third, crisped colewort, but without the
+stalks: this, ordinarily the food of the two preceding faculties, was
+on this occasion eaten along with them; thus is it that in this world
+one goes up and another down. The concluding figure was made up of the
+three figures of the bridal pair and an eventual baby baked in butter;
+these three glorified bodies, which, like "the three children," had
+come forth unscathed from the fiery furnace, and had raisins for souls,
+were eaten up bodily, skin and bones, by those cannibals the guests,
+with the exception of an arm or so of the infant, which, like the bird
+Phœnix, was personified ere it existed.
+
+This picture draws me on. But it ought to be coloured, and as regards
+the luxury of the feast, it would not be passing it over too lightly
+were I to compare it to a Saxon electoral banquet, by reference to
+which I might illustrate it. It is true, the electors of that country
+require a good deal (and on that account they used to be weighed every
+year); and I am quite aware that at the beginning of the 16th century,
+a Saxon treasurer made the following entry in his accounts:--"This day
+was our gracious sovereign at the wine, with his court, for which I
+have had to disburse the sum of fifteen gulden (25_s_.). That's what I
+_call_ banquetting!" But what would the Saxon treasurer have written?
+how he would have lifted his hands up with amazement if he had read in
+my very first chapter that a poor's advocate had gone and spent three
+gulden and seven groschen more than his royal master!
+
+As is the case with many natural springs, the fountains of mirth, which
+welled but slowly in the daytime, jetted up higher in the hearts of the
+guests as the evening came on. The two advocates indeed told the
+company that, as they remembered from their college days, though the
+privilege formerly possessed by every German of drinking his fill had
+been but too much curtailed by emperors and parliaments, and the
+imperial decrees of 1512, 1531, 1548, and 1577 permitted no
+drunkenness, yet they did not prohibit Kuhschnappel from exercising the
+right common to all imperial states, of abrogating imperial statutes in
+cases where local laws exist within their own boundaries. The Schulrath
+alone could not quite see (and he shook his head about it internally to
+himself twenty times) how two scholars, two lawyers at all events,
+could go on gravely joking with a set of such unlearned plebeians and
+empty heads as were here supported upon elbows;--joking with them, and
+actually conversing about the utter rubbish which they talked. More
+than once he spliced on threads of scholarly speech, concerning the
+newest, most highly elaborated school addresses, as well as sundry
+critiques on the same, but the advocates would have nothing to do with
+his threads, but made the bookbinder speak the apprentice speech he
+made at his admission to the rank of master, to which the shoemaker, of
+his own motion, stitched and cobbled on one which _he_ had made on a
+similar occasion.
+
+Siebenkæs remarked to the company in general that in the upper circles
+of society people are much graver, and more tedious, and empty than in
+the lower; that in the former, if any party happens to come to an end
+without accursed tedium, people talk of it for a whole week, whereas in
+the latter everyone contributes so much to the merry picnic of
+conversation that the only thing there generally is not enough of, is
+beer. "Oh!" he went on, "if everyone of our condition would but think
+of it, he would but envy those of a lower; how accurately, in a
+figurative sense too, does that old truth hold good, that coarse linen
+keeps one much warmer than fine linen, or even silk, just as a wooden
+house is easier warmed than a stone one--and the stone one again
+doesn't get cool so soon as the wooden in summer--or as coarse brown
+flour is much more nourishing than the fine white, as all the doctors
+tell us. And I cannot bring myself to believe that ladies in Paris who
+wear diamond hairpins, lead half such happy lives as the women there
+who get their living by picking up old hairpins out of the street
+sweepings; and many a one whose fuel is nothing but dry fir-cones,
+gathered by himself as a substitute for fir-fuel" (here the fuel
+economising company thought vividly of their own case), "is often quite
+as well off on the whole as people who can preserve green cones in
+sugar and eat them."
+
+"Friend Parish Advocate," said Leibgeber, "there you hit it! In the
+tap-room and the bar-parlour the worst is at the beginning, the blow,
+the kick, the angry word come first of all; the pleasure swells with
+the reckoning. The reverse is the case in the palace; in a 'palais' for
+the 'palais' everybody's enjoyment goes into his mouth at the same
+instant; just as the little Aphides on the leaves all lift up their
+tail-ends, and squirt out the honey at the same moment,[12] in the
+palace it is absorbed with like simultaneousness and sociability.
+Tediousness, again, annoyance and satiety, are only mixed up
+ingeniously among the various pleasures which are served up and
+administered in the course of a great entertainment, just as we give a
+dog an emetic by rubbing him all over with it, so that he may bring it
+to operate by licking it slowly off."
+
+And other similar sayings were spoken. When once any pleasure has
+reached a considerable height, its natural tendency is to become
+greater. Many of the lower class members of the sitting exercised the
+privilege of drink, and of the special inquisition, to say "Thou" to
+one another. Even the gentleman in the red plush coat (the Schulrath
+was given to wear one in the dog-day holidays) screwed up his lips, and
+smiled in a seductive manner, as elderly maiden ladies do in the
+presence of elderly single gentlemen, and gave hints that he had got at
+home a couple of real Horatian bottles of champagne. "Not sparkling
+then, I'm sure?" Leibgeber answered inquiringly. The Schulrath, who
+thought the best kind of champagne exactly the worst, replied with some
+self-consciousness, "If it isn't sparkling, well and good, I swear I'll
+drink every drop of it myself." The bottles appeared. Leibgeber, taking
+the first one, carefully filed through its barrier chain, removed the
+cork and opened it as if it had been a last will and testament.
+
+What I maintain is, that, even should the two balsam-trees of life,
+namely wit and the love of our fellow men, be withered away up to the
+very topmost twig, they can still be brought to life by a proper shower
+out of the watering pot of these said bottles--in three minutes they
+will begin to sprout. As the glad, wild essence, the wine of the silver
+foam, touched the heads of the guests, every brain began to seethe and
+glow while fair air-castles rose in each amain. Brilliant and many
+tinted were the floating bubbles blown and set free by the Schulrath
+Stiefel's ideas of all categories, his simple as well as his compound
+ideas, his innate ideas, and also his fixed. And can it ever be
+forgotten that he ceased to make learned statements, except on the
+subject of Lenette's perfections, and that he told Leibgeber in
+confidence, that he should really like to marry, not indeed, "the tenth
+Muse, or the fourth Grace, or the second Venus--for it was clear who
+had got _her_ already but some step-sister goddess, a distant relation
+or other of hers." During the whole journey, he said, he had preached
+from the coachbox, as from a pulpit, enlarging to the bride on the
+subject of the blessedness of the married state, painting it to her in
+the brightest colours, and drawing such a lively picture of it, that he
+quite longed to enter into it himself: and the bridegroom would have
+thanked him if he had seen how gratefully she had looked at him in
+return. And, indeed, the bride was a great success, and happy in all
+she did that day, and particularly that evening; and what became her
+best of all was that on such a high day as this, she waited upon others
+more than she let herself be waited upon--that she put on a light
+every-day dress--that even at this advanced stage of her own education
+she took private lessons in cookery and household matters from her
+female guests, who aired their own theories on these subjects--and that
+she already began to think about to-morrow. Stiefel, in his inspired
+state, ventured upon exploits which were all but impossible. He placed
+his left arm under his right, and thus supporting its weight and that
+of its plush sleeve, in a horizontal position, snuffed the candle
+before the whole company, and did it rather skilfully on the whole;
+somewhat like a gardener on a ladder holding out his pruning shears at
+arm's length to a high branch and snipping off the whole concern by a
+slight movement of his hand at the bottom. He asked Leibgeber plump out
+to give him a profile of Lenette, and later on, when he was going away,
+he even made an attempt (but this was the only one of his ventures
+which failed) to get hold of her hand and kiss it.
+
+At length all the joy-fires of this happy little company burnt down
+like their candles, and one by one the rivers of Eden fell away into
+the night. The guests and the candles got fewer and fewer; at last
+there was only one guest there, Stiefel (for Leibgeber is not a guest),
+and one long candle. It is a lovely and touching time when the loud
+clamour of a merry company has finally buzzed itself away into silence,
+and just one or two, left alone, sit quietly, often sadly, listening to
+the faint echoes, as it were, of all the joy. Finally, the Schulrath
+struck the last remaining tent of this camp of enjoyment, and departed;
+but he would not for a moment suffer that those fingers, which, in
+spite of all their efforts, his lips could not touch, should be clasped
+about a cold brass candlestick, for the purpose of lighting him
+downstairs. So Leibgeber had to do this lighting. The husband and wife,
+for the first time, were alone in the darkness, hand in hand.
+
+Oh, hour of beauty! when in every cloud there stood a smiling angel,
+dropping flowers instead of rain, may some faint reflection from thee
+reach even to this page of mine, and shine on there for ever.
+
+The bridegroom had never yet kissed his bride. He knew, or fancied,
+that his face was a clever one, with sharp lines and angles, expressing
+energetic, active effort; not a smooth, regular, "handsome" one: and
+as, moreover, he always laughed at himself and his own appearance, he
+supposed it would strike other persons in the same light. Hence it was
+that, although as an every-day matter he rose superior to the eyes and
+tongues of a whole street (not even taking the pains mentally to snap
+his fingers at them), he never, except in extraordinary moments of
+dithyrambics of friendship, had mustered up the courage to kiss his
+Leibgeber--let alone Lenette. And now he pressed her hand more closely,
+and in a dauntless manner turned his face to hers (for, you see, they
+were in the dark, and he couldn't see her); and he wished the staircase
+had as many steps as the cathedral tower, so that Leibgeber might be a
+long time coming back with the candle. Of a sudden there _danced_ (so
+to speak) over his lips a gliding, tremulous kiss, and--then all the
+flames of his affection blazed on high, the ashes blown clean away. For
+Lenette, innocent as a child, believed it to be the bride's duty to
+give this kiss. He put his arms about the frightened giver with the
+courage of bashfulness, and glowed upon her lips with his with all the
+fire wherewith love, wine and joy had endowed him; but--so strange is
+her sex--she turned away her mouth, and let the burning lips touch her
+cheek. And there the modest bridegroom contented himself with one long
+kiss, giving expression to his rapture only in tears of unutterable
+sweetness which fell like glowing naphtha-drops upon Lenette's cheeks,
+and thence into her trembling heart. She leant her face further away;
+but in her beautiful wonder at his love, she drew him closer to her.
+
+He left her before his darling friend came back. The tell-tale
+powder-snow which had fallen on the bridegroom--that butterfly-dust
+which the very slightest touch of these white butterflies leaves upon
+our fingers (and hence it was a good idea of Pitt's to put a tax on
+powder in 1795)--told some of the story, but the eyes of the friend and
+the bride, gleaming in happy tears, told him it all. The two friends
+looked for some time at each other with embarrassed smiles, and Lenette
+looked at the ground. Leibgeber said, "Hem! Hem!" twice over, and at
+length, in his perplexity, remarked, "We've had a delightful evening!"
+He took up a position behind the bridegroom's chair, to be out of
+sight, and laid his hand on his shoulder, and squeezed it right
+heartily; but the happy Siebenkæs could restrain himself no longer; he
+stood up, resigned the bride's hand, and the two friends, at last,
+after the long yearning of the long day, as if celebrating the moment
+of their meeting, stood silently embracing, united by angels, with
+Heaven all around them. His heart beating higher, the bridegroom would
+fain have widened and completed this circle of union, by joining his
+bride and his friend in one embrace; but the bride and the friend took
+each one side of him, each embracing only him. Then three pure heavens
+opened in glory in three pure hearts; and nothing was there but God,
+love, and happiness, and the little earthly tear which hangs on all our
+joy-flowers, here below.
+
+In this their great joy and bliss, overborne by unwonted emotion, and
+feeling almost strange to each other, they had scarce the courage to
+look into each other's tearful eyes; and Leibgeber went away in
+silence, without a word of parting or good night.
+
+
+
+
+ CHAPTER II.
+
+ HOME FUN--SUNDRY FORMAL CALLS--THE NEWSPAPER ARTICLE--A LOVE
+ QUARREL, AND A FEW HARD WORDS--ANTIPATHETIC INK ON THE WALL--
+ FRIENDSHIP OF THE SATIRISTS--GOVERNMENT OF KUHSCHNAPPEL.
+
+
+There is many a life which is as pleasant to live as to write, and the
+material of this one, in particular, which I am engaged in writing, is
+as yet always giving out, like rosewood on the turning lathe, a truly
+delicious perfume, all over my workshop. Siebenkæs duly arose on the
+Wednesday, but not till the Sunday was it his intention to deposit in
+the hands of his diligent house goddess--who put a cap on to her
+cap-block in the morning before she put one on to herself--the silver
+ingots from his guardian's coffer (wrapped in blotting paper), her
+palisades of refuge in the siege of this life; for in fact he couldn't
+do so any sooner, because his guardian had gone into the country, that
+is to say, out of town, till the Saturday night. "I can give you no
+notion, old Leibgeber," said Siebenkæs, "what a joy I feel in looking
+forward to how this will delight my wife. I'm sure, to give her
+pleasure, I could wish it were three thousand dollars. The dear child
+has always hitherto had to live from bonnet to bonnet, but how she
+_will_ consider herself a woman set up on a sudden for life, when she
+finds she can carry out a hundred housekeeping projects, which, I see
+as well as possible, she has got in her head already. And then, old
+boy, with the money in our hands, we shall begin the keeping of my
+silver wedding directly, the moment the evening service is over--there
+shall be a good half-florin's worth of beer in every room in the house.
+Look here! why shouldn't the dove, or call him the sparrow, of _my_
+hymen play out beer on the people as the two-headed eagle in Frankfort
+does wine at a coronation?" Leibgeber answered, "The reason he can't
+is, that the prey he catches is of quite another brand. The sour wine
+(of the Frankfort eagle) is but the grapeskins--the feathers, the wool,
+and the hair which eagles always eject."
+
+It would be of no use whatever--because hundreds of Kuhschnappelers
+would correct my statement in their local paper, the 'Imperial
+News'--if I were to tell a falsehood here (which I should like very
+much to do), and assert that the two advocates spent the short week of
+their being together with that gravity and propriety which, becoming as
+they are to mankind in general, do yet more particularly secure to
+scholars and to the learned the respect and consideration of commoner
+minds, to say nothing of the Kuhschnappelian intelligences.
+
+Unfortunately I have got to sing to another tune. In the town of
+Kuhschnappel, as in all other towns, provincial, or metropolitan, what
+Leibgeber was least of all conspicuous for was a proper gravity of
+deportment and behaviour. Here, as elsewhere, his first proceeding was
+to get an introduction to the club, as a stranger artist, in order that
+he might ensconce himself on a sofa, and, without uttering a word or a
+syllable to a human being, go to sleep under the noses of the company
+of the "Relaxation" as the club was called. "This," he said, "was what
+he liked to have the opportunity of doing in all towns where there were
+clubs, casinos, museums, musical societies, &c.; because to sleep in
+any rational manner at night in one's ordinary quiet bed was a thing
+which _he_, at least, found he was seldom able to manage, on account of
+the loud battle of ideas which went on in his head, and the firework
+trains of processions of pictures all interweaving and whirling in
+and out with such a crash and a din that one could hardly see or hear
+one's self. Whereas when one lies down upon a club sofa, everything of
+this sort quiets itself down, and a universal truce of ideas
+establishes itself; the delicious effect of the company all talking at
+once--the happily chosen and appropriate words contributed to the
+political-and-other-conversation-picnic, of which one distinguishes
+nothing but an _ultima_, perhaps, or sometimes only an _antepenultima_;
+this alone sings you into a light slumber. But when a more serious
+discussion arises, and some point is argued, disputed and discussed in
+all its bearings in a universal clamorous shout--your barometer becomes
+completely stationary, and you sleep the deep sleep of a flower which
+is rocked, but not awakened, by the storm."
+
+One or two towns with which I am acquainted must, I am sure, remember a
+stranger who always used to go to sleep in their clubs, and must also
+recollect the beaming expression of countenance with which he would
+look about him when he got up and took his hat, as much as to say,
+"Many thanks for this refreshing rest."
+
+However, I have little to do with Leibgeber's waking or with his
+sleeping here in Kuhschnappel; him I may treat with some indulgence,
+seeing that he is soon to be off again into the wide world. But it is
+anything but a matter of indifference that my young hero, just
+established here with his wife, and whose pranks I have undertaken to
+give some account of, as well as of the hits he gets in return, should
+go and conduct himself just as if his name was Leibgeber; which had
+long ceased to be the case, seeing that he had given formal notice to
+his guardian that he had changed it to Siebenkæs.
+
+To mention but one prank--was it not a piece of true tomfoolery that,
+when the procession of poor scholars, singing for alms about the
+streets, were just beginning their usual begging hymn under the windows
+of the best religious families on the opposite side of the street, and
+just as they had struck their key-note and were going to start off with
+their chorus, Leibgeber, to begin with, made his boar-hound "Saufinder"
+(he couldn't live without a big dog) look out of window with a
+fashionable lady's night-cap on his head? And was it by any means a
+soberer proceeding on Siebenkæs's part, that he took lemons and bit
+into them before the eyes of the whole singing class, so that all their
+teeth begun to water in an instant? The result will answer these
+questions for itself. The singers, having Saufinder in his night-cap in
+full view, could no more bring their lips together into a singing
+position than a man can whistle and laugh at the same instant. At the
+same time all their vocal apparatus being completely submerged by the
+opening of their glands, every note they attempted to give out had to
+wade painfully through water. In short, was this entire ludicrous
+interruption of the whole company of street singers not the precise end
+aimed at by both the advocates?
+
+But Siebenkæs has only recently come back from college, and being still
+half-full of the freedom of university life, may be excused a liberty
+or two. And indeed I consider the little exuberances of university
+youth to be like the adipose matter, which, according to Reaumur,
+Bonnet, and Cuvier, is stored up by the caterpillar for the nourishment
+of the future butterfly during its chrysalis state; the liberty of
+manhood has to be alimented by that of youth, and if a son of the muse
+has not room given him to develop in full freedom, he will never
+develop into anything but some office-holder creeping along on all
+fours.
+
+Meanwhile the two friends spent the following days--not wholly in a
+disorderly manner--in the writing of marriage cards. With these, on
+which of course there was nothing but the words, "Mr. Firmian
+Stanislaus Siebenkæs, Poor's Advocate, and his wife, _née_ Engelkraut;
+with compliments."--with these papers, and with the lady, they were
+both to drive about the town on the Saturday, and Leibgeber had to get
+down at all the respectable houses and hand in a card, which is by no
+means otherwise than a laudable and befitting custom in towns where
+people observe the usages of good society. But the two brethren,
+Siebenkæs and Leibgeber, appeared to follow these usages of imperial
+and rural towns more from satirical motives than anything else,
+conforming to them pretty minutely, it is true, but clearly chiefly for
+the fun of the thing, each of them playing the part of first low
+comedian and of audience at the same time. It would be an insult to the
+borough of Kuhschnappel to suppose that, notwithstanding Siebenkæs's
+zealous readiness to join in all the processions of the little place,
+in and out of churches, to the town hall and the shooting-ground, it
+was wholly unobservant of the satisfaction which it afforded him rather
+to make fun of some properly ordered cortége, and mar the effect of it
+by his unsuitable dress and absurd behaviour, than to be an ornament to
+it. And the genuine eagerness with which he tried to get admitted as a
+member of the Kuhschnappel shooting-club was ascribed rather to his
+love of a joke than to his being the son of a keen sportsman. As for
+Leibgeber, he of course has the very devil in him as regards all such
+matters; but he is younger than Siebenkæs, and about to set out on his
+travels.
+
+So they drove about the town on the Saturday--and where anybody in the
+shape of a grandee lived they stopped, left their passengers' tickets
+and drove on, without any misbehaviour. Many ladies and gentlemen, it
+is true, got the wrong sow by the ear, and confounded the card carrier
+with the young husband sitting in the carriage; but the card carrier
+maintained his gravity, knowing that fun has its own proper time. The
+cards (some of which were glazed) were delivered according to the
+directory, firstly to the members of the government, both of the
+greater and lesser council--to the seventy members of the greater, and
+the thirteen of the lesser council; consequently the judge, the
+treasurer, the two finance councillors, the Heimlicher (so to say,
+tribune of the people) and the remaining eight ordinary members--these
+constituting the said lesser council--each received his card. After
+which the carriage drove down lower, and provided the minor government
+officials in the various chambers and offices with _their_ cards, such
+as the Offices of Woods, of the Game Commissioners, the Office of
+Reform (which latter was for the repression of luxury), and the Meat
+Tax Commission, which was presided over by a single master butcher, a
+very nice old man.
+
+I am much afraid I have made a considerable slip, inasmuch as I have
+drawn up no tables relative to the constitution, &c., of this imperial
+borough of Kuhschnappel (which is properly a small imperial town,
+though it was once a large one) to lay before the learned and
+statistical world. However, I can't possibly pull up here in the full
+gallop of my chapter, but must wait till we all get to the end of it,
+when I can more conveniently open my statistical warehouse.
+
+The wheel of fortune soon began to rattle, and throw up mud; for when
+Leibgeber took his eighth part of a placard of Siebenkæs's marriage to
+the house of his guardian, the Heimlicher von Blaise, a tall, meagre,
+barge-pole of a woman, wrapped up in wimples of calico, the
+Heimlicher's wife, received it indeed, and with warmth, but warmth of
+the sort with which we generally administer a cudgelling; moreover, she
+uttered the following words (calculated to give rise to reflection)--
+
+"My husband is the Heimlicher of this town, and what is more, he's away
+from home. He has nothing to do with seven cheeses;[13] he is tutor and
+guardian to persons belonging to the highest and noblest families. You
+had better be off as fast as you like; you've got hold of the wrong man
+here."
+
+"I quite think we have, myself," said Leibgeber.
+
+Siebenkæs, the ward, here tried to pacify his letter or paper carrier
+with the woman a little, by suggesting that, like every good dog, she
+was but barking at the strangers before fetching and carrying for them:
+and when his friend, more anxious than himself, said, "You're quite
+sure, are you not, that you took proper legal precautions against any
+venomous 'objections' which the guardian might make to paying up your
+money, on account of your changing your name?" he assured him, that
+before he had established himself as Siebenkæs, he had procured his
+guardian's opinion and approval in writing, which he would show him
+when they got home.
+
+But when they did get home, Von Blaise's letter was nowhere to be
+found--it wasn't in any of the boxes, nor in any of the college
+note-books, nor even among the wastepaper--in fact, there was nothing
+of the kind.
+
+"But what a donkey I am to bother about it!" cried Siebenkæs, "what do
+I require it for, at all?"
+
+Here Leibgeber, who had been glancing at the Saturday newspapers,
+suddenly shoved them into his pocket, and said in a somewhat unwonted
+tone of voice, "Come out, old boy, and let's have a run in the fields."
+When they got there, he put into his hands the 'Schaffhausen News,' the
+'Swabian Mercury,' the 'Stuttgart Times,' and the 'Erlangen Gazette,'
+and said, "These will enable you to form some idea of the sort of
+scoundrel you have for a guardian."
+
+In each of these newspapers, the following notification appeared:--
+
+"Whereas, Hoseas Heinrich Leibgeber, now in his 29th year, proceeded to
+the University of Leipzig in 1774, but since that date has not been
+heard of: now the said Hoseas Heinrich Leibgeber, is hereby, at the
+instance of his cousin, Herr Heimlicher von Blaise, edictally cited and
+summoned by himself or the lawful heirs of his body, within six months
+from the date of these presents (whereof two months are hereby
+constituted the first term, two months the second, and two months the
+third and peremptory term), to appear within the Inheritance Office of
+this borough, and, on satisfactory proof of identity, to receive over
+the sum of 1200 Rhenish gulden deposited in the hands of the said
+Heimlicher von Blaise as trustee and guardian; _which failing_, that,
+as directed by the decree of council of 24th July 1655 (which enacts,
+that any person who shall be for ten years absent from the realm, shall
+be taken _pro mortuo_), the above-named sum of 1200 Rhenish florins may
+be made over and paid to his said guardian and trustee, the aforesaid
+Heimlicher von Blaise. Dated at Kuhschnappel in Swabia, the 20th
+August, 1785.
+
+ "Inheritance Office of the free Imperial
+ Borough of Kuhschnappel."
+
+
+It is unnecessary to remind the legal reader that the decree of council
+referred to is not in accordance with the legal usage of Bohemia, where
+thirty-one years is the stipulated period, but with that which formerly
+prevailed in France, when ten years were sufficient. And when the
+advocate came to the end of the notice, and stared, motionless, at its
+concluding lines, his soul's brother took hold of his hand, and cried,
+"Alas! alas! it is I who am to blame for all this, for changing names
+with you."
+
+"You?--oh, you? The devil alone, and nobody else. But I must find that
+letter," he said, and they made another search all over the house, in
+every corner where a letter could be. After an hour of this Leibgeber
+hunted out one with a broken seal of the guardian, of which the thick
+paper, and the broad legal fold, without an envelope, told
+unmistakeably that it had been addressed neither by a lady, a merchant,
+nor courtier, but by the quill of a bird of quite a different tribe.
+However, there was nothing _in_ this letter, except Siebenkæs's name in
+Siebenkæs's own writing--not another word, outside or inside. Quite
+natural; for the advocate had a bad habit of trying his hand and his
+pen on the backs of letters, and writing his own name and other
+people's as well, with flourishes about them.
+
+The letter _had_ once been written in the inside, but, to save an
+incredible waste of good paper, the Heimlicher von Blaise had written
+his concurrence in the exchange of the names with an ink which vanishes
+from the paper of itself, and leaves it, _in integrum_, white as it was
+before it was written on.
+
+I may, perhaps, be doing a chance service to many persons of the better
+classes, who nowadays more than ever have occasion to write promissory
+notes and other business documents, if I here copy out for them the
+receipt for this ink which vanishes after it is dry; I take it from a
+reliable source. Let the man of rank scrape off the surface from a
+piece of fine black cloth, such as he wears at court--grind the
+scrapings finer still on a piece of marble--moisten this fine cloth
+dust repeatedly with water, then make his ink with this, and write his
+promissory note with it; he will find that, as soon as the moisture has
+evaporated, every letter of the promissory note has flown away with it
+in the form of dust; the white star will have shone out, as it were,
+through the blackness of the ink.
+
+But I consider that I am doing an equal service to the holders and
+presenters of such promissory notes as to the drawers of them, inasmuch
+as, for the future, they will be careful not to be satisfied with a
+security of this description, till they have exposed it for some time
+to the sun.
+
+Some time ago, I should have here been apt to confound this cloth ink
+with the _sympathetic_ ink (likewise possessing the property of turning
+pale and disappearing after a time), which is commonly made use of in
+both the preliminary and final treaties entered into between royal
+persons; the latter however, has a _red_ tint. A treaty of peace of
+three years' standing is no longer legible to a man in the prime of
+life, because the _red_ ink--the _encaustum_, with which formerly no
+one but the Roman emperors might write--is too apt to turn _pale_,
+unless a sufficient number of human beings (from whom, as from the
+cochineal insect, this dye stuff is prepared) have been made use of in
+its manufacture; and this (from motives of sordid parsimony) is not
+always the case. So that the treaty has frequently to be engraved and
+etched into the territory afresh with good instruments--the so-called
+"instruments of peace"--at the point of the bayonet.
+
+The two friends kept the happy young wife in ignorance of this first
+thunderclap of the storm which was threatening her married life. On the
+Sunday morning they went to make a friendly call on the Heimlicher
+during the church service; unfortunately he was at church, however.
+They postponed their entertaining visit till the afternoon; but then he
+himself was paying one to the chapel of the orphan asylum, the whole
+blooming body of the orphans, boys and girls, having previously made
+one to him, to enjoy the privilege of kissing his hand in his capacity
+of superintendent of the orphan asylum; for the inspectorship of that
+institution was, as he modestly but truly observed, entrusted to his
+unworthy hands. After the evening sermon, he had to perform a service
+of his own in his own house, in short, he was fenced off from the two
+advocates by a triple row of spiritual altar rails. It was his
+admirable custom to permit the members of his household, not indeed to
+eat, but to pray at the same table with him. He thought it well to
+spend the Sunday as a day of labour in psalm-singing with them,
+because, by such devotional exercises, he best preserved them from sins
+of Sabbath breaking, such as working on _their own_ account, at sewing,
+mending, &c. And, on the whole, he thought it well to make of the
+Sunday in this manner a day of preparation for the coming week, just as
+actors in places where Sunday representations are not allowed, have
+their rehearsals on that day.
+
+However, I recommend people in delicate health not to go near or smell
+at this sort of beautiful sky-blue plants which grow in the Church's
+vineyard only to be looked at, as an English garden is adorned with the
+pretty aconite and its sky- or Jesuit's-blue _poisonous_ flowers, which
+grow pyramidally to man's height.[14] People like Von Blaise, not only
+ascend Mount Sinai and the Golgotha, that, like goats, they may feed as
+they climb; but they occupy these sacred heights for the purpose of
+making attacks and incursions from them, just as good generals take
+possession of the hills, and particularly the _gallows-hills_. The
+Heimlicher mounts from earth to the heavens oftener than Blanchard
+does, and with similar motives, indeed, he can keep his soul on the
+wing in these elevated regions for half a day at a time, in which
+respect, however, he does not quite equal the King of Siam's dragon
+kites which the mandarins, by relieving each other at the task, manage
+to keep up in the sky for a couple of months at a time. He soars, not
+as the lark does, to make music, but as the noble falcon does, to swoop
+down upon something or other. If you see him praying on a Mount of
+Olives, be sure that he's going to build an oil mill on it; and if he
+weeps by a brook Kedron, depend upon it he's either going a-fishing in
+it, or else thinking of pitching somebody into it. He prays with the
+object of luring to him the _ignes-fatui_ of sins; he kneels, but only
+as a front rank does, to deliver its fire at the foe before it; he
+opens his arms as with warm benevolent affection, to fold home one, a
+ward say, in their embrace, but only in the manner of the red-hot
+Moloch, that he may burn him to cinders; or he folds his arms piously
+together, but does it as the machines called "maidens" did, only to cut
+people to pieces.
+
+At last the friends, in their anxiety, came to see that there are some
+people whom one can only manage to get access to when one comes as
+thieves do, unannounced so at 8 o'clock on the Sunday evening they
+walked, _sans façon_, into Von Blaise's house. Everything was still and
+empty; they went through an empty hall into an empty drawing-room, the
+half-open folding doors of which led into the household chapel. All
+they could see through the crevice was six chairs, an open hymn-book
+lying on its face on each of them, and a table with wax-cloth cover, on
+which were Miller's 'Heavenly Kiss of the Soul,' and Schlichthoher's
+'Five-fold Dispositions for all Sundays and Feasts of the Church.' They
+pressed through the gap, and lo and behold! there was the Heimlicher
+all alone, continuing his devotions in his sleep, with his cap under
+his arm. His house- and church-servants had read to him till sleep had
+stiffened him to a petrifaction, or pillar of salt (an event which
+occurred every Sunday), for his eyes and his head were alike heavy with
+the edible, the potable, and the spiritual, refreshment of which he had
+partaken; or because he was like many who think it well to close their
+eyes during the sowing of the heavenly seed, just as people do when
+their heads are being powdered, or because churches and private chapels
+are still like those ancient temples in which the communications of the
+oracles were received during sleep. And as soon as they saw his eyes
+closed, the servants would read more and more softly, to accustom him
+gradually to the complete cessation of the sound; and, by and by, the
+devout domestics would steal gently away, leaving him in his attitude
+of prayer till 10 o'clock; at that hour (when, moreover, Madame von
+Blaise generally came home from paying visits) the domestic sacristan
+and night watchman would rouse him from his sleep with a shrill "Amen,"
+and he would put something on to his bald head again.
+
+This evening matters fell out differently. Leibgeber rapped loudly on
+the table two or three times with the knuckle of his forefinger to wake
+the city's father out of his first sleep. When he opened his eyes and
+saw before him the two lean parodies and copies of one another, he
+took, in his beer- and sleep-heaviness of idea, a glass periwig from
+off a block, and put that on his head instead of his cap, which had
+fallen down. His ward addressed him politely, saying he wished to
+present to him his friend with whom he had made the exchange of names.
+He likewise called him his "kind cousin and guardian." Leibgeber, more
+angry and less self-contained, because he was younger, and because the
+wrong had not been done to _him_, fired into the Heimlicher's ears,
+from a position closer to him by three discourteous paces, the
+inquiries, "Which of us two is it that your worship has given out _pro
+mortuo_, that you may be able to cite him as a dead man? There are the
+ghosts of _two_ of us here both together." Blaise turned with a lofty
+air from Leibgeber to Siebenkæs, and said, "If you have not changed
+your dress, sir, as well as your name, I believe _you_ are the
+gentleman whom I have had the honour of talking with on several
+previous occasions. Or was it _you_, sir?" he said to Leibgeber, who
+shook like one possessed. "Well," he continued in a more pleasant tone,
+"I must confess to you, Mr. Siebenkæs, that I had always supposed,
+until now, that you were the person who left this for the university
+ten years ago, and whose little inheritance I then assumed the
+guardianship or curatorship of. What probably chiefly contributed to my
+mistake, if it be a mistake, was, I presume, the likeness which,
+_præter propter_, you certainly seem to bear to my missing ward; for in
+many details you undoubtedly differ from him; for instance, he had a
+mole beside his ear."
+
+"The infernal mole," interrupted Leibgeber, "was obliterated by means
+of a toad, on my account entirely, because it was like an ass's ear,
+and he never thought that, when he lost his ear, he should lose a
+relative along with it."
+
+"That may be," said the guardian coldly, "You must prove to me, Herr
+Advocate, that it was to YOU I had been thinking of paying over the
+inheritance to-day; for your announcement that you had exchanged your
+family name for that of an utter stranger I considered to be probably
+one of the jokes for which you are so celebrated. But I learned last
+week that you had been proclaimed in church and married in the name of
+Siebenkæs, and more to the same effect. I then discussed the question
+with Herr Grossweibel (the President of the Chamber of Inheritance),
+and with my son-in-law, Herr von Knärnschilder, and they assured me I
+should be acting contrary to my duty and safety if I let this property
+out of my hands. What would you do--they very properly said--what
+answer would you have to make if the real owner of the name were to
+appear and demand another settlement of the guardianship accounts? It
+would be too bad, truly, for a man, who, besides his manifold business
+of other kinds, undertook this troublesome guardian work, which the law
+does not require him to do, purely from affection for his relative, and
+from the love which he bears to all his brethren of mankind[15]--it
+would be too bad, I say, for him to have to pay up this money a second
+time out of his own pocket. At the same time, Mr. Siebenkæs, as, in my
+capacity of a private individual, I am more disposed to admit the
+validity of your claim than you perhaps suppose, you being a lawyer,
+know quite as well as I that my individual conviction carries with it
+no legal weight whatever, and that I have to deal with this matter not
+as a man, but as a guardian--it would probably be the best course to
+let some third party less biassed in my favour, such as the Inheritance
+Office, decide the question. Let me have the satisfaction, Mr.
+Siebenkæs, as soon as it may be possible" (he ended more smilingly, and
+laying his hand on the other's shoulder) "to see that which I hope may
+prove the case, namely, that you are my long-missing cousin, Leibgeber,
+properly established by legal proof."
+
+"Then," said Leibgeber, grimly calm, and with all kinds of
+scale-passages and fugatos coursing over the colour-piano of his face,
+"is the little bit of resemblance which Mr. Siebenkæs there has to--to
+_himself_, that is to say, to your worship's ward, to be taken as
+proving nothing; not even as much as an equal similarity in a case of
+_comparatio literarum_ would prove?"
+
+"Oh, of course," said Blasius, "something, certainly, but not
+everything; for there were several false Neros, and three or four sham
+Sebastians in Portugal; suppose, now, _you_ should be my cousin
+yourself, Mr. Leibgeber!"
+
+Leibgeber jumped up at once, and said in an altered and joyful voice,
+"So I am, my dearest guardian--it was all done to try you--I hope you
+will pardon my friend his share in the little mystification."
+
+"All very well," answered Blasius, more inflatedly, "but your own
+changes of ground must show you the necessity for a proper legal
+investigation."
+
+This was more than Siebenkæs could endure, he squeezed his friend by
+the hand, as much as to say, "Pray be patient," and inquired in a voice
+which an unwonted feeling of hatred rendered faint, "Did you never
+write to me when I was in Leipzig?"--"If you are my ward, I certainly
+did, many times; if you are not, you have got hold of my letters in
+some other way."
+
+Then Siebenkæs asked, more faintly still, "Have you no recollection at
+all of a letter in which you assured me there was not the slightest
+risk involved in my proposed change of name, none whatever?"
+
+"This is really quite ludicrous," answered Blaise, "in that case there
+could be no question about the matter!"
+
+Here Leibgeber clasped the father of the city with his two fingers as
+if they had been iron rivets, grasped his shoulders as one does the
+pommel of a saddle at mounting, clamped him firmly into his chair, and
+thundered out, "You never wrote anything of the kind, did you? you
+smooth-tongued, grey-headed old scoundrel! Stop your grunting, or I'll
+throttle you! never wrote the letter, eh? keep quiet--if you lift a
+finger, my dog will tear your windpipe out. Answer me quietly you say
+you never received any letter on the subject, do you?"
+
+"I had rather say nothing," whispered Blasius, "evidence given under
+coercion is valueless."
+
+Here Siebenkæs drew his friend away from the Heimlicher, but Leibgeber
+said to the dog, "Mordax! hooy, Sau.," took the glass periwig from the
+head of the servant of the state, broke off the principal curls of it,
+and said to Siebenkæs (Saufinder lay ready to spring), "Screw him down
+yourself, if the dog is not to do it, that he may listen to me. I want
+to say one or two pretty things to him--don't let him say 'Pap!'--Herr
+Heimlicher von Blasius, I have not the slightest intention of making
+use of libellous or abusive language to you, or of spouting an
+improvised pasquinade; I merely tell you, that you are an old rascal, a
+robber of orphans, a varnished villain, and everything else of the
+kind--for instance, a Polish bear, whose footmarks are just like a
+human being's.[16] The epithets which I here make use of, such as
+scoundrel--Judas--gallows-bird" (at each word he struck the glass
+turban like a cymbal against his other hand), "skunk, leech,
+horse-leech--nominal definitions such as these are not abuse, and do not
+constitute libel, firstly because, according to 'L. § de injur.,' the
+grossest abuse may be uttered in jest, and I am in jest here--and
+we may always make use of abusive language in maintaining our own
+rights--see 'Leyser.'[17] Indeed, according to Quistorp's 'Penal Code,'
+we may accuse a person of the gravest crimes without _animus
+injurandi_, provided that he has not been already tried and punished
+for them. And has your honesty ever been put on its trial and punished,
+you cheating old grey-headed vagabond? I suppose you are like the
+Heimlicher in Freyburg[18]--rather a different sort of man to you, it's
+to be hoped--and have half-a-dozen years or so, during which no one can
+lay hold of you--but I've got hold of you to-day, hypocrite! Mordax!"
+The dog looked up at this word of command.
+
+"Let him go, now," Siebenkæs begged, compassionating the prostrate
+sinner.
+
+"In a moment; but don't you put me in a fury, please," said Leibgeber,
+letting fall the plucked wig, standing on it, and taking out his
+scissors and black paper, "I want to be quite calm while I clip out a
+likeness of the padded countenance of this portentous cotton-nightcap
+of a creature, because I shall take it away with me as a _gage
+d'amour_. I want to carry this _ecce homunculus_ about with me half
+over the world, and say to everybody, 'Hit it, bang away at it well;
+blessed is he who doth not depart this life till he hath thrashed
+Heimlicher Blasius of Kuhschnappel; I would have done it myself if I
+had not been far too strong.'
+
+"I shan't be able," he went on, turning to Siebenkæs, and finishing a
+good portrait, "to give that sneak and sharper there an account by word
+of mouth of my success, for a whole year to come; but by that time the
+one or two little touches of abuse which I have just lightly applied to
+him will be covered by the statute of limitations, and we shall be as
+good friends as ever again."
+
+Here he unexpectedly requested Siebenkæs to stay by Saufinder--whom he
+had constituted into a corps of observation by a motion of his
+finger--as he was obliged to leave the room for a moment. On the last
+occasion of his being in Blaise's grand drawing-room (where he
+displayed his magnificence before the Kuhschnappel world, great and
+small), he had noticed the paper-hangings there, and an exceedingly
+ingenious stove, in the form of the goddess of justice, Themis, who
+does, indeed, singe as frequently as she merely warms. And this time he
+had brought with him a camel's-hair pencil, and a bottle of an ink made
+from cobalt dissolved in aquafortis, with a little muriatic acid
+dropped into it. Unlike the black cloth ink, which is visible at first
+and disappears afterwards, the sympathetic ink here spoken of is
+invisible at first, and only comes out a green colour on the paper when
+it is warmed. Leibgeber now wrote with his camel's-hair pencil and this
+ink the following invisible notification on the paper which was closest
+to the stove, or Themis.
+
+
+"The Goddess of Justice hereby protests in presence of this assembly
+against being thus set up in effigy, and warmed and cooled (if not
+absolutely hanged), at the pleasure of the Heimlicher von Blaise, who
+is long since condemned at her inner secret tribunal.
+
+ "THEMIS."
+
+
+Leibgeber came away, leaving the silent seed of this Priestley's green
+composition behind him on the wall with the pleasing certainty that
+next winter, some evening when the drawing-room was nicely warmed by
+the goddess for a party, the whole dormant green crop would all of a
+sudden shoot lustily forth.
+
+So he came back to the oratory again, finding Saufinder keeping up his
+appointed official contemplation, and his friend maintaining his
+observation of the dog. They then all took a most polite leave, and
+even begged the Heimlicher not to come into the street with them, as it
+mightn't be so easy to keep Mordax from a bite or so there.
+
+When they got to the street Leibgeber said to his friend, "Don't pull
+such a long face about it--I shall keep flying backwards and forwards
+to you, of course. Come through the gate with me--I must get across the
+frontier of this country; let's run, and get on to royal territory
+before six minutes are over our heads."
+
+When they had passed the gate, that is to say, the un-Palmyra-like
+ruins of it, the crystal reflecting grotto of the August night stood
+open and shining above the dark-green earth, and the ocean-calm of
+nature stayed the wild storm of the human heart. Night was drawing and
+closing her curtain (a sky full of silent suns, not a breath of breeze
+moving in it), up above the world and down beneath it; the reaped corn
+stood in the sheaves without a rustle. The cricket with his one
+constant song, and a poor old man gathering snails for the snail-pits,
+seemed to be the only things that dwelt in the far reaching darkness.
+The fires of anger had suddenly gone out in the two friends' hearts.
+Leibgeber said, in a voice pitched two octaves lower, "God be thanked!
+this writes a verse of peace round the storm bell within! the night
+seems to me to have muffled my alarum drum with her black robe, and
+softened it down to a funeral march. I am delighted to find myself
+growing a little sad after all that anger and shouting."
+
+"If it only hadn't all been on my account, old Henry," said Siebenkæs,
+"your humorous fury at that barefaced old sinner."
+
+"Though you are not so apt to shy your satire into people's faces as I
+am," said Leibgeber, "you would have been in a greater rage if you had
+been in my place. One can bear injustice to one's self--particularly
+when one has as good a temper as I have--but not to a friend. And
+unluckily you are the martyr to my name to-day, and eyewitness and
+blood-witness into the bargain. Besides, I should tell you that, as a
+general rule, when once I am ridden by the devil of anger--or rather
+when I have got on to _his_ back--I always spur the brute nearly to
+death, till he falls down, so that I mayn't have to mount him again for
+the next three months. However, I have poured _you_ out a nice basin of
+black broth, and left you sitting with the spoon in your hand."
+Siebenkæs had been dreading for some time that he would say something
+about the 1200 gulden, those baptismal dues of his re-baptism, the
+discount of his name. He therefore said, as cheerfully and pleasantly
+as his heart, torn by this sudden, nocturnal parting, would let him,
+"My wife and I have plenty of supplies in our little bit of a fortress
+of Konigstein, and we can sow and reap there too. Heaven only grant
+that we may have many a hard nut to crack; they give a delicious
+flavour to the table-wine of our stale, flat, everyday life. I shall
+bring my action to-morrow."
+
+They both concealed their emotion at the approach of the moment of
+parting under the cloak of comic speeches. These two counterparts came
+to a column which had been erected by the Princess of ---- on the spot
+where, on her return from England, she had met her sister coming from
+the Alps; and as this joyful souvenir of a meeting had a quite opposite
+significance to-night, Leibgeber said, "Now, right about face--march!
+Your wife is getting anxious--it's past eleven o'clock. There, you
+see, we have reached your boundary mark, your frontier fortress,
+the gallows. I am off at once into Bayreuth and Saxony to cut my
+crop--other people's faces, to wit, and sometimes my own fool's face
+into the bargain. I shall most likely come and see you again, just for
+the fun of the thing, in a year and a day, when the verbal libels are
+pretty well out of date. By the by." he added, hastily, "promise me on
+your word of honour to do me one little favour."
+
+Siebenkæs instantly did so. "Don't send my deposit after me[19]--a
+plaintiff has payments to make. So fare you well, dearest old man," he
+blurted huskily out, and after a hurried kiss, ran quickly down the
+little hill with an air of assumed unconcern. His friend, bewildered
+and forsaken, looked after the runner, without uttering a syllable.
+When he got to the bottom of the hillock, the runner stopped, bent his
+head low towards the ground, and--loosened his garters.
+
+"Couldn't you have done that up here?" cried Siebenkæs, and went down
+to him, and said, "We'll go as far as the gallows hill together." The
+sand-bath and reverberating furnace of a noble anger made all their
+emotions warmer to-day, just as a hot climate gives strength to poisons
+and spices. As the _first_ parting had caused their eyes to overflow,
+they had nothing more to keep in control but voice and language.
+
+"Are you sure you feel quite well after being so much vexed?" said
+Siebenkæs. "If the death of domestic animals portends the death of the
+master of the house, as the superstition runs," said Leibgeber, "I
+shall live to all eternity, for my menagerie[20] of beasts is all alive
+and kicking." At last they stopped at the market house, beside the
+place of execution. "Just up to the top," said Siebenkæs, "no further."
+
+When they came to the top of this boundary-hill of so many an unhappy
+life--and when Siebenkæs looked down upon the green spotted stone altar
+where so many an innocent sacrifice had been offered up, and thought,
+in that dark minute, of the heavy blood drops of agony, the burning
+tears which women who had killed their children[21] (and were
+themselves put to death by the state and their lovers) had let fall
+upon this their last and briefest rack of torture here in this field of
+blood--and as he gazed from this cloudbank of life out over the broad
+earth with the mists of night steaming up round its horizons and over
+all its streams--he took his friend's hand, and, looking to the free
+starry heaven, said, "The mists of our life on earth _must_ be resolved
+into stars, up there at last, as the mists of the milky way part into
+suns. Henry, don't you yet believe in the soul's immortality?"--"It
+will _not_ do yet, I can _not_," Leibgeber replied. "Blasius, now,
+hardly deserves to live _once_, let alone twice or several times. I
+sometimes can't help feeling as if a little piece of the other world
+had been _painted on_ to this, just to finish it off and make it
+complete, as I've sometimes seen subsidiary subjects introduced in
+fainter colours towards the edge of a picture, to make the principal
+subject stand out from the frame, and to give it unity of effect. But
+at this moment, human beings strike me as being like those crabs which
+priests used to fasten tapers to and set them crawling about
+churchyards, telling the people they were the souls of the departed.
+Just so do we, in a masquerade impersonation of immortal beings, crawl
+about over graves with our tapers of souls. Ten to one they go out at
+last."
+
+His friend fell on his heart, and said with vivid conviction, "We do
+_not_ go out! Farewell a thousand times. We shall meet where there is
+no parting. By my soul! we do _not_ go out. Farewell, farewell."
+
+And so they parted. Henry passed slowly and with drooping arms through
+the footpaths between the stubble-fields, raising neither hand nor eye,
+that he might give no sign of sorrow. But a deep grief fell on
+Siebenkæs, for men who rarely shed tears shed all the more when they do
+weep. So he went to his house and laid his weary melting heart to rest
+on his wife's untroubled breast (there was not even a dream stirring
+it). But far on into the forecourt of the world of dreams did the
+thought of the days in store for Lenette attend him--and of his
+friend's night journey under the stars, which he would be looking up at
+without any hope of ever being nearer to them; and it was chiefly for
+his friend that his tears flowed fast.
+
+Oh ye two friends--thou who art out in the darkness there, and thou who
+art here at home! But wherefore should I be continually harping back
+upon the old emotion which you have once more awakened in me--the same
+which in old days used to penetrate and refresh me so when I read as a
+lad about the friendship of a Swift, an Arbuthnott and a Pope in their
+letters? Many another heart must have been fired and aroused as mine
+was at the contemplation of the touching, calm affection which the
+hearts of these men felt for one another; cold, sharp, and cutting to
+the outer world, in the inner land which was common to them they could
+work and beat for each other; like lofty palm trees, presenting long
+sharp spines towards the common world below them, but at their summits
+full of the precious palm-wine of strong friendship.
+
+So, in their lesser degree, I think we may find something of a similar
+kind to like and to admire in our two friends, Leibgeber and Siebenkæs.
+We need not inquire very closely into the causes which brought about
+their friendship; for it is hate, not love, which needs to be explained
+and accounted for. The sources whence everything that is good wells
+forth from this universe upwards to God himself, are veiled by a night
+all thick with stars; but the stars are very far away.
+
+These two men, while as yet in the fresh, green springtime of
+university life, at once saw straight through each other's breasts into
+each other's hearts, and they attracted each other with their opposite
+poles. What chiefly delighted Siebenkæs was Leibgeber's firmness and
+power, and even his capability of anger, as well as his flights and
+laughter over every kind of sham grandeur, sham fine feeling, sham
+scholarship. Like the condor, he laid the eggs (of his act or of his
+pregnant saying) in no nest, but on the bare rock, preferring to live
+without a name, and consequently always taking some other than his own.
+On which account the poor's advocate used to tell him, ten times over,
+the two following anecdotes, just to enjoy his irritation at them.
+
+The first was, that a German professor in Dorpat, who was delivering a
+eulogistic address on the subject of the reigning grand duke Alexander,
+suddenly stopped in the middle of it, and gazed for a long time in
+silence on a bust of that potentate, saying at length, "The speechless
+heart has spoken."
+
+The second was that Klopstock sent finely got-up copies of his
+'Messiah' to schoolporters, with the request that the most deserving
+among them might scatter spring-flowers on the grave of his own old
+teacher, Stubel, while softly pronouncing his (Klopstock's) name. To
+which, if Leibgeber had anything to adduce on the subject, Siebenkæs
+would go on to add that the poet had called up four new porters to give
+them three readings apiece from his 'Messiah,' rewarding each with a
+gold medal provided by a friend. After telling him this he would look
+to see Leibgeber's foaming and stamping at a person's thus worshipping
+himself as a species of reliquary full of old fingers and bones.
+
+What Leibgeber, on the other hand,--more like the Morlacks, who, as
+Towinson and Forlis tell us, though they have but one word to express
+both revenge and sanctification (osveta), do yet have their friends
+betrothed to them with a blessing at the altar--chiefly delighted in
+and loved about his satirical foster-brother was the diamond brooch
+which in his case pinned together poetry, kindly temper, and a stoicism
+which scorned this world's absurdities. And lastly, each of them daily
+enjoyed the gratification of knowing that the other understood him
+completely and wonderfully, whether he were in jest or in earnest. But
+it is not every friend who meets with another of this stamp.
+
+
+
+
+ APPENDIX TO CHAPTER II.
+
+ GOVERNMENT OF THE IMPERIAL MARKET BOROUGH OF KUHSCHNAPPEL.
+
+
+I have omitted, all through two chapters, to state that the free
+imperial borough of Kuhschnappel (of which, it appears, there is a
+namesake in the Erzgebirge country) is the thirty-second of the Swabian
+towns which takes its seat on Swabia's town-bench of thirty-one towns.
+Swabia may look upon herself as being a hotbed and forcing-house of
+imperial towns, these colonies, or hostelries, of the goddess of
+freedom in Germany, whom persons of position worship as their household
+goddess; and according to whose "election of grace" it is that poor
+sinners are called to salvation. I must now, in this place, accede to
+the universally expressed desire for an accurate sketch map of the
+Kuhschnappel Government; though few readers, save people such as
+Nikolai, Schlæzer and the like, can be expected to form an idea of the
+difficulty I have experienced, and the sum I have had to expend in
+postage, before getting hold of information somewhat more accurate than
+that which is generally current on the subject of Kuhschnappel. Indeed,
+imperial towns, like Swiss towns, always plaster over and stop up the
+combs where their honey is stored, as though their constitutions were
+stolen silver plate with the owner's name still unobliterated--or as
+though the little bits of towns and territories were fortresses (which
+indeed they are as against their own inhabitants more than against
+their enemies), of which strangers are not allowed to take sketches.
+
+The constitution of our noteworthy borough of Kuhschnappel seems to
+have been the original rough draft or sketch which Bern (a place at no
+great distance) has copied hers from, only with the pantograph on a
+larger scale. For Bern, like Kuhschnappel, has her Upper House, or
+supreme council, which decides upon peace and war, and has the power of
+life and death just as in Kuhschnappel, and consists of chief
+magistrates, treasurers, Venners, Heimlichers and counsellors, only
+that there are more of them in Bern than in Kuhschnappel. Further, Bern
+has her Lower House, consisting of presidents, deputies and pensioners,
+subsidiary to the Upper. The two Chambers of Appeal, those of Woods and
+Forests, Game Laws, and Reform, the Meat Tax and other commissions are
+clearly but large text copies of the Kuhschnappel outlines.
+
+To speak the truth, however, I have drawn this comparison between these
+two places solely with the view of being comprehensible (perhaps at the
+same time agreeable) to the Swiss generally, and particularly to the
+people of Bern. For in reality, Kuhschnappel rejoices in a much more
+perfect and aristocratic constitution than Bern, such as was to be
+found in a measure in Ulm and Nürnberg, though the stormy weather of
+the revolution has rather kept them back than brought them forward. A
+short time since, Nürnberg and Ulm were as fortunate as Kuhschnappel is
+now, inasmuch as they were governed, not by the common, working
+classes, but by people of family only, so that no mere citizen could
+meddle with the matter in the least degree either in person or by
+deputy. Now, unfortunately, it appears to be the case in both towns
+that the cask of the state has had to be fresh tapped just about an
+inch or so above the thick dregs of the common herd, because what came
+from the tap _nearer the top_ proved sour. However, it is impossible
+for me to go on until I have cleared out of the way a much too
+prevalent error respecting large towns.
+
+The Behemoths and Condors among towns--Petersburg, London,
+Vienna--might, if they chose, establish universal equality of liberty
+and liberty of equality; very few statisticians have been struck by
+this idea, although it is so very clear. For a capital which it takes
+two hours and a quarter to go round is, as it were, an Ætna-crater of
+equivalent circumference for an entire country, and benefits the
+neighbourhood of it as the volcano does, not only by what it _ejects_
+(its eruptive matter), but by what it swallows up. It clears
+the country in the first place of villages, and next of country
+towns--which are primarily the outhouses and office-buildings of
+capital cities--inasmuch as it pushes itself outwards in all directions
+year by year, and gets grown over, fringed round, and walled about with
+the villages. London, we know, has converted the neighbouring villages
+into streets of itself; but in the lapse of centuries the long,
+constantly extending arms of all great towns must enfold not only the
+villages, but also the country towns, converting them into suburbs.
+Now, in this process, the roads, fields and meadows which lie between
+the giant city and the villages get covered over like a river-bed with
+a deposit of stone-paving; and consequently the operations of
+agriculture can no longer be carried on otherwise than in flower-pots
+in the windows. Where there is no agriculture, I cannot see what the
+agricultural population can become but unemployed idlers, such as no
+state allows within its boundaries; and, prevention being better than
+cure, the state will have to clear this agricultural population out of
+the way before it sinks into this condition of idling, either by means
+of letters inhibitory directed against the increase of population, or
+by extermination, or by ennobling them into soldiery and domestics. In
+a village which has undergone this process of being morticed into a
+town like a lump of rubble,--or converted into a stave of the great tun
+of Heidelberg in this manner--any country people that might be still to
+the fore, would be as ludicrous as useless; the coral cells of the
+villages must be cleared out before they attain the dignity of becoming
+reefs or atolls of a town.
+
+When this is done, the hardest step towards equality has, no doubt,
+been taken; the people of the country towns, a class the most hostile
+of all classes, at heart, to equality--have next to be attacked and, if
+possible, exterminated by the great town; this, however, is more a
+matter of time than of good management. At the same time, what one or
+two residency-towns have accomplished in this direction, is a good
+beginning at all events. Could we attain to our ideal, however--could
+we live to see the day when the two classes who are the most formidable
+opponents of equality--the peasants, and the people of the smaller
+towns--should have disappeared; and when not only the agricultural
+races but the lower nobility, the small proprietors, should be
+extinct--ah! then the world would be in the blissful enjoyment of an
+equality of a nobler sort than that which obtained in France, where it
+was merely a _plebeian_ one. There would be an absolute equality if
+pure nobility and collective humanity could rejoice in the possession
+of _one_ patent of nobility, and of real authentic _ancestors_. In
+Paris, the revolution wrote (as people did in the most ancient times)
+without capital letters; but if my golden age came to pass, the writing
+would be as it was in somewhat _later_ times than those just alluded
+to, _all_ capital letters, not, as at present, with capitals sticking
+up like steeples among quantities of small letters. But though such a
+lofty style, such an ennoblement of humanity as this may be nothing but
+a beautiful dream, and though we must be content with the minor
+consolation of seeing, in towns, the middle classes restricted to a
+single street, as is now the case with the Jews; even that would be a
+clear gain to the intellectual portion of mankind in the eyes of anyone
+who considers what an accomplished, capable set of people the higher
+nobility are.
+
+It is upon the smaller towns, however, that we can more confidently
+rely than upon the great residency-towns, for aid in bringing about the
+nobilisation of the collective human race, and this brings me back to
+Kuhschnappel. People really seem to forget that it is too much to
+expect that the four square versts or so which a residency-town
+occupies shall be able to dominate, swallow up, and convert into
+portions of itself, more than a thousand square miles of the
+surrounding country (just as the boa-constrictor swallows animals
+bigger than itself). London has not much above 600,000 inhabitants;
+what a miserably small force compared to the 5½ millions of all
+England, which that city has to contend with, and cut off the wings,
+and supplies of, alone and unassisted--to say nothing of Scotland and
+Ireland! This, however, does not apply to provincial towns; here the
+number of villages, villagers, and burghers which have to be coerced,
+starved, and put to rout, are in a fair proportion to the size of the
+town, the numbers of the aristocracy or governing classes, who have to
+execute the task, and work the smoothing plane which is to level the
+surface of humanity. Here there is little difficulty in _precipitating_
+the citizens (as if they were a kind of coarse dregs swimming in the
+clear fluid of nobility); and when this precipitation is not
+successfully accomplished, it is the aristocracy themselves who are to
+blame, in that they often show mercy in the wrong place, and look upon
+the Burgher-bank as a grassbank, the grass of which is, it is true,
+grown only to be sat upon and pressed down, but is kept always watered,
+in order that it may not wither from being so constantly sat upon. If
+there were to be nothing left but the noblest classes, the citizenic
+cinnamon-trees would be completely barked, by means of taxes and
+levyings of contributions--(which none but plebeian authors term
+"flaying" and "pulling the hide over the ears"),--and, the bark being
+off, the trees of course wither and die. At the same time, this process
+of aristocratization costs men. But in my opinion it would be cheaply
+purchased by the few thousands of people it would cost, seeing that the
+Americans, the Swiss, and the Dutch paid (so to speak) whole millions
+of men "cash down," on the battlefield, as the price of a freedom of a
+much more restricted kind. The fault which is sometimes found with
+modern battle pictures, namely that they are overcrowded with people,
+can rarely be found with modern countries. We should rather notice the
+clever manner in which many German states have, by _energetic_
+treatment, _determined_ their population, as morbid matter, in a
+_downward_ direction (as good physicians are wont to do), namely, down
+to the United States of America, which are situated straight _below_
+them.
+
+Kuhschnappel (to return to our subject) has the pull over hundreds of
+other towns. I admit, as Nicolai's assertion, that of the 60,000 which
+Nürnberg contained there are but 30,000 left, and that is something; at
+the same time it takes fifty burghers, and more, to be equivalent to
+one aristocrat, which is much. Now I am in a position to show at any
+moment by reference to registers of deaths and baptisms, that the
+borough of Kuhschnappel contains almost as many aristocrats as
+burghers, which is all the more wonderful when we reflect that the
+former, on account of their appetites, find it a harder matter to live
+than the latter. What modern town, I ask, can point to so many free
+inhabitants? Were there not even in free Athens and Rome--in the West
+Indies there were of course--more slaves than free men, for which
+reason the latter did not dare to make the former wear any distinctive
+dress? And are there not in all towns more tenants than noble
+landlords, although the latter _ought_, one would think, to be in the
+majority, since peasants and burghers grow only by nature, while
+aristocrats are raised, both by nature, and by art (in the shape of
+princely and imperial chanceries). If this appendix were not a
+digression (and digressions are generally expected to be brief) I
+should proceed to show, at some length, that in several respects
+Kuhschnappel, if she does not surpass, is at least quite on a par with,
+many of the towns of Switzerland; for instance, in a good method of
+sharpening and lengthening the sword of justice, and, on the whole, in
+her manner of wielding a good, spiked, knotty mace--in the tax she
+levies on (ecclesiastical) corn, not that imported from abroad, but
+that of home growth, to exclude _thought_ and other (in an
+ecclesiastical sense) rubbish of that sort--and even in her "green
+market," or trade in young men. As regards the latter, the reason why
+the trade with France for young Kuhschnappelers to serve as porters and
+defenders of the Crown has hitherto been so flat is, that the Swiss
+have so terribly overdone the market with fine young fellows who go and
+stand in front of all the doors and (in war time) in front of all the
+cannons. Of course, were it not for this, there would be more doors
+than one with a Kuhschnappeler standing and saying, "Nobody at home."
+(Indeed, here in my second edition, I can assert that Kuhschnappel
+continues to maintain its title of _imperial market_ town, like a
+secondary electoral dignity, and keeps up its old protective laws
+against the import of ideas and the export of information, and its
+blood tithe; or young men tithe to France, just as Switzerland does,
+which is like the keeper of the castle of the Wartburg, who keeps
+constantly re-blackening the indelible mark of the ink which Luther
+threw at the devil.)
+
+
+
+
+ CHAPTER III.
+
+ LENETTE'S HONEYMOON--BOOK BREWING--SCHULRATH STIEFEL--MR. EVERARD--
+ A DAY BEFORE THE FAIR--THE RED COW--ST. MICHAEL'S FAIR--THE
+ BEGGARS' OPERA--DIABOLICAL TEMPTATION IN THE WILDERNESS, OR THE
+ MANNIKIN OF FASHION--AUTUMN JOYS--A NEW LABYRINTH.
+
+
+The world could not make a greater mistake than to suppose that our
+common hero would be to be seen on the Monday sitting in a mourning
+coach, in a mourning cloak, crape hat-band and scarf, and black
+shoe-buckles, figuring as chief mourner at the sham funeral of his
+happiness and his capital.
+
+Heavens! how _can_ the world make such an exceedingly bad shot as that?
+The advocate was not even in _quarter_ mourning, let alone half; he was
+in as good spirits as if he had this third chapter before him, and were
+just beginning it, as I am.
+
+The reason was, that he had drawn up an able plaint against his
+guardian, Blaise (enlivening it with sundry satirical touches, which
+nobody but himself understood), and laid it before the Inheritance
+Office. When we are in a difficulty, it is always so much gained if we
+can but _do something or other_. Let fortune bluster in our faces with
+ever so harsh and frosty an autumn wind--as long as it does not break
+the fore joint of our wing (as in the case of the swans), our very
+fluttering, though it may not transport us into a warmer climate, will
+at all events have the effect of warming us a little. From motives of
+kindness, Siebenkæs kept his wife in ignorance of the delay in the
+settling of his heritage accounts, as well as of the old story of the
+change of names; he thought there was very little likelihood of a
+struggling advocate's wife ever having an opportunity of looking over a
+patrician's shoulder into his family hand at cards.
+
+And, indeed, what could a man who had made a sudden plunge from out his
+hermit's holy-week of single blessedness, into the full honeymoon of
+double blessedness wish for besides? Not until now had he been able to
+hold his Lenette in both his arms rightly--hitherto his friend, always
+fluttering backwards and forwards in life, had been held fast with his
+_left_ arm; but now, she was able to stretch herself out far more
+comfortably in the chambers of his heart. And the bashful wife did this
+as much as she dared. She confessed to him, albeit timidly, that she
+was almost glad not to have that boisterous Saufinder lying under the
+table and glaring out in that terrible way of his. Whether she
+experienced a similar relief at the absence of his wild master, she
+could not be brought to say. To the advocate she felt a good deal like
+a daughter, and her great tall father could never have enough of her
+quaint little ways. That, when he went out, she used to look after him
+as long as he was in sight, was nothing in comparison to the way in
+which she used to run out after him with a brush, when she noticed from
+the window that there was such a quantity of street paving sticking to
+his coat-tails that nothing would do but she must have him back again
+into the house, and brush his back as clean as if the Kuhschnappel
+municipality would charge him paving-tax if any of the mud were found
+on him. He would take hold of the brush and stop it, and kiss her, and
+say, "There's a good deal _inside_ as well; but nobody sees it there;
+when I come back we'll set to work and scrub some of _that_ away."
+
+Her maidenly obedience to his every wish and hint, her daughterly
+observance and fulfilment of them, were more than he looked for or
+required, indeed; but not too great for the love he bestowed in return.
+"Senate clerk's daughter," he said, "you mustn't be _too_ obedient to
+me; remember I'm not your father, a senate clerk, but a poor's advocate
+who has married you and signs himself Siebenkæs, to the best of his
+belief."
+
+"My poor dear father," she answered, "used often to compose and write
+down things too at home, himself, with his own hand, and then fair-copy
+them beautifully afterwards." But he enjoyed these crooked answers
+which she used to make. And though, from sheer veneration of him, she
+never understood a single one of the jokes which he was always making
+about himself (for she gainsaid him when he satirically depreciated
+himself, and agreed with him completely if he ironically lauded
+himself), yet these mental provincialisms of hers pleased him not a
+little. She would use such words as "fleuch" for "fliehe," "reuch" and
+"kreuch" for "riehe" and "kriehe;" religious antiquities out of
+Luther's Bible, which were valuable and enjoyable contributions to her
+stock of idiosyncracies, and to the happiness of his honeymoon. One day
+when he took a particularly pretty cap which she had tried on with
+much satisfaction to each of her three cap-blocks, one after another
+(she would often gently kiss these cap-blocks), and putting it on her
+own little head before the looking-glass, said, "See how it looks on
+your _own_ head; perhaps that's as good a block as the others," she
+laughed with immense delight, and said, "Now, you are always flattering
+one!"
+
+Believe me, this naive failure of hers to see his joke so touched him
+that he made a secret vow never to make another of the kind, except in
+private to himself. But there was a greater honeymoon pleasure still.
+This was that, when there came a fast day, Lenette would on no account
+allow him to kiss her, when she came into the room (ready for church),
+her white and red bloom of youth shining out with threefold beauty from
+under her black lace head-dress, and the dark leafage of her dress.
+
+"Worldly thoughts of that kind," she said, "weren't at all proper
+before service, when people had on their fast-day things; people must
+wait!"
+
+"By heaven!" said Siebenkæs to himself, "may I stick a soup spoon five
+inches long and three broad through my lower lip, like a North American
+squaw, and go about with it there, if ever I begin spooning and kissing
+the pious soul again, when she has a black dress on, and the bells are
+ringing." And though he wasn't much of a churchgoer himself, he kept
+his word. See how we men behave in matrimonial life, young ladies!
+
+From all which it will readily appear how perfectly happy the advocate
+was during his honeymoon, when Lenette, in the most delightful manner,
+did all those things for him which he used previously to have to do for
+himself in a most miserable fashion and against the grain, making by
+unwearied sweepings and brushings his dithyrambic chartreuse as clean
+and level and smooth as a billiard-table. Whole honey-trees full of
+cakes did she plant during the honeymoon; humming round him of a
+morning like a busy bee, carrying wax into her little hive (while he
+was going quietly on with his law-papers, building away at his
+juridical wasp's nest), forming her cells, cleaning them out, ejecting
+foreign bodies, and mending chinks; he now and then looking out of his
+wasp's nest at the pretty little figure in the tidiest of household
+dresses, at sight of which he would take his pen in his mouth, hold his
+hand out to her across the ink-bottle, and say, "Only wait till the
+afternoon comes and you're sitting sewing--then, as I walk up and down,
+I shall pay you with kisses to your heart's content." But that none of
+my fair readers may be unhappy about the souring of the honey of this
+moon which the conduct of that disinheriting blackguard Blaise might
+bring about, let me just ask one question? Hadn't Siebenkæs a whole
+silver mine and a coining mill, in the shape of seven law suits all
+going on, full of veins of rich ore? And hadn't Leibgeber sent him a
+military treasury chest on four wheels of fortune, containing two
+spectacle dollars of Julius Duke of Brunswig, a Russian triple-dollar
+of 1679, a tail or queue ducat--a gnat or wasp dollar--five vicariat
+ducats, and a heap of Ephraimites? For he might melt down and
+volatilise this collection of coins without a moment's hesitation,
+inasmuch as his friend had only pocketed them by way of a jest on the
+people who pay a hundred dollars for one. They two had all things
+corporeal and mental in common to an extent comprehensible by few. They
+had arrived at that point where there is no distinction visible between
+the giver and the receiver of a benefit, and they stepped across the
+chasms of life bound together, as the crystal-seekers in the Alps tie
+themselves to each other to prevent their falling into the ice clefts.
+
+One Lady Day, towards evening, however, he hit upon an idea which will
+quite reassure all fair readers of his history who may be in a state of
+anxiety about him, and which made _him_ happier than the receipt of the
+biggest basket of bread with little baskets of fruit in it would have
+done--or a hamper of wine. He had felt sure all along that he _would_
+hit upon an idea. Whenever he was in a difficulty of any kind, he
+always used to say, "Now, I wonder what I shall hit upon _this_ time;
+for I _shall_ hit upon something or other as sure as there are four
+chambers in my brain." The delightful idea in question was, that he
+should do what I am doing at this moment--write a book; only his was to
+be a satirical one.[22] A torrent of blood rushed through the opened
+sluices of his heart, right in amongst the wheels and mill-machinery of
+his ideas, and the whole of the mental mechanism rattled, whirred, and
+jingled in a moment--a peck or two of material for the book was ground
+on the spot.
+
+I know of no greater mental tumult--hardly of any sweeter--which can
+arise in a young man's being, than that which he experiences when he is
+walking up and down his room, and forming the daring resolution that he
+will take a book of blank paper and make it into a manuscript; indeed
+it is a point which might be argued whether Winckelmann, or Hannibal
+the great general, strode up and down _their_ rooms at a greater pace
+when they respectively formed the (equally daring) resolution that they
+would go to Rome. Siebenkæs, having made up his mind to write a
+'Selection from the Devil's Papers,' was forced to run out of the
+house, and three times round the market-place, just to fix his
+fluttering, rushing ideas into their proper grooves again by the
+process of tiring his legs. He came back wearied by the glow within
+him--looked to see if there was enough white paper in the house for his
+manuscript--and running up to his Lenette, who was tranquilly working
+away at a cap, gave her a kiss before she could well take the needle
+out of her mouth--last thorn upon the rose-tree! During the kiss she
+quietly gave a finishing stitch to the border of the cap (squinting
+down at it the best way she could without moving her head).
+
+"Rejoice with me!" he cried, "come and dance about with me! to-morrow
+I'm going to begin a work, a book! Roast the calf's head to-night,
+though it be a breach of our ten commandments." For he and she, on the
+Wednesday before, had formed themselves into a committee on food
+regulations, and, of the Thirty-nine articles of domestic economy,
+which had then been passed and subscribed to, one was that,
+Brahminlike, they were to do without meat at supper.
+
+But he had the greatest difficulty in getting her to understand how it
+was that he made out that he would be able to procure her another
+calf's head with a single sheet of the 'Selections from the Devil's
+Papers,' and that he was perfectly justified in issuing a dispensation
+from that evening's fast; for like the common herd of mankind, or like
+the printers, Lenette thought that a written book was paid for at the
+same rate as a printed one, and that the compositor got rather more
+than the author. She had never in her life had the slightest idea of
+the enormous sums which authors are paid nowadays; she was like
+Racine's wife, who did not know what a line of poetry or a tragedy was,
+although she kept house upon them. For my part, however, I should never
+lead to the altar, or into my home as my wife, any woman who wasn't
+capable of at least completing any sentence which death should knock me
+over with his hour-glass in the middle of,--or who wouldn't be
+unspeakably delighted when I read to her learned Göttingen gazettes, or
+universal German magazines, in which I was bepraised, more than I
+deserved perhaps.
+
+The rapture of authorship had set all Siebenkæs's blood-globules into
+such a flow, and all his ideas into such a whirlwind this whole evening
+that, in the condition of vividness of fueling and fancy in which he
+was (a condition which in him often assumed the appearance of temper),
+he would instantly have flown out and exploded like so much fulminating
+gold at everything of a slow moving kind which he came across--such as
+the servant girl's heavy dawdling step, or the species of dropsy with
+which her utterance was afflicted;--but that he at once laid hold on a
+precious sedative powder for the over-excitement caused by happiness,
+and took a dose of it. It is easier to communicate an impetus and a
+rapid flow to the slow-gliding blood of a heavy, sorrowful heart, than
+to moderate and restrain the billowy, surging, foaming current which
+rushes through the veins in happiness; but he could always calm
+himself, even in the wildest joy, by the thought of the inexhaustible
+Hand which bestowed it, and that gentle tenderness of heart wherewith
+our eyes are drooped to earth as we remember the invisible, eternal
+Benefactor of all hearts. At such a time the heart, softened by
+thankfulness and by joyful tears, will speak its gratitude by at least
+being kindlier towards all mankind, if in no other way. That fierce,
+untamed delight, which is what Nemesis avenges, can best be kept within
+due bounds by this sense of gratitude; and those who have died of joy
+would either _not_ have died at all, or would have died of a _better_
+and lovelier joy, if their hearts had first been softened by a grateful
+heavenward gaze.
+
+His first and best thanksgiving for the new, smooth, beautiful banks,
+between which his life-stream had now been led, took the form of a
+zealous and careful drawing up of a defence which he had to prepare in
+the case of a girl charged with child-murder, to save her from torture
+on the rack. The state-physician of the borough had condemned her to
+the "trial by the lungs," a neither more nor less suitable punishment
+than the "trial by water" (which used to be inflicted on witches).
+
+Calm spring-days of matrimony, peaceful and undisturbed, laid down
+their carpet of flowers for the feet of these two to tread upon.
+Only there sometimes appeared under the window, when Lenette was
+stretching herself and her white arm out of a morning, and slowly
+accomplishing the fastening back of the outside shutters, a gentleman
+in flesh-coloured silk.
+
+"I really feel quite ashamed to stretch," she said; "there's a
+gentleman always standing in the street, and he takes off his hat, and
+notes one down just as if he were the meat appraiser."
+
+The Schulrath Stiefel kept, on the school Saturday holidays, the
+solemn promise he had made on the wedding-day to come and see them
+often, and at all events to be sure and come on the Saturdays. I think
+I shall call him Peltzstiefel (Furboots) as a pleasing variety for the
+ear--seeing that the whole town gave him that name on account of the
+gray miniver, faced with hareskin, which he wore on his legs by way of
+a portable wood-economising stove. Well, Peltzstiefel, the moment he
+came in at the door, fastened joy-flowers together into a nosegay, and
+stuck them into the advocate's button-bole, by appointing him on the
+spot his collaborateur on the 'Kuhschnappel Indicator, Heavenly
+Messenger, and School Programme Review'--a work which ought to be
+better known, so that the works recommended by it might be so too. This
+newspaper engagement of Siebenkæs is a great pleasure to me; it will at
+any rate bring my hero in sixpence or so towards a supper now and then.
+The Schulrath, who was editor of this paper, had a high sense of the
+power and responsibility of his post; but Siebenkæs had now risen to
+the dignity of an author--the only being who in his eyes was superior
+even to a reviewer--for Lenette had told him on the way to church that
+her husband was going to have a great thick book printed. The Schulrath
+considered the 'Salzburg Literary Gazette' of the period the
+apocryphal, and the 'Jena Literary Gazette' the canonical scriptures:
+the single voice of one reviewer was, for _his_ ears, multiplied by the
+echo in the critical judgment hall into a thousand voices. His deluded
+imagination multiplied the head of one single reviewer into several
+Lernæan heads, as it was believed of old that the devil used to
+surround the heads of sinners with delusive _false_ heads, that the
+executioner might miss his stroke at them.
+
+The fact that a reviewer writes anonymously gives to a single
+individual's opinions the weight and authority they would possess, if
+arrived at by a whole council; but then if his name were put at the
+end, for instance, "X.Y.Z., Student of Divinity," instead of "New
+Universal German Library," it would weaken the effect of the divinity
+student's learned laying down of the law to too great an extent. The
+Schulrath paid court to my hero on account of his satirical turn; for
+he himself, a very lamb in common life, transformed himself into a
+wehrwolf in a review article; which is frequently the case with
+good-tempered men when they write, particularly on _humaniora_ and such
+like subjects. As indeed, peaceful shepherd races (according to Gibbon)
+are fond of making war, and of beginning it, or just as the Idyllic
+painter, Gessner, was himself a biting caricaturist.
+
+And our hero for his part afforded Stiefel a great pleasure this
+evening, as well as holding out to him the prospect of many more such,
+when he took from Leibgeber's collection of coins a gnat or wasp
+dollar, and gave it to him, not as a douceur for his appointment
+to the critical wasp's nest, but that he might turn it into small
+change. The Schulrath who, being himself the zealous "Silberdiener"
+(master of the plate and jewels) of a dollar-cabinet of his own,
+would have been delighted if money had existed solely for the
+sake of cabinets--(meaning, however, numismatic, not political,
+cabinets)--sparkled and blushed delighted over the dollar, and declared
+to the advocate (who only wanted the absolute value of it, not the
+coin-fancier's price) that he considered this a piece of true
+friendship. "No," answered Siebenkæs, "the only piece of true
+friendship about the matter is Leibgeber giving _me_ the dollar." "But
+I'll give you certainly three dollars for it, if you like to ask it,"
+said Stiefel. Lenette, delighted at Stiefel's delight, and at his
+kindly feeling, and secretly giving her husband a push as an admonition
+not to give way, here struck in with an amount of determination which
+astonishes me, "But my husband's not going to do anything of the kind,
+I assure you; a dollar's a dollar." "But," said Siebenkæs, "I ought
+rather to ask you only a _third_ of the price, if I'm going to hand
+over my coins to you one at a time in this way." Ye dear souls! If
+people's "yeses" in this world were only always such as your "buts."
+
+Stiefel, confirmed bachelor though he was, wasn't going to let himself
+be found wanting, on such a delightful occasion as this, at all events,
+in proper politeness towards the fair sex, least of all towards a woman
+whom he had begun to be so fond of, even when he was bringing her home
+to be married, and whom he liked twice as much now that she was the
+wife of such a dear friend, and was such a dear friend herself too. He
+therefore adroitly led her to join in the conversation (which had
+previously been too deep and scholarly for her) by using the three
+cap-blocks as stepping-stones over to the journal of fashions; only he
+slid back again sooner than he might have done to a more ancient
+journal of fashions, that of Rubenius on the 'Costume of the ancient
+Greeks and Romans.' He said he should be happy to lend her his sermons
+every Sunday, as advocates don't deal in theology much. And when she
+was looking on the floor at her feet for the snuffers which had fallen,
+he held the candle down that she might see.
+
+The next Sunday was an important day for the house (or rather rooms) of
+Siebenkæs, for it introduced thereto a grander character than any who
+have appeared hitherto, namely the Venner (Finance Councillor)--Mr.
+Everard Rosa von Meyern, a young member of the aristocracy, who went
+daily in and out at Heimlicher von Blaise's to "learn the routine of
+official business;" he was also engaged to be married to a poor niece
+of the Heimlicher's, who was being brought up and educated for his
+heart in another part of Germany.
+
+Thus the Venner was a character of consequence in the borough of
+Kuhschnappel as well as in our 'Thorn-piece,' and this in every
+political point of view. In a corporeal point of view he was much less
+so. His body was stuck through his flowered garments much like a piece
+of stick through a village nosegay; under the shining wing-covers of
+his waistcoat (in itself a perfect animal-picture)[23] there
+pulsated a thorax, perpendicular, if not absolutely concave, and his
+legs had, all told, about the same amount of calf as those wooden ones
+which stocking-makers put into their windows as an advertisement.
+
+The Venner gave the advocate to understand, in a cold and politely rude
+manner, that he had merely come to relieve him from the task of
+defending the case of child-murder, as he had so much to attend to
+besides. But Siebenkæs saw through this pretence with great ease. It
+was a well-known circumstance that the girl accused of this crime had
+adopted as the father of her child (now flown, away above this earth) a
+certain commercial traveller, whose name neither she nor the documents
+connected with her case could mention; but that the real father--who,
+like a young author, was bashful about putting his name to his _pièce
+fugitive_--was no other than the emaciated Venner, Everard Rosa von
+Meyern himself. There are certain things which a whole town will
+determine and make up its mind to ignore; and one of these was Rosa's
+authorship. Heimlicher von Blaise knew that Siebenkæs was aware of it,
+however, and feared that he might, out of revenge for the affair of the
+inheritance, purposely make a poor defence of the girl, that the shame
+and disgrace of her end might fall upon his relative, Meyern's
+shoulders. What a terrible, mean suspicion!
+
+And yet the purest minds are sometimes driven to entertain such
+suspicions. Fortunately Siebenkæs had already got the poor mother's
+lightning-conductor all ready forged and set up. When he showed it to
+this false bridegroom of the supposed child-murderess, the latter
+immediately declared that she could not have found an abler guardian
+saint among all the advocates in the town; to which author and reader
+can both add "nor one who should be actuated by worthier motives," as
+we know he did it as a thank-offering to Heaven for the first idea of
+the 'Devil's Papers.'
+
+At this juncture, the advocate's wife came suddenly back from the
+adjoining bookbinder's room, where she had been paying a flying visit.
+The Venner sprang to meet her at the threshold with a degree of
+politeness which couldn't have been carried further, inasmuch as she
+had to open the door before he could reach her. He took her hand,
+which, in her respect and awe of him, she half permitted, and kissed it
+stooping, but twisted his eyes up to her face, and said:
+
+"Meddem! I have had this beautiful hand in mine for several days."
+
+It now appeared, from what he said, that he was the identical
+flesh-coloured gentleman who had stolen her hand with his drawing-pen
+when she had had it out of the window; because he had been anxious to
+get a pretty Dolce's hand for a three-quarter portrait of the young
+lady he was engaged to, and hadn't known what to do; her _head_ he was
+doing from memory. He then took off his gloves, in which alone he had
+dared as yet to touch her (as many of the early Christians used only to
+touch the Eucharist in gloves from reverence therefor), displaying the
+fires of his rings and the snow of his skin. To preserve the whiteness
+of the latter from the sun, he hardly ever took his gloves off, except
+in winter when the sun has scarcely power to burn.
+
+The Kuhschnappel aristocracy, particularly its younger members, give a
+willing obedience to the commandment which Christ gave to His apostles,
+to "greet no man by the way," and the Venner observed the required
+degree of incivility towards the husband, though not by any means to
+the wife, towards whom his condescension was infinite. An inborn
+characteristic of Siebenkæs's satirical disposition was a fault which
+he had of being too polite and kindly with the lower classes, and too
+forward and aggressive with the upper. He had not as yet sufficient
+knowledge of the world to enable him to determine the precise angle at
+which his back should bend before the various great ones of the place,
+wherefore he preferred to go about bolt upright, though he did so
+against the promptings of his kind heart. An additional cause was, that
+the profession to which he belonged being of a belligerent nature, has
+a tendency to embolden those who belong to it; an advocate has the
+advantage of never requiring to employ one himself, and consequently he
+is often inclined to treat even the grandest folks with some amount of
+coolness, unless they happen to be judges or clients, at the disposal
+of both of which classes of society his best services are at all times
+ready to be placed. Notwithstanding which, it generally happened that,
+in Siebenkæs's kindly feeling to all mankind, his moveable bridge got
+shoved down so low under his tightened strings that the notes given out
+by them became quite low and soft. On the present occasion, however, it
+was much more difficult to be polite to the Venner (whose designs as
+regarded Lenette he was compelled to see) than to be rude to him.
+
+Moreover, he had an inborn detestation for dressy men although--just,
+the contrary feeling for dressy women--so that he would often sit and
+stare for a long time at the little Fugel-mannikins of dress in the
+fashion journals, just to get properly angry at them; and he would
+assure the Kuhschnappelers that there was nobody whom he should so
+delight in playing practical jokes upon as on such a mannikin--yea, in
+insulting him, or even doing him an injury (to the extent of a good
+cudgelling). Also it had always been a source of delight to him that
+Socrates and Cato walked barefoot about in the market-place; going
+_bareheaded_, on the other hand (_chapeau bas_), he did not like half
+so much.
+
+But, ere he could utter himself otherwise than by making faces, the
+wooden-head of a Venner stroked his sprouting beard, and in a distant
+manner graciously offered himself to the advocate in the capacity of
+cardinal protector or mediator in the Blaise inheritance business; this
+he did, of course, partly to blind the advocate's eyes, and partly to
+impress upon him how immeasurably inferior was his station. The latter,
+however, shuddering at the idea of taking a gnome of this kind for
+paraclete and household angel, said to him (but in Latin)--
+
+"In the first place I must _insist_ that my wife shall not hear a
+syllable about that insignificant potato quarrel. And moreover, in any
+legal question I scorn and despise anybody's assistance but a legal
+friend's, and in this instance _I_ am my own legal friend. I fill an
+official position here in Kuhschnappel; it is true, the official
+position by no means fills _me_." The latter play upon words he
+expressed by means of a Latin one, which displayed such an unusual
+amount of linguistic ability, that I should almost like to quote it
+here. The Venner, however, who could neither construe the pun nor the
+rest of the speech with the ease with which we have read it here,
+answered at once (so as to escape without exposing his ignorance) in
+the same language, "Imo, immo," which he meant for yes. Firmian then
+went on, in German, saying, "Guardian and ward, intimate as their
+connection should be, in this case came into contact to an extent
+almost too great to be pleasant; although, no doubt, there _have_ been
+cases before where one cousin has cozened another:[24] however, the
+very members of ecclesiastical councils have come to fisticuffs before
+now, _e. g_. at Ephesus in the fifteenth century. Indeed, the Abbot
+Barsumas and Dioscurus, Bishop of Alexandria, men of position,
+pummelled the good Flavian on that very occasion till he was as dead as
+a herring.[25] And this was on a Sunday too, a day on which, in these
+absurd old times, a sacred truce was put to quarrels and differences of
+every description; though now, Sundays and feast-days are the very days
+when the peace is broken; the public-house bells and the tinkling of
+the glasses ring the truce _out_, and people pummel each other, so that
+the law gets _her_ finger into the pie. In old days, people multiplied
+the number of saints' days for the sake of stopping fights, but the
+fact is that everybody connected with the legal profession, Herr von
+Meyern (who _must_ have _something_ to live upon), ought to petition
+that a peaceable working-day or two might be abolished now and then, so
+that the number of rows might be increased, and with them the fines and
+the fees in like ratio. Yet who thinks of such a thing, Venner?"
+
+He was quite safe in spouting the greater part of this before Lenette;
+she had long been accustomed to understanding only a half, a fourth, or
+an eighth part of what he said; as for the _whole_ Venner, she gave
+herself no concern about him. When Meyern had taken his departure with
+frigid politeness, Siebenkæs, with the view of helping to advance him
+in his wife's good opinion, extolled his whole and undivided love for
+the entire female sex (though engaged to be married), and more
+particularly his attachment to that preliminary bride of his, who was
+now in the condemned cell of the prison; this, however, rather seemed
+to have the effect of _lowering_ him in her good opinion.
+
+"Thou good, kind soul, may you always be as faithful to yourself and to
+me!" said he, taking her to his heart. But she didn't _know_ that she
+had been faithful, and said, "to whom should I be _un_faithful?"
+
+From this day onwards to Michaelmas Day, which was the day of the
+borough fair, fortune seems to have led our _pathway_, I mean the
+reader's and mine, through no very special flower-beds to speak of, but
+merely along the smooth green turf of an English lawn, one would
+suppose on purpose that the fair on Michaelmas Day may suddenly arise
+upon our view as some shining, dazzling town starts up out of a valley.
+Very little did occur until then; at least, my pen, which only
+considers itself bound to record incidents of some importance, is not
+very willing to be troubled to mention that the Venner Meyern dropped
+in pretty often at the bookbinder's (who lived under the same roof with
+the Siebenkæses)--he merely came to see whether the 'Liaisons
+Dangereuses' were bound yet.
+
+But that Michaelmas! Truly the world shall remember it. And in fact the
+very eve of it was a time of such a splendid and exquisite quality that
+we may venture to give the world some account of it.
+
+Let the world _read_ the account of this eve of preparation at all
+events, and then give its vote.
+
+On this eve of the fair all Kuhschnappel (as all other places are at
+such a time) was turned into a workhouse and house of industry for
+women; you couldn't have found a woman in the whole town either sitting
+down, or at peace, or properly dressed. Girls the most given to reading
+opened no books but needle-books to take needles out, and the only
+leaves they turned over were paste ones to be put on pies. Scarcely a
+woman took any dinner; the Michaelmas cakes and the coming enjoyment of
+them were the sole mainspring of the feminine machinery.
+
+On these occasions women may be said to hold their exhibitions of
+pictures, the cakes being the altar-pieces. Everyone nibbles at and
+minutely inspects these baked escutcheons of her neighbour's nobility;
+and each has, as it were, her cake attached to her, as a medal is, or
+the lead tickets on bales of cloth, to indicate her value. They
+scarcely eat or drink anything, it is true, thick coffee being their
+consecrated sacrament wine, and thin transparent pastry their wafers;
+only the latter (in their friend's and hostess's houses) tastes best,
+and is eaten almost with fondness when it has turned out hard and stony
+and shot and dagger proof--or is burnt to a cinder--or, in short, is
+wretched from some cause or other; they cheerfully acknowledge all the
+failures of their dearest friends, and try to comfort them by taking
+them to their own houses and treating them to something of a _very
+different_ kind.
+
+As for our Lenette, she, my dear lady reader, has always been a baker
+of such a sort that male connoisseurs have preferred her crust, and
+female connoisseurs her crum, both classes maintaining that no one but
+she (and yourself, dearest) could bake anything like either. The
+kitchen fire was this salamander's second element, for the first and
+native element of this dear nixie was water. To be scouring with sand,
+and squattering and splattering in it, in a great establishment like
+Siebenkæs's (who had devoted all Leibgeber's Ephraimites to the keeping
+of this feast), was quite her vocation. No kiss could be applied to her
+glowing face on such a day--and indeed she had her hands pretty full,
+for at ten o'clock the butcher came bringing more work with him.
+
+The world will be glad (I'm perfectly certain in my own mind) if
+I just give them a very short account of this business--_who_ could
+have done it better, for that matter? The facts of it were these: at
+the beginning of summer the four fellow lodgers had clubbed together
+and bought a cow in poor condition which they had then put up to
+fatten. The bookbinder, the cobbler, the poor's advocate and the
+hairdresser--between whom and his tenants there was this distinction,
+that they owed _their_ rent to _him_, whereas he owed _his_ to his
+creditors--caused to be prepaid and drawn up by a skilful hand (which
+was attached to the arm of Siebenkæs) an authentic instrument (here
+KOLBE the word-purist will snarl at poor innocent me in his usual
+manner for employing foreign words in a document based on the Roman
+law) relative to the life and death of the cow; in which instrument the
+four contracting parties aforesaid--who all stood attentively round the
+document, he who was sitting and drawing it excepted--bound and engaged
+themselves in manner following, that is to say, that--
+
+1stly. Each of the four parties interested, as aforesaid, in the said
+cow might and should have the privilege of milking her alternately.
+
+2ndly. That this Cooking or Fattening Society might and should defray
+from a common treasury chest the price of said cow, the cost of the
+carriage of implements and provisions, and maintenance generally of the
+same; and
+
+3rdly. That the allied powers as aforesaid should not only on the day
+before Michaelmas, the 28th September, 1785, slaughter the said cow,
+but further that each quarter of the same should then and there be
+further divided into four quarters, conformably to the lex agraria, for
+partition among the said parties to the said contract.
+
+Siebenkæs prepared four certified copies of this treaty, one for each;
+he never wrote anything with graver pleasure. All that now remained to
+be performed of the contract by the house association of our four
+evangelists, who had collectively adopted as their armorial crest or
+emblematic animal, one single joint-stock beast, namely, the female of
+that of Saint Luke--was the third article of it.
+
+However, I know the learned classes are panting for my fair, so I shall
+only dash down a hurried sketch of my Man-and-Animal piece (Kolbe of
+course goes on taking me to task).
+
+That Septembriseur, the butcher, did his part of the business well,
+though it was at the close of Fructidor--the four messmates looking on
+throughout the operation, as also did old Sabine, who did a good deal,
+and got something for it. The quadruple alliance regaled itself on the
+slain animal at a general picnic, to which each contributed something
+in order that the butcher might be included gratis; and it is
+undeniable that one member of the league, whom I shall name hereafter,
+attended this picnic in a frame of mind and in a costume barely serious
+enough for the occasion. The slaughter confederation then set to
+working its division sum, according to the number of its members, and
+the golden calf round which their dance was executed was cut, up with
+the appropriate heraldic cuts. Then the whole thing was over. I think I
+can say nothing more laudatory of the manner in which the whole process
+of zootomic division was carried out than what Siebenkæs, an interested
+party, said himself, viz., "It's to be wished that the twelve tribes of
+Israel, as well as, in later times, the Roman empire, had been divided
+into as many and as fair divisions as our cow and Poland have been."
+
+I shall be doing ample justice to the cow's embonpoint if I merely
+mention that Fecht the cobbler uttered a panegyric which commenced with
+the most lively and vigorous oaths, and the statement that she was an
+(adjective) bag of skin and bones, and ended with an assurance, uttered
+in mild and pious accents that Heaven had indeed favoured the poor
+beast, and "blessed us unworthy sinners above measure." A frolicsome
+cult by nature, he had had the heavy coach-harness of pietism put on to
+him, and was consequently obliged to keep softening down the "strong
+language" which came naturally to him into the pious sighs appropriate
+to his "converted state." And it was to the frame of mind and the
+costume of this very FECHT that I made allusion above as being barely
+suitable to the occasion, for I'm sorry to say he had no breeches on
+him the whole day of this great slaughter, but ran up and down the
+slaughter-house in a white frieze frock of his wife's, having a strange
+general effect of looking something like his own better half. However,
+the members of the association didn't take any offence; he couldn't
+help it, because while he was going about got up in this Amazon's
+_demi-negligée_, and presenting this hermaphrodite appearance, his own
+black-leather leg-cases were in the dye pot, being prepared for a
+reissue.
+
+The poor's advocate had begged Lenette (about a quarter past four in
+the afternoon) not to go on working herself to death, and never to mind
+bothering about any supper, as he was going to be miserly for once,
+save himself a supper tonight, and sup upon eighteen penn'orth of
+pastry: but the busy soul kept running about brushing and sweeping, and
+by six o'clock they were both lying resting in the leather arms of--a
+big easy chair (for he had no flesh and she no bones), and looking
+around them with that expression of tranquil happiness which you may
+see in children while eating, at the room in its state of mathematical
+order, at the way in which everything in it was shining, at the pastry
+new-moon-crescents in their hands, and at the liquid burnished gold (or
+rather foilgold[26]) of the setting sun creeping up and up upon the
+gleaming tin dishes. There they rested and reposed like cradled
+children, with the screeching, clattering, twelve herculean labours of
+the rest of the people of the house going on all round them; and the
+clearness of the sky and the newly cleaned windows added a full
+half-hour to the length of the day; the bell-hammer, or tuning-hammer
+of the curfew bell gently let down the pitch of their melodious wishes
+till they lapsed into dreams.
+
+At ten o'clock they woke up and went to bed...!
+
+I quite enjoy this little starry night picture myself; though my head
+has reflected it all glimmery and out of focus, as the gilt hemisphere
+of my watch does the evening sun when I hold it up to it. Evening is
+the time when we weary, hunted men long to be at rest; it is for the
+evening of the day, for the evening of the year (autumn), and for the
+evening of life, that we lay up our hard-earned harvests, and with such
+eager hopes! But hast thou never seen in fields, when the crops were
+gathered, an image and emblem of thyself--I mean the autumn daisy, the
+flower of harvest; she delays her blossom till the summer is past and
+gone, the winter snows cover her before her fruit appears, and it is
+not till the--coming spring that that fruit is ripe!
+
+But see how the roaring, dashing surges of the fair-day morning come
+beating upon our hero's bedposts! He comes into the white, shining
+room, which Lenette had stolen out of bed like a thief before midnight
+to wash while he was in his first sleep, and had sanded all over like
+an Arabia; in which manner she had her own way while he had his. On a
+fair-day morning I recommend everybody to open the window and lean out,
+as Siebenkæs did, to watch the rapid erection and hiring of the wooden
+booths in the market-place, and the falling of the first drops of the
+coming deluge of people, only let the reader observe that it wasn't by
+my advice that my hero, in the very arrogance of his wealth (for there
+were samples of every kind of pastry which the house contained on a
+table behind him), called down to many of the little green aristocratic
+caterpillars whom he saw moving along in the street with even greater
+arrogance than his own, and whose natural history he felt inclined to
+learn by a look at their faces.
+
+"I say, sir, will you just be good enough to look at that house, that
+one there--do you notice anything particular?"
+
+If the caterpillar lifted up its physiognomy, he could peruse and study
+it at his ease,--which was of course his object.
+
+"You don't notice anything particular?" he would ask.
+
+When the insect shook its head, he concurred with it, and did the same
+up at the window, saying:
+
+"No, of course not! I've been looking at it for the last twelve months
+myself, and can't see anything particular about it; but I didn't choose
+to believe my own eyes."
+
+Giddypated Firmian! Your seething foam of pleasure may soon drop down
+and disappear--as it did that Saturday when the cards were left. As
+yet, however, his little drop of must which he has squeezed out of the
+forenoon hours was foaming and sparkling briskly. The landlord moved at
+a gallop, casting (with his powder-sowing machine) seed into a fruitful
+soil. The bookbinder conveyed his goods (consisting partly of empty
+manuscript books, partly of still emptier song books, partly of
+"novelties," in almanacs) to the fair by land-carriage in a
+wheelbarrow, which he had to make two journeys with in going, but only
+one in returning in the evening, because then he had got rid of his
+almanacs to purchasers and to sellers (almanacs are the greatest of all
+novelties, or pieces of news--for there is nothing in all the long
+course of time so new as the new year). Old Sabel had set up her East
+India house, her fruit garner, and her cabinet of tin rings at the town
+gate; she wouldn't have let that warehouse of hers go to her own
+brother at a lower figure than half-a-sovereign. The cobbler put a
+stitch in no shoe on this St. Michael's Day except his wife's.
+
+Suck away, my hero, at your nice bit of raffinade sugar of life, and
+empty your forenoon sweetstuff spoon, not troubling your head about the
+devil and his grandmother, although the pair of them should be thinking
+(after the nature of them) about getting a bitter potion, even a poison
+cup, made ready and handing it to you.
+
+But his greatest enjoyment is still to come, to wit, the numberless
+beggar people. I will describe this enjoyment, and so distribute it.
+
+A fair is the high mass which the beggars of all ranks and classes
+attend; when it is still a day or two off, all the footsoles that have
+nothing to walk upon but compassionate hearts, are converging towards
+the spot like so many radii, but on the morning of the fair-day itself
+the whole annual congress of beggardom and the column of cripples are
+fairly on the march. Anyone who has seen _Fŭrth_, or been in
+Elwangen during P. Gassner's government, may cut these few leaves out
+of his copy; but no one else has any idea of it till I proceed and lead
+him in at the town-gate of Kuhschnappel.
+
+The street choral service and the vocal serenades now commence. The
+blind sing like blinded singing-birds--better, but louder; the lame
+walk; the poor preach the gospel themselves; the deaf and dumb make a
+terrible noise, and ring in the feast with little bells--everybody
+sings his own tune in the middle of everybody else's--a paternoster is
+clattering at the door of every house, and in the rooms inside nobody
+can hear himself swear. Whole cabinets of small coppers are lavished on
+one hand, pocketed on the other. The one-legged soldiery spice their
+ejaculatory prayers with curses, and blaspheme horribly, because people
+don't give them enough--in brief, the borough which had made up its
+mind for a day's enjoyment, is invaded and almost taken by storm by the
+rabble of beggars.
+
+And now the maimed and the diseased begin to appear. Whoever has a
+wooden jury-leg under him, sets it and his long third leg and
+fellow-labourer the crutch, in motion towards Kuhschnappel, and drives
+and plants his sharp-pointed timber toe into moist earth there in the
+vicinity of the town-gate, in hopes of its thriving and bearing fruit.
+Whosoever has no arms or hands left, stretches both out for an alms.
+Those to whom Heaven has entrusted the beggars' talent, disease, above
+all paralysis, the beggars' _vapeurs_--trades with his talent, and the
+body appertaining to it, levying contributions with it on the whole and
+the sound. People who might stand as frontispieces to works on surgery
+and medicine, quite as appropriately as at city gates, take up their
+position near the latter and announce what they lack, which is, first
+and foremost, other people's cash. There are plenty of legs, noses, and
+arms in Kuhschnappel, but a great many more people. There is one most
+extraordinary fellow--(to be admired at a distance, though impossible
+to be equalled--looked upon with envy, though indeed only by such
+blotting-paper souls as can never see supreme excellence without
+longing to possess it); there's only half of him there, because the
+other half's in his grave already, everything you could call legs
+having been shot clean away; and these shots have placed him in a
+position at once to arrogate and assume to himself the primacy and
+generalship-in-chief of the cripples, and be drawn about on a triumphal
+car as a kind of demigod, whose soul, in place of a corporeal garment,
+has on merely a sort of cape and short doublet. "A soldier," said
+Siebenkæs, "who is still afflicted with one leg, and who on that ground
+expostulates with fate, inquiring of her, 'Why am _I_ not shot to
+pieces like that cripple, so that I might make as much in the day as he
+does?' seems to forget that on the other side of the question there are
+thousands of other warriors besides himself who haven't even _one_
+wooden leg (let alone more), but are totally unprovided with even
+_that_ fire- and begging-certificate; moreover, that however many of
+his limbs he might have been relieved of by bullets, he might still
+keep on asking, 'Why not more?'"
+
+Siebenkæs was merry over the poor because they are merry over
+themselves; and he never would kick up a politico-economical row about
+their occasionally tippling and guzzling a little too much,--when, for
+instance, a whole lazarette-wagon, or ambulance-load of them, halting
+at some shepherd's hut, they get down, and go in, and their plasters,
+their martyrs' crowns, their spiked girdles and hair-shirts come off,
+leaving nothing but a brisk human being who has left off sighing just
+for a minute; or--since what everybody works for is, not merely to
+live, but to live a little better now and then--when the beggar too has
+something a little better than his everyday fare, and when the cripple
+pulls the goddess of joy into his boarded dancing-barn to dance with
+him as his partner, and her hot mask falls off in the waltz (as for
+_our_ ball-rooms, it never falls off in them).
+
+About 11 o'clock, the devil, as I have half hinted already, dropped a
+handful of blue-bottle flies into Firmian's wedding soup--to wit, Herr
+Rosa von Meyern, who graciously intimated his aristocratic intention of
+coming to call that afternoon, "because there was such a good view of
+the market-place." People of impecunious gentility, who can't issue
+orders in any houses but their own, construct _in_ their own, with much
+ease, loopholes whence they can fire upon the enemy who makes his
+attack from--within. The advocate had a piece of rudeness towards the
+Venner to put into either scale of his balance of justice, so as to
+determine which was the least of the two. The one was, to let him be
+told he might stay where he was; the other, to let him in, and then
+behave just as though the noodle were up in the moon. Siebenkæs chose
+the latter as the smaller.
+
+Women, good souls, have always to carry and hold up the Jacob's
+ladder by which the male sex mount into the blue æther and into the
+evening-red; this call of the Venner came as an extra freight loaded on
+to Lenette's two burden-poles of arms. The laving of all moveable
+property, and the aspersion of all immoveable, recommenced. Meyern, the
+false lover of the poor child-murderess, Lenette detested with all her
+heart; at the same time, all her polishing machinery was at once set
+agoing on the room, indeed, I think women dress themselves more and
+with greater pains for their lady-enemies than for their lady-friends.
+
+The advocate went up and down, all behung with long chains of
+ratiocination, like a ghost, and would fain have succeeded in imbuing
+her with the idea that she shouldn't give herself the slightest bother
+of any kind about the nincompoop. "It was no good," she said, "what
+would he think of me?" It was not until having eliminated from the room
+as a piece of crudity his old ink-bottle, into which he had only that
+minute put ink-powder to dissolve and make ink for the 'Selection from
+the Devil's Papers,' she was about to lay hands on that holy ark, his
+writing-table--that the head of the house ramped up--on his hind legs,
+pointing with his fore paw to the line of demarcation.
+
+Rosa appeared! Nobody who had just a little soft place in his heart
+could really have cursed this youngster, or beaten him into a jelly;
+one rather got to feel a kind of a liking for him, between his pranks.
+He had white hair on his head and on his chin, and was soft all over;
+and had stuff like milk instead of blood in his veins, like the
+insects, just as poisonous plants have generally white milky juice. He
+was of a very forgiving nature, especially towards women, and often
+shed more tears himself in an evening at the theatre than he had caused
+many whom he had ruined to let fall. His heart was really not made of
+stone, or lapis infernalis, and if he prayed for a certain time, he
+grew pious during the process and sought out the most time-honoured of
+religious formularies to give in his adhesion to them then and there.
+Thunder was to him a watchman's rattle, arousing him from the sleep of
+sin. He loved to take the needy by the hand, especially if the hand was
+pretty. All things considered, he may perhaps get to heaven sooner or
+later; for, like many debtors in the upper circles of society, he
+doesn't pay his play-debts, and he also has in his heart an inborn
+duel-prohibition against shooting and hacking. As yet he is not a man
+of his word; and if he were poorer, he would steal without a moment's
+hesitation. Like a lap-dog, he lies down wagging his tail at the feet
+of people of any importance, but tugs women by the skirts, or shows his
+teeth and snarls at them.
+
+Pliant water-weeds of this sort fall away from the very slightest
+satiric touch, and you can't manage to hit them with one, richly as
+they deserve it, because its effect is only proportionate to the
+resistance it meets with. Siebenkæs would have been better pleased had
+Von Meyern only been a little rougher and coarser, for it is just these
+yielding, pitiful, sapless, powerless sort of creatures that filch away
+good fortune, hard cash, feminine honour, good appointments and fair
+names, and are exactly like the ratsbane or arsenic, which, when it is
+good and pure, must be quite white, shining and transparent.
+
+Rosa appeared, I have said, but oh! lovely to behold beyond expression!
+His handkerchief was a great Molucca of perfume; his two side locks
+were two small ones. On his waistcoat he had a complete animal kingdom
+painted (as the fashion of the day was), or Zimmermann's Zoological
+Atlas. His little breeches and his little coat, and every thing
+about him salted the women of the house into Lottish salt-pillars,
+merely in passing them by on his way upstairs, I must, say, though,
+that what dazzle me personally, are the rings which emboss six of his
+fingers,--there were profile portraits, landscapes, stones, even
+beetle-wing covers all employed in this gold-shoeing of his fingers.
+
+We may quite properly apply to the human hand the expression "it was
+shod with rings like a horse's hoof," it has been long applied to the
+horse's hoof itself, and Daubenton has proved, by dissections, that the
+latter contains all the different parts of the human hand. The use of
+these hand or finger manacles is quite proper and permissible; indeed
+rings are indispensable to the fingers of those who ought by rights to
+have them in their noses. According to the received opinion, these
+metal spavins, or excrescences of the fingers, were only invented to
+make pretty hands ugly, as a kind of chain and nose-rings to keep
+vanity in check; so that fists which are ugly by nature can easily
+dispense with these disfigurements. I should like to know whether there
+is anything in another idea of mine bearing on this subject. It is
+this. Pascal used to wear a great iron ring with sharp spines on it
+round his naked body, that he might always be ready to punish himself
+for any vain thought which might occur to him by giving this ring a
+slight pressure; now is it not perhaps the case that these smaller and
+prettier rings in a similar way chastise any vain thoughts which may
+occur, by slightly, but frequently hurting? They _seem_ at least to be
+worn with some such object, for it is exactly the people who suffer
+most from vanity who wear the greatest quantities of them, and move
+about their beringed hands the most.
+
+Unwished-for visits often pass off better than others; on this occasion
+everyone got on pretty comfortably. Siebenkæs of course was in his own
+house--and behaved himself accordingly. He and the Venner looked out of
+the window at the people in the market-place. Lenette, in accordance
+with her upbringing, and the manners and customs of the middle classes
+of small towns, didn't venture to be otherwise than silent, or at the
+most to take an exceedingly subordinate, obligato, accompanying part in
+the concert of a conversation between men; she fetched and carried in
+and out, and, in fact, sat most of the time down stairs with the other
+women. It was in vain that the courteous, gallant Rosa Everard, tried
+upon her his wonted wizard spells to root women to a given spot. To her
+husband he complained that there was little real refinement in
+Kuhschnappel, and not one single amateur theatre where one could act,
+as there was in Ulm. He had to order his new books and latest fashions
+from abroad.
+
+Siebenkæs in return expressed to him merely his enjoyment over
+the--beggars in the market-place. He made him notice the little boys
+blowing red wooden trumpets, loud enough to burst the drum of the ear,
+if not to overthrow the walls of Jericho. But he added, with proper
+thoughtfulness, that he shouldn't omit to notice those other poor
+devils who were collecting the waste bits of split wood in their caps
+for fuel. He asked him if, like other members of the chamber, he
+disapproved of lotteries and lotto, and whether he thought it was very
+bad for the Kuhschnappel common people's morals that they should be
+crowding about an old cask turned upside down, with an index fixed to
+the bottom of it which revolved round a dial formed of gingerbread and
+nuts, and where the shareholders, for a small stake, carried off from
+the banker of the establishment, a greedy old harridan of a woman, a
+nut or a ginger cake. Siebenkæs took pleasure in the little, because in
+his eyes it was a satirical, caricaturing diminishing mirror of
+everything in the shape of burgherly pomposity. The Venner saw no
+entertainment whatever in double-meaning allusions of the kind; but
+indeed the advocate never dreamt of amusing anybody but himself with
+them. "I may surely speak out whatever I like to myself," he once said;
+"what is it to me if people choose to listen behind my back, or before
+my face either?"
+
+At length he went down among the people in the market-place, not
+without the full concurrence of the Venner, who expected at last to be
+able to have some rational conversation with the wife. Now that Firmian
+was gone, Everard begun to feel in his element, swimming in his own
+native pike-pond as it were. As an introductory move he constructed for
+Lenette a model of her native town; he knew a good many streets and
+people in Augspurg, and had often ridden through the Fuggery, and it
+seemed only yesterday, he said, that he saw her there working at a
+lady's hat, beside a nice old lady, her mother he should think. He took
+her right hand in his (in an incidental manner), she allowing him to do
+so out of gratefulness for calling up such pleasant memories; he
+pressed it--then suddenly let it go to see if she mightn't just have
+returned the pressure the least bit in the world, in the confusion of
+fingers as it were--or should try to _recover_ the lost pressure. But
+he might as well have pressed Götz von Berlichingen's iron hand with
+his thievish thumb as her warm one. He next came upon the subject of
+her millinery work, and talked about cap and bonnet fashions like a man
+who knew what he was talking about; whereas when Siebenkæs mixed
+himself up with these questions, he displayed no real knowledge of the
+subject at all. He promised her two consignments, of patterns from Ulm,
+and of customers from Kuhschnappel. "I know several ladies who _must_
+do what I ask them," he said, and showed her the list of his
+engagements for the coming winter balls in his pocket-book; "I shan't
+dance with them if they don't give you an order." "I hope it won't come
+to that," said Lenette (with many meanings). Finally, he was obliged to
+ask her to let him see her at work for a little, his object here being
+to weaken the enemy by effecting a diversion of her forces--her eyes
+being occupied with her needle, she could only have her ears at liberty
+to observe him with. She blushed as she took two bodkins and stuck one
+of them into the round red little pincushion of--her mouth; this was
+more than he could really allow, it was so very dangerous--it formed a
+hedge against himself--and she might swallow either the stiletto in
+question, or at all events some of the poisonous verdigris off it. So
+he drew this lethal weapon with his own hand out of its sheath in her
+lips, scratching the cherry mouth a little, or not at all--as he loudly
+lamented--in the process, however. A venner of the right sort considers
+himself liable in a case of this kind for the fees and expenses
+consequent upon the accident; Everard, in his liberality, took
+out his English patent pomade, smeared some on to her left forefinger,
+and applied the salve to the invisible wound with the finger as a
+spatula--in doing which he was obliged to take hold of her whole hand
+as the _handle_ of the spatula, and frequently squeeze it
+unconsciously. He stuck the unfortunate stiletto itself into his shirt
+front, giving her his own breastpin instead, and exposing his own
+tender white breast to--the cold. I particularly beg persons who have
+had experience in this description of service to give their opinion
+with firm impartiality on my hero's conduct, and, sitting in court
+martial on him, to point out such of his movements and dispositions as
+they may consider to have been ill-advised.
+
+Now that she was wounded, poor thing, he wouldn't let her go on
+working, but only show him her finished productions. He ordered a copy
+of one of them for Madame von Blaise. He begged her to put it on and
+let him see it on her--and he set it himself just as Madame von Blaise
+would wear it. By heaven! it was better even than he had thought; he
+swore it would suit Madame von Blaise quite as well, as she was just
+the same height as Lenette. This was all stuff and nonsense, really the
+one was taller by quite half a nose than the other. Lenette said so
+herself, she had seen Madame von Blaise at church. Rosa stuck to his
+own opinion, and swore by his soul and salvation (for in cases of the
+kind he was given to profane language), and by the sacrament, that
+he had measured himself with her a hundred times, and that she was
+half-an-inch taller than himself. "By heaven!" he said, suddenly
+jumping up, "of course I carry her measure about with me, like her
+tailor; all that need be done is that _you_ and _I_ measure ourselves
+together."
+
+I shall not here withhold from little girls a golden rule of war
+made by myself, "Don't argue long with a man, whatever it may be
+about--warmth is always warmth, even if it only be warmth of
+argument--one forgets one's self, and ultimately takes to proving by
+syllogistic figures, and this is just what the enemy wants--he converts
+these figures into poetical figures--ultimately even into plastic
+figures."
+
+Lenette, a little giddy with the rapid whirl of events, good naturedly
+stood up to serve as recruit measure for her recruit Rosa; he leant his
+back to hers. "This won't do," he said, "I can't see," and unlocked his
+fingers which had been intertwined together, backwards, over the region
+of her heart. He turned quickly round, stood before her, and embraced
+her gently, so as to determine, by comparing the levels of their eyes,
+whether their brows were an exact height or not. His were glaring quite
+an inch higher up than hers; he clasped her closely and said, turning
+red, "you see you were right; but my mistake was that I added your
+beauty to your height," and in this proximity he pressed his mouth, red
+as sealing-wax, upon her lips, very founts and sources of truth as they
+were.
+
+She was ashamed, annoyed and embarrassed, angry, and ready to cry, but
+had not the courage to let her indignation break out upon a gentleman
+of quality. She didn't speak another word then. He set her and himself
+at the window, and said he would read her some songs, of rather a
+different kind, he hoped, to those which were being hawked down
+in the street. For he was one of the greatest poets in Kuhschnappel,
+although as yet it was not so much that his verses had made him known,
+as that he had made his verses known. His poems, like so many others
+nowadays, were like the muses themselves, children of memory. Every
+old Frankish town has at least its one fashionable fop, a person
+who _fait les honneurs_; and every town, however old, prosaic,
+imperial-judicature-endowed, possesses its genius, its poet, and
+sentimentalist; often both these offices are filled by the same
+individual--as was the case in Kuhschnappel. The greater and likewise
+the lesser house of assembly looked upon Rosa as a mighty genius,
+smitten with the genius-epidemic-fever. This disease is something like
+elephantiasis, of which Troil in his travels in Iceland gives such an
+accurate description in twenty-four letters, and the principal features
+of which are that the patient is exactly like an elephant as to hair,
+cracks, colour, and lumps of the skin, but has not the _power_ of the
+elephant, and lives in a _cold_ climate.
+
+Everard took a touching elegy out of one of his pockets, the left one,
+in which (I mean in the elegy) a noble gentleman, lovesick, sang
+himself to death; and he told her he should like to read it to her, if
+his feelings would let him get through it without breaking down.
+However, the poem shortly drew more than one tear and emotion from its
+owner, and he, to his honour, was constrained to furnish a fresh proof
+of the fact that however manly and cold he and poets of his stamp can
+be to the heaviest sorrows of humanity, they really cannot quite
+contain themselves at the woes of love, but are compelled to weep at
+them. Meanwhile Rosa, who, like swindlers at play, always kept one eye
+upon a reflecting surface of some sort--water, window panes, or
+polished steel for instance, so as to catch a passing glimpse of the
+female countenance from time to time--saw by means of a little mirror
+in one of the rings of his left hand, in which hand he was holding the
+elegy, just a trace or two in Lenette's eyes of the tragic dew left
+there by his poem. So he pulled out of his second pocket a ballad (it
+is, no doubt, printed long ago) in which an innocent child murderess,
+with a tearful adieu to her lover, throws herself upon a sword. This
+ballad (very unlike his other poetical children) had real poetic merit,
+for luckily (for the poem at least) he was a lover of that kind
+himself, so that he could speak _from_ the heart _to_ the heart. It is
+not easy to portray the emotion and the melting pitying tears on
+Lenette's face; all her heart rose to her tear-dimmed eyes.
+
+It was an experience utterly new to her to be thus agitated by a
+combination of truth and fiction.
+
+The Venner threw the ballad into the fire, and himself into Lenette's
+arms, and cried--
+
+"Oh! you sympathising, noble, holy creature!"
+
+I cannot paint the amazement with which, completely unprepared for and
+incomprehensive of this transition from crying to kissing, she shoved
+him away. This made little impression on him; he was on his high
+horse and said he must have some souvenir of this "sacred entrancing
+moment"--only a little lock of her hair. Her humble station, his
+high-flown language, and the fact that she was perfectly unable to form
+the slightest idea what use her hair would be to him, even supposing
+she gave enough to stuff a pillow--all this put into her head the
+foolish idea that he wanted it to perform some magical rite with, such
+as putting her under a love spell, or something of the sort.
+
+He might have stabbed himself there and then before her, hewn himself
+in pieces, impaled himself alive, she wouldn't have interfered; she
+might indeed have shed her _blood_ to save him, but not a single _hair_
+of her head.
+
+He had still one resource _in petto_--he had really never met with such
+a case as this before; he lifted up his hand and vowed that he would
+get Herr von Blaise to recognise her husband as his nephew, and pay
+over his inheritance--and that with the greatest ease, because he would
+threaten to jilt his niece unless he did it--if she would just take the
+scissors and cut off a _little_ hair memorial, no bigger even than the
+fourth part of a moustache.
+
+She knew nothing about the business of the inheritance, and he was
+consequently obliged, to the great detriment of his enthusiastic state,
+to give a prosaic, detailed account of the _species facti_ of the whole
+of that law suit. By great good fortune he had still in his pocket the
+number of the 'Gazette' in which the inheritance chamber's inquiry as
+to the advocate's existence appeared in print, and he was able to put
+it into her hands. And now this plundered wife began to cry bitterly,
+not for the loss of the money, but because her husband had told her
+nothing about it all this time, and still more because she couldn't
+quite make out what her own name really was, or whether she was married
+to a Siebenkæs or to a Leibgeber. Her tears flowed faster and faster,
+and in her passion of grief she would have let the deceiver before her
+have all the pretty hair on her head, had not an accidental
+circumstance burst the whole chain of events, just as he was kneeling
+and imploring her for one little lock.
+
+But we must first look after her husband a little, and see how he is
+getting on, and whither he bends his steps. At first among the market
+stalls; for the many-throated roaring, and the Olla Podrida of cheap
+pleasures, and the displayed pattern cards of all the rags out of, and
+upon, which we human clothes moths construct our covering cases and our
+abodes--all these caused his mind to sink deep into a sea of
+humoristic-melancholy reflections concerning this mosaic picture of a
+life of ours, made up as it is of so many little bits, many-tinted
+moments, motes, atoms, drops, dust, vapours. He laughed, and listened,
+with an emotion incomprehensible by many of my readers, to a ballad
+singer, bawling, with his rhapsodist's staff in his right hand pointed
+at a big, staring picture of a horrible murder, and his left full of
+smaller, printed pictures, for sale, in which the misdeed and the
+perpetrator of it were displayed to the German public in no brighter
+colours than those of poetry. Siebenkæs bought two copies, and put them
+in his pocket, to read in the evening.
+
+This tragic murder picture evoked in the background of his fancy that
+of the poor girl he had defended, and the gallows, on to which fell
+those burning tears which had flowed from his wounded heart--that heart
+which nobody on earth, save one, understood--when last it had been
+lacerated. He left the noisy market-place, and sought all-peaceful
+nature, and that isolatorium, destined alike for friendship and for
+guilt, the gallows. When we pass from the stormy uproar of a fair into
+the still expanse of wide creation, entering into the dim aisles of
+nature's hushed cathedral, the strange sudden calm, is to the soul as
+the caressing touch of some beloved hand.
+
+With a sad heart he climbed up to the well-known spot, whose ugly name
+I shall omit, and from these ruins he gazed around upon creation, as if
+he were the last of living beings. Neither in the blue sky, nor upon
+the wide earth, was there voice or sound; nothing but one forlorn
+cricket, chirping in monosyllables, among the bare furrows, where
+the harvest had been cleared away. The troops of birds flocking
+together with discordant cries flew to the green nets spread upon the
+ground--and not to meet the green spring far away. Above the meadows,
+where all the flowers were withered and dead, above the fields, where
+the corn ears waved no more, floated dim phantom forms, all pale and
+wan, faint pictures of the past. Over the grand eternal woods and hills
+a biting mist was draped in clinging folds, as if all nature, trembling
+into dust, must vanish in its wreaths. But one bright thought pierced
+these dark fogs of nature and the soul, turning them to a white
+gleaming mist, a dew all glittering with rainbow colours, and gently
+lighting upon flowers. He turned his face to the north-east, to the
+hills which lay between him and his other heart, and up from behind
+them rose, like an early moon in harvest, a pale image of his friend.
+The spring, when he should go to him and see him once more, was at work
+already preparing for him a fair broad pathway thither, all rich with
+grass and flowers. Ah! how we play with the world about us, so quickly
+dressing it all with the webs which our own spirits spin.
+
+The cloudless sky seemed sinking closer to the dusky earth, bright with
+a softer blue. And though a whole long winter lay between, the music of
+the coming spring already came, faint and distant, to his ear; it was
+there in the evening chime of the cattle bells down in the meadows, in
+the birds' wild wood notes in the groves, and in the free streams
+flowing fast away amid the flowery tapestries that were yet to be.
+
+A palpitating chrysalis was hanging near him still in her
+half-shrivelled caterpillar's case, sleeping away the time till the
+flower cups all should open; phantasy, that eye of the soul, saw beyond
+and over the sheaves of autumn the glories of a night in June; every
+autumn-tinted tree seemed blooming once again; their bright coloured
+crests, like magnified tulips, painted the autumn mist with rainbow
+dyes; light breezes of early May seemed chasing each other through the
+fresh, fluttering leaves; they breathed upon our friend, and buoyed him
+up, and rose with him on high, and held him up above the harvest and
+above the hills, till he could see beyond these hills and lands--and
+lo! the springs of all his life to come, lying as yet enfolded in the
+bud, lay spread before his sight like gardens side by side--and there,
+in every spring time, stood his friend.
+
+He left the place, but wandered a long while about the meadows,
+where at this time of year there was no need to hunt carefully for
+footpaths--chiefly that his eyes might not betray where his thoughts
+had been to all the market people who were to be met. It was of little
+use--for in certain moods the torn and wounded heart, like injured
+trees, bleeds on and on, and at the slightest touch.
+
+He shunned eye-witnesses, such as Rosa above all, for this reason, that
+he was (I am sorry to have to say it) in just one of those moods when,
+whether from modesty or from vividness of feeling, he was most disposed
+to mask his emotion under the semblance of temper. At last a weapon of
+victory came to his hand, the thought that he had to apologize and make
+amends to his guest for so long and so uncourteous an absence.
+
+When he got home what a strange state of matters! The old guest
+gone--another there in his place--and near the latter his wife in
+tears. When he came into the room, Lenette went to one of the windows,
+and a fresh torrent of tears fell down. "Madame Siebenkæs," said the
+Schulrath, continuing his address to her, and keeping hold of her hand,
+"submit yourself to the will of God, I beseech you; nothing has
+happened but what can be put to rights without difficulty. I am willing
+to concede you a sorrow of the heart--but it must be a restrained and a
+subdued one."
+
+Lenette looked out of the window, not at her husband.
+
+The Schulrath related, in the first place, all that I have already
+given my account of (Firmian, listening to him and looking at him, took
+the glowing hand of Lenette, whose face was still averted), and then
+continued--
+
+"When I came in, merciful Heavens, there was his lordship on his knees
+before Madame Siebenkæs, with carnal tears, and--I am constrained to
+have the gravest suspicions--a design upon her precious honour!
+However, I raised him up, without the least ceremony, and I said to
+him, with the boldness of St. Paul himself--for which I am ready to
+answer before God and man--'Your Lordship, are these the doctrines
+which I inculcated into your Lordship when I was your private tutor; is
+it Christian conduct to go down upon your knees in such a manner? Fie,
+for shame, Herr von Meyern. Fie, for shame, Herr von Meyern!'"
+
+Here the Schulrath got into a terrible heat again, and strode up and
+down the room with his hands in the pockets of his plush coat.
+
+Firmian said, "It's a simple matter to set up a scarecrow and plant a
+hedge to keep off a hare like _him_; but what ails _you_, love," he
+said, "and what are you crying so bitterly about?"
+
+She cried more bitterly than ever; when the Schulrath planted his hands
+on his sides, and said to her in much wrath, "Very well, Madame
+Siebenkæs, this is the way of it, is it? This is all the impression my
+good counsel and comforting words have made upon your mind, is it? I
+never should have believed it of you!
+
+"It was all for nothing then (as I am constrained to conclude) that,
+when I had the honour of bringing you here from Augspurg in my
+carriage, I described to you with all the eloquence at my command, the
+blessedness of the married state, before you had had an opportunity of
+learning it by experience; it seems I might just as well have spoken to
+the winds of heaven. Can it really be the case that all that I said to
+you in the carriage simply went in at one ear and out at the other?
+when I told you how happy a wife was in and through her husband, how
+she often could hardly help crying for joy at possessing him--how these
+two had but one heart and one flesh, and shared everything between
+them, joy and sorrow, every morsel of food, every wish and desire, ay
+and the very smallest secrets. Well, well, Madame Siebenkæs, I see the
+Schulrath may keep his breath to cool his porridge."
+
+Upon this she twice wiped and dried her eyes hurriedly, constrained
+herself to look at him very kindly indeed, and with a forced appearance
+of being quite pleased again, and said with a deep sigh, but softly and
+not in a tone of pain, "Oh dear me!"
+
+The Schulrath touched her hand as it hung down with his finger tips in
+a priestly manner, and said--
+
+"But may the Lord be your physician and helper in all your necessities"
+(he could hardly say more, for his tears were coming), "Amen,--which
+is, being interpreted, 'Yea, verily, so mote it be.'" Here he embraced
+and kissed the husband, and this with much warmth, saying, "Send for
+me, if your wife can obtain no consolation--and may God give you both
+strength. O, by the by--the very thing I came here about--the review of
+the Easter programme must be ready by Wednesday--and I am in your debt
+for the eight lines or more you did about that piece of rubbish the
+other day, which you gave such a capital dressing to."
+
+When he had gone, however, Lenette didn't seem so thoroughly consoled
+as might have been expected: she leant at the window sunk in deep,
+hopeless, amazement and reflection. It was in vain that Firmian pointed
+out that of course he wasn't going to change his and her present name
+any more, and that her honour, marriage, and love didn't depend upon a
+wretched name or so up or down, but upon himself and his heart. She
+restrained her tears, but she continued to be troubled and silent the
+whole of the evening.
+
+Now let no one call our good Firmian over jealous or suspicious when,
+having just got well rid of one wretched sacrilegious robber of
+marriage honour, the Venner, the idea of a volcanic eruption which
+might throw stones and ashes all over a great tract of his life
+suddenly occurs to him; what if his friend Stiefel should be really (as
+it almost seems) falling in love with his wife, in all innocence,
+himself. His whole behaviour from the very beginning--his attentions on
+the wedding-day, his constant visits, and even his exasperation with
+the Venner that very day, and his warm feeling and sympathy on the
+occasion altogether, all these were the separate parts of a pretty
+coherent whole, and seemed to indicate a deep and growing affection,
+thoroughly honourable, no doubt, and unperceived by himself. Whether or
+not a spark of it had jumped off into Lenette's heart, and was
+smouldering there, it was impossible as yet to determine; but true and
+good as he knew his wife and his friend to be, his hopes and his fears
+could not but be pretty equally balanced.
+
+Dear hero! Do continue to be one! Destiny, as I see more and more
+clearly as time goes on, seems to have made up her mind gradually to
+join the separate pieces of a drill machine together with which to
+pierce through the diamond of thy stoicism; or else by slow degrees to
+build and fashion English scraping and singeing machines (made out of
+poverty, household worries, law suits, and jealousy) to scrape and
+singe away from thee every rough and ill-placed fibre, as if you were a
+web of finest English cloth. If this should be so, do but come out of
+the mill as splendid a piece of English stuff as was ever brought to
+the Leipzig cloth and book fair, and you will be glorious indeed.
+
+
+
+
+ CHAPTER IV.
+
+ A MATRIMONIAL PARTIE À LA GUERRE--LETTER TO THAT HAIR COLLECTOR,
+ THE VENNER--SELF-DECEPTIONS--ADAM'S MARRIAGE SERMON--SHADOWING
+ AND OVER-SHADOWING.
+
+
+There is nothing which I observe and note down with more scrupulous and
+copious accuracy than two equinoctial periods, the matrimonial equinox
+when, after the honeymoon, the sun enters the constellation Libra (or
+the balance), and the meteorologic vernal equinox; because, by
+observing the weather which prevails at these two periods, I am enabled
+to prognosticate with surprising accuracy the nature of that which will
+characterise the succeeding season. I consider the first storm of the
+spring to be always the most important, and similarly, the first
+matrimonial storm; the others all come from the same quarter.
+
+When the Schulrath was gone, the poor's advocate took his sulky
+house-goddess into his arms, and plied her with every conceivable
+method of proof; with proofs derived from immemorial hearsay,
+partial proofs, evidential proof, proof on oath, and by logical
+deduction--every kind of proof wherewith one can harden one's own
+heart, or soften another's.
+
+But the whole of the evidence he adduced was useless. He might just as
+well have been embracing the cold hard angel at the baptismal font in
+the principal church, his own angel remained quite as cold and silent.
+Furboots had been the tourniquet which stopped the hemorrhage of
+Lenette's open, streaming artery; but his departure had taken the
+German tinder stopping from her eyes and now they streamed unstanched.
+
+Siebenkæs went often to the window, and up and down in the room, that
+she might not see that he was following her example, and that her
+sorrow, little reasonable as it was, infected him by sympathy. We can
+more easily bear, and forgive pain of our own causing than of
+another's. All the following day there was an unendurable silence in
+the house. This was the very first of the beds of the matrimonial
+nursery-garden in which a seed of the apple of discord had been
+planted, and as yet not the faintest rustle of its sap was audible. It
+is not in the first domestic squabble, not till the fourth, tenth,
+ten-thousandth, that a woman can keep perfect silence with her tongue,
+yet make a tremendous noise with her body, and turn every chair which
+she shoves about, and every reel of cotton which she lets fall, into a
+language-machine and fountain of speech, and play her _instrumental_
+music all the louder, because her _vocal_ parts are counting their
+rests. LENETTE WENDELINE moved everything and said everything, as
+softly as if her liege lord had the gout and was lying with cramped
+foot pressed in agony against the trembling bottom board of his bed.
+
+When the third day of this came on, he was vexed and annoyed--and he
+had reason. I beg to say that, for my own part, I should be quite
+prepared to quarrel with my own wife, if I had one--ay, and to do it
+with a will--and that to some purpose, and to bandy words with her, as
+well as letters (though I should prefer the former). But there's one
+thing which would kill me outright, and that would be her keeping up a
+long, dreary, tearful sulking, a thing which, like the sirocco wind,
+ends by blowing out all a man's lights, thoughts, and joys, and at
+length his life itself. Just as we all of us, rather _like_ a violent
+thunderstorm in summer, and think it refreshing rather than otherwise
+in itself--and yet consider it a cursed nuisance on the whole, because
+it's sure to be followed by some days of dreary wet weather. Siebenkæs
+was all the more vexed on this occasion, because he was a man who
+scarcely ever was vexed. As other jurists have reckoned themselves
+among men exempt from torture, so Siebenkæs had long ago fortified
+_himself_ against grief and care, those torture racks of the soul (by
+the help of Epictetus), as effectually as he had the infanticide
+against bodily torture.
+
+The Jews hold that when Messiah comes, hell will be joined on to
+paradise, so as to make a bigger dancing saloon. And all the year long,
+Siebenkæs occupied himself in building and adding on his torture
+chambers and schools of suffering to the entertainment halls of his
+bagatelle, so as to have more room to perform his ballets.
+
+He often said a medal should be struck for any citizen who should be
+three hundred and sixty-five days, five hours, forty-eight minutes and
+fifty-five seconds, without either growling or snarling.
+
+He wouldn't have got that medal himself in the year 1785. On the third
+day, the Saturday, he was so wild at his wife's speechlessness, that he
+was wilder still with that kill-joy of an Everard. For, of course, that
+minnesinger, might come in again at any moment, bringing in his company
+the goddess of discord (who, as directrix and ambassadress, performs
+such important poetical functions in Voltaire's Henriade), and
+introducing her into the homely "Volkslied" of an advocate, by way of a
+_dea ex machina_ to unloose the matrimonial knot, and tie a fresh one
+with the Venner. Siebenkæs accordingly wrote him the following
+academic-controversial document.
+
+
+"May it please your Lordship,
+
+"I take the liberty to lay before your Lordship in this little memorial
+my humble petition,
+
+"That you will be pleased to stay at home, and spare me the honour of
+your visits.
+
+"Should your Lordship find it necessary to become possessed of a
+certain quantity of my wife's hair--the undersigned hereby undertakes
+to cut and deliver the same himself. In the event of your Lordship's
+being minded to exercise a _jus compascui_, or right of free common and
+pasturage in my premises, and appearing therein in person, I shall
+embrace with much pleasure the opportunity then afforded me of plucking
+as many of your Lordship's own hairs as may be requisite to constitute
+a souvenir out of your Lordship's head, by the roots, like monthly
+radishes, with my own hands. While I was in Nürnberg, I used often to
+go and dine in the neighbouring villages (against the will of the
+authorities) with a fine old PRUGEL KNECHT,[27] _i. e_. with a private
+tutor, who had towzed out and excerpted from the heads of three little
+slips of nobility, while he was giving them their lessons, enough silky
+hair to make him a handsome mouse-coloured bag-wig, which the man most
+probably wears to this day. His motive in thus applying himself to the
+production of silk, or rather, his reason for divesting these little
+heads of their exterior foliage, was, that his own beams might the more
+effectually ripen the fruit within, as, for similar reasons, it is
+usual to remove leaves from the vines in August.
+
+ "I have the honour to remain, &c."
+
+
+I shall be very sorry if I cannot manage to get the reader to
+understand that the advocate wrote this biting letter without the
+slightest bitterness of feeling. He had read the brilliant satirical
+writings of the three merry wise men of London, Butler, Swift, and
+Sterne--those three bodies of the satirical giant, Geryon, or three
+furies (Parcæ) of the foolish--to such an extent that, as their
+disciple and follower, he never thought whether it was a biting letter
+or not. In his admiration of the artistic beauties of his composition,
+he lost sight of its meaning; and indeed, if a stinging speech were
+made to himself, he would think nothing of the length of its prickles
+in comparison with its form and shape. I need merely instance his
+'Selection from the Devil's Papers;' the satirical poison bubbles
+and venomous prickles so frequent in that work came from his pen and
+ink--_i. e_. his head only, not from his heart.
+
+I take the opportunity of begging the reader always to infuse the very
+soul of gentleness and kindness into every word and tone he utters
+(because it is our words more than our deeds which make people angry),
+and, more particularly still, into every page he writes. For, truly,
+even if your correspondents have forgiven you an epistolary _pereat_
+long ago, yet the old leaven of ill-will ferments anew, if the
+sorrel-leaf of a letter containing it chances to come to hand again. We
+may, of course, on the other hand, reckon upon a similar immortality
+for a piece of epistolary kindness. Truly, though a long, cutting
+December wind had made my heart stiff and immoveable to everything in
+the shape of kindly feeling for one who, once on a time, used to write
+me absolute Epistles of St. John, tender pastorals of letters, what
+would it matter, if I should but chance to turn up these old letters in
+my letter-treasury of bundles and packets of letters?
+
+The sight of the beloved handwriting, the welcome seal, the kind,
+endearing words, and the pieces of paper where so many a pleasure found
+space to sport and play, would cast the sunshine of the old affection
+upon the frozen heart once more; it would reopen at the memory of the
+dear old time, as some flower that has closed reopens when a sunbeam
+lights upon it, and its only thought--ay, were it but the day before
+yesterday that it had conceived itself mortally offended--would be,
+"Ah! I was too hard upon him (or her) after all." Many of the saints in
+the first century used to drive devils out of the possessed, in a
+somewhat similar way, merely by means of letters.
+
+Furboots came, as if he had been sent for, on the Saturday evening,
+like a Jewish Sabbath. I have often seen a guest serve as cement
+or hefting powder to two better halves in a state of fracture,
+because shame and necessity compelled them to speak and behave
+kindly to each other, at all events while the guest was there.
+Every husband should be provided with two or three visitors
+of this sort, to come in when he's suffering from an attack of
+wife-possessed-too-long-with-the-devil-of-dumbness; as long as the
+people are there, at all events, she must speak, and take the iron
+thief-apple of silence--which grows on the same stalk as the apple of
+discord--out of her mouth.
+
+The Schulrath stood up before Lenette Wendeline as if she were one of
+his school girls, and asked her if she had borne this first cross of
+her married life patiently, and like a worthy sister in suffering of
+the patriarch Job. She drooped her big eyes, wound a thread the length
+of a finger into a white snowball, and breathed deeper. Her husband
+answered for her: "I was her brother in affliction, and bore the
+cross-bar of the burden--I without a murmur, she without a murmur. In
+the twelfth century, the heap of ashes on which Job endured his
+sufferings used still to be shown. Our two chairs are our heaps of
+ashes; there they are still to be seen!"
+
+"Good woman!" said Stiefel, in the softest pianissimo of his pedal
+reed-stop of a masculine voice, and laid his snow-white hand on the
+soft, raven hair upon her forehead. Siebenkæs heard a multiplying
+sympathetic echo of these words in his heart, and laid his arm on
+Lenette's shoulders, who was blushing with pleasure at the honour
+conferred upon her by this kindness of the man in office. Her husband
+softly pressed her left side to his right, and said:--
+
+"She is good, indeed; she is gentle, and quiet, and patient, and only
+too industrious. If the whole tag, rag and bobtail of Hell's army,
+in the shape of the Venner, had only not advanced upon our little
+summer-house of happiness, to knock its roof off, we should have lived
+happy in it for many a day, Mr. Stiefel, far into the winter of our
+lives. For my Lenette is good, and _too_ good for me and for many
+another man." Here Stiefel, in his emotion, surrounded that hand of
+hers which had the skein of thread in it, at the seat of the pulse with
+his fine fingers--the empty hand being in her husband's possession--and
+the Wound Water of our pain, the great drops of which trickled from her
+drooped eyes down her cheeks, where her imprisoned hands could not wipe
+them away, made the two male hearts very tender. And besides, her
+husband could never praise any one long without his eyes overflowing.
+He went on, faster, "Yes, she might have been very comfortable and
+well-off with me, but that my mother's money is kept back from me in
+this terrible way. But, even for all that, I should have made her happy
+without the money, and she me--we never had a word, never a single
+unhappy moment--now had we, Lenette? nothing but peace and love, till
+the Venner came. He has taken a good deal from _us_!"
+
+The Schulrath raised his clenched fist in wrath, and exclaimed, sawing
+the air with it, "You child of hell! you robber-captain and filibuster!
+You silken Catiline and mischief-maker! Does it ever strike you that
+you'll have to answer for this and your other pranks one day? Mr.
+Siebenkæs, this, at all events, I _do_ expect of you, that if ever he
+comes here again asking for hair, you will turn him out by the hair of
+his own head, or hit this fur-maggot (as you call him yourself) across
+the shoulders with a boot-jack, and squeeze his hand with a pair of
+pincers--in fact, the long and the short of it is, _I will not_ have
+him come here any more."
+
+And here Siebenkæs, to cool down his own emotions and other people's,
+mentioned the fact of his having already taken steps in the matter, and
+served the necessary letter of inhibition upon the Venner. Stiefel
+clucked his tongue in a joyful manner, and nodded his head approvingly.
+He considered any person high in office to be a vicegerent of Christ on
+earth, a count to be a demigod, and an emperor as a whole one;--but a
+single one of the deadly sins committed by any of them all would at
+once cost them the whole of his deferential good will,--and a slip in
+Latin grammar, though committed by a head crowned with gold, he would
+at once have done battle with in a whole Latin Easter programme. Men of
+"the world have straight bodies and crooked souls; scholars often have
+neither the one nor the other. The last of Lenette's clouds cleared
+away when she heard that a paper escarpment and _cheval de frise_
+against the Venner had been constructed at her door. "Then he will
+trouble me no more! Thanks be to Heaven! He goes about lying and
+deceiving everyone he comes across."[28]
+
+"We don't employ these words, Madame Siebenkæs, if we care to speak
+grammatically," said Stiefel; "irregular verbs such as '_kriechen_,
+_trügen_, _lügen_,' though they are _verba anomala_, and as such have
+'_kroch_, _log_, _trog_,' and so on in the imperfect tense, are still
+always inflected quite regularly in the present by the best German
+grammarians--although the poets permit themselves a poetical license in
+such cases, as, I am sorry to say, they do in most others--and
+therefore we say, if we care to be grammatically correct, '_lügt_,
+_trügt_, _kriecht_,' &c., at the present day, that is."
+
+"Don't find fault with my dear Augspurger's Lutheran inflections," said
+Siebenkæs; "there's something touching to me about these irregular
+verbs of hers; they are the Schmalkaldian article of the Augspurg
+confession." Here she drew her husband's ear softly down to her lips
+and said, "What would you like me to get for supper? Tell the gentleman
+that you know I mean no offence, whatever words I use. And I wish you
+would ask his reverence, Firmian dear, when I'm out of the room,
+whether our marriage is really all right according to the Bible." He
+asked this question on the spot. Stiefel answered it deliberately as
+follows:--"We have only to look at the case of Leah, who was conducted
+to Jacob's tent under the pseudonym of Rachel on her marriage night,
+and whose marriage the Bible holds to be perfectly valid. Is it names
+or bodies that exchange rings? And can a name fulfil the marriage vow?"
+
+Lenette answered these questions, and spoke her thanks for this
+consistorial decision by a bashful glance of restored content and a
+beaming face upturned towards him. She went to the kitchen, but kept
+constantly coming back and snuffing the candle, which was on the table
+at which the two gentlemen sat talking; and probably nobody, except the
+advocate and I, will consider this to be any indication of a more than
+ordinary liking for Stiefel. The latter always took the snuffers from
+her, saying "it was _his_ duty." Siebenkæs clearly perceived that both
+the apples of his eyes revolved, satellite-fashion, round his own
+planet, Lenette; but he did not grudge the Latin knight his little
+glimpse of an age of chivalry thus sweetened by a Dulcinea; like most
+men, he could far sooner pardon the rival lover than the unfaithful
+fair; women, on the other hand, hate the rival more than the unfaithful
+lover. Moreover, he knew perfectly that Stiefel had not the least idea
+himself whom or what he cared for or sighed for, and that he was a far
+better hand at reviewing schoolmen and authors than himself. For
+instance, his own anger he called professional zeal; his pride, the
+dignity due to his office; his passions, sins of weakness; and on this
+occasion love appeared to him disguised as mere philanthropy. The arch
+of Lenette's troth was firmly finished off in the keystone of religion,
+and the Venner's assault upon it had not shaken this sacred masonry in
+the slightest degree.
+
+At this juncture the postman stumped up stairs with a new constellation
+which he set in their serene family sky, namely, the following letter
+from Leibgeber.
+
+
+ "Bayreuth, 21 Sept., 1785.
+
+ "My dear Brother, Cousin, and Uncle,
+ Father and Son!
+
+"For the two auricles and the two ventricles of thy heart constitute my
+entire genealogical tree:--as Adam, when he went for a walk, carried
+about with him the whole of his blood relations that were to be, and
+his long line of descendants--which is not wholly unreeled and wound up
+even at this day--till he became a father, and his wife bare a child. I
+wish to goodness I had been the first Adam! Siebenkæs, I do adjure you,
+let me, let me, follow up this idea which has struck me and taken hold
+of me with such power; let me not write a word in this letter that does
+not add a touch to the three-quarter-length portrait which I shall draw
+of myself as the first father of mankind!
+
+"Men of learning are much mistaken who suppose my reason for wishing I
+were Adam to be, that Puffendorf and many other writers very properly
+award me the whole of this earth as a kind of European colony in the
+India of the universe, as my _patrimonium Petri_, _Pauli_, _Judæ_ and
+the rest of the Apostles; inasmuch as I, being the sole Adam and man,
+and consequently the first and last of universal monarchs (although as
+yet without any subjects), might of course lay claim to the entire
+earth. It might occur to the pope, indeed (he being holy father, though
+not our first father), to make a similar claim, or rather it did occur
+to him some centuries ago, when he constituted himself the guardian and
+the heir of all the countries of the earth, and indeed made bold to set
+two other crowns on the top of his earthly one, a crown of heaven and a
+crown of hell.
+
+"How small a thing it is that I desire! All that I wish I had been the
+old Adam (in fact, the oldest Adam) for, is merely that I might have
+strolled up and down with Eve among the espaliers of Eden on our
+marriage night, in our aprons and beasts' skins, and delivered an
+address in Hebrew to the mother of all living.
+
+"Before commencing my address I beg to observe that, while I was yet
+unfallen, it fortunately occurred to me to note down the more important
+heads of my universal knowledge. For I had, in my condition of
+innocence, a perfect and intuitive knowledge of all the sciences, of
+history, both universal and literary, the various criminal and other
+codes of law, all the dead languages as well as the living, and was a
+kind of live Pindus and Pegasus, a portable Lodge of Light and learned
+society, a pocket university, and miniature golden _Siècle de Louis
+XIV_. Considering what my mental powers were at that juncture it is a
+miracle (and what's more, a very lucky job) that in my leisure moments
+I put down the cream of my universal knowledge on paper, because when I
+subsequently fell, and became simple and ignorant, I had these
+excerpts, or _Catalogues raisonnés_, of my former wisdom by me, so that
+I could refer to them.
+
+"'Virgin!' (it was thus that the sermon delivered outside Paradise
+commenced) 'it is true we are the first of parents, and are minded to
+originate all the subsequent parents; though all that you think about
+is sticking your spoon into a forbidden apple. However, I, being a man
+and protoplast, reflect and ponder, and as we walk to and fro, I shall
+undertake the office of preacher of the sermon on this, the occasion of
+our entering into the bonds of wedlock (not having as yet,
+unfortunately, begotten anybody else to do it), and, in a brief wedding
+exhortation, direct your attention to the doubts affecting and the
+reasons deciding, the protoplasts, or the first parents and first of
+wedded couples (that is to say, you and me), in the act of reflecting
+and considering, and how--
+
+"'In the first place, they consider the reasons why they should not
+people the earth, but emigrate this very day, the one into the old
+world, the other into the new; and
+
+"'In the second place, the reasons why they should do nothing of the
+kind, but marry.
+
+"'After which a short elench, or _usus epanorthoticus_, will be
+adduced, and will conclude the lecture and the night.'
+
+
+ IN THE FIRST PLACE
+
+"'My dearly beloved!
+
+"'Here, in my sheepskin, as I appear before you, grave, thoughtful, and
+wise, it is nevertheless the fact that I am full to the very brim
+of--not so much follies as _fools_, with a good many wise men stuck in
+here and there between them by way of parentheses. I am of short
+stature, it is true, and the ocean[29] came a good deal above my
+ancles, and besprinkled my new beasts' skin; and yet, as I walk up and
+down here, I am girt about with a seed cloth, containing the seeds of
+all nations, and carrying the repertory of the whole human race, an
+entire world in miniature and _orbis pictus_, round my middle like a
+pedlar's stock in trade. For BONNET, who is in me among the rest, will
+sit down at his desk (when he comes out), and prove that they are all
+one inside the other, like a nest of boxes or a set of parentheses,
+that the father contains the son, that the grandfather contains them
+both, the great-grandfather consequently the grandfather and all the
+contents of him, the great-great-grandfather the great-grandfather and
+the contents of his contents and all his episodes, all sitting waiting
+one inside the other. Are there not then here embodied in thy
+bridegroom--this is a point, dear bride, which cannot be made _too_
+intelligible to you--all religious sects, excepting the Preadamites,
+but including the Adamites,[30] and all giants, the great Christopher
+himself among them every individual of every nation of all the
+earth--all the shiploads of negroes destined for America, and the
+packets marked with red containing the soldiers promised by England to
+Anspach and Bayreuth? Eve, am I not, as I stand here before you, a
+whole Jews'-quarter--a Louvre of all the crowned heads of the
+earth--since I can bring them all into existence if I please, and if I
+am not induced by this first head of my discourse to refrain from doing
+so? You will admire me, and yet laugh at me at the same time if you but
+look at me well, lay your hand on my shoulder, and say to yourself:
+"Now, in this man and protoplast are contained all mankind, all the
+learned faculties, all schools of philosophy, and of sewing and
+spinning, cheek by jowl in peace and harmony, the highest and noblest
+royal families and princely houses (though not yet sorted out from
+among the common ship's company), all free imperial orders of
+knighthood, packed higgledy-piggledy with their vassals, cottiers,
+and tenants, it is true--monasteries and nunneries next door to each
+other--barracks and members of Parliament, to say nothing of cathedral
+chapters, with all their provosts, deans, priors, sub-priors, and
+canons! What a man! What an Anak!" you will add. You are right, dear, I
+am indeed--the very nest dollar of the human coin-cabinet, the
+universal court of assembly of all judicatures, with all the members of
+all assemblies, not one out of its place, the walking _corpus juris_ of
+all civil, canon, criminal, feudal, and municipal law. Haven't I
+Meusel's 'Learned Germany' and Jöcher's 'Scholastic Lexicon' within me
+all complete, and Jöcher and Meusel themselves, to say nothing of their
+supplementary volumes? I wish I could just let you see Cain--who, if
+head second of this discourse should determine me, would be our first
+offshoot and sucker, our Prince of Wales, Calabria, Asturias and the
+Brazils. You would see, if he were transparent--as I believe him to
+be--how he contains all the rest, one inside the other, like beer
+glasses--all œcumenical councils, inquisitions, and propaganda, and
+the devil and his grandmother. But, loveliest, thou didst not write
+down any of thy _scientia media_ before thy fall, as I did, and
+consequently thou starest into the future as blind as a bat. I,
+however, who see into it quite clearly, am enabled by my chrestomathy
+to perceive that, where other men beget perhaps some ten fools, I shall
+beget whole millions of tens, and units into the bargain, seeing that
+the Bohemians, Parisians, Viennese, Leipzigers, Bayreuthers, Hofians,
+Dublinese, Kuhschnappelers (and their wives and daughters over and
+above) have all got to come into existence through me, and that in
+every million of them there will always be at least five hundred who
+neither have, nor will listen to, reason. Duenna, as yet you know
+little of the human race, but two in fact, for the serpent is not one;
+but I know what sort of race I am going to produce, and that in opening
+my _limbus infantum_, I open at the same time a Bedlam. By heaven, I
+weep and lament when I merely peep in between the leaves of the
+centuries in their long course, and see nothing there but gouts of
+gore, and a congeries of idiots--when I think of the trouble and pain
+to be undergone before a century shall learn to write a legible hand, a
+hand even as good as a minister's or an elephant's trunk--before poor
+humanity gets through its dame's school, and private tutors, and French
+governesses, so as to be fit for Latin grammar schools, public schools,
+Jesuit seminaries, and next for fencing classes, dancing classes,
+dogmatic and clinical courses. By old Harry, I feel hot. Nobody will
+think of you as the brood-hen of the coming flock of starlings, as the
+spawning codfish in whom Leuwenhack will count 9½ millions of eggs; not
+you, my little Eve, but your husband, will get all the blame, who
+should have known better, and rather begotten nothing than such a
+rabble of thieves and robbers, crowned emperors on the Roman throne,
+and vicegerents on the Roman chair, the former of whom will call
+themselves after Antoninus and Cæsar, the latter after Christus and
+Petrus, and among whom there are men whose thrones shall be Lüneburg
+torture chairs for the human race, if not the converse of a Place de
+Grève, where the masses shall be put to death, and the single
+individual feted and amused.[31] And I shall be taken to task on
+account of Borgia, Pizarro, St. Dominic, and Potemkin. Even supposing I
+should manage to evade being blamed for black exceptions such as these,
+I should be obliged to admit that my descendants really cannot get
+through the space of half-an-hour without either thinking or doing
+something foolish, that the war of giants, waged in them by their
+passions, is never broken by a peace, seldom even by a truce; that the
+greatest of all man's faults is that he has such a number of little
+ones; that his conscience serves for scarcely anything but _hating his
+neighbours and being morbidly sensitive to their transgressions_; that
+he never leaves off evil ways till he is on his deathbed; that, he
+learns and loves the language of virtue, but is at enmity with the
+virtuous--just as the English employ French language teachers, though
+they detest the French themselves. Eve, Eve, we shall have little to
+congratulate ourselves upon if we marry; Adam means in the original
+"red earth," and truly my cheeks will consist entirely thereof, and
+will blush scarlet at the mere thought of the indescribable and
+unparalleled conceit and vanity of our great-grandchildren, increasing
+as the centuries go on. Nobody will tweak _himself_ by the nose--unless
+perhaps when he is shaving. Critics will set themselves up above
+authors, authors above critics--Heimlicher von Blaise will give his
+hand to be kissed by orphans; ladies theirs to be kissed by all and
+sundry; mighty ones the embroidered hems of their garments. Eve, I had
+only got as far on with my prophetic extracts from the world's history
+as the sixth century, when you bit the apple under the tree, and I,
+like a fool, did as you did, and everything slipped out of my head: God
+only knows what sort of a set the fools and foolesses of the subsequent
+centuries may turn out to be. Virgin, wilt thou now put into action thy
+_Sternocleidomastoideum_, as Sömmering styles the muscle which nods the
+head, and so express your "yes" when I put to you the question, "Wilt
+thou have the marriage-preacher to thy wedded husband?"
+
+"'You will no doubt reply, let us first hear the second head of the
+discourse, in which the subject is considered from another point of
+view. And indeed, dearly beloved, we had almost forgotten that we must
+proceed to the
+
+
+ SECOND PLACE,
+
+and consider the reasons which may persuade first parents to become
+such, and to marry, and serve Destiny in the capacity of sewing and
+spinning machines of linseed, hemp, flax, and tow, to be wound by her
+in endless networks and coils around the earthly sphere. My strongest
+reason, and, I trust, yours also, is the thought of the Day of
+Judgment. For, in the event of our becoming the _entrepreneurs_ of the
+human race, I shall see all my descendants, when they ascend from the
+calcined earth like vapour, at the last day, into the nearest planet,
+and fall into order for the last review; and among this harvest of
+children and grandchildren, I shall hit upon a few sensible people with
+whom one may be able to exchange a rational word or two--men whose
+whole lives were passed, as well as lost, amid thunder and lightning
+(as according to the Romans those whom the gods loved were killed by
+lightning), and who never closed their eyes or their ears, however wild
+the storm. I see the four heathen evangelists among them too, Socrates,
+Cato, Epictetus, and Antoninus, men who went through the world, using
+their voices like fire-engine pipes, two hundred feet long, to save
+people from being burnt out of house and home by the fire of their own
+passions, sluicing them all over with pure, cold, Alp-water. And there
+can be no doubt after all, that I may really be the arch-papa, and you
+the arch-mamma, of some very great and celebrated people, that's to
+say, if we choose. I tell you, Eve, that I have it here in black and
+white among my excerpts and collectanea that I shall be the forefather,
+ancestor, and Bethlehem of an Aristotle, Plato, Shakespeare, Newton,
+Rousseau, Goethe, Kant, Leibnitz, people, take them for all in all, who
+are as able thinkers as their protoplast himself, if not abler. Eve,
+thou active and important member of the fruit-bearing jointstock
+company, or productive class of the state (consisting of thyself and
+this marriage-preacher), I assure you I expect to pass a few hours of
+exquisite enjoyment when on that neighbouring star I survey in a
+cursory manner that classic concourse newly risen from the dead, and at
+length kneel down, and cry, "Good morning, my children! Such of you as
+are Jews were wont to utter an ejaculatory prayer when ye met a wise
+man; but what such utterance would suffice for me, now that I behold
+all the wise and all the faculties at once, all of them my own blood
+relations too, who amid the wolfish hunger of their desires have
+stedfastly refrained from forbidden apples, pears, and pine apples,
+and, deep as their thirst for wisdom might be, committed no
+orchard-robbery on the tree of knowledge, though their first parents
+seized upon the forbidden fruit, although they had never known what
+hunger was, and upon the tree of knowledge, although they possessed all
+knowledge, except knowledge of the serpent nature." And then I shall
+arise from the ground, pass into the angelic crowd, fall on the bosom
+of some distinguished descendant, and, throwing my arms around him,
+say, "Thou, true, good, contented-minded, gentle son! If I could just
+have shown _thee_ only, sitting in thy brood-cell, to my Eve, the
+queen-bee of this great swarm here present, at the time when I was
+delivering the second head of my marriage sermon, I'm sure she would
+have listened to reason, and given a favourable answer.'"
+
+"And thou, Siebenkæs, art that same, true, good son, and thou restest
+ever on the warm, heaving breast of
+
+ "Thy Friend.
+
+
+ "_Postscript and Clausula Salutaris_.
+
+"Please to forgive me this merry private ball and witches' dance upon
+cheap and nasty letter-paper, notwithstanding that you are
+unfortunately an infinitesimal fractional part of the German race, and
+as such, can't be expected either to stand, or to understand, such a
+dance of ideas. This is why I never print anything for the unwieldy
+German intellect; entire sheets which I have spawned full of playful
+idea-fishes of this sort I consign at once to regions where such
+productions do not usually arrive till they attain the evening of their
+days, having previously exercised the right of transit through the
+booksellers' shops. I was eight days in Hof, and am at present living a
+retired life at Bayreuth; in both of these towns I have made faces,
+that is, other people's profiles; but most of the heads which sat or
+stood to my scissors opined that all was not quite right in mine. Tell
+me the real truth of the matter; it's not altogether a matter of
+indifference to me, because if I should turn out not to be quite 'all
+there,' I should be incapable of devising my property by will, or of
+exercising various civil functions.
+
+"In conclusion, I send a thousand kind remembrances and kisses to your
+dear, good Lenette, and my compliments to Herr Schulrath Stiefel, and
+will you please ask him if he is any relation to Magister Stiefel, the
+rector of Holzdorf and Lochau (in Wittemberg), who prophesied
+(incorrectly, as I consider) that the end of the world would take place
+on the 1st January, 1533, at 8 o'clock in the morning, and lived to die
+in his own bed after all. I also send, for you and the 'Advertiser,' a
+couple of programmes of Professor Lang's of this place, relative to the
+General Superintendent of Bayreuth, and one of Dr. Frank's of Pavia.
+There is a very charming young lady, exceedingly clever and
+intellectual, living here at the Sun Hotel (she is in the front rooms,
+and I in the back). She has been very much pleased with me and my face,
+I am happy to tell you, seeing how exactly you and I are alike, the
+only difference between us being my lame foot. So that the things I
+pride myself upon in ladies' society are my likeness to you and my
+weaknesses. Unless I have been misinformed, this lady is a poor niece
+of your old uncle's with the broken glass wig, and is being brought up
+at his expense, and destined for a marriage with some Kuhschnappeler of
+the upper ten thousand. Perhaps she may soon be forwarded to you,
+entered in the way-bill as bridegroom's effects.
+
+"The above is my oldest news, but my newest news, namely your own self,
+I shall not expect to arrive here at Bayreuth till I and the spring get
+back to it together (for the day after to-morrow I am off to meet it in
+Italy), and we, I and the spring, together beautify the world to such a
+degree that you will certainly enjoy a happy time of it in Bayreuth,
+the houses and the hills of that place being so particularly charming.
+And so, fare thee somewhat well."
+
+
+They all felt certain that the Kuhschnappeler of rank for whom the
+Heimlicher's niece was being brought up could be none other than the
+Venner Rosa, whose little burnt-down stump of a heart--what was left of
+it after being hitherto made use of to set fire to the bosoms of female
+humanity in general (as the lamp in a smoking-room serves to kindle the
+pipes of the collective frequenters thereof)--would be the marriage
+torch to light her to her new home.
+
+As there were three heavens in this letter--one for each of the
+party--kind remembrances for Lenette, the programmes for Peltzstiefel,
+the letter itself for Siebenkæs--I shouldn't have been astonished if
+the terzetto of them had danced for joy. The Schulrath, intoxicated
+with delight--for the glad blood rose to his sober head--opened the
+papers sent him upon the square patterned supper-cloth (which was laid
+already), and hungrily began to devour his three printed "relishes
+before supper," and literary petits soupers, upon the tin plate without
+even saying grace, until an invitation to stay and have some supper
+reminded him that he must be off. But before leaving, he petitioned
+that, by way of fee for having acted as middleman and court of
+arbitration between them, or as an alkali to promote the blending of
+his oil with her water--he might have a new profile of Lenette. The old
+one cut out by Leibgeber (which the letter brought to his
+recollection), and which, as we may remember, Leibgeber let him have,
+happened to have been put into the pocket of his dressing-gown and sent
+to the wash with it (being of much the same colour, moreover). "It
+shall be put on the stocks to-night," said Siebenkæs.
+
+When the Schulrath was going, as he could see that the ring upon
+Lenette's finger didn't squeeze it so uncomfortably as it had done (and
+gave _himself_ credit for having been the means of filing it smoother
+and padding it softer), he shook her hand with much warmth, and said--
+
+"I shall always be delighted to come whenever there's the slightest
+thing the matter with you two charming people."
+
+Lenette answered, "Oh yes, do come very often."
+
+And Siebenkæs added, "The oftener the better."
+
+And yet, when he had gone, the ring seemed to be not quite so
+comfortable again, and medical students who may be working at
+psychology may be a little surprised that during supper the advocate
+said very little to his wife, and she very little to him. The reason
+was that he had Leibgeber's letter lying by his plate in the place
+where the bread normally is, and the image of his beloved friend shone
+bright before his mental vision from Bayreuth all athwart the far misty
+darkness between--their first happy meeting to come floated magically
+before him. Hope shot down a pure clearing ray into the dark mephitic
+cave where he was panting and toiling now--and the coming spring stood
+like some cathedral tower all hung with lamps lofty and bright in the
+distance, beaming through the dark night sky.
+
+At length he "came to himself," _i. e_. to his wife; the strong image
+of Leibgeber had buoyed him up from the sharp stones which strewed the
+present; the dear old friend, who had clipped out the bride's profile
+up in the choir on the wedding-day, and been with them in the early
+weeks of their honeymoon, seemed to fling a chain of flower-wreaths
+about him and draw him closer to the silent form by his side. "Well
+darling, and how are you getting on?" he said, awaking from his reverie
+and taking her hand, now that all was peace again between them. She
+had, however, the feminine peculiarity or foible, habit at all events,
+of being much quicker to show that she was vexed than that her anger
+was over; of, at all events, being slow to show the latter; and of
+commencing a reconsideration of all the matters in dispute at the very
+moment that amends have been made and accepted, and pardon begged and
+granted. There are very few married women indeed who will put their
+hand into their husbands', and say "There, I'm good again," without a
+very considerable hesitation and delay; unmarried women are much more
+ready to do it. Wendeline _did_ hold hers out, but did it too coldly,
+and drew it away again in a great hurry, to take up the table-cloth,
+which she asked him to help her to smooth and fold up. He did this
+smilingly--she gravely giving her whole attention to the process of
+folding the long white parallelogram into exact squares--and at length,
+when the last and thickest square was arrived at, he held it fast
+there--she pulled, trying to look very serious--he looked at her very
+fondly and tenderly--she couldn't help smiling at this and then he took
+the tablecloth from her, pressed it and himself with it to her heart,
+and said, in her arms, "Little thief! how can you be so naughty to your
+old ragamuffin of a Siebenkæs, or whatever his name may be?" And now
+the rainbow of a brighter future appeared shining above the fast ebbing
+flood which had risen as high as their hearts so lately---- But, my
+dears, rainbows now-a-days very often mean just the reverse of what the
+first was said to signify.
+
+The prize he awarded to his queen of the rose-feast of the heart was to
+ask her to let him take a profile of her pretty face, that Peltzstiefel
+might find a joy and a present waiting for him on the morrow. I think I
+shall just trace an outline of his outline-tracing for people of taste
+in this place; but I must stipulate that nobody is to expect a pen
+to be a painter's brush--or a painter's brush to be an engraver's
+style--or an engraver's style a flower anther, generating generation
+upon generation of lilies and roses.
+
+The advocate borrowed a drawing-board, viz. the façade of a new
+pigeon-house, from Fecht the cobbler. Lenette's shoulder fitted into
+the oval portal of it as a clasp-knife does into its handle; a sheet of
+white paper was tacked on to the board--her pretty, soft head was
+pressed on the stiff paper--he applied, with much care and self
+restraint, his pencil at the upper part of the brow, difficult as it
+was to catch the shadow in such immediate proximity to the reality--and
+went slowly down the beautiful, flowery declivity all roses and lilies.
+But little or nothing came of it; the _back_ part of the head was
+pretty good. His eyes would keep turning away from his work to the
+sitter, so that he drew as vilely as a box-painter.
+
+"Wendeline, your head isn't still a moment," he said. And indeed her
+face, an well as her brain-fibres, shook by reason of the heightened
+beat of her pulse and the quickening of her breathing; while, on the
+other hand, his pencil stumbled when it came to the delicate _basso
+relievo_ of her little nose, fell into the cleft at her lips, and
+stranded on the shoal of her chin. He kissed those lips which he
+couldn't draw, and which she always had either too much open or too
+tightly closed, and brought a shaving-glass and said, "See, haven't you
+got more faces than Janus, or any Indian god? The Schulrath will think
+you were making faces, and I copying them. Look, here's where you
+moved, and I sprung after you like a chamois; the effect of the jump
+is, that the upper part of the face sticks out before the lower like a
+half mask. Just think how the Schulrath will stare in the morning."
+
+"Try once more, dear; I'll do just as you tell me; I should like it to
+be very nice," Lenette said, blushing; and stiffened her neck, and
+steadied her soft cheek against the drawing-board. And as her husband
+gently glided his drawing ovipositor over her brow like a segment of
+some white hemisphere--instead of breathing, he found she was _holding_
+her breath this time till she shook again, and till the colour came to
+her face.
+
+And here jealousy, like some exploding fire-ship, sent hard fragments
+of the wreck of his shattered happiness crashing on a sudden against
+his heart.
+
+"Ah!" (he thought) "can it be that she does really love him?" (_i. e._
+the Schulrath).
+
+His pencil stood still in the obtuse angle between her nose and her
+chin as if under a spell; he heard her let go her pent-up breath; his
+pencil made black zigzags at the edge of the paper, and as he stopped
+at the closed lips, which nothing warmer than his own, and her morning
+prayers, had ever touched, and thought "Must _this_ come upon me too?
+must _this_ joy be taken from me like all the rest? And am I drawing up
+my bill of divorce and Uriah-letter here with my own very hands?" He
+could do no more at it. He took the drawing-board quickly from
+her shoulder--fell upon her closed lips--kissed away the pent-up
+sigh--pressed the life out of his jealousy between his heart and hers,
+and said--
+
+"I can't do it till to-morrow, Lenette! Don't be vexed, darling! Tell
+me, are you quite as you used to be in Augspurg? Don't you understand
+me? Have you not the slightest idea what I am driving at?"
+
+She answered quite innocently, "Now you will be annoyed, Firmian, I
+know, but I really have _not_ the slightest idea."
+
+Then the Goddess of Peace took from the God of Sleep his poppy garland,
+and twined it into her own olive wreath and led the wedded pair,
+garlanded and reconciled, hand in hand into the glittering, gleaming,
+icefields of the land of dreams--the magic shadowy background of the
+noisy jarring, shifting day--our camera obscura full of moving
+miniature pictures of a world all dwarfed, in which man, like the
+Creator, dwells alone with his own creations.
+
+
+ END OF THE PREFACE AND OF THE FIRST BOOK.
+
+The reader will remember that, at the beginning of the preface, I
+stated that I succeeded in putting the old merchant into a sweet sleep,
+and in providing his daughter with a gladsome feast of tabernacles, in
+the shape of the young unopened buds of this, my little cottage-garden
+here. But the foul fiend knows how to breeze up a sudden rain squall,
+and let it splattering down upon all our loveliest fireworks. I was
+only performing a duty in converting myself into a small, pocket
+circulating library for a poor lonely thing of a girl, whose father
+gave her no chance of a word or two of rational conversation except
+with her parrot, and with the family lawyer aforesaid.
+
+The cage of the former was placed near her inkstand and waste-book; and
+he acquired from his mistress as much in the shape of German-Italian
+as a bookkeeper finds necessary for carrying on his foreign
+correspondence. And a parrot being always incited to talkativeness by a
+looking-glass in his cage, he and his language-mistress were enabled to
+look at themselves in it together. The latter (the family lawyer) I
+myself was. But the Captain--for fear of seductive princess-kidnappers
+and pirates such as me, and because her mother was dead, and because
+she was useful in the business--would let her speak to no man
+whomsoever, except in the presence of a third party (viz., himself). So
+that it was very seldom any man came to the house, except me; whereas,
+a father generally decoys whole museums of insects into his house by
+means of a blooming daughter, just as a cherry-tree in blossom near a
+window fills a room with wasps and bees. It wasn't exactly everybody
+who, when he wanted to speak a rational word with her (_i. e_. one her
+father shouldn't hear), could manage to draw the flute stop of his
+organ, and then play away for an hour to this Argus till he should
+close his hundred green eyes, so that two blue ones might be looked
+into. I _did_ manage it, indeed; but the world shall hear what sort of
+a psalm of thanksgiving and vote of thanks I was treated to for my
+pains.
+
+The old man--who had grown suspicious on account of the length of time
+I had remained the evening before--had this evening only _pretended_ to
+be asleep, that he might see what I was going to be at. The rapidity
+with which he went asleep (the reader no doubt remembers it at the
+beginning of the book) ought to have struck me more than it did. I
+ought to have reckoned on a contrary state of matters myself, and been
+ready with more prefaces in addition to this present one, to serve as
+sleeping powders.
+
+The rascally eavesdropper lay in wait till I had made my report on the
+two Flower-pieces and the four first chapters of this book. At the end
+of the fourth he bounced up as a mole-trap does when one walks on it,
+and addressed me from behind with the following harangue of
+congratulation--"Has the devil got you by the coat-tails? You must come
+here from Berlin, must you, and stuff my daughter's head with all sorts
+of atheistical, nonsensical, romantic balderdash and nonsense, till
+she'll be of no more use in a shop than----"
+
+"Just listen to one word, Herr Pigtail!" said I quite quietly, taking
+him into the next room, where there was neither fire nor light; "just
+listen to one single, _half_-word!"
+
+I put my hands upon his shoulders, and said, "Herr Pigtail--for in
+Charles the Great's time every officer was so styled, because in those
+days the soldiers wore tails, as the women do now--Herr Pigtail, I'm
+not going to have a tussle with you to-night, when the old year's going
+out and the new year's coming in. I assure you solemnly that I am the
+son of the ----,[32] and that I shall never see you more, though you
+shall have all the Vienna letters just the same. But I implore you, for
+God's sake, to allow your daughter to read. Now-a-days every tradesman
+reads--one of whom will be her husband--and every tradesman's wife. Yet
+for all this reading, there's still plenty of spinning and cooking
+going on; there are shirts in plenty, and fat people in abundance. And
+as for _corrupting_ her--why! that's just what a man who reads will
+find it most difficult to accomplish in the case of a woman who reads,
+and most easy in the case of one who hardly knows her A B C. Let me
+entreat you, Captain."
+
+"If you would but just mind your own affairs! What's the girl to
+_you_?" was his reply. It was a true harbour of refuge for me that, on
+neither of these two evenings, the Christmas Eve or the New Year's, had
+I, in the enthusiasm of narration, so much as touched anything of the
+daughter's but about a groschen's worth of hair (and that not her own),
+which got among my fingers somehow or other, I hardly know how.
+
+It would have been little to have seized her hands, in the fervour of
+my biographical enthusiasm it would have been nothing at all; but, as I
+have said, I hadn't done it. I had said to myself, "Enjoy a pretty face
+as you would a picture, and a female voice as you would a
+nightingale's, and don't touch the picture or throttle the bird. What!
+must every tulip be out up for salad, and all altar-cloths made into
+camisoles?"
+
+Of all truths, the one which we bring ourselves to credit last of all
+is that there are certain men whom no amount of truth will convince.
+That Herr Pigtail was one of these presently occurred to me, not so
+soon as it ought to have done, and I determined that the only sermon I
+should preach, to him would be of the jocular and middle-age-Easter
+kind.[33] "Not so loud, Herr Pigtail, or mademoiselle will hear every
+syllable; you have pinned her, poor butterfly, into your letter book;
+but at the great day of judgment I shall accuse you of not having given
+her my works to read. I do wish you had only gone on pretending to be
+asleep long enough to allow me to tell her the other books of the
+history of Kuhschnappel, where Siebenkæs's troubles occur, and his
+death, and his marriage. But, mademoiselle, I shall tell my publisher
+in Berlin to send you the remaining books of the story the moment they
+are in print, fresh out of the press, still all damp, like a morning
+newspaper. And now, adieu, Herr Pigtail; may Heaven grant you a new
+heart with the new year, and your dear daughter a second heart inside
+her own."
+
+The elemental conflict of his and my dissimilar components raged louder
+and louder: but I say no more about it--every additional word would
+have the appearance of an act of vindictiveness. This, however, I may
+at all events say: happy is every daughter who may read my works while
+her father is awake (very few such daughters, however, recognise this
+truth). Unhappy is every dependent of an Oehrmann, because he will be
+starved, as a greyhound is, that he may be the more nimble at running
+(I do not mean on the piano with his fingers), as the dancers' children
+get nothing to eat that they may spring the better! And fortunate are
+all needy persons who have nothing to do with him; because Jacob
+Oehrmann gives to everyone just as much moral, as he possesses
+mercantile, credit, to which recruit-measure of worth he has been
+habituated by his fellow-tradesmen, who measure each other with
+yard-measures of metal. The only people who find favour in his sight
+are those who are complete paupers, and this because they serve as
+pedestals for his charity; for the alms which he distributes in the
+name of the town and out of its exchequer, he looks upon as his own.
+Peace be with him! At that time I had not taken a part myself in
+celebrating the peace-festival of the soul which I have described in
+the Fruit-piece of this book, and I had read but little of what I have
+there written concerning the year of Jubilee which ought to last as
+long as the Long Parliament in our hearts with respect to all our moral
+debtors; for if I had I should not even have contradicted Herr Pigtail.
+
+I vexed him, I am sorry to say, once more by my parting speech to his
+daughter (for I wished him and her my wishes both together and at once,
+so that it might not appear which was for which).
+
+"Herr Pigtail, and mademoiselle, I bid you a long farewell. No more
+shall I be able, in elysian evenings, to relate to you any of my
+biographies (shorn of the digressions); and the feast days and the
+holidays, as well as the eves thereof, will come and will go, but he
+who has caused you such vivid emotions will come no more. May fate send
+thee books instead of bookmakers, sometimes stir thy dull heart with a
+poetic throb, heave thy still breast with tender sighs prophetic of the
+future--bring to thy eyes some gentle tear drops, such as an andante
+causes to flow, and lead thee on through the hot, toilsome summer days,
+not to an after summer, but to a flowery tuneful spring. And so, good
+night."
+
+It goes to my heart to part with people; even were it my sworn
+hereditary foe: one is going to see him no more. Pauline was anything
+but my sworn hereditary foe. Out in the streets there were more
+new year well-wishers going their rounds, the watchmen, who were
+giving utterance to their good wishes in wind instrumental music and
+miserable verse. Stiff, old-fashioned, rude verses always touch me
+more--particularly in an appropriate mouth--than your sapless, new
+poems, all tricked out with artificial flowers and ice-plants; poetry
+altogether wretched is better than the mediocre. I decided upon going
+through the town gate; my heart was filled with emotions of very
+different kinds--for you see it was only eleven o'clock and the cold
+night was full of stars. And it was the last night of the year, and I
+didn't want to pass from the old year to the new in sleep, though that
+is how I would pass from this life to the next. I resolved to take that
+flushed, throbbing heart of mine out of the streets, and to a quieter
+company.
+
+Place a man in some waste Sahara desert stretching further than the eye
+can reach, and afterwards pen him up into the narrowest of corners, he
+will be struck, in both cases, by the same vivid consciousness of his
+own individuality--the widest spaces and the narrowest have the same
+powerful effect in quickening our perception of our own Ego and of its
+relationship. There is nothing, on the whole, oftener forgotten than
+that which is what forgets--namely, the forgetter's _self_. Not only do
+the mechanical employments of labour and trade always draw men out of
+themselves, but the mental effort of study and investigation, also,
+renders scholars and philosophers just as deaf and blind to their own
+Ego, and its position with respect to other entities--deafer and
+blinder even. Nothing is more difficult than to convert an object of
+contemplation (which we always _move away_ to a certain distance from
+ourselves, and from the mind's eye, so as to bring the latter to bear
+on it properly) into an object of sensation, and to feel that the
+object is the eye itself. I have often read whole books on the subject
+of the Ego, and of printing, right through, until at last I saw, to my
+astonishment, that the Ego and the printed letters were before--me so
+to speak under my nose.
+
+Let the reader say truly: has he not even at this moment, while I have
+been talking, been forgetting that there are letters before him, ay,
+and his own Ego into the bargain?
+
+But out where I was, under the twinkling heavens, and on a snow-covered
+height, round about which there gleamed a white, frozen plain, my Ego
+burst away from its relationships (while in connection with them it was
+no more than an attribute, a quality), and it became a personage--a
+separate entity. And then I could look upon myself. All marked points
+of time--stanzas as it were, or music phrases, of existence--new years'
+days for example, and birthdays, lift man high out of and up above the
+waves which are round him; he clears the water from his eyes, and looks
+about him, and says--"How the current has been carrying me along,
+drowning my hearing, and blinding my sight! Those are the waves, down
+there, onward, which have been bearing me along, and these, now coming
+toward me, when I dip down among them, will whirl me away!"
+
+Without this clear, distinct consciousness of one's Ego, there can be
+no freedom, and no calm equanimity amid the crowding elbowing tumult of
+the world.
+
+I shall go on with my story. I stood upon an iceberg, but my soul was
+all aglow--the cloven moon shone brightly down, and the shadows of the
+pine-trees about me lay, like dismembered limbs of the night, black
+upon the lily ground of snow. Away, some distance from me, a man seemed
+to be kneeling motionless on the ground.
+
+And now 12 o'clock struck, and 1794, year of war and tumult, fell,
+with all its rivers of blood, into the ocean of eternity; the booming
+after-tone of the bell seemed to say to me, "Now has Destiny, with the
+twelfth stroke of her hammer, knocked down the old year to you, poor
+perishing mortals, at her auction of minutes."
+
+The kneeling man now stood up and went quickly away. I could long see
+him and his shadow disappearing in the moonlight.
+
+I left my height, the boundary hill between two years, and went down to
+where the man had been kneeling. I found a crucifix and a black leather
+prayer-book in duodecimo, all thumbed yellow, except one leaf at the
+beginning on which was the name of the owner, whose knees had worn deep
+traces in the ice. I knew him well, he was a cottager whose two sons
+had had to go to the war. On looking more closely, I found he had drawn
+a circle in the snow, to keep off evil spirits.
+
+I saw it all; the simple, weak-minded creature, whose soul was darkened
+by a perpetual annular eclipse, had gone there on this solemn night to
+hearken to the hollow distant muttering thunder of the coming storm,
+and laid his prostrate soul, as it were, upon the earth to hear the
+distant march of the approaching foe. "Shallow, timid soul," thought I,
+"why should the dead that are to be come floating athwart the face of
+the clear, still night--thy sleeping sons among them, memberless? Why
+strive already to see the darting flames of conflagrations yet to come,
+and to hear the dismal turmoil, the bitter wail, of a woe as yet
+unborn? The coffins of the coming year have, as in times of pestilence,
+no inscriptions yet--why should the names appear upon them? Oh! thy
+Solomon's ring has been no protection against the destroying angel who
+dwells within our breasts. And that vague, ugly giant-cloud, behind
+which are death and the future, will prove, on approach, to _be_ death
+and the future itself."
+
+In hours like these we are all ready to lay our hats and swords on to
+the bier--ay, and ourselves as well--our old wounds burn anew, and our
+hearts, not being truly healed, a little thing breaks them again, like
+arms imperfectly set. But the cruel, piercing lightning flash of some
+great minute, the reflection of which stretches gleaming athwart the
+whole river of our life, is necessary to us to make us blind to the
+_ignes fatui_ and glowworms which meet us, to guide us, every hour: and
+frivolous, giddy man needs some powerful shock to counteract his
+tendency to continual petty naggling. Therefore, to us little
+crustaceans sticking with our suckers upon the ship of this earth,
+every new year's night is, like night in the old mythologies, a mother
+of many gods in us--and in such a night there begins for us a better
+normal year than that which began in 1624. And I felt as if I should
+kneel, humble and penitent, on the spot where the poor childless father
+had knelt.
+
+But now a brisker air brought to my ears a burst of gladsome music; it
+came like the breath of flowers across the frozen plain, horns and
+trumpets on the church tower, sending their cheering harmonies over the
+sleeping earth, ushering, with glad vigorous tones, the first hour of
+the new year in to a world of anxious, doubting men. And I too grew
+glad and strong; I raised my glance from the white shroud of the coming
+spring, and gazed at the moon; and on these spots on her face (these
+spots which grow green as you approach) I saw our earthly spring
+reposing upon flowers, and already moving his young wings, soon to take
+his flight with other birds of passage, and, bright with glittering
+plumes, and hailed by skylarks' anthems, come and alight upon our
+shores.
+
+The distant new year's music flowed around me still I felt much
+happier, and far more tender; I saw the _coming_ sorrows in the new
+born year, but they wore such lovely masks that they were more like
+sorrows that are _past_, or like the music around me--just as the rain
+which falls through the great caverns in the Derbyshire hills sounds in
+the distance like music.
+
+But when I looked around me, and saw the white earth shining like a
+white sun, and the silent deep blue sphere all round, like a household
+circle of one great family--and as the music, like lovelier sighs,
+accompanied my thoughts--as I fixed my gaze, with grateful heart, upon
+the starry sky where all these thousands of stedfast witnesses of the
+beautiful moments (moments faded, out of bloom, indeed, now--but the
+great Beneficence spreads their _seed_ for evermore)--when I thought of
+the men asleep all around me, and wished that they might all be happier
+when they opened their eyes in the morning--and when I thought of
+those awake UNDER me, whose slumbering souls stood in need of such a
+wish,--my heart, oppressed by the music, and by the night, grew heavy
+and grew full, and the blue sky, the glittering moon, and the sparkling
+snow-height all melted into one great floating shimmer.
+
+And in the shimmer, and amid the music, I heard voices of my friends,
+and dear fellow-creatures, tenderly and anxiously wishing their new
+year's wishes. They touched my heart so deeply, that I could but barely
+_think_ my own--
+
+"Oh! may you all be happy _all_ the years of your lives."
+
+
+
+ END OF BOOK I.
+
+
+
+
+ PREFACE TO THE SECOND, THIRD, AND FOURTH BOOKS.
+
+
+It has often been a source of much annoyance to me that to every
+preface I write I am obliged to append a book--like the endorsement on
+a bill of exchange--or an appendix to letters A to Z. Many a man who
+dabbles in authorship by way of amusement has his books sent to him all
+ready written and complete, straight from the cradle; so that all he
+has to do is to attach his gold frontlets of prefaces to their
+foreheads--which is nothing but painting the _corona_ about the sun. As
+yet, however, not a single author has applied to me for a preamble to a
+book, although for several years I have had a considerable number of
+prefaces by me (all ready beforehand, and going at great bargains), in
+which I extol to the best of my ability works which have not as yet
+come in to being. In fact, I have now a perfect museum of these prize
+medals and commemoration medals of other people's cleverness at the
+service of anyone who may stand in need of them; they are all made by
+the very finest of mint-machinery, and my collection of them is
+increasing day by day; so that I shall be obliged to sell it off
+wholesale before very long (I don't see what else I can do), and bring
+out a book--consisting of nothing but pre-existent prefaces.
+
+They will still be obtainable singly, however, until the Easter fair,
+and authors who make early application can have the entire fascicle of
+preludes forwarded to them, so that they can pick out for themselves
+whichever preface seems to them the most laudatory of a book. After the
+Easter fair however, when the Book of Prefaces above mentioned comes
+out (and it will be interleaved with the fair catalogue), the literary
+world will only be beglorified in _corpore_, in _coro_, and I shall be
+(so to speak) making a present of a patent of nobility to the republic
+of letters in the lump,--as the Empress Queen did in 1775 to the whole
+mercantile community of Vienna; although I have before my eyes (in the
+shape of the poor reviewers who work themselves well nigh to death,
+hammering and building away at the temple of fame, and at triumphal
+arches) the melancholy proof that though a man were to extol the
+republic of letters even in six volumes folio, he would get less for it
+than Sannazaro did for belauding the republic of Venice in as many
+lines--for each line in the latter case brought the poet in a matter of
+a hundred five-dollar pieces.
+
+I propose to interstratify one of the prefaces in question in this
+place by way of a specimen and experiment, making as if its celebrated
+author had written it to order for this book (which is the actual
+truth, moreover). There is no difficulty in my splitting myself up into
+two characters, the flower painter and the preface maker. But,--as one
+cannot _quite_ lose sight of feelings of becoming modesty--I carefully
+pick out the most miserable specimen of the lot, one in which laudation
+occurs but to a very moderate extent, one which places the author of
+the book attached to it upon a funeral car, rather than upon a
+triumphal one, with nothing whatever to draw it along moreover; whereas
+the other prefaces harness posterity to them, and the reading public
+are, by _them_, yoked on to the heavenly chariot, the Elijah's chariot,
+of Immortality, in which they draw the author along.
+
+In conclusion, then, I have only to observe that the celebrated author
+of 'HESPERUS' has been kind enough to look through my Flower-pieces,
+and contribute to them the following preface, which will be found well
+worthy of perusal.
+
+
+
+
+ PREFACE, BY THE AUTHOR OF 'HESPERUS.'
+
+
+The following remarks may be thrown into the form of a series of
+postulates, which are, at the same time, so many similes.
+
+Many authors (Young is an instance) set fire to their nerve-spirit,
+which, like burning spirit of another kind (brandy), tinges every
+person who stands round the inkbottle where it is flaring with a sham
+DEADLY pallor. But, unfortunately, each looks only at the others, none
+looks into the mirror. The effect of the proximity of this universal
+mortality all about, upon people and authors, is that each is impressed
+with a livelier sense of the exceptional nature of his own
+_im_mortality; and this is remarkably comforting to us all.
+
+The consequence is, as it seems to me, very plain. Poets, living in
+fifth, or fiftieth floors, may make poems, but not marriages; neither
+may they keep, nor establish, houses. Canaries' breeding cages have to
+be more roomy than their singing cages.
+
+If this be so, then, what does the author's pen do? Like a child's, it
+traces in ink the characters which nature has faintly marked in the
+reader with pencil.
+
+The author's strings only vibrate in unison with the reader's octaves,
+fifths, fourths, and thirds--not with his seconds or sevenths.
+Unsympathetic readers do not become sympathetic ones; it is only the
+cognate, or congruent, sort which rise to the author's level or pass
+beyond it.
+
+And with this stands or falls my fourth postulate. The iron shoe of
+Pegasus is the armature of the magnet of truth, increasing its power of
+attraction; yet we are hungry birds, and fly at the poet's grapes as
+though they were real ones, thinking the _boy_ a painted one, when we
+really ought to be frightened at _him_.
+
+The transition from this to the fifth postulate is a self-evident
+matter. Man has such a high opinion of everything in the shape of
+antiquity, that he prolongs it, and keeps it alive, and lives according
+to it, though it be but the cover and the mask of the very poison which
+will destroy itself. There are two proofs of this proposition which I
+leave aside, of set purpose; the first is, Religion, which is all
+gnawed to worm dust; the second, Freedom, which is quite as much
+crumbled to powder as the other. In my capacity of a member of the
+Lutheran Church, I merely glance at the subject of relics (in support
+of the proposition)--relics, in the case of which, as Vasquez the
+Jesuit informs us, if they chance to be entirely eaten up of worms, we
+must continue to worship what remains--that is to say, the worms which
+have eaten them. Wherefore, meddle not with that nest of worms, the
+time in which thou livest, or it will eat thee up; a million of worms
+are quite equal to one dragon.
+
+This must be admitted and assumed, at least if my sixth postulate is to
+have any sense in it which is,--that no man is wholly indifferent to,
+and unaffected by, _every_ kind of truth; indeed even if it be only to
+poetical _reflections_ (illusions) that he swears allegiance--inasmuch
+as he does even _that_ he thereby does homage to truth; for in all
+poetry it is but the part which is _true_ which goes to the heart (or
+head), just as in our passions and emotions nothing but the Moral
+produces effect. A reflection which should be nothing whatever _but_ a
+reflection would necessarily, for that very reason, not _be_ a
+reflection. Every _semblance_ (meaning every thing which we _see_, or
+suppose we _see_) presupposes the existence of _light_ somewhere, and
+_is_ itself light, only in an enfeebled or reflected condition. Only,
+most people in our, not so much _enlightened_ as _enlightening_ times,
+are like nocturnal insects who avoid, or are pained by, the light of
+day, but, in the night, fly to every _nocturnal_ light, every
+phosphorescent surface.
+
+The graves of the best men are like those of the Moravians, level and
+flat, and this earthly sphere of ours is a Westminster Abbey of such
+levellings and flattenings--ah! what innumerable drops of tears as well
+as blood (which are what the three grand trees of this world--the trees
+of Life, of Knowledge, and Liberty--are watered with) have been shed,
+but never counted. History, in painting the human race, does not follow
+the example of that painter who, making a portrait of a one-eyed king,
+drew only his seeing profile; what history paints is the blind side,
+and it needs some grand calamity to bring great men to light--as comets
+are seen during total eclipses of the sun. Not upon the battle-field
+only--upon the holy ground of virtue also, and upon the classic soil of
+truth--the pedestal whereon history raises on high some _single_ hero
+whose name rings in all men's ears has to be composed and built
+up of thousands of _other_ heroes who have fought and fallen, nameless
+and unknown. The noblest deeds of heroism are done within four walls,
+not before the public gaze,--and as history keeps record only of the
+_men_ sacrificed, and, on the whole, writes only in spilt blood,
+doubtless our annals are grander and more beautiful in the eyes
+of the all-pervading spirit of the universe than in those of the
+history-writer; the great scenes of history are estimated according to
+the numbers of angels or devils on the stage, the _men_ not being taken
+into account.
+
+These are the grounds on which I rely when I assert with a good deal of
+boldness that when we inhale the perfume of the full-blown blossoms of
+joy with too deep and strong an inhalation, without having first given
+them a good shake, we run the risk of snuffing up some tormenting
+insect (before we know what we are about) through the ethmoid into the
+brain;[34] and _who_--tell me if you can--is to get it out again?
+Whereas little or nothing of a risky sort can be snuffed up out of
+_Flower-pieces_, and their painted calices, since painted worms remain
+where they are.
+
+This, then, is what _I_ have to postulate by means of similes. What the
+_public_ postulates, or demands, is my opinion of these Flower-pieces.
+The author is a promising youth of five years of age;[35] he and I have
+been friends since childhood, and, I think, can assert that we have but
+one soul between us, as Aristotle says should be the case with friends.
+He gets me to read over everything he thinks of publishing, and to give
+him my opinion and advice. And, as I returned these Flower-pieces to
+him with the warmest (and, at the same time, sincerest) expression of
+my approval, he has requested me to make my verdict somewhat more
+widely known, believing as he does (rather too flatteringly perhaps)
+that it may carry a certain amount of weight with it, more especially
+as it is an impartial verdict, and, as such, one which can be placed in
+the hands of the critics as a species of ruler wherewith to draw the
+lines upon which _their_ verdicts may be written.
+
+In this, however, he goes a little too far. All I can say is that the
+work is written quite as if I had done it myself. There is no greater
+amount of dynamic ornamentation in it than is usual in books, and,
+happy as the author would have been to have thundered, stormed, and
+poured in it, there was of course no room in a parish advocate's
+lodgings for Rhine cataracts, thunderstorms, tropical hurricanes (of
+tropes) or waterspouts, and he has had to reserve his more terrific
+tornadoes for a future work. I have his permission to mention the name
+of this future work; it is the 'Titan.' In this work he means to be an
+absolute Hecla, and shatter the ice of his country (and himself into
+the bargain) to pieces; like the volcanoes in Iceland, he will spout
+up a column of boiling water four feet in diameter to a height of
+eighty-nine or ninety feet in the air, and that at such a temperature
+that when this wet fire pillar falls down again and flows into the book
+shops, it will still be warm enough to boil eggs hard or their mother
+soft. "Then" (he always says--very sadly however--because he sees what
+a hard matter it is to distinguish between full half of our battling
+and harrying here below and a Jack Pudding farce and piece of utter
+buffoonery and nonsense,--also, that the cradle of this life _rocks_
+us, and _stills_ us indeed, but carries us not a step on our
+way)--"then may the _Arbor Toxicaria Macassariensis_[36] of the Ideal,
+beneath which I have lost a little hair already, go on poisoning me,
+and dispatch me to the Land of the Ideal. At all events, I have knelt
+down and prayed under the solemnising soul-elevating sighing roar of
+its death-dealing branches. And why should there be a hut made ready
+for the traveller beside the eternal well of truth, marked with the
+title 'Travellers' REST,' if no one ever enters it?" He wants, by way
+of broad "flies" for his life stage on earth, merely a regular,
+downright, _rainy year_ or two (two will suffice); for a broad, bright,
+open sky overpowers us, and weakens the hand's pen power by making the
+eyes over full. And here the book-maker differs markedly from his
+provision-contractor, the papermaker, who shuts _his_ mill up precisely
+when the weather is _wet_.
+
+I should also be glad if readers would have the goodness to go once
+more through the few chapters composing the first book--that they may
+see what they really lack; and indeed a book which is not worth reading
+twice is not worth reading once.
+
+In conclusion, I (albeit the most inconsiderable clubbist and
+vote-possessor of all the public) would fain incite the author to the
+production of other seedlings, suckers, and infantas of the same stamp,
+trusting that the reading world may form its opinion on his work with
+the same careful favour and indulgent approval as I have formed mine.
+
+ JEAN PAUL FR. RICHTER.
+
+ Hof in Voigtland,
+ _June 5th_, 1796.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Thus far my friend's preface. Utterly absurd as it is, my own preface,
+you see, has got to be concluded too, and at the end of it I can but
+sign myself as my aforesaid man Friday and namesake does, videlicet,
+
+ JEAN PAUL FR. RICHTER.
+
+ Hof in Voigtland,
+ _June 5th_, 1796.
+
+
+
+
+
+ BOOK II.
+
+
+
+
+ CHAPTER V.
+
+ THE BROOM AND THE BESOM AS PASSION IMPLEMENTS--THE IMPORTANCE OF A
+ BOOKWRITER--DIPLOMATIC NEGOTIATIONS AND DISCUSSIONS ON THE SUBJECT
+ OF CANDLE SNUFFING--THE PEWTER CUPBOARD--DOMESTIC HARDSHIPS AND
+ ENJOYMENTS.
+
+
+Catholics hold that there were fifteen mysteries in the life of
+Christ--five of Joy, five of Woe, five of Glory. I have carefully
+accompanied our hero through the five joyful mysteries of which the
+Linden honey-month of his marriage has had to tell. I now come with him
+to the five mysteries of Woe with which the series of the mysteries of
+most marriages is--concluded. I trust, however, that his may yet be
+found to contain the five of Glory also.
+
+In my first edition, I began this book of my hero's story in an
+unconcerned manner, with the above sentence just as if it were
+literally correct. A second, and carefully revised edition, however,
+renders it incumbent upon me to add, as an emendation, that the fifteen
+mysteries in question do not come one after another, like steps of
+stairs, or ancestors in a pedigree, but are shuffled up together like
+good and bad cards in a hand. Yet, in spite of this shuffling, the joy
+outbalances the sorrow, at any rate in its duration, as has been the
+case, indeed, with this terrestrial globe, our planet itself, which has
+survived several last days, and as a consequence still more springs,
+that is to say, re-creations on a smaller scale. I mention all this to
+save a number of poor devils of readers from the dreadful thought that
+they have got to wade through a whole "Book II." full of tears, partly
+to be read about, partly to be shed out of compassion. I am not one of
+those authors who, like very rattlesnakes, can sit and gaze upon
+thousands of charmed people running up and down, a prey to every kind
+of agitation, suspense, and anxiety, till his time comes to spring upon
+them and swallow them up.
+
+When Siebenkæs awoke in the morning, he at once packed the devil of
+jealousy, the marriage devil, off to the place where all other devils
+dwell. For a calming sleep lowers the pulse of the soul's fever--the
+grains thereof are fever-bark for the cold fever of hate, and also for
+the hot fever of love. Indeed he put down the tracing board, and with a
+pantograph made a correct, reduced copy of his yesterday's free
+translation of the Engelkrautian countenance, and blackened it nicely.
+When it was done, he said to his wife, for very love of her, "We'll
+send him the profile this morning, at once. It may be a good long while
+before he comes to fetch it." "Oh yes! he won't be here till Wednesday,
+and by that time he'll have forgotten all about it." "But I could bring
+him here sooner than that," Siebenkæs answered; "I need only send him
+the Russian Trinity dollar of 1679 to get changed for me; he won't
+_send_ me a farthing of the money he'll bring it himself as he always
+has done all through Leibgeber's collection." "Or you might send him
+the dollar and the picture both," said Lenette, "he would like it
+better." "Which would he like better?" he asked. She didn't see exactly
+what answer to make to this ridiculous question (whether she meant the
+stamped face or the pictured one) sprung upon her like a mine in this
+sort of way, and got out of her difficulty by saying, "Well, _the
+things_, of course." He spared her any further catechising.
+
+The Schulrath, however, sent nothing but an answer to the effect that
+he was beside himself with delight at the charming presents, and would
+come to express his thanks in person, and to settle up with the
+advocate, by the end of the following week at latest. The little dash
+of bitter flavour which was perceptible to the taste in this unexpected
+answer of the too happy Schulrath, was by no means sweetened away by
+the arrival at this moment of the messenger of the Inheritance Office,
+with Heimlicher von Blaise's first proceedings in the matter of the
+plaint lodged against him, consisting of a petition for three weeks'
+grace within which to lodge answers, a delay which the Court had
+readily accorded. Siebenkæs, as his own poor's advocate, lived in the
+sure and certain hope that the promised land of inheritance, flowing
+with milk and honey, would be reached by his children, though _he_
+would in all probability have long ere that time perched in the
+wilderness of the law; for justice is given to recompensing the
+children, and the children's children, for the uprightness of the
+fathers, and for the goodness of their cause. It was more or less in
+convenient, at the same time, to have nothing to live upon during one's
+own lifetime. The Russian Trinity dollar--for which the Schulrath
+hadn't even paid as yet--couldn't be lived upon, and there were but one
+or two queue ducats remaining of the treasury chest provided by
+Leibgeber, for the carrying on of operations against the Heimlicher.
+This gold coin and those few silver ones were (although I have said
+nothing about it till now) the entire money contents remaining in the
+Leibgeberian saviour's scrip, and indeed none but a true disciple and
+follower of the Saviour could be expected to hold out upon them. My
+silence on this matter of the emptying of the coin cabinet may perhaps
+be accepted in evidence of the fact that I try as much as I can to
+avoid mentioning anything calculated to give my readers pain.
+
+"Oh! I shall get on somehow or other," said Siebenkæs quite gleefully,
+as he set to work harder than ever at his writing, with the view of
+getting a considerable haul of money into the house, at the earliest
+moment possible, in the shape of payment for his 'Selection from the
+Devil's Papers.'
+
+But there was a fresh purgatorial fire now being stoked and blown, till
+it blazed hotter and hotter about him. I have refrained from saying
+anything about the fire in question till now, though he has been
+sitting roasting at it since the day before yesterday, Lenette being
+the cook, and his writing table the larkspit.
+
+During the few days when the wordless quarrel was going on, he had got
+into a habit of listening with the closest attention to what Lenette
+was doing, as he sat writing away at his 'Selection from the Devil's
+Papers'; and this sent his ideas all astray. The softest step, the very
+slightest shake of anything affected him just as if he had had
+hydrophobia, or the gout, and put one or two fine young ideas to death,
+as a louder noise kills young canaries, or silkworms.
+
+He controlled himself very well at first. He pointed out to himself
+that his wife really could _not_ help moving about, and that as long as
+she hadn't a spiritual or glorified body and furniture to deal with,
+she couldn't possibly go about as silently as a sunbeam, or as her
+invisible good and evil angels behind her. But while he was listening
+to this _cours de morale_, this _collegium pietatis_ of his own, he
+lost the run of his satirical conceits and contexts, and his language
+was deprived of a good deal of its sparkle.
+
+But the morning after the silhouette evening, when their hearts had
+shaken hands and renewed the old royal alliance of Love, he could go
+much more openly to work, and so, as soon as he had blackened
+the profile, and had only his own original creations to go on
+blackening--_i. e_. when he was going to begin working in his own
+charcoal burning hut, he said to his wife, as a preliminary--
+
+"If you can help it, Lenette, don't make very much noise to-day. I
+really can hardly get on with my writing, if you do--you know it's for
+publication."
+
+She said "I'm sure you can't hear me--I go about so very quietly."
+
+Although a man may be long past the years of his youthful follies, yet
+in every year of his life there crop up a few weeks and days in which
+he has fresh follies to commit. It was truly in a moment of one of
+these days that Siebenkæs made the request above mentioned; for he had
+now laid upon himself the necessity of lying in wait and watching to
+see what Lenette would do in consequence of it. She skimmed over the
+floor, and athwart the various webs of her household labours, with the
+tread of a spider. Like her sex in general, she had disputed his little
+point, merely for the sake of disputing it, not of doing what she was
+asked not to do. Siebenkæs had to keep his ears very much on the alert
+to hear what little noise she did make, either with her hands or her
+feet--but he was successful, and did hear the greater part of it.
+Unless when we are asleep we are more attentive to a slight noise than
+to a loud one; and our author listened to her wherever she went, his
+ear and his attention going about fixed to her like a pedometer
+wherever she moved. In short he had to break off in the middle of the
+satire, called "The Nobleman with the Ague," and jump up and cry to her
+(as she went creeping about), "For one whole hour have I been listening
+and watching that dreadful tripping about on tiptoe. I had much rather
+you would stamp about in a pair of the iron-soled sandals people used
+to wear for beating time in.[37] Please go about as you usually do,
+darling."
+
+She complied, and went about _almost_ as she usually did. He would have
+very much liked to have prohibited the intermediate style of walking,
+as he had the light and the heavy; but a husband doesn't care to
+contradict himself twice in one morning; once is enough. In the evening
+he asked her if she would mind going about the house in her stockings
+when he was at work at his writing. She would find it nice and cool for
+the feet. "In fact," he added, "as I'm working all the forenoon
+literally for our bread, it would be well if you would do nothing that
+isn't absolutely necessary while I am at my literary work."
+
+Next morning he sat in judgment (mentally) upon everything that went on
+behind his back, and challenged it to see if it could produce the
+free-pass of necessity--going on with his writing all the time, but
+doing it worse than usual. This scribbling martyr endured a great many
+things with as much patience as he could muster, but when Wendeline
+took to whisking the straw under the green painted marriage TORUS with
+a long broom, the cross grew too heavy for his shoulder. It happened,
+moreover, that he had been reading two days before in an old Ephemeris
+of scientific inquirers, that a clergyman, of the name of Johann
+Pechmann, couldn't bear the sound of a besom--that it nearly took his
+breath away, and that he once took to his heels and bolted when a
+crossing sweeper accidentally ran against him. The effect of his having
+read this was, that he was involuntarily more observant and intolerant
+of a cognate discomfort. He called out to the domestic sweeper in the
+next room, from his chair where he sat--
+
+"Lenette, do _not_ go on scrubbing and switching about with that besom
+of yours, it drives away the whole of my best ideas out of my head.
+There was an old clergyman once of the name of Pechmann, who would
+rather have been condemned to sweep a crossing in Vienna himself, than
+to listen to another sweeping it--he would rather have been flogged
+with a birch-broom, than have heard the infernal sound of it swishing
+and whishing. How is a man to get a coherent idea, fit to go to the
+printer and publisher, into his head with all this sweeping and
+scrubbing going on?"
+
+Lenette did what every good wife, and her lap dog, would have done; she
+left off the noise by degrees. At last she laid down the besom, and
+merely whisked three straws and a little feather fluff gently with the
+hair-broom, from under the bed, not making as much noise even as he did
+with his writing. However the editor of the 'Devil's Papers' managed to
+hear it, in a manner beyond his fondest hopes. He rose up, went to the
+bedroom door and called in at the room, "My darling, it's every bit as
+hellish a torment to me if I can hear it _at all_. You may fan those
+miserable sweepings with a peacock's feather, or a holy-water asperger,
+or you may puff them away with a pair of bellows, but I and my poor
+book must suffer and pay the piper all the same."
+
+"I'm quite done now, at all events," she said.
+
+He set to work again, and gaily took up the threads of his fourth
+satire, "Concerning the five Monsters and their receptacles, whereon I
+at first intended to subsist."
+
+Meanwhile Lenette gently closed the door, so that he was driven to the
+conclusion that there was something or other going on to annoy him
+again in his Gehenna and place of penitence. He laid down his pen and
+cried--
+
+"Lenette, I can't hear very distinctly what it is--but you're up to
+something or other in there that I can _not_ stand. For God's dear
+sake, stop it at once, do put a period to my martyrdom and sorrows of
+Werther, for this one day--come here, let me see you."
+
+She answered, all out of breath with hard work--
+
+"I'm not doing anything."
+
+He got up and opened the door of his chamber of torture. There was his
+wife rubbing away with a piece of grey flannel, polishing up the green
+rails of the bed. The author of this history once lay sick of smallpox
+in a bed of this kind, and knows them well. But the reader may not be
+aware that a green slumber cage of this kind is a good deal like a
+magnified canaries' breeding cage with its latticed folding doors or
+portcullises, and that this trellis and hothouse for dreams is, though
+less handsome in appearance, much better for health than our heavy
+bastille towers all hung about with curtains which keep away every
+breath of fresh air. The advocate swallowed about half a pint of
+bedroom air, and said, in measured accents--
+
+"You're at your brushing and sweeping again, are you? although you know
+quite well that I'm sitting there working like a slave for you and
+myself too, and that I've been writing away for the last hour with
+scarcely an idea in my head. Oh! my heavenly better half! out with all
+your cartridges at one shot, for God's sake, and don't finish me off
+altogether with that rag of yours."
+
+Lenette, full of astonishment said, "It's simply impossible, old man.
+that you can hear me in the next room"--and polished away harder than
+ever. He took her hand, somewhat hastily, though not roughly, and said
+in a louder tone, "Come, get up!--It's exactly that which I complain
+of, that I _can't_ hear you in the next room; I'm obliged to rack my
+brains to guess what you're at--and the only ideas left in my head are
+connected with brushing and scrubbing, so that all the brilliant
+notions which I might otherwise be putting down on paper are driven
+away. My darling child, nobody could possibly sit and work away here
+more composedly and contentedly than I, if it were only grape-shot and
+canister, howitzer shells, and hundred-pounders that you were banging
+away with at my back out of these embrasures of yours. What it is that
+I really can _not_ stand, is a _quiet_ noise."
+
+All this talk having put him a little out of temper, he fetched her out
+of the room, rag and all, saying--
+
+"It does seem a little hard that, while I'm labouring away here with
+all my might, working myself almost to death, to provide a little
+entertainment for the reading public, a regular bear-baiting pit should
+be started in my own room, and that an author's very bed should be
+turned into a siege-trench, and arrows and fire-balls sent about his
+ears out of it. There, I shan't be writing while we're at dinner, I'll
+talk the thing out at full length with you then."
+
+At noon, then,[38] as he was about to enter on the subject of the
+morning's tourney, he had first to hold a prayer-tourney. I mean this:
+"prayers" do not, in Nürnberg and Kuhschnappel, mean a certain
+hereditary office and service of mass in a court chapel, but--the
+ringing of the twelve o'clock bell. Now the dining-table of our couple
+stood against the wall, and was not put in the middle of the floor
+except for meals. Well, Siebenkæs never succeeded above twice during
+his married life in having this table brought forward BEFORE the soup
+came in (for if a woman ONCE forgets a thing, she goes on forgetting it
+a thousand times running[39]), though he preached his lungs as dry as a
+fox's (which are used for curing ours); both soup and table were always
+moved together, after the soup came in, without the spilling of a
+greater quantity of the latter than one might have used in swallowing a
+pill.
+
+To-day this was the case as usual. Siebenkæs slowly chewed the pill
+which he swallowed with the soup. The delay in moving the table he
+observed anxiously (as if it had been a delay in the arrival of
+an equinox), with a long face and slow breathing, and when the
+soup-libation was duly poured as usual, he broke out as follows, in a
+calm tone of voice, however--
+
+"The fact is, Lenette, we are on board a good ship. At sea, you know,
+people spill their soup because their vessel rolls and pitches--and
+ours is spilt for a similar reason. See here, the dinner-table
+and the morning besom are both in a tale together; they are two
+conspirators who will blow out your husband's candle--to use a strong
+expression--before they have done."
+
+This, the exordium of his sermon, was followed by way of hymn, by the
+arrival of the town fool of Kuhschnappel, who brought in a great sheet
+of paper containing an invitation to the shooting match on St. Andrew's
+Day, the 30th of November. Every one of us must, I am sure, have
+gathered from what has already been said that the only money left in
+the house was the queue-ducat. At the same time, Siebenkæs couldn't
+leave the shooting-club, without thereby granting to himself a
+certificate of poverty, a _testimonium paupertatis_, in the face of the
+whole town. And really a shooting-ticket for this match was almost as
+good as mining shares or East India stock to a man who was as good a
+shot as Siebenkæs. It would also give him an opportunity of doing that
+public honour to his wife which she, as a senate clerk's daughter from
+Augspurg, had a right to expect. Unfortunately, however, the grave man
+of folly couldn't be got to give change for the curious queue-ducat,
+particularly as Siebenkæs aroused his suspicions with respect to it
+himself, by saying. "This is a very good tail or queue-ducat, I assure
+you. I don't wear a tail myself," he added, "but that's no reason why a
+ducat shouldn't, if the King of Prussia chooses to immortalise his own
+by having it stamped upon it. Wife, would you get our landlord, the
+hairdresser, to come up; nobody can know better than he whether it's a
+queue-ducat or not, seeing he has queues (not upon ducats) in his hands
+every day." The pickle-herring of Kuhschnappel didn't vouchsafe the
+ghost of a smile at this. The hairdresser came, and declared it to be a
+queue, and civilly took it away himself to get it changed. Hairdressers
+can run; in five minutes he brought the change for the ducat.
+
+When the melancholy buffoon had pocketed his portion of it, Lenette's
+face was all over double interjections and marks of interrogation;
+wherefore Siebenkæs resumed his midday sermon. "The principal prizes,"
+he said, "are pewter dishes and sums of money for hitting the bird, and
+mostly provisions for the other marks we shoot at. I suspect that you
+and I shall dine on St. Andrew's Day upon a nice piece of roast meat in
+a new dish, both of which I shall have shot into your kitchen, if I
+only take a little pains. And at all events don't worry yourself,
+darling, because our money's nearly all gone. Take refuge behind me. I
+am your sandbag, your gabion, your shelter trench, and with my rifle,
+more certainly still with my pen, I feel pretty sure I shall keep the
+devil of poverty at his distance, till my precious guardian hands over
+my mother's property. Only for God's sake don't let _your_ work
+interrupt _mine_. Your rag and your besom have cost me at least sixteen
+currency dollars this morning. For supposing I get eight imperial
+dollars a printed sheet for my Devilish Papers (counting the imperial
+dollar at ninety kreuzer)--and I ought, to get more--I should have
+earned forty-eight currency dollars this morning if I had written a
+(printed) sheet and a half. But you see I had to stop in the middle of
+it and expend a great many words upon you, for none of which I get a
+single kreuzer. You should look upon me as a fat old spider stowed away
+in a box to shrivel up in time into a precious gold nugget or jewel.
+Whenever I take a dip of ink I draw a thread of gold out of the ink
+bottle, as I've often told you, and (as the proverb says) the morning
+hours have gold in their mouths (Morgenstund hat Gold im Mund). Go on
+with your dinner, and listen. I'll just take this opportunity of
+explaining to you the principal points in which the preciousness of an
+author consists, and so give you the key to a good many things. In
+Swabia, in Saxony, and Pomerania, there are towns in which there are
+people who appraise authors as our master butcher here does beef. They
+are usually known by the name of tasters or rulers of taste, because
+they try the flavour of every book as it comes out, and then tell the
+people whether they'll like it or not. We authors in our irritation
+often call these people critics, but they might bring an action against
+us for libel for so doing. Now as these directors of taste seldom write
+books themselves, they have all the more time to read and find fault
+with other people's. Yet it does sometimes happen that some of them
+have written bad books themselves, and consequently know a bad book in
+a moment when they come across one. Many become patron saints of
+authors and of their books for the same reason that St. John Nepomuck
+became the patron saint of bridges and those who cross them; because he
+was once thrown off one into the water. Now these scribblings of mine
+will be sent to these gentlemen as soon as they are in print (as your
+hymn-book is). And they'll peer all through my productions to see
+whether or not I've written them quite legibly and distinctly (not too
+large or too small), whether I've put any wrong letters, a little e for
+a big, or an f instead of a ph, whether the hyphen-strokes are too long
+or too short, and all that sort of thing: indeed they often even give
+opinions about the thoughts in the book (which they have nothing to do
+with). Now you see, if you go on scrubbing and swishing about with
+besoms behind me, I shall keep writing all sorts of stuff and nonsense,
+and it'll all be printed. Of course that's a terrible thing to happen
+to a man, for these tasters tear great frightful holes and wounds in
+the paper however fine it is, with nails as long as fingers
+(buttonmakers' nails are shorter, but not circumcisers' among the
+Jews), before they give it a name to carry about with it, as the
+circumcisers do to the Jew boys. And after this, they circulate a slip
+of unsized paper, in which they find fault with me, and give me a bad
+name, all over the empire, in Saxony and Pomerania, and tell all Swabia
+in so many plain words that I'm an ass. May the devil confound their
+impertinence! This is the sort of birching, you see, that besom of
+yours will be getting me in for. Whereas, if I write beautifully and
+legibly, and with proper attention and ability--and every sheet of my
+Devilish Papers is so written--if I carefully weigh and consider every
+word and every page before I write it, if I am playful in one place,
+instructive in another, pleasing in all,--in that case I am bound to
+tell you, Lenette, that the tasters are people who are quite capable of
+appreciating work of that sort, and would think nothing of sitting down
+and circulating papers in which the least they would say of me would be
+that I had certainly brought something away from college in my head,
+and had a little to show for my studies. In short, they would say, they
+hadn't expected it of me, and there was really something _in me_. Now a
+panegyric of this kind upon a husband is reflected, of course, upon his
+wife, and when the Augspurg people are all asking 'Where does he live,
+this Siebenkæs whom everybody's talking of?' there are sure to be lots
+of folks in the Fuggery to answer, 'Oh! he lives in Kuhschnappel, his
+wife was a daughter of Engelkraut, the senate clerk, and a very good
+wife she is to him.'"
+
+"You've told me all that about bookmaking hundreds of times," she
+answered. "And it's just what the bookbinder says too; and I am sure
+_he_ has all the best books through his hands, binding them."
+
+This allusion to his repetitions of himself, though not meant
+ill-temperedly, he didn't very much relish. In fact, the habit had
+hitherto been, as it were, incubating unperceived in him, as a fever
+does in its early stage. Husbands, even those who are sage and of few
+words, talk to their wives with the same boundless liberty and
+unrestraint as they do to their own selves; and a man repeats himself
+_to_ himself immeasurably oftener than to anybody else, and that
+without so much as observing that he does it, let alone taking any
+count of how often. The wife, however, both observes and counts;
+accustomed as she is to hear the cleverest (and most unintelligible)
+remarks from her husband's lips daily, she can't help remembering them
+when they occur again.
+
+The hairdresser reappeared unexpectedly, bringing a fleeting cloud with
+him. He said he had been to all the poor devils in the house to see if
+he could get as much of the Martinmas rent out of them in advance as
+would pay his subscription to the shooting match, but that they were a
+set of church mice and he hadn't succeeded. The whole garrison of them
+were naturally unequal to the payment of an impost of this description
+six whole weeks before it was due, inasmuch as the majority of them
+didn't see how they were to pay it when it _was_ due. So the Saxon came
+to the grandee of his house, to the "Lord of Ducats" as he styled the
+advocate. Siebenkæs couldn't find in his heart to disappoint the
+patient soul with another "no" on the top of those he had borne so
+good-humouredly; his wife and he scraped together the little small
+change they had left out of the ducat, and sent him away rejoicing with
+half of the rent, three gulden. All they had left for themselves
+was--the question what they should do for light in the evening; for
+there weren't even a couple of groschen in the house to get half a
+pound of candles, and there were no candles _in natura_.
+
+I cannot say that he here turned deadly pale, or fainted, or began to
+rave. Praise be to every manly soul who has drunk the icy whey of
+stoicism for only half a spring, and does not fall down paralysed and
+frozen, like a woman, before the chill spectre of penury. In an age
+which has had all its strongest sinews cut through except the universal
+one, money, any diatribe, even the most extravagant, against riches, is
+nobler and more useful than the most accurately just depreciation of
+poverty. For pasquinades on gold dirt are agreeable to the rich,
+reminding them that though their riches may take to themselves wings,
+true happiness does not depend thereon; while the poor derive from them
+not bitterer feeling merely, but also the sweeter satisfaction of
+conquering the same. All that is base in man--thoughts, fancies, what
+we look on as being examples--all join in one chorus in praise of gold;
+why should we desire to deprive poverty of her true reserve force, her
+_chevaliers d'honneur_, philosophy and beggars' pride?
+
+The first thing Siebenkæs opened was not his mouth, but the door, and
+then the pewter cupboard in the kitchen, from which he carefully and
+with a good deal of gravity took down a bell-shaped tureen and three
+pewter plates, and put them on a chair. Lenette could no longer stand
+by in silence; she clasped her hands and said in a faint voice of
+shame, "Merciful Providence! is it come to selling our dishes?"
+
+"I'm only going to turn them into silver," he said; "as kings make
+church bells into dollars, so shall we make our bell-dishes into coin.
+There's nothing you need be ashamed about in converting trash of table
+ware, the coffins of beasts, into currency, when Duke Christian of
+Brunswick turned a king's silver coffin into dollars in 1662. Is a
+plate an apostle, do you think? Great monarchs have taken many an
+apostle, if he happened to be a silver one, Hugo of St. Caro and others
+as well, divided them (as it were) into chapters, verses, and legends,
+sent them to the mint, and then dispatched them off all over the world
+in that analysed form."
+
+"Ah! stupid nonsense," she answered.
+
+Some few readers will probably say "What else was it?" and I ought long
+ago to have apologized, perhaps, for the style of speech, so
+incomprehensible to Lenette, which the advocate makes use of.
+
+He justified it satisfactorily to himself by the consideration that his
+wife always had some DISTANT idea of what he was talking about, even
+when he made use of the most learned technical expressions, and the
+farthest-fetched plays upon words, because of its being good practice,
+and of his liking to hear himself do it. "Women," he would repeat,
+"have a distant and dim comprehension of all these things, and
+therefore don't waste, in long tedious efforts to discover the precise
+signification of these unintelligibilities, precious time which might
+be better employed." This, I may observe, is not much encouragement for
+Reinhold's 'Lexicon to Jean Paul's Levana,' nor for me personally
+either, in some senses.
+
+"Ah! stuff and nonsense" had been Lenette's answer. Firmian merely
+asked her to bring the pewter into the sitting-room, and he would talk
+the matter over sensibly. But he might as well have set forth his
+reasons before a woman's skin stuffed with straw. What she chiefly
+blamed him for, was that by his contribution to the shooting-club purse
+he had emptied hers. And thus she herself suggested to him the best
+answer he could have made. He said, "It was an angel that put it in my
+head; because on St. Andrew's Day I shall regain everything that I turn
+into silver now, and repewterise it immediately. To please you, I shall
+keep not only the tureen and the plates I get as prizes, but all the
+rest of the pewter ware, and put it all into your cupboard. I assure
+you I had made up my mind before to sell all my prizes."
+
+What was to be done, then? There was no help for it. This banished and
+expatriated table ware was lowered in the darkness of evening into old
+Sabel's basket--and she was celebrated all over the town for
+transacting this sort of commission agency or transfer business, with
+as discreet a silence as if she were dealing in stolen gold. "Nobody
+gets it out of _me_," she would say, "whose the things are. The
+treasurer, who's dead and gone poor man--you know I sold everything he
+had in the world for him--he often used to say there was never the
+equal of me."
+
+But, my poor dear young couple, I fear this Sabbath[40] or "Descent of
+the Saviour into Hades" is but little likely to help you long, in that
+antechamber of hell which you've got into. The flames are gone from
+about you to-day, certainly, and a cool sea-breeze is refreshing you,
+but tomorrow and the day after the old smoke and the old fire will be
+blazing at your hearts! However, I don't want to put any restrictions
+upon your trade in tin. We're quite right to have a good dinner to-day
+though we know perfectly well we shall be just every bit as hungry
+to-morrow again.
+
+So the next morning Siebenkæs begged that he might be allowed to be all
+the quieter that day because he had been obliged to talk so much the
+day before. Our dear Lenette, who was a live washing-machine and
+scouring-mill, and in whose eyes the washing bill and the bill of fare
+had much of the weight of a confessor's certificate, would sooner have
+let go her hold of everything in the world--her husband included--than
+of the duster and the besom. She thought this was merely _his_
+obstinate persistency, whereas it was really her own, in blowing the
+organ bellows and thundering away upon her pedal reed stops right
+behind her author's back during the morning hours, whose mouths had two
+kinds of gold in them for _him_, namely gold from the golden age, and
+ordinary metallic gold. She might have played with a thirty-two feet
+stop out in the afternoon as long as she liked, but she wasn't to be
+got out of her usual daily routine. A woman is the most heterogeneous
+compound of obstinate will and self-sacrifice that I have ever met
+with; she would let her head be cut off by the headsman of Paris for
+her husband's sake, very likely, but not a single hair of it. And she
+can deny herself to almost any extent for others' good, but not one bit
+for her own. She can forego sleep for three nights running for a sick
+person, but not one minute of a nap before bed-time, to ensure herself
+a better night's sleep in bed. Neither the souls of the blest, nor
+butterflies, though neither of them possess stomachs, can eat less than
+a woman going to a ball or to her wedding, or than one cooking for her
+guests; but if it's only her doctor and her own health that forbid her
+some Esau's mess or other, she eats it that instant. Now men's
+sacrifices are all just turned the opposite way.
+
+Lenette, impelled by two imposing forces, what she was asked to do and
+what she wanted to do, tried to find the feminine line of the
+resultant, and hit upon the middle course of stopping her scouring and
+sweeping as long as he was sitting at his writing. But the moment he
+got up, and went to the piano for a couple of minutes, or to the
+window, or across the doorstep, that instant back she would bring her
+washing and scrubbing instruments of torture into the room again.
+Siebenkæs wasn't long in becoming cognisant of this terrible
+alternation and relieving-of-the-guard between her besom and his
+(satirical) one; and the way she watched and lay in wait for his
+movements drove all the ideas in his head higgledy-piggledy. At first
+he bore it with really very great patience, as great as ever a husband
+has, patience, that is, which lasts for a short time. But after
+reflecting for a considerable period in silence, that the public, as
+well as he, were sufferers by this room-cleaning business, and that all
+posterity was, in a manner, watching and hanging upon every stroke of
+that besom, which might do its work just as well in the afternoon when
+he would only be at his law papers--the tumour of his anger suddenly
+broke, and he grew mad, _i. e_. madder than he was before, and ran up
+to her and cried--
+
+"Oh! this is the very devil! At it again, eh! I see what you're about.
+You watch till I get up from the table! Just be kind enough to finish
+me off at once; hunger and worry will kill me before Easter, whether or
+not. Good God! It's a thing I really can _not_ comprehend. She sees as
+well as possible that my book is our larder--that there are whole
+rations of bread in every page of it--yet she holds my hands the entire
+morning, so that I can't do a line of it. Here I've been sitting on the
+nest all this time and only hatched as far as letter E, where I
+describe the ascent of Justice to heaven. Oh! Lenette! Lenette!"
+
+"Very well," said Lenette, "it's all the same whatever I do, it's sure
+to be wrong; do let me tidy the house properly, like any other woman."
+
+And she asked him, in a simple manner, why it was that the bookbinder's
+little boy (the language is mine, not hers), who played fantasias the
+whole day long upon a child's toy fiddle, composing and enjoying whole
+Alexander's Feasts upon it, didn't disturb him with his screeching
+_un_harmonical progressions--and how he bore the chimneysweep's
+sweeping the other day so much better than he did her sweeping of the
+room. And as he couldn't quite manage to condense, just in a moment,
+into few words the demonstration of the magnitude of the difference
+which existed between these things, he found it better to get into a
+rage again, and say--
+
+"Do you suppose I'm going to make a great long speech and explanation
+gratis, and lose dollar after dollar at my work? _Himmel_! _Kreuz_!
+_Wetter_! The municipal code, the Roman pandects, forbid a coppersmith
+even to enter a street where a professor is working, and here's my own
+wife harder than an old jurist--and not only that--she's the
+coppersmith herself. I'll tell you what it is, Lenette, I shall really
+speak to the Schulrath about this." This did a great deal of service.
+
+The produce of the Trinity dollar here arrived before the Schulrath; a
+piece of polite attention which no one would have expected from a man
+of so much learning and knowledge. No doubt all my readers will be as
+much delighted as if they were husbands of Lenette themselves at the
+fact that she was a perfect angel all the afternoon; her hands made no
+more noise at their work than her fingers or her needle; she even put
+off the doing of several things which were not necessary. She
+accompanied a sister in the oratorical art, who came in with a divine
+bonnet (in her hands, to be altered), all the way down stairs, not so
+much out of politeness as thoughtfulness, that all the points of
+principal importance connected with the doing up of the bonnet, which
+had already been settled, might be gone over again two or three times
+out of the advocate's hearing.
+
+This touched the old noise-hunter, and went to the weak and tender
+spot in him, his heart. He sought long in himself for a fitting
+thank-offering in return, till he at last hit upon quite a new sort of
+one.
+
+"Listen, child," he said, taking her hand very affectionately;
+"wouldn't it be more reasonable in me if I were to amuse myself with my
+writing in the _evening_? I mean, if the husband were to do his
+creating at a time when the wife had no washing to do. Just think what
+a life of nectar and ambrosia that would be; we should sit opposite to
+each other with a candle between us--you at your sewing, I at my
+writing--the other people in the house would all have their work done
+and be at their beer--of course there wouldn't be customers with
+bonnets coming at that time of night to make themselves visible and
+audible. The evenings will be getting longer too, and of course I shall
+have the more time for my writing fun, but we need say nothing about
+that now. What do you think, or what do you _say_ (if you like the
+expression better), to this new style of life? Remember too, that we're
+quite rich again now--the Russian Trinity dollar is like so much found
+money."
+
+"Oh! it will be delightful," she said, "I shall be able to do all my
+household work in the morning, as a proper reasonable housekeeper
+should."
+
+"Yes, just so," he answered, "I shall write away quietly at my satires
+all morning, then wait till evening, and go on where I left off."
+
+The evening of nectar and ambrosia came duly on, and was quite without
+a rival among all evenings that had gone before it. A young married
+couple, sitting one on each side of a table, working away quietly at
+their work, with a candle between them, have a considerable notion what
+happiness is. He was all happy thoughts and kisses; she all smiles, and
+what little noise she made with the frying-pan seemed no louder to him
+than what she made with her needle. "When people are earning double
+working-pay by the light of one candle," he said, greatly delighted at
+the domestic reformation, "they needn't, as far as I see, restrict
+themselves to a miserable dip, the thickness of a worm, which they can
+see nothing by, unless it be the wretchedness of its own light.
+To-morrow we'll set up a mould candle, and no more about it."
+
+As I take some credit to myself for selecting for narration in this
+story such events only as are of universal interest, it will be
+sufficient cursorily to mention that the mould candle duly appeared
+next evening, and kindled a feeble strife, because, _apropos_ of this
+candle, the advocate once more brought forward a new theory of his,
+concerning the lighting of candles. He held the somewhat schismatic
+opinion that the rational way of lighting all candles, more
+particularly thick ones, was to light them at the thick end, and not at
+the top or thin end; and that this was the reason of there being two
+wicks projecting from every candle. "A law of combustion," he would
+add, "in support of which I need only refer (at least for women of
+sense) to the self-evident truth that, when a candle is burning down,
+it keeps growing larger and larger at its lower extremity--just as
+people who are burning down from debauchery grow thicker at theirs,
+with fat and dropsy. If we light the candle at the top, we find the
+result to be a useless lump, plug, or stump of tallow running all over
+our candlestick. Whereas, if we light it at the bottom, the liquefied
+grease from the thick end wraps itself gradually and with the most
+exquisite symmetry all over the thinner end as if feeding it, and
+equalising its proportions."
+
+In reply to which, Lenette, with some force, adduced Shaftesbury's
+touchstone of truth, ridicule. "Why, everybody that came in of an
+evening, and noticed that I had put my candle upside down in the
+candlestick, would burst out laughing; and it would be the wife that
+everybody would blame." So that a mutual treaty of peace had to put a
+period to this battle of the candle, to the effect that he should light
+his candle at the bottom, and she hers at the top. And for the present,
+as the candle common to both parties happened to be thick at the top,
+he agreed to admit, without objection, the erroneous method of
+lighting.
+
+However, the Devil, who crosses and blesses himself at such treaties of
+peace, managed so to play his cards, that on this very day Siebenkæs
+chanced, in his reading, to come upon the touching anecdote of the
+younger Pliny's wife holding the lamp for her husband that he might see
+to write. And it occurred to him that, now that he was getting along so
+swimmingly with his selection from the said Devil's Papers, it would be
+a splendid arrangement, and save him many interruptions, if Lenette
+would snuff the candle always instead of his doing it himself.
+
+"Of course," said she, "I shall be delighted." The first fifteen or
+twenty minutes passed, and everything seemed to be all right.
+
+The above period having elapsed, he cocked up his chin towards the
+candle, by way of reminder to her to snuff it. Next, he gently touched
+the snuffers with the tip of his pen, with the like object, not saying
+anything however; and a little while after that, he moved the
+candlestick a little bit, and said softly, "The candle." Matters now
+began to assume a more serious aspect; he began to observe and watch
+with greater attention the gradual obscuration of his paper, and
+consequently the very snuffers which, in Lenette's hands, had promised
+to throw so much light on his labours, became the means of impeding his
+progress quite as effectually as the crabs did Hercules in his battle
+with the hydra. The two wretched ideas, "snuff" and "snuffers," took
+bodily shape, and danced hand in hand, with a sprightly pertness up and
+down on every letter of his most biting satires. "Lenette," he had soon
+to say again, "please to amputate that stupid black stump there, on
+both our accounts."
+
+"Dear me, have I been forgetting it?" she said, and snuffed it in a
+great hurry.
+
+Readers of a historical turn--such as I should wish mine to be--can now
+see that things couldn't but get worse and worse, and more and more out
+of joint. He had often to stop, making letters a yard or so in length,
+waiting till some beneficent hand should remove the black thorn from
+the rose of light, till, at length, he broke out with the word "Snuff!"
+Then he took to varying his verbs, saying, "Enlighten!" or "Behead!" or
+"Nip-off." Or he endeavoured to introduce an agreeable variety by using
+other forms of speech, such as "The candle's cap, Capmaker;" "There's a
+long spot in the sun again;" or, "This is a charming _chiaroscuro_,
+well adapted for night thoughts in a beautiful Correggio-night; but
+snuff away all the same."
+
+At last, shortly before supper, when the charcoal stack in the flame
+had really attained a great height, he inhaled half a river of air into
+his lungs, and, slowly dropping it out again, said, in a grimly mild
+manner, "You don't snuff a bit--as far as I can see, the black
+funereal pyre might rise up to the ceiling for all you would care. All
+right! I prefer to be the candle-snuffer of this theatre myself till
+supper-time; and while we're at supper I shall just say to you, as a
+rational man, what there is to say on the subject." "Oh! yes, please,"
+she said, quite delighted.
+
+When she had set four eggs on the table, two for each, he commenced:
+"You see, I had been looking forward to my working at night being
+attended with several advantages, because I thought you would have
+managed this easy little task of snuffing the candle always at the
+right time, as a Roman lady of high rank made herself do duty as a
+candlestick for her celebrated husband, Pliny junior (to use a
+commercial expression), and held his light for him. I was mistaken, it
+appears; for, unfortunately, I can't write with my toes under the
+table, like a person with no arms, nor yet in the dark, as a
+clairvoyant might. The only use the candle is to me, in the
+circumstances, is that it serves as an Epictetus lamp, enabling me to
+get some practice in stoicism. It had often as much as twelve inches of
+eclipse, like a sun, and I wished in vain, darling, for an invisible
+eclipse--such as frequently occurs in the heavens. The cursed slag of
+our candle hatches just these obscure ideas and gloomy night thoughts,
+which authors (too) often have. Whereas, gracious goodness! if you had
+only snuffed, as you ought to have done----"
+
+"You're in fun, are you not?" she asked. "My stitches are much smaller
+than your strokes, and I'm sure I saw quite well."
+
+"Well, dear," he continued, "I'll proceed to point out to you that, on
+the grounds of psychology and mental science, it isn't that it matters
+a bit whether a person who is writing and thinking _sees_ a little more
+or less distinctly or not, it's the snuffers and the snuff that he
+can't get out of his head, and they get behind his spiritual legs, trip
+up his ideas, and stop him, just as a log does a horse hobbled to it.
+For even when you've only just snuffed the candle, and I'm in the full
+enjoyment of the light, I begin to look out for the instant when you'll
+do it next. Now, this watching being in itself neither visible nor
+audible, can be nothing but a thought, or idea; and as every thought
+has the property of occupying the mind to the exclusion of all others,
+it follows that all an author's other and more valuable ideas are sent
+at once to the dogs. But this is by no means the worst of the affair.
+I, of course, _ought_ not to have had to occupy my head with the idea
+of candle-snuffing any more than with that of snuff-taking; but when
+the ardently longed-for snuffing never comes off at all, the black
+smut on the ripe ear of light keeps growing longer--the darkness
+deepening--a regular funereal torch feebly casting its ray upon a
+half-dead writer, who can't drive from his head the thought of the
+conjugal hand which could snap all the fetters asunder with one single
+snip;--then, my dearest Lenette, it's not easy for the said writer to
+help writing like an ass, and stamping like a dromedary. At least, I
+express my own opinion and experience on the subject!"
+
+On this, she assured him that, if he were really serious, she would
+take great care to do it properly next evening.
+
+And, in truth, this story must give her credit for keeping her word,
+for she not only snuffed much oftener than the night before, but, the
+fact is, she _hardly ever left off_ snuffing, particularly after he had
+nodded his head once or twice by way of thanks.
+
+"Don't snuff _too_ often, darling," he said, at length, but very, very
+kindly. "If you attempt _too_ fine sub-sub-subdivisions (fractions of
+fractions of fractions of fractions) of the wick, it'll be almost as
+bad as ever--a candle snuffed too short gives as little light as one
+with an overgrown wick which you may apply to the lights of the world
+and of the Church, that's to say if you _can_. It's only for a short
+while _before_ and _after_ the snuffing, _entre chien et loup_ as it
+were, that that delicious middle-age of the soul prevails when it can
+see to perfection; when it is truly a life for the gods, a just
+proportion of black and white, both in the candle and on the book."
+
+I and others really do not see any great reason to congratulate
+ourselves upon this new turn of events. The poor's advocate has
+evidently laid upon himself the additional burden, that all the time he
+is writing he has to keep watching and calculating,--superficially
+perhaps, but still, watching and calculating--the mean term, or
+middle-distance, between the long wick and the short. And what time has
+he left for his work?
+
+Some minutes after, when the snuffing came a little too soon, he asked,
+though somewhat doubtfully, "Dirty clothes for the wash already?" Next
+time, as she let it be almost too long before she snuffed, he looked at
+her interrogatively, and said, "Well? well?"
+
+"In one instant," said she. By-and-by, he having got rather more deeply
+absorbed than usual in his writing, and she in her work, he found, when
+he suddenly came to himself and looked, one of the longest spears in
+the candle that had yet appeared, and with two or three thieves round
+it to the bargain.
+
+"Oh, good Lord! 'Pon my soul, this is really the life of a dog!" cried
+he; and, seizing the snuffers in a fury, he snuffed the candle--out.
+
+This holiday pause of darkness afforded a capital opportunity for
+jumping up, flying into a passion, and pointing out to Lenette more in
+detail how it was that she plagued and tormented him, however admirably
+he might have arranged things; and, like all women, had neither rhyme
+nor reason in her ways of doing things, always snuffing either too
+close or not close enough. She, however, lighted the candle without
+saying a word, and he got into a greater rage than before, and demanded
+to be informed whether he had ever as yet asked anything of her but the
+merest trifles possible to conceive, and if anybody but his own wedded
+wife would have hesitated for a moment to attend to them. "Just answer
+me," he said.
+
+She did not answer him; she set the freshly-lighted candle on the
+table, and tears were in her eyes. It was the first time he had caused
+her a tear, since her marriage. In a moment, like a person magnetised,
+he saw and diagnosed all that was diseased and unhealthy in his system;
+and, on the spot, he cast out the old Adam, and shied him
+contemptuously away into a corner. This was an easy task for _him_; his
+heart was always so open to love and justice, that the moment these
+goddesses came into view, the tone of anger with which he had commenced
+a sentence would fall into gentle melody before he reached the end of
+it; he could stop his battle-axe in the middle of its stroke.
+
+So that a household peace was here concluded, the instruments thereof
+being one pair of moist eyes and one pair of bright kind ones; and a
+Westphalia treaty of peace accorded one candle to each party, with
+absolute freedom of snuffing.
+
+But the peace was soon embittered, inasmuch as Penia, goddess of
+poverty (who has thousands of invisible churches all about the country,
+where most houses are her tabernacles and lazar cells), began to make
+manifest her bodily presence and her all-controlling power. There was
+no more money in the house. But, rather than place his honour and his
+freedom in pledge, and incur obligations which he had less and less
+prospect of repaying--I mean, rather than borrow--he would have sold
+all he had, and himself into the bargain, like the old German. It is
+said, the national debt of England, if counted out in dollars, would
+make a ring round the earth, like a second equator; however, I have not
+as yet measured this nose-ring of the British Lion, this annular
+eclipse, or halo, round the sun of Britain, myself. But I know that
+Siebenkæs would have considered a negative money-girdle of this sort
+about his waist to be a penance-belt stuck full of spines, or an iron
+ring, such as people who tow boats have on; a girdle compressing the
+heart in a fatal manner. Even supposing he were to borrow, and then
+stop payment, as nations and banking-houses do--a catastrophe which
+debtors and aristocratic persons, who have their wits about them,
+manage to avoid without difficulty, by the simple expedient of never
+_beginning_ payment--yet, having only one friend whom he could convert
+into a creditor (Stiefel), he couldn't possibly have seen this dear
+friend, who was in the first rank of his spiritual creditors already,
+figuring in the fifth rank, or that of the unpaid. He therefore avoided
+such a two-fold transgression as this would have been--a sin against
+both friendship and honour--by pledging things of less value, namely,
+household furniture.
+
+He went back (but alone) to the pewter cupboard in the kitchen, and
+peeped through the rail to see whether there were two ranks of dishes
+or three. Alas! there wag but one rear-rank man of a plate standing
+behind his front-rank man, like double notes of interrogation. He
+marched the rear-rank man to the front accordingly, and gave him for
+travelling companions and fellow-refugees a herring-dish, a sauce-boat,
+and a salad-bowl. Having effected this reduction of his army, he
+extended the remaining troops so as to occupy a wider front, and
+subdivided the three large gaps into twenty small ones. He then moved
+these disbanded soldiers to the sitting-room, and went and called
+Lenette, who was in the bookbinder's room.
+
+"I've been looking at our pewter cupboard for the last five or ten
+minutes," he said. "I really shouldn't have noticed, if I hadn't known
+it, that I had taken away the tureen and the plates. Should you?"
+
+"Ah, indeed, I do notice it every day of my life," she declared.
+
+Here, however, being rather uneasy at the idea of what might be
+the result of _too_ long an inspection, he hurried her into the
+sitting-room, where the dishes were which he had just taken out, and
+made known his intention of transposing, like a clever musician, this
+quartett from the key of pewter into that of silver. He proposed the
+selling of them, that she might be got to agree the more easily to
+their being pawned. But she pulled out every stop of the feminine organ,
+the clarion, the stopped diapason, flute, bird-stop, _vox humana_, and,
+lastly, the tremolo stop. He might say whatever he liked; _she_ said
+whatever _she_ liked. A man does not try to arrest the iron arm of
+necessity, or to avert it; he calmly awaits its stroke; a woman tries
+to struggle away from its grip, at any rate for a few hours, before it
+encircles her. It was in vain that Siebenkæs quietly and simply asked
+her if she knew what else was to be done. To questions of this sort,
+there float up and down in women's heads not one complete answer, but
+thousands of half answers, which are supposed to amount to a whole one,
+just as in the differential calculus an infinite number of straight
+lines go to form a curved one. Some of these unripe, half-formed,
+fugitive, mutually auxiliary answers were----
+
+"He shouldn't have changed his name, and he would have had his mother's
+money by this time."
+
+"Of course, he might borrow."
+
+"Look at all his clients, well off and comfortable, and he won't ask
+them to pay him."
+
+"He never dreams of asking a fee for defending the infanticide."
+
+"And he shouldn't spend so much money." "He needn't have paid that
+half-term's rent in advance." For the latter would have kept him going
+for a day or two, you see!
+
+It is always a vain task to oppose the "minority of one" of the
+complete and true answer to the immense majority of feminine partial
+proofs of this sort; women know, at any rate, thus much of the law of
+Switzerland, that four half or invalid witnesses outweigh one whole or
+valid one.[41] But the best way of confuting them is, to let them say
+what they have got to say, and not utter a word yourself; they're
+certain to diverge, before very long, into subsidiary or accessory
+matters, which you yield to them, confuting them, as regards the real
+subject of argument, simply by action. This is the only species of
+confutation which they ever forgive. Siebenkæs, unfortunately,
+attempted to apply the surgical bandage of philosophy to Lenette's two
+principal members, her head and her heart, and therefore commenced as
+follows--
+
+"Dear wife, in the parish church you sing against worldly riches, like
+the rest of the congregation, and yet you have them fixed on your heart
+as firmly as your brooch. Now, I don't go to a church, it's true, but I
+have a pulpit in my own breast, and I prize one single happy moment
+more than the whole of this pewter dirt. Tell me truly now, has your
+immortal heart been pained by the tragical fate of the soup-tureen, or
+was it only your pericardium? The doctors prescribe tin, in powder, for
+worms; and may not this miserable tin, which we have broken into little
+pieces and swallowed, have had a similar effect on the abominable worms
+of the heart? Collect yourself, and think of our cobbler here, does his
+soup taste any the worse to him out of his painted iron _saucière_
+because his bit of roast meat is eaten out of it too? You sit behind
+that pincushion of yours, and can't see that society is mad, and drinks
+coffee, tea, and chocolate out of different cups, and has particular
+kinds of plates for fruit, for salad, and for herrings, and particular
+sorts of dishes for hares, fish, and poultry. And I say that it will
+get madder and madder as time goes on, and order as many kinds of fruit
+plates from the china shops as there are different fruits in the
+gardens--at least, I should do it myself; and if I were a crown prince,
+or a grand master, I should insist upon having lark dishes and lark
+knives, snipe dishes and snipe knives; neither would I carve the haunch
+of a stag of sixteen upon any plate I had once had a stag of eight
+upon. The world is a fine madhouse, and one gets up and preaches his
+false doctrine in it when another has done, just as they do in a Quaker
+meeting. So the Bedlamites think that only two follies are veritable
+follies, follies which are past, and follies which are yet to come--old
+follies and new; but I would show them that theirs partake of the
+nature of both."
+
+Lenette's only reply was an inexpressibly _gentle_ request: "Oh!
+please, Firmian, do _not_ sell the pewter."
+
+"Very well, then, I shan't!" (he answered, with a bitter satirical joy
+at having got the brilliant neck of the pigeon fairly into the noose
+which he had so long had ready baited for it). "The emperor Antoninus
+sent his real silver plate to the mint, so that I might surely send
+mine; but just as you like: I don't care twopence. Not an ounce of it
+shall be old; I shall merely pawn! I'm much obliged to you for the
+suggestion; and if I only hit the eagle's tail on St. Andrew's Day, or
+the imperial globe, I can redeem the whole of it in a minute--I mean
+with the money of the prize; at all events, the salad-bowl and the
+soup-tureen. I think you're quite right. Old Sabel's in the house, is
+she not? She can take the things and bring back the money."
+
+She let it be so now. The shooting-match on St. Andrew's Day was her
+Fortunatus's wishing-cap, the wooden wings of the eagle were as waxen
+flying-apparatus fixed on to her hopes, the powder and shot were the
+flower-seeds of her future blossoms of peace (as they are to crowned
+heads also). Thou poor soul, in many senses of the word! But the poor
+hope incredibly more than the rich; therefore it is that poor devils
+are more apt to catch the infection of lotteries than the rich--just as
+they are to catch the plague and other epidemics.
+
+Siebenkæs--who looked down with contempt not only on the loss of his
+household goods, but on the loss of his money--was secretly resolved
+to leave the trash at the pawnbroker's, unredeemed for ever, like
+a state-bond, even though he should chance to be king (at the
+shooting-match), and convert the transaction into a regular sale some
+future day, when he happened to be passing the shop.
+
+After a few bright quiet days Peltzstiefel came again to make an
+evening call. Amid the manifold embargoes laid upon their supplies, the
+risks attending their smuggling operations, and as a tear or a sigh was
+laid as a tax which _must_ necessarily be paid upon every loaf of
+bread, Firmian had had no time, to say nothing of inclination, to
+remember his jealousy. In Lenette's case, matters were necessarily
+exactly reversed; and if she really has any love for Stiefel, it must
+grow faster on his money-dunghill than on the advocate's field all over
+wells of hunger. The Schulrath's eye was not one of those which read
+the troubles of a household in a minute, though they are masked by
+smiling faces; he noticed nothing of the kind. And for that very reason
+it came to pass that this friendly trio spent a happy hour free from
+clouds, during which, though the sun of happiness did not shine, yet
+the moon of happiness (hope and memory) rose shimmering in their sky.
+Moreover, Siebenkæs had the enjoyment of being provided with a
+cultivated listener, who could follow and appreciate the jingle of the
+bells on the jester's cap, the trumpet fanfares of his Leibgeberish
+sallies. Lenette could neither follow nor appreciate them in the very
+least, and even Peltzstiefel didn't understand him when he _read_ him,
+but only when he _heard him talk_. The two men at first talked only of
+persons, not of things, as women do; only that they called their
+chronique scandaleuse by the name of History of Literature and Men of
+Letters. For literary men like to know every little trait and
+peculiarity of a great author--what clothes he wears, and what his
+favourite dishes are. For similar reasons, women minutely observe every
+little trait and peculiarity of any crown princess who happens to pass
+through the town, even to her ribbons and fringes. From literary men
+they passed to scholarship; and then all the clouds of this life melted
+away, and in the land of learning, the fair realm of science, the
+downcast sorrowful head, wrapped and veiled in the black Lenten
+altar-cloth of hardship and privation, is lifted up once more. The soul
+inhales the mountain air of its native land, and looks down from the
+lofty peak of Pindus upon its poor bruised and wounded body lying
+beneath--that body which it has to drag and bear about, sighing
+under its weight. When some dunned, needy scholar, some skin-and-bone
+reading-master, a poor curate with five children, or a baited and
+badgered tutor, is lying woeful and wretched--every nerve quivering
+under some instrument of torture--and a brother of his craft, plagued
+by just as many instruments of torture as himself, comes and argues and
+philosophises with him a whole evening, and tells him all the latest
+opinions of the literary papers, then truly the sand-glass which marks
+the hours of the torture[42] is laid on its side--Orpheus comes, all
+bright and shining, with the lyre of knowledge in his hand, into the
+psychic hell of the two brethren in office, the sad tears vanish from
+their brightening eyes, the snakes of the furies twine into graceful
+curls, the Ixion's wheel rolls harmoniously to the lyre, and these two
+poor Sisyphuses sit resting quietly on their stones and listen to the
+music. But the poor curate's, the reading-master's, the scholar's, good
+wife, what is her comfort in her misery? She has none except her
+husband, who ought, therefore, to be very tender to all her
+shortcomings.
+
+The reader was made aware in the first book that Leibgeber had sent
+three programmes from Bayreuth. Stiefel brought the one, by Dr. Frank,
+with him, and asked Siebenkæs to write a notice of it for the
+'Kuhschnappel Heavenly Messenger.' He also took out of his pocket
+another little book, to receive its sentence. The reader will hail both
+these works with gladness, seeing that my hero and his has no money in
+the house, and will be able to live for a day or two by reviewing them.
+The second manuscript, which was in a roll, was entitled: 'Lessingii,
+Emilia Galotti. Pro gymnasmatis loco latine reddita et publice acta,
+moderante J. H. Steffens. Cellis 1788.'
+
+It seems that a good many of the subscribers to the 'Heavenly
+Messenger' have complained of the length of time which elapsed before
+this work was noticed, drawing disadvantageous comparisons between the
+'Messenger' and the 'Universal German Library;' for the latter,
+notwithstanding the greatness of its universal German circulation,
+notices good works within a few years of their birth--sometimes even as
+early as the third year of their existence--so that the favourable
+notice can frequently be bound up with the work, the first paper-covers
+of it not being worn out before. The reason, however, why the 'Heavenly
+Messenger' did not, and in fact could not, review more of the books of
+the year 1788, was, that it was not until five years after that date
+that it--first saw the light itself.
+
+"Don't you think," said Siebenkæs, in a friendly manner to
+Peltzstiefel, "that if I'm going to write proper notices of Messrs.
+Frank and Steffens here, my wife should take care not to make a
+thundering noise, swishing away with her broom at my back?"
+
+"That might really be a matter of very considerable importance," said
+Stiefel, gravely. Upon which a playful and somewhat abridged report of
+the proceedings in the household action of inhibition was laid before
+him. Wendeline fixed her kindly eyes on Peltzstiefel's face, striving
+to read the _Rubrum_ (the red title), and the _Nigrum_ (the black body
+matter) of his judgment there before it was pronounced. Both colours
+were there. But though Stiefel's bosom heaved with genuine sighs of the
+deepest affection for her, he nevertheless addressed her as follows--
+
+"Madame Siebenkæs, this really won't do at all; for God hath not
+created anything nobler than a scholar sitting at his writing. Hundreds
+of thousands of people, ten times told, are sitting in every quarter of
+the globe, as if on school-forms before him, and to all of these he has
+to speak. Errors held by the wisest and cleverest people he has to
+eradicate: ages, long since gone to dust and passed away, with those
+who lived in them, he has to describe with accuracy and minuteness;
+systems, the most profound and the most complex, he has to confute and
+overthrow, or otherwise to invent and establish, himself. His light has
+to pierce through massy crowns, through the Pope's triple tiara,
+through Capuchin hoods and through wreaths of laurel--to pierce them
+all and enlighten the brains within. This is his work; and this work he
+can perform. But Madame Siebenkæs, what a strain on his faculties! What
+a grand sustained effort is necessary! It is a hard matter and a
+difficult to set up a book in type, but harder still to write it! Think
+what the strain must have been when Pindar wrote, and Homer, earlier
+still--I mean in the 'Iliad'--and so with one after another, down to
+our own day. Is it any wonder, then, that great writers, in the
+terrible strain and absorption of all their ideas, have often scarcely
+known where they were, what they were doing, or what they would be at;
+that they were blind and dumb, and insensible to everything but what
+was perceived by the _five interior spiritual senses_, like blind
+people, who see beautifully in their dreams, but in their waking state
+are, as we have said, blind! This state of absorbedness and strain it
+is which I consider to explain how it was that Socrates and Archimedes
+could stand and be completely unconscious of the storm and turmoil
+going on around them; how Cardanus in the profundity of his meditation
+was unconscious of his Chiragra; others of the gout; one Frenchman of a
+great conflagration, and a second Frenchman of the death of his wife."
+
+"There, you see," said Lenette, much delighted, in a low voice to her
+husband, "how can a learned gentleman possibly hear his wife when she's
+at her washing and scrubbing?"
+
+Stiefel, unmoved, went on with the thread of his argument: "Now, a fire
+of this description can only be kindled in absolute and uninterrupted
+calm. And this is the reason why all the great artists and men of
+letters in Paris live nowhere but in the Rue Ste. Victoire; the other
+streets are all too noisy. And it is hence that no smiths, tinkers, or
+tinmen, are allowed to work in the street where a professor lives."
+
+"No TINMEN especially," added Siebenkæs, very gravely. "It should
+always be remembered that the mind cannot entertain more than
+half-a-dozen of ideas at a time; so that if the idea of noise should
+make its appearance as a wicked seventh, of course some one or other of
+the previous ideas, which might otherwise have been followed up or
+written down, takes its departure from the head altogether."
+
+Indeed Stiefel made Lenette give him her hand as a pledge that she
+would always stand still, like Joshua's sun, while Firmian was smiting
+the foe with pen and scourge.
+
+"Haven't I often asked the bookbinder myself," she said, "not to hammer
+so hard upon his books, because my husband would hear him when he was
+making _his_." However, she gave the Schulrath her hand, and he went
+away contented with their contentment, leaving them quite hopeful of
+quieter times.
+
+But, ye dear souls, of how little use to you is this state of peace,
+seeing ye are on half-pay and starving in this cold, empty, orphan
+hospital of an earth--how little will it help you in these dim
+labyrinthian wanderings of your destiny, of which even the Ariadne
+clue-threads all turn to nets and snares? How long will the poor's
+advocate manage to live on the produce of the pawned pewter, and on the
+price of the two reviews which he is going to write? Only, we are all
+like the Adam of the epic, and take our first night to be the day of
+judgment, and the setting of the sun for the end of the world. We
+sorrow for our friends, just as if there were no brighter future
+YONDER, and we sorrow for ourselves as if there were no brighter future
+HERE. For all our passions are born Atheists and unbelievers.
+
+
+
+
+ CHAPTER VI.
+
+ MATRIMONIAL JARS--EXTRA LEAFLET ON THE LOQUACITY OF WOMEN--MORE
+ PLEDGING--THE MORTAR AND THE SNUFF-MILL--A SCHOLAR'S KISS--ON
+ THE CONSOLATIONS OF HUMANITY--CONTINUATION OF THE SIXTH CHAPTER.
+
+
+This chapter commences at once with pecuniary difficulties. The
+wretched, leaky Danaid's bucket which our good couple had to use for
+washing their groschen or two, their grains of gold-dust--few and far
+between as they were--out of the sands of their Pactolus, had always
+run dry again in the course of a couple of days, or of three at the
+outside. On this occasion, however, they had something certain to go
+upon, namely, the reviews of the two works; they could count upon four
+florins certainly, if not upon five.
+
+Early next day, after his morning kiss, Firmian seated himself upon his
+critical judgment-bench again, and proceeded to pass his sentences. He
+might have written an epic poem, so light were the trade-winds which
+had hitherto been prevalent during the early hours of the day. From
+eight o'clock in the morning till eleven in the forenoon, he was
+engaged in holding up to the world in a favourable light the programme
+of Dr. Frank of Pavia, which was entitled: 'Sermo Academicus de civis
+medici in republica conditione atque officiis, ex lege præipue erutis.
+Auct. Frank. 1785.' He criticised, praised, blamed, and made extracts
+from this little production, till he thought he had covered enough
+paper to earn what would suffice to redeem the pawned herring-dish,
+salad-bowl, sauce-boat, and plates--his views on the work occupying one
+sheet, four pages, and fifteen lines.
+
+The morning had passed so pleasantly, in holding Vehmgericht in this
+manner, that he thought he might as well go on, and hold another in the
+afternoon on the other book. He had never ventured upon this before; in
+the afternoons he had done advocate's work, not reviewer's, appearing
+in the character of defendant (_maker_ of defence), not of fiscal
+(prosecutor). He had ample reason for this, seeing that every afternoon
+girls and maid-servants came with bonnets and caps, and with _mouths_
+full of conversational treasures, which they at once unpacked; richer
+in language than the Arabs, who have only a thousand _words_ to express
+the same idea, these young women had a thousand _idioms_ for it, or
+different ways of putting it;--and, as an organ when it's out of order,
+immediately begins to cipher on twenty of its pipes or so at a time as
+soon as you begin to work the bellows, though no notes may be pressed
+down, so would they the moment the bellows of their lungs was set
+a-going. He didn't mind this, however, seeing that at the particular
+hours to which these feminine alarum clocks were set, he let his own
+juristical alarum go rattling off too, and during the arguing of
+Lenette's cases, went on with the arguing of his. He wasn't disturbed
+by this; he maintained: "A lawyer is not to be put out, he can open and
+close his sentences when he chooses--his periods are long tapeworms,
+and can be lengthened or cut down with impunity--for each segment of
+them is itself a worm, each comma a period."
+
+But reviewing was another matter, and couldn't be done so well. At the
+same time, I shall here faithfully transcribe for the benefit of the
+unlearned (the learned have read the review long ago), so much as he
+actually did manage to get done after his dinner. He wrote down the
+title of Steffen's Latin translation of "Emilia Galotti," and proceeded
+as follows--
+
+"This translation meets a want which we have long experienced. It is,
+indeed, a striking phenomenon, that so few of the German classics have
+as yet been translated into Latin for the use of scholars, who, for
+their part, have supplied us with German versions of nearly all the
+Greek and Roman classic authors. The German nation can point to
+literary productions of its own which are quite worthy of perusal by
+scholars and by linguists, who, although they can translate them, do
+not understand them, because they are not written in Latin.
+Lichtenberg's 'Pocket Calendar' has appeared simultaneously in a German
+edition--for the English, who are studying German--and in a French for
+our own _haute noblesse_. But why should not German original works, and
+even the very 'Calendar' itself, be made known to linguists and to
+scholars by means of a good and faithful Latin translation? There can
+be no doubt that they would be the very first to be struck by the great
+resemblance which may be traced between the odes of Ramler and those of
+Horace, if the former were but translated. The reviewer must confess
+that it has always been matter of surprise, as well as regret, to him
+that but two correct editions of Klopstock's 'Messiah' have as yet
+appeared, the original edition and his own--and that there is no Latin
+edition of it for scholars--(Lessing having scarcely translated the
+'Invocation' in his miscellaneous writings)--nor one in the curial
+style for lawyers, nor a plain prose one for the commercial world, nor
+one in Jew-German for the Jewish community."
+
+When he had got thus far, he was compelled to stop, because a housemaid
+_wouldn't_ stop, but went on reiterating what her mistress had gone on
+re-iterating, namely, how her night-cap was to be done up; twenty times
+did she sketch the ground-plan and elevation of the said cap, and laid
+weight on the necessity for speedy execution. Lenette answered her
+tautologies with equivalent ones, paying her back to the full in her
+own coin. Scarce was the housemaid out at the door, when the reviewer
+said--
+
+"I haven't written a word while that windmill was clacking. Lenette,
+tell me, is it really a positive impossibility for a woman to say,
+'It's four o'clock,' instead of 'The four quarters to four have gone?'
+Can no woman say, 'The head-clout will be ready to-morrow,' and then an
+end of the matter? Can no woman say, 'I want a dollar for it,' and
+there an end of the story? Nor, 'Run in again to-morrow!' and no more
+about it? Can _you_ not do it, for instance?"
+
+Lenette answered very coldly, "Oh! of course you think everybody thinks
+just as you think yourself!"
+
+Lenette had two feminine bad habits, which have sent millions of male
+rockets, or pyrotechnic serpents--namely, curses--up skywards. The
+first was, that whenever she gave the servant an order, she did it as
+if it were a memorial in two copies, and then went out of the room with
+her and repeated the order in question three or four times more in the
+passage. The second was, that let Siebenkæs shout a thing to her, as
+distinctly as man could, her first answer was, "What?" or, "What do you
+say?" Now, I not only advise ladies always to demand a "second of
+exchange" of this sort when they are in any embarrassment for an
+answer, and I laud them for so doing; but in cases where what is
+required of them is attention, not the truth, this _ancora_ and _bis_
+which they cry to a speaker who is anxious not to waste time, is as
+cumbersome as it is unnecessary. Matters of this kind are trifles in
+married life only so long as the sufferer by them does not complain of
+them. But when they have been found fault with they are worse than
+deadly sins, and felonies, and adulteries--seeing that they occur much
+more frequently.
+
+If the author were disturbed at his work by pleonasms of the above
+description; what he would do would be, not deliver a serious lecture,
+but (because this is a good opportunity) write the following
+
+
+ EXTRA LEAFLET ON FEMALE LOQUACITY.
+
+"The author of the work on 'Marriage' has said, 'A woman who does not
+talk is a stupid woman.' But it is easier to be his encomiast than his
+disciple. The cleverest women are often silent with women, and the most
+stupid and most silent are often both with men. On the whole, this
+statement, which has been applied to the male sex, is true also of the
+female, namely, that those who think most have least to say; as frogs
+cease croaking when a light is brought to the side of their pond.
+Moreover, the extreme talkativeness of women is a result of the
+sedentary nature of their occupations. Men, whose work is sedentary,
+such as tailors, shoemakers, weavers, have in common with women not
+only their hypochondriac fancies, but also their loquacity.
+
+"The little work-tables, where feminine fingers are employed, are also
+the playgrounds of the feminine imagination, and their needles become
+little magic wands, wherewith they transform their rooms into isles of
+spirits filled with dreams. Hence it is that a letter or a book
+distracts a woman who is in love more than the knitting of a whole pair
+of stockings. Savages say that the monkeys refrain from talking that
+they may not be made to work; but many a woman talks twice as much when
+she is working as when she is not.
+
+"I have devoted much thought to the question, what purpose this
+peculiarity subserves in the economy of the universe. At first it might
+strike us that Nature has ordained these re-iterations of that which
+has been already said with a view to the development of metaphysical
+truths: for, as demonstration, according to Jacobi and Kant, is merely
+a series, or progression, of identical propositions, it is evident that
+women, who always proceed from the same thing to the same thing, are
+continually demonstrating. There can be no doubt, however, that the
+object which Nature has chiefly had in view is the following. Accurate
+observers of nature have pointed out that the reason why the leaves of
+trees keep up their constant fluttering motion is that the atmosphere
+may be purified by this perpetual flagellation--this oscillation of the
+leaves having very much the effect of a light and gentle breeze.[43] It
+would, however, be very wonderful had Nature--always economising her
+forces, Nature, who never does anything in vain--ordained this much
+longer oscillation, this seventy years' wagging of the feminine tongue,
+to no definite purpose. For the purpose in question, however, we have
+not far to seek. It is the same which is subserved by the quivering of
+the leaves of trees. The endless, regular, unceasing beat of the
+feminine tongue is to assist in agitating and stirring up the
+atmosphere, which would otherwise become putrescent. The moon has her
+ocean of water, and the feminine head has its ocean of air, to stir
+into salubrity and to keep in perpetual freshness. Hence a universal
+Pythagorean noviciate would, sooner or later, give rise to epidemics,
+and Chartreuses of nuns would become pesthouses. Hence it is that
+diseases of the pestiferous type are less frequent among civilised
+nations, who talk the most. And hence Nature's beneficent arrangement
+that it is exactly in the largest cities--and moreover in the
+winter--and moreover indoors--and in large assemblages--that women talk
+most, inasmuch as it is exactly in these places and at these periods
+that the atmosphere is most impure, and charged with the largest
+proportion of carbonic acid and other products of respiration, &c.,
+requiring to be thoroughly fanned and set in motion. And, indeed,
+Nature here overthrows all artificial barriers and impediments;
+for, although many European women have endeavoured to imitate
+those of America--who fill their mouths with water in order to keep
+silence--and, while making calls, fill theirs with tea or coffee, yet
+these fluids have been found rather to facilitate than to prevent the
+free flow of feminine speech.
+
+"I trust that in this I am far from being like the narrow-minded
+teleologists, who, to every grand sun-path, or sun-orbit of Nature,
+must always be appending and intercalating little subsidiary
+foot-tracks and ends in view. Such persons might permit themselves the
+supposition (_I_ should be ashamed to do so) that the oscillation of
+the female tongue, the use of which is sufficiently apparent in the
+motion which it communicates to the atmosphere, may possibly serve to
+give typical illustration to some thought or idea of a spiritual
+nature--_e. g_. the female soul itself, perhaps.
+
+"This belongs to that class of things with respect to which Kant has
+said that they can neither be proved nor disproved. I myself should
+rather incline, however, to the opinion that the talking of women is an
+indication of the cessation of thought and mental activity--as in a
+good mill the warning bell only rings when there is no corn left in the
+hopper. Moreover, every husband knows that tongues are attached to
+women's heads in order to give due notice, by their clanging, that some
+contradiction, something irregular or impossible, is dominating in
+them.[44] Similarly, H. Müller's calculating machine has a little bell
+in it, which rings merely to give notice that some error has occurred
+in a calculation. However, it now remains for the natural philosopher
+to prosecute this inquiry, and to determine to what extent my views may
+prove to be erroneous."
+
+I may just mention that the above leaflet was written by the advocate.
+
+He did not finish his review till the following morning. He had
+intended to go on writing down his ideas on the subject of the
+translation of Emilia Galotti till the money coming to him as the price
+of the ideas should be enough to pay for new toes to his boots--Fecht
+asked a sheet and a half for doing the pair--but he had not time for
+this, as he was obliged to calculate the price of his notice by the
+compositor's sight-rule, and get the money for it that very day.
+
+The reviews were sent to the editor; the critical invoice amounted to
+three florins four groschen and five pfennige. Strange! we smile when
+we see the spiritual and the corporeal, intellect and hard cash, pain
+and pecuniary compensation, stated as sums in proportion; but is not
+our whole life an equation, a sum in "partnership" between soul and
+body; and is not all action _upon_ us corporeal, and all _re_action
+_from_ us spiritual?
+
+The servant-girl brought back only "kind regards;" not the leaves of
+silver which his ink should have crystallised into. Peltzstiefel had
+not given the matter a thought. He was so absorbed in his studies
+that he was indifferent to his own money, and blind to the poverty of
+other people. He was capable, indeed, of noticing a _hiatus_; but it
+must be in a manuscript--not in his own or other people's shoes,
+stockings, &c. An inward fire blinded this fortunate man to the
+phosphorescence of the rotten wood around him. And happy is every actor
+in the school-theatricals of life who finds the lofty inward delusion
+suffice to compensate him for the delusions without, or to hide them
+from his view;--who is so carried away by the enthusiasm with which he
+enters into and renders his spiritual _rôle_, that the coarse daubs of
+landscapes of the scenery seem to bloom, and the branches to rustle in
+the refreshing showers (of peas) from the rain-box--and who does not
+wake to reality at the shifting of the scenes.
+
+But this beautiful blindness of the Rath was very distressing to our
+two dear friends; their little constellation, which was to have shone
+in their evening sky, fell all down in meteoric drops upon the earth. I
+do not blame Stiefel; he had an ear for distress, though not an eye.
+But ye rich and great ones of the earth, who, helpless in the
+honeycombs of your pleasures, swimming with clogged wings in your
+melted sugar of roses, do not find it an easy matter to move your hand,
+put it into your money-bag, and take out the wage of him who helped to
+fill your honey-cells--an hour of judgment will strike at last for
+_you_, and ask you if ye were worthy to _live_, let alone to live a
+life of pleasure, when ye avoid even the _trifling_ trouble of _paying_
+the poor who have undergone the _immense_ trouble of _earning_. But ye
+would be better if ye thought what misery your comfortable, indolent,
+indisposition to open a purse, or to read a little account, often
+inflicts upon the poor; if ye pictured to yourselves the backward start
+of hopeless disappointment of some poor woman whose husband comes home
+without his money--the starvation, the obliteration of so many hopes,
+and the weary sorrowful days of a whole family.
+
+The advocate, therefore, put on his wicked silverising face again and
+went prying about into every corner with his eyeglass, making himself
+into a species of pressgang of the furniture. As a king or an English
+minister sits up in his bed at night, rests his head on his hand, and
+considers what commodity or what tree-stem full of birch-sap he may
+stick his winetap of a new tax into, or (in another metaphor) so cut
+the peat of taxation that new peat may grow in its place: thus did
+Siebenkæs. With his letter of marque in his hand he scanned minutely
+every flag that hove in sight; he lifted up his shaving-dish and set it
+down; he shook the paralytic arms of an old chair till they cracked
+again--he subjected it to a trial more severe, by sitting down in it
+and getting up again.--I interrupt my period to observe _en passant_
+that Lenette fully understood the danger of this conscription and
+measuring of the children of the land, and that she protested
+continuously and unavailingly against this game of pledges with
+Job-like lamentations.--He also took down from its hook an old yellow
+mirror, with a gilt leaf-pattern frame, which hung in the bedroom
+opposite the green-railed bed, examined its wooden case and the back of
+it, moved the glass of it up and down a little and then hung it up
+again--an old firedog and some bedroom crockery he did not touch; he
+whipt the lid off a porcelain butter-boat, made, according to the
+plastic art of the period, in the shape of a cow, and glanced into the
+inside of it, but set it back, empty and full of dust, as an ornament
+on the mantelpiece again; he weighed, longer and with both hands, a
+spice-mortar, and put it back again into the cupboard.
+
+He looked more and more dangerous, and more and more merry; he drew out
+with both arms the drawer of a wardrobe, shoved back table-napkins, and
+begun to overhaul a mourning-dress of checked cotton a little ----. But
+here Lenette flew out, seized him by his overhauling arm, and cried,
+"Why not, indeed! But, please God, it shall _not_ come to _that_ with
+_me_!"
+
+He shut the drawer quietly, opened the cupboard again, and carefully
+lifted the mortar on to the table, saying, "Oh! very well, it matters
+little to me, it comes all to the same thing; the mortar will have to
+take its departure." By covering this bell of shame with his open hand
+by way of a damper, he was able to take out the pestle, its clapper,
+without producing any ring or clang. He had been perfectly aware all
+the time that she would rather pawn the garment of her soul (_i. e_.
+her body) than the checked garment of that garment; but it was of set
+purpose that, like the Court of Rome, he demanded the entire hand that
+he might be the more likely to obtain a single finger of it--in this
+case the mortar--and moreover he hoped the mere frequency with which he
+reiterated his determination would save him the necessity of stating
+any reasons, and that he would familiarise Lenette with the bugbear and
+hobgoblin by keeping it continually before her eyes (I mean, with his
+design upon the mortar). Wherefore he went on to say, "The fact is,
+that it's very little that we have to pound in the course of a
+twelvemonth, except when we have a quarter of a fat beast; at the same
+time, just give me some idea why you're so anxious to keep the checked
+gown--what on earth is the use of it? The only time you can wear it
+will be when I depart this life. Now, Lenette, that's a terrible sort
+of idea; I can't stand it. Coin the dress into silver--eliminate it
+altogether; I'll send two pairs of mourning-buckles of mine along with
+it; I hope I may never have anything to buckle with them again."
+
+She stormed without bounds and preached with much wisdom against all
+"careless, thoughtless householders;" and this for the very reason,
+that she felt it was only too probable that he would soon take every
+article of furniture in the place (which he had been feeling and
+valuing, like a person buying bullocks) to the slaughter-house,
+and--goodness gracious! the checked dress among the rest. "I had rather
+starve," she cried, "than throw away that mortar for a mere song. The
+Schulrath is sure to be here to-morrow evening, with the money for your
+reviews."
+
+"Now you begin to talk sense," said he; and he carried the pestle
+horizontally in both his hands into the bedroom, and laid it on to
+Lenette's pillow--next bringing the mortar, and placing it on his own.
+"If people should happen to hear it ring," he said, "they would think I
+wanted to turn it into silver, as we were pounding nothing in it; and I
+shouldn't like that."
+
+The united capital contained in his greenish-yellow cotton-purse, and
+her large money-bag (which she wore at her girdle), amounted to about
+three groschen, good money. In the evening there would have to be a
+groschen-loaf bought, for cash, and the remainder of the metallic-seed
+must be sown in the morning to grow the breakfast- and dinner-crop. The
+servant-girl went out for the bread, but came back with the groschen
+and with the Job's message, "There's nothing left at the bakers' shops
+at this time of night but two-groschen loaves; father (the cobbler
+Fecht) couldn't get any either." This was lucky; the advocate could
+enter into partnership with the shoemaker, and it would be easy for
+these partners, by each contributing a groschen to the partnership
+funds, to obtain a two-groschen loaf. The Fechts were asked if they
+agreed to this. The cobbler, who made no secret of his daily
+bankruptcies, answered--
+
+"With all my heart. G--d d--n me! (Heaven forgive me for swearing) if I
+and the whole crew of young tatterdemalions in the place have had a
+scrap of anything to fill our mouths with the whole blessed day but
+waxed-ends." In short, this coalition of the _tiers état_ with the
+learned estates put an end to the famine, and the covenanting parties
+broke the loaf in two and weighed it in a just balance, it being itself
+both the weight and the thing weighed. Ah! ye rich! Ye, with your
+manna, or bread sent from heaven, little think how indispensable to
+poverty are small weights, apothecaries' measure, heller-loaves,[45] a
+dinner for eight kreuzers (and your shirt washed into the bargain); and
+a broken-bread shop, where mere crumbs and black-bread powder are
+to be had for money; and how the comfort of a whole family's evening
+depends on the fact that your hundredweights are on sale in lots of
+half-an-ounce.
+
+They ate, and were content. Lenette was in good humour because she had
+gained her point. At night the advocate put the things which were to be
+pawned upon a soft chair. In the morning she facilitated his writing by
+keeping very quiet. It was a good omen, however, that she did not put
+the mortar back into the cupboard. And Siebenkæs fired off various
+queries out of the said bomb-mortar in parabolic curves. He knew
+perfectly well that the Loretto- and Harmonica-bell in question must
+march that day or the next over the frontier for a small pecuniary
+_Abzug-geld_.[46] Women always like to put everything off till the very
+last possible moment.
+
+Peltzstiefel came in that evening. It was both ridiculous and natural
+to expect that the first thing the editor of the 'Heavenly Messenger'
+would do would be to pay the critic his wages, so that he might at
+least be able to set before his editor a candlestick with a candle in
+it, and a beer-glass containing beer. Nothing can be more cruel than an
+anxiety of this sort, because this kind of shame breaks in a moment all
+the springs in the human machine. Siebenkæs wouldn't let it trouble his
+head, because he knew Stiefel wouldn't let it trouble his. But Lenette
+was to be pitied, inasmuch as the blushes of her shame were heightened
+by her fondness for Stiefel! At last the Rath put his hand in his
+pocket. They thought now he was going to produce the review-money; but
+all he took out was his snuff-machine, his tobacco-grater, and he dived
+back into his coat-tail pocket for half-an-ounce of rappee to put upon
+this little chopping-bench. But he had grated the half-ounce already.
+He searched his breeches-pockets for money to send for another
+half-ounce. Truly--and here he swore an oath for which he would have
+incurred a fine had he been in England--he had sent, like an ass, not
+only his purse but also the money for the reviews, carefully counted
+out and neatly wrapped in paper, with his breeches--they were his plush
+ones--to the tailor's. He said it wasn't the first time, and it was a
+lucky job that the tailor was an honest man; the only thing was, he
+hadn't noticed how much there was in his purse. He innocently requested
+Lenette to "send and get him an ounce of rappee; he would repay her
+next morning, when he sent the money for the reviews." Siebenkæs
+roguishly added, "And send for some beer at the same time, dear." He
+and Stiefel looked out of window; but he saw that his poor wife--her
+bosom torn with sighs, and suffering _peine forte et dure_--stole into
+the bedroom and noiselessly put the spice-mill into her apron.
+
+After a good half-hour, rappee, beer, money, and happiness entered the
+room; the bell-metal of the mortar was transformed into sustenance for
+the inward man, and the bell in question had been somewhat like the
+little altar-bell, which in this case, besides _announcing_ a
+transubstantiation, or transformation of the substance of the bread, as
+it does in the Roman Catholic Church, had _undergone_ one itself. Their
+blood no longer gurgled among rocks and stones, but flowed softly and
+tranquilly along, by meadows, and over silver sands. Such is man. When
+he is in the depths of misery, the first happy moment lifts him out;
+when he is at the height of bliss, the remotest sorrowful moment,
+even though it is down beneath the horizon, casts him to earth.
+No great man, who has _maîtres de cuisine_, clerks of the cellar,
+capon-stuffers, and confectioners, has any true enjoyment of the
+pleasure it is to give and receive hospitality; he gets and gives no
+thanks. But a poor man and his poor guest, with whom he halves his loaf
+and his can, are united by a mutual bond of gratitude.
+
+The evening wound a soft bandage about the pain of the morning. The
+poppy-juice of sixty drops of happiness was taken hourly, and the
+medicine had a gently soothing and exhilarating power. When his old,
+kind friend was leaving, Siebenkæs gave him a hearty, grateful kiss for
+his cheering visit, Lenette standing by, with the candle in her hand.
+Her husband, as some little compensation to her for having pounded her
+little fit of obstinacy to groats in the mortar, said to her in an
+off-hand, cheerful manner, "You give him one, too." The blushes
+mantled on her cheeks like fire, and she leant back, as if she had a
+mouth to avoid already. It was quite clear that, if she had not been
+obliged to perform the office of torch-bearer, she would have fled to
+her room on the spot. The Rath stood before her beaming with
+affectionate friendliness--something like a white winter-landscape in
+sunshine--waiting till--she should give him the kiss. The fruitlessness
+of this expectation, and the prematureness of her bending her head out
+of the way, began to vex him a little at last. Somewhat hurt, but still
+beaming as affectionately as ever, he said--
+
+"Am I not worth a kiss, Madam Siebenkæs?"
+
+Her husband said, "Surely you don't expect my wife to _give_ you the
+kiss. She would set her hair and everything in a blaze with the
+candle!"
+
+Upon this, Peltzstiefel inclined his head slowly and cautiously, and at
+the same time commandingly, down to her mouth, and laid his warm lips
+on hers, like the half of a stick of melted sealing-wax on the other
+half. Lenette gave him more space, by bending back her head; yet it
+must be said that while she held her left arm with the candle high up
+in the air, for fear of fire, she did a good deal to push away the
+Rath--another, more proximate, fire--politely with the other. When he
+was gone, she was still just the least bit embarrassed. She moved about
+with a certain floating motion, as though some great happiness was
+buoying her up with its wings--the evening red was still bright on her
+cheek, though the moon was high in the heavens: her eyes were bright,
+but dreamy, seeming to notice nothing about her--her smiles came before
+her words, and she spake very few--not the slightest allusion was made
+to the mortar. She touched everything more gently, and looked out of
+the window at the sky two or three times. She didn't seem to care to
+eat more of the two-groschen loaf, and drank no beer, but only a glass
+or two of water. Anybody else--myself for example--would have held up
+his finger and sworn he was looking upon a girl who had just had a
+first kiss from her sweetheart.
+
+And I shouldn't have regretted having taken that oath had I seen the
+sudden blush which suffused her face next day when the money for the
+reviews and the snuff was brought. It was a miracle, and an
+extraordinary piece of politeness, that Peltzstiefel should not have
+forgotten about his having contracted this little loan--little debts of
+two or three groschen always escaped his preoccupied memory. But rich
+people, who always carry less money about them than the poor, and
+therefore borrow from them, ought to inscribe trifling debts of this
+sort on a memorial tablet, in their brain, because it is very wrong to
+break into a poor devil's purse, who gets, moreover, no thanks for
+these groschen of his which thus drop into the stream of Lethe.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Now, I beg to say, I should be happy to give two sheets of this
+manuscript if the day of the shooting-match were but come, solely
+because our dear couple build so upon it and upon its bird-pole. For
+the position of these people is really going on from bad to worse; the
+days of their destiny move with those of the calendar, from October on
+to November, that is to say, from the end of summer to the beginning of
+winter, and they find that moral frosts and nights get harder and
+longer in the same ratio with those of the season. However, I must go
+regularly on with my story.
+
+I think there is no doubt that November, the month which is such a
+_Novembriseur_ of the British, is the most horrible month of all the
+year--for me it is a regular _Septembriseur_. I wish I could hybernate,
+sleep, till the beginning of the Christmas month, December. The
+November of '85 had, at the commencement of its reign, a dreadful
+wheezing breath, a hand as cold as death, and an unpleasant lachrymal
+fistula; in fact it was unendurable. The northeast wind, which in
+summer it is so pleasant to hear blowing past one's ears, because one
+knows it is a sure sign of settled weather, is, in autumn, only a sign
+of steady cold. To our couple the weathercock was really a funeral
+standard. Though they didn't exactly go out to the woods themselves
+with baskets and barrows to pick up fallen branches and twigs, like the
+poor day-labourer, they had to buy the stuff for firewood from the
+wood-gatherers, by weight, as if it had been wood from the Indies, and
+it had to be dried by the combustion of other wood before it would
+burn. But this damp cold weather was more trying to the advocate's
+stoicism, after all, than even to his purse; he couldn't run out and go
+up a hill, and look about him, and seek in the heavens for that which
+consoles and comforts the anxious and sorrowful, that which dissipates
+the clouds which shroud our life, and shows us guiding nebulæ
+(Magellan's clouds), if nothing else, gleaming through the fog-banks.
+For when he could go up the Rabenstein, or some other hill, he could
+get sight from thence of the aurora of the sun of happiness, though
+that sun was under his horizon; the sorrows and torments of this
+earthly life lay, writhing, like other vipers, in the clefts and
+hollows beneath him, and no rattlesnake could rear itself with its
+fangs up to his hill. Ah! there, in the free air, close to the ocean of
+life which stretches on into the invisible distance of infinity, near
+to the lofty heavens, the blue coal smoke of the stifling, suffocating
+dwelling of our daily life cannot rise to us, we see its wreaths
+hanging far down beneath; our sorrows drop, like leeches, from our
+bleeding bosoms, and raised, for the time, above our woes, we stretch
+our arms--no fetters on them now, though sore and marked, and bruised
+with the galling iron--we stretch them out as if to soar in the pure
+bright æther; we stretch them out, and fain would take to our bosom the
+peaceful universe above us, we stretch them to the invisible eternal
+Father, like children hastening home to Him--and we open them wider yet
+to clasp our visible mother, created Nature, crying, "Oh take not this
+solace, this comfort, away from me, when I am down there again among
+the fog and the sorrow." And why is it that prisoners and the sick are
+so wretched in their confinement? They are there shut up in their
+holes, the clouds sail over them, they can only see the mountains far
+away in the distance, these mountains whence, as from those of the
+Polar regions in summer midnights, the sun, down below the horizon, can
+be seen shining with a mild face, as if in slumber. But in this
+wretched weather though Siebenkæs could not enjoy the consolations of
+imagination, which bloom beneath the open sky, he could derive comfort
+from reason, which thrives in the flower-pots of the window-sills. His
+chief consolation, which I commend to everybody, was this: Man is under
+the pressure of a necessity of two kinds--an every-day necessity,
+which, everybody bears uncomplainingly, and a rare, or yearly-recurrent
+necessity, which is only submitted to after struggles and complaints.
+The daily and everlastingly recurrent necessity is this--that corn does
+not ripen in winter--that we have not got wings, though so many
+lower creatures have them--or that we cannot go and stand upon the
+ring-shaped craters of the lunar mountains, and looking down into the
+abysses, which are miles in depth, watch the marvellous and beautiful
+effects of the setting sun's rays. The annual, or rarely recurrent,
+necessity is that there is rainy weather when the corn is in
+blossom--that there are a great many water-meadows of this world where
+it is very bad walking, and that sometimes, because we have corns, or
+no shoes, we cannot even walk anywhere. Only the annual necessity and
+the daily are of exactly equal magnitude, and it is just as senseless
+to murmur because we have paralysed limbs as because we have no wings.
+All the PAST--and this alone is the subject of our sorrow--is of so
+iron a necessity that in the eyes of a superior intelligence it is just
+as senseless of an apothecary to mourn because his shop is burnt to the
+ground as to sigh because he can't go botanising in the moon, although
+there may be many things in the phials there which he has not got in
+his.
+
+I mean to introduce an extra leaflet here on the consolations which we
+may meet with in this damp, chilly, draughty life of ours. Anybody who
+may be annoyed at these brief digressions of mine, and is scarcely to
+be consoled, let him seek consolation in this--
+
+
+ EXTRA LEAFLET ON CONSOLATION.
+
+A time may, that is to say, _must_ come when it shall be held to be a
+moral obligation not only to cease to torment other people, but to
+cease to torment ourselves; a time must and will come when we shall
+wipe away the greater part of our tears, even here on earth, were it
+only from proper pride.
+
+It is true, nature is so constantly drawing tears from our eyes, and
+forcing sighs from our breasts, that a wise man can scarcely ever
+wholly lay aside his _body's_ garb of mourning; but let his soul wear
+none! For if it is a simple duty or merit to endure minor sorrows with
+proper cheerfulness, it is likewise a merit, only a greater one, to
+bear the greatest sorrows bravely, just as the same reason which
+enjoins the forgiveness of small injuries is equally valid for the
+forgiveness of the greatest.
+
+What we have principally to contend against, and to treat with due
+contempt, in sorrow, as in anger, is its paralysing poisonous
+sweetness, which we are so loth to exchange for the exertion of
+consoling ourselves and of exercising our reasoning faculties.
+
+We must not expect Philosophy to produce, with one stroke of the
+pen, the converse effect to that which Rubens produced, when he
+converted a smiling child into a weeping one with one stroke of his
+brush. It is sufficient if she converts the soul's deep mourning garb
+into half-mourning; it is enough when I can say to myself, "I am
+content to bear that share of my sorrow of which my philosophy has not
+relieved me; but for her it would have been greater--the gnat's sting
+would have been a wasp's."
+
+It is only through the imagination, as from an electric condenser, that
+even physical pain emits its sparks upon us. We would bear the severest
+physical pains without a wince if they were not of longer duration than
+a sixtieth part of a second; but we never really do have an hour of
+pain to endure, but only a succession of sixtieth parts of a second of
+pain, the sixty separate rays of which are concentrated into the focus
+and burning-point of a second, and directed upon our nerves by the
+imagination alone. The most painful part of corporeal pain is the
+_in_corporeal part of it, that is to say, our own impatience, and our
+delusive conviction that it will last for ever.
+
+We all know for certain that we shall have given up grieving for many a
+loss, in twenty, ten, or two years why do we not say to ourselves,
+"Very well--if this is an opinion which I shall cease to hold in twenty
+years' time,--I prefer to abandon it to-day, at once? Why must it take
+me twenty years to abandon an error, when I need not hold it twenty
+hours?"
+
+When I awake from a dream which has painted for me an Otaheite on the
+black background of the night, and find the flowery land melted away, I
+scarcely sigh, and I think it was but a dream. How were it if I had
+actually possessed this flowery island in waking life, and it had been
+submerged in the sea by an earthquake? Why should I not, _then_ also,
+say, "The island was but a dream"? Why am I more inconsolable for the
+loss of a LONGER dream than for the loss of a SHORTER (for that is what
+constitutes the distinction),--and why does man think a great loss less
+necessary and less probable than a small?
+
+The reason is that every sentiment and every passion is a mad thing,
+demanding, or building, a complete world of its own. We are capable of
+being vexed because it's past twelve o'clock, or because it's _not_
+past, but only _just_ twelve o'clock. What nonsense! The passion wants
+besides a personality of its own (sein eignes Ich), and a world of its
+own,--a time of its own as well. I beg every one, just for once, to let
+his passions speak plainly out, and to listen to them, and ascertain
+what it is that they really each of them want; he will be dismayed when
+he sees what monstrous things are these desires of theirs which they
+have previously only half muttered. Anger would have but one neck for
+all mankind, love would have but one heart, sorrow but one pair of
+lachrymal ducts, and pride two bent knees!
+
+When I was reading in Widman's 'Höfer Chronik' the account of the
+fearful, bloody times of the thirty years' war, and, as it were, lived
+them over again; when I heard once more the cries for help of those
+poor suffering people, all struggling in the Danube-whirlpools of their
+days--and saw the beating of their hands, and their delirious
+wanderings on the crumbling pillars of broken bridges, foaming billows
+and drifting ice-floes dashing against them; and then, when I thought
+"All these waves have gone down, the ice is melted, the howling turmoil
+is all sunk to silence, so are the human beings and all their sighs"--I
+was filled with a melancholy comfort, a thought of consolation for
+_all_ times, and I asked, "Was, and is, then, this passing, cursory,
+transient burst of sorrow at the CHURCHYARD-GATE OF LIFE, which three
+steps into the nearest cavern could end, a fit cause for this cowardly
+lamentation?" Truly if, as I believe, there be such a thing as true
+patience under an eternal woe, then, verily, patience under a
+transitory sorrow is hardly worth the name.
+
+A great but unmerited national calamity should not humble us, as the
+theologians would have it--it should make us proud. When the long,
+heavy sword of war falls upon mankind, and thousands of blanched hearts
+are torn and bleeding--or when in the blue, pure evening sky the hot
+cloud of a burning city, smoking on its funereal pyre, hangs dark and
+lurid, like a cloud of ashes, the ashes of thousands of hearts and joys
+all burnt to cinders and dust--then let thy spirit be lifted up in
+pride, let it loathe, contemn, and despise tears, and that for which
+they fall, and let it say--
+
+"Thou art much too small a thing, thou every-day, common life, that an
+immortal being should be inconsolable with regard to _thee_, thou torn
+and tattered chance-bargain of an existence. Here upon this earth--the
+ashes of centuries rolled into a sphere, worked into shape and form
+from vapour by convulsion--the cry of one dreaming in a sorrowful
+dream--I say, it is a disgrace that the sigh should cease only when the
+breast which gives it utterance is resolved into its elements, and that
+the tear should cease to flow only when the eye is closed in death."
+
+But moderate this thy sublime transport of indignation and put to
+thyself this question, "If He, the Infinite one, who, veiled from thy
+sight, sits surrounded by the gleaming abysses, without bounds save
+such as Himself creates, were to lay bare to thy sight the
+immeasurability of infinity, and let Himself be seen of thee as he
+distributes the suns, the great spirits, the little human hearts, and
+our days, and a tear or two therein; wouldst thou rise up out of thy
+dust against Him, and say, 'Almighty, be other than thou art!'"
+
+But there is one sorrow which will be forgiven thee, and for which
+there is recompense; it is sorrow for thy dead. For this sweet sorrow
+for thy lost ones is, in truth, but another form of consolation; when
+we long for them, this is but a sadder way of loving them still; and
+when we think of their departure we shed tears, as well as when we
+picture to ourselves our happy meeting with them again. And perhaps
+these tears differ not.
+
+
+
+
+ CONTINUATION AND CONCLUSION OF CHAPTER VI.
+
+ THE CHECKED CALICO DRESS--MORE PLEDGES--CHRISTIAN NEGLECT OF THE
+ STUDY OF JUDAISM--A HELPING ARM (OF LEATHER) STRETCHED FORTH FROM
+ THE CLOUDS--THE AUCTION.
+
+
+The St. Andrew's shooting-match will take place in the seventh
+chapter: the present one fills up the wintry thorny interval up to that
+period--that is to say, the wolf-month with its wolf-hunger. Siebenkæs
+would at that period have been much annoyed if any one had told him
+beforehand with what compassion the flourishing state of his trading
+enterprises was one day to be described by me, and, as a consequence,
+read by millions of persons in all time to come. He wanted no pity, and
+said, "If _I_ am quite happy, why should _you_ be pitying me?" The
+articles of household furniture which he had touched, as with the hand
+of death, or notched with his axe, like trees marked for cutting, were
+one by one duly felled and hauled away. The mirror, with the floral
+border, in the bedroom (which, luckily for itself, could not see itself
+in any other), was the first thing to be tolled out of the house by the
+passing- or vesper-bell, under the pall of an apron. Before he
+stationed it in the train of this dance of death, he proposed to
+Lenette a substitute for it, the checked calico mourning-dress, in
+order to accustom her to the idea. It was the "Censeo Carthaginem
+delendam" (I vote for the destruction of Carthage) which old Cato used
+to say daily in the senate after every speech.
+
+Next the old arm-chair was got rid of bodily (not like Shakespeare's
+arm-chair, which was weighed out by the ounce, like saffron, or in
+carats, like gold), and the firedog went in company with it. Siebenkæs
+had the wisdom to say, before they went away, "Censeo Carthaginem
+delendam," _i. e_. "Wouldn't it be better to pawn the checked calico?"
+
+They could barely subsist for two days upon the dog and the chair.
+
+And then the process of alchemical transmutation of metals was applied
+to the shaving-basin and the bedroom crockery, which were converted
+into table-money. Of course he previously said "Censeo." It is scarcely
+worth the trouble, but I may just observe here how little fruit was
+born by this branch of trade; it was rather a woody branch than a
+fruit-bearing one.
+
+The lean porcelain cow or butter-boat would scarcely have served as
+their nourishing milch cow for more than a day, if she had not been
+attended by seven potentates (that is to say, most miserable prints of
+them), who went "into the bargain," but for whom the woman at the shop
+added some melted butter. Wherefore he said "Censeo." Many of my
+readers must remember my mentioning that, a short time ago, when he was
+distributing sentences of death among the furniture, he did not take
+very much notice of certain table-napkins which were lying beside the
+checked calico dress. Now, however, he acted as screech-owl, or bird of
+death, and gallows-priest to them also, and routed them out all but a
+few. When they were gone, he remarked, in an incidental manner, shortly
+before Martinmas Day, that the napkin-press was still to the fore,
+though it was not very clear what was the use of it, as there was
+nothing for it to press.
+
+"If such a thing should be necessary," he said, "the press might very
+well get leave of absence on private affairs, until _we_ get through
+the smoothing-press, oiling-press, and napkin-press of destiny, and
+come out all smooth and beautiful ourselves, and can stick the napkins
+into our button-holes on their return." His first intention had even
+been to reverse the order of the funeral procession, and put the press
+in the van of it as _avant-courier_ of the napkins, and in that event
+he would only have had to invert his syllogism (as well as his
+procession) in this way: "I don't see what we can do with the napkins,
+or how we're to press them and keep them smooth, till we get the press
+home again."
+
+I am most firmly convinced that the majority of people would have done
+as Lenette did with reference to my trade-consul Siebenkæs, and his
+Hanseatic confederation with everybody who dealt in anything--that is,
+clasped her hands above her head, and said, "Oh! the thoughtless, silly
+creature! he'll soon be a beggar at this rate: the beautiful
+furniture!"
+
+Firmian's constant answer was--
+
+"You would have me kneel down and howl, and tear my coat in
+lamentation, like a Jew--my coat, which is torn already and pull my
+hair out by the roots--that hair, which terror frequently causes to
+fall off in a single night. Isn't it enough if _you_ do the howling?
+Are you not my appointed _præfica_ and keening-woman? Wife, I swear to
+you, and that as solemnly as if I were standing on pig's bristles,[47]
+that if it is the will of God, who has given me so light and merry a
+heart--if it be His will that I am to go about the town with eight
+thousand holes in my coat, and without a sole to either shoe or
+stocking that I am to go on always getting poorer and poorer" (here his
+eyes grew moist in spite of him, and his voice faltered), "may the
+devil take me and lash me to death with the tuft of his tail if I leave
+off laughing and singing; and anybody who pities me, I tell him to his
+face, is an ass. Good heavens! the apostles, and Diogenes, and
+Epictetus, and Socrates, had seldom a whole coat to their backs--never
+such a thing as a shirt--and shall a creature such as I let a hair of
+him turn grey for such a reason, in miserable PROVINCIALISTIC times
+such as these?"
+
+Right, my Firmian! Have a proper contempt for the narrow heart-sacs of
+the big clothes-moths about you--the human furniture-boring worms. And
+ye, poor devils, who chance to be reading me--whether ye be sitting in
+colleges or in offices, or even in parsonage-houses, who perhaps
+haven't got a hat without a hole in it to put on your heads, most
+certainly haven't got a black one--rise above the effeminate
+surroundings of your times to the grand Greek and Roman days, wherein
+it was thought no disgrace to a noble human creature to have neither
+clothes nor temple, like the statue of Hercules; take heed only that
+your soul shares not the poverty of your outward circumstances; lift
+your faces to heaven with pride--a sickly faint northern Aurora is
+veiling it, but the eternal stars are breaking through the thin
+blood-red storm!
+
+It was but a few weeks now to the St. Andrew's Day shooting-match,
+which was Lenette's consolation in all her troubles, and to which all
+her wishes were directed; however, there came one day on which she was
+something worse than melancholy--inconsolable.
+
+This was Michaelmas: on that day the press was to have followed
+Lenette's Salzburg emigrants, the napkins, as their lady superior; but
+nobody in all the town would have anything to do with it. The sole
+anchor of refuge was one Jew, because there was no species of animal
+(in the shape of articles of merchandise) which did not flee to his
+Noah's ark of a shop. Unfortunately, however, the day when the
+napkin-press applied to him was a Jewish feast-day, which he kept more
+strictly than ever he did his word. He said he would see about it
+to-morrow.
+
+Permit me, if you please, to take this opportunity of making a few
+remarks of importance. Is it not a piece of most culpable negligence on
+the part of the Government that, seeing the Jews are, as it were,
+farmers-general and metal-kings of the Christians in German states, the
+days of their feasts and fasts, and other times connected with their
+worship, are not published and clearly made known for the benefit of
+those very numerous persons who wish to borrow of them, or have any
+business to transact with them? Those who suffer most from this
+omission are just the upper circles of society, persons of birth and
+rank, officials of high position; these are the persons who bring
+papers and want money on Feasts of Haman, Feasts of Esther, of the
+Destruction of the Temple, of the Rejoicing of the Law, and can't
+obtain any. Surely the Jewish festivals, with the hours at which they
+begin and end, ought to be given in every almanack--as they have
+been fortunately, for a considerable time, in those of Berlin and
+Bavaria--or in newspapers--or be proclaimed by the crier, and carefully
+taught in schools. The Jew, indeed, has no need of a calendar of _our_
+festivals, since we are always ready to put off and postpone, if he
+likes, every Sunday of the year, though it were the first Sunday of it,
+the feast of the Jewish Circumcision; and consequently hereafter, when
+the universal monarchy of the Jews is actually established, he won't
+take the trouble to append a Christian calendar to his own Jewish
+calendars, as we now append the Jewish to our Christian. The necessity,
+however, of inculcating in our schools a better and more exact
+acquaintance with the seasons of the Jewish festivals, and with their
+religious observances in general, will not be so fully manifest until
+hereafter, when the Jews shall have elevated Germany to the proud
+position of being their Land of Promise, leaving us to make our
+crusade, and our return to the Asiatic land of promise, if we feel
+disposed--to a holy sepulchre, and a sacred Calvary.
+
+And yet _I_ think (to close this digression by another) that hereafter,
+when we become the Christian numerators of Jewish denominators, we
+should be wrong to set out, as modern crusaders, for the holy land, as
+to which the Jews themselves trouble their heads but little. It is
+certain that they will treat us with a far wider measure of the spirit
+of tolerance than we, unfortunately, have extended to them; but their
+genius for commerce, which they have hitherto been so much reproached
+with, will be found to prove itself a guardian angel for us poor
+Christians, and to take us under its tutelage, inasmuch as we are so
+indispensably necessary to them as purchasers and consumers of the
+unprepared hindquarters of the cattle (for it is only the fore-quarters
+which they may eat, unless the veins are all taken out). Who else but
+Christians can take the place of the beasts of burden--as no animal may
+be degraded by working on the "Schabbes"[48] (Sabbath)--and perform the
+necessary draught and other labour? and to whom are they to entrust the
+performance of menial and manual employments, like the ancient
+republicans, but to us, their nobler slaves and helots, whom they will,
+therefore, be sure to treat with more consideration than they have
+heretofore treated us when we have omitted to pay our promissory notes
+as they became due.
+
+I return to our poor's advocate, and record that on Michaelmas Day he
+could get no money, and consequently no Michaelmas goose. Lenette's
+grief at the absence of the goose of her ecclesiastical communion we
+must all share. Women, who care less about eating and drinking than the
+most ascetic philosophers--caring, indeed, more about the latter
+themselves than about the former--are at the same time not to be
+controlled if they have to go without certain _chronological_ articles
+of diet. Their natural liking for burgherly festivities brings it about
+that they would rather go without the appointed hymns and the gospel of
+the day than without butter-cakes at Christmas, cheesecakes at Easter,
+the goose at Michaelmas; their stomachs require a particular cover for
+each festival, like Catholic altars. So that the canonical dish is a
+kind of secondary sacrament, which, like the primary one, they take,
+not for the palate's sake, but "by reason of the ordinance." Antoninus
+and Epictetus could provide Siebenkæs with no efficient substitute for
+the goose, with which to console the weeping Lenette, who said,
+"We really _are_ Christians, whatever you may say, and belong to
+the Lutheran Church; and every Lutheran has a goose on his table
+to-day--I'm sure my poor dear father and mother always had. As for you,
+_you_ believe in nothing." Whether he believed in anything or not,
+however, he slipped off, though it was the afternoon of the Jewish
+feast-day, to the Jew, who kept a nice pen of geese, with livers both
+fat and lean, serving as a post-stable for country friends of his own
+religion. When he went into his place he pulled a duodecimo Hebrew
+Bible out of his pocket and put it down on the table, with the words,
+"It was a great pleasure to him to meet with a keen, diligent, student
+of the law; to such a man it would be a real satisfaction to make a
+present of his Bible, without asking a halfpenny for it; as it was, an
+unpointed edition (that is to say, one without vowels), he couldn't
+read it himself, especially as even if it had _had_ points, he couldn't
+have managed it. This napkin-press of mine, here"--he said, producing
+it from under his coat-tails "I should be very glad if you would allow
+me to leave with you, because I find it a good deal in my way at home;
+I don't quite know what to do with it. You see, I have particular
+reasons for being anxious to get hold of a goose out of your pen; I
+don't mind if it's as thin as a whipping-post. _If you like_, you may
+_call_ it giving it to me in charity on a holy day of this sort, for
+all I care; it'll make no difference to _me_. If I should ever come and
+take away the press again, it'll be an easy matter, and it'll be time
+enough, to go into the transaction afresh."
+
+It was thus that, in order to secure his wife the free exercise of her
+religious observances, he _brought in_ this goose of controversy, which
+_seemed_ to have some polemical bearing, as well as to be connected
+with distinctive doctrines of faith; and next day these two Doctor
+Martin Lutherists ate up the Schmalkaldian article (and, indeed,
+_another_ Schmalkaldian article, a _commercial_ one--cold iron,
+namely--has often been employed in defence of the articles of
+theology). Thus was the capitol of the Lutheran religion saved, in an
+easy manner, by the bird, which was roasted (so to speak) at the fire
+of an _auto-da-fé_.
+
+But on this particular morning up came the wigmaker, an individual whom
+he was delighted to see generally, though _not_ to-day, for on the day
+before, Michaelmas, the quarter's house rent was due, as we may
+remember. The _Friseur_ presented himself as a sort of mute bill "at
+sight;" yet he was polite enough not to _ask_ for anything. He merely
+mentioned, in a casual manner, that "there was going to be an auction
+of a variety of things on the Monday before St. Andrew's Day, and in
+case the advocate might care to get together a few things for it, he
+thought he would give him notice of it, as he held a life appointment
+from the Houses of Assembly as auction-crier."
+
+He was scarcely down stairs before Lenette gave deep, but not loud,
+expression to her woes, saying he had "dunned them now, and that the
+whole house must know all about their disreputable style of
+housekeeping: had he not talked about furniture?" It was
+incomprehensible how the poor woman could have fancied anybody had been
+in the dark about it before! Poor people are always the first to nose
+out poverty. At the same time Firmian had been ashamed to tell the
+_Friseur_ that he had been obliged to appoint himself auctioneer of his
+own furniture. Here he perceived that he blushed for his poverty more
+before one person, and before the poor, than he did before a whole
+town, and before the rich; and he flew into a furious indignation with
+these execrable _eructations_ of human vanity in his noblest parts.
+
+The path from hence to St. Andrew's Day, all bordered with nothing but
+thistles as it is, cannot possibly seem longer, even to the reader,
+than it did to my hero, who, moreover, had to take hold of the thistles
+and pull them up with his own hands. The garden of his life kept
+getting more and more like a _jardin Anglais_, where only prickly and
+barren trees, but no fruit-trees, were to be found.
+
+Every night, when he opened the latch of his bed-railings, he would
+say, with great enjoyment, to his Lenette, "Only twenty (or nineteen,
+or eighteen, or seventeen) days now to the shooting-match." But the
+hairdresser and auction-crier had played the deuce and all with
+Lenette, though the evenings were long and dark and splendidly
+convenient for needy borrowers on deposit, veiling and hiding the
+naked, abashed, misery of the poor; she was ashamed the people in the
+house should know, and afraid to meet them. Firmian, who was astonished
+equally at the inexhaustible resources of his brain and of his house,
+and who kept saying to himself, "Do you know, I'm really curious to see
+what I shall hit upon to-day again, and how I shall manage to get out
+of _this_ difficulty now--" Firmian, a day or two after the Michaelmas
+dinner, got his eye upon two more good articles of furniture--a long
+cask-siphon and a rocking-horse (a relic of his childhood). "We haven't
+a cask, and we haven't a baby," he said. But his wife implored him, for
+heaven's sake, "not to put her to this shame. The horse and the siphon"
+(she said) "are things that would stick out of the basket so terribly,
+or out from under one's apron, and in the moonlight everybody would see
+them."
+
+And yet _something_ must go! Firmian said, in an odd cutting, yet
+sorrowful way, "It must be so! Fate, like Pritzel,[49] is beating on
+the bottom of the drum, and the oats are jumping on the top of it; we
+have got to eat off the drum."
+
+"Anything," she said, faint and beaten, "except things that stick out
+so." She searched about, opened the top drawer of the cupboard, and
+took out a faded wreath of artificial flowers: she said, "Rather take
+this!" and neither smiled nor wept! _He_ had often looked at it; but as
+he had sent it to her himself last New Year's Day, the day of their
+betrothal, and because it was so romantically beautiful (a white rose,
+two red rosebuds, and a border of forget-me-nots) every fibre of that
+tender heart of his would have stood out against parting with this
+pretty relic--this memorial of better, happier, days. The patient,
+resigned way in which she made the sacrifice of these poor old
+flowers tore his heart in two. "Lenette!" he said, moved beyond
+expression--"why, you know, these are our betrothal flowers!"
+
+"Well, who's to be any the wiser," she said, quite cheerfully and quite
+coolly. "You see they're not so _big_ as other things are."
+
+"Have you forgotten, then quite," he stammered, "what I told you these
+flowers meant?"
+
+"Let me see," the said, more coldly still, and proud of the goodness of
+her memory, "the forget-me-nots mean that I'm not to forget you, and
+that you won't forget me--the buds mean happiness--no, no, the buds
+mean happiness that's not quite all come yet--and the white rose--I
+don't recollect now _what_ the white rose means----"
+
+"It means pain" (he said, overwhelmed with emotion), "and innocence,
+and sorrow, and a poor white face." He clasped her in his arms, as the
+tears came to his eyes, and cried, "Oh! poor darling! poor darling!
+What can I do? It's all beyond me! I should like to give you everything
+the world contains, and I have nothing----"
+
+He ceased suddenly, for while his arms were round her, she had shut up
+the drawer of the cupboard, and was looking at him with calm, clear,
+gentle eyes, not the trace of a tear in them. She resumed her petition
+in the old tone saying, "I may keep the siphon and the horse, mayn't I?
+We shall get more money for the flowers." What he said was, "Lenette!
+Oh, darling Lenette," over and over again, each time more tenderly.
+
+"But why not?" she asked, more gently each time, for she didn't
+understand him in the least. "I had sooner pawn the coat off my back,"
+was his answer. But as she now got the alarming idea into her head that
+what he was driving at was the calico gown, and as _this_ put her into
+a great state, and as she immediately began to inveigh warmly against
+all pledging of large articles; and as he clearly perceived that her
+previous coldness had been thoroughly genuine, and not assumed, he
+knew, alas! the very worst, a grief which no sweet drops of philosophy
+could avail to alleviate, namely--she either loved him no longer, or,
+she had never really loved him at all.
+
+The sinews of his arms were now fairly cut in two, the sinews of his
+arms which had till now kept misfortune at bay. In the prostration of
+this his (spiritual) putrid fever he could say nothing but--"Whatever
+you please, dear; it's all the same to me now."
+
+Upon that, she went out delighted, and quickly, to old Sabel, but came
+back again immediately. This pleased him; sorrow having gnawed deeper
+into his heart during the three moments she was gone, he could follow
+up the bitter speech with these quiet words: "Put up your marriage
+wreath along with the other flowers, there'll be a little more weight,
+and a little more money for it; though it is nothing like such pretty
+work as my flowers."
+
+"My marriage wreath?" cried Lenette, colouring with anger, while two
+bitter tears burst from her eyes. "No, that I positively _shall_ NOT
+let go, it shall be put with me into my coffin, as my poor dear
+mother's was. Did you not take it up in your hand from the table on my
+wedding-day, when I had taken it off to have my hair powdered, and say
+you thought quite as much of it as you did of the marriage ceremony
+itself, if not more? (I noticed what you said very carefully, and
+remember it quite distinctly). No, no, I am your wife, at all events,
+and I shall never let that wreath go as long as _I_ live."
+
+His emotion now took a new bent, one more in harmony with hers, but he
+masked this behind the question, "What made you come back in such a
+hurry?" It was that old Sabel had just been in at the bookbinder's, it
+seemed, and Herr von Meyern had been there too. That young gentleman
+was in the habit of getting off his horse and dropping in, partly to
+see what new books the ladies were having bound at the bookbinder's,
+and in what sort of pretty bindings, partly to stick up his leg
+with its riding boot upon the cobbler's bench and get him to stitch a
+top tighter, asking about all sorts of things during the process.
+The world--(which expression can only mean the collection of female
+tongue-threshers of empty straw belonging to Kuhschnappel)--may
+undoubtedly conclude, if it be so minded, the Venner to be a regular
+Henry the Fowler with respect to more women than one in the house, the
+latter being a feminine _Volière_ to him; but I want proofs of this.
+Lenette, however, didn't trouble herself about any proofs, but piously
+fled out of the way of Rosa the birdcatcher.
+
+I further relate (doing so, moreover, without any very marked blush for
+the mutability of the human heart) that at this point Firmian's
+compressed thoracic cavity grew several inches wider, so as to give
+admission to a considerable modicum of happiness, for no other reason
+but that Lenette had kept such a tight grasp of her marriage-wreath,
+and had endured the Venner for so short a time. "She is faithful, at
+all events, although she may be rather cool; in fact, I don't really
+believe she _is_ a bit cool, either, after all." So that he was quite
+pleased that she should have her way (which was _his_ also) about
+keeping the wedding-wreath in the house and in her heart. Besides
+which, without contending further about the betrothal-wreath, he let
+her have that _other_ way of hers, though less willingly--this being a
+proceeding which hurt _his_ feelings only, not hers. His old flower
+keepsake was accordingly deposited in the hands of an obliging lady who
+rejoiced in the title of "Appraiser," on the solemn understanding that
+it was to be redeemed with the very first dollar which should drop from
+the bird-pole on St. Andrew's Day.
+
+The blood-money of these silken flowers was so parcelled out as to be
+made available by way of stepping-stones in the muddy path leading to
+the Sunday before the shooting-match. This Sunday (the 27th November,
+1785) was to be followed by the Monday for which the auction had been
+announced; on the Wednesday he (and I hope all of us with him) would be
+in his place in front of the bird-pole.
+
+It is true, however, that on the Sunday he had to ford a stream swollen
+to a considerable extent by rainy weather; we will go through it after
+him, but I give due notice that, in the middle, it is pretty deep.
+
+The stomach of his inner man evinced a wonderful disrelish, and
+exhibited a reversed peristaltic motion towards everything in the shape
+of pawning, since the affair of the flowers. The reason was--there was
+nothing more to which he could _refer_ his wife. At first, he used to
+refer her to the shooting-match; but when the mortar and the chair had
+evacuated the fortress without tuck of drum, they not being articles of
+a sort to be obtained as prizes for shooting, he took to referring her
+to public auctions at which he could always buy what he might require
+at about half price. Finally, though still referring her to auctions,
+he did so no longer with a view to import, but to export, trade--as a
+seller, rather than as a buyer, of commodities; in which respect he
+surpasses Spain.
+
+He who has risen victorious over great and serious attacks of an
+insulting or offensive nature, has often had to yield to very small and
+trifling ones; and so it is with our troubles. The stout, firm heart,
+which has beat strongly on all through long years of bitter trial and
+affliction, will often break at once, like over-flooded ice, at some
+lightest touch of Fortune's foot. Till now, Siebenkæs had carried
+himself erect, and borne his burden without a bend, ay, and with a
+merrier heart than many a man. Up to this hour, he really hadn't minded
+the whole affair one single button. Had he not (merely to mention one
+or two instances) pointed out that, in the matter of clothes, he was
+better off than the Emperor of Germany, who (he said) had nothing to
+put on, on his coronation-day in Frankfort, but a frightful old
+cast-off robe of Charles the Great's, not much better than Rabelais's
+old gown, though _that_ was not by several centuries so old as the
+Imperial one? And once when his wife was sadly looking over his fading
+perennial clothes flora, he told her all she had to do was to suppose
+he was serving in the new world with a thousand or so of other Anspach
+men, and the ship which was bringing out their new uniforms had been
+captured by the enemy, so that the whole force had nothing to put on
+but what they would have preferred to have been able to take off.
+Likewise that what he had had to go upon, and to take his stand upon
+for a considerable time past, had been something much superior to his
+own pair of boots (by this he clearly meant pure apathy); as for his
+boots, they, having been twice new fronted, had been shoved in like
+pocket telescopes, or trombones, till they had become a pair of fair
+halt-boots; just as the German _corpora_, also, by the influence of
+long years of civilisation and culture, have got considerably taken in,
+the long rifle having been docked into a short, or non-commissioned
+officers' rifle.
+
+But on the Sunday to which I am alluding, he was far too much scared at
+the sight of one single bird of prey and of ill omen, flying athwart
+the lonely Sahara desert in which his life was passing. He himself was
+taken by surprise at this alarm of his; he would have expected anything
+else but alarm under the circumstances. For as it had hitherto been his
+custom to prepare himself for dark and tragic scenes by comedy
+rehearsals of them--by which I mean, that he carefully read up,
+beforehand, all the legal steps which Herr von Blaise could take
+against him, thus taking up, in sport, and in advance, the burdens
+which the future had in store--it astonished him greatly to find that
+an ill, quite certain to come, and clearly foreseen, should prove to
+have longer thorns, when it came up towards him out of the future, than
+it seemed to possess while still at a distance.
+
+So that when, on the Sunday, the messenger of the Inheritance Office
+came, with the long-expected THIRD dilatory plea of the Heimlicher, and
+with the third affirmatory decree written on the face thereof, as his
+breast was in the condition of a vacuum (no air to breathe in it)
+before his coming, his poor heart grew sick and breathless indeed, when
+this fresh stroke of the air-pump exhausted the receiver even more
+thoroughly than it had been emptied before.
+
+Amid the multiplicity of matters which it has been my duty to report to
+the public, I have omitted, on purpose, all mention of the second of
+Mr. Blaise's dilatory pleas, because I thought I might assume that
+every reader who has had as much as half a ship's pound weight of
+legal documents through his hands--or one single settlement of law
+accounts--would take it for granted, as a matter of course, that the
+first petition for delay would infallibly be followed by a second. It
+reflects much discredit on our administration of justice that every
+upright, honourable counsel finds himself compelled to adduce such a
+number of reasons (I wish I might say "lies") before he can be accorded
+the smallest, necessary term of delay; he has got to say his children
+and his wife are dying; that he has met with all kinds of unfortunate
+accidents, and has thousands of things to do, journeys to make, and
+sicknesses. Whereas it ought to be quite enough for him to say that the
+preparation of the innumerable petitions for delay with which he is
+overwhelmed, leaves him little time to write anything else. People
+ought to notice that these petitions for delay tend, as all other
+petitions do, to the protracting of the suit, just as all the wheels of
+a watch work together to retard the principal wheel. A slow pulse is a
+sign of longevity not only in human beings but in lawsuits. It seems to
+me that an advocate who has any conscience is glad to do what he
+can to promote the length of life in his opponent's suit--not in
+his own client's, he would make an end of _that_ in a minute if he
+could--partly to punish the said opponent, partly to terrify him, or
+else to snatch, from his grasp a favourable judgment (a sort of thing
+as to which nobody can form an idea whether it is likely or not)--for
+as many years as possible; just as in 'Gulliver's Travels,' the people
+who had a black mark on their brow were doomed to the torture of
+eternal life. The object of the man of business on the opposite side is
+a similar prolongation of the war to _his_ opponents, and thus the two
+counsel immesh the two clients in a long drag-net of documents, &c.,
+each with the best possible intentions. On the whole, lawyers are not
+so indifferent to the question, "What is the law?" as to the question,
+"What is justice?" For which reason they prefer arguing to writing; as
+_Simonides_, when he was asked by the king the question, "What is God?"
+begged for a day to consider his answer--then for another day--then for
+another--and for another, and always for another, because no man's life
+is sufficient to answer that question--so the jurist, when he is
+asked, "What is justice?" keeps continually asking for more and more
+delays--he can never reply to the question--indeed, if the judges and
+clients would let him, he would gladly devote his whole life to writing
+replies to a legal question of this sort. Advocates are so used to this
+way of looking at matters, that it never strikes them that there is
+anything unusual about it.
+
+I return to my story. This blow of the iron secular arm, with its six
+long thief- and writing-fingers, all but felled Siebenkæs to the earth.
+The vapours about his path in life condensed to morning mist, the
+morning mist to evening clouds, the clouds to showers of rain. "Many a
+poor devil has more to do than he can manage," he said. If he had had a
+pleasant, cheerful wife, he would not have said this; but one such as
+his, who painfully _trailed_ her cross (instead of taking it up), and
+was all lamentations--an elegiac poetess, a Job's comforter--was
+herself a _second_ cross to bear.
+
+He set to work and thought the whole thing over; he had hardly enough
+left to buy the next year's almanack, or a bundle of Hamburgh quills
+(for his satires used up Lenette's feather dusters much more than his
+own energies, so that he often thought of cutting Stiefel's red
+pipe-stalk into a pen); he would have been delighted to convert his
+plates into something to eat (there were none left, however), following
+the example of the Gauls, who used round pieces of bread as plates
+first, and afterwards as dessert; or of the Huns, who, after riding
+upon pieces of beef (by way of saddles) till it was partly cooked,
+dined upon these saddles. His half-boots would need to be new fronted,
+and abbreviated for the third time, before the arrival of the impending
+shooting-match day; and of the necessary requisites for the performance
+of that operation the only one in existence was the artist, Fecht the
+cobbler. In short, for that important occasion he had nothing to put on
+his back or in his pocket, his bullet-pouch, or his powder-horn.
+
+When a man intentionally works his anxieties and apprehensions up to
+the highest possible pitch, some consolation is sure to fall upon his
+heart from heaven, like a drop of warm rain. Siebenkæs began
+catechising himself more strictly, asking himself what it really was
+that he was tormenting himself about. Nothing but the fear of having to
+go to the shooting-match without money, without powder and shot, and
+without having had his boots abbreviated for the third time! "Is that
+really all?" he said. "And what, if you please, is there to make it a
+compulsory matter that I should go there at all? I'll tell you what it
+is" (he went on to himself), "I am the monkey complaining bitterly
+that, having stuck his hand into a narrow-mouthed bottle of rice, and
+filled it, he can't pull it out without a corkscrew. All I've got to do
+is to sell my rifle and my shooting ticket; all I've got to do is to
+open my hand and draw it out empty." So he made up his mind to take his
+rifle to the barber on the day of the auction to be put up to sale.
+
+All battered, bruised, and weary with the day, he climbed into his bed,
+with the thought of which safe and sheltered anchoring ground he
+consoled himself all day long. "There is this blessed property about
+night," he said, as he sat and spread the feathers of his quilt level,
+"that while it lasts we need trouble ourselves neither about candles,
+coals, victuals, drink, debts, nor clothes; all we want is a bed. A
+poor fellow is in peace and comfort as long as he is lying down: and,
+luckily, he has only got to stand for half of his time."
+
+The attacks of syncope, to which our souls and our cheerfulness are
+subject, cease, as those of the body do (according to Zimmermann), when
+the patient is placed in a horizontal position.
+
+Had his bed been provided with bed-tassel, I should have called it the
+capstan, whereby he heaved himself slowly up on the Monday morning from
+his resting place. When he got up, he ascended to the garret, where his
+rifle was nailed up in an old, long field-chest, to keep it safe. This
+rifle was a valuable legacy from his father, who had been huntsman and
+gun-loader to a great prince of the empire. He took a crowbar, and,
+using it as a lever, prised up the lid with its roots, _i. e_. nails;
+and the first thing he saw in it was a leather arm, which "gave him
+quite a turn;" for he had had many a good thrashing from that arm in
+bygone days.
+
+It will not take me too far out of my way to expend a word or two on
+this subject. This full-dress arm had been borne by Siebenkæs's father
+on his body (as it might be in the field of his escutcheon) ever since
+the time when he had lost his natural arm in the military service of
+the before-mentioned prince, who, as some slight reward, had got him
+his appointment as gun-loader to his corps of Jägers. The gun-loader
+wore this auxiliary arm fastened to a hook on his left shoulder; it
+being more like the arm of a Hussar's pelisse, or an elongated glove,
+worn by way of ornament, than as a _mouth_ Christian of an arm
+(pretending to be what it was not). In the education of his children,
+however, the leather arm served, to some extent, the purpose of a
+school library and Bible Society, and was the _collaborateur_ of the
+fleshly arm. Every-day shortcomings--for instance, when Firmian made a
+mistake in his multiplication, or rode on the pointer dog, or ate
+gunpowder, or broke a pipe--were punished _not_ severely, that is, only
+with a stick, which in all good schools runs up the backs of the
+children by way of capillary sap-vessel or siphon, to supply the
+nourishing juice of knowledge; or is the carriage-pole to which entire
+winter-schools are harnessed, and at which they tug with a will. But
+there were two other sorts of transgressions which he punished _more_
+severely. When one of the children laughed at table during meals, or
+hesitated, or made a blunder during the long table-grace or evening
+prayers, he would immediately amputate his adventitious arm with his
+natural one, and administer a tremendous thrashing to the little
+darling.
+
+Firmian remembered, as if it had happened yesterday, one occasion when
+he and his sisters had been thrashed, turn about, for a whole half-hour
+at dinner-time with the battle-flail, because one of them began to
+laugh while the long muscle was swishing about the ears of another, who
+was serious enough. The sight of the bit of leather made his heart burn
+even at this day. I can quite see the advantage to parents and teachers
+who try the expedient of unhooking an empty by an organic arm, and
+smiting a pupil with this species of Concordat, and alliance between
+the _temporal_ and _spiritual arms_; but this mode of punishment ought
+to be _invariably_ the one made use of; for there is nothing which
+infuriates children more than anything _new_ in the way of instruments
+of punishment, or a new mode of application of those in general use. A
+child who is accustomed to rulers and blows on the back, must not be
+set upon with boxes on the ear and bare hands; nor one accustomed to
+the latter treated to the former. The author of these Flower-pieces had
+once a slipper thrown at him in his earlier days. The scar of that
+slipper is still fresh in his heart, whereas he has scarcely any
+recollection of lickings of the ordinary sort.
+
+Siebenkæs pulled the arm of punishment and the rifle out of the chest;
+but what a treasure trove there was beneath them! Here was help,
+indeed! At all events he could go to the shooting-match in shorter
+boots, and eat whatever he liked for some days to come. What most
+astonishes both him and me in this affair (it is easily explicable,
+however) is that he had never thought of it sooner, inasmuch as his
+father was a Jäger; while, on the other hand, I must confess it could
+not have happened on a luckier day, because it chanced to be just the
+day of the auction.
+
+The hunting spear, the horse's tail, the decoy bird, the fox-trap, the
+_couteau de chasse_, the medicine-chest, the fencing mask and foil--a
+collection of things which he had never had a thought of looking for in
+the chest--could be taken over instantly to the town-house, and set up
+to auction on the spot by the hairdressing Saxon.
+
+It was done accordingly. After all his troubles, the little piece of
+good luck warmed and gladdened his heart. He went himself after the
+box--which was sent just as it stood to the auction, except that the
+rifle and the leathern artery were kept back--to hear what would be
+offered for the things.
+
+He took up his position (on account of the excessive length of his
+half-boots) at the back of the auctioneer's table, close to his hectic
+landlord. The sight of this pile of heterogeneous goods and chattels
+all heaped up higgledy-piggledy (as if some grand conflagration were
+raging, and it had been collected in haste for safety; or as if it were
+the plunder of some captured city), goods and chattels sold, for the
+most part, by people on the downward path to poverty, and bought by
+those who had arrived at poverty already--had the effect of making him
+contemn and despise more every moment all this complex pumping
+apparatus, this machinery for keeping the spring-wells of a few petty,
+feeble lives in clear and vigorous flow; and he himself, the engineer
+and driver of this machinery, felt his sense of manliness grow
+stronger. He was furious with himself, because his soul had seemed
+yesterday to be but a sham jewel, which a drop of aquafortis deprives
+of its colour and lustre, whereas a real jewel never loses either.
+
+Nothing awakens our humour more, nor renders us more utterly
+indifferent to the honour paid to mere rank and worldly position,
+than our being in any manner compelled to fall back upon the honour
+due to ourselves (independently of our chance position), our own
+_intrinsic worth_, our being compelled to tar over our inner being with
+philosophy (as if it were a Diogenes' tub), by way of protection
+against injuries from without; or (in a prettier metaphor) when, like
+pearl oysters, we have to exude pearls of maxims to fill the holes
+which worms bore in our mother-of-pearl. Now pearls are better than
+uninjured mother-of-pearl; an idea which I should like to have written
+in letters of gold.
+
+I have good reasons of my own for prefacing what has to follow with all
+this philosophy, because I want to get the reader into such a frame of
+mind that he may not make too great a fuss about what the advocate is
+going to do now: it was really nothing but a harmless piece of fun. As
+the be-powdered lungs of the auctioneer were more adapted to wheezing
+and coughing than to shouting, he took the auction-hammer from this
+hammer-man and sold off the things himself. True, he only did it for
+about half an hour, and only auctioned his own things; and even
+then he would have thought twice about taking the hammer in hand and
+setting to work, if it hadn't been such an indescribable delight
+to him to hold up the horse's tail, the spear, the decoy-bird, &c., and
+hammer on the table and cry, "Four groschen for the horse's tail,
+_once_! five kreuzer for the decoy, _twice_!--going! Half-a dollar
+for the fox-trap, once! two gulden for this fine foil, twice! two
+gulden--going--going--and gone!" He did what it is an auctioneer's duty
+to do, he praised the goods. He turned the horse's tail over and over,
+and opened it out before the huntsmen who were at the sale (the
+shooting-match had attracted many from a distance, as carrion does
+vultures), stroked it with and against the hair, and said there was
+enough of it to make snares for all the blackbirds in the Black Forest.
+He held up the decoy-bird in its best light, exhibiting to the company
+its wooden beak, its wings, talons, and feathers, and only wished there
+were a hawk present, that he might bait the decoy and lure it.
+
+The entries in his housekeeping account-book, which, on account of the
+wretchedness of my memory, I have had to refer to twice, show that the
+sum received from the huntsmen amounted to seven florins and some
+groschen. This does not include the medicine-chest nor the long-necked
+mask; for nobody would have anything to say to _them_. When he went
+home he poured the whole of this crown-treasure and sinking-fund into
+Lenette's gold satchel, taking occasion to warn her and himself of the
+dangers of great riches, and holding up to both the example of those
+who are arrogant by reason of wealth, and must therefore of necessity,
+sooner or later, come to ruin.
+
+In my Seventh Chapter, which I shall commence immediately, I shall
+at length be able, after all these thousands of domestic worries
+and miseries, to conduct the learned world of Germany to the
+shooting-ground and present to them my hero as a worthy member
+of the shooting-club, with a rifle and bullets, and properly and
+respectably--well, _booted_, more than _attired_ for his bullets are
+cast, his rifle cleaned, and his boots have put on their shoes,
+Fecht having stitched, on his knee, the three-quarter boots down to
+half-boots, and soled them with the--leather arm, of which enough has
+been said already.
+
+
+
+
+ CHAPTER VII.
+
+ THE SHOOTING-MATCH--ROSA'S AUTUMNAL CAMPAIGN--CONSIDERATIONS
+ CONCERNING CURSES, KISSES, AND THE MILITIA.
+
+
+There is nothing which so much inconveniences me, or is so much to the
+prejudice of this story (so beautiful in itself), as the fact that I
+have made a resolution to restrict it within the compass of four
+alphabets. I have thus, by my own act, deprived myself of everything in
+the shape of room for digressions. I find myself, metaphorically, in a
+somewhat similar position to one which I once found myself in, without
+metaphor, on an occasion when I was measuring the diameter and
+circumference of the town of Hof. On that occasion I had fastened a
+Catel's pedometer by a hook to the waistband of my trousers and the
+silken cord which runs down the thigh to a curved hook of steel at my
+knee, so that the three indexes on one dial (of which the first marks a
+hundred steps, the second a thousand, and the third up to twenty
+thousand) were all moving just as I moved myself. At this moment I met
+a young lady, whom it was incumbent on me that I should see home. I
+begged her to excuse me, as I had a Catel's pedometer on, and had
+already made a certain number of steps towards my measurement of the
+diameter of Hof. "You see, in a moment," I said, "how I am situated.
+The pedometer, like a species of conscience, records all the steps I
+take; and, with a lady, I shall be obliged to take shorter steps,
+besides thousands of sideway and backward steps, all of which the
+pedometer will put to the account of the diameter. So, you see, I am
+afraid it's quite impossible that I _can_ have the pleasure of----"
+However, this only made her the more determined that I _should_, and I
+was well laughed at; but I screwed myself to the spot, and wouldn't
+stir. At last I said I would go home with her, pedometer and all, if
+she would just read off my indexes for me (seeing I couldn't twist
+myself down low enough to see the dial)--read them off for me
+twice--firstly, then and there, and secondly, when we got to her
+house--so that I might deduct the steps taken by me in this young
+lady's company from the size of Hof. This agreement was honestly kept;
+and this little account of the occurrence may be of service to me some
+day if ever I publish (as I have not given up all hopes of doing) my
+perspective sketch of the town of Hof; and townspeople who saw me
+walking with the said young lady, and with the pedometer trailing at my
+knee, might cast it in my teeth and say it was a lame affair, and that
+nobody could calculate as to the steps he might take in a lady's
+company, far less apply them to the measurement of a town.
+
+St. Andrew's Day was bright and fine, and not very windy. It was
+tolerably warm, and there wasn't as much snow in the furrows as would
+have cooled a nutshell of wine, or knocked over a humming-bird. On the
+previous Tuesday Siebenkæs had been looking on with the other
+spectators, when the bird-pole had described its majestic arc in
+descending to impale the black golden eagle with outstretched wings,
+and rise again therewith on high. He felt some emotion as the thought
+struck him, "That bird of prey up there holds in his claws, and will
+dispense, the happiness or the misery of thy Lenette's coming weeks,
+and our goddess of Fortune has transformed herself and dwindled into
+that black form, nothing left of her but her WINGS and BALL."
+
+On St. Andrew's morning, as he said good-bye to Lenette, with kisses,
+and in his abbreviated boots, over which he had a pair of goloshes, she
+said, "May God grant you luck, and not let you do any mischief with
+your rifle." She asked several times if there was nothing he had
+forgotten--his eyeglass, or his handkerchief, or his purse; "And mind
+you don't get into any quarrel with Mr. von Meyern," was her parting
+counsel: and finally, as one or two preliminary thundrous drum-ruffles
+were heard from the direction of the courthouse, she added most
+anxiously, "For God's sake, mind and don't shoot yourself; my blood
+will run cold the whole forenoon every time I hear a gun go off!"
+
+At length the long thread of riflemen, rolled up like a ball, began to
+unwind itself, and the waving line, like a great serpent, moved off in
+surging convolutions to the sound of trumpets and drums. A banner
+represented the serpent's crest, and the standard-bearer's coat was
+like a second flag beneath the other. The town-soldiery, more
+remarkable for quality than for quantity, shot the mottled line of
+competitors at intervals with the white of their uniforms. The
+auctioneering hairdresser--the only member of the lower ten thousand
+who rejoiced in a powdered head--tripped along, keeping the white peak
+of his cap at the due degree of distance from the leather pigtails of
+the aristocracy, which he had that morning tied and powdered. The
+multitude felt what a lofty position in this world really was, when,
+with bent heads, they raised their eyes to Heimlicher von Blaise, the
+director of the competition, who accompanied the procession in his
+capacity of aorta of the whole arterial system, or elementary fire of
+all these ignes-fatui--or, in a word, as master of the shooters' lodge.
+Happy was the wife who peeped out and saw her husband marching past in
+the procession--happy was Lenette, for her husband was there, and
+looked gallantly up as he passed by. His short boots looked very nice,
+indeed; they were made both in the old fashion and in the new, and,
+like man, had put on the new (short) Adam over the old one.
+
+I wish Schulrath Stiefel had given a thought or so to the St. Andrew's
+shooting-match, and looked out of his window at his Orestes; however,
+he went on with his reviewing.
+
+Now, when these processional caterpillars had crept together again at
+the shooting-ground, as upon a leaf--when the eagle hung in his
+heavenly eyrie, like the crest of the future's armorial bearings--when
+the wind instruments, which the troop of "wandering minstrels" had
+scarce been able to hold firmly to their lips, blared out their loudest
+now that the band was halted, and as the procession, with martial tramp
+and rattle of grounded rifles, came with a rush into the empty echoing
+shooting-house, everybody, strictly speaking, was more or less out of
+his senses, and mentally intoxicated; and that although the lots were
+not even drawn, far less any shot fired. Siebenkæs said to himself,
+"The whole thing is stuff and nonsense, yet see how it has gone to all
+our heads, and how a mere _unbroken_ faded flower-wreath of pleasant
+_trifles_, wound ten times about our hearts, half chokes and darkens
+them. Our thirsty heart is made of loose, absorptive mould; a warm
+shower makes it swell, and as it expands it cracks the roots of all the
+plants that are growing in it."
+
+Mr. von Blaise, who smiled unceasingly upon my hero, and treated the
+others with the rudeness becoming authority, ordered the lots to be
+drawn which were to decide the order in which the competitors were to
+shoot. The reader cannot expect Chance to stop the wheel of Fortune,
+thrust in her hand, and, behind her bandage, pull out from among
+seventy numbers the very first for the advocate; she drew him the
+twelfth, however. And at length the brave Germans and imperial citizens
+opened fire upon the Roman eagle. At first they aimed at his crown. The
+eagerness and zeal of these pretenders were proportioned to the
+importance of the affair: was there not a royal revenue of six florins
+attached to this golden penthouse when the bullet brought it down--to
+say nothing whatever of other crown property, consisting of three
+pounds of tow and a pewter shaving-dish. The fellows did what they
+could; but the rifle placed the crown of the eagle, not, alas! on our
+hero's head, but upon that of No. 11, his predecessor, the hectic
+Saxon. He had need of it, poor fellow! seeing that, like a Prince of
+Wales, he had come into possession of the crown debts sooner than of
+the crown itself.
+
+At a shooting contest of this kind nothing is better calculated to
+dissipate everything in the shape of tedium than to have arrangements
+made for "running shooting" (as it is called) being carried on by those
+who are waiting their turn at the birdpole. A man who has to wait while
+sixty-nine other people slowly aim and shoot before his turn comes
+round, may find a good deal to amuse him if, during that time, he can
+load and aim at something of a less lofty kind--for instance, a
+Capuchin general. The "running" or "swing" shooting, as carried out at
+Kuhschnappel, differs in no respect from that of other places. A piece
+of canvas is hung up, and floats to and fro; there are painted dishes
+of edibles upon it, as on a table-cloth, and whoever puts a bullet
+through one of these paintings obtains the original--just as princes
+choose their brides from their portraits, before bringing home the
+brides in person; or as witches stick pins into a man's image in order
+to wound the prototype himself. The Kuhschnappelers were, on this
+occasion, shooting at a portrait on this canvas, which a great many
+persons considered to represent a Capuchin general. I know that there
+were some who, basing their opinion chiefly upon the red hat in the
+portrait, considered it to represent a cardinal, or cardinal-protector,
+but these have clearly, in the first place, got to settle the point
+with a third party, which differed from both of those above mentioned,
+holding that it portrayed the whore of Babylon--that is to say, a
+European one. From all of which we may form a pretty accurate estimate
+of the amount of truth contained in another rumour--which I
+contradicted in the first hour of its existence--namely, that the
+Augsburg people had taken offence at this effigy-arquebusading, and had
+written, in consequence, to the attorney-general representing that they
+felt themselves aggrieved, and that it was an injustice to one religion
+if, within the bounds of the holy Roman empire, a general of a
+religious order should be shot to shivers, without a Lutheran
+superintendent general being also shot to shivers at the same time. I
+should certainly have heard something further about this, if it had
+been anything but mere wind. Indeed, I have a shrewd suspicion that the
+whole story is no more than a false tradition, or garbled version of
+_another_ story, which a gentleman of rank belonging to Vienna recently
+_lied_ to me at table. What he said was, that in the more considerable
+towns of the empire, where the spirit-level of religious toleration has
+established a beautiful equilibrium between Papists and Lutherans, many
+had complained, on the part of the Lutherans, of the circumstance that
+although there were equal numbers of night-watchmen and censors (that
+is, transcendental night-watchmen), keepers of hotels, and keepers of
+circulating libraries of each communion, yet there were more Papists
+hanged than Lutherans; so that it was very clear, whether the Jesuits
+had to do with it or not, that a high and important post such as the
+gallows was not filled with the same amount of impartiality as the
+Council of State, but with a certain bias towards the Catholics. I
+thought of contradicting the story, in the most distinct terms, in the
+'Literary Gazette' of December last, but Government declined to pay the
+expense of the insertion.
+
+However, although those who occupied themselves with the "swing"
+shooting _did_ only have a Capuchin to aim at, the said swing shooting
+was every bit as important a business as the shooting at the _standing_
+mark. I must point out (in this connection) that there were edible
+prizes attached to the divers bodily members of this said general of
+his order, which had their attractions for riflemen of a reflective
+turn of mind. An entire Bohemian porker was the prize appointed for him
+who should pierce the heart of the Capuchin pasha--which heart,
+however, was represented by a spot no bigger than a beauty-patch--so
+that he who should hit this little mark would have need of all his
+skill and nerve. The cardinal's hat was easier of attainment, for which
+reason it was worth only a couple of jack. The honorarium of the
+oculist who should succeed in inserting new (_leaden_) pupils into the
+cardinal's eyes consisted of an equivalent number of geese. As he was
+portrayed in the full fervour of prayer, it was well worth anyone's
+while to send a bullet through between his hands, seeing that this
+would be tantamount to knocking the two fore-quarters out of a
+cantering, smoked pig. And each of the cardinal's feet rested upon a
+fine hind-quarter or ham. I do not hesitate for a moment--whatever the
+imperial burgh of Kuhschnappel may say to it--to record, with the
+utmost distinctness, that no portion of the whole lord-protector was
+more poorly endowed, or had a scantier revenue and salarium allotted to
+it, than his navel; for there was nothing to be got out of that, with
+however good a bullet, but a Bologna sausage.
+
+The advocate had failed in his designs upon the crown; but fortune
+chucked him the cardinal's hat to make up for it--the cardinal's hat
+with two pike inside it. But some puissant necromantic spell of
+invulnerability turned all his bullets aside from the eagle's head, and
+from the general's too. He would fain have sent one eye, at any rate,
+out of the face of the harlot of Babylon, but he could not manage that
+either.
+
+Now the prize-lists--which are correct, seeing that they were made
+out by the secretary, under the eyes of the president, Herr von
+Blaise--state with distinctness that the head, the ring in the beak,
+and the little flag, fell into the hands of numbers 16, 2, and 63.
+
+The sceptre was now being aimed at; and Siebenkæs would have been very
+very glad, for his dear little wife's sake (waiting for him now, as she
+was, with the soup), to have sent that, at least, flying out of the
+eagle's talons, and to have fixed it, by way of a bayonet, on to his
+rifle.
+
+All the numbers who had tried their best to break off this golden
+oak-branch had shot in vain, except the worst--the most to be dreaded
+of all--his own predecessor and landlord. _He_ aimed, and shot--and the
+gilded harpoon quivered. Siebenkæs fired--and the eel-spear came
+tumbling down.
+
+Messrs. Meyern and Blaise smiled, and uttered congratulations; the
+blowers of instruments, crooked and straight, blew, in honour of the
+advent of this new bird-member, a blast both loud and shrill (like the
+Karlsbad people, when a new bath-guest arrives), looking closely and
+carefully at their music as they did so, though they had played their
+little _fanfares_ far oftener than the very night-watchmen. All the
+infantas--I mean all the children--began a race for the sceptre, but
+the buffoon dashed among them, and scattered them; and, taking up the
+sceptre, presented that emblem of sovereignty to the advocate with one
+hand, holding in the other his _own_ emblem of sovereignty, the whip.
+
+Siebenkæs contemplated with a smile the little twig of timber--the
+little branch, sticking to which the buzzing swarms of nations are so
+often borne away; and he veiled his satisfaction under cover of the
+following satirical remarks (which the reigning Heimlicher overheard,
+and applied to himself):--
+
+"A very pretty little frog-shooter! It _ought_, by rights, to be a
+honey-gauge; but the poor bees are crushed by it, that their honey-bags
+may be got out of them! The Waiwodes and the despots, child-like, put
+the bees of the country to death, and take the honey from their
+_stomachs_, not from, their _combs_. A truly preposterous and absurd
+implement! It is made of wood; very likely a piece broken off a
+shepherd's crook, and gilded, pointed, and notched--one of those
+shepherd's staves with which the shepherds often drag the sheep's fat
+out of them while they are feeding in the meadows!"
+
+He had ceased to be conscious, now, when he emitted the bitterest
+satirical matter (there was never a drop of it in his heart); he often
+turned mere acquaintances into foes with some joke, made merely for the
+sake of jesting; and couldn't imagine what made people vexed with him,
+and why it was that _he_ couldn't have his little bit of fun with them
+as well as any one else.
+
+He put the sceptre into the breast of his coat and took it home, seeing
+that they would not shoot up to his number again before dinner-time. He
+held it up straight and stiff, as the king of diamonds holds his, and
+said to Lenette, "There's a soup-ladle and sugar-tongs for you, all in
+one!" the allusion being to the two pewter prizes, which, in company
+with a sum of nine florins, had fallen to his share by way of
+sceptre-fief. It was enough for one shot. And next he gave an account
+of the catching of the pike. He expected that Lenette would, at the
+very least, go through the five dancing positions and execute Euler's
+"knight's move" on the chess-board of the room-floor, into the bargain,
+within the first five seconds after hearing the news. She did what she
+_could_ do, namely, nothing at all; and said what she knew, namely,
+that the landlady had been holding forth, with bitter severity, to the
+bookseller's wife, on the subject of the non-payment of the rent, and
+further, concerning her own husband, whom she characterised as a
+smooth-tongued flatterer and payer of compliments--a man who didn't
+half threaten people. "What I tell you," repeated the sceptre-bearer,
+"is, that I have this day had the luck to shoot a couple of pikes and a
+sceptre, Wendeline Engelkraut!" and he banged his sceptre-knout in
+indignation upon the table where the crockery was all set out. She
+answered at last, "Well, Lucas came running a short time ago and told
+me all about _that_; I _am so_ glad about it, but I should quite think
+you will shoot a good many more things yet--will you not? I said so to
+the bookseller's wife."
+
+She was slipping into her old cart-rut again, you see, but Firmian
+thought, "She can cry and mourn loud enough, but deuce a bit of
+gladness can she show when a fellow comes home with a pike or two under
+his arm, and a sceptre or so." It was just the same with the wife of
+the gentle-hearted Racine, when he threw down a long purse of golden
+Louis XVI. he had got hold of, on the table.
+
+How, or whence, oh! beloved wives, cometh to you the naughty trick ye
+have of making a kind of parade of an insupportable frigidity and
+indifference, just on the very occasions when your husbands come to you
+laden with good news, or with presents--that at the very moment when
+Fate brightens the wine of your joy into "bloom," your vats grow turbid
+with the lees of the _old_ liquor? Comes it from your custom of showing
+only one of your faces at a time, like your sister and prototype, the
+moon? or from a peevish discontent with destiny? or is its cause a
+sweet, delicious, overflowing happiness and gladness, making the heart
+too full and the tongue too hard to move?
+
+I believe it is often from all these causes combined.
+
+In men, again--sometimes, too, in women, but only in one out of a
+thousand--it may arise from the sad thought of the sharks which tear
+off the arm with which, down in the dark ocean, all breathless and
+anxious, we have clasped hold of four pearls of happiness. Or, perhaps,
+from a deeper question still. Is not our heart's inward bliss but an
+olive-leaf which a dove brings to us, fluttering over the great deluge
+foaming and seething all round us--an olive-leaf which she has culled
+for us away in the far distant Paradise, high up above the flood, clear
+and blissful in the eternal sun? And if all we attain of that whole
+olive-garden is but one leaf, instead of all its flowers and its fruit,
+is this leaf of peace, is this dove of peace, to give to us something
+_beyond_ peace--namely, hope?
+
+Firmian went back to the shooting-ground, his breast full of
+growing hopes. The heart of man, which, in matters of chance,
+makes its calculations in direct defiance of the theory of
+probabilities, and when heads have turned up once, expects them three
+times running--(although what _ought_ to be anticipated is the very
+reverse)--or reckons upon hitting the eagle's talon became it has
+knocked the sceptre out of it--this heart of man, uncontrollable alike
+in its fears and in its hopes, the advocate took with him to the
+shooters' trench.
+
+He came not by the talons, however. And at the folded praying claws or
+hands of the general of the Capuchins--these algebraic exponents or
+heraldic devices of two forequarters of pork--aimed he alike in vain.
+
+It mattered not; more was left of the eagle, when all was done, than
+would be this day of Poland, if the latter, or its coat of arms--a
+silver eagle in a bloody field--were to be set up on a throne or a
+bird-pole, and shot at by a shooting-club composed of an army or two.
+
+Even the imperial globe was not yet knocked down. Number 69, a
+formidable foregoer, Mr. Everard Rosa von Meyern, had taken his
+aim--eager to cull _this_ forbidden fruit--a Ribstone pippin and
+football fit for a very prince, such as this imperial apple, was a
+thing of too great price to be grasped for the sake of what was to be
+gained along with it--'twas honour alone that fired his heart--he
+pulled his trigger, and he might just as well have aimed in the
+opposite direction. Rosa--this particular apple being too high out of
+his reach--went, all blushes, in among the lady spectators, dealing out
+apples of Paris all round, and telling each lady how lovely she was,
+that she might be convinced how handsome he was himself. In the eyes of
+a woman, her panegyrist is, firstly, a very _clever_ man, and, ere
+long, such a _nice_-LOOKING one. Rosa knew that grains of incense are
+the anise which these doves fly after, as though infatuated.
+
+Our friend had no need to disquiet himself about any of the would-be
+fruit-gatherers--about the second, eighth, or ninth, till it came to
+the eleventh--and he was the Saxon, who shot like the demon in person.
+There were few among the seventy who didn't wish this accursed
+gallows-number at the deuce, or at all events into the vegetable
+kingdom, where it is altogether absent.[50] The hairdresser fired,
+struck the eagle on the leg, and the leg remained hanging aloft, with
+the imperial globe in the talons.
+
+His lodger (and lawyer) came up to the scratch, but the landlord stood
+still in the trench, to satisfy his soul with curses of his luckless
+star. As the former levelled the sights of his rifle upon the ball
+above, he made up his mind that he would not aim at the ball at all,
+but at the eagle's tail, so as simply to _shake_ the apple down.
+
+In one second the worm-eaten world-apple fell. The Saxon cursed beyond
+all description.
+
+Siebenkæs all but offered up an inward prayer, not because a pewter
+mustard-pot, a sugar-dish, and five florins came showering along with
+the apple into his lap, but for the piece of good luck--for the warm
+burst of sunshine which thus came breaking out from among the clouds of
+the distant storm. "Thou wouldst prove this soul of mine, happy
+Fortune," thought he, "and thou placest it, as men do watches, in all
+positions--perpendicular and horizontal, quiet and unquiet--to see if
+it will go and mark the time correctly in all, or no. Ay, truly! it
+_shall_!"
+
+He let this little, bright, miniature earth-ball roll from one hand to
+the other, spinning and weaving, as he did so, the following brief
+chain of syllogisms:--"What a genealogical tree of copies! Nothing but
+pictures within pictures comedies within comedies! The emperor's globe
+is an emblem of this terrestrial globe of ours--the core of each is a
+handful of earth--and this emperor's globe of mine, again, is a
+miniature emblem of a real emperor's, with even less of earth--none at
+all, in fact. The mustard-pot and sugar-dish, again, are emblems of
+this emblem. What a long, diminishing series, ere man arrives at
+enjoyment!" Most of man's pleasures are but _preparations_ for
+pleasure; he thinks he has attained his _ends_, when he has merely got
+hold of his _means_ to those ends. The burning sun of bliss is beheld
+of our feeble eyes but in the seventy mirrors of our seventy years.
+Each of these mirrors reflects that sun's image less brightly--more
+faint and pale--upon the next; and in the seventieth it shimmers upon
+us all frozen, and is become a moon.
+
+He ran home, but without his globe, for he did not mean to tell her of
+that till the evening. It was a great refreshment to him to slip,
+during his shooting vacations, away from the public turmoil to his
+quiet little chamber, give a rapid narrative of anything of importance
+going on, and then cast himself back into the _mêlée_. As his number
+was a next-door neighbour to Rosa's, and they had, consequently, their
+holidays at the same time, it surprises me that he did not come upon
+Herr von Meyern beneath his own window, inasmuch as that gentleman was
+walking up and down there, with his head elevated, like an ant. He who
+desires to destroy a young gentleman of this species, let him look for
+him _under_ (if not _in_) a lady's window; just as an experienced
+gardener, when he wants to kill woodlice or earwigs, needs only lift up
+his flower-pots to annihilate them by the score.
+
+Siebenkæs did not hit so much as another shaving the whole of the
+afternoon; even the very tail, which he had attacked with such success
+in his bold stroke for the conquest of the globe of the holy Roman
+empire, resisted all his efforts to knock it off. He let himself be
+drummed and fifed home by the town militia towards evening. When he got
+to his wife's door, he there assumed the _rôle_ of Knecht Ruprecht (the
+children's "Bogie," who, on St. Andrew's Day, bestows upon them, for
+the _first_ time in their career, fruit, and fear along with the same),
+and, growling in a terrible manner, chucked his (wooden) apple in to
+her; a piece of fun which delighted her immensely. But really I ought
+not to record such little trifles.
+
+As Firmian laid his head on his pillow, he said to his wife, "This time
+to-morrow, wife, we shall know if it be two crowned heads that we are
+going to lay on the pillow, or not! I shall just _recall_ this
+important minute to your memory to-morrow night, when we're going to
+bed!" When he got up in the morning he said, "Very likely this is the
+last time that I shall rise a common, ordinary person, without a
+crown."
+
+He was so anxious to have the mutilated bird (all wet with dew, a mass
+of gunshot wounds and compound fractures) once more before his bodily
+eyes, that he hardly knew how to possess himself in patience till the
+time came. But it was only as long as he _did not_ see the eagle that
+his hopes of shooting himself into a king at him endured. He was,
+therefore, delighted to agree to a proposal made by the clever Saxon,
+whose bullet had throughout the proceedings always cleared the way for
+his number-neighbour's; the proposal was, "we go shares in gains and in
+losses--in the bird and in the cardinal." This copartnership doubled
+the advocate's hopes by the process of halving them.
+
+But these companions in arms didn't bring down a single painted
+splinter the whole of the afternoon. Each in his secret heart thought
+the other was the bird of evil omen; for in matters of chance we are
+prone to hang our faith upon a bit of superstition, rather than to
+nothing at all. The fickle Babylonish harlot went fluttering off with
+that amount of bashful coyness, that the hairdresser once sent a bullet
+within an ace of the fellow who was working her backwards and forwards.
+
+At last, however, in the afternoon, he sent his Cupid's dart right
+through that black heart of hers, and, by consequence, through the pig
+at the same time. This almost terrified Firmian; he said that if he
+couldn't hit anything himself he would accept only the head of this
+pig--this polypus in the heart of the Babylonian _fille de joie_. All
+that was left of the bird was its _torso_, which stuck to its perch
+like the very Rump Parliament, which these pretenders to the crown
+would so fain have dissolved.
+
+A regular running musketry fusilade of eager interest, enthusiasm,
+emulation, now went flashing from breast to breast, fanned by every
+puff of powder which rose in smoke as a rifle went off. When the bird
+shook a little all the competitors shook also, except Herr von Meyern,
+who had gone off, and--seeing what a state of excitement everybody was
+in, especially our hero--marched away to Madame Siebenkæs, thinking
+that he had a better chance of becoming, in _that_ quarter, king of a
+queen than he had here of acquiring the sovereignty of the riflemen.
+However, my readers and I shall slip into the Siebenkæs' chamber after
+him presently.
+
+Twice already had the seventy numbers loaded in vain for the decisive
+shot; the obstinate stump still stuck glued to its perch, and scarce so
+much as trembled; the poor tantalised hearts were torn and pierced by
+every bullet that sped on its course. Their fears waxed apace, so did
+their hopes, but most of all their curses (those brief ejaculatory
+prayers to the devil). The theologians of the seventh decade of the
+present century had the devil often enough in their pens--in their
+denials or in their assertions of him--but the Kuhschnappelers had him
+far oftener in their mouths, particularly the upper classes.
+
+Seneca, in his 'Remedies for Anger,' has omitted the simplest of all,
+the devil. True, the Kabbalists highly extol the therapeutic powers of
+the word Shemhamphorash, which is a name of a diametrically opposite
+character; but I have observed, for my part, that the spotted,
+malignant fever of wrath, so readily diagnosed by the raving delirium
+of the patient, is instantly relieved, dispersed, and mitigated, by
+invoking the name of the devil, which is perhaps, indeed, quite as
+efficacious a remedy as the wearing of amulets. In the absence of this
+name, the ancients, who were altogether without a Satan, recommended a
+mere repetition of the A B C, which, it is true, does _contain_ the
+devil's name, only too much diluted with other letters. And the word
+Abracadabra, spoken _diminuendo_, was a cure for corporeal fevers. As
+regards the inflammatory fever of anger, however, the greater the
+quantity of morbid matter which has to be ejected from the system
+through the secretions of the mouth, the greater is the number of
+devils necessary to make mention of. For a mere trifling irritation--a
+mild case of simple anger--"the devil," or perhaps "hell and the
+devil," will generally be found sufficient; but for the pleuritic fever
+of rage I should be disposed to prescribe "the devil and his infernal
+grandmother:" strengthening the dose, moreover, with a "_donnerwetter_"
+or two, and a few "_sacraments_," as the curative powers of the
+electric fluid are now so generally recognised. It is unnecessary to
+point out to me that in cases of absolute canine fury or maniacal
+wrath, doses of the specific, such as the foregoing, are of little
+avail; I should, of course, let a patient in this condition be "taken
+and torn by all the devils in hell." But what I would fain render clear
+is that, in all these remedies, the real _specific_ is the devil; for
+as it is his sting which is the cause of our malady, he himself has got
+to be employed as the remedy, just as the stings of scorpions are cured
+by the application of scorpions in powder.
+
+The tumult of anticipation shook up the aristocracy and the sixpenny
+gallery into one common whole. On occasions like this--as also in the
+chase and in agricultural operations--the aristocracy forget what they
+are, viz., something better than the citizen classes. An aristocrat
+should, in my opinion, never for a moment lose sight of the fact that
+his position with reference to the common herd is that which the actor
+now a days stands in with respect to the chorus. In the time of Thespis
+the whole of the tragedy was sung and acted by the chorus, while one
+single actor, called the protagonist, delivered a speech or two,
+unaccompanied by any music, bearing on the subject of the play.
+Æschylus introduced a second actor, the deuteragonist; Sophocles even a
+third, the tritagonist. In more recent times the actors have been
+retained, but the chorus omitted, unless we consider those who applaud
+to represent it. In a similar manner also, in this world of ours
+(mankind's natural theatre), the chorus, _i. e_. the people, has been
+gradually cleared off the stage, only with more advantage than in the
+case of smaller theatrical ones, and promoted from taking part in the
+action of the drama (which the protagonists (princes), deuteragonists
+(ministers), and tritagonists (people of quality), are better fit to
+do), to the post of spectators who criticise and applaud--what was the
+chorus in Athens, now sitting at ease in the pit, near the orchestra,
+and before the stage where the great "business" is going on.
+
+By this time it was past two o'clock, and the afternoons were brief;
+yet the saucy bird would not stir. Everybody swore that the carpenter
+who had hatched it from its native block was a low scoundrel, and must
+have carved it out of tough branchwood. But at last, all battered, with
+nearly the whole of its paint broken away from it, it did appear to be
+somewhat disposed to topple down. The hairdresser, who, like the common
+herd in general, was conscientious towards individuals only, not
+towards an aggregation of them, now without any scruple secretly
+doubled his bullets (since he could not double his rifle), putting in
+one for himself and one for his brother in arms, in the hope that this
+decomposing medium might have the effect of precipitating the eagle.
+"The devil and his infernal grandmother!" cried he, when he had fired
+his shot, making use of the febrifuge or cooling draught above alluded
+to. He now had to place all his trust in his lodger, to whom he handed
+his rifle. Siebenkæs fired, and the Saxon cried, "Ten thousand devils!"
+doubling in vain the dose of devils, as he had the dose of bullets.
+
+They now, in despair, laid aside their rifles and also their hopes; for
+there were more pretenders to this crown than there were to that of
+Rome in the time of Galienus, when there were but thirty. This shooting
+septuaginta had all telescopes at their eyes (when they had not rifles
+there), that they might observe how there were a greater number of
+bullets in this heaven-suspended constellation of theirs than there are
+stars in the astronomical one of the eagle. The faces of all beholders
+were now turned towards this Keblah of a bird, like those of the Jews
+towards their ruined Jerusalem. Even old Sabel sat behind her table of
+sweetmeats customerless, and gazing up at the eagle. The earlier
+numbers didn't even give themselves the trouble of shaking a pinch of
+powder into their pans.
+
+Firmian pitied these oppressed hearts, swimming heavily in turbid,
+earthy blood--for whom at this time, the setting sun, the bright array
+of sky tints, and the broad, fair world were all invisible--or, rather,
+all shrivelled up to a battered block of wood. The surest token that
+these hearts were all lying fettered in the eternal dungeon of need and
+necessity, was that none could make a single witty allusion either to
+the bird or the kingship. It is only concerning matters which leave our
+souls free and unshackled that we notice similitudes and connection.
+
+"This bird," thought Firmian, "is the decoy of all these men, and the
+money is what baits the lure." But he himself had three reasons for
+desiring to be king: firstly, to laugh himself to death at his own
+coronation; secondly, on account of his Lenette: thirdly, on account of
+the Saxon.
+
+The second half of the seventy gradually fired off, and the earlier
+numbers began to load again, if it were for nothing but the fun of the
+thing. Every one put in two bullets now. Our two Hanseatic confederates
+came once more up to the mark, and Siebenkæs borrowed a more powerful
+glass, screwing it on to his rifle like the finder of a telescope.
+
+No. 10 loosened the bird from its joining to the pole. Nothing but the
+sheer weight of it now retained it on its perch, for they had well nigh
+saturated and incrusted the wood of it with lead (as certain springs
+transform wood into iron).
+
+The Saxon had but to graze the eagle-torso--ay, or even the perch of
+it--nay, the very evening breeze had but to give an extra puff--to send
+the bird of prey swooping down. He had his rifle to his shoulder--aimed
+for a whole eternity (there were fifty florins hanging in the sky)--and
+pulled his trigger. The powder flashed in the pan. The band had all
+their trumpets ready at their lips--trumpets horizontal, music
+perpendicular--the boys stood round ready to seize the fallen skeleton;
+the buffoon in his excitement couldn't think of a joke to make--his
+ideas were all up beside the bird; the poor, anxious, eager, excited
+hairdresser drew his trigger once more, and again 'twas but a flash in
+the pan. Great drops of perspiration bedewed him; he glowed, he
+trembled; loaded, aimed, fired, and sent his bullet several ells, at
+the least, away over the bird.
+
+He stepped back, pale and silent, in a cold perspiration; not an oath
+did he utter; nay, I suspect he offered up a silent prayer or two that
+his co-partner might, by heaven's grace, capture the feathered game.
+
+Firmian went forward, thinking as hard as he could about something
+else, to keep down his thrilling excitement; aimed, not very long, at
+this, his anchor in his little storms, as it hung hovering in the
+twilight, fired; saw the old stump turn three times round in the air,
+like Fortune's wheel, and, at last, break loose, and come pitching
+down.
+
+As, when the old French kings were crowned, a live bird always
+fluttered in the air; as, at the apotheoses of the Roman emperors, an
+eagle soared skyward from out the funeral pyre, so did one swoop
+downward from the heavens at the coronation of my hero.
+
+The children screamed, and the trumpets blared. One moiety of the
+assemblage crowded to see who the new king was, and to have a look at
+him; while the other moiety streamed crowding round the jester, as he
+advanced bearing that shattered bullet-case, the eagle's body, holding
+it up above the heads of the throng. The barber ran to meet it, crying,
+"Vive le roi," and adding that he was a king himself into the bargain;
+and Firmian moved towards the door in silence, full of happiness, but
+fuller of emotion.
+
+And now it is time that we should all of us hurry to the town to see
+how Rosa fares, what kind of throne he gains _chez_ Madame Siebenkæs
+(while her husband is thus ascending _his_)--a richer throne, or only a
+pillory--and what number of steps he climbs towards whichever of the
+two it may prove to be.
+
+Rosa knocked at Lenette's door, and straightway entered in at it, in
+order that she might not have a chance of coming and ascertaining who
+was there. "He had torn himself away from the shooting-match; her
+husband was coming immediately, and he would wait for him there. His
+rifle had once more been excessively fortunate." It was with these
+truths that he came into the presence of the alarmed Lenette, bearing,
+however upon his countenance, an assumed aristocratic frigid zone. He
+walked, in an easy and unconcerned manner, up and down the room. He
+inquired whether this April weather affected her health at all; as for
+himself, it produced in him a kind of miserable prostrating low fever.
+Lenette, timid and nervous, stood at the window, her eyes half in the
+street, half in the room. He glanced, in passing, at her work-table,
+took up a paper bonnet shape and a pair of scissors, and put them down
+again, his attention being arrested by a paper of pins. "Why, these are
+No. 8's," he said; "these pins are a great deal too large, Madame;
+their heads would do for No. 1 shot. The lady whose hat you were
+putting them in ought really to be immensely grateful to me."
+
+He then went quickly up to her, and, from a spot a trifling distance
+below her heart (where she had a whole quiver, or thorn-hedge of
+needles planted, ready for use), he plucked one out with a dauntless
+coolness, and held it up for her inspection, saying, "Look how badly
+this is plated; 'twill spoil every stitch you take with it." He threw
+it out of the window, and evinced symptoms of being about to pluck out
+the remainder from that heart (where the fates had stuck none other
+than such as were "badly plated"), and stick the contents of his own
+needle-book into that pretty pincushion instead. But she waved him off
+with an icy, repellant, gesture, saying, "Don't trouble yourself."
+
+"I really wish your husband would come," he said, looking at his watch.
+"The king's shot must be over long ere this time."
+
+He took up the paper cap-pattern again, and the scissors; but, as she
+fixed on him a gaze of deep anxiety (lest he should spoil her pattern),
+he took from his pocket a sheet of verses dipped in hippocrene, and, by
+way of passing the time, he clipped this up, by wavy lines, into a
+series of hearts, one within the other. This gentleman, who, like the
+Augurs, always strove to carry off the _heart_ of the sacrifice--he,
+whose own heart (like that of a coquette) constantly grew again as
+often as he lost it (as a lizard's tail does)--he had the _word_
+"heart," which Germans and men in general seem almost to shrink from
+uttering, continually on his tongue, or, at all events, impressions of
+it in his hand.
+
+My belief that his motive for leaving behind him (as he did) his
+needles, and his rhymeful hearts, was that he had observed of women
+that they always think fondly of an absent person when they chance to
+see something of his which he has left behind. Rosa belonged to that
+class of persons (of both sexes) who never show any cleverness,
+delicacy of perception, or knowledge of human nature, save in matters
+relating to love of the opposite sex.
+
+He now catechised out of her a number of cooking and washing receipts
+of various kinds, and these, despite her cautious monosyllabicity, she
+imparted--prescription fashion--in all their fulness, both of words and
+of ingredients. At length he made preparations for departure, saying,
+he had been most anxious for her husband's homecoming because of a
+certain matter of business which he could not well discuss with him on
+the shooting-ground, among so many people, and before Herr von Blaise.
+"I shall come another day," he said; "but the most important point of
+the affair I can mention to yourself," and he sat down before her, with
+his hat and stick in his hand. Just as he commenced his recital,
+however, observing that she was standing, he laid aside his hat and
+stick to place a chair for her, opposite to his. His propinquity was
+grateful to her Schneiderian membrane, at any rate; his odour was
+paradisaic; his pocket-handkerchief a musk-bag, his head an altar of
+incense, or magnified civet-ball. (Shaw has remarked that the whole
+viper tribe has the property of emitting a peculiar, sweet scent.)
+
+"She might readily see," he said, "that it referred to that wretched
+lawsuit with the Heimlicher. The poor's advocate did not deserve,
+indeed, that a man should interest himself in _his_ favour; but then,
+you see, he had an _admirable_ wife, who _did_ deserve it." (He
+italicised the word "admirable" by means of a hurried squeeze of her
+hand.) "He had been fortunate enough to induce Herr von Blaise to defer
+his 'no' three separate times, though he had not as yet been able to
+speak to the advocate in person. But now, that a pasquinade of Mr.
+Leibgeber's (whose hand was well known), had come to light near a
+stove-statue at the Heimlicher's, nothing approximating to a yielding,
+or a payment of the trust-fund, was to be dreamt of for a moment. Now
+this was a state of matters for which his very heart bled, particularly
+as, since he had been in such poor health of late, he felt only too
+keen a sympathy and interest in everything; he knew perfectly well what
+an unhappy condition her (Lenette's) household matters had been placed
+in by this lawsuit; and had often sighed, in vain, over many things. He
+should be delighted, therefore, to advance whatever she might require
+for current expenditure. As yet she did not know _him_ in the slightest
+degree, and perhaps could scarce surmise what he did, from motives of
+the purest benevolence, for six charities in Kuhschnappel--though he
+could produce documentary evidence if she liked," and he did produce
+and hand to her six receipts of the Charitable Commission. I should not
+be giving proof of that impartiality of character which I bear the
+reputation of possessing, did I not here freely admit, and clearly
+place on record, that the Venner had, from his youth up, always shown a
+certain disposition to benefit and assist the poor of both sexes, and
+that his consciousness that he dealt in this large-hearted manner, did
+(when compared with the narrow close-fistedness prevalent in
+Kuhschnappel) give him some warrant for bearing himself with a certain
+amount of proper pride towards those mean and miserly beings who sate
+in judgment upon his little genial breaches of the moral laws. For his
+conscience bore him witness that, conversely to the process whereby
+spiders are metamorphosed into jewels, he spun his shining webs (of
+gold and silver), and in their meshes, wet with the glittering dew of
+tears, made an occasional capture from time to time.
+
+But for a woman like Lenette (he continued) he would do things of a
+much grander description; as proofs of which, given already by him, he
+needed only to point to the fact that he had set at defiance the
+Heimlicher's hostility towards her husband, and that he had more than
+once quietly swallowed speeches of her husband's own, such as in his
+social position he had never suffered anybody to address to him before.
+"Name any sum of money you are in want of; by Heaven, all you have to
+do is to ask for it."
+
+Lenette, bashful and trembling, glowed red with shame at this discovery
+of (what she had believed to be) the mystery of her poverty and her
+pawnings. With the view of pouring a few drops of oil on the troubled
+waters, he began, by way of preamble, to make some disparaging remarks
+concerning his fiancée at Bayreuth. "She reads too much, and doesn't
+work enough. I only wish she could have the benefit of a few lessons
+from _you_ in housekeeping. And really, a lady such as you, with so
+many attractions (quite unaware of them, too, herself), so much
+patience, such wonderful diligence and assiduity, should have a
+very different kind of household than this place for her sphere of
+action." Her hand was by this time lying still in the stocks--the close
+arrest--of his; her wings and her tongue, as well as her hands, were
+tied and fettered by that fainthearted incapacity of self-assertion
+which is born of the sense of poverty. When women were in question, Mr.
+Everard's longings and likings paid no heed to boundary-marks; but
+rather strove hard to obliterate them, and get rid of them altogether.
+Most men, in the wild, unreasoning whirl of their appetites, are like
+the jay, which tears the carnation to tatters in order to get at its
+seeds.
+
+Upon her downcast eyes he now riveted a long gaze of fondness, not
+withdrawing it, however, when she raised them up; and, by dint of
+keeping his eyes very wide open, and thinking with great vividness on
+pathetic and touching subjects, he managed to squeeze out about as much
+water as would have sufficed to make an end of a humming bird of the
+smaller sort.
+
+In him, as in a fine actor, all false emotions became for the time real
+and genuine; and when he flattered any one, he at once began to respect
+him. As soon as he felt there were tears enough in his eyes, and sighs
+enough in his breast, he asked her if she had _any idea_ what was
+causing them. She looked innocently, and with kindly alarm, into those
+eyes of his, and her own began to overflow. This greatly encouraged
+him, and he said, "It is the fact that _you_ have not such a happy lot
+as you deserve."
+
+Ah! selfish pigmy! at such a moment you might have spared this poor,
+anxious, trembling soul, sinking, well nigh, in an ocean of tears for
+all the long, long past.
+
+But he knew no sorrow save of the theatrical, the transient, the petty,
+and the sham sort; and so he spared her not.
+
+Yet that which he had expected would prove the bridge from his heart to
+hers, namely, sorrow, became, on the contrary, the portcullis barrier
+between them. A dance, or some _joyful_ tumult of the senses would have
+brought him further with this _commonplace_, every-day, honest, and
+upright woman than three pailfuls of selfish tears. His hopes rose
+high, as he laid his flowery, sorrow-laden head upon his hands, down
+into her lap.
+
+But Lenette jumped up with such a suddenness that it nearly knocked him
+over altogether. She gazed inquiringly into his eyes. Upright women
+must, I think, have some instinct of their own concerning the
+lightnings of the eye, by means of which they can distinguish between
+the lurid flashes of hell and the pure coruscations of heaven. This
+profligate was as little aware of the flashes of his eyes as was Moses
+of the brightness of his countenance. Her glance shrunk before his
+scorching gaze; at the same time I feel it incumbent on me as an
+historian--seeing that readers by the thousand (and I myself into the
+bargain) are all up in arms to such an extent against this defenceless
+Everard--not to conceal the fact that Lenette had had her mind's eye
+firmly fixed upon certain rather rude and free-handed sketches which
+Schulrath Stiefel had drawn for her of the manœuvring grounds of
+rakes in general (and this one in particular), and, in consequence, had
+pricked up her ears in alarm at each move he made, whether in advance
+or in retreat.
+
+And yet every word I write in defence of the poor rascal will only tell
+against him now; indeed, there are many ladies whose acquaintance with
+the Salic Law (or Mr. Meiner's work) teaches them that in former times
+the penalty for touching a woman's hand was the same as for hewing off
+a man's middle finger, namely, fifteen shillings, and who, being
+indignant with Rosa for his hand pressures, would fain have him to be
+duly punished therefor. I am convinced that these ladies would by no
+means be pacified were I to go on speaking in his extenuation, for they
+have doubtless learnt, out of Mallet's 'Introduction to the History of
+Denmark,' that formerly persons who kissed without leave, and against
+the will, were, by the law of the land, liable to be banished. And
+there are very many women of the present day who are strictly governed
+by the ancient pandects of Germany, and, in the case of lip-thieves
+(since, in the eye of the law, banishment and confinement to one place
+are held to be tantamount and equivalent one to another), they adjudge
+them--not, it is true, to be _banished from_ their chambers, but to
+_remain in_ them; similarly, they lodge debtors (to whom they have
+given their hearts, and who insist on retaining possession of the same)
+in the Marshalsea of the Matrimonial Torus.
+
+When Rosa jumped up (as before set forth), he had nothing to urge in
+extenuation of his false step but an aggravation or augmentation of it,
+and accordingly he fairly took the marble goddess in his arms---- But
+at this point my progress is barred for a moment by an observation
+which has to be made ere I proceed; it is this: There are many kindly
+beauties who cover their retreats or make amends for their denials by
+concessions. By way of making themselves some amends for their hard
+services in the campaign of virtue, they offer no resistance at all in
+matters of the smaller sort, skilfully abandoning a good many
+intrenchments and outworks (in the shape of words, articles of dress,
+and so on), to enable them to deftly steal a march upon the enemy and
+outmanœuvre him--just as clever generals burn the suburbs that they
+may fight the better up in the citadel.
+
+My sole object in making this observation is to point out that it did
+not apply to Lenette in any respect whatever. Pure as she was in soul
+and in body, she might have gone straight away into heaven just as she
+stood, without changing so much as a stitch of her attire--have taken
+her eyes, heart, clothes, everything except that tongue of hers, which
+was uncultivated, rude, indiscreet; so that her resistance to Everard's
+attempted burglary on her lips was unnecessarily grave and discourteous
+(considering what a trifling case of orchard-robbery it really was),
+much more so than it would have been had Lenette been able to drive the
+Schulrath's highly-coloured prognostics concerning Rosa out of her
+head.
+
+Rosa had anticipated a denial of a less unpleasant kind. His obstinacy
+availed him nothing as against hers, which was the greater of the two.
+A gnat-swarm of firm and passionate resolves buzzed about his ears; but
+when at length (probably inspired thereto by the Schulrath) she said,
+"Your lordship remembers that the Tenth Commandment says, 'Thou shalt
+not covet thy neighbour's wife'"--from the crossroad between love and
+hatred, on which he was standing, he suddenly made a great jump--into
+his pocket and brought out a wreath of artificial flowers, "There!" he
+cried, "take them, you nasty, inexorable creature! just this one
+forget-me-not as a souvenir; devil fly away with me if I want anything
+further!" If she _had_ taken it, he _would_ immediately have wanted
+something further; but she turned her face aside and repulsed the
+silken garland with both hands. At this the honeycomb of love in his
+heart soured into very vinegar; he grew wild with fury, and throwing
+the flowers right over the table, he cried, "Why, they are your own
+pawned flowers--I redeemed them myself--so take them you _must_." On
+which he took his departure, not, however, without making his bow,
+which Lenette, all hurt and offended as she was, ceremoniously
+returned.
+
+She took the envenomed wreath to the window, to have a better light to
+examine it by. Alas! these were indeed, and beyond all doubt, the very
+roses and rosebuds whose steely thorns were wet with the blood-drops
+from a pair of pierced hearts. Whilst she, thus weeping and bowed
+beneath the weight of her woe, stunned and stupid rather than
+observant, stood at her window, it suddenly struck her as a strange
+circumstance that the torturer of her soul, though he had gone rattling
+down the stairs in a hurry with noise enough, had never gone out at the
+street-door. After a long and attentive watch, during which anxiety,
+closely bordering upon terror, assumed the _rôle_ of comforter and
+spake louder than her sorrow (the future, at the same time, driving the
+past out of view), the becrowned hairdresser came galloping home (the
+crown of his hat pointing heavenwards), and shouted to her in a mere
+parenthetical manner as he dashed by, "Madame the queen!" for his great
+idea was, that before anything else he should rush home, and there on
+the spot, and without a moment's delay, make proclamation of the
+kingship and queenship of four persons.
+
+There now devolves upon me the duty of conducting my readers to the
+corner where the Venner is cowering. From Lenette he had _descended_
+(in two senses of that word) to the hairdresser's wife, one of that
+common class of women who never so much as dream of an infidelity all
+the year round--for no horse in all the kingdom is harder worked--and
+commit one only when there appears on the scene some tempter, whom they
+neither invite nor resist, probably forgetting all about the incident
+by the time next baking day comes round. On the whole, the superiority
+which the female middle-class is disposed to arrogate to itself over
+that of a higher rank, is just about equally great as it is
+questionable. There are not a great many tempters in the middle-class,
+and those there are are not of a very tempting sort.
+
+Like the earthworm, which has ten hearts that extend all the way from
+one end of it to the other, Rosa was fitted out with as many hearts as
+there are species of women; for the delicate, the coarse, the
+religious, the immoral--every sort, in fact; he was always ready with
+the appropriate heart. For as Lessing and others so frequently blame
+the critics for narrowness and onesidedness in matters of taste,
+inculcating upon them a greater universality of it--a greater power of
+appreciation of the beautiful, to whatsoever times and nations
+belonging--so do men of the world also advocate a universality of taste
+for the _live_ beautiful, on two legs, not excluding any variety of it,
+but deriving gratification from all. This taste the Venner possessed.
+There was such a marked distinction between his feelings for the
+wigmaker's wife and for Lenette, that, in revenge upon the latter, he
+came to the determination, on the stair, to take a jump right over this
+distinction and slip in to pay a visit to the landlady, while her
+narrow-chested husband was away scheming and plotting in confederacy
+for a crown in another quarter. Sophia (this was her name) had been
+always combing at wigs in the bookbinder's on the occasions when the
+Venner had been sitting there on the business of getting his novels and
+life romances done up and bound, and there they had communicated to one
+other, by looks and glances, all that which people are not in the habit
+of confiding to third parties. Meyern made his _entrée_ into the
+childless abode with all the confident assurance of an epic poet, who
+soars superior to all prefaces. There was a certain corner partitioned
+off from the room by boards: it contained little or nothing--no window,
+no chair, a little warmth from the sitting-room, a clothes-cupboard,
+and the couple's bed.
+
+When the first compliments had been exchanged, Rosa took up a position
+behind the door of this partitioned space, for the street passed close
+by the window, and at this late hour he was anxious not to give
+occasion to unpleasant surmises on the part of passers by. Of a sudden,
+however, Sophia saw her husband run by the window. The intent to commit
+a sin may betray itself by a superabundance of carefulness and caution;
+Rosa and Sophia were so startled at the sight of the runner, that she
+begged the young gentleman to get behind the partition until her
+husband should go back to the shooting-range. The Venner went stumbling
+into the _sanctum sanctorum_, while Sophia placed herself at the door
+of it, and, as her husband entered, made as though she were just coming
+out of it, closing the door after her. The moment he had stuttered out
+the news of his elevation in rank, he darted out of the room, crying,
+"She upstairs there knows nothing about it yet." Gladness and hurried
+draughts of liquor had just blurred the sharp outlines of his lighter
+ideas with a thin haze or fog. He ran out and called "Madame Siebenkæs"
+up the stairs (he was anxious to be off again so as to join the
+procession). She hastened half way down, heard the glad news with
+trembling, and, either by way of masking her joy, or as a fruit of a
+warmer liking for her husband now that fortune seemed kinder to him (or
+it may have been, perhaps, _another_ fruit which joy commonly bears,
+namely, anxiety, or shall I name it fear?), she threw down to him the
+question, "Is Mr. von Meyern out yet?"
+
+"What! was _he_ in my room just now?" cried he, while his wife echoed,
+unbidden, from the door, "Has _he_ been in the house?" "He was here,
+upstairs," Lenette replied, with a touch of suspicion, "and he hasn't
+gone out yet."
+
+The hairdresser's suspicions were now awakened, for the consumptive
+trust no woman, and, like children, take every chimney-sweep they see
+for the devil himself, hoof, horns, tail and all. "Things are not all
+exactly as they should be here, Sophy," said he to his wife. The
+passing brain-dropsy, induced by what he had drunk during the day and
+by his half-share in a throne and fifty florins, had the effect of
+screwing his courage up to such a pitch that he secretly formed the
+idea of treating the Venner to a good sound cudgelling in the event of
+his coming upon him in any illegal corner. Accordingly he started upon
+voyages of discovery, first exploring the entrance passage, where
+Rosa's sweet-scented head served him as a trail, or lure; he followed
+this incense-pillar of cloud into his own room, observing that this
+Ariadne's thread of his, this sweet odour, grew stronger as he went.
+Here among the flowers lay the serpent--as, according to Pliny,
+sweet-smelling forests harbour venomous snakes. Sophia wished herself
+in the nethermost of Dante's hells, though in fact and reality she
+_was_ there already. It dawned upon the hairdresser that if the Venner
+would only stay where he was, in the closed titmouse-trap of the
+partitioned corner, he should have bruin safe in his toils;
+consequently he reserved till the last a peep into the said corner.
+What is historically certain is, that he seized upon a pair of
+curling-tongs wherewith to probe the dark corner and gauge the cubic
+contents thereof. Into its dark depths he made a horizontal lunge with
+his tongs, but encountered nothing. He next inserted this probe, this
+searcher of his, into more places than one--firstly, into the bed,
+next, under the bed (taking this time the precaution to keep opening
+and shutting the tongs, which were not hot, on the chance of some stray
+lock of hair getting caught in them in the darkness.) However,
+all this trap captured was air. At this juncture he came upon a
+clothes-cupboard, the door of which had always stood gaping ajar for
+the last six years or so; the key had been lost just that time, and in
+this slipshod household it was a matter of necessity to keep this door
+open, otherwise the lock would have snapped to, and there would have
+been no getting in. To-day, however, this door was close shut. The
+Venner (in a profuse perspiration) was inside; the _friseur_ pressed
+the lock home, and then the net was fairly over the quail.
+
+The hairdresser, now master of the situation, quietly took the command
+of his establishment at his ease; the Venner could not get out!
+
+He despatched Sophia (as red as a furnace and loudly dissentient,
+though forced to obey) for the locksmith and his breaching implements;
+however, she quite made up her mind to come back with a lie, not with a
+locksmith. When she had marched off he fetched Fecht, the cobbler, up,
+to be at once his witness of and his assistant in that which he
+proposed to accomplish. The shoe-stitcher crept into the room softly at
+his heels; the phthisic haircurler went up to the canary-cage and
+addressed the bird imprisoned therein (tapping the while with his tongs
+on the gate of this fortress of Engelsburg) as follows: "I _know_ you
+are in there, honourable Sir, make a move; there's nobody here but me,
+as yet (there'll soon be more). I can break the cupboard open with my
+tongs and let you out." Laying his ear close to the door of this
+Spandau, he heard the captive sigh.
+
+"Ah! you are puffing and panting a little, honourable gentleman," said
+the wigmaker; "I am here at the door by myself now. When the locksmith
+comes and breaks it open, we shall all see you, and I'll call the whole
+house; but all I shall ask to let you jump out now, quietly, and be off
+unseen, will be a mere trifle. Give me that hat of yours, and a
+shilling or two, and give me your custom."
+
+At length the miserable prisoner knocked upon the door and said, "I
+_am_ in here; just let me out, will you, my man, and I'll do all you
+say. I can help, from the inside, to break open the door." The wigmaker
+and the cobbler applied their battering apparatus to the "parloir" of
+this donjon-keep, and the captive bounded forth. During the breaking
+open of the gates of jubilee the friseur parleyed or negotiated a
+little more, and amerced the anchorite in the locksmith's fee; at
+last, bringing Rosa forth, like Pallas in her mail, when she issued
+from Jove's cranium into the light of day, "The landlord," said Fecht,
+"couldn't have managed the job without me."
+
+Rosa opened his eyes wide at the sight of this auxiliary deliverer from
+the house of bondage, took off the sweet-smelling hat (which the
+cobbler immediately clapped on to his own head), shed some drops of
+golden rain from his waistcoat-pocket upon the pair, and, in dread of
+them and of the locksmith's arrival, fled home bareheaded in the dark.
+The friseur, whose bald pate was so near to the triple crown of the
+emperors of old, and the popes of the present (for the eagle gave
+him a crown, the Venner a hat, and his wife had nearly placed
+something else----),--however, the friseur, in high satisfaction of
+this new martyr-crown of felt, which he had been envying the Venner
+the possession of all the afternoon, went back with it to the
+shooting-ground, that he might have the gratification of marching home
+in company with his co-emperor, attended by their subjects and their
+vassals.
+
+The wigmaker took his hat off to his royal brother Siebenkæs (that hat
+so much more worthy of a co-king than his former one), and told him
+something of what had been happening.
+
+The Heimlicher von Blaise smiled his Domitian smile to-day more
+affectionately than ever, which made the bird emperor far from
+comfortable; for friendliness and smiling make the heart colder when it
+is cold to begin with, and warmer when it is warm--just as _spiritus
+nitri_ does water. From a friendliness of this particular kind nothing
+was to be expected but its opposite, as in ancient jurisprudence
+excessive piety in a woman was merely a proof that she had sold herself
+to the devil. Christ's implements of torture became holy relics; and,
+conversely, relics of saints often become implements of torture.
+
+Under the twinkling gleams of the wide, starry firmament (where new
+constellations kept bursting into view, in the shape of banging
+rockets) the grand procession marched along. The competitors who had
+come after the king's shot had fired their rifles in the air, by way of
+salute to the royal pair. The two kings walked side by side, but the
+one who belonged to the guild of wigmakers found some difficulty in
+standing (what between joy and beer), and would gladly have sat down
+upon a throne. However, over these seventy Brethren of the Eagle, and
+the two vicars of the empire, we are losing sight, and delaying to
+treat of something else.
+
+To wit, the town militia, who are also present, or more properly
+speaking, the Royal Kuhschnappel Militia. Concerning this regiment I
+think a good deal, and say only about half what I think. A city or
+county militia regiment--and particularly the Royal Kuhschnappel
+Militia--is a distinguished and important body of men, whose _raison
+d'être_ is to scorn and show contempt for the enemy, by always turning
+their backs upon him--showing him, in fact, nothing _but_ backs, like a
+well-ordered library. If the enemy has anything in the nature of
+courage, then our said force sacrifices to Fear like the ancient
+Spartans; and as poets and actors ought in the first place to
+experience and picture to themselves in a vivid manner the emotions
+they are about to portray, the militia endeavours to give an
+illustration, in itself, of that panic terror into which it would fain
+throw the enemy. Now with the view of affording these men of war (or
+"of peace" if you prefer it) the necessary amount of practice in the
+mimic representation of terror, they are daily put through a process of
+being terrified at the city gates. It is _called_ "being relieved."
+When one of these men of peace is on sentry, another of them, a comrade
+of his, marches up to his sentry box, shouts out words of command at
+him in a warlike tone of voice, and makes hostile and threatening
+gestures in close proximity to his nose; the one who is on sentry also
+cries out in a similar voice, goes through certain motions with his
+weapon, and then lays it down and gets away as fast as he can; the
+conqueror in this brief winter campaign retains possession of the
+field, and puts on the watchcoat which he has taken from the other man
+by way of booty; but that they may each have an opportunity of being
+terrified by the others, they take the part of conqueror turn about. A
+warrior of this peaceful order may very often be most dangerous in
+actual war, when, in the act of bolting, he happens, in throwing his
+rifle away with the bayonet fixed, to throw it too far, and harpoon his
+too proximate pursuer with it. Militiamen of this sort ("precious" they
+are in every sense) are usually posted, for greater security's sake, in
+public places where they are safe from injury, such as the gates of
+towns, where these harpooners are protected by the town and gate; at
+the same time I have often wished, in passing, that these students of
+the art military were provided with a good thick stick, so that they
+might have something to defend themselves with if anybody should try to
+take away their muskets.
+
+It will appear to many that I am but artfully cloaking the shortcomings
+of the militia in these respects; I am prepared for this--but it is not
+difficult to perceive that this species of praise also applies to all
+small standing armies of lesser principalities--forces which are
+recruited only that they may recruit. I shall here utter myself on this
+subject a little. Vuillaume recommends educators to teach children to
+play at soldiers, to make them drill and mount guard, in order to
+accustom them, by this play, to firm and active habits both of body and
+of mind; in short, to render them firm and upright. This soldier-game
+has been carried on for a considerable time already in Campe's
+Institute. But is Mr. Vuillaume really ignorant that scholar-drill,
+such as he recommends, has been long since introduced by every good
+prince of the empire into his dominions? Does he suppose it is anything
+new when I tell him that these princes seize upon all strong young
+fellows (as soon as they attain the canonical height) and have them
+drilled, in order that they, the State's children, may thus be taught
+_mores_, carriage, and all that has to be acquired in the State's
+school? The truth is that, even in the very smallest principalities,
+the soldiers often possess all the acquirements and accomplishments of
+real soldiers; they can present arms, stand bolt upright at portals,
+and _smoke_ at all events, if not _fire_--matters which a poodle learns
+with ease, but a country bumpkin with more difficulty.
+
+To these rehearsals of warlike business I attribute it that many
+otherwise clever and sensible men have allowed themselves to believe
+that this sham soldiery of the little States, is in fact a real
+soldiery; they must otherwise have seen in a moment that with so small
+a force neither could a small territory be defended, nor a large one
+attacked; neither is there indeed any need for even this small force,
+since in Germany the question of relative strength is merged in that of
+equality of religion. Hunger, cold, nakedness, and privation are the
+benefits which Vuillaume considers the soldier-game to hold out to his
+scholars, as lessons in patient endurance and fortitude; now these are
+the very advantages which the State schools above referred to confer
+upon the young men of the country--and that much more thoroughly and
+efficaciously than Vuillaume does--which, of course, is the entire
+object of the institution. I am quite aware that there are not
+infrequent cases in which perhaps a third part of the population
+escapes being made into soldiery, and consequently gets none of the
+valuable practice in question; at the same time there can be no doubt
+that if we even get the length of having two-thirds of the population
+with rifles on their shoulders in the place of scythes, the remaining
+third (inasmuch as it has considerably less to mow, to thresh, and to
+subsist upon) obtains the before-mentioned benefits (of cold, hunger,
+nakedness, &c.), almost gratis, and without having to fire so much as a
+single shot. Let but barracks be multiplied in a sufficient ratio in a
+country, in a province, parish, town, village (as the case may be), and
+the remainder of the houses will of themselves settle down, into
+suburbs, and accessory and out-buildings to the barracks, nay, become
+absolute conventual establishments, in which the three monastic vows
+(the Prince alone being _père provincial_) are, whether _taken_ or
+_not_, at all events most religiously _kept_.
+
+We now hear the two vicars of the empire go into their homes. The
+friseur's sole punishment to his wife is a narrative of the whole
+affair, and a sight of the hat; while the advocate rewards Lenette with
+the kiss which she had refused to other lips. If her story did not
+please him, the teller of it did, and on the whole the only thing she
+omitted was the flower-wreath, and the allusions made to it. She would
+not cloud the happiness of his evening, nor bring back upon him the
+pain and the reproaches of that other evening when she had pawned it.
+I, like many of my readers, had expected that Lenette would have
+received the news of the enthronisation far too coldly; she has
+deceived us all; she received it even too joyfully. But there were two
+good reasons for this; she had heard of it an hour before, and
+consequently the first feminine mourning over a joy had had time to
+give place to the joy itself. For women are like thermometers, which on
+a sudden application of heat sink at first a few degrees, as a
+preliminary to rising a good many. The second reason for her being thus
+indulgent and sympathetic was the humiliating consciousness she
+possessed of the Venner's visit, and of the wreath in its hiding-place;
+for we are often severe when we are strong, and practise forbearance
+when we stand in need of it.
+
+I now wish the entire royal family and household a good night, and a
+pleasant awaking in the eighth chapter.
+
+
+
+
+ CHAPTER VIII.
+
+ SCRUPLES AS TO PAYMENT OF DEBTS--THE RICH PAUPER'S SUNDAY
+ THRONE-CEREMONIAL--ARTIFICIAL FLOWERS ON THE GRAVE--NEW THISTLE
+ SEEDLINGS OF CONTENTION.
+
+
+Siebenkæs, a king, and yet a poor's-advocate and member of a
+wood-economising association, arose next morning a man who could lay
+forty good florins down upon his table at any hour of the day. The
+whole of that forenoon he enjoyed a pleasure which possesses, for the
+virtuous and right-thinking, an especial charm--that of paying debts:
+firstly, to the Saxon his house-rent, and then to the butchers, bakers,
+and other nurses of this needy machine, our body, their little
+duodecimo accounts. For he was like the aristocracy who borrow from the
+lower classes, not money, but only victuals, just as there are many
+judges who are bribeable with the latter, but not with the former.
+
+That he does pay his debts is not a circumstance which should lower him
+in the opinion of anybody who remembers that he is a man of very poor
+"extraction"--scarcely of any "extraction" at all, in fact. A man of
+rank is expected (as a thing becoming his position) _not_ to pay his
+debts, for thanks to the papal indulgences granted to his noble
+ancestors at the time of the Crusades, he need give his mind no trouble
+on the subject of liability, and least of all should liabilities of a
+_pecuniary_ nature cause him a thought. To place a man of a high and
+delicate sense of honour, a courtier say, under an obligation (_e.g_.
+to lend him money) is to wound his feelings to a greater or less
+extent; and a wound of this sort to the feelings is a matter which his
+refined sensitive nature naturally leads him to endeavour to forgive;
+he will, therefore, do his utmost to drive the injury thus done him,
+with all its attendant circumstances, completely out of his mind.
+Should the person who inflicted this hurt upon his sense of honour
+remind him of it, he will then, with genuine delicacy of feeling, make
+as if he were scarcely aware that he had _been_ wounded. Rough young
+squires, again, and officers on the march _do_ really pay, and
+moreover, they coin (if the expression may be used) for themselves the
+money they require, as is the case in Algiers, where every one
+possesses the privilege of minting. In Malta there is current a
+leathern coin of the value of eightpence, on which is the legend "Non
+As, sed Fides." With leather money of a somewhat different description,
+not circular in shape, but drawn out to some length, more like that of
+the ancient Spartans (and, indeed, this sort of money usually gets the
+appellation of dog-whips or riding-whips), the landed gentry and people
+of village nobility pay their coachmen, Jews, carpenters, and others to
+whom they owe money--_going on_ paying them, in fact, until they are
+quite satisfied. Indeed I once stood at table and saw officers, men
+most tenacious of their honour, take their swords from the wall or from
+their sides, and therewith, when the boots asked for his money, pay him
+in the true currency of antiquity (among the brave Spartans, also,
+weapons were money), so that, in fact, the fellow's jacket got a better
+brushing than most of the boots for cleaning which he wanted to be
+paid. And looking at the matter all round, ought it _really_ to be
+accounted a grave offence in military personages, even of the highest
+rank, to pay their small debts? So that often, when some wretched
+tailor asks for metal, they take the iron ell-measure from him, and
+(while, moreover, applying to _him_ in person the very measure which he
+applied to their furs) press--not perhaps _into_ his hands, but _on_ to
+a part of his body on which "contour" lines might be drawn--not mere
+coins, or bills on approved security, but a metal which Peru with all
+its wealth does not boast the possession of, the aforesaid iron
+to wit? In Sumatra the skulls of the enemy are their Louis d'ors and
+head-pieces, and even _this_ species of currency--the hostile head of
+the tradesman who has furnished goods--is often taken by the nobler
+creditor, just by way of satisfying him "in full of all demands."
+Neither in the Clausular Jurisprudence nor in the most recent Prussian
+code is it enacted that a creditor is to stipulate in his bill which
+species of currency he elects to be paid in by his noble debtor, the
+metallic currency or the castigatory.
+
+On this Thursday morning Siebenkæs had a tough and ticklish argument,
+or piece of special pleading, to go through on the subject of the
+half-heart or (half-pig) of the cardinal protector, which his co-king,
+the hairdresser, pressed the acceptance of upon him, by way of making
+more sure of duly sharing all the prizes which appertained to the
+king's shot himself. But his having gained the twenty-five florin prize
+did not add to the warmth of his arguments, and at last he agreed to
+the arrangement that the animal should be eaten, pure and clean, like a
+passover lamb, next Sunday in Siebenkæs's room by the lodgers
+generally, and by the two rifle kings with their queens in company with
+Schulrath Stiefel. The flower goddess of the days of man took at this
+juncture a fingertipful or two of seeds of quickly blooming and quickly
+fading flowers (such as like the hellebore come into blossom in our
+December) and sowed them beside the path which Firmian's steps most
+often trod. Ah, happy man, how soon will these forced blossoms fall
+from your days. Will not your philosophic Diana-and-bread-fruit tree
+(which takes the place, in your case, of an oak of lamentation) fare
+like the cut plants which people put in lime-water in their chambers on
+St. Andrew's Day, and which, after a hurried outburst of yellowish
+leaves and feeble dingy flowers, fade and perish for good and all?
+
+Sleep, riches, and health, to be truly enjoyed, must be interrupted; it
+is only during the first few days after the burden of poverty or
+sickness has been lifted from a man's shoulders, that the upright
+posture, and the free breath, cause their fullest measure of delight.
+These days lasted for our Firmian until the Sunday. He built a whole
+cubic-foot of his Devil rampart (in his 'Selection from the Devil's
+Papers'), he wrote reviews, he wrote law papers, he kept a careful eye
+on the maintenance of the household truce (liable to be disturbed by
+the question of the redemption of the pawned furniture). I shall treat
+of this matter firstly, before proceeding to give an account of the
+Platonic banquet of the Sunday. On Firmian's coronation-day he invested
+twenty-one florins in a watch, with the view of avoiding frittering
+away his money by driblets; he thought it well to cast an anchor of
+hope into his watch-pocket. Then, when his wife talked of redeeming the
+salad-bowl, the herring-dish, and other pledges a matter involving not
+kisses only but half of his capital--he would say, "I'm not in favour
+of it, old Sabel would very soon have to carry them off again; however,
+if you're determined, pray have them out, I shall not interfere." If he
+had offered any opposition, back they would have had to come; but,
+inasmuch as he poured the greater portion of his cash into her money
+bag, and as she marked its daily ebb--and as she could go and redeem
+the furniture any day--why for that very reason she let it alone. Women
+are fond of putting off, men of pushing on; with the former, patience
+most speedily gains us our point; with the latter (ministers of the
+crown for instance) _im_patience. I here once more remind all German
+husbands, who have any pledge they do not wish to redeem, how to deal
+with their fair registers.
+
+Every morning she said, "Ah! we really must send and get back our
+plates," to which he as regularly antiphonated, "_I_ don't think so; I
+praise you rather for not doing it." And in this manner he caused his
+own desire to assume the form of another person's desert. Firmian
+understood some individual specimens of humanity, but not humanity as a
+class, in its broad sense; he was embarrassed with every woman at
+first, while her acquaintance was new, though not so afterwards when he
+came to know her better; he knew exactly how one _ought_ to talk, walk,
+and stand, in "society," but he never put this knowledge in practice;
+he took accurate note of all outward and inward awkwardness of other
+people, but yet retained all his own; and after treating his
+acquaintances for years with the airs of a superior, experienced man of
+the world accustomed to "society," he would suddenly find, on some
+occasion of his being from home, that, unlike a true man of the world,
+he had no effect or influence whatever on people to whom he was a
+stranger; to make a long tale short, he was a man of letters.
+
+Meanwhile, however, before the Sunday came, notwithstanding all the
+peace-sermons and peace-treaties in his heart, he found that he had
+plumped, before he knew where he was, right into the thick of a
+household battle of the frogs and mice once more, which occurred as
+follows:--It is matter of history, derived from his own statement,
+that, as Lenette kept on ceaselessly washing her hands and arms, as
+well as other things by the hundred (although, for the most part,
+with cold water, it being impossible to have warm water continually
+ready)--that, I say, he simply asked, in the gentlest tone in the
+world, the kindly and half-playful question, "Doesn't that cold water
+give you cold?" She answered "No," in a _sostenuto_ voice. "Perhaps
+_warm_ water would be more likely to do so, would it?" he continued.
+Her answer was, "Yes, it would," delivered in a snapping _staccato_.
+Moralists and psychologists, who may be a good deal surprised at this
+half-angry answer to a question so innocent, are, contrary to my
+expectations, far behindhand in their knowledge of psychology in
+general, and the psychology of this tale in particular. Lenette knew by
+experience that the advocate, like Socrates, generally opened his
+battles in the most dulcet tones, as the Spartans commenced theirs to
+the sound of flutes, and, in fact, continued them in the same strain,
+that, like the said Spartans, he might retain complete command of
+himself. She therefore dreaded that, on this occasion also, his
+flute-text might usher in a declaration of war against the feminine
+form of government, of which the various provinces of work are divided
+one from another by washing-waters, as the judicial districts of modern
+Bavaria are by rivers.
+
+"What key is a husband to play his tune in, I ask you all!" the
+advocate would often cry with curses, "since, whether he takes it in
+the major or in the minor, or plays piano or forte, it seems all the
+same in the end?"
+
+On the present occasion, however, all he was aiming at, his gentleness
+of demeanour notwithstanding, was a preface to a proper system of
+educating or training the bodies of children. For after her answer he
+went on to say, "I am delighted to hear you say so. If we had children,
+I see you would be continually washing them, and with cold water, too,
+over their whole bodies, and this would invigorate them and make them
+strong and hardy, since, as you say, it produces warmth." Her only
+answer to this was to hold her hands aloft, folded for victory, like
+the biblical prophet--for, in her eyes, a cold bathing of children was
+a Herodian blood-bath. Firmian then developed with much greater
+clearness his invigorating system of upbringing, while more and more
+strenuously strove his wife against it, with all her feathers ruffled,
+till by dint of able exposition on both sides of the respective
+masculine and feminine systems of rearing, they had nearly reached a
+point where they would have clashed together, like a couple of summer
+thunderclouds, had not he dispelled these by firing the following shot:
+"Good heavens! have _we_ any children? Why should we make fools of
+ourselves in this way about the matter?"
+
+"I was speaking of other people's children," was Lenette's reply.
+
+Consequently, as I said above, war did _not_ break out, but, on the
+other hand, the morning of the Sabbath of peace brake in, and with it
+came the guests who were bent upon possessing themselves of (and
+eating) the warm and divided heart, or pig, of the Babylonish harlot,
+or Cardinal Protector. It seemed, in fact, as if some happy star of the
+wise men of the East must be standing in the heavens above this
+houseful of recipients of out-door relief, for there had, by good luck,
+been a gale of wind on the previous Friday which had blown down some
+half of the Government forest and strewn the path to Advent, for the
+poor, so grandly with branches (and the trees attached) that the entire
+staff of forest officials could not hinder the ingathering of such a
+vintage. For many a long year the Morbitzer's house hadn't boasted
+anything approaching to such a stock of timber, part of it purchased,
+part adroitly collected.
+
+And if every Sunday is--in a poor man's quarters--in itself and in the
+nature of things, not only a sun-day, but a moon-and-stars-day into the
+bargain a day when a poor fellow has his mouthful or two of food, his
+trifle or two of good clothes, his twelve hours for eating and twelve
+for lying down, besides the necessary neighbours to talk with--it may
+be conjectured in what a superlative sort this particular Sunday dawned
+upon the Morbitzer household, where everybody was as sure of eating his
+share of the pig in the afternoon as of hearing the sermon in the
+morning, and with as little to pay for the one as for the other, seeing
+that it was a settled matter that the lodger of greatest dignity in the
+establishment had determined that his coronation feast should be
+celebrated nowhere but there, at the table with mere working men.
+
+Old Sabel was on the spot before the earliest church-bell had begun to
+toll. The rifle-king's crown-treasury could afford to appoint her
+hereditary mistress of the kitchen, under Lenette, for a kreuzer or two
+and a plate or so of victuals; but the queen looked upon her as a
+superfluity and coadjutor, or auxiliary queen. A king on the chessboard
+gets two queens whenever a mere ordinary pawn gets moved on to the
+place of royalty, one of the royal squares (though he has not lost his
+first consort); and indeed it is just the same when it happens under
+the canopy of a throne. Lenette, however, would have preferred to have
+washed, cooked, and served the meats with her own unassisted hands,
+like a true Homeric or Carlovingian princess. The marksman-monarch
+himself fled the noisy, dusty throne-scaffold of the day, and in a
+loose old coat, happy and free, he rambled about the broad green levels
+of the quiet, blue, latter autumn, checked by no interfering dry stems
+or straw sheaves standing sentry on the plain, and bursting no thicker
+barrier-chains than the webs of the spiders. Never do husbands more
+happily and tranquilly take their walks abroad--out in the open
+country, or, indeed, up and down in other people's rooms--than when, in
+their own, the stamping-mills, the sugar and fanning-mills are at
+work, whirling and roaring, and they promise themselves, at their
+home-coming, the clean, finished product and outcome of all these
+mill-wheels. Siebenkæs glanced with a poet's idyllic eye from his quiet
+meadow into the distant noise-chamber, full of pans, choppers, and
+besoms, and found true and deep delight in a peaceful contemplation of
+the whirl of backwards and forwards assiduity going on there, and in
+picturing to himself and joining in, the pleasant tongue-visions of the
+hungry guests, till suddenly he grew red and hot. "You're doing a fine
+thing!" he said, addressing himself; "_I_ could do that, myself, too!
+But there's the poor wife scrubbing and cooking herself to death at
+home, and nobody giving her even a thought of thanks." And the least he
+could do was to vow, on the spot, that however he might find things
+moved about and "put in order" in the house on his return, he would
+accept and belaud it all without a word of demur.
+
+And history vouches, to his honour, for the fact that when, on his
+reaching the house, he found his bookshelves dusted and his inkpot
+washed white on the outside, and all his belongings "put in order"--(in
+a _different_ order to the previous one, be it observed),--he at once
+praised Lenette in the kindest manner, without a shade of irritation,
+and said she had performed her household processes and accomplished her
+cleaning and brushing in a manner quite after his heart, for that it
+was impossible to be _too_ exquisitely neat and spick and span in the
+eyes of commonplace women, particularly such as composed the infernal
+triumvirate who were to be present that day (_i. e_. the bookbinder's,
+the barber's, and the shoemaker's wives); and on that account he had
+left the intendance-general of the theatre of operations entirely to
+her--whereas, in the case of scholars, like Stiefel and himself, the
+room might be turned into a complete English scouring, carding, and
+brushing apparatus--for men of their sort never glanced down at trifles
+of that description from their sublime heights of mental contemplation.
+
+But how pleasantly and cheerily did the president of the eating
+congress put all things in train by this his kindly temper, even before
+the assembling of the congress; though this appeared most fully after
+it _had_ assembled. When the thirteen United States, by their thirteen
+deputies, dine together at a round table to celebrate some arrangement
+which they have jointly arrived at (and that they do so at least,
+establishes the fact that when thirteen dine at a table the thirteenth
+does not necessarily die), it is an easy matter for the thirteen free
+states in question, paying, as they do, the expenses out of thirteen
+treasuries, to treat their delegates as liberally as Firmian treated
+his guests. It is pleasant to look at cattle grazing in the meadows,
+but not so pleasant to see Nebuchadnezzar conducting himself like one
+of them; and similarly it is repulsive to see a man of cultivation
+pasturing with a too eager delight on the stomach's meadow, the
+dinner-table (though it is not so in the case of the poor). Firmian's
+guests were all of one mind, even the married couples; for it is a
+leading characteristic of the lower classes that they enter into a
+dozen treaties of peace and make as many declarations of war, in the
+course of the four-and-twenty hours, and particularly that they ennoble
+each of their meals into a feast of love and reconciliation. Firmian
+saw in the lower classes a kind of standing troupe of actors playing
+Shakespeare's comedies, and thousands of times fancied that the
+dramatist himself was prompting them unseen. He had long coveted the
+pleasure of having some enjoyment or other of which he could give away
+some portion to the poor; he envied those rich Britons who pay the
+score of a beershop full of labourers, or, like Cæsar, give free
+commons to an entire town. The poor who _have_ houses give to the poor
+who have not--one lazzarone gives to another--as shell-fish become the
+habitations of other crustaceans, and earthworms are the habitable
+universes of lesser worms.
+
+In the evening arrived Peltzstiefel, who was too learned a man to eat
+swine's flesh, or a measure of salt, among the untaught vulgar. And
+then Siebenkæs could once more entertain an idea unintelligible to any
+one but Stiefel. He could lay the sceptre and the tinted glass-ball of
+the imperial globe upon the table, and in his capacity of king of the
+feast and of the eagle, say that his long hair served him for a crown,
+like that of the old Frank kings, his own crown having been knocked
+down by his landlord's rifle; he could assert that the rule by which
+only he by whose hands the eagle was brought down became king was
+clearly imitated from the code of the Fraticelli Berghadi, who could
+only elect to the papacy a person who had killed a child. That 'twas
+true he had it not in his power to reign over Kuhschnappel so long by
+fourteen days as the King of Prussia over the ecclesiastical see of
+Elten (the latter period being one of _fifteen_ days)--that 'twas true
+he had a crown and revenues, but the latter were sadly reduced, cut
+down by one-half, in fact--and that he was far too much like the Great
+Mogul, who formerly had an income of two hundred and twenty-six
+millions a year, but now receives only the one hundred and thirteenth
+part of that sum; however, at his (Siebenkæs's) coronation, though
+there had been no general liberation of the _wicked_ prisoners, yet
+_one good_ one had been released, namely, himself; also that, like
+Peter the Second of Arragon, he had been crowned with nothing worse
+than bread: finally that, under his ephemeral rule, nobody was
+beheaded, robbed, or beaten to death; and--which delighted him most of
+all--the feeling that he was like one of the ancient German princes,
+who governed, defended, and increased a free people, and was a member
+of that free people himself, &c. &c.
+
+The throats in this royal chamber grew louder and drier as the evening
+advanced; the pipes (those chimneys of the mouth) made of the room a
+heaven of clouds, and of their heads heavens of joy. Outside, the
+autumn sun brooded, with warm, flaming wings, over the cold, naked
+earth, as if in haste to hatch the spring. The guests had drawn the
+quint, (I mean the five prizes of the five senses) out of the ninety
+numbers, or ninety years of the lottery of human life; the famished
+eyes were sparkling, and in Firmian's soul the buds of gladness had
+burst their leaflet envelopes and swelled forth into flower. Deep
+happiness always leads love by the hand; and Firmian longed to-day,
+with an unutterable longing, to press his heart, all heavy with bliss,
+upon Lenette's breast, and there forget all his wants and hers.
+
+These circumstances, in their combination, inspired him with a strange
+idea. He determined, on this happy day, to go and redeem the pawned
+silken flower-wreath and plant it in some dark spot out of doors, then
+take her out there in the evening, or perhaps even in the night, and
+give her a pleasant little surprise at the sight of it. He slipped out
+and took his way to the pawnbroker's; but--as all our resolves begin in
+us as tiny sparks, and end in broad lightning flashes--so, as he went,
+he improved his original idea (of redeeming the wreath from pawn) into
+an altogether different one, that of buying real flowers and planting
+_them_ by way of goal of the nocturnal ramble. There was no difficulty
+in getting red and white roses from the greenhouse of a gardener of the
+Prince of Oettingen-Spielberg, who had lately come to the place. He
+walked round under the upright glass roofs, all behung with blossom,
+went to the gardener and got what he wanted--only no forget-me-nots,
+for these, of course, the man had left the meadows to supply. But
+forget-me-nots were indispensable, to make the loving surprise
+complete. He therefore took his real autumn flowers to the pawnbroker
+woman's, in whose hands his silk plants had been deposited, that he
+might twine the dead, poor, cocoon forget-me-nots among the living
+roses. What was his astonishment to learn that the pledge had been
+redeemed and taken away by Mr. von Meyern, and that he had paid a sum
+of money so considerable that the woman thought she still owed the
+advocate a debt of thanks. It needed all the strength of a heart
+fortified by love to keep him from going at once to the Venner
+with a storm of reproaches for this move of warlike strategy--this
+pledge-robbery--for he could scarce endure the thought (a mistaken
+idea, 'tis true, only given rise to by Lenette's silence on the subject
+of the garland) of his pure love's pretty token in Rosa's beringed and
+thievish fingers. The brokeress, too, though she was not to blame,
+would have been severely taken to task had it been any other day, one
+less full of love and happiness; as it was, however, Firmian cursed in
+a merely general manner, especially as the woman gave him silk
+forget-me-nots of somebody else's, when he said he wanted some. When in
+the street again, he was at variance with himself as to the spot where
+he should plant his flowers; he wished he knew where to find some
+fresh-dug bed of fine old mould, of which the dark colour should set
+off to advantage the red and blue of the flowers. At length he saw a
+field which is broken into beds at all seasons--in summer and in
+winter, ay, in the bitterest cold--the churchyard, with its church,
+hanging like a vineyard on the slope of a hill beyond the town. He
+slipped in by a back entrance and saw the fresh-raised boundary-hillock
+which marked the close of an earthly life, rolled, as it were, up to
+the foot of the triumphal gate, through which a mother, with her
+newborn child in her arms, had passed away into the brighter world.
+Upon this earthen bier he laid his flowers down, like a funeral
+garland, and then went home.
+
+The members of the gladsome company had scarcely missed him; they were
+floating, like fish benumbed in their element saturated with foreign
+matter, paralysed with the poison of pleasure; but Stiefel was still in
+his senses, and was talking with Lenette. The world has already learned
+from the former portion of this history--the people of the house, too,
+were well aware--that Firmian was fond of running away from his guests,
+in order to throw himself back into their society with a greater zest,
+and that he interrupted his pleasures in order that he might savour
+them--as Montaigne used to have himself awakened from his sleep that he
+might thoroughly appreciate what it was--and so Firmian merely said
+that he had been out.
+
+All the waves, even the most turbulent of them, subsided at last, and
+there was nothing left in the ebb save those three pearl mussels, our
+three friends. Firmian gazed with tender eyes upon Lenette's bright
+ones, for he loved her the more fondly because he had a pleasure in
+store for her. Stiefel glowed with a love so pure that, without any
+serious error of logic, he was able to define and classify it to
+himself as a mere sympathetic rejoicing in her happiness; particularly
+as his love for the wife placed wings, not fetters, upon his affection
+for her husband. Indeed the Schulrath's anxiety was directed altogether
+to the reverse side of the question, his only doubt being whether he
+had it in him to express his love with adequate force and ardour.
+Therefore he pressed both their hands many times, and laid them between
+his own; he said beauty was a thing to which he very rarely paid any
+attention, but that he _had_ been observant of it that day, because
+that of Mrs. Siebenkæs had appeared to such great advantage amid all
+her labours, particularly with all these ordinary women about her, and
+at _them_ he had not so much as looked. He assured the advocate that he
+had considered his goodness and kindness to this admirable wife of his
+as a mark of increased personal friendship for himself; and he
+asseverated to her that his affection for her, of which he had given
+some little proof as they came together from Augspurg in the coach,
+would grow stronger the more she loved his friend, and through that
+friend, himself.
+
+Into this cup of joy of hers Firmian of course cast no drop of poison
+relative to (what he _supposed_ to be) the news of the Venner's having
+made prize of the flowers. He was so happy that day; his little toy
+crown had so tenderly covered and soothed all the bleeding wounds on
+that head of his whence he had lifted his crown of thorns just a little
+way (as Alexander's diadem soothed the bleeding head of Lysimachus),
+that his only wish was that the night might be as long as a Polar one,
+since it was just as calm and peaceful, as bright and serene. In
+moments like these the poison fangs of all our troubles are broken out,
+and a Paul, like him in Malta of old, has turned all the tongues of the
+soul's serpents to stone.
+
+When Stiefel rose to go, Firmian did not detain him, but insisted that
+he should allow them both to go with him, not to their own door only,
+but to his. They went out. The broad heaven, with the streets of the
+City of God all lit with the lamps which are suns, drew them on, out
+beyond the narrow crossways of the town, and into the great spectacle
+hall of night, where we breathe the blue of heaven, and drink the east
+breeze. We should conclude and sanctify all our chamber feasts by
+"going to church" in that cool, vast temple, that great cathedral whose
+dome is adorned with the sacred picture of the Most Holy, portrayed in
+a mosaic of stars. They roamed on refreshed and exalted by breezes of
+the coming spring hastening to blow before their appointed time, those
+breezes which wipe the snow away from the mountains. All nature gave
+promise of a mild winter--to lead the poor, who have no fuel, gently
+through the darkest quarter of the year--it was a season such as none
+curse except the rich, who can order sleighs but not snow.
+
+The two men carried on a conversation befitting the sublimity of the
+night; Lenette said nothing. Firmian said, "How near together these
+miserable oyster banks, the villages, seem to be, and how small they
+are; when we go from one of these villages to another the journey seems
+to us about the same in length as a mite's, if it crawled on a map from
+the name of the one to the name of the other, might appear to it. And
+to higher spirits our earth-ball may perhaps be a globe for their
+children, which their tutor turns and explains."
+
+"Yet," said Stiefel, "there may very possibly be worlds even smaller
+than this earth of ours; and, after all, there _must_ be something in
+ours since the Lord Christ died for it." At this the warm blood rushed
+to Lenette's heart. Firmian merely answered, "More Saviours than one
+have died for this world and mankind, and I am convinced that Christ
+will one day take many a good man by the hand, and say, '_You_ have
+suffered under your Pontius Pilate too!' And for that matter many a
+seeming Pilate is very likely a Messiah, if the truth were known."
+Lenette's secret dread was that her husband was really an absolute
+Atheist, or at all events a "philosopher."
+
+He led them by snaky windings and corkscrew paths to the churchyard;
+but suddenly his eyes grew moist, as one's do when passing through a
+thick mist, when he thought of the mother's grave with the flowers on
+it, and on Lenette who gave no sign of ever becoming one. He strove to
+expel the sadness from his heart by philosophic speeches. He said human
+beings and watches stop while they are being wound up for a new long
+day; and that he believed that those dark intervals of sleep and
+death, which break up and divide our existence into segments, prevent
+any one particular idea from getting to glare too brightly, and our
+never-cooling desires from searing us wholly--and oven our ideas from
+interflowing into confusion--just as the planetary systems are
+separated by gloomy wastes of space, and the solar systems by yet
+greater gulfs of darkness. That the human spirit could never take in
+and contain the endless stream of knowledge which flows throughout
+eternity, but that it sips it by portions at a time, with intervals
+between: the eternal day would blind our souls were it not broken into
+separate days by midsummer nights (which we call, now sleep, now
+death), framing its noons in a border of mornings and evenings.
+
+Lenette was frightened, and would have liked to run away behind the
+wall and not go into the churchyard; however, she had to go in.
+Firmian, holding her closely to him, took a roundabout path to the
+place where the wreath was. He closed the little clattering metal gates
+which guarded the pious verses and the brief life-careers. They came to
+the better-class graves nearest the church, which lay round that
+fortress like a kind of moat. Here there were nothing but upright
+monuments standing over the quiet mummies below, while further on were
+mere trapdoors let down upon recumbent human beings. A bony head, which
+was sleeping in the open air, Firmian set a-rolling, and--heedless
+of Lenette's oft-renewed entreaties to him not to make himself
+"unclean"--he took up in both his hands this last capsule case
+of a spirit of many dwelling places, and, looking into the empty
+window-openings of the ruined pleasure-house, said, "They ought to get
+up into the pulpit inside there at midnight, and put this scalped mask
+of our Personality down upon the desk in place of the Bible and the
+hourglass, and preach upon it as a text to the _other_ heads sitting
+there still packed in their skins. They should have _my_ head, if they
+liked to skin it after my decease, and hook it up in the church like a
+herring's, upon a string, by way of angel at the font--so that the
+silly souls might for once in their lives look _upward_ and then
+_downward_--for we hang and hover between heaven and the grave. The
+hazel-nut worm is still in _our_ heads, Herr Schulrath, but it has gone
+through its transformation and flown out from this one, for there are
+two holes in it and a kernel of dust."[51]
+
+Lenette was terrified at this godless jesting in such close proximity
+to ghosts; yet it was but a disguised form of mental exaltation. All at
+once she whispered, "There's something looking down at us over the top
+of the charnel house. See, see, it's raising itself higher up." It was
+only the evening breeze lifting a cloud higher; but this cloud had the
+semblance of a bier resting on the roof, and a hand was stretched forth
+from it, while a star, shining close to the cloud's edge, seemed like a
+white flower laid on the heart of the form which lay upon the bier of
+cloud.
+
+"It is only a cloud," said Firmian; "come nearer to the house, and then
+we shall lose sight of it." This furnished him with the best possible
+pretext for leading her up to the blooming Eden in miniature upon the
+grave. When they had walked some twenty paces, the bier was hidden by
+the house. "Dear me," said the Rath, "what may that be in flower
+there?" "Upon my life," cried Firmian, "white and red roses, and
+forget-me-nots, wife." She looked tremblingly, doubtingly, inquiringly
+at this resting-place of a heart, decked with a garland, at this altar
+with the sacrifice lying beneath it. "Very well then, Firmian," she
+cried, "I'm sure I can't help it, it is no fault of mine; but _oh_! you
+_shouldn't_ have done such a thing! oh dear! oh dear! will you _never_
+cease tormenting me!" She began to weep, and hid her streaming eyes on
+Stiefel's arm.
+
+For she, who was so delicately clever in nothing as in touchiness and
+taking umbrage, supposed this garland was the silken one from her
+wardrobe, and that her husband knew that Rosa had presented it to her,
+and had placed the flowers upon this grave of a woman, dead in
+childbed, in mockery either of her childlessness or of herself. These
+mutual misunderstandings were to the full as confounding to him as to
+her; he had to combat _her_ errors, and at the same time ask himself
+what his _own_ consisted of. It was only now that she told him that
+Rosa had some time since returned the pawned wreath to her. Upon the
+green thistle-plant of mistrust of her love, a flower or two now came
+out; nothing is more painful than when a person whom we love hides
+something from us for the first time, were it but the merest trifle. It
+was a great distress and disappointment to Firmian that the pleasant
+surprise he had prepared should have taken such a bitter turn. There
+was too much of the artificial about his garland to commence with, but
+the foul fiend, Chance, had malevolently crisped and twirled it up,
+with added weeds, into a more unreal and unnatural affair than ever.
+Let us take care then not to hire Chance into the heart's service.
+
+The Schulrath, at his wits' end, gave vent to his embarrassment in a
+warm curse or two upon the Venner's head; he tried to establish a peace
+congress between the husband and wife (who were sunk in silent musing),
+and strongly urged Lenette to give her hand to her husband and be
+reconciled to him. But nothing would induce her. Yet, after long
+hesitation, she agreed to do it, but only on condition that he would
+first _wash_ his hands. Hers shrunk away in convulsive loathing from
+touching those which had been in contact with a skull.
+
+The Schulrath took away the battle-flag from them, and delivered a
+peace-sermon which came warm from his heart. He reminded them what the
+place was in which they stood, surrounded by human beings all gone to
+their last account; he bade them think for a moment how near they were
+to the angels who guard the graves of the just, the very mother (he
+pointed out) who was mouldering at their feet, with her baby in her
+arms (and whose eldest son he himself was bringing along in his Latin
+studies--he was then in Scheller's _principia_), might be said to be
+admonishing them not to fall out about a flower or two over her quiet
+grave, but rather to take them away as olive-branches of peace.
+Lenette's heart drank _his_ theologic holy water with far greater zest
+than Firmian's pure, philosophic Alp water, and the latter's lofty
+thoughts of Death shot athwart her soul without the slightest
+penetration. However, the sacrifice of reconciliation was accomplished
+and mutual letters of indulgence exchanged. At the same time, a peace
+like this, brought about by a third party, is always something in the
+nature of a mere suspension of hostilities. Strangely enough they both
+awoke in the morning with tears in their eyes, but could not tell
+whether happy dreams or sad ones had left these drops behind.
+
+
+ FIRST FLOWER PIECE.
+
+ THE DEAD CHRIST PROCLAIMS THAT THERE IS NO GOD.
+
+ INTRODUCTION.
+
+My aim in writing this fiction must be my excuse for its audacity.
+
+Men, as a class, deny God's existence with about the same small
+amount of true consideration, conviction, and feeling as that
+with which most individual men admit it. Even in our regularly
+established _systems_ of belief we form collections of mere words,
+game-counters, medallions--just as coin-collectors accumulate
+cabinetsful of coins--and not till long after our collection is made do
+we convert the words into sentiments, the coins into enjoyments. We
+may believe in the immortality of the soul for twenty years long, yet
+it may be the twenty-first before, in some one supreme moment, we
+suddenly perceive, to our astonishment, what this belief involves, and
+how wonderful is the warmth of that naphtha spring.
+
+In a similar manner to this, I myself was suddenly horror-struck at the
+perception of the poison-power of that vapour which strikes with such
+suffocating fumes to the heart of him who enters the school of
+Atheistic doctrine. It would cause me less pain to deny immortality
+than to deny God's existence. In the former case, what I lose is but a
+world hidden by clouds; but in the latter, I lose this present world,
+that is to say, its sun. The whole spiritual universe is shattered and
+shivered, by the hand of Atheism, into innumerable glittering
+quicksilver globules of individual personalities, running hither and
+thither at random, coalescing, and parting asunder without unity,
+coherence, or consistency. In all this wide universe there is none so
+utterly solitary and alone as a denier of God. With orphaned heart--a
+heart which has lost the Great Father--he mourns beside the
+immeasurable corpse of Nature, a corpse no longer animated or held
+together by the Great Spirit of the Universe--a corpse which grows in
+its grave; and by this corpse he mourns until he himself crumbles and
+falls away from it into nothingness. The wide earth lies before such
+an one like the great Egyptian sphinx of stone, half-buried in the
+desert sand; the immeasurable universe has become for him but the cold
+iron-mask upon an eternity which is without form and void.
+
+I would also fain awaken, with this piece of fiction, some alarm in the
+hearts of certain masters and teachers (reading, as well as _read_);
+for, in truth, these men (now that they have come to do their appointed
+day's work, like so many convicts, in the canal-diggings and in the
+mine-shaft excavations, of the "critical" schools of philosophy)
+discuss God's existence as cold-bloodedly and chill-heartedly as though
+it were a question of the existence of the kraken or the unicorn.
+
+For others, who have not progressed quite so far as this I would
+further remark, that the belief in immortality may without
+contradiction, co-exist with the belief in Atheism, for the self-same
+necessity which, in this life, placed my little shining dew-drop of a
+personality in a flower-cup and beneath a sun, can certainly do the
+same in a second life--ay, and could embody me with still greater ease
+for a second time than for the first.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+When, in our childhood, we are told that, at midnight, when our sleep
+reaches near the soul and darkens our very dreams, the dead arise from
+theirs, and in the churches ape the religious services of the living,
+we shudder at death, because of the dead, and in the loneliness of
+night we turn our eyes in terror from the tall windows of the silent
+church, and dread to look at their pale shimmer to see whether it be
+truly the reflection of the moon's beams--or _something else_!
+
+Childhood and its terrors (even more than its pleasures) assume, in our
+dreams, wings and brightness, shining glowworm-like in the dark night
+of the soul. Extinguish not these little flickering sparks! Leave us
+the dim and painful dreams even; they serve to make life's high-lights
+all the more brilliant. And what will ye give us in exchange for the
+dreams which raise and bear us up from beneath the roar of the falling
+cataract back to the peaceful mountain-heights of childhood, where the
+river of life was flowing as yet in peace, reflecting heaven upon its
+little surface, on towards the precipices of the future course.
+
+Once on a summer evening I was lying upon a quiet hillside in the sun.
+I fell asleep, and dreamed that I awoke in a churchyard. The rattle of
+the wheels of the clock running down as it was striking eleven, had
+awakened me. I looked for the sun in the dark and void night sky, for I
+supposed that some eclipse was hiding it with the moon. And all the
+graves were open, and the iron doors of the charnel-house kept opening
+and shutting, moved by invisible hands. Athwart the walls shadows went
+flitting; but no bodies cast those shadows and there were others, too,
+moving about out in the open air. Within the open coffins there were
+none now asleep, except the children. Nothing was in the sky but sultry
+fog, heavy and grey, ranging there in great clammy folds; and some
+gigantic shadow closed and closed this fog as in a net, and drew it
+ever nearer, closer, and hotter. Up overhead I heard the thunder of
+distant avalanches, and beneath my feet the first footfalls of a
+boundless earthquake. The church was heaved and shaken to and fro by
+two terrific discords striving in it, beating in stormy effort to
+attain harmonious resolution. Now and then a greyish glimmer passed
+with rapid gleam flittering athwart the windows; but, whenever this
+glimmer came, the lead and iron of the frames always melted and ran
+rolling down. The fog's net, and the quaking of the earth, drove me
+into the temple, past gleaming, glittering basilisks, brooding in
+poison-nests beside the door. I passed among shadows, strange and
+unknown to me; but they all bore the impress of the centuries. These
+shadows stood all grouped about the altar, and their breasts quivered
+and throbbed--their _breasts_ but not their hearts. There was but one
+of the dead still lying on his pillow, and he was one who had but just
+been buried in the church; he lay at peace, his breast without a throb,
+a happy dream upon his smiling face. But now, as I came in (I, one of
+the living), his sleep broke, he awoke, and smiled no more; with
+painful effort he raised his heavy eyelids--and there was no eye
+beneath--and in his beating breast there was no heart, but a deep wound
+instead. He raised his hands, folded as it for prayer; but then his
+arms shot out and came apart from his poor trunk, the folded hands came
+off and fell away. Upon the dome above there was inscribed the dial of
+eternity--but figures there were none, and the dial itself was its own
+gnomon; a great black finger was pointing at it, and the dead strove
+hard to read the time upon it.
+
+And at this point a lofty, noble form, bearing the impress of eternal
+sorrow, came sinking down towards our group, and rested on the altar;
+whereupon all the dead cried out, "Christ! Is there no God?"
+
+He answered, "There is none."
+
+At this the dead quivered and trembled; but now it was not their
+breasts alone that throbbed; the quivering ran all through the shadows,
+so that one by one the shudder shook them into nothingness. And Christ
+spake on, saying, "I have traversed the worlds, I have risen to the
+suns, with the milky ways I have passed athwart the great waste spaces
+of the sky; there is no God. And I descended to where the very shadow
+cast by Being dies out and ends, and I gazed out into the gulf beyond,
+and cried, 'Father, where art Thou?' But answer came there none, save
+the eternal storm which rages on, controlled by none; and towards the
+west, above the chasm, a gleaming rainbow hung, but there was no sun to
+give it birth, and so it sank and fell by drops into the gulf. And when
+I looked up to the boundless universe for the Divine eye, behold, it
+glared at me from out a socket, empty and bottomless. Over the face of
+chaos brooded Eternity, chewing it for ever, again and yet again.
+Shriek on, then, discords, shatter the shadows with your shrieking din,
+for HE IS NOT!"
+
+The pale and colourless shades flickered away to nothingness, as frosty
+fog dissolves before warm breath, and all grew void. Ah! then the dead
+children, who had been asleep out in the graves, awoke, and came into
+the temple, and fell down before the noble form (a sight to rend one's
+heart), and cried, "Jesus, have we no Father?" He made answer, with
+streaming tears, "We are orphans all, both I and ye. We have no
+Father."
+
+Then the discords clashed and clanged more harshly yet; the shivering
+walls of the temple parted asunder, and the temple and the children
+sank--the earth and sun sank with them--and the boundless fabric of the
+universe sank down before us, while high on the summit of immeasurable
+nature Jesus stood and gazed upon the sinking universe, besprent with
+thousand suns, and like a mine dug in the face of black eternal night;
+the suns being miners' lamps, and the milky way the veins of silvery
+ore.
+
+And as he gazed upon the grinding mass of worlds, the wild torch dance
+of starry will-o'-the-wisps, and all the coral banks of throbbing
+hearts--and saw how world by world shook forth its glimmering souls on
+to the Ocean of Death--then He, sublime, loftiest of finite beings,
+raised his eyes towards the nothingness and boundless void, saying, "Oh
+dead, dumb, nothingness! necessity endless and chill! Oh! mad
+unreasoning Chance--when will ye dash this fabric into atoms, and me
+too? Chance, knowest thou--thou knowest not--when thou dost march,
+hurricane-winged, amid the whirling snow of stars, extinguishing sun
+after sun upon thy onward way, and when the sparkling dew of
+constellations ceases to gleam, as thou dost pass them by? How every
+soul in this great corpse-trench of an universe is utterly alone? _I_
+am alone--none by me--O Father, Father! where is that boundless breast
+of thine, that I may rest upon it? Alas! if every soul be its own
+father and creator, why shall it not be its own destroying angel too?
+Is this a man still near me? Wretched being! That petty life of thine
+is but the sigh of nature, or the echo of that sigh. Your wavering
+cloudy forms are but reflections of rays cast by a concave mirror upon
+the clouds of dust which shroud your world--dust which is dead men's
+ashes. Look ye down into the chasm athwart the face of which the
+ash-clouds float and fly. A mist of worlds rises up from the Ocean of
+Death; the future is a gathering cloud, the present a falling vapour.
+Dost thou see and know thy earth?"
+
+Here Christ looked downward, and his eyes grew full of tears, and he
+spake on, and said, "Alas! I, too, was once of that poor earth; then I
+was happy, then I still possessed my infinite Father, and I could look
+up from the hills with joy to the boundless heaven, and I could cry
+even in the bitterness of death, 'My Father, take thy Son from out this
+bleeding earthly shell, and lift Him to thy heart.' Alas! too happy
+dwellers upon earth, ye still believe in Him. Your sun, it may be, is
+setting at this hour, and amid flowers and brilliance, and with tears
+ye sink upon your knees, and, lifting up your hands in rapturous joy,
+ye cry each one aloud up to the open heavens, 'Oh Father, infinite,
+eternal, hear! Thou knowest _me_ in all my littleness, even as Thou
+knowest all things, and Thou seest my wounds and sorrows, and Thou
+wilt receive me after death and soothe and heal them all.' Alas!
+unhappy souls! For after death these wounds will _not_ be healed. But
+when the sad and weary lays down his worn and wounded frame upon the
+earth to sleep towards a fairer brighter morn all truth, goodness and
+joy,--behold! he awakes amid a howling chaos, in a night endless and
+everlasting; and no morning dawns, there is no healing hand, no
+everlasting Father. Oh, mortal, who standest near, if still thou
+breathest the breath of life, worship and pray to Him, or else thou
+losest Him for evermore."
+
+And I fell down and peered into the shining mass of worlds, and beheld
+the coils of the great serpent of eternity all twined about those
+worlds; these mighty coils began to writhe and rise, and then again
+they tightened and contracted, folding round the universe twice as
+closely as before; they wound about all nature in thousandfolds, and
+crashed the worlds together, and crushed down the boundless temple to a
+little churchyard chapel. And all grew narrow, and dark, and terrible.
+And then a great immeasurable bell began to swing in act to toll the
+last hour of Time, and shatter the fabric of the universe to countless
+atoms,--when my sleep broke up, and I awoke.
+
+And my soul wept for joy that it could still worship God--my gladness,
+and my weeping, and my faith--these were my prayer! And as I rose the
+sun was gleaming low in the west, behind the ripe purple ears of corn,
+and casting in peace the reflection of his evening blushes over the sky
+to where the little moon was rising clear and cloudless in the east.
+And between the heaven and the earth, a gladsome, shortlived world was
+spreading tiny wings, and, like myself, _living_ in the eternal
+Father's sight. And from all nature round, on every hand, rose
+music-tones of peace and joy, a rich, soft, gentle harmony, like the
+sweet chime of bells at evening pealing far away.
+
+
+ SECOND FLOWER PIECE.
+
+ A DREAM WITHIN A DREAM.
+
+A sky of glorious and sublime beauty was spread out above this earth; a
+rainbow stood in the east, like the circle of eternity: a storm, with
+broken wings, passed thundering, as if weary, along by the lightning
+conductors, and away through the glowing gate of Eden in the west; the
+evening sun gazed after the storm with a brightness tender as if it
+shone through tears, resting its glance upon the great triumphal arch
+of Nature. All enraptured with the loveliness of the scene, I closed my
+eyes, and seeing nothing, save the sun shining warm and glowing through
+my lids, listened to the thunder as it died away in the far distance.
+And at length the mists of sleep sank down into my soul, and shrouded
+all the spring in folds of grey; but soon there came luminous bands of
+brightness piercing through the mist, and by-and-by shone many-tinted
+lines of beauty, and ere long the dark face of my sleep was painted
+with the brilliant pictures of the world of dreams.
+
+And then I thought that I was standing in the second world, and all
+about me a dim green grassy plain, which, in the distance, merged into
+brighter flowers, and woods of glowing red, and hills so clear that you
+could see the lodes of gold within them. Beyond these crystal hills
+there glowed a bright rose dawn of morning, with dewy rainbows arching
+it all over. All the shining woods were sprent with suns (where earthly
+forests would have gleamed with drops of dew); while all the flowers
+were draped with nebulæ, as earthly flowers are hung with gossamer. At
+times the meadows shook, as waves of motion passed quivering over
+them--but this was not because the zephyrs bent the grasses in their
+play--it was that passing souls brushed them with unseen wings. I was
+invisible in this second world, for there this shell of ours is but a
+little shroud, a tiny fleck of fog not yet condensed.
+
+And on the brink of this, the second world, reposed the holy Virgin
+near her Son; and she was looking downward to our earth, there as it
+floated dwarfed and far beneath, in its pale, feeble spring-time, on
+the mighty face of the Ocean of Death. And every wave was tossing it at
+will, and its dim light was nothing but the shadow of a shadow. Then
+Mary's heart beat with a yearning pulse, when she beheld the old
+beloved world, and all her soul grew tender, and she said, with
+brightening glance, "Oh, Son! this heart of mine is full of longing,
+and mine eyes with tears, for all these my beloved human friends! Raise
+the earth near us, that I once more may look into the eyes of mine own
+race, my brothers, and my sisters. Ah! my tears will fall when I behold
+the living once again."
+
+But Christ replied, "The earth is but a dream of many dreams; and thou
+must sleep to see these dreams."
+
+And Mary answered, "I will gladly sleep that I may dream of man." And
+then Christ said, "Say what the dream shall show thee."
+
+"Oh beloved! I would the dream would show me mankind's love. Love such
+as hearts which meet once more in bliss after long painful parting only
+know."
+
+And as she spake it, lo! the angel of Death stood close behind her, and
+with closing eyes she sank upon his bosom, which was cold as polar ice.
+And then the little earth rose quivering up, but as it neared it paled
+and narrowed, and grew more dim and small. The clouds about it parted,
+and the cleft mists gave to view the little night in which it lay, and
+from a sleeping brook a star or two of the second world were mirrored
+back. And all the children lay sleeping on the earth, and all were
+smiling--for they had seen Mary appear to them as they slept, in
+semblance of a mother. But, in the night, stood one unhappy being, the
+power of outward grief almost gone from her, except in sighs which tore
+her breaking heart. Even her very tears had ceased to flow. Oh! gaze no
+more, sad soul, towards the west, where stands the house of mourning
+all behung with funeral crape; nor to the east, upon the grave and
+house of death. For this one day, turn thy sad gaze away from that
+drear charnel house where the loved corpse is laid, so that the cool
+night breeze may fan and wake him from his sleep earlier than if he
+were shut up within the narrow grave! Yet, no! bereaved one, gaze thy
+fill on thy beloved one while he still is here, and ere he falls to
+dust--and steep thy heart deep in the eternal woe.
+
+As then an echo in the lone churchyard began to talk in faint and
+murmuring tones, repeating the notes of the low-voiced funeral hymn
+that rose within the house of mourning; and this after-song, floating
+half-heard in air--as though the dead were chanting low--tore all her
+heart in twain; and then her tears found vent and flowed anew, and wild
+with sorrow she raised her voice and cried, "For ever silent! oh my
+love, my love! Callest thou me once more? oh, speak again--but
+once--only this once, once more, to me whom thou hast left for ever!
+Ah, no! nothing but silence; no sound except the echo stirring among
+the graves. All the poor dead lie deaf beneath, and not a tone comes
+from the broken heart."
+
+But when the mourning hymn ceased of a sudden, and the dying echo from
+the graves sung faintly on alone, a tremor seized her, and her very
+life shook in the balance; for the echo came nearer and nearer, and
+from out the night one of the dead came close. And he stretched forth
+his pale and shadowy hand and took her own, saying, "My darling, why is
+it that you weep? Where have we been so long? for I have been dreaming
+that I had lost you!" But they had not lost each other. From Mary's
+closed lids there fell some happy tears, and ere her son could wipe
+those tears away, the earth had sunk back to its place again--and on
+its face this happy pair, restored to one another, and in bliss.
+
+Then all at once there rose a spark of fire up from the earth, and
+presently a soul hovered all trembling near the second world, as if in
+doubt whether to enter there. And Christ a second time raised up the
+earth ball, and the bodily frame from whence this soul had winged its
+way was lying still on earth, marked with the scars and wounds of a
+long life. Beside this fallen leafage of the soul a grey old man was
+standing, and, speaking to the corpse, he said, "I am as old as thou;
+why must my death be after thine, oh kind and faithful wife? Morning by
+morning, evening by evening, now, what can I do but think how deep thy
+grave, how far thy form has crumbled on its course to undistinguished
+dust, till my time comes to lie and crumble with thee side by side! I
+am alone! And _what_ a loneliness is mine! For nothing hears me now.
+_She_ cannot hear! Well! well! To-morrow I shall gaze with such a woe
+upon her faithful hands and her grey hairs that my poor broken life
+must snap and end. Oh, thou All-merciful! end it to-day; spare me that
+last great sorrow."
+
+Why should it be that, even in old age, when man has grown so weary and
+oppressed, and has descended to the lowest and last of all the steps
+that lead him downward to his grave, the spectre, Sorrow, sits so heavy
+upon him, bowing his head (where every bygone year has left its special
+thorns) to earth with a new despair?
+
+But the Lord Christ sent not the angel of death with the hand of ice;
+for he himself looked on the bereaved old man, standing so near him
+now, with such a glance of glowing solar warmth that the ripe fruit
+broke from the tree. Like sudden flame his soul burst upwards from his
+riven heart, and hovering above the second world rejoined that other
+soul it loved so well; there knit together in silent close embrace,
+like those of old, they trembled downward into Elysium, where no
+embrace finds end. And Mary stretched, all love, her hands towards
+them, and all joy and rapture from her dream, she cried, "Ah, happy
+pair, ye are together now for evermore."
+
+But now there rose a pillar of red vapour up on high above the hapless
+earth, and clung there hiding with its dun folds a battle-field's loud
+roar. At length the smoke parted asunder, and two bleeding men were
+seen lying enlocked in each other's bleeding arms. They were two grand
+and glorious friends, and they had sacrificed all to each other, ay!
+and their very selves,--but not the Fatherland. "Lay thy wounds upon
+mine, beloved friend. The past lies all behind us now, we can be
+friends again; thou hast sacrificed me to the Fatherland, as I have
+thee. Give me thy heart again, ere it bleeds quite away. Alas! we can
+only die together now." And each gave to his friend his pierced and
+wounded heart. But these glorious friends beamed with a lustre such
+that Death shrank back, and the great berg of ice, wherewith he crushes
+man, melted away at touching their warm hearts. And the earth _kept_
+those two, who rose above her level like two lofty mountains, dowering
+her with streams, with healing virtues, and with lofty views, she
+giving only _clouds_ to them in return.
+
+Mary in her dream here glanced and bent her head towards her son, for
+truly he alone can read, support, and succour hearts like these.
+
+Why does she smile now, like some happy mother? Is it because the earth
+she loves so well, still rising nearer, seems to hover close above the
+border of the second world, sweet with the flowers of spring, while
+nightingales lie brooding, with those burning hearts of theirs pressed
+on the grasses and the meadow blooms,--the stormy skies all brightening
+into rainbows? Is it because the earth, never to be forgotten of her
+heart, now shows so happy and so gay bedecked in its spring dress,
+radiant in all its flowers, the joy hymn bursting from all its singers'
+throats? No, not for this alone; that happy smile breaks over her
+sleeping face because she sees a mother and her child. For this must be
+a mother who bends down and holds her arms wide open, and calls in
+sweet enraptured tones, "Come, darling child, come to my heart again."
+This is her child, we see and know, standing all innocence, within the
+ringing temple of the spring, by his good genius who teaches him--and
+now goes running up to that smiling form--thus early blest, pressed to
+that heart overflowing with a mother's love, scarce understanding the
+blissful words she speaks. "Oh, dearest child, how thou delightest me.
+Art thou happy too? Thou lovest me! Oh, look at me, my own, and smile
+for evermore."
+
+But now the very blissfulness of her dream woke Mary up; and with a
+tender tremor she fell upon her own son's heart, saying with tears,
+"None, save a mother, _knows_ what it is to love." And as she spoke the
+earth sank to its place (where its own æther flowed around its orb),
+and with it that glad mother with her arms about her child.
+
+And all this bliss bursting upon my heart dissolved my dream. And I
+awoke--but nothing had truly changed or passed away; for the mother of
+my dream still clasped her child close to her heart here on earth's
+face; she reads my dream, and, for its truth, forgives, perchance, the
+dreamer who tells his tale.
+
+
+
+
+
+ BOOK III.
+
+
+
+
+ CHAPTER IX.
+
+ A POTATO WAR WITH WOMEN--AND WITH MEN--A WALK IN DECEMBER--TINDER
+ FOR JEALOUSY--A WAR OF SUCCESSION ON THE SUBJECT OF A PIECE OF
+ CHECKED CALICO--RUPTURE WITH STIEFEL--SAD EVENING MUSIC.
+
+
+I should very much like to make an incidental digression about this
+point; however, I feel that I don't dare.
+
+You see there are, now-a-days, so very few readers (at all events,
+of the younger and more aristocratic sort) who don't know
+everything--while, at the same time, they expect their pet authors (and
+I don't blame them for it) to know more than themselves--which is
+impossible. By the help of the English machinery (now brought to such
+high perfection), of encyclopædias, of encyclopædic-dictionaries, of
+conversations-lexicons, of excerpts from conversations-lexicons, of
+Ersch and Gruber's 'Universal Dictionaries of all the Sciences,' a
+young man, after devoting his _days_ to it for a month or two (he has
+no occasion to devote his _nights_) converts himself into a perfect
+Senatus Academicus of all the Faculties of a University, which he
+represents in his own single person; besides, in a sense, also himself
+standing to it in the relation of the student-body at the same time.
+
+I have never, myself, met with a phenomenal youth of the sort above
+described, unless it were, perhaps, a fellow I once heard playing in
+the Baireuth band, who represented in his own person a whole Royal
+Academy of Music--a complete orchestra--inasmuch as he held, carried,
+and played upon instruments of every kind. This Panharmonist
+performing, to us partial harmonists only (as we were), blew a French
+horn, which he held under his right arm, and this right arm bowed a
+fiddle placed under his left; and that left arm beat, at the proper
+moments, a drum which was fastened on his back; his cap was hung round
+with bells, out of which he shook an accompaniment "alla Turca," by
+moving his head, and he had a cymbal strapped upon each of his knees,
+which he banged vigorously together; so that the man was all music,
+from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot So that, one is
+tempted to make this simile-man an occasion and ground-work of further
+similes, and liken him to a prince who represents in his own person all
+the instruments of his State, and all its members and representatives.
+Now, in the presence of readers who are all-knowers, just as this man
+was an all-player, how is a humble individual such as I, who am but a
+mere Heidelberg master of seven arts, at the outside, and doctor of a
+small trifle of philosophy, or so, to venture to take upon himself to
+attempt such a thing as a bit of a digression with any approach to the
+clever or the felicitous about it? No; the safe course, in the
+circumstances, for me is to go quietly on with my story.
+
+We find the advocate, Siebenkæs, once more, then, in full blossom of
+hope; although that blossom is all sterile, and not of the sort which
+bears fruit. After his royal shot, he had reckoned upon, at any rate,
+as many happy days as the money would last for--upon fourteen at least;
+but mourning-black, now the traveller's uniform, ought to have been the
+colour of his upon his earthly night-journey--that _voyage pittoresque_
+for poets. Though marmots and squirrels know how to plug up that
+particular hole in their dwellings which chances to be on the side from
+which the approaching storm is coming, men do not; Firmian thought if
+the hole in his _purse_ was mended no more was necessary. Alas! a
+better thing than money now departed from him--_Love_. His good Lenette
+receded to a greater distance from his heart, as he did from hers, day
+by day.
+
+Her having concealed from him the fact that Rosa had given back the
+wreath, formed in his heart (as foreign matter lodged in any vessel of
+the body always does) the nucleus of a gradual deposit of stone about
+it. But that was only a small matter.
+
+For she brushed and scraped of a morning, and every morning, and that
+whether (as the saying goes) he "liked it or lumped it."
+
+She would persist, and insist, on communicating all her prorogations of
+parliament and other decrees to the servant girl, in several duplicates
+and revised copies, let him protest as much as he chose.
+
+She asked him every thing she had to ask him (no matter what) two or
+three separate times over; and that whether he shouted beforehand like
+a quack doctor at a fair, or swore afterwards like one of his
+customers.
+
+She continued to say, "It has struck four quarters to four o'clock."
+
+When he had proved, with immense care and trouble, that Augspurg was
+not in the Island of Cyprus, she would return him the quiet
+incontrovertible answer, "Well, it's not in Roumania either, nor in
+Bulgaria, nor in the Principality of Jauer, nor in Vauduz, nor in the
+neighbourhood of Hüshen--two very little, insignificant places, both of
+them." He could never bring her to give an unqualified assent, when he
+made the unconditional and positive assertion (in a loud voice), "It's
+in Swabia--or the devil's in it." She would go no further than to admit
+that it was situated, in a certain sense, and to some extent, between
+Franconia, Bavaria, and Switzerland, &c.; it was only to the
+bookbinder's wife that she would _acknowledge_ that it was in Swabia.
+
+Burdens, nay, overloads, of this sort, however, can be borne more or
+less easily and bravely by a soul fortified by the example of great
+sufferers--such as a Lycurgus, who let himself be deprived of an eye,
+and an Epictetus, who allowed his master to hack off his leg; and all
+these little failings of Lenette's have been touched upon in a previous
+chapter. But I have to tell of new shortcomings besides; and as regards
+these, I leave it to unbiassed married men to determine whether they
+are among the matters which husbands can, and should, put up with.
+
+Firstly: Lenette washed her hands forty times in the course of the day,
+at the very least; no matter what she touched, she must needs put
+herself through this process of Holy Re-baptism; like a Jew, she was
+rendered unclean by the propinquity of _everything_. She would far more
+probably have followed the example of Rabbi Akiba, than have been in
+the least astonished at his proceedings--who, when he was a captive in
+prison, and in the direst distress for water, instead of quenching his
+thirst with the very small quantity of it he could get, preferred to
+use it for his ablutions.
+
+"Of course it is right and proper that she should be scrupulous about
+cleanliness," said Siebenkæs, "and more so than I am; but there are
+limits to all things. Why doesn't she rub herself with a towel when
+anybody breathes upon her? Why not purify her lips with soap after a
+fly has deposited itself (and not _only_ itself) upon them? I'm sure
+she turns our sitting-room into a regular English man-of-war, scoured
+and holystoned from stem to stern every morning; and I look on as
+pleased as any officer on her quarter-deck."
+
+If a heavy Irish rain-cloud, or a waterspout with its attendant
+thunders and lightnings, came over his and her days, she always managed
+to put her husband right under water (like a Dutch fortress), with all
+his courageous energy, and gave free course to all her tears. But when
+the sun of happiness cast a feeble ray no broader than a window into
+the room, Lenette would always have a hundred things, other than this
+pleasant one, to attend to and to look at. Firmian had particularly
+made up his mind that he would most thoroughly winnow the husks from
+the corn of these few days during which he had a few shillings of ready
+money in his pocket; that he would skim off the cream of them, and
+completely hide, with a thick veil, the second Janus face, let it be
+smiling or weeping over the past or the future, as the case might be;
+but Lenette would insist upon rending this veil, and pointing to the
+hidden face. "My dear soul!" her husband more than once implored her,
+"do but wait till we're as poor as church mice, and leading the life of
+a dog, again; then I'll groan and moan with you with the greatest
+pleasure." And she only once made him any pertinent answer, namely,
+"How long will it be before we're without a farthing in the house?" But
+to this he was able to return a still more apposite reply: "If that is
+your way of looking at the matter, you will never be able to enjoy a
+single quiet, bright, happy day, unless one can give you his solemn
+oath that there will never come another dark, cloudy, wretched one
+again; in which case, of course, you can _never_ enjoy one. What king
+or emperor--ay! and though he had thrones upon the head of him and
+crowns under his tail--can ever be sure but that any post-delivery, or
+any sitting of his parliament, may bring him a cloudy time of it; yet
+he passes his happy day in his _Sans Souci_, or his _Bellevue_ (or
+whatever he may call it), and enjoys his life." (She shook her head).
+"I can prove it to you in print, and from the Greek." And, opening the
+New Testament, he read out the following passage (inserted by himself
+on the spur of the moment): "If, in a time of good fortune and
+happiness, thou delayest the joy of thine heart until a moment shall
+come in which nothing shall lie before thee save hopes in unbroken
+sequence for whole years to come, then there can be no true happiness
+on the face of this changing world. For after ten days, or years, some
+sorrow shall surely come; and thus thou canst delight in no May-day,
+though it shower blossoms and nightingales upon thee, since, beyond all
+doubt, the winter will come thereafter, with its nights and its
+snowflakes. Yet thou enjoyest thine ardent youth, not thinking with
+dread upon the ice-pit of age, which is ready in the background, with a
+gradually-increasing coldness to preserve thee for a certain season.
+Look, then, upon the glad To-day as a long youth; and let the sad
+Day-after-to-morrow appear unto thee but as a brief old age."
+
+"The Latin or the Greek always has a more religious sound, I know," she
+answered, "and we often hear the thing in the pulpit, too; and whenever
+I do hear it preached I always go home and feel much comforted and
+consoled, till the money's all gone again."
+
+He had greater difficulty still to get her to jump for joy quite to his
+liking at the dinner-table at mid-day. If, instead of their every-day
+fare, some extraordinary fleshpot of Egypt should chance to be smoking
+on the table--some dish such as the Counts of Wratislaw might have
+served, and the Counts of Waldstein have carved, without a blush--then
+Siebenkæs might be sure that his wife would have at least one hundred
+things more than usual to finish and to put away before she could come
+to dinner. There sits her husband, eager to begin; he looks round for
+her, quietly at first, angrily after a while, but keeps command of
+himself for two or three entire minutes, during which he has time to
+remember all his troubles as well as think about the roast--then,
+however, he discharges the first thunder-clap of his storm, and shouts,
+"Thunder and lightning! here have I been sitting for a whole Eternity,
+and everything getting as cold as charity. Wife! Wife!!"
+
+In Lenette, as in other women, the cause of this was not ill-temper,
+neither was it stupidity, nor stubborn indifference to the matter or to
+her husband; she really could not do otherwise, however, and that's
+quite sufficient explanation.
+
+At the same time, my friend Siebenkæs--who will have this story in his
+hands even before the printer's devils get hold of it--musn't take it
+ill of me that I divulge to the world in general certain small
+breakfast-failings of his own--which he has communicated to me with his
+own lips. As he lay in his trellis-bed in the morning, before getting
+up, with his eyes closed, there would suddenly flash upon him ideas for
+his book, and forms in which to express them, such as never occurred to
+him while he was sitting or standing during the day; and, indeed, I
+have in the course of my reading found that there have been many men of
+learning--such, for instance, as Descartes, Abbé Galiani, Basedow--I,
+myself, too, whom of course I don't count, who belonged to the
+Coleopterous family of backswimmers (_Notonectæ_), and got on quickest
+in the recumbent position, and in whose cases bed has been the
+brewing-kettle of their most brilliant and original ideas. I, myself,
+could point to many such which I have written down immediately after
+getting out of bed in the morning. Any one who sets himself to work to
+explain this phenomenon should adduce in the first place the matutinal
+power of the brain, and the fact of its lending itself with a more
+nimble, as well as vigorous obedience to the impulses of the spirit
+after its internal and external holiday of rest; next, the freedom and
+facility both of thinking and of brain mobility, which the manifold
+impulsions of the day has not yet begun to weary and impair; and,
+lastly, the vigour which is a peculiar property of all firstborn
+things--a vigour which our earliest morning thoughts possess in common
+with the first impressions of youth.
+
+Now, after the above explanations, it will doubtless seem clear that,
+when the advocate lay in this fashion, sprouting and sending out long
+shoots in the warm forcing-house of the pillow, and bearing the most
+precious flowers and fruit, nothing could strike upon his ear in a
+harsher and more distracting manner than the voice of Lenette calling
+from the next room, "Come to breakfast, the coffee's ready." He
+generally gave birth to one or two more happy turns of expression after
+he _did_ hear it, pricking his ears all the while, however, in dread of
+a second order to march. But as Lenette knew that he always allowed
+himself a considerable number of minutes of grace after the summons,
+she always cried, "Get up, the coffee's cold," when it was only just
+coming to the boil. The notonectic satirist, for his part, had observed
+the law which governed this precession of the equinoxes, and lay
+quietly among the feathers breeding his ideas happy and undisturbed
+when it was only once that she had summoned him, merely answering,
+"This very moment!" and availing himself of the double usance
+prescribed by law.
+
+This obliged his wife, for her part, to go farther back, and when the
+coffee was made and standing by the fire, to cry, "Come, dear, it's
+getting quite cold." Now, on this system, of getting earlier on one
+side and later on the other, matters became more critical every day,
+with nowhere a prospect of extrication from the difficulty; in fact,
+what was naturally to be expected was the arrival of a state of things
+in which Lenette would end by calling him to get up a whole day too
+soon; although, in the end, this would eventuate in a mere restoration
+of the original condition of affairs, just as our suppers at the
+present day threaten to become too-early breakfasts, and our breakfasts
+unfashionably early dinners. Had Siebenkæs been able to bear the
+process of grinding the coffee, he might have moored himself to that as
+to an anchor of hope, and it would then have been a simple matter to
+calculate the time the coffee would take to get ready; but this he
+could not, for, in the absence of a coffee-mill, the coffee was bought
+ready ground (by everybody in the house, for that matter). If Lenette
+could have been induced to call him just one exact minute before the
+coffee was boiling and smoking, _she_ would have done instead of the
+coffee-mill--however, she could _not_ be induced.
+
+What are trifling differences of opinion before marriage assume large
+dimensions thereafter--as north winds are warm in summer and cold in
+winter; the zephyr, when it is breathed forth by conjugal lungs, is
+like Homer's zephyr, concerning the biting keenness of which the poet
+sings so much. For this period onward, Firmian set himself to look with
+much care and minuteness for every crack, feather, flaw, or cloudiness,
+which might be discoverable in that diamond--Lenette's heart. Poor
+fellow! this being the case with thee, soon, soon must the crumbling
+altar of thy love go toppling down one stone after another, and the
+sacrificial fire flutter and go out.
+
+He now discovered that she was not nearly as learned a woman as Mdlles.
+Burmann and Reiske. It is true no book wearied her, but neither did any
+interest her, and she could read her one book of Sermons as often as
+scholars can go through Homer and Kant. Her secular or "profane"
+authors were only two; in fact, one married pair of authors--the
+immortal authoress of her own cookery receipts, and that, lady's
+husband--but the latter she never read. She paid his essays the tribute
+of her profoundest admiration, but she never glanced into them. Three
+sensible words with the bookbinder's wife were of more value in her
+eyes than all the bookbinder's and bookmaker's printed ones put
+together. To a literary man who is making new arguments, and new ink,
+all the year long, it is incomprehensible how those persons who have
+neither a book, nor a pen, nor a drop of ink in the house (except the
+pale rusty liquid borrowed from the village schoolmaster) can exist at
+all. Firmian sometimes appointed himself a species of special
+Professor-extraordinary, and mounted the professional chair with the
+view of initiating Lenette into one or two of the elementary principles
+of Astronomy; but either she had no pineal gland (that manor-house of
+the soul and its ideas), or else the chambers of her brain were
+saturated, satiated, and crammed to the roof with lace, bonnets,
+shirts, and saucepans; at all events, it was beyond his power to get a
+single star into her head bigger than a reel of cotton. With
+Pneumatology (Psychology), again, his difficulty was exactly of the
+_converse_ sort. In this branch of science, where the calculus of the
+infinitesimally small would have come to his aid with an equal amount
+of serviceableness as that of the infinitely great in astronomy,
+Lenette expanded and stretched out the dimensions of the angels, souls,
+and so forth, passing the minutest and most ethereal of spiritual
+beings through the stretching mill of her imagination, so that
+angels--of whom the scholiasts would have invited whole companies to a
+carpet-dance on the tip of a new needle (or have threaded them with it
+by couples on one and the same point of space)--expanded on her hands
+to such an extent that each angel would have filled a cradle by itself;
+and as for the Devil, he swelled out upon her till he got to be pretty
+much about the size of her husband.
+
+Further, Siebenkæs discovered an iron-mould stain, a pock-mark or wart,
+on her heart; he could never warm her into a true lyric enthusiasm of
+Love, in which she should forget heaven and earth, and all things. She
+could count the strokes of the town clock amid his kisses; though some
+affecting story or discourse of his might bring the big tears to her
+eyes, she could still hear the soup-pot boiling over, and run away to
+it, tears and all. She would join devoutly in the hymns which came
+resounding from the other lodgers' rooms of a Sunday, but in the middle
+of a verse ask the prosaic question, "What shall I warm for supper?"
+and he never could forget that, once, when she was listening,
+apparently much interested and quite touched, to one of his
+chamber-sermons on death and immortality, she looked at him,
+thoughtfully it is true, but with a glance directed downward, and said,
+"Don't put on that left stocking to-morrow morning till I've darned it
+for you."
+
+The author of this tale declares that he has sometimes been driven
+nearly out of his mind by feminine _entr'actes_ of this sort, against
+the occurrence of which there is no warranty for the man who soars up
+into the æther in company with these beautiful birds of paradise, and
+there hovers up and down with them, in the fond hope of hatching the
+eggs of his phantasies upon their backs up among the clouds.[52] All in
+an instant, down drops the winged mate, as if by magic, with a green
+gleam, on to a clod of earth. I admit that this is but an excellence
+the more; it makes them resemble the hens, whose eyes the Great
+Optician of the Universe has made so perfect that they can see the most
+distant sparrow-hawk in the sky as well as the nearest grain of malt on
+the dunghill. It is to be hoped, indeed, that the author of this story,
+should he ever chance to marry, may meet with a wife to whom he may be
+able to give readings concerning the more essential principles and
+dictata of psychology and astronomy without her bringing in the subject
+of his stockings in the middle of his loftiest and fullest flights of
+enthusiasm; but yet he will be well content should one possessed of
+moderate excellencies fall to his lot--one who shall be capable of
+accompanying him, side by side with him, in his flights, so far as they
+may extend--whose eyes and heart may be wide enough to take in the
+blooming earth and the shining heavens in great, grand masses at a
+time, and not in mere infinitesimal particles; for whom this universe
+shall be something higher than a nursery and a ball-room; and who, with
+feelings delicate and tender, and a heart both pious and wide, should
+be continually making her husband better and holier. The author's
+fondest wishes go not beyond this.
+
+Thus, then, while the flowers, if not the leaves, were falling fast
+from Firmian's love, Lenette's was like a rose somewhat overblown,
+whose beauty a touch will scatter to the earth. Her husband's endless
+arguments wearied her heart at length. Moreover, she was one of those
+women whose loveliest blossoms remain sterile and dead, unless children
+troop around to enjoy them, as the flowers of the vine do not produce
+grapes unless frequented by bees. She belonged to this class of women
+also in this respect, that she was born to be the spiral mainspring of
+a housekeeping engine--the stage-manageress of a great household
+theatre. Alas! the market-value of the shares, and the state of the
+treasury of the said theatre are well-known to everybody--from Hamburg
+to Ofen.
+
+Moreover, our couple, like phœnixes and giants, were childless: the
+two columns stood apart and unconnected, no fruit garlands twining
+about them to bind them one to another. Firmian had, in imagination,
+thoroughly rehearsed the character of _père de famille_, and dispatcher
+of invitations to be godfather, but it never came to a performance.
+
+What was most of all effective in breaking him away from Lenette's
+heart, however, was his dissimilarity to Peltzstiefel. The Schulrath
+had in him as much of the wearisome, the deliberately circumspect, the
+grave and reserved, the stiff and starched, the pompous and inflated,
+the heavy and the dull, as----these three lines have; but this
+delighted the very soul of our born housekeeper. Siebenkæs, again, was
+like a jerboa from morning till night. She often said to him, "I'm sure
+people must think you're not quite right in the head;" to which he
+would answer, "And am I?" He concealed the beauty of his character
+behind a comedy mask, and the trodden-down heels of the buskins he
+always wore made his stature seem shorter than it really was. The brief
+drama of his own life he turned into a mere burlesque and parodied
+epic, and it was from higher motives than mere vain folly that he so
+gave himself over to grotesque performances. In the first place he
+delighted with a deep delight in the sense of freedom of soul, and
+entire absence of all conventional trammels; secondly, he found
+pleasure in the thought that he travestied--not imitated--the follies
+of his fellow-men. In acting his part he had a double enjoyment--that
+of comedian as well as that of the spectator. A person who puts humour
+into action is a satirical _improvisatore_. Every male reader
+understands this though no female reader does. I have often wished that
+I could place in the hands of a woman, looking at the white sun-ray of
+wisdom broken into a tinted spectrum by the prism of humour, some
+powerful lens which should _burn_ that spectrum back into its pristine
+whiteness,--but it is not to be done. The fine, delicate, womanly sense
+of the fit, the proper, the becoming, seems to be torn and scratched by
+the touch of anything angular and unpolished; these souls, so firmly
+welded on to the every-day, commonplace, conventional relations of
+things, cannot understand souls which place themselves in antagonism to
+these relations. And therefore it is that humorists are so rare in the
+hereditary kingdoms of women, courts--and in their realm of shadows,
+France.
+
+Lenette could not be otherwise than much, and continually, vexed and
+annoyed with this whistling, singing, dancing husband of hers--a
+man who didn't behave to his very clients with anything like
+proper professional gravity; who, sad to say--and people assured
+her it was a fact--often walked in circles round the gallows on
+the hill,--concerning whose sanity sensible people spoke very
+doubtfully--as to whom she complained, that you would never think,
+to see him, that he lived in a royal burgh, the capital of the
+province--and who was respectful and reserved only before one person
+in the world, namely, himself. Why, when maidservants, from the very
+best houses in the place, came in--with linen to be made up, and so
+on--didn't they very often see him jump up and, without a "With your
+leave," or "By your leave," to anybody, run to his old, battered,
+rattling piano (it still had all its keys, and nearly as many strings),
+and there he would stand with a wooden yard-measure in his mouth, up
+which, as over a drawbridge, the notes climbed to him from the
+soundboard, then through the portcullis of his teeth, finally arriving
+at his soul by way of the Eustachian tube and the drum of the ear. He
+held this stork's-beak of a yard-measure between his teeth as described
+in order to magnify the inaudible pianissimo of his piano into a
+fortissimo at its upper end. However, humour looks paler when reflected
+in narrative than in the vividness of reality.
+
+That portion of earth's surface on which these two stood was riven into
+two distinct islets by these continual tremblings of the soil, and
+these islets kept drifting steadily further and further apart. And ere
+long there came a serious shock of earthquake.
+
+For the Heimlicher came on the stage again, with his plea of demurrer
+to Siebenkæs's suit, in which all he demanded was justice and
+equity--in other words, the money which was in question, unless Siebenkæs
+could prove himself to be himself, that is to say, the ward, whose
+patrimony the Heimlicher had hitherto kept in his paternal hands and purse.
+This juridical Hell-river took Firmian's breath away and struck ice-cold
+to his heart, though he had jumped over the three previous petitions for
+postponement as easily as the crowned lion over the three rivers in the
+Gotha coat-of-arms. The wounds which we receive from Fate soon heal,
+but those inflicted by the blunt and rusty torture-implement of an
+unjust man suppurate and take long to close. This cut, made into nerves
+already laid bare by so many a rude clutch and sharp tongue, caused our
+dear friend some severe pain; yet he had seen that the cut was coming
+long before it came, and had cried to his spirit, "Look out--mind your
+head!" Alas! there is something _new_ in _every_ pain. He had even
+taken legal steps in anticipation of it. A few weeks before he
+had had evidence sent from Leipsic, where he had studied, to prove that
+he had formerly been known by the name of Leibgeber, and was,
+consequently, Blaise's ward. A young notary there, of the name of
+Giegold, an old college friend and literary brother in arms, had done
+him the service of seeing all the people who had known of his
+Leibgeberhood--particularly a rusty, musty old tutor, who had often
+been present when the guardian's register-ships came in--and a
+postman, who had piloted them into port, and his landlord and other
+well-informed persons, who all took the Jus credulitalis (or oath of
+conviction), and whose evidence the young lawyer forwarded to Siebenkæs
+(like a mountain full of precious ore); he had no great difficulty, to
+speak of, in paying the postage of it, as he was king of the marksmen.
+
+With this stout club of evidence he resisted and withstood his guardian
+and robber.
+
+When Blaise's denial was lodged, the timid Lenette gave herself and the
+suit up for lost; poverty, lean and bare, seemed in _her_ eyes now to
+enmesh them in a network of parasite ivy, and there was no other
+prospect for them but to perish and fall to the ground. Her first
+proceeding was to burst into loud abuse of Von Meyern; for as he had
+himself told her that his father-in-law's three applications for delay
+had been the result of _his_ intercession, which he had made for her
+sake alone, she looked upon Blaise's plea of demurrer as being the
+first thorn-sucker sent forth by Rosa's revengeful soul in return for
+the imprisonment and the sacking he had undergone in Firmian's house
+(and half ascribed to her), and for what he had lost.
+
+Up to the day of the shooting-match he had supposed that the husband
+was his enemy, but not the wife; then, however, his pleasant conceit
+had been embittered and proved to be groundless. But the Venner not
+being present to hear her reproaches, she was obliged to turn the full
+stream of her anger on to her husband, to whom she attributed all the
+blame, because of his having so wickedly and sinfully changed names
+with Leibgeber. He who has married a wife will be prepared to relieve
+me of the trouble of mentioning that it made not the slightest
+difference what Siebenkæs said in reply or adduced concerning Blaise's
+wickedness (who, being the greatest Judas Iscariot and corn-Jew the
+world contained, would have robbed him just the same if his name had
+been Leibgeber still, and would have found out a thousand legal
+byepaths by which to proceed to the plundering of his ward). It had no
+effect. At last the following words were forced out of him: "You are
+quite as unjust as I should be were I to attribute this document of
+Blaise's to your behaviour to the Venner." Nothing irritates women so
+much as derogatory comparisons; they apply them indiscriminately,
+without distinction. Lenette's ears lengthened to tongues, like those
+of Rumour; her husband was immediately out-bawled and unlistened to.
+
+He was obliged to send privately to Peltzstiefel to ask where he had
+been so long, and why he had utterly forgotten their house; Stiefel was
+not even in his own house, however, but out walking, for it was a
+beautiful day.
+
+"Lenette," said Siebenkæs suddenly--he often preferred vaulting over a
+marsh on the leaping-pole of an idea to wading painfully across it on
+the long stilts of syllogism, and was anxious to banish from her memory
+the innocent remark which he had let slip about Rosa, and which she had
+so utterly misunderstood--"Lenette, I'll tell you what we'll do this
+afternoon; we'll take a strong cup of coffee, and go and take a walk
+and enjoy ourselves: it is not a Sunday, but it _is_ the day which all
+the Catholics in the town keep holiday on as the feast of the
+Annunciation, and the weather is really _too_ magnificent. We'll go and
+sit in the big upstairs room at the Rifle Club-house, as it would be a
+little too warm outside perhaps, and we can look down from the windows
+and see all the heterodox people promenading in their best clothes--and
+our Lutheran Stiefel among them, who knows?"
+
+Either I am more in error than I often am, or this was a most agreeable
+surprise to Lenette. Coffee, in the morning the water-of-baptism
+and altar-wine of the fair sex, is their love-philter and their
+waters-of-strife in the afternoon (the _latter_, however, only as
+regards the absent); but what a wondrous mill-stream for the setting in
+motion of the machinery of the ideas must an afternoon cup of coffee on
+a common working-day be for a woman such as Lenette, who rarely had any
+on other than Sunday afternoons; for before the days of the blockade of
+the continent it cost too much money.
+
+A woman who is really very much delighted needs but a very short time
+to put on her black silk bonnet and take her big church-fan, and
+(contrary to all her ordinary manners and customs) be _quite_ ready and
+dressed for a walk to the Rifle Club-house, even going the length of
+making the coffee during the process of dressing, so as to be able to
+take it, and the milk, with her in her hand.
+
+Our couple set forth at two o'clock in the happiest possible frame of
+mind, carrying with them warm in their pockets what was to be warmed up
+later on in the afternoon.
+
+Even at two o'clock, early as it was, the western and southern hills
+lay all beflooded with the warm evening glow with which the low
+December sun was bathing them, while great glaciers of cloud, ranged
+about the sky, cast their cheerful lights over the landscape. All about
+this world there beamed a beautiful brightness, which cheered and
+lighted up many a dark and narrow life.
+
+Siebenkæs pointed out the eagle's perch to Lenette while they were
+still at some distance from it--the alpenstock or boat-pole which had
+so recently helped him out of his most imminent difficulties. When they
+reached the Clubhouse he took her and showed her the shooter's-stand
+where he had shot himself with his rifle up to the dignity of bird
+emperor, and out of the Frankfort-Jew's-quarter of duns, liberating at
+his coronation at least _one_ debtor, namely, himself. They had room
+and to spare to "spread themselves out" (so to speak) upstairs in the
+members' hall--he at a writing-table by the right-hand window, and she
+with her work at another on the left.
+
+How the coffee gave warmth to this December festival may be imagined,
+but not described.
+
+Lenette put on one stocking of her husband's after another--put them on
+her left arm, that is, while her right wielded the darning-needle; and
+as she sat, with a stocking generally quite open at the bottom, she
+was, as regarded one of her arms at all events, like a lady with the
+long, fashionable Danish mittens, with holes for the fingers. However,
+she did not raise these arm-stockings of hers high enough to be seen by
+the people walking in the upper walks, but kept nodding down her "your
+very humble and obedient servant" from the open window to numbers of
+the most genteel she-heretics as they passed, wearing her own works of
+art upon their heads, in honour of the Annunciation-feast; and more
+than one sent an obliging salute up to her roof-thatcher.
+
+The strictest religious and political parity being established by law
+in Kuhschnappel, it was natural that Protestants of position should
+also go a-walking on this Catholic holiday. However, the advocate was
+perhaps enjoying himself quite as much as his wife; he went on writing
+his 'Devil's Papers,' and at the same time feasting his gaze upon the
+high places, the _sommités_ of the landscape, if not of Kuhschnappel
+society.
+
+When he first entered the room he had a most agreeable reception from a
+child's trumpet, left there by accident; the paint was not quite all
+licked away from it, and it was the smell of this paint, more even than
+the squeak of the trumpet, which pleased him so very much, by recalling
+the vague delights of Christmases of the past: so that pleasure was
+heaped upon pleasure. He could rise from his satires and point out to
+Lenette the great rooks' nests in the leafless trees, and the bare
+tables and benches in the arbours, and the invisible guests who had
+occupied seats of the blessed there on summer evenings, and still
+remembered the time, looking forward to a repetition of it; and he
+could draw her attention to the fields, where, late as it was in the
+year, volunteer gardeneresses were gathering salad for him, namely,
+corn salad or rampion, which he might have some of for supper if he had
+a mind.
+
+And now he sat at his window, with his eyes fixed upon the hills, all
+flushed with the evening red, the sun growing larger as it sunk towards
+them. Beyond these hills lay the lands where wandered his Leibgeber,
+sporting away his life.
+
+"How delightful it is, wife," he said, "that what parts me from
+Leibgeber is not a mere wide level plain, with nothing but a hillock or
+two cropping up here and there on it, but a grand, lofty wall of
+mountains, behind which he stands as if behind the grating of a
+monastery." This sounded to her almost as if her husband was glad that
+this barrier stood between them; she herself had but little liking for
+Leibgeber, and considered him to be a sort of coin-clipper to her
+husband, who cut all his angles sharper than they were by nature;
+however, in dubious cases like this, she was always glad to ask no
+questions. What he _had_ meant was exactly the reverse of what she
+supposed; he had meant that it is good, if parted from those we love,
+that it should be by holy hills, because they are, as it were, lofty
+garden-walls, behind which we picture the flowery thickets of our
+Edens; whereas, on the other verge of the broadest barnfloor of a level
+plain we only picture to ourselves a repetition of it sloping the other
+way. And this applies to nations as well as to individuals. The
+Luneburg moors or the Marklands of Prussia will not draw even an
+Italian's longing gaze towards Italy; but when a Markman in Italy sees
+the Apennines, his heart yearns to his German loved ones behind them.
+
+As Firmian looked upon that sunny mountain-barrier between two severed
+spirits, there was that in his eyes which much resembled tears; but he
+only turned his chair a little away, that Lenette might ask no
+questions; he was well aware of his old ingrained habit of getting
+angry when anybody asked what brought tears to his eyes, and he strove
+with it. Was he not, in fact, tenderness personified to-day, only
+acting his comedy in the palest middle-tints before his wife, because
+he was delighting in the fresh-growth of this enjoyment of hers, of
+which he was himself the origin. It is true she did not discover the
+existence of this, his feeling of delicate consideration for her; but
+just as he was quite content when no one but himself (least of all,
+_she_) perceived that he was poking fun at her (in the most delicate
+manner), so was he content that she should be in utter ignorance that
+he was causing her a little happiness.
+
+At last they left the spacious room, the sun now robing them in
+purple hues; and as they went he drew Lenette's attention to the
+liquid, golden splendour shining upon the roofs of the greenhouses,
+and he hung himself on to the sun--at that moment cut in two by the
+mountain-range--that he might sink, with it, to his far-away friend.
+Ah! how strong is love in distance--be it distance of space, or of
+time, of the future or the past--ay, or that greater distance
+still--beyond this world! And so the evening might very well have ended
+in an altogether delightful manner, had not something intervened.
+
+For some particularly ingenious evil spirit or other had taken the
+Heimlicher von Blaise, and so set him down, promenading in the open
+air, that the advocate must needs come within shooting range and
+hailing distance of him just on a feast of the Annunciation for _good_
+folks only. When the guardian went through the proper forms of
+salutation--accompanying them with a smile such as, fortunately, can
+never be seen on a child's face--Siebenkæs returned his salutes
+politely, although with a mere clutching and jerking at his hat--which
+he didn't take off. Lenette tried to make amends for this, by doubling
+the profundity of her own bow and curtsey; but as soon as practicable
+she administered to her husband a garden lecture, or, rather, a garden
+_paling_ lecture, on his always, as if on purpose, irritating his
+guardian whenever he had an opportunity. "Indeed, love," he said, "I
+couldn't help it. I really meant nothing of the kind to-day, of all
+days in the year."
+
+The truth of the matter, indeed, is, that Siebenkæs had sometime before
+complained to his wife that his hat, which was of softish felt, was
+getting a good deal spoiled by having to be so often taken off to
+people in the streets, and that he could think of nothing better than
+to protect it with a coat of mail in the shape of a stiff cover of
+green oilskin, so that when packed up in this pudding roll he might go
+on daily employing it in those offices of out-door politeness which men
+owe one to another, without ever having to take hold of the hat
+_itself_ at all. Well, the first walk he took after assuming this
+double hat, or hat's hat, was to a grocer's, where he disembowelled the
+inner one from its envelope and swopped it away for six pounds of
+coffee, which warmed the four chambers of his brain better than the
+hare-skin had ever done; he then went tranquilly home, with only the
+coadjutor hat on his head, undetected, and thenceforward bore the empty
+case through the streets with a secret joy that, in a sense, he now
+really took off his _hat_ to nobody--with other entertaining fancies
+bearing on the subject of his sugar-loaf.
+
+Of course, when he forgot--and on that day in particular, it was
+perhaps excusable that he did so--to support his hat-case with the
+necessary framework of artificial rafters, it was really almost an
+impossibility to take this mere shell of a hat _right_ OFF for purposes
+of salutation. The most he could do was just to _touch_ it courteously,
+like an officer returning a salute; and thus, against his will, play
+the part of a rude and ill-bred individual.
+
+And it so happened that just on this very day get it off he could not.
+
+It was so ordained, however, that matters should not even rest _here_
+(as regarded our couple's promenade), but one of the above-mentioned
+ingenious evil spirits changed the scene of the drama with such
+nimbleness, that we have a fresh combination before our eyes before we
+know where we are. Just in front of our wedded pair, a master tailor of
+the Catholic confession was taking his walk, most sprucely attired in
+honour of the Feast of the Annunciation, like all the rest of his
+_pro_- and CON-fession. As ill luck would have it, this tailor, being
+in a narrow walk, had (whether for fear of mud, or in the delight of
+his soul over his holiday) so elevated his coat-tails that the
+vertebral extremity, the _os coccygis_, or (shall we call it) insertion
+of the spinal cord, of his waistcoat, was clearly exhibited; in other
+words, the _background_ of his waistcoat, which, as we know, is
+generally executed in colours more subdued than those used for the
+brighter and more prominent foreground on the chest of the wearer. "Hy!
+Mr.!" cried Lenette; "what are you doing with a lot of my chintz on the
+back of you?"
+
+The truth was that this tailor had put aside and taken possession of so
+much of a nice green Augspurg chintz (sent to him by Lenette, on her
+becoming a queen, to make her a new body) as he considered proper and
+Christianly honest, calculating on the principle of "no charge for wine
+samples," and this trifle of a sample had just barely sufficed to form
+a sober background to his pea-green waistcoat; and he had contented
+himself with so dim a reverse side for this waistcoat in the confident
+expectation that it would never be seen. However, as the tailor went on
+with his walk (after Lenette had shouted her query at him), as utterly
+unmoved as if it had nothing on earth to do with _him_, the little
+spark of her anger became a blazing flame, and, regardless of all her
+husband's winks and whispers, she cried aloud, "Why, it's my very own
+chintz, that I got all the way from Augspurg; do you hear, Mr. Mowser,
+you've stolen my chintz, you blackguard, you!" Then, and not till then,
+the guilty chintz-robber turned round with much _sangfroid_, and said,
+"_Prove_ that, if you please! But, mind, _I'll_ CHINTZ YOU, if there be
+such a thing as law in all Kuhschnappel."
+
+At this she burst into a conflagration. Her husband's prayers and
+entreaties were but as wind to her. "Ey! you riff-raff," she snapped
+out. "But I'll have what's my own--you villain!" she cried. The only
+reply the tailor vouchsafed to this attack was this--he simply lifted
+his coat-tails with both hands high above the endorsed waistcoat, and,
+bending a little forward, said, "There!" after which he strode slowly
+on, keeping at the same focal distance from her, so as to bask in her
+warmth as long as possible.
+
+Siebenkæs was the most to be pitied on this rich feast day, when, in
+spite of all his juristic and theological exorcisms, he could not cast
+out this devil of discord--when by good luck his guardian angel
+suddenly emerged from a side path, Peltzstiefel to wit, taking his
+walk. Gone, so far as Lenette was concerned, were the tailor, the
+quarter-ell of chintz, the apple of discord, and the devil thereof; the
+blue of her eyes and the blush on her cheek fronted Stiefel as bright
+and as fresh as the blue of the evening sky and the blush on its sunset
+clouds. Ten ells of chintz and half that number of tailors with
+waistcoat-backs of it into the bargain, were to her, at that moment,
+feathers light as air, not worth a word or a farthing; so that
+Siebenkæs saw on the instant that Stiefel's coming was as that of a
+regular Mount of Olives all full of mere olive-branches of peace;
+although for discord devils hailing from another quarter there might
+without difficulty be pressed from the olives on said mountain an oil
+which could not be poured on any fire of matrimonial difference which
+_Stiefel's_ would be the bucket to put out. If Lenette was a tender,
+delicate, white butterfly, silently hovering and fluttering about
+Peltzstiefel's flowery path, _out of doors_--when she got him into her
+house she was an absolute Greek Psyche; and, in spite of all my
+partiality for her, I am bound, under pain of having all the rest
+discredited, to insert in this protocol a clear statement (much as I
+regret to do so) to the effect that on this particular evening she gave
+one the idea of being nothing but some clear-winged translucent soul
+free from all trammels of body--which, at some former time, while as
+yet in the body, had stood in some love-relationship to the Schulrath,
+but now hovered about him with upraised pinions, and fanned him with
+fluttering downy plumes, and which at length weary of hovering, and
+pleased to rest once more on the loved perch of a body, settled upon
+Lenette's, there being no other feminine one at hand, and there folded
+its wings to rest. Such seemed Lenette. But why was she thus to-day?
+Stiefel's ignorance and delight at it were great; Firmian's very small.
+Before I explain it, I will say, "I pity thee, poor husband, and thee,
+too, poor wife. For why must the smooth flow of the stream of your life
+(and of our own) be always broken by sorrows or by sins, and why cannot
+it fall into its grave in the _Black_ Sea, without having to pass over
+thirteen cataracts, like the river Dnieper?" However, the reason why
+Lenette on this day in particular exhibited all her heart toward
+Stiefel, almost bared of the cloister grating of the breast, was that
+she was, just on this day, so keenly suffering under her misery--her
+poverty. Stiefel was full of genuine, solid treasures; Firmian's were
+all lacquered. I know that her Siebenkæs, whom before marriage she had
+loved with the calm and cool regard of a wife, would have found that
+she would have come to love him after marriage with the warm affection
+of a _fiancée_, if he had only been able to give her the bare
+necessaries of life. There are hundreds of girls who bring themselves
+to believe that they love the man to whom they are engaged, whereas it
+is not till after marriage that the play becomes a reality--and that
+for good reasons, both metallic and physiological. In a well-filled
+room and kitchen, filled with a comfortable income, and twelve
+household labours of Hercules, Lenette would have been quite true to
+the advocate, though an entire philosophical society of Stiefels had
+sat down all round her, and would have said and thought, every hour of
+the day, "No more, thank you--I am helped;" but as things were, in a
+house and kitchen so empty as hers, the chambers of a woman's heart
+grow full; in one word, no good comes of it. For a woman's soul is by
+nature a beautiful _fresco_ painted on rooms, table-leaves, dresses,
+silver salvers, and household plenishing in general. A woman has a
+large stock of virtue, but few virtues; she needs a confined sphere and
+social forms, and without these flower-sticks the pure white flowers
+trail in the dust of the border. A man may be a citizen of the world,
+and if he has nothing else to put his arms round he can press the
+entire earthly ball to his bosom, although he can't put his arms round
+much more of it than will make him a grave. But a citizen_ess_ of the
+world is a giantess, and goes through the world with nothing but
+spectators, and is nothing but a character on the stage.
+
+I ought to have described the whole of this evening much more
+circumstantially than I have done, for it was upon this evening that
+the wheels of the _vis-à-vis_ phæton of wedded life began to smoke, as
+a consequence of the friction they had recently been subjected to, and
+threatened to break out into a blaze of the fire of jealousy. Jealousy
+is like Maria Theresa's small-pox, which allowed that princess to pass
+with impunity through thirty hospitals, full of small-pox patients, but
+attacked her beneath the Crowns of Hungary and Germany. Siebenkæs had
+had on that of Kuhschnappel (the Bird-one) for a week or two now.
+
+After this evening Stiefel, who took an increasing delight in sitting
+basking in the rays of the still rising Sun of Lenette, came oftener
+and oftener, and considered himself the peace-maker, not the
+peace-breaker.
+
+It is now my duty to paint with the utmost minutiæ of detail the last
+and most important day of this year, the 31st of December, with its
+background and foreground all complete, and with all accessories.
+
+Before the 31st of December arrived, of course Christmas came, a time
+which had to be gilt, and which turned Siebenkæs's silver age (after
+the Royal shot) into a brazen and a wooden age. The money went. But,
+worse than that, poor Firmian had fretted, and laughed, himself into an
+illness. A man who has all his life, upon the upper wings of Fantasy
+and the lower wings of good spirits, skimmed lightly away over the tops
+of all the spread-net snares and the open pitfalls of life, does, if
+once he chances to get impaled upon the hard spines of the full-blown
+thistles (above the purple blossoms and the honey-vessels of which he
+used to hover) beat in a terrible way about him, hungry, bleeding,
+epileptically--a glad, happy man finds in the first sunstroke of
+trouble well-nigh his death-blow. To the polypus of anxiety daily
+growing in Siebenkæs's heart add the effects of the work and excitement
+of authorship. He was very anxious to get done with his 'Selections
+from the Devil's Papers' at the earliest moment possible, so as to live
+on the price of them and carry on the law-suit besides. So that he sat
+through entire nights almost (and chairs as well). And in this way he
+wrote himself into an affection of the chest, such as the present
+author brought upon himself, and that, as far as he could make out,
+simply by excess of bountiful generosity towards the world of letters.
+He was attacked, just as I was, by a sudden pausing of the breath and
+of the action of the heart, succeeded by a blank disappearance of the
+spirit of life, and then by a throbbing rush of blood up to the brain;
+and this came on most frequently while he was sitting at his literary
+spinning-wheel and spool.[53]
+
+However, not a soul offers either of us one single farthing, by way of
+indemnification, on account of it. It would appear to be ordained that
+authors are not to go down to posterity in the body, but only in the
+form of portraits or plaster-casts; as delicate trout are boiled before
+being sent away as presents, people don't put in the laurel-sprig
+(which is stuck into our mouths as lemons are into the wild boar's)
+until we have been killed and dished. It would be a gratification to my
+colleagues and to me if a reader whose heart we have moved (as well as
+its auricles) were only to say as much as, "This _sweet_ emotion of
+_my_ heart was not produced without a hypochondriac palpitation of
+theirs." We brighten and illuminate many a head which never dreams of
+thinking. "Yes, I have to thank _them_ for this, it is true, but what
+is their reward? Why, pains in their _own_ heads--kephalalgia and
+neuralgia in various forms!" Ay, he ought to interrupt me in the middle
+of a satire like this, and cry, "Great as is the pain which his satires
+cause _me_, they cause _him_ far more; luckily, _my_ pain is only
+mental!" Health of body only runs parallel with health of mind; it
+turns aside and departs from erudition, from over-much imagination, and
+from great profundity. All these as little indicate health of mind as
+corpulence, a runner's feet, a wrestler's arms, indicate health of
+body. I have often wished that all souls were bottled into their bodies
+as the Pyrmont water is put into its flasks. The best strength of it is
+allowed to escape first, because, otherwise, it would break the bottle;
+but it would seem that it is only in the case of colleges of cardinals
+(if we are to credit Gorani), cathedral chapters, &c., that this
+precaution is adopted, and that _their_ extraordinary power of ability,
+which would other wise have burst their bodies up, is, as a preliminary
+measure, let off a good deal before they are put into bodies and sent
+upon earth; so that the bottles last quite well for seventy or eighty
+years.
+
+With a sick mind, then, and a sick heart, without money, Siebenkæs
+begun the last day of the year. The day itself had put on its most
+beautiful summer-dress--one of Berlin blue; it was as cerulean as
+Krishna, or the new sect of Grahamites, or the Jews in Persia. It had
+had a fire lighted in the balloon-stove of the sun, and the snow,
+delicately candied upon the earth, melted into wintergreen, like the
+sugar on some cunningly-devised supper-dish, as soon as the hills were
+brought within reach of its warmth. The year seemed to be saying
+good-bye to Time as if with a cheerful warmth, attended with joyful
+tears. Firmian longed to run and sun himself upon the moist, green
+sward; but he had Professor Lang, of Baireuth, to review first.
+
+He wrote reviews as many people offer up prayers--only in time of need.
+It was like the water-carrying of the Athenian, done that he might
+afterwards devote himself to the studies of his choice without dying of
+hunger. But when he was reviewing, he drew his satiric sting into its
+sheath, constructing his criticisms of material drawn only from his
+store of wax and his honey-bag. "Little authors," he said, "are always
+better than their works, and great ones are worse than theirs. Why
+should I pardon moral failings--e.g. self-conceit--in the genius, and
+not in the dunce? Least of all should it be forgiven the genius.
+Unmerited poverty and ugliness do not deserve to be ridiculed; but they
+as little deserve it when they _are merited_--though I am aware Cicero
+is against me here--for a moral fault (and consequently its punishment)
+can, of a certainty, not be made greater by a chance physical
+consequence, which sometimes follows upon it, and sometimes does not.
+Can it? Does an extravagant person who chances to come to poverty
+deserve a severer punishment than one who does not? If anything, rather
+the reverse." If we apply this to bad authors, from whose own eyes
+their lack of merit is hidden by an impenetrable veil of self-conceit,
+and at whose unoffending heart the critic discharges the fury which is
+aroused in him by their (offending) heads, we may, indeed, direct our
+bitterest irony against _the race_, but the _individual_ will be best
+instructed by means of gentleness. I think it would be the gold-test,
+the trial-by-crucible, of a morally great and altogether perfect
+scholar to give him a bad, but celebrated book to review.
+
+For my own part, I will allow myself to be reviewed by Dr. Merkel
+throughout eternity if I digress again in this chapter. Firmian
+worked in some haste at his notice of Lang's essay, entitled
+"Præmissa Historiæ Superintendentium Generalium Bairuthi non
+Specialium--Continuatione XX." It was quite essential that he should
+get hold of a dollar or two that day, and he also longed to go and take
+a walk, the weather was so motherly, so _hatching_. The new year fell
+on the Saturday, and as early as the Thursday (the day before the one
+we are writing of) Lenette had begun the holding of preliminary feasts
+of purification (she now washed daily more and more _in advance_ of
+actual necessities); but to-day she was keeping a regular feast of
+in-gathering among the furniture, &c. The room was being put through a
+course of derivative treatment for the clearing away of all impurities.
+With her eye on her _index expurgandorum_, she thrust everything that
+had wooden legs into the water, and followed it herself with balls of
+soap; in short, she paddled and bubbled, in the Levitical purification
+of the room, in her warm, native element, for once in her life to her
+heart's full content. As for Siebenkæs, he sat bolt-upright in
+purgatorial fire, already beginning to emit a smell of burning.
+
+For, as it happened, he was rather madder than usual that day, to begin
+with. Firstly, because he had made up his mind that he would pawn the
+striped calico-gown in the afternoon, though whole nunneries were to
+shriek their loudest at it, and because he foresaw that he would have
+to grow exceedingly warm in consequence. And this resolve of resolves
+he had taken on this particular day, because (and this is at the same
+time the second reason why he was madder than usual)--because he was
+sorry that their good days were all gone again, and that their music of
+the spheres had all been marred by Lenette's funereal Misereres.
+
+"Wife!" he said, "I'm reviewing for money now, recollect." She went on
+with her scraping. "I have got Professor Lang before me here--the
+seventh chapter of him, in which he treats of the sixth of the
+Superintendents-General of Bayreuth, Herr Stockfleth." She was going to
+stop in a minute or two, but just then, you know, she really _could_
+NOT. Women are fond of doing everything "by and bye"--they like putting
+a thing off just for a minute or two, which is the reason why they put
+off even their arrival in this world a few minutes longer than boys
+do.[54] "This essay," he continued, with forced calmness, "ought to
+have been reviewed in the 'Messenger' six months ago, and it'll never
+do for the 'Messenger' to be like the 'Universal German Library' and
+the Pope, and canonise people a century or so after date."
+
+If he had only been able to maintain his forced calmness for one minute
+longer, he would have got to the end of Lenette's buzzing din; however,
+he couldn't. "Oh! the devil take me, and you, too, and the 'Messenger
+of the Gods' into the bargain," he burst out, starting up and dashing
+his pen on the floor. "I don't know," he went on, suddenly resuming his
+self-control, speaking in a faint, piteous tone, and sitting down,
+quite unnerved, feeling something like a man with cupping-glasses on
+all over him--"I don't know a bit what I'm translating, or whether I'm
+writing Stockfleth or Lang. What a stupid arrangement it is that an
+advocate mayn't be as deaf as a judge. If I were deaf, I should be
+exempt from torture then. Do you know how many people it takes to
+constitute a tumult by law? Either ten, or you by yourself in that
+washing academy of music of yours." He was not so much inclined to be
+reasonable as to do as the Spanish innkeeper did, who charged the noise
+made by his guests in the bill. But now, having had her way, and gained
+her point, she was noiseless in word and deed.
+
+He finished his critique in the forenoon, and sent it to Stiefel, his
+chief, who wrote back that he would bring the money for it himself in
+the evening, for he now seized upon every possible opportunity of
+paying a visit. At dinner Firmian (in whose head the sultry, fœtid
+vapour of ill-temper would not dissolve and fall), said, "I can't
+understand how you come to care so very little about cleanliness and
+order. It would be better even if you rather _overdid_ your cleanliness
+than otherwise. People say, what a pity it is such an orderly man as
+Siebenkæs should have such a slovenly kind of wife!" To irony of this
+sort, though she knew quite well it _was_ irony, she always opposed
+regular formal arguments. He could never get her to enjoy these little
+jests instead of arguing about them, or join him in laughing at the
+masculine view of the question. The fact is, a woman abandons her
+opinion as soon as her husband adopts it. Even in church, the women
+sing the tunes an octave higher than the men that they may differ from
+them in all things.
+
+In the afternoon the great, the momentous, hour approached in which the
+ostracism, the banishment from house and home, of the checked calico
+gown was at last to be carried out--the last and greatest deed of the
+year 1785. Of this signal for fight, this Timour's and Muhammed's red
+battle-flag, this Ziska's hide, which always set them by the ears, his
+very soul was sick: he would have been delighted if somebody would have
+stolen it, simply to be quit of the wearisome, threadbare idea of the
+wretched rag for good and all. He did not hurry himself, but introduced
+his petition with all the wordy prolixity of an M.P. addressing the
+house (at home). He asked her to guess what might be the greatest
+kindness, the most signal favour which she could do him on this last
+day of the old year. He said he had an hereditary enemy, an
+Anti-Christ, a dragon, living under his roof; tares sown among his
+wheat by an enemy, which she could pull up if she chose; and, at last,
+he brought the checked calico gown out of the drawer, with a kind of
+twilight sorrow: "_This_," he said, "is the bird of prey which
+pursues me; the net which Satan sets to catch me; his sheep-skin
+my martyr-robe, my Cassim's slipper. Dearest, do me but this one
+favour--send it to the pawn-shop!"
+
+"Don't answer just yet," he said, gently laying his hand on her lips;
+"let me just remind you what a stupid parish did when the only
+blacksmith there was in it was going to be hanged in the village. This
+parish thought it preferable to condemn an innocent master-tailor or
+two to the gallows, because they could be better spared. Now, a woman
+of your good sense must surely see how much easier and better it would
+be to let me take away this mere piece of tailor's stitch-work, than
+metal things which we eat out of every day; the mourning calico won't
+be wanted, you know, as long as I'm alive."
+
+"I've seen quite clearly for a long while past," she said, "that you've
+made up your mind to carry off my mourning dress from me, by hook or by
+crook, whether I will or no. But I'm not going to let you have it.
+Suppose I were to say to you, pawn your watch, how would you like
+that?" Perhaps the reason why husbands get into the way of issuing
+their orders in a needlessly dictatorial manner is, that they generally
+have little effect, but rather confirm opposition than overcome it.
+
+"Damnation!" he cried; "that'll do, that's quite enough! I'm not a
+turkey-cock, nor a bonassus neither, to be continually driven into a
+frenzy by a piece of coloured rag. It goes to the pawn-shop to-day, as
+sure as my name's Siebenkæs."
+
+"Your name is Leibgeber as well," said she.
+
+"Devil fly away with me, if that calico remains in this house!" said
+he. On which she began to cry, and lament the bitter fortune which left
+her nothing now, not even the very clothes for her back. When
+thoughtless tears fall into a seething masculine heart, they often have
+the effect which drops of water have when they fall upon bubbling
+molten copper; the fluid mass bursts asunder with a great explosion.
+
+"Heavenly, kind, gentle Devil," said he, "do please come and break my
+neck for me. May God have pity on a woman like this! Very well, then,
+keep your calico; keep this Lenten altar-cloth of yours to yourself.
+But may the Devil fly away with me if I don't cock the old deer's horns
+that belonged to my father on to my head this very day, like a poacher
+on the pillory, and hawk them about the streets for sale in broad
+daylight. Ay. _I give you my word of honour_ it shall be done, for all
+the fun it may afford every soul in the place. And I shall simply say
+that it is your doing; I'll do it, as sure as there's a devil in hell."
+
+He went, gnashing his teeth, to the window, and looked into the street,
+seeing vacancy. A rustic funeral was passing slowly by; the bier was a
+man's shoulder, and on it tottered a child's rude coffin.
+
+Such a sight is a touching one, when one thinks of the little, obscure,
+human creature, passing over from the fœtal slumber to the slumber
+of death, from the amnion-membrane in this life to the shroud, that
+amnion-membrane of the next; whose eyes have closed at their first
+glimpse of this bright earth, without looking on the parents who now
+gaze after it with theirs so wet with tears; which has been loved
+without loving in return; whose little tongue moulders to dust before
+it has ever spoken; as does its face ere it has smiled upon this odd,
+contradictory, inconsistent orb of ours. These cut buds of this mould
+will find a stem on which great destiny will graft them, these flowers
+which, like some besides, close in sleep while it is still early
+morning, will yet feel the rays of a morning sun which will open them
+once more. As Firmian looked at the cold, shrouded child passing by, in
+this hour, when he was ignobly quarrelling about the mourning dress
+(which should mourn for _him_)--now, when the very last drops of the
+old year were flowing so fast away, and his heart, now becoming so
+terribly accustomed to these passing fainting fits, forbade him to hope
+that he could ever complete the new one--now, amid all these pains and
+sorrows, he seemed to hear the unseen river of Death murmuring under
+his feet (as the Chinese lead rushing brooks under the soil of their
+gardens), and the thin, brittle crust of ice on which he was standing
+seemed as if it would soon crack and sink with him into the watery
+depths. Unspeakably touched, he said to Lenette, "Perhaps you may be
+quite right, dear, after all, to keep your mourning dress; you may have
+some presentiment that I am not going to live. Do as you think best,
+then, dear; I would fain not embitter this last of December any more; I
+don't know that it may not be _my_ last in another sense, and that in
+another year I may not be nearer to that poor baby than you. I am going
+for a walk now."
+
+She said nothing; all this startled and surprised her. He hurried away,
+to escape the answer which was sure to come eventually; his absence
+would, in the circumstances, be the most eloquent kind of oratory. All
+persons are better than their outbreaks (or ebullitions)--that is, than
+their _bad_ ones; for all are worse than their _noble_ ones, also--and
+when we allow the former an hour or so to dissipate and disperse, we
+gain something better than our point--we gain our opponent. He left
+Lenette a very grave subject for cogitation, however,--the stag's horns
+and his word of honour.
+
+I have already once written it. The winter was lying on the ground all
+bare and naked, not even the bed-sheet and chrisom-cloth of snow thrown
+over it; there it lay beside the dry, withered mummy of the by-gone
+summer. Firmian looked with an unsatisfied gaze athwart unclothed
+fields (over which the cradle-quilt of the snow, and the white crape of
+the frost, had not yet been laid), and down at the streams, not yet
+struck palsied and speechless. Bright, warm days at the end of December
+soften us with a sadness in which there are four or five bitter drops
+more than in that belonging to the after-summer. Up to twelve o'clock
+at night, and until the thirty-first day of the twelfth month, the
+wintry, nocturnal, idea of dissolution and decay oppresses us; but as
+soon as it is one in the morning, and the first of January, a morning
+breeze, speaking of new life, moves away the clouds which were lying
+over our souls, and we begin to look for the dark, pure, morning blue,
+the rising of the star of morning and of spring. On a December day like
+this the pale, dim, stagnant world of stiffened, sapless, plants about
+us oppresses and hems us round; and the insect-collections lying
+beneath the vegetation, covered with earth; and the rafter-work of
+bare, dry, wrinkly trees; the December sun hanging in the sky at noon
+no higher than the June sun does at evening; all these combined shed a
+yellow lustre as of death (like that of burning alcohol) over the pale,
+faded meadows; and long giant shadows lie extended, motionless,
+everywhere--_evening_ shadows of this evening of nature and of the
+year--like the ruined remains, the burnt-out ash-heaps of nights as
+long as themselves. But the glistening snow, on the other hand, spread
+over the blooming earth under us, is like the blue foreground of
+spring, or a white fog a foot or two in depth. The quiet dark sky lies
+above, and the white earth is like some white moon, whose sparkling
+ice-fields melt, as we draw nearer, into dark waving meadows of
+flowers.
+
+The heart of our sorrowful Firmian grew sadder yet as he stood upon
+this cold, burnt-out hearth-place of nature. The daily-recurring
+pausings of his heart and pulse were (he thought) the sudden silences
+of the storm-bell in his breast, presaging a speedy end of the thunder,
+and dissolution of the storm-cloud, of life. He thought the faltering
+of his mechanism was caused by some loose pin having fallen in among
+the wheels somewhere; he ascribed it to polypus of the heart, and his
+giddiness he felt sure gave warning of an attack of apoplexy. To-day
+was the three hundred and sixty-fifth Act of the year, and the curtain
+was slowly dropping upon it already: what could this suggest to him
+save gloomy similes of his own epilogue--of the winter solstice of his
+shortened, over-shadowed life? The weeping image of his Lenette came
+now before his forgiving, departing soul, and he thought, "She is
+really not in the right; but I will yield to her, as we have not very
+long to be together now. I am glad for her sake, poor soul, that _my_
+arms are mouldering away from about her, and that her friend is taking
+her to his."
+
+He went up on to the scaffold of blood and sorrow where _his_ friend,
+Heinrich, had taken his farewell. From that eminence, as often as his
+heart was heavy, his glance would follow Leibgeber's path as far as the
+hills; but to-day his eyes were moister than before, for he had no hope
+that he would see the spring again. This spot was to him the hill which
+the Emperor Adrian permitted the Jews to go up twice in the year, that
+they might look towards the ruins of the holy city and weep for the
+place wherein their steps might tread no more. The sun was now
+assembling the shadows which were to close in upon the old year, and as
+the stars appeared--the stars which rose at evening now being those
+which in spring adorn the morning--fate snapped away the loveliest and
+richest in flowers of the liana-branches from his soul, and from the
+wound flowed clear water. "I shall see nothing of the coming spring,"
+he thought, "except her blue, which, as in enamel-painting, is the
+first laid on of all her colours." His heart--one educated to be
+loving--could always fly for rest from his satires and from dry details
+of business-duty, sometimes, too, from Lenette's indifference and lack
+of sympathy, to the warm breast of the eternal goddess Nature, ever
+ready to take us to her heart. Into the free, unveiled, and blooming
+out-door world, beneath the grand wide sky, he loved to repair with all
+his sighs and sorrows, and in this great garden he made all his graves
+(as the Jews made them in smaller ones). And when our fellows forsake
+and wound us, the sky and the earth, and the little blooming tree, open
+their arms and take us into them; the flowers press themselves to our
+wounded hearts, the streams mingle in our tears, and the breezes
+breathe coolness into our sighs. A mighty angel troubles and inspires
+the great ocean-pool of Bethesda; into its warm waves we plunge, with
+all our thousand aches and pains, and ascend from the water of life
+with our spasms all relaxed and our health and vigour renewed once
+more.
+
+Firmian walked slowly home with a heart all conciliation, and eyes
+which, now that it was dark, he did not take the pains to dry. He went
+over in his mind everything which could possibly be adduced in his
+Lenette's excuse. He strove to win himself over to her side of the
+question by reflecting that she could not (like him) arm herself
+against the shocks, the stumbling-stones, of life by putting on the
+Minerva's helm, the armour of meditation, philosophy, authorship. He
+thoroughly determined (he had determined the same thing thirty times
+before) to be as scrupulously careful to observe in all things the
+outside _politesses_ of life with _her_ as with the most absolute
+stranger;[55] nay, he already enveloped himself in the fly-net or
+mail-shirt of patience, in case he should really find the checked
+calico untranslated at home. This is how we men continually
+behave--stopping our ears tight with both hands, trying our hardest to
+fall into the siesta, the mid-day sleep, of a little peace of mind (if
+we can only anyhow manage it); thus do our souls, swayed by our
+passions, reflect the sunlight of truth as one dazzling spot (like
+mirrors or calm water), while all the surrounding surface lies but in
+deeper shade.
+
+How differently all fell out! He was received by Peltzstiefel, who
+advanced to meet him, all solemnity of deportment, and with a
+church-visitation countenance full of inspection-sermons. Lenette
+scarcely turned her swollen eyes towards the windward side of her
+husband as he came in at the door. Stiefel kept the strings tight which
+held the muscles of his knit face, lest it might unbend before
+Firmian's, which was all beaming soft with kindliness, and thus
+commenced: "Mr. Siebenkæs, I came to this house to hand you the money
+for your review of Professor Lang; but friendship demands of me a duty
+of a far more serious and important kind, that I should exhort you and
+constrain you to conduct yourself towards this poor unfortunate wife of
+yours here like a true Christian man to a true Christian woman." "Or
+even better, if you like," he said. "What is it all about, wife?" She
+preserved an embarrassed silence. She had asked Stiefel's advice and
+assistance, less for the sake of obtaining them than to have an
+opportunity of telling her story. The truth was, that when the
+Schulrath came unexpectedly in, while her burst of crying was at its
+bitterest, she had really just that very moment sent her checked,
+spiny, outer caterpillar-skin (the calico-dress, to wit) away to the
+pawnshop; for her husband having pledged his honour, she felt sure
+that, beyond a doubt, he would stick those preposterous horns on his
+head and really go and hawk them, all over the town, for she well knew
+how sacredly he kept his word, and also how utterly he disregarded
+"appearances,"--and that both of these peculiarities of his were always
+at their fellest pitch at a time of domestic difficulty like the
+present. Perhaps she would have told her ghostly counsellor and adviser
+nothing about the matter, but contented herself with having a good cry
+when he came, if she had had her way (and her dress); but, having
+sacrificed both, she needed compensation and revenge. At first she had
+merely reckoned up difficulties in indeterminate quantities to him; but
+when he pressed her more closely, her bursting heart overflowed and
+_all_ her woes streamed forth. Stiefel, contrarily to the laws of
+equity (and of several universities), always held the complainant in
+any case to be in the right, simply because he spoke _first_: most men
+think impartiality of heart is impartiality of head. Stiefel swore that
+he would tell her husband what he ought to be told, and that the calico
+should be back in the house that very afternoon.
+
+So this father-confessor began to jingle his bunch of
+binding-and-loosing keys in the advocate's face, and reported to him
+his wife's general confession and the pawning of the dress. When there
+are two diverse actions of a person to be given account of--a vexatious
+and an agreeable one--the effect depends on which is spoken of the
+first; it is the first narrated one which gives the ground-tint to the
+listener's mind, and the one subsequently portrayed only takes rank as
+a subdued accessory figure. Firmian should have heard that Lenette
+pawned the dress _first_, while he was still out of doors, and of her
+tale-bearing not till afterwards. But you see how the devil brought it
+about, as it really did all happen. "What!" (Siebenkæs _felt_, if not
+exactly _thought_) "What! She makes my rival her confidant and my
+judge! I bring her home a heart all kindness and reconciliation, and
+she makes a fresh cut in it at once, distressing and annoying me in
+this way, on the very last day of the year, with her confounded
+chattering and tale-telling." By this last expression he meant
+something which the reader does not yet quite understand; for I have
+not yet told him that Lenette had the bad habit of being--rather
+ill-bred; wherefore she made common people of her own sex, such as the
+bookbinder's wife, the recipients of her secret thoughts--the electric
+discharging-rods of her little atmospheric disturbances; while, at the
+same time, she took it ill of her husband that, though he did not,
+indeed, admit serving-men and maids and "the vulgar" into his own
+mysteries, he yet accompanied them into theirs.
+
+Stiefel (like all people who have little knowledge of the world, and
+are not gifted with much tact,--who never assume anything as granted in
+the first place, but always go through every subject _ab initio_)--now
+delivered a long, theological, matrimonial-service sort of exhortation
+concerning love as between Christian husband and wife, and ended by
+insisting on the recall of the calico (his Necker, so to say). This
+address irritated Firmian, and that chiefly because (irrespectively of
+_it_) his wife thought he had not any religion, or, at all events, not
+so much as Stiefel. "I remember" (he said) "seeing in the history of
+France that Gaston, the first prince of the blood, having caused his
+brother some little difficulties or other of the warlike sort on one
+occasion, in the subsequent treaty of peace bound himself, in a special
+article, to love Cardinal Richelieu. Now I think there's no question
+but that an article to the effect that man and wife shall love one
+another ought to be inserted as a distinct, separate, secret clause, in
+all contracts of marriage; for though love, like man himself, is by
+origin eternal and immortal, yet, thanks to the wiles of the serpent,
+it certainly becomes mortal enough within a short time. But, as far as
+the calico's concerned, let's all thank God that _that_ apple of
+discord has been pitched out of the house." Stiefel, by way of offering
+up a sacrifice, and burning a little incense before the shrine of his
+beloved Lenette, _insisted_ on the return of the calico, and did so
+very firmly; for Siebenkæs's gentle, complaisant readiness to yield to
+him, up to this point, in little matters of sacrifice and service, had
+led him to entertain the deluded idea that he possessed an irresistible
+authority over him. The husband, a good deal agitated now, said, "We'll
+drop the subject, if you please." "Indeed, we'll do nothing of the
+kind," said Stiefel; "I must really _insist_ upon it that your wife has
+her dress back." "It can't be done, Herr Schulrath." "I'll advance you
+whatever money you require," cried Stiefel, in a fever of indignation
+at this striking and unwonted piece of disobedience. It was now, of
+course, more impossible than ever for the advocate to retire from his
+position; he shook his head eighty times. "Either _you_ are out of your
+mind," said Stiefel, "or _I_ am; just let me go through my reasons to
+you once more." "Advocates," said Siebenkæs, "_were_ fortunate enough,
+in former times, to have private chaplains of their own; but it was
+found that there was no converting any of them, and therefore they are
+now exempt from being preached at."
+
+Lenette wept more bitterly--Stiefel shouted the louder on that account;
+in his annoyance at his ill success, he thought it well to repeat his
+commands in a ruder and blunter form; of course Siebenkæs resisted more
+firmly. Stiefel was a pedant, a class of men which surpasses all others
+in a bare-faced, blind, self-conceit, just like an unceasing wind
+blowing from all the points of the compass at once (for a pedant even
+makes an ostentatious display of his own personal idiosyncrasies).
+Stiefel, like a careful and conscientious player, felt it a duty to
+thoroughly throw himself into the part he was representing, and carry
+it out in all its details, and say, "Either" "Or" Mr. Siebenkæs;
+"either the mourning gown comes, or _I_ go, _aut-aut_. My visits cannot
+be of much consequence, it's true, still they have I consider, a
+certain value, if it were but on Mrs. Siebenkæs's account." Firmian,
+doubly irritated, firstly at the imperious rudeness and conceit of an
+alternative of the sort, and secondly at the lowness of the market
+price for which the Rath abandoned their society, could but say,
+"Nobody can influence your decision on that point now but yourself. _I_
+most certainly cannot. It will be an easy matter for you, Herr
+Schulrath, to give up our acquaintance--though there is no real reason
+why you should--but it will not be easy for me to give up yours,
+although I shall have no choice." Stiefel, from whose brow the
+sprouting laurels were thus so unexpectedly shorn--and that, too, in
+the presence of the woman he loved--had nothing to do but take his
+leave; but he did it with three thoughts gnawing at his heart--his
+vanity was hurt, his dear Lenette was crying, and her husband was
+rebellious and insubordinate, and resisting his authority.
+
+And as the Schulrath said farewell for ever, a bitter, bitter sorrow
+stood fixed in the eyes of his beloved Lenette--a sorrow which, though
+the hand of time has long since covered it over, I still see there in
+its fixity; and she could not go down stairs, as at other times, with
+her sorrowing friend, but went back into the dark, unlighted room,
+alone with her overflowing breaking heart.
+
+Firmian's heart laid aside its hardness, though not its coldness, at
+the sight of his persecuted wife in her dry, stony grief at this
+falling to ruin of every one of her little plans and joys; and he did
+not add to her sorrow by a single word of reproach. "You see," was all
+he said, "that it is no fault of mine that the Schulrath gives up our
+acquaintance; he ought never to have been told anything about the
+matter,--however, it's all over now." She made no reply. The hornet's
+sting (which makes a triple stab), the dagger, thrown as by some
+revengeful Italian, was left sticking firm in her wound, which
+therefore could not bleed. Ah! poor soul; thou hast deprived thyself of
+so much! Firmian, however, could not see that he had anything to accuse
+himself of; he being the gentlest, the most yielding of men under the
+sun, always ruffled all the feathers on his body up with a rustle in an
+instant at the slightest touch of _compulsion_, most especially if it
+concerned his honour. He _would_ accept a present, it is true, but only
+from Leibgeber, or (on rare occasions) from others in the warmest hours
+of soul communion; and his friend and he both held the opinion that, in
+friendship, not only was a farthing of quite as much value as a
+sovereign, but that a sovereign was worth just as little as a farthing,
+and that one is bound to accept the most splendid presents just as
+readily as the most trifling; and hence he counted it among the
+unrecognised blessings of childhood that children can receive gifts
+without any feeling of shame.
+
+In a mental torpor he now sat down in the arm-chair, and covered his
+eyes with his hand; and then the mists which hid the future all rolled
+away, and showed in it a wide dreary tract of country, full of the
+black ashy ruins of burnt homesteads, and of dead bushes of underwood,
+and the skeletons of beasts lying in the sand. He saw that the chasm,
+or landslip, which had torn his heart and Lenette's asunder, would go
+on gaping wider and wider; he saw, oh! so clearly and cheerlessly, that
+his old beautiful love would never come back, that Lenette would never
+lay aside her self-willed pertinacity, her whims, the habits of her
+daily life; that the narrow limits of her heart and head would remain
+fixed firmly for ever; that she would as little learn to understand
+him, as get to love him; while, again, her repugnance to him would get
+the greater the longer her friend's banishment endured, and that her
+fondness for the latter would increase in proportion. Stiefel's money,
+and his seriousness, and religion, and attachment to herself combined
+to tear in two the galling bond of wedlock by the pressure of a more
+complex and gentle tie. Sorrowfully did Siebenkæs gaze into a long
+prospect of dreary days, all constrained silence, and dumb hostility
+and complaint.
+
+Lenette was working in her room in silence, for her wounded heart
+shrunk from a word or a look as from a cold fierce wind. It was now
+very dark, she wanted no light. On a sudden, a wandering street-singing
+woman began to play a harp, and her child to accompany her on a flute,
+somewhere in the house downstairs. At this our friend's bursting heart
+seemed to have a thousand gashes inflicted on it to let it bleed gently
+away. As nightingales love to sing where there is an echo, so our
+hearts speak loudest to music. As these tones brought back to him his
+old hopes, almost irrecognisable now,--as he gazed down at his Arcadia
+now lying hidden deep, deep, beneath the stream of years, and saw
+himself down in it, with all his young fresh wishes, amid his long lost
+friends, gazing with happy eyes round their circle, all confidence and
+trust, his growing heart hoarding and cherishing its love and truth for
+some warm heart yet to be met in the time to come: and as he now burst
+into that music with a dissonance, crying, "And I have never found that
+heart, and now all is past and over," and as the pitiless tones brought
+pictures of blossomy springs and flowery lands, and circles of loving
+friends to pass, as in a camera obscura, before him--_him_ who had
+nothing, not one soul in all the land to love him; his steadfast
+spirit gave way at last, and sank down on earth to rest as quite
+overdone, and nothing soothed him now but that which pained. Suddenly
+this sleep-walking music ceased, and the pause clutched, like a
+speechless nightmare, tighter at his heart. In the silence he went into
+the room and said to Lenette, "Take them down what little we have
+left." But over the latter words his voice broke and failed, for he saw
+(by the flare of some potash-burning which was going on opposite) that
+all her glowing face was covered with streaming, undried tears, though
+when he came in she pretended to be busily wiping the windowpane dimmed
+by her breath. She laid the money down on the window. He said, more
+gently yet, "Lenette, you will have to take it to them now, or they
+will be gone." She took it; her eyes worn with weeping met his (which
+were worn with weeping too); she went, and then their eyes grew
+well-nigh dry, so far apart were their two souls already.
+
+They were suffering in that terrible position of circumstances when not
+even a moment of mutual and reciprocal emotion can any longer reconcile
+and warm two hearts. His whole heart swelled with overflowing
+affection, but hers belonged to his no more; he was urged at once by
+the wish to love her, and the feeling that it was now impossible, by
+the perception of all her shortcomings and the conviction of her
+indifference to him. He sat down in the window seat, and leaned his
+head upon the sill, where it rested, as it chanced, upon a handkerchief
+which she had left there, and which was moist and cold with tears. She
+had been solacing herself after the long oppression of the day, with
+this gentle effusion, much as we have a vein opened after some severe
+contusion. When he touched the handkerchief, an icy shudder crept down
+his back, like a sting of conscience, but immediately after it there
+came a burning glow as the thought flashed to his mind that her weeping
+had been for another person than himself altogether. The singing and
+the flute now began again (without the harp this time), and floated in
+the rising, falling waves, of a slow-timed song, of which the verses
+ended always with the words, "Gone is gone, and dead is dead." Sorrow
+now clutched him in her grasp, like some mantle-fish, casting around
+him her dark and suffocating folds. He pressed Lenette's wet
+handkerchief to his eyes hard, and heard (but less distinctly), "Gone
+is gone, and dead is dead." Then of a sudden his whole soul melted and
+dissolved at the thought that perhaps that halting heart of his would
+let him see no other new year save that of the morrow, and he thought
+of himself as dying; and the cold handkerchief, wet with his own tears
+now as well as hers, lay cool upon his burning brow, while the notes of
+the music seemed to mark like bells each stroke of time, so that its
+rapid flight was made distinguishable by the ear, and he saw himself
+asleep in a quiet grave, like one in the Grotto of the Serpents, but
+with worms in place of the serpents, licking off the burning poison of
+life.
+
+The music had ceased. He heard Lenette moving in the next room and
+getting a light; he went to her and gave her her handkerchief. But his
+heart was so pained and bleeding that he longed to embrace some one, no
+matter whom; he was impelled to press his Lenette to his heart, his
+Lenette of _the past_ if not of _the present_, his _suffering_, if no
+longer his loving, Lenette; at the same time he could not utter one
+word of affection, neither had he the slightest wish to do so. He put
+his arms round her slowly, unbent, and held her to him, but she turned
+her head quickly and coldly away as from a kiss which was not
+proffered. This pained him greatly, and he said, "Do you suppose I am
+any happier than you are yourself?" He laid his face down on her
+averted head, pressed her to him again, and then let her away; and this
+vain embrace at an end, his heart cried, "Gone is gone, and dead is
+dead."
+
+The silent room in which the music and the words had ceased to sound
+was like some unhappy village from whence the enemy has carried off all
+the bells, and where there is nothing but silence all the day and
+night, and the church tower is mute as if time itself were past.
+
+As Firmian laid him down on his bed, he thought, "A sleep closes the
+old year as if it were one's last, and ushers in the new as it does,
+our own lives; and I sleep on towards a future all anxiety, vague of
+form, and darkly veiled. Thus does man sleep at the gate behind which
+the dreams are barred; but although his dreams are but a step or two--a
+minute or two--within that gate, he cannot tell _what_ dreams await him
+at its opening; whether in the brief unconscious night beasts of prey
+with glaring eyes are lying in wait to dash upon him, or smiling
+children to come trooping round him in their play; nor if, when the
+cloudy shapes beyond that mystic door come about him, their clasp is to
+be the fond embrace of love, or the murderous clutch of death."
+
+
+
+
+ CHAPTER X.
+
+ A LONELY NEW-YEAR'S DAY--THE LEARNED SCHALASTER--WOODEN-LEG OF
+ APPEAL--CHAMBER POSTAL DELIVERY--THE 11TH OF FEBRUARY, AND
+ BIRTH-DAY OF THE YEAR 1786.
+
+
+I really cannot wish my hero a happy new year on a new year's day when,
+on his awaking in the morning, he rolls his swollen eyeballs heavily in
+their sockets towards the dawn, and then buries his worn and stupefied
+head deep again in his pillow, as he does now. A man who scarcely ever
+sheds a tear is always attacked in this way by physical, as a
+consequence of moral, pain. He lay in bed much later than usual,
+thinking over what he had done, and what he had now to do. He awoke,
+feeling; much cooler towards Lenette than he had done when he went to
+bed. When two hearts can no longer be brought together by the influence
+of some mutual, warm emotion, when the glow of enthusiasm no longer
+links them together, still less can they mingle and unite when the glow
+has passed away, and chilly reserve has resumed its sway. There is a
+certain half-and-half state of partial reconciliation in which the
+vertical index of the jewel-balance, in its glass-case, is turned by
+the lightest breath from the tongue of a third person; to-day, alas!
+the scale on Firmian's side sunk a little, and that on Lenette's went
+down altogether. He prepared himself, however, and dreaded at the same
+time, to give and to return the new year greetings. He took heart, and
+entered the room with his usual hearty step, as if nothing had
+happened. She had let the coffee-pot turn into a refrigerator rather
+than call him, and was standing with her back to him, at the drawer of
+the _commode_, tearing hearts to pieces, to see what was inside them.
+The hearts in question were printed new year's wishes in verse, which
+she had received, in happier days, from her friends in Augspurg; the
+kindly wishes were hidden behind groups of hearts clipped out and
+twined together in spiral lines. As the Holy Virgin gets behung with
+"_assignat_" hearts of wax, so do other virgins with paper ones; for
+with these fair maidens all warmth and enthusiasm gets the name of
+"heart," much as map-makers fancy that the outline of burning Africa
+has a considerable resemblance to a heart.
+
+Firmian could well divine how many a longing sigh the poor soul had
+heaved over so many a ruined wish and hope, and all her mournful
+comparisons of the present time--with those smiling days gone by--and
+all that sorrow and the memory of the past spake to the gentle, tender
+heart. Alas! since even the happy greet the new year with sighs, the
+wretched may well be allowed a tear or two. He said his "good morning"
+gently, and had he received a gentle answer, would have gone so far as
+to add _his_ wishes to the stock of printed ones; but Lenette, who had
+been oftener hurt, and more deeply too, on the previous day, than he
+had, snarled back at him a cold and hasty reply. So that he could not
+offer any wishes; she offered none; and thus stonily and thus miserably
+they went elbowing one another through the gate of the new year.
+
+I must say it; he had been looking forward for something like eight
+weeks to the happiness of this new year's morning--to the blissful
+union of their hearts--to the thousands of loving wishes which he would
+offer--to their close embraces and happy silences of lips upon lips!
+Ah! how different it all was; cold, deathly cold! On some other
+occasion, when I have more paper, I must explain at full length why and
+wherefore his satirical vein served the purpose of a ferment, a leaven
+or yeast, or, say a kind of irrigating engine to that sensitive heart
+of his of which he was both proud and ashamed at once. The royal burgh
+of Kuhschnappel itself had more to do with it than anything else. Upon
+this town, as upon some others in Germany, the dew of sensibility has
+never fallen (as if these places were made of metal), whilst their
+inhabitants have provided themselves with hearts of bone, on which, as
+on frozen limbs, and witches bearing the _stigmata_ of the devil, it is
+impossible to inflict wounds of any consequence to speak of. Amid a
+population possessed of this sort of frigidity, one is, of course,
+inclined to pardon--and even go out of one's way in search of--a little
+warmth, even of an exaggerated kind,--whereas a man who had been living
+about 1785 in Leipzig, where nearly all hearts and arteries were
+injected full of the spirit of tears, might have been disposed to carry
+his humorous indignation at that circumstance a little too far, in the
+same way that cooks dish up watery vegetables with more pepper in wet
+weather than in dry.
+
+Lenette went three times to church that day, not that there was
+anything extraordinary in that. It is not so much with respect to the
+church-goers that the words "three times" in this connection, alarming
+as they are, horrify one. The church-goers may sometimes, perhaps, be
+all the better for going so often; but it is for the sake of the
+unfortunate clergy who are obliged to preach so many times in one day,
+that they may think themselves lucky if all that happens to them is
+that they go to the devil and don't lose their voices into the bargain.
+The first time a man preaches, he certainly moves _himself_ more than
+anybody else, and becomes his own proselyte; but when it comes to the
+millionth time or so of his laying down the moral law, it must be much
+the same with him as with the Egerian peasants, who drink the Egerian
+waters every day, and consequently cease to be susceptible to their
+derivative qualities, however visitors may be affected by them.
+
+At dinner our melancholy pair sat silent, except that the husband,
+seeing the wife preparing to go to the afternoon service at church,
+which she had not been in the habit of attending for some time, asked
+her who was going to preach. "Most probably Schulrath Stiefel," she
+said, although he usually preached only in the morning, but just now
+the evening preacher couldn't preach, he had received "a chastisement
+from God--he had put out his collar-bone." At another time Siebenkæs
+would have had a good deal to say as touching the latter clause of her
+sentence; but on the present occasion (circumstances being as they
+were), all he did was to strike his plate with one of the prongs of his
+fork, and then hold it up to one of his ears, while he stopped the
+other; this droning bass, this humming harmony, bore his tortured soul
+away upon the waves of music, and this echoing sound-board, this
+vibrating bell-tongue, seemed to be singing to him (by way of new
+year's greeting), "Hearest thou not the distant bell ringing at the
+close of thy chill life's high mass? The question is, shalt thou, when
+next new year's day comes, be able to hear; or lying, by that time,
+crumbling into dust?"
+
+After dinner he looked out of window, directing his gaze less to the
+street than to the sky. There, as it chanced, he saw two mock suns, and
+almost in the zenith the half of a rainbow with a paler one
+intersecting it. These tinted stars began strangely to sway his soul,
+making it sad, as if he saw in them the reflected image of his own dim,
+pale, shattered life. For to man, when swayed by emotion, Nature is
+ever a great mirror, all emotion too; it is only to him who is
+satisfied and at rest that she seems nothing but a cold, dead window
+between him and the world beyond.
+
+When he was alone in the room after dinner, and the jubilant hymns from
+the church, and the glad song of a canary in a neighbour's room came
+upon his weary soul like the movement and the tumult of all the joy of
+his youth, now buried alive in the tomb; and when the bright magic
+sunshine broke into his chamber, and light cloud-shadows slid athwart
+the spot of light upon the floor, questioning his sick, moaning heart
+in a thousand melancholy tropes, and saying, "Is it not thus with all
+things? Are not your own days fleeting by like vapours through a chilly
+sky, above a dead earth, floating away towards the night?"--he could
+but open his swelling heart by means of the soft-edged sword of music,
+that so the nearest and heaviest of the drops of his sorrow might be
+set free to flow. He struck a single triad chord upon his piano, and
+struck it once again, letting it gradually die away; the tones floated
+away as the clouds had, the sweet harmony trembled more slowly and more
+slowly, grew fainter and fainter, and ceased at last; silence, as of
+the grave, was all that was left. As he listened, his breath and his
+heart stopped, a faintness came over him which extended to his very
+soul; and then--and then--as floods wash the dead from out of the
+churches and the graves, in this morbid hour of dreams, the stream of
+his heart came flowing again, and bearing upon its billows a new corpse
+from out the future, torn all unshrouded from its earthly bed; it was
+his own body; he was dead. He looked out of window towards the
+comforting and reassuring light and star of life, but the voice within
+him cried on still, "Do not deceive thyself; before the new year's
+wishes are said again, thou wilt have departed hence."
+
+When a shivering heart is thus all shorn of its leaves and standing
+bare, every breeze that touches it is a freezing blast. With what a
+soft, warm, gentle touch Lenette would have had to touch it so as not
+to startle it. A heart in this condition is like a clairvoyante, who
+feels a chill as of death in every hand which touches from beyond the
+charmed circle.
+
+He determined to join the corpse-lottery (as it was called) that very
+day, so as to be able at all events to pay the toll or tax on his
+departure for the next world. He told Lenette so, but she thought this
+was only another of his harpings on the subject of the mourning dress.
+Thus cloudily passed the first day of the year, and the first week was
+even more rainy. The garden-hedge and fencing round Lenette's love for
+Stiefel were completely cut down and pulled up now, and the love was to
+be clearly seen of every passer-by. Every evening at the time when the
+Schulrath used formerly to come, vexation and regret graved a deeper
+furrow on her round young face, which as time went on turned wholly
+into a piece of carving fretted by the hand of grief. She found out the
+days when he was to preach, so that she might go and hear him, and
+whenever a funeral passed, she went to the window to see him. The
+bookbinder's wife was her "corresponding member," from whom she
+constantly drew fresh discoveries concerning the Schulrath, and
+repeated the old ones with her over and over again. What an amount of
+warmth the Schulrath must have gained by reason of his focal distance,
+and her husband have lost on account of his proximity will be at once
+apparent; just as the earth derives least warmth from the sun when they
+are nearest together, i. e. in winter! Moreover another event came just
+then to pass which increased Lenette's aversion. Von Blaize had
+secretly circulated a report that Siebenkæs was an atheist and no
+Christian. Respectable old maiden ladies and the clergy, form a
+charming contrast to the vindictive Romans under the Empire, who often
+accused, the most innocent people possible of being Christians, in
+order that they might obtain a martyr's crown. The old maids and
+parsons aforesaid rather take the part of a man who is in a position of
+this kind, and deny that he is a Christian; and in this they contrast,
+likewise with the Romans and Italians of the present day, who always
+say "there are four Christians here," when they mean "four men." In St.
+Ferieux, near Besançon, the most virtuous girl used to be presented
+with a lace veil of the value of five shillings by way of a prize; and
+people like Blaize are fond of throwing a prize for virtue of this
+kind, namely, a moral veil, over the good. This is why they are fond of
+calling thinking men infidels, and the heterodox wolves, whose teeth
+help to smooth and polish,--which is the reason why wolves are engraved
+upon the best steel blades.
+
+When Siebenkæs first told his wife this report of Blaize's (that he was
+no Christian, if not, indeed, altogether an infidel), she didn't pay
+very much attention to it, inasmuch as it seemed out of the question
+such a thing could be true of a man to whom she had united herself in
+the holy state of matrimony. It was not until sometime afterwards that
+she remembered that, one month when there had been a long period of dry
+weather he had spoken disparagingly (without the least hesitation), not
+only of the Roman Catholic processions (for she did not think THEY WERE
+of very much use herself), but concerning the Protestant's prayers for
+rain, inquiring, "Do the processions, miles long, in the Arabian
+deserts, which go by the name of caravans, ever lead to the production
+of a single cloud in the sky, let them pray for rain as hard as they
+choose?" And "Why do the clergy get up processions only for rain or
+fine weather? why not to get rid of a severe winter, when at all events
+those who took part in the processions would feel a little warmer; or,
+in Holland, for bright sunny weather and the dispersion of fog; or
+against the aurora-borealis in Greenland?" "But what he wondered at
+most," he said, "was why those converters of the heathen, who pray so
+often, and with so much success for the sun when he's only behind a
+cloud or two, should not supplicate for him in circumstances of
+infinitely greater importance--in the polar regions, namely, where for
+months at a time he never appears even when the sky is altogether
+cloudless? Or why," he asked in the last place, "do they take no steps
+to petition against the great solar eclipses (which are seldom very
+enjoyable occurrences), suffering themselves to be outdone by savage
+nations in this respect, for as the latter _do_ howl and pray them
+away?" Many speeches, in themselves innocuous at first, nay sweet,
+acquire poisonous properties in the storehouse of time, as sugar does
+when kept for thirty years in a warehouse.[56] These few words,
+candidly spoken out in the course of common conversation, took a great
+hold upon Lenette now that she sate under Stiefel's pulpit (made of
+apostles all carpentered up together), and heard him offering up one
+prayer after another, for, or against (as the case might be), sickness,
+government, child-birth, harvest, &c., &c.! How dear, on the other
+hand, Peltzstiefel grew to her; his very sermons became, in the most
+charming manner, regular love-letters to her heart. And indeed
+clericality does, at all times, stand in a very close relation to the
+feminine heart; that's why "hearts" formerly meant the clergy on German
+playing cards.
+
+Now what all this time did Stanislaus Siebenkæs think and do? Two
+contradictory things. If a hard word escaped him, he was sorry for the
+feeble, forsaken soul, whose whole rose-border of enjoyment had been
+hoed up, whose first love for the Schulrath lay languishing in sorrow
+and famine; for the thousand charms of that imprisoned nature of hers
+would have opened in all their beauty to some heart she loved, which
+_his_ was not. "And can I not see," he said further, "how impossible it
+is that the pin's or needle's point can act as a lightning conductor to
+the sultry, lightning-charged clouds of her life, in the same way that
+the pen's point does for mine. One _can_ WRITE a good deal of one's
+mind, but one can't _stitch_ very much off it. And when I consider what
+swimming-belts and cork-jackets for the deepest floods _I_ am prepared
+with, in the shape of the self-contemplation of the Emperor Antoninus
+and in Arrianus Epictetus, of neither of whom _she_ knows even the
+binding, let alone the name (to say nothing of my astronomy and
+psychology); and what splendid hands at the fire engine-pumps _they_
+are to me when I blaze up in a conflagration of anger as I did just
+now, while _she_ has to let _her_ anger burn itself out, verily I ought
+to be ten times more gentle with her, instead of being ten times more
+irritable." If it happened, on the other hand, that he had not given
+but had _received_ a few hard words, he thought of her warm longing for
+the Schulrath which she could so readily increase and magnify in secret
+during her wholly mechanical work, to any extent; and of the continual
+yielding of his own too soft heart; a thing for which his strong-souled
+Leibgeber would have scolded him, while his wife would have done so for
+the contrary defect, which she was not likely to encounter in her stiff
+unyielding Stiefel, judging by the recent unceremoniousness of style in
+which he, the other day, gave his notice of the calling in of his
+capital of Regard.
+
+In this frame of mind, one day when his spirit was heavy with anger, he
+put to her, as she was starting again to go to the Schulrath's evening
+sermon, the simple little question, why it was she used formerly to go
+so seldom to the evening service, and now went so often? She answered
+that it was because the evening preacher, Mr. Schalaster, always
+used to preach in the evenings, but that since he had put out his
+collar-bone the Schulrath had taken his duty. Heaven forbid that she
+should go to the evening services when Mr. Schalaster's collar-bone was
+well again. By slow degrees he drew out of her that she considered this
+young Mr. Schalaster a most dangerous disseminator of false doctrine, a
+man who by no means adhered to Luther's bible, but believed in
+_Mosheh_, and in Jesos Christos, Petros and Paulos, and, in fact,
+_os'd_ all the Apostles in such a manner as to be an offence to all
+Christian folks; nay he had gone the length of naming the Holy
+Jerusalem in such an extraordinary way that she couldn't so much
+as say it after him; it was soon after this that he had put out his
+collar-bone, but far be it from her to judge the man. "No, don't,
+dear," her husband said, "perhaps the young gentleman may be a little
+nearsighted, or he mayn't know his Greek Testament so well as he ought,
+the _u_'s in it are sometimes a good deal like _o_'s. Ah! how many
+Schalasters there are who do in their several sciences and doctrines,
+say Petros for Petrus, and where there's not the slightest occasion,
+and nothing in the shape of a stumbling-block in the path, breed
+dissension among mankind by means of consanguineous vowels."
+
+On this particular occasion, however, Schalaster drew our couple a
+little nearer together again. It was a satisfaction to Siebenkæs to
+find that he had been a little mistaken up to this point, and that it
+was not only love to Stiefel which had taken her to evening church, but
+that regard for purity of doctrine had something to do with it as well.
+The distinction was fine, it is true; but in time of need one catches
+at the minutest fragment of comfort; and Siebenkæs was delighted that
+his wife wasn't _quite_ so deeply in love with the Schulrath as he had
+been supposing. Let no one hear speak despairingly of the delicate
+gossamer web which supports us and our happiness. If we _do_ spin and
+draw it out of _ourselves_, as the spider does hers, yet it bears us
+pretty firmly up, and, like the spider, we hang safe and sound in the
+middle of it, while the storm-wind rocks both our web and us uninjured
+to and fro.
+
+From this day Siebenkæs went straightway back to his only friend in the
+place, Stiefel, whose little mistake he had forgiven from his heart
+long long since--half an hour after it happened, I believe. He knew
+that the sight of him would be a consolation to the exiled evangelist
+in his Patmos-chamber, and that his wife would find a consolation in it
+too. Yea, he carried greetings which had never been intrusted to him
+backwards and forwards between the two.
+
+The little scraps of news of the Schulrath, which he would let drop of
+an evening, were to Lenette as the young green shoots which the
+partridge scratches up from beneath the snow. At the same time, I am
+not concealing the fact that I am very sorry both for him and for her;
+although I am not such a wretched partisan of either as to withhold my
+love and my sympathy from two people who are mutually misunderstanding
+and making war upon each other.
+
+Out of this grey sultry sky, whose electrical machines were being
+charged fuller and fuller every hour, there broke, at last, a first
+harsh peal of thunder--Firmian lost his law suit. The Heimlicher
+was the catskin rubber, the foxtail switch, which charged the
+Inheritance Chamber, the goldsmith's pitch-cake of Justice, full of
+pocket-lightning. But the suit was adjudged to be lost on the simple
+ground that the young notary, Giegold, with whose notarial instrument
+Siebenkæs had armed himself, was not as yet duly matriculated. There
+cannot be very many persons unaware that in Saxony no legal instrument
+is valid unless drawn up by a notary who has been duly matriculated,
+while, at the same time, documentary evidence can be of no greater
+force in another country than of that which it possessed in the country
+where it was drawn up. Firmian lost his suit, and his inheritance along
+with it. However, the latter remained untouched, for, perhaps, nothing
+can keep a sum of money safer from the attacks of thieves, clients, and
+lawyers, than the fact of its being the subject of a lawsuit--nobody
+can touch it then. The sum is clearly specified in all the documents,
+and these documents would have, themselves, to be got out of the way
+before the _money_ could be got at. Similarly, the good man of the farm
+rejoices when the weevil has papered his cornricks all over with white,
+because then the corn which has not had the heart of it eaten out by
+the spinner is safe against the ravages of all other corn worms.
+
+A lawsuit is never more easily won than when it is lost--one lodges an
+appeal. After payment of the costs, ordinary and extraordinary, the law
+concedes the _beneficium appellationis_ (benefit of appeal to a higher
+tribunal), although this benefit-farce cannot be of much avail to
+anybody who has not had certain other benefits conferred upon him
+beforehand.
+
+Siebenkæs had the right to appeal; he could with ease adduce evidence
+of his name and wardship through a duly matriculated Leipzig notary.
+All he wanted was the worktool--the weapon for the fight, which was
+also the subject of it--to wit, money. During the ten days which the
+appeal (fœtus-like) had wherein to come to maturity, he went about
+sickly and thoughtful. Each of these decimal days exercised upon him
+one of the persecutions of the early Christians and decimated his hours
+of happiness. To apply to his Leibgeber, in Bayreuth, for money, the
+distance was too long and the time too short; for Leibgeber, to judge
+by his silence, had probably leapt ever many a mountain on the
+leaping-pole, the climbing-spurs, of his silhouette-clipping. Firmian
+cast everything to the winds, and went to his old friend, Stiefel, that
+he might comfort himself and tell all the story. Stiefel fumed at the
+sight of marshy bottomless paths of the law, and pressed upon Siebenkæs
+the acceptance of a pair of stilts whereon to traverse them, namely,
+the money necessary for the appeal. Ah! this to the disconsolate,
+longing, Schulrath was almost tantamount to another clasp of Lenette's
+beloved, clinging hand; his honest blood, coagulated by all these days
+of mere icy cold, thawed once more and began to flow. It was through no
+cheating of his sense of honour that Firmian, who preferred starving to
+borrowing, at once accepted Stiefel's money, looking upon each dollar
+as a little stone wherewith to pave the path of the law, and so pass
+over it unbemired. His principal idea was that he would soon be dead,
+and that, at all events, his helpless widow would have the enjoyment of
+his inheritance.
+
+He appealed to the Supreme Court and ordered another instrument to be
+drawn up in Leipzig.
+
+These fresh nail-scratches of fortune, on the one hand, and Stiefel's
+kindness and money, on the other, laid up a fresh accumulation of
+oxygenous, or acidifying, matter in Lenette, and, at the same time, the
+acid of her ill-humour became (as acids in general do) stronger in a
+time of frost, and on this subject I shall here communicate the few
+meteorological observations which I have to make.
+
+They are as follows:--Since the misunderstanding with Stiefel, Lenette
+was mute the whole day long, recovering from this lingual paralysis
+only in the presence of strangers. I presume there must exist some
+physical cause for the phenomenon that a woman is frequently unable to
+speak except in the presence of strangers, and we should be able to
+discover the reason of the converse phenomenon, that a mesmerized
+subject can converse only with the mesmerizer or with persons who are
+_en rapport_ with him. In St. Kilda everybody coughs when a stranger
+arrives in the island, and although coughing is not exactly speaking,
+perhaps, yet it is a preliminary whirring of the wheels of the
+mechanism of speech. This periodic or intermittent dumbness, which,
+perhaps, like the non-periodic or continued form of the complaint may
+be the result of the suppression of (surface) outbreaks, is nothing new
+to the medical world. Wepfer mentions the case of a paralytic woman who
+could say nothing except the Lord's Prayer and the Creed; and cases of
+dumbness are of frequent occurrence in matrimonial life, in which the
+wife can say nothing to the husband beyond a word or two of the
+extremest necessity. There was a fever-patient at Wittenberg who
+couldn't speak a word the whole day long except between 12 and 1
+o'clock; and we meet with plenty of poor dumb women who are only in a
+condition to speak for about a quarter of an hour in the course of the
+day, or can just manage to get out a word or two in the evening, and
+are obliged to have recourse to _dumb-bells_ by way of helping out
+their meaning, using for that purpose plates, keys, and doors.
+
+This dumbness, at last, so worked upon poor Siebenkæs that he caught it
+himself. He mimicked his wife as a father does his children for their
+good. His satiric humour often had a good deal the appearance of
+satiric _ill_-humour; but this was done with the sole view of keeping
+himself at all times perfectly calm and cool. When chamber-wenches
+distracted him most utterly as he was in the depths of his auctorial
+sugar-refinery and beer-brewery, by converting (with Lenette's
+assistance) his room into a regular herald's chancellery and orator's
+tribune, he could always bring his wife, at all events, down from the
+platform by striking three blows on his desk with his bird-sceptre
+(this was by virtue of an arrangement which he had come to with her on
+the subject). Also, on the many occasions when he would find himself
+sitting over against these talking Cicero-heads, powerless to frame an
+idea, or to write a line, and regretting the loss (not so much to
+himself as to the innumerable mass of persons of the highest condition
+and intelligence) of the thousands of ideas which were thus abstracted
+by these adepts in the art of talk--he could give a tremendous thump
+with his sceptre-ruler, upon the table, such as one gives to a pond to
+make the frogs cease croaking. What pained him most with regard to this
+robbery of posterity was the thought that his book would go down to it
+shorn of its fair and due proportions as a consequence of all this
+fugitive chatter. It is a beautiful thing that all authors, even those
+who deny the immortality of their own souls, seldom have anything to
+say against that of their names. As Cicero declared that he would
+believe in the second life, even were there none, they cleave to a
+belief in the second, eternal, life of their names, however their
+critics may demonstrate the contrary.
+
+Siebenkæs now most distinctly intimated to his wife, that he should not
+speak any more at all, not even concerning matters of the utmost
+necessity, and this because he simply could not and would not be
+distracted or chilled in the fervour of composition, by long angry
+discussions concerning talking, washing, or the like, neither be
+induced to lose his temper with her about such matters. Any given
+matter of perfect indifference can be spoken of in ten different tones
+and mistones, and, therefore, with the view of not depriving his wife
+of whatever enjoyment she might derive from speculating as to the
+_tones_ in which things were capable of being said, he gave her to
+understand that for the future he would speak to her only in writing.
+
+I am ready, here, with an explanation of the fullest description as to
+this proceeding. That grave and earnest person, the bookbinder, was
+exercised in his mind, all through the ecclesiastical year, by nothing
+to such an extent as by the conduct of his "Rascal," as he styled his
+son, a bit of a _mauvais sujet_, who was a better hand at reading a
+book than at binding one--always clipping the edges askew, or cropping
+them too closely, or doubling or halving the dimensions of the damp
+sheets by screwing the press too tight. Now these were matters of a
+sort which his father could by no means endure, and he lost his temper
+over them to such an extent that he would not _speak_ to this child of
+the devil and his realm, not so much as a syllable. Such sumptuary laws
+and golden rules connected with bookmaking, therefore, as he had to
+communicate to his son he delivered to his wife, in her capacity of
+postmistress, and she (using her needle by way of rod of office) would
+then get up in her distant corner of the room and transmit the commands
+of the father to the son, who would be planing away at no very great
+distance. The son, who had to deliver all _his_ questions and answers
+to the postmistress in the same manner, approved of this arrangement
+most thoroughly; his father's tongue gave much less trouble than
+before. The father got into the habit of this system and ceased to
+treat of anything by word of mouth, no matter what. He even got to
+trying to express his views concerning his son's proceedings by means
+of looks, darting burning glances at him, like a lover, as he sat
+opposite to him. An eye full of glances, however (notwithstanding the
+fact that there are ocular letters, as well as palatals, labials, and
+glossals), is at best but a box of confused pearl type. But as, by
+good fortune, the invention of writing, and the institution of the
+post-office have enabled a man, who is drifting round the North Pole
+on a slab of ice, to communicate with another who is sitting in a
+palm-tree amidst parrots in the torrid zone--this father and son (when,
+thus divided, they sat opposite to one another at the work-table) were
+provided with a means of sweetening and lightening their separation by
+help of an epistolary correspondence carried on across the table.
+Business letters of the utmost importance were conveyed from one to the
+other unsealed, and in complete safety, for the mail bags, the
+mail-packet of this penny-post, consisted of a pair of fingers. The
+interchange of letters and couriers between these two silent powers
+took place over roads so smooth, and by such an admirable system of
+"Poste aux Anes" without interruption and free from all delay, that the
+father could, without difficulty, receive a reply on a subject of
+importance from his correspondent within one minute of its despatch
+(such was the facility of communication), in fact, they were quite as
+near to one another as if they had been next door neighbours. I would
+here beg any traveller who may visit Kuhschnappel before I do so to saw
+off the two corners of the table, of which the one served as _Bureau
+d'Intelligence_ to the other, put both these bureaux in his pocket and
+exhibit them to the curious in some great city or company--or to me in
+Hof.
+
+Siebenkæs partially copied the bookbinder's system. He cut out brief
+letters of decretal in anticipation, to be ready for the occasions when
+they should be required. If Lenette put an unforeseen question to which
+there wasn't an answer in his letter-bag, he would write three lines
+and pass them across the table. Such notes of hand or orders in council
+as had to be renewed daily, he ordered the return of in a standing
+requisition, so as to save paper, and not be obliged to write a fresh
+order on this subject every day; for he merely passed this particular
+paper back across the table again. But what said Lenette to all this? I
+shall be better able to answer this question after relating what
+follows here. There was only one occasion on which he _spoke_ in this
+deaf and dumb institution of a house of his; it was while he was eating
+salad out of an earthenware-dish, which had poetical as well as
+pictorial flowers on it by way of ornament. Lifting the salad with his
+fork, he disclosed to view the little _carmen_ which bordered this
+dish, and which ran as follows:--
+
+
+ "Peace feeds, but strife
+ Consumes our life."
+
+
+Whenever he lifted up a forkful of his salad, he was in a position to
+read one or the other foot of this didactic poem; and he did so aloud.
+
+"Well, and what said Lenette to all this?" we inquired above. Not a
+word, I answer. She wasn't going to let _his_ sulks and silence
+diminish _hers_ in the slightest degree, for in the end it seemed clear
+to her that he was holding his tongue out of sheer ill-temper, and she
+wasn't going to be outdone by him in that respect. And, in fact, he
+carried matters further and further every day, continually passing new
+broken tables-of-the-law across the table to her, or carrying them
+round to her side. I shall not catalogue the whole of them, but merely
+quote a few specimens, e. g. 'The Forty-eight-pounder Paper' (he
+gratified himself by continually inventing new titles for these
+missives), of which the contents were: "Stop the mouth of that tall
+sewing creature there, who sees perfectly well how busy I am with my
+writing, or I shall seize her by that throat with which she's baiting
+me."
+
+"The 'Official Gazette' paragraph:"--"Let me have a little drop of some
+of your dirty wash-water; I want to get the ink off these raccoon paws
+of mine." "The Pastoral Letter:"--"I want to get a glance or so at
+'Epictetus on what Man has to endure,' could I find a moment of some
+sort of peace; don't disturb me." "The Pin-paper:"--"I happen to be in
+the middle of a satire, of the hardest and severest nature, on the
+subject of women; take that screeching bookbinderess down stairs to the
+hairdresseress, and yell away there as sprightlily as ye have a mind."
+"Torture-bench Note," or rather "Folio:"--"I have held out, this
+forenoon, through well-nigh as much as is possible; I have fought my
+course through besoms, feather-dusters, women's bonnets, and women's
+tongues. Is there no hope that, now that evening is falling, I may have
+a little, brief hour of peace, in which to try to get some slight idea
+of the sense of these terrible Acts of Parliament before me here?"
+Nobody can convince me that it was any blunting of the stings of these
+visiting cards of his (which he left upon her so very frequently), that
+he occasionally translated writing into speech, and when other people
+were present, jested with them concerning cognate subjects. Thus he
+said on one occasion to Meerbitzer, the hairdresser, in Lenette's
+presence, "Monsieur Meerbitzer, it's incredible what my housekeeping
+costs in the course of the year. Why, that wife of mine, there as she
+stands, gets through half-a-ton of food or so by herself alone, and"
+(when she and the barber both beat their hands together above their
+heads) "so do I, too." He showed it to Meerbitzer, printed in
+Schötzer's book, that every one _does_ consume about that quantity of
+sustenance in the course of the year; but did anybody in that room
+fancy such a thing was possible?
+
+Ill-will towards a person is a kind of catalepsy of the mind, and so is
+sulking; and in this mental catalepsy, as in the bodily, every limb
+remains immovably fixed in the position which it chanced to be in when
+the attack came on. Moreover, mental catalepsy has this feature in
+common with corporeal--that women are more subject to it than men.
+Consequently the only effect upon Lenette of her husband's little joke
+(which _had_ the outward semblance of being a piece of ill temper,
+although it was in reality only carried on with a view to the complete
+maintaining of his own calmness and self-control) was to redouble her
+stiffness and chilliness. Yet how very little she would have minded it
+had she but seen Stiefel even once in the course of the week, and had
+not the cares connected with those house expenses of hers (which melted
+down and swallowed up all the pewter-plattery of the eagle's perch)
+decomposed and dried up the very last drop of happy warm blood in her
+wretched heart. Ah! sorrow-laden soul! But, as things were, there was
+no help for her, nor any for him whom she so terribly misunderstood.
+
+Poverty is the only burden which grows heavier in proportion to the
+number of dear ones who have to help to bear it. Had Firmian been
+alone, he would scarcely have so much as glanced at the holes and ruts
+in the streets of life; for destiny lays down little piles of stones
+for us every thirty steps with which we may fill the holes up. And he
+had a haven of refuge, a diving-bell, to fly to in the strongest gale
+that might blow--in the shape of his watch (to say nothing of his
+glorious philosophy), which he could always turn into cash. But that
+wife of his, and all her funereal music and Kyrie Eleisons, and a
+thousand things besides, and Leibgeber's inexplicable silence, and his
+growing ill-health--the continual immixture of all these impure matters
+into the breeze of his life converted it into a sultry, unnerving
+sirocco blast--a wind which creates in a man a dry, hot, sickly thirst,
+which often makes him put that into his breast which soldiers put into
+their mouths to cure bodily thirst, namely, cold powder and lead.
+
+On the 11th of February, Firmian sought relief.
+
+On the 11th of February, Euphrosyne's day, 1767, Lenette was born.
+
+She had often mentioned this to him, and oftener yet to her
+sewing-customers. However, he would have forgotten all about it but for
+the Superintendent-General Ziethen, who had printed a book in which he
+reminded him of the 11th of February. The superintendent had given due
+notice, in this work of his, that on the 11th of February, 1786, a
+segment of South Germany would be sent down, by an earthquake, into the
+realms below, like so much corn laid by a summer storm. As a
+consequence, the Kuhschnapplers would have been lowered, upon the
+dropped coffin-cords or lowered drawbridges of sinking soil, into hell
+by entire companies at a time, instead of going there as single
+_envoyés_, as theretofore was the usage. However, nothing came of all
+this.
+
+On the day before the earthquake, and before Lenette's birthday,
+Firmian repaired to the lifting-crane--the springboard of his
+soul--namely, the old height where his Henry had taken his farewell.
+The forms of his friend and wife stood, dim and vague, before his
+soul's sight. He thought upon the circumstance that since his friend
+had left him there had been about the same number of ruptures and
+divisions in his married life as, according to Moreri, took place in
+the Church from the time of the Apostles down to Luther's days, namely,
+124. Labourers, innocent and simple, silent and happy, were smoothing
+the spring's path. He had passed by gardens where they were clearing
+the moss and the autumn-leaves away from the trees--by beehives and
+vine-stocks being transplanted, cleaned, pruned--by osiers being
+trimmed and dressed. The sun shone bright and warm over the land, all
+rich with buds; and suddenly he was struck by one of these sensations
+which often come upon imaginative men--and this is why these are
+somewhat apt to be a little fanciful and visionary--it seemed to him as
+if his life dwelt, not in a bodily heart, but in some warm and tender
+tear, as if his heavy-laden soul were expanding and breaking away
+through some chink in its prison, and melting into a tone of music--a
+blue æther wave.
+
+"I must and will forgive her, on her birthday," cried his softened
+heart and soul; "I have little doubt that I have been too hard upon her
+all this time." He resolved that he would have the Schulrath into the
+house, and the calico-gown beforehand, and make her a birthday present
+of the pair, and of a new sewing-cushion. He grasped his watch-chain
+and pulled out that Elijah's and Faust's mantle, which was to bear him
+away over all his ills by being converted into cash. He went home with
+every corner of his heart glowing with sunshine, artfully made his
+watch stop, and told Lenette he must take it to the watchmaker's to be
+repaired (and indeed its movements hitherto had been like those of the
+planets above us, a forward movement at the beginning of the
+terrestrial or clock-day, afterwards stationary, and latterly
+retrograde). In this fashion he concealed his projects from her. He
+took the watch himself to the market-place and sold it, though he knew
+very well he would never be able to write with comfort unless it was
+ticking on his table (like the nobleman mentioned by Locke, who could
+only dance in one particular room, in which there was an old box
+standing). Also, in the evening, the redeemed, checked shirt-of-blood,
+or seedbag of evil weeds, was clandestinely introduced into the house.
+Towards evening Firmian went to the Schulrath, and with all the warmth
+of his eloquent heart told him of his resolve and everything connected
+with it--the birthday, the return of the calico, his request to _him_
+to come and see them again, his own imminent death, and his resignation
+to everything. Warm breath of life was breathed into Stiefel, long
+languishing in absence and love (which, together, had gnawed him into
+paleness, as lime does the shadows of a fresco), when he heard that on
+the morrow the beloved voice of his Lenette, longed for during all this
+weary time (_she_ could hear _his_, by-the-by, in church, of course),
+would once more stir the chords of his being.
+
+I must here just glance at a defence, for a moment, as well as an
+accusation. The former relates to my hero, who seems rather to have
+rumpled his honour's patent of nobility to a greater or less extent, by
+having made this request to Stiefel; but, then, we must consider that
+his _intention_ in making it was to do a great kindness to his
+suffering wife, and a small one to himself. The fact is, that the very
+strongest and roughest of men cannot hold out in the long run against
+the everlasting feminine sulking and undermining. For the sheer sake of
+a little peace and quietness, a man who may have sworn a thousand oaths
+before marriage that he _would_ have his own way in that condition of
+life, comes, in the long run, to let his wife have _hers_. The
+remainder of Siebenkæs' conduct I have no need to defend, since 'tis
+not possible to do so, but only necessary. The accusation to which I
+alluded is against my own fellow-labourers, and it is--that they differ
+so widely in their romances from this Biography and from real life, in
+describing the ruptures and reconciliations of their characters as
+being possible, and as actually occurring, in periods of time so brief
+that one might stand by and time them with a stop-watch in one's hand.
+But a man does _not_ break with a person he loves all in an instant;
+the rendings alternate with little re-bindings with bands of silk and
+flowers, till at length the long alternation between seeking and
+shunning ends in complete separation, and it is then, and not till
+then, that we wretched creatures are at our wretchedest. The same is
+generally true of the _union_ of souls; for though at times an unseen
+infinite Arm seems suddenly to press us upon some new heart, yet we
+have always long _known_ this heart, in the Gallery of the Saints of
+our longing devotion and often taken the picture down, uncovered, and
+adored it. It became impossible to Firmian (sitting in the evening in
+his lonesome chair of anxiety and suspense) to keep all that love of
+his waiting with any sort of patience for the morrow. The very
+restraint which was upon him made his love wax warmer; and when his old
+familiar fear--that he would die before the equinox came round--fell
+upon him, it terrified him more than it was wont; but not the thought
+of death. What shook him was the idea of Lenette's difficulties, and
+how she would ever find the money requisite for the performance of the
+final trial, the anchor-proof[57] of his humanity. As it chanced, he
+had plenty of money among his fingers at this very moment. He sprang up
+and ran that very evening to the manager of the corpse lottery, so
+that, at all events, his wife should be entitled to a capital of fifty
+florins at his death, and be able to cover his body decently over with
+a little earth. I don't know the exact sum he paid; but I am quite
+accustomed to embarrassments of this description, which novel-writers,
+who can invent any sum they please in a case of this sort, have no idea
+of, but which are exceedingly troublesome to a writer of actual
+biography, who does not put down anything which he is not in a position
+to substantiate by documentary evidence, and a reference to records.
+
+On the morning of the 11th of February, that is to say on the Saturday,
+Firmian entered his room, feeling very tender-hearted (for every
+illness and weakness softens our heart--loss of blood, for instance,
+and trouble), and all the more so because he was looking forward to a
+kindly, peaceful day. We love much more warmly when we are looking
+forward to making somebody happy than we do half an hour after, when we
+have done it. It was as windy this morning as if the gales were holding
+tournament, or riding at the ring, or as if Æolus were shooting his
+winds out of air-guns. Hence many people thought either that the
+earthquake was beginning, or that a few people here and there had
+hanged themselves for fear of it. Firmian met a pair of eyes in
+Lenette's face, from which, even at that early hour, there had fallen a
+warm blood-rain of tears, on this first of her days. She had not in the
+slightest degree guessed at his tenderness towards her, or at that
+which he had in his mind. She had had no thought of anything of the
+kind; her only idea had been, "Ah, me! since my poor father and mother
+have been dead and gone, there is not a soul that ever remembers I have
+a birthday." Something or other was evidently pre-occupying her. She
+looked once or twice, very inquiringly, into his eyes, and seemed to be
+making up her mind to something; so he put off for a time the
+outpouring of his full heart, and the unveiling of his twofold
+birthday-present. At last she came up to him slowly, with the colour in
+her face, tried in a troubled way to get his hand into hers, and said,
+with downcast eyes, in which, as yet, there were no tears, "We will be
+friends again to-day. If you _have_ hurt me, and given me a little
+pain, what I want is to forgive you from my heart. Do you the same to
+me." This address rent his warm breast in twain, and at first all
+he could do was to be dumb, and clasp her in this silence to his
+o'er-fraught heart, saying, after a time, "Forgive _thou_ me only! for,
+ah! I love thee far more than thou lovest me." And here, at the thought
+of bygone days, the heavy tear-drops rose from the depths of his laden
+heart, and flowed, silent and slow, as the deep streams flow. She gazed
+at him much astonished, saying, "We are going to be friends, then, are
+we, to-day? and it is my birthday. But, ah, me! it is a sad, sad
+birthday, too." It was only at this point that he remembered his
+birthday-present. He ran and brought it that is to say, the cushion,
+the calico-dress, and the news that Stiefel was coming in the
+evening. At this she began to shed tears, and said, "Ah! did you
+really do all this yesterday? And you remembered that this was my
+birthday? Oh! it was so kind of you, and I do so thank you for it;
+particularly--particularly--for the delightful--cushion. I never
+thought you would remember anything about my wretched birthday at all!"
+His manly, beautiful soul, which kept no watch upon its enthusiasm (as
+women's do), told her everything, including the fact that he had joined
+the corpse-lottery the day before, so that she might be able to put him
+under ground at less expense. Her emotion became as strong and as
+visible as his own. "No, no," she cried at length, "God will preserve
+you; but, then, there's _this_ terrible day; who knows if we shall ever
+see another morning. Tell me, what does Mr. Stiefel think about the
+earthquake?" "Don't distress yourself on that score," said Firmian; "he
+says there won't be anything of the kind."
+
+Reluctantly he let her away from his glowing heart. Until he went out
+into the free air (for writing was utterly impossible) he gazed
+continually upon her bright, shining face, whence all the clouds were
+quite cleared away. He practised upon himself an old trick he had
+(which _I_ have learnt from him); when he wished to love some dear
+person very dearly, and forgive him everything, he looked long on his
+face. For we (that's to say he and I) see in a human face, when it is
+old, the finger-board, the counting board, of all the bitter pains and
+sorrows which have passed so rudely over it; and when it is young, it
+is like a bed of flowers on the slope of a volcano, whose next eruption
+will split it into shivers. Either the future or the past is written on
+every face--making us gentle and tender, if not sad.
+
+Firmian would have been delighted to have held his new-found, restored
+Lenette to his heart all the day long; at all events till evening came;
+but her house-work and other occupations were so many bars' rest in
+this music, and her lachrymal ducts were sources of appetite, as well
+as of tears. And she had not the courage to question him concerning the
+metallic source of his gold-bearing stream, upon whose gentle waves she
+was floating now. But her husband gladly divulged the secret of the
+sale of his watch. The actual estate of matrimony was to-day to him
+what the pre-nuptial period is always--a _cymbale d'amour_--having a
+sounding-board at each of its faces which doubles, not the strings of
+the instrument, but the tone of those it has. The entire day was like a
+piece cut out of the full moon, unclouded by the slightest haze, or
+rather out of the second world, into which the people of the moon
+themselves proceed. Lenette, in her morning glow, was like the
+(so-called) Moss of Violet Stone--the Iolite--which gives out the
+perfume of a miniature-bed of violets, if you but rub it till it gets a
+little warm.
+
+At evening finally appeared the Rath, all a-shake with agitation. He
+looked just the least bit haughty, but when he tried to wish Lenette
+many happy returns of the day, he could not do it for tears, which were
+in his throat quite as much as in his eyes. His embarrassment served to
+conceal hers; but _at length_ the opaque mist cleared away from among
+them, and they were able to look at one another. And then they were
+very happy; Firmian forced himself to be so; the other two required no
+constraining.
+
+The heavy storm-clouds, then, ceased for a time to hang and sweep so
+low, as they had been doing of late, over their comforted, softened
+hearts. The boding comet of the future was shorn of its sword, and went
+sweeping on, far brighter and whiter, into the blue expanse of heaven,
+passing athwart more brilliant constellations. And there came into
+their evening a brief letter from Leibgeber, of which the joy-bringing
+lines bedeck and adorn our hero's evening, as well as our next chapter.
+
+Thus did the quick, transient, quivering _Flower-pieces_ of Fantasy
+mature in the brains of our triple alliance (as in the reader's own)
+into actual and living flowers of joy--as the fever-patient takes the
+flowers patterned upon his waving bed-curtain to be real and tangible
+forms. In truth, this winter night, like one of summer, would hardly
+quite cool down and die out on their horizon, and when they parted at
+midnight they said, "We have all had a very happy time."
+
+
+
+
+ CHAPTER XI.
+
+ LEIBGEBER'S DISQUISITION ON FAME--FIRMIAN'S "EVENING PAPER."
+
+
+In my last chapter I practised a deception on the reader out of pure
+goodwill towards him; however, I must let him remain undeceived until
+he has read the following letter of Leibgeber's:--
+
+
+ "Vaduz February 2, 1786.
+
+"MY FIRMIAN STANISLAUS,
+
+"In May I shall be in Bayreuth, and you must be there too. I have
+nothing else of any consequence to write to you now--however, this is
+quite important enough, namely, that I _order_ you to arrive in
+Bayreuth upon the first day of the month of gladness, because I have
+something of the most extraordinarily mad and important kind in my head
+concerning you, and that as sure as there is a heaven above us. My joy
+and your happiness depend on your making this journey. I would reveal
+the whole mystery to you in this letter if I were certain that it would
+fall into no hands but your own. Come! You might travel in company with
+a certain Kuhschnappler, of the name of Rosa, who is coming to Bayreuth
+to fetch his bride home. But if (which God forbid) this Kuhschnappler
+be that Meyern, of whom you have written to me, and if the said
+goldfish is about to come swimming here to freeze (rather than to warm)
+his pretty bride with his dry, wizzened arms (as in Spain they put
+serpents, something like him, round bottles to cool them), I shall take
+care, as soon as I get to Bayreuth to give her a very distinct idea of
+him, and shall maintain that he's ten thousand times better than the
+Heresiarch Bellarmin, who committed adultery a great deal oftener
+during his career--two thousand two hundred and thirty-six times,
+to wit. I have the most anxious and heartfelt longing to behold
+the Heimlicher von Blaise; were he but a little nearer at hand I
+should--(seeing that there's always something sticking in that throat
+of his which he has some difficulty in getting down, such as an
+inheritance, or somebody else's house and land),--I say, I should give
+him a good hard thwack every now and then in the small of his back (by
+way of a cure) and await the outcome--I mean, of the mouthful. I myself
+have been limping about the world in all directions, with my silhouette
+scissors, and am now taking a little rest in Vaduz at a studious,
+bibliothecarian Count's, who really deserves that I should like him ten
+times better than I do. But, you see, my fondness for _you_ is fully as
+much as my heart can hold; and (to speak in general terms) the human
+race, and this green cheese of a world which it keeps on gnawing at,
+seem to me more and more rotten and stinking every day. I _must_ say to
+you, '_Fame_ may go to the devil!' I think I shall decidedly dip down,
+disappear, and get out of the way altogether, almost immediately, run
+right into the thick of the crowd, and come to the surface every week
+under a new name, so that the fools shan't know who I am. Ah! there
+were a few years, once on a time, when I really _did_ wish to be
+something--if not a great author, at least a ninth elector--to be
+mitred, at any rate, if not belaurelled--if not (now and then) to be a
+pro-rector, certainly (and very often) to be a dean. At that period of
+my life I should have been exceedingly delighted had I suffered the
+most atrocious tortures from gallstones, because I should have been
+able to erect (with those eliminated from my system) an altar or temple
+in my own honour, higher than the pyramid mentioned by Ruysh in his
+'Cabinet of Natural Science' as having been constructed of the
+forty-two gallstones of a certain noble lady. Siebenkæs, in those days
+I could have gotten me a beard of wasps (as Wildau used to have one of
+bees)--a stinging beard of wasps, for nothing else but to become famous
+thereby. 'I quite admit' (said I, at the period in question) 'that it
+is not accorded to every son of earth (neither should he expect it), as
+it was to Saint Romuald (as Bembo mentions in his life of him), that a
+city shall beat him to death, merely to be enabled to filch his holy
+body by way of a relic; but he _may_, I think, without being unduly
+conceited, entertain a desire that a few hairs, if not of his fur-coat
+(as of Voltaire's, in Paris), yet, at all events, of his head, may have
+the good luck to be plucked out as a souvenir by people who have a
+certain opinion of him. (Here I chiefly allude to the reviewers.)'
+
+"At the time in question I thought as above set forth, but _now_ my
+views are far more enlightened. Fame is a thing altogether unworthy of
+fame. I was once sitting, on a cold, wet evening, on a boundary-stone,
+considering myself carefully, and I said, 'Now, _is_ there really
+anything in the wide world that can be made of you? What is it? Have
+_you_ any chance of becoming (like the deceased Cornelius Agrippa)
+Secretary of State for War to the Emperor Maximilian, and
+Historiographer to the Emperor Charles the Fifth? Will YOU ever hoist
+yourself up to the position of Syndic and Advocate of the city of Metz,
+Physician in Ordinary to the Duchess of Anjou, and Professor of
+Theology in Pavia? Do you find that the Cardinal of Lorraine is as
+anxious to stand godfather to your son as he was to Agrippa's? And
+would it not be ludicrous if _you_ were to give out (and give yourself
+airs about it) that a Margrave in Italy, and the King of England, the
+Chancellor Mercurius Galinaria, and Margarita (a Princess of Austria),
+had all wished to have you in their service in the same year? Wouldn't
+it be ludicrous, and a lie into the bargain, to say nothing of the
+utter impossibility of the thing, seeing that all these people exploded
+into the sleeping-powder of death so many years before _you_ flashed up
+in the shape of the priming and detonating powder of life! In what
+well-known work (let me ask you) does Paul Jovius style _you_ a
+_portentosum ingenium_? What author reckons you among the _clarissima
+sui sæculi lumina_? If it had been the case that _you_ stood in
+extraordinary credit with four cardinals and five bishops--with
+Erasmus, Melancthon, and Capellanus--wouldn't Schröckh and Schmidt have
+mentioned it, _en passant_, in their "History of the Reformation"? Even
+supposing that I were actually reposing side by side with Cornelius
+Agrippa under his great grove of shrubbery of laurels, the same lot
+would be mine and his; we should both rot away in obscurity beneath the
+thicket, and it would be centuries before anybody came to lift the
+branches and take a look at us.'
+
+"It would do me no more good were I to go about the matter more
+knowingly, and have myself belauded in the 'Universal German Library.'
+I might stand for many a long year, with my wreath of bays round my hat
+in that chill pocket-Pantheon, in my niche amongst the great _literati_
+lying and sitting round me on their beds of state--we might all (I say)
+wait begarlanded there, all alone together in that Temple of Fame of
+ours for many a long year before a single soul came and opened the
+door, and looked in at us, or entered and knelt down before me; and our
+triumphal car would be nothing but a wheelbarrow, on which our temple,
+with all its riches, should be whirled occasionally to a public
+auction. Yet I might, perhaps, soar above all that, and make myself
+immortal, could I but indulge a demi-hope that my immortality would
+reach the ears of any but those who are themselves as yet in this
+mortal life. But can it afford me the smallest gratification when I am
+compelled to perceive that it is exactly to all the most renowned and
+celebrated of people, over whose faces the laurel is growing, year by
+year, in their coffins (as the rosemary does over humbler dead), that I
+can never be anything but an unexplored Africa--particularly to Shem,
+Ham, and Japhet; to Absalom and his father; to both the Catos, the two
+Anthonys, Nebuchadnezzar, the Seventy Interpreters, and their wives; to
+the seven wise men of Greece; even to mere fools, such as Taubmann and
+Eulenspiegel? When a Henry IV., and the four Evangelists, and Bayle
+(who knows all the rest of the learned), and the charming Ninon (who
+knows them better still), and Job, the bearer of sorrows--or, at all
+events, the author of Job--don't know that there ever was such a thing
+as a Leibgeber on the face of the earth: when I am, and must ever
+remain, to a whole bye-gone world (_i. e_., six thousand years replete
+with great and grand men and nations), a mathematical point, an
+invisible eclipse, a wretched _je ne sais quoi_, I really do not see
+how posterity (in which there mayn't be so very much after all), or the
+next six thousand years, can do anything to speak of by way of
+compensation.
+
+"Besides, I cannot tell what description of glorious heavenly
+hosts and archangels there are upon other world-balls, and on the
+little spheres in the milky way--that paternoster bead-chaplet of
+world-balls--seraphs, compared to whom I cannot be looked upon as
+anything but a sheep. We souls do, it is true, progress to a
+considerable extent, and ascend to loftier levels. Even here upon earth
+the oyster-soul develops into a frog-soul, the frog-soul into a
+cod-fish, the cod-fish into a goose, thence to a sheep, an ass--aye, or
+even an ape--and ultimately into a Bush Hottentot (for we can suppose
+nothing higher than that). But a peripatetic climax of this kind begins
+to cease inflating one with pride when the following reflection occurs
+to one. Among the various individuals which compose a species of
+animals (among whom there _must_ certainly occur geniuses, good, sound,
+common-sense intelligences, and absolute blockheads), we find that we
+remark and take notice only of the latter, or, at most, of the
+extremes. No species of animals (considered collectively) is close
+enough to our retina to admit of our perceiving its delicate middle
+tints and gradations: and thus must it be with _us_ when some spirit,
+sitting in heaven, looks at us in the mass. He is so far away, that he
+will find some trouble (very vain trouble, too) in drawing a proper
+distinction between Kant, and his shaving looking-glasses--the
+Kantists; between Goëthe and his imitators; and will see little or no
+difference between members of faculty and dunces, professors'
+lecture-rooms and lunatic asylums; for little steps are wholly lost to
+the sight of one who is standing on the uppermost of them.
+
+"Now this deprives a thinker of all pleasure and courage; and,
+Siebenkæs, hang me if I ever sit down and grow one bit famous, or give
+myself the trouble either to build up or to pull down any learned or
+ingenious system whatever, or write anything at all of greater length
+than a letter.
+
+ "Thy (not my) Self,
+
+ "L.
+
+"P.S. I wish it would please God to grant me a second life after this,
+that I might have the opportunity of dealing with a few _realities_ in
+the next world; for this one is really altogether too hollow and
+stupid; a wretched Nürnberg toy; nothing but the falling froth of a
+life; a jump through the hoop of eternity; a rotten, dusty, apple of
+Sodom, which, splutter as much as I will, I can't get out of my mouth.
+Oh!--"
+
+
+To readers who think the above piece of humour not sufficiently
+serious, I shall prove, in another place, that it is _too_ serious, and
+that it is only an _oppressed_ heart which can jest in this fashion;
+that it is only an eye which is in much too feverish a condition--with
+the fireworks of life darting round it like the flying fire-flashes
+which precede _amaurosis_--which is capable of seeing and picturing
+such fever-forms.
+
+Firmian understood it all, at the time in question at all events. But I
+must go back to the 11th of February, in order to half-deprive the
+reader of his sympathising enjoyment of the re-union of the trefoil of
+friends which then took place. Lenette's trembling petition that her
+husband would pardon her, was but the forced hot-bed fruit of Zichen's
+earth-shaking prophecy. She thought that she herself, and the ground
+she stood upon, were about to be let down; and it was at the near
+approach of death (whom she thought she already saw wagging his tiger's
+tail) that she held out to her husband a hand of Christian peace. For
+(and _to_) that beautiful soul of his (_dis_embodied) hers wept tears
+of love and of rapture. But very probably she, to some extent, confused
+her happiness with her love--satisfaction with fidelity; and (it
+may be suspected) the eagerness with which she was looking forward
+to enwrapping the Schulrath, that very evening, in a warm and
+tender--_gaze_, found outward expression in the shape of an unusual
+degree of affection for her husband. It is here most essential that I
+should communicate to all and sundry persons one of the most valuable
+of all my maxims; in dealings with even the very best woman in the
+world, it is of the utmost importance that we should make excessively
+certain, and discriminate with the utmost accuracy, what it is which
+she really wants (at the time being), and particularly _whom_--(this is
+not always the person who is thus discriminating). There is in the
+female heart such a rapid coming and going, and fluctuation, of
+emotions of every kind; such an effusion of many-tinted bubbles which
+reflect everything, but most particularly whatever chances to be
+nearest, that a woman, under the influence of emotion, shall, while she
+sheds a tear for _you_ out of her left eye, go on thinking, and drop
+another for your predecessor or successor (as the case may be) out of
+her right. Also a feeling of tenderness for a rival falls half to a
+husband's share; and a woman, even the most loyally faithful, weeps
+more at what she thinks than at what she hears.
+
+'Tis very stupid that so many masculine persons among us are stupid
+precisely on this point; that a woman thinking (as she does) more of
+other people's feelings than of her own, is, in this matter, neither
+the deceiver nor the deceived; what she is is the deception itself--the
+optical deception and the acoustic.
+
+But Firmians seldom make well-digested reflections of this sort
+concerning elevenths of February until the twelfth. Wendeline was in
+love with the Schulrath; that was the fact of the matter. Like all
+women of any sense (in Kuhschnappel), she had believed in the
+superintendent-general, and in the kick he had administered to the
+earth, until Peltzstiefel, in the evening, unhesitatingly pronounced
+the idea of such a thing to be simply _impious_, when she abandoned the
+prophetic superintendent and gave in her adhesion to the incredulous
+worldling, Firmian. We all know that he had every bit as much of the
+masculine failing of overdoing consistency as she had of the feminine
+one of carrying inconsistency too far. It was foolish, therefore, in
+him to think that he was going to regain, by means of one grand
+effusion of the heart, an affection embittered by so many small
+effusions of gall. The grandest benefits, the loftiest manly
+enthusiasm, are incapable of uprooting, all in an instant, a feeling of
+ill-will which has rooted itself all over a person's heart with a
+thousand little spreading fibres. The affection which we have deprived
+ourselves of by means of a long-continued, gradual process of chilling,
+is only to be regained by an equally lengthy process of warming.
+
+In a word, it became evident in the course of a day or two that things
+were just as they had been three weeks before. Lenette's love had
+flourished and grown to such an extent, by reason of Stiefel's absence,
+that there was not room for it any longer under its bell-glass--it was
+shooting out leaves beyond the edge of it into the open-air. The _Aqua
+Toffana_ of jealousy at last permeated every vessel in Firmian's body,
+flowed into his heart, and gnawed it slowly in pieces. He was but the
+tree on which Lenette had inscribed her love for another, and was
+withering by reason of the incisions. He _had so_ hoped that the
+Schulrath, recalled to them on Lenette's birthday, would have healed
+all wounds, however deep; or at all events cicatrized them over:
+whereas, what he really had done was to open them all wider than
+ever--all unconscious as he was of it. Ah! what pain this was to the
+wretched husband! He grew poorer and weaker, and more miserable--both
+outwardly and inwardly--as the days went by, and gave up all hope of
+ever seeing the First of May and Bayreuth. February, March, and April
+passed over head--all heavy, dripping clouds, without a single break of
+blue sky or blink of evening-red.
+
+On the 1st of April he lost his law-suit for the second time; and on
+the 13th (Maunday Thursday) he finished, for ever, his 'Evening Paper'
+(this was the name he gave to his diary, because he wrote it of an
+evening), meaning to consign _that_, along with his 'Selections from
+the Devil's Papers' (as far as they were completed) into Leibgeber's
+most faithful hands (at Bayreuth), in place of his body, so soon to
+vanish and be resolved into its elements. For, he thought, those hands
+would fainer clasp his soul (which was in the papers) than his poor
+meagre body--of which, _du reste_, Liebgeber always possessed a second
+unaltered edition (a perfect _facsimile_ copy, so to speak) at all
+times at hand, in the shape of his own. I have no hesitation in here
+quoting, without emendation, the whole of this concluding page of the
+'Evening Paper'--Firmian's 'Swan Song,' which--which went off by the
+following post.
+
+
+"Yesterday, my law-suit was wrecked on the shoal of the Court of Appeal
+of the second instance. The defendant's counsel, and the Court, brought
+to bear upon me an old Statute, of force in Kuhschnappel as well as in
+Bayreuth, which enacts that a deposition made before a notary is not
+valid--depositions having to be made before the Court. These two
+hearings of my case render the uphill path to the third a little
+easier. For my poor Lenette's sake I have appealed to the Lower House,
+my kind Stiefel advancing me the necessary cash. Truly, in applying to
+the oracles of Justice we have to fast and mortify, just as much as was
+_de rigueur_ in consulting the heathen oracles of old. I have reason to
+hope that I shall be able to effect my escape from the clutches of the
+knaves of the State;[58] or (shall I say), from these game-keepers and
+their _couteaux de chasse_, and hunting-spears or swords of Themis. I
+think I shall get through their hunting-tackle of legal proceedings,
+the toils, nets, and gins of their Acts of Parliament--not by my purse
+(which is fallen away to the thickness of an insect's feeler, and could
+be drawn, like a leather _queue_, through the smallest mesh in any of
+their legal nets)--but with my body, which, as it approaches the
+topmost of their nets will be turned into dust of death, and will then
+fly free through and over every trap they can set.
+
+"I desire to lift my hand away from this, my evening paper, to-night
+for the last time, ere it becomes an absolute martyrology. If one could
+give away his life as a gift, I should be very happy to give mine to
+any dying person who would care to accept it. At the same time, let
+nobody suppose that because there chances to be a total eclipse of the
+sun above my head, I think, for a moment, that there must be one in
+America as well; or that I imagine the Gold Coast must be snowed up for
+the winter because a snowflake or two happen to be falling in front of
+my own nose. Life is warm and beautiful; even mine was so once. If it
+must be that I am to melt away, even before these snowflakes, I beg of
+my heirs, and of all Christian people, that they will not publish any
+part of my selection from the 'Devil's Papers,' except that which I
+have copied out fair, which extends as far as the 'Satire upon Women'
+(inclusively). And as regards this diary of mine, in which one or two
+satirical fancies crop out here and there, I beg, also, that not a
+single one of these may be put into print.
+
+"Should any curious inquirer into the history of this
+day-and-night-book of mine be anxious to discover what the heavy
+weights, the nests, the clothes hung out to dry upon my branches,
+really consisted of, that they should so bend my top shoot and my
+branches down (and all the more curious to know it, inasmuch as I have
+written humorous satires)--(though, indeed, my sole object has been to
+nourish and support myself by help of these satire prickles of mine,
+absorbent vessels, to me, like those of the torch-thistle), I beg to
+inform him that he seeks to know more than I know myself, and more than
+I mean to tell. For man and the horseradish are most biting when
+grated; and the satirist is sadder than the jester, for the same reason
+that the Urang-Utang is more melancholy than the ape, namely, because
+he is nobler. If this paper does really reach your hands, my Henry, my
+beloved, and you wish to hear somewhat concerning the hail which has
+kept falling deeper and deeper upon my young seed-crop--count not the
+melted hailstones, but the broken stalks. I have nothing left to give
+me joy, save your affection--everything else is battered down into
+ruin. Since, for more reasons than one,[59] it is most unlikely that I
+shall ever come to you at Bayreuth, let us part, on this page, like
+spirits, giving each other hands of air. I detest the sentimental, but
+Fate has wellnigh grafted it on to me at last, in spite of myself, and
+I swallow great spoonsful of that satiric Glauber's salt, which is
+generally so good a remedy for it--as sheep, who have caught the rot
+from feeding in damp meadows, are cured by licking salt. I say I
+swallow great spoonsful, about the size of my prizes at the
+bird-shooting, without the least perceptible effect. But, on the whole,
+it matters little. Fate, unlike our Sheriffs' Courts, does not wait
+until we are well before she inflicts her sentence. My giddiness and
+other premonitory symptoms of apoplexy, give me to understand, with
+sufficient clearness, that I shall soon be subjected to a good Galenian
+blood-letting,[60] by way of remedy for the nose-bleedings of this
+life. I cannot say that I am particularly glad of it, or anxious for
+it. On the contrary, I am annoyed with people who demand that Fate
+shall at once unswaddle them (for we are swaddled in our bodies, the
+nerves and arteries being the swaddling-bands)--as a mother does her
+infant just because it cries, and has a little pain in its stomach. I
+should be glad to remain swaddled for a while to come among the rest of
+the 'Children of the Rope,'[61] particularly as I cannot but fear that,
+in the next world, I shall be able to make little or no use of my
+satirical humour. However, I shall have to go. But when that comes to
+pass, I should like to ask you, Henry, to come some day to this town,
+and make them uncover your friend's quiet face, which will scarce
+manage to put on the Hippocratic mien again. Then, my Henry, when you
+gaze long upon the grey, spotty, new moon-face there, and think that
+very little sunshine ever fell thereon--no sunshine of love, of fame,
+or fortune--you will not be able to look up to heaven, and cry out to
+God, 'And now, at last, after all his sorrows and troubles, Thou, O
+God, hast annihilated him altogether; when he stretched his arms, in
+death, towards Thee, and that world of thine, Thou hast broken him in
+sunder as he lies there--poor soul!' No, Henry, when I die, _you_ will
+be compelled to believe in Immortality.
+
+"Now that I have finished this 'Evening Paper' of mine, I am going to
+put out the light, for the full moon is shedding broad, imperial sheets
+of brightness into the room. Then, as there is no one else awake in the
+house, I will sit down in the twilight stillness, and, while I gaze at
+the moon's white magic amid the black magic of night, and listen to
+great flocks of birds of passage as they come flying hither from warmer
+lands through the blue, clear moonlight--while I am passing away into a
+sister country--I will stretch my feelers out from my snail's shell
+once more before the last frost closes it up for ever. Henry, I want to
+picture to myself to-night, clearly and brightly, all that is now over
+and past; the May of our friendship--every evening when we were too
+much moved by emotion and could not but fall into each other's arms--my
+hopes, so old and grey now that I hardly know them to be mine--five
+old, but bright and happy, springs which I still remember--my dead
+mother, who, when she was dying, gave me a lemon, which she thought
+would be put into her coffin, and said, 'Ah, I wish it were going into
+my bridal garland.' And I will picture to myself, also, that moment,
+now so near, of my _own_ death, when thy image will rise before the
+broken sight of my soul for the last time--when I shall part from thee,
+and, with a dark, inward pang, which can no more bring a tear into my
+cold and glazing eyes, sink away from thy shadowy form into the dark,
+and from amid the thick and heavy clouds of death, call to thee with a
+faint and hollow cry, 'Henry, good-night! good-night! Ah, fare thee
+well! for I can say no more.'"
+
+ END OF THE 'EVENING PAPER.'
+
+
+
+
+ CHAPTER XII.
+
+ THE FLIGHT OUT OF EGYPT--THE GLORIES OF TRAVEL--THE UNKNOWN--
+ BAYREUTH--BAPTISM IN A STORM--NATHALIE AND THE HERMITAGE--THE
+ MOST IMPORTANT CONVERSATION IN ALL THIS BOOK--AN EVENING OF
+ FRIENDSHIP.
+
+
+Once, in the Easter week, when Firmian came home from a half-hour's
+pleasure-trip full of forced marches, Lenette asked him why he had not
+come back sooner, because the postman had been with a great, enormous
+packet, and had said that the husband must sign the receipt for it
+himself. In a small establishment like Siebenkæs' an occurrence such as
+this ranks among the world's greatest events, or the principal
+revolutions in its history. The moments of waiting lay on their souls
+like cupping-glasses and drawing plasters. At length the postman, in
+his yellow uniform, put an end to the bitter-sweet hemp beating of
+their arteries. Firmian acknowledged the receipt of fifty dollars,
+while Lenette asked the postman who had sent them, and where they came
+from. The letter commenced thus:--
+
+
+"My dear Siebenkæs,
+
+"I have received your 'Evening Paper' and 'Devil's Selections' all
+safely. The rest by word of mouth.
+
+ "_Postscript_.
+
+"But listen! If the future course of my waltz of life is a matter of
+the slightest interest to you--if you care in the least degree about my
+happiness, my plans, or ideas--if it is anything to you but a matter of
+the supremest indifference that I frank you as far as Bayreuth,
+providing you with board, lodging, and travelling expenses all on
+account of a project whose yarn the spinning-mills of the future must
+either manufacture into gin-snares and gallows-ropes (for my life), or
+else into rope-ladders and best bower anchor-cables--if this, and other
+matters more momentous still, have the smallest power over you,
+Firmian, for heaven's sake, on with a pair of boots and start!"
+
+ * * * * *
+
+"And, by thy holy friendship!" said Siebenkæs, "I will on with a pair,
+though the bolt of apoplexy should flash out of the blue sky of Swabia,
+and strike me down beneath a cherry-tree in full blossom. Nothing shall
+prevent me now!"
+
+He kept his word, for in six days from thence we find him, at eleven
+o'clock at night, ready for his journey, with clean linen on his back,
+and in his pockets--with a hat-cover on his head (secretly freighted
+and stuffed with an old soft hat)--his newest boots (the antediluvian
+pair s relieved from duty, being left behind in garrison)--and a
+tower-clock, borrowed from Peltzstiefel, in his pocket--and fresh
+bathed, shaven, and kempt, standing by his wife and friend--both of
+whom kept their eyes fixed, with a gladsome, courteous watchfulness
+upon the departing traveller only, and did not, for the time being,
+look at all at one another. He took his leave of the pair while it was
+still night, being minded to pass the rest of it in his arm chair (of
+many sorrows), and be off about three o'clock, while Lenette should
+still be snoring. He committed to the Schulrath the office of
+treasurer-in-chief of the widow's fund to his grass-widow, and the
+managership, or, at least, the "leading business," of his miniature
+Covent Garden full of Gay's Beggar's Operas, the theatrical journal
+whereof I am here writing for the edification of a full half of the
+world. "Lenette," he said, "when you want any counsel, apply to the
+counsellor here; he is going to do me the favour to come and see you
+very often indeed." Peltzstiefel made the most solemn promises to come
+every day. Lenette did not go down stairs to the door with the
+Schulrath when he went away, as she usually did, but remained above,
+and drawing her hand out of her replenished money-bag (the starved
+stomachic coats of which had hitherto been rubbing together), snapped
+it to. It is not of sufficient importance to be recorded that Siebenkæs
+asked her to put out the light, and go to her bed, and that he gave her
+charming face his long parting kiss, and said good night, and took the
+tender farewell, almost within the Eden-gate of the land of dreams with
+that redoublement of fondness with which we take our leave of those we
+love, and greet them when we come back to them again.
+
+The watchman's last call at length drew him from his sleeping chair out
+into the starlight, breezy morning; but, first, he crept once more into
+the bed-room to the rose-maiden dreaming there, warm and happy, pulled
+the window to (for there was a cool air from it falling upon her
+unprotected breast), and would not suffer his lips to touch her in an
+awakening kiss. He gazed at her by the light of the stars and early
+blush of dawn, till he turned his eyes away (fast growing dim) at the
+thought, "perhaps I may never see her again."
+
+As he passed through the sitting-room, her distaff seemed to look at
+him as if it were a thing of life; it was wrapped in broad bands of
+coloured paper (which she had put on it because she had not got silk);
+and there was her spinning-wheel, too, which she used to work at in the
+dark mornings and evenings when there was not light enough for sewing.
+As he pictured her to himself working industriously at them while he
+was away, every wish of his heart cried out, "Ah, poor darling! may all
+go well with her, always, whether I ever come back to her or not."
+
+This thought of the _last time_ grew more vivid still when he was out
+in the open air, and felt a slight giddiness produced, in the physical
+part of his head, by agitation and broken sleep, as well as natural
+regret at the sight of his home receding from view, and the town
+growing dimmer, and the foreground changing into background, and the
+disappearance of all the paths and heights on which he had so often
+walked a little life into his benumbed heart, frozen by the past
+winter. The little leaf whereon, like a leaf roller, or miner-worm, he
+had been crawling and feeding, was falling now to earth behind him, a
+skeleton leaf.
+
+But the first spot of foreign, unfamiliar soil, as yet unmarked by any
+"Station of his Passion," drew, like a serpent-stone, an acrid drop or
+two of sorrow-poison out of his heart.
+
+And now the solar flames shot higher and higher up upon the enkindled
+morning clouds, till, at length, hundreds of suns rose in an instant in
+the sky, in the streams and pools, and in the dew-cups of the flowers,
+while thousands of varied colours went flowing athwart the face of
+earth, and one bright whiteness broke from the sky.
+
+Fate plucked away most of the yellow, faded leaves from Firmian's soul,
+as gardeners remove those of plants in spring. His giddiness diminished
+rather than otherwise as he went on; the walking did it good. As the
+sun rose in heaven, another, a super-earthly sun, rose in his soul. In
+every valley, in every grove, on every rising ground, he broke and cast
+away a ring or two of the chrysalis-case of wintry life and trouble
+(which had been clinging so tightly to him), and unfolded his moist
+upper and nether wings, and let the breeze of May waft him away, on
+four outspread pinions, up into the bright air among the butterflies,
+but higher than they, and over loftier flowers.
+
+And then with what a burst of power the life within him began, under
+this new impetus, to boil and seethe, as, issuing from a diamond-mine
+of a valley all shade and dewdrops, he walked a pace or two up through
+the heaven-gate of the spring. It was as if some great earthquake had
+upheaved a new-created flowery plain, all dripping from the ocean,
+stretching further than the eye could reach, all rich in youthful
+powers and impulses. The fire of earth glowed beneath the roots of this
+great hanging garden, and the fire of heaven flamed above it burning
+the colours into the trees and flowers. Between the white mountains, as
+between porcelain towers, stood the bright tinted, flowery slopes like
+thrones for the fruit goddesses. And all over the face of this great
+camp of gladness, the cups of the flowers and the heavy dewdrops were
+pitched, like peopled tents. The earth teemed with young broods, and
+sprouting grasses, and countless little hearts; and heart after
+heart, life after life, burst forth into being from out the warm
+brooding-cells of Mother Nature--burst forth with wings, or silken
+threads, or delicate feelers--and hummed, and sucked, and smacked its
+lips and sang. And for every one of these countless honeysucking trunks
+a cup of gladness had long since been filled and ready.
+
+In this great market-place of this living city of the sun, so full of
+glory and sounding life, the pet child of the infinite Mother stood
+solitary--gazing, with bright and happy eyes, delighted, around him
+into all its innumerable streets. But his eternal Mother wore her veil
+of immeasurable immensity, and it was only the warmth which pierced to
+his heart which told him that he was lying upon her breast. Firmian
+reposed from this two hours' intoxication of heart in a peasant's hut.
+The foaming spirit of a cup of joy like this went quicker to the heart
+of a sick man such as he than to those of the commoner run of
+sufferers.
+
+When he went out again the glory had sobered down into brightness, and
+his enthusiasm into simple happiness. Every red ladybird fluttering on
+its way, every red church-roof, and every sparkling stream as it
+glittered and glistened with dancing stars, shed joyous lights and
+brilliant colours upon his soul. When he heard the cries of the
+charcoal burners in the wood, the resounding cracking of whips, and the
+crash of falling trees, and then, when coming out into the open, he saw
+the white châteaux and roads standing out against the dark-green
+background like constellations and milky ways, and above the shining
+cloud specks in the deep blue sky; while lights flashed and darted
+everywhere, now down from trees, now up from streams, now athwart saws
+in the distance--there was no such thing as a foggy corner left in his
+soul, nor a single spot in it all unpenetrated by the spring sunshine:
+the moss of gnawing, corroding care, which can grow only in damp shade,
+fell from his bread-trees and trees of liberty out here in the glad,
+free air, and his soul could not but join in the great chorus of flying
+and humming creatures which was rising all round him, singing, "Life is
+beautiful, and youth is lovelier still; but spring is loveliest of
+all."
+
+The bygone winter lay behind him like the dark, frozen South Pole; the
+royal burgh of Kuhschnappel like some deep, dreary school-dungeon with
+dripping walls. The only spot in it over which broad, gladsome sunbeams
+were intertwining was his own home, and he pictured to himself Lenette
+in that home as commander-in-chief, free to talk, cook, and wash at her
+own sweet will, and with her head (and hands, too) full all day long of
+the delight that was coming in the evening. He was glad from the very
+depths of his heart that, in that little egg-shell of hers, that
+sulphur-hut and chartreuse, she should enjoy the glory and brightness
+which that angel Peltzstiefel would bring with him into her St. Peter's
+prison. "Ah! in God's name," thought he, "may she be as happy as I
+am--nay, and happier, too, if that be possible."
+
+The more villages he came to, with their troupes of strolling players
+(of inhabitants), the more did life in general seem to assume a
+theatrical guise--his past troubles were transformed into leading
+parts in the drama, or Aristotelian problems--his clothes into stage
+costumes--his new boots became _cothurna_--and his purse a theatre
+treasury--while a delicious stage-recognition was awaiting him in the
+arms of his beloved Henry.
+
+About half-past three in the afternoon, in a Swabian village, whose
+name he did not inquire, his whole soul melted of a sudden to tears, so
+that he was completely astonished at the unlooked-for and rapid
+_attendrissement_. His surroundings at the time would have rather led
+him to anticipate a contrary effect. He was standing by an old
+thorn-tree, rather crooked, and dead at the top; the village women were
+on the green washing their clothes, which glistened in the sunlight,
+and throwing down chopped eggs and nettles to feed the downy, yellow
+goslings; a gentleman's gardener was clipping a hedge, while a herd-boy
+was summoning his sheep (clipped already for _their_ part) round the
+thorn-tree, with his _cornemuse_. It was all so youthful, so pretty, so
+Italian! The beautiful May had half (or wholly) unclad everything and
+everyone--the sheep, the geese, the women, the shepherd-minstrel, the
+hedger, and his hedge....
+
+Why was he thus moved to tenderness in this gladsome and smiling scene?
+Partly because he had been so happy all day, but chiefly by the
+shepherd bassoonist calling his flock together with that stage
+instrument of his beneath the thorn. Firmian had helped a shepherd of
+this sort, with a crook and a reed-pipe, to drive his own father's
+sheep home hundreds of times when he was a boy; and the tones of the
+_Ranz des Vaches_ brought back in an instant his own rose-coloured
+childhood--it arose from out its dew of the morning, its bowers of
+budding blossoms and sleeping flowers, and stood before him in heavenly
+guise, and smiled in all its own innocence dressed in its thousand
+hopes, saying, "Behold me! see how lovely I am; we used to play
+together, you and I; how much I used to give you!--grand kingdoms,
+broad meadows, and gold, and a great, endless Paradise beyond the
+hills. But it seems you have nothing left now. And how pale you are,
+and worn! Come and play with me again!"
+
+Who is there amongst us to whom Music has not brought back his
+childhood a thousand times? She comes and says, "Are not the rosebuds
+blown yet which I gave you?" Yes, yes, they are blown; they were white
+roses, though!
+
+The evening made his joy-flowers close, folding their petals together
+above their nectaries; and an evening dew of melancholy fell ever
+heavier and thicker upon his soul as he went on his way. Just before
+sunset he came to a village; I am sorry to say I cannot remember
+whether it was Honbart, or Houstein, or Jaxheim; but of this I am
+pretty certain, that it was one of the three, because it was near the
+River Jagst, and in Anspach, on the borders of Ellwangen. His
+night-quarters lay smoking down in the valley before him. Before going
+on into them he lay down on the hill-side beneath a tree, whose
+branches were the cathedral chancel of a choir of singing creatures.
+Not far from him gleamed the trembling tinsel of a piece of water,
+glittering in the evening sun; and above him the golden leaves and the
+white blossoms rustled like grasses waving over flowers. The cuckoo
+(always her own sounding-board and multiplying echo) talked to him from
+the tree-top in mournful tones of sorrow; the sun was gone; the shadows
+were throwing thick veils of crape over the brightness of the day. He
+asked himself, "_What_ is my Lenette doing now? Of whom is she
+thinking? Who is with her?" And here there fell about his heart, like a
+band of ice, the thought, "Ah! but _I_ have no loved one whose hand I
+can clasp!"
+
+After drawing to himself a vivid picture of the tender, delicate,
+beautiful, woman whom he had so often invoked, but never met--to whom
+he would have given and sacrificed--oh! so gladly--so much! not only
+his heart and his life, but his every wish, his every whim--he went
+down the hill with streaming eyes, which he strove in vain to dry; but,
+at all events, any kind womanly heart (among the readers of this tale)
+which has loved in vain, or to its own detriment, will forgive him
+these burning tears, knowing, from sad personal experience, how the
+soul seems to journey on through a desolate wilderness, where the
+deathly Samiel wind blows ceaselessly, while lifeless forms lie
+scattered around, dashed to earth by the blast, their arms breaking
+from their crumbling trunks when the living touches them in act to
+clasp them to his own warm heart. But ye, in whose clasp so many a
+heart has grown cold, chilled by inconstancy or by the frost of
+death--ye should not mourn so bitterly as do those lonely souls who
+have never _lost_, because they have never _found_; who yearn for that
+immortal and eternal love of which even the mortal and transient reflex
+has never been vouchsafed to bless them.
+
+Firmian carried with him into his night-quarters a tranquil, though a
+tender, heart, which healed itself in dreams. When he looked up
+from his slumbers, the constellations, set in his window as in a
+picture-frame, twinkled lovingly before his bright and happy eyes, and
+beamed upon him the astrological prophecy of a happy morrow.
+
+He fluttered, with the earliest lark, up out of the furrow of his bed,
+with as many trills as he, and quite as much energy. That day, fatigue
+plucking the bird-of-paradise wings from his fancy, he could not quite
+get out of the territory of Anspach. The day after, he reached Bamberg,
+leaving on the right hand Nürnberg--that and its _Pays Coutumiers_ and
+_Pays de Droit écrit_. His path led him from one paradise to another.
+The plain seemed to be one great mosaic of gardens; the hills seemed to
+crouch closer to the earth, as if to let men the more readily climb up
+upon their backs and humps. The groves of deciduous trees were like
+garlands, twined and placed to adorn Nature on some great festal day;
+and the setting sun often glowed through the trellis-work of some leafy
+balustrade on a hill-side, like a purple apple in some perforated
+fruit-vase. In one valley one longed to take one's mid-day sleep; in
+another, one's breakfast; in this stream, to see the moon reflected
+when she stood in the zenith; to see her rise behind this group of
+trees; to see the sun rise out of that green trellised bed of trees at
+the _Streitberg_.
+
+When he arrived the next day at Streitberg, where all those delights
+could be indulged in at once, he might easily have seen the top
+of the spire of Bayreuth put on the blushing tints of the evening
+Aurora--unless he was a much worse walker than his historian; however,
+he did not care to do so. He said to himself, "I should be an ass were
+I to go rushing, all dog-tired and dried up as I am, upon the first
+hour of a delicious reunion and meeting of this sort; neither he
+(Leibgeber) nor I would get a wink of sleep; and what should we have
+time to talk about at this hour in the evening? No, no, better wait,
+and get there the first thing in the morning, about six o'clock, and so
+have the whole day before us for our millennium."
+
+Accordingly he passed the night in Fantaisie, an artificial pleasure,
+rose, and flower-valley, half a mile from Bayreuth. I find it a very
+hard and difficult matter to reserve the erection of my paper model of
+this Seifersdorf miniature valley (which I should so much like to
+introduce at this point), until I find a roomier place for it than the
+present; however, I can't help it, and should I not find such a place,
+there is sure to be ample space in the blank pages at the end of the
+book.
+
+Firmian started, then, in company with a body of bats and beetles--the
+advanced guard of a beautiful bright day--and bringing up the rear (so
+to speak) of the people of Bayreuth, who had just finished their Sunday
+and Feast of the Ascension (it was the 7th of May): and he walked so
+late that the moon, in her first quarter, was casting deep, strong
+shadows of the blossoms and branches upon the greensward. Thus late in
+the evening, then, Firmian climbed a height from whence he could look
+down, with tears of joy, to Bayreuth--where the beloved brother of his
+soul was waiting for him and thinking of him--as it lay softly veiled
+in the bridal night of spring, and broidered over with shining flakes
+of Luna's radiance. I can affirm in his name with a "Verily" that he
+nearly did what _I should_ have done myself; that is to say, _I_, with
+a heart welling up in such a warm sort of manner as _his_ was, and on a
+night all so adorned and pranked out with gold and silver, should have
+made but one bound into the Sun Hotel, and into my Leibgeber's arms.
+However, he went back again into his odour-breathing Capua (Fantaisie),
+and there, in the brief intervening space of time between his return
+and supper and evening prayer time, he met--beside a dried-up
+water-basin or fish-pond, peopled by a race of deities transformed into
+stone--he met with nothing less than an exceedingly charming adventure.
+I proceed to give an account of it.
+
+Beside the wall which surrounded the little lake in question, there was
+a lady standing; she was dressed all in black except her veil, which
+was white; she had a bouquet of faded flowers in her hand, and was
+turning it over with her fingers. She was looking towards the west,
+that is to say, away from him, and seemed to be contemplating partly
+the confused mass of stone _Suisseries_, and the coral-reef of
+sea-horses, tritons, and so on, and partly a temple, in artificial
+ruins, which was close by. As he passed slowly on he saw, by a side
+glance, that she threw a flower, not so much _at_ as _over_ him, as if
+this sign of exclamation were meant to rouse a pre-occupied person from
+his _reverie_. He looked round a little, just to show that he was
+really awake and observant, and went up to the glass-door of the
+artificially-ruined temple, in order to linger a little longer in the
+vicinity of this enigma. Inside the temple, facing him, there was a
+mirrored pillar, which reflected all the foreground and middle distance
+(including the fair unknown) in the green perspective of a long
+background. Firmian saw, in the mirror, the lady throw her bouquet at
+him bodily, and then roll an orange (which would not fly so far as the
+flowers) towards his feet. He turned round with a smile. A soft voice
+cried in an eager, hasty way, "Don't you know me?" He said, "No;" and
+ere he had added, more slowly, "I am a stranger," the unknown Lady
+Abbess had drawn near to him, and lifted the Moses veil rapidly from
+her face, and asked, in a louder tone, "Don't you, _now_?" And a female
+head which might have been sawn from the shoulders of the Vatican
+Apollo (only softened by some eight or ten feminine traits, and a
+narrower brow) glowed upon him like some bust illumined by the flare of
+a torch. But, on his repeating that he was a stranger, and when she
+examined him more closely, and without her veil, and let her gauze
+portcullis down again (which movements took altogether about as long as
+one beat of the pendulum of an astronomical clock), she turned away
+saying, "I beg your pardon," in a tone which expressed more womanly
+annoyance than embarrassment.
+
+A very little thing would have set him off to follow her in a
+mechanical sort of manner. He immediately set about adorning all
+Fantaisie with plaster-casts of her head (instead of the stone
+goddesses)--of her head, which had but three pleonasms in the face of
+it--too much colour in the cheeks, too much curve in the nose, and too
+much wild fire (or rather material for kindling it) in the eyes. "That
+is the sort of head," he thought, "which would be well in its place in
+an opera-box, beside the sparkling one of some royal bride (ay, and
+hold its own there), and might contain all the wisdom it might
+deprive--other people of."
+
+One carries a magic adventure such as this into one's dreams with one,
+for it is like a dream itself. The month of May now stuck in little
+flower-sticks to all Firmian's drooping, trembling, joy-flowers (as she
+had done to Nature's), and lightly bound them to them. Ah! with what
+brightness do even little joys beam upon the soul when it stands on
+some spot all darkened by clouds of sorrow--as stars shine out in the
+empty sky when we look up at it from a cellar or deep well.
+
+On the exquisite morning which followed, the earth rose with the sun.
+Siebenkæs had his friend of all time in his head and heart more than
+the unknown of yesterday; although, at the same time, he took care that
+his path should lead him by the ocean, and the shell out of which that
+Venus had arisen--for mere curiosity's sake--which led to no result.
+And so he waded away through the moist radiance and cloudy vapour of
+the glittering silver-mine, tearing down in his passage the
+gossamer-wreaths all behung with seed-pearls of dew which hung upon the
+flowers; brushing (in his eagerness to reach his Olympus of yesterday)
+the chilled butterflies and dew-drops from off the branches, all
+a-flutter with the insect swarms (the key-board of a harmonica framed
+in flowers). He climbed to his place in the great "Auditorium" all
+delight at length. Bayreuth lay behind a glowing drop-curtain of mist.
+The sun (in his character of "king" of this drama) stood on a hill-top,
+and looked down at this many-tinted curtain, which took fire and
+blazed, while the morning breezes caught and bore away its fluttering,
+sparkling, tinder fragments, and scattered them over the gardens and
+the flowers. And soon nothing save the sun was shining; nothing round
+him now except the sky. Amid this radiance Siebenkæs made his entry
+into his dear friend's camp of recreation and head-quarter city,
+whereof all the buildings looked as if they were a glittering, solider
+sort of air-and-magic castles fallen down from the æther. It was
+strange, but, on noticing certain window-curtains drawn in (which the
+street breeze had been toying with), he could scarcely help feeling
+certain that it was the "Unknown" of yesterday who was doing it,
+although at that time of the morning (it was barely eight o'clock) a
+Bayreuth lady would have as little got through her flower-sleep as the
+red mouse-ear, or the Alpine hawksbeard.[62] His heart beat quicker at
+every street. It was quite a pleasure to him to lose his way a little,
+as to some extent delaying and adding to his happiness. At length he
+attained his perihelion--that is to say--reached the Sun (Hotel), where
+was the metallic sun which had attracted to it _his_ comet, as the
+astronomical sun does comets in general. He inquired the number of
+Leibgeber's room; they said it was number 8, at the back of the house,
+but that he had gone that day on a trip into Swabia, unless he was
+still upstairs. Fortunately there just then came in from the street an
+individual who testified to the correctness of the latter hypothesis,
+and wagged his tail at sight of Siebenkæs--Leibgeber's dog to wit.
+
+To storm up the stairs, to burst open the door of joy, to fall upon the
+beloved breast, was the work of a single instant; and then the barren
+minutes of life passed unseen and unheard by the close, silent union of
+two human creatures, who lay clinging together on the waters of life,
+like two shipwrecked brothers floating, embracing and embraced, on the
+chill waves, with nothing left them save the heart they die upon....
+
+As yet they had not said a word to one another. Firmian, whom a longer
+continuance of troubles had made the weaker of the two, wept without
+disguise at sight of the face of his newly recovered friend. Heinrich's
+features were drawn as if by pain. They both had their hats still on.
+Leibgeber, in his embarrassment, could think of nothing to hold on to
+except the bell-rope. The waiter came running in. "Oh! it's nothing!"
+said Leibgeber; "except, by the way, that I shan't go out now. Heaven
+grant," he added, "that we may get fairly into the thick of a long
+talk! Drag me into one, brother!"
+
+He had no difficulty in beginning one with the pragmatic detailing of
+the _Nouvelle du Jour_--or rather _de la Nuit_--in short, the town (or,
+more properly speaking, the country) news of what had taken place on
+the previous day in the vicinity of the veil of the beautiful _Je ne
+sais quoi_.
+
+"I know her" (Leibgeber answered), "as I know my own pulse; but I don't
+intend to say anything whatever about her just now. I should be obliged
+to sit still and wait here for such a time. Put the whole thing off
+till we are sitting in Abraham's warm bosom in the Hermitage, which is
+the second heaven of Bayreuth, next to Fantaisie,--for Fantaisie is the
+first heaven, and the whole country is the third."
+
+They then made an ascent into heaven in every fresh street they came
+to, and also in every subject of conversation which they fell upon.
+"You shall knock my head off its stalk like a poppy," said Leibgeber,
+on Firmian's betraying (I regret to say) as great a curiosity as the
+reader's own to know the secret, "before I transform _my_ mysteries
+into _yours_, either to-day, or to-morrow, or the day after that. Thus
+much I will tell you, that your 'Selections from the Devil's Papers'
+(your 'Evening Journal' contains matter more morbific) are perfectly
+divine, and very heavenly indeed, and not at all bad, and by no means
+without beauties; but, on the whole (let us say), passable enough."
+Leibgeber then told him how delighted he was with the work, and how it
+surprised him that he, a lawyer in a little country town, with nobody
+in it but a parcel of shopkeepers and juristic souls, with a sprinkling
+of higher officialities, should have managed to rise in these satires
+to such a freedom and purity of art; and, indeed, when _I_ first read
+the 'Selections from the Devil's Papers,' I said, myself now and then,
+"I am sure _I_ couldn't have written anything of the kind in Hof in
+Voigtland, and I _have_ written one or two pretty good things there,
+too."
+
+Leibgeber placed a crown on the top of the laurel wreath by declaring
+that it was much easier for him to laugh at the world aloud, and with
+both lips, than under his breath and with the pen, and this in
+accordance with well-tried rules of art. Siebenkæs was beyond himself
+with delight at his friend's praise. But let no one grudge a pleasure
+of this sort to our advocate, or to any other worker who, in solitude,
+and without a single soul to give him a word of praise, has gone
+steadfastly forward along the path of art which he has honestly chosen,
+unsupported, unassisted by the smallest encouragement of any kind,
+whom, at last, on reaching the goal, the fragrance of a leaf or two of
+laurel from a friend's hand, penetrates, strengthens, and recompenses,
+with an aroma as of Araby the Blest. If even the far-famed and the
+self-satisfied stand in need of a little of the warmth which is
+derived from other people's opinions, how much more the diffident and
+the unknown! Ah! lucky Firmian! to what a distance in the far
+south-south-west did the passing thunder-storms of thy life now go
+drifting away. When the sun fell upon them, nothing of them was to be
+seen but a gentle fall of rain.
+
+At the _table d'hôte_ he observed with delight, in the case of
+Leibgeber, how wonderfully a constant intercourse with men and cities
+loosens the tongue though, at the same time, the heart puts on the
+bridle which has been taken from the lips. Leibgeber thought nothing of
+talking about himself, and this in the most humorous manner, before all
+sorts of grand councillors of state and chancery officials dining at
+the Sun--a thing which he, a cabined, cribbed, confined parish advocate
+would scarce have dared even after a good bottle of wine. As the
+discourse which he delivered on this occasion pleased the parish
+advocate, I shall build it into this history, and place over it the
+superscription--
+
+
+ LEIBGEBER'S DINNER SPEECH.
+
+"I think I may venture to say that of all the Christians and persons of
+name and title seated at this table, not one was made into one with
+such wonderful difficulty as I was. My mother, a native of Gascony, was
+on her way to Holland, by sea, from London, where she had left my
+father as diocesan of a German community. But, never since there has
+been such a thing on the face of the earth as a councillor of the
+German empire, did the German Ocean rage and insurge so terrifically as
+upon the occasion in question when it was my mother's lot to be
+crossing it. Pour all hell, hissing lakes of brimstone, boiling copper,
+splattering devils, and all, into the cold ocean, and observe the
+crackling, the roaring, and the seething of the hell-flames and
+ocean-waves contending, till one of these hostile elements swallow up
+the other, and you have a faint (but, at dinner-time, a sufficient)
+idea of the infernal storm in which I came upon the sea, and into the
+world. When I tell you that the main braces, the topsail sheets, and
+the main topgallant stays (to say nothing of the crossjack braces and
+fore topgallant halyards, which were in a worse state still)--and when,
+moreover, the mizen topsail, and the foretop mast staysail rigging, and
+the flying jib (to say nothing of the spanker)--when things so
+accustomed to the sea as these (I say) felt as if their _last hour_ was
+come, it was a real ocean miracle that a creature so tender as I was at
+that time should have managed to commence his _first_. I had about as
+much flesh on my body then as I have fat now, and may have weighed, at
+the outside, about four Nürnberg pounds, which (if we may credit the
+authority of the best anatomical theatres) is at the present moment
+about the weight of my brain alone. Besides which, I was the merest of
+beginners. I had seen absolutely nothing of the world, except this
+infernal gale. I was a creature, not so much of _few_ years as of
+_none_ at all (though everybody's life commences some nine months
+sooner than the parish registers indicate), excessively tender and
+delicate--having been (in opposition to all the rules of hygiene) kept
+much too warm, swaddled, and coddled during these very first nine
+months in question, when I ought rather to have been undergoing a
+preparation of some kind to enable me to bear the chill atmosphere of
+this world. And thus, quarter-grown, a tender flower-bud, liquidly soft
+as first love, when I made my appearance during a storm such as was
+raging (I added one or two feeble squeaks, with some difficulty, to its
+roar), what was to be expected was, that I should be extinguished
+altogether, even before it calmed down. People didn't like the idea of
+my going without something in the shape of a name--without some little
+vestige of Christianity of some kind--out of this world, which is a
+place whence we _do_ carry away even less than we bring into it with
+us. But the grand difficulty experienced was that of _standing_
+godfather, in a rolling, plunging vessel, which pitched everything and
+everybody higgledy-piggledy that wasn't made fast. The chaplain was
+(luckily) lying in a hammock, and he baptized down out of thence. My
+godfather was the boatswain, who held me for five whole minutes; but
+inasmuch as he couldn't, without help, stand steady enough to enable
+the chaplain to touch my brow with the water without missing me, he was
+held by the barber's mate, who was made fast to a marine, who was made
+fast to a boatswain's mate, who was made fast to the master-at-arms,
+who sat upon the knee of an old bluejacket, who held on to him like
+grim death.
+
+"However, neither the ship nor the child (as I afterwards ascertained)
+came to any detriment; but you all see, do you not, that, hard as it is
+for any one amid the storms of life, to become, and continue, a
+Christian, or to get a name--be it in a directory, in a literary
+gazette, in a herald's college, or upon a medal--yet there are few who
+have had the same difficulty as I have had in acquiring the mere _first
+elements_ of a name--the groundwork, the binomial root, of a Christian
+name, whereon, at a subsequent period, the other _great_ name might be
+engrafted--and to get hold of a faint smattering of Christianity, as
+much as a catechumen and candidate as yet in a speechless and sucking
+condition might be capable of. There is but one thing more difficult to
+make; the greatest princes and heroes can only do it once in their
+lives--the mightiest geniuses--even the three electors of the Church,
+the Emperor of Germany himself, with all their united efforts, can't do
+more, were they to sit for years, stamping in the mint with all the
+latest improvements in coining machinery."
+
+The whole of the company entreated him to explain what this was that
+was so hard to frame.
+
+"'Tis a crown prince," he answered, quietly; "even a reigning sovereign
+finds it no easy matter to produce an appanaged prince--but, let him
+try as he will, even in the best days of his life, he can never produce
+more than one specimen of a crown prince; for a Seminarist of that sort
+is none of your accessory-works, but the prime mover, the regulator,
+the striking and driving-wheel of the whole nation. On the other hand,
+gentry, counts, barons, chamberlains, staff-officers, and above all,
+common people and subjects of the altogether every-day sort--to be
+brief, a scurvy crew of that description--a _generatio æquivoca_--can
+be brought into being by a prince with such wonderful ease that he
+creates these _lusus naturæ_ and virgin swarms, or _protoplasmata_, in
+considerable numbers even in his earlier days, although in riper years
+he may not manage to turn out an heir to his throne. Yet, after so much
+preliminary drill, so many trial-shots, one would have taken one's oath
+the other way!"
+
+ END OF LEIBGEBER'S TABLE-TALK.
+
+In the afternoon they paid a visit to that verdant, pleasure place, the
+Hermitage, and the alley leading thither seemed to their happy hearts
+to be a path cut through some beauteous grove of gladness. That young
+bird of passage, Spring, was encamped all over the plain around, her
+unladen floral treasures scattered about the meadows, and floating down
+the streams, while the birds were drawn up into air upon long sunbeams,
+and the world of winged creatures hovered all about in intoxication of
+bliss amid the exquisite scents shed abroad by kind Nature.
+
+Leibgeber determined to pour out his heart and his secret at the
+Hermitage that day, and (by way of preliminary) a bottle of wine or so
+to begin with.
+
+He begged and constrained Siebenkæs first of all to deliver a
+diary-lecture concerning his adventures by land and by water up to the
+present time. Firmian complied, but with discretion. Over his stomach's
+barren year, over his hard times, over the (metaphorical) winter of his
+life (upon whose snow he had had to make his nest, icebird-like), and
+over all the bitter northerly wind, which drives a man to BURY himself
+in the earth (as soldiers do)--over all these he passed lightly and
+quickly. I myself must approve of him for so doing; firstly, because a
+man would be none who should shed a bigger tear over wounds of poverty
+than a young lady drops at the piercing of her ears, for in both cases
+the wounds become points of suspension for jewels; secondly, because
+Siebenkæs would not cause his friend the slightest pain on the score of
+their change of names, the main source of all his hunger-springs.
+However, his friend knew, and sympathised with him sufficiently to
+consider that his pale, faded face and his sunken eyes constituted a
+sufficient almanac month-emblem of his frost-month or winter-picture of
+the snowed-up tracts of his life-road.
+
+But when Siebenkæs came to speak of the deep and secret wounds of his
+soul, it was all he could do to keep back the drops of blood-water
+which pressed to his eyes; I mean the subject of Lenette's hatred and
+love. But while he drew a very indulgent picture of her little love for
+him, and her great love for Stiefel, he used much brighter colours for
+the historical piece which he painted of her admirable behaviour to the
+Venner, and of that gentleman's wickedness in general.
+
+"As soon as you have done," said Leibgeber, "you must allow yourself to
+be informed that women are not _fallen_ angels, but FALLING ones. By
+all the heavens! while we stand patient, like sheep being shorn, they
+stick the shears oftener into our skins than into our wool. I should
+think of the fair sex if I were to cross the bridge of St. Angelo at
+Rome, for there are twelve statues of angels there, holding the
+implements of the Passion, each a different one; one has the nails,
+another the reed, another the dice, and similarly each woman has a
+peculiar torture-instrument of her own to apply to us poor lambs. Whom,
+think you, for instance now, is the Palladium of yesterday, your
+unknown beauty, going to tether to her bed-post with the nose-ring of a
+wedding-ring? But I must tell you about her. She is altogether
+glorious: she is poetic; full of romantic, enthusiastic admiration for
+the British, and for intellectual people in general (consequently for
+me), and lives with an aristocratic English lady, a sort of companion
+to Lady Craven and the Margrave at Fantaisie yonder. She has nothing,
+and accepts nothing; is poor and proud, daring to rashness, and pure as
+the day; and she signs herself '_Nathalie Aquiliana_.' Do you know
+who's going to be her husband? A horrible, burnt-out, used-up wretch--a
+feeble, puny creature, whose egg-shell was chipped a week or two before
+its time, and who now goes cheeping about our toes like a chicken with
+the pip; a fellow who copies Heliogabalus (who put on a new ring every
+day) in the matter of wedding-rings; a hop-o'-my-thumb whom I could
+sneeze over the North Pole (and I should like very much to do it), and
+whom I have the less need to give you any description of, inasmuch as
+you have just given _me_ one of him yourself: when I tell you his name,
+you will see that you know him pretty well. This magnificent creature
+is going to be married to the Venner Rosa von Meyern!"
+
+Firmian fell, not _from_ the clouds, but right _into_ them. To make a
+long tale short, this Nathalie is the Heimlicher's niece, of whom
+Leibgeber wrote some account in our first volume. "But, listen,"
+continued Leibgeber, "I will let myself be hewn and hacked into crumbs
+smaller than those of Poland--into clippings not big enough to cover a
+Hebrew vowel--if this affair comes to anything; for I am going to put a
+stop to it."
+
+Since Leibgeber (as we know) was in the habit of talking to the lady
+every day (his spotless soul and his bold mind having unspeakable
+attractions for her), all he had to do in order to break the marriage
+off, was simply to repeat to her what Siebenkæs had told him concerning
+her bridegroom elect. It was his intimacy with her, and his resemblance
+to Siebenkæs which had led to her mistaking Firmian for him on the
+evening of his arrival.
+
+The majority of my readers will urge against me and Leibgeber the same
+objection which Siebenkæs brought forward--that, Nathalie's love and
+marriage for money were quite out of harmony with her character, and
+her disregard for riches. But, in one word, all she had ever as yet
+seen of that gaudy flycatcher, Mr. Rosa, was his Esau's hand, that, is
+to say, his writing, _i. e_. his Jacob's voice; he had only written her
+a few irreprehensible, sentimental letters of assurance (pin-papers,
+stuck full of Cupid's darts and stitching-needles), and so given
+guarantee of the _documentary_ nobility of his heart.... The
+Heimlicher, moreover, had written to his niece, saying, on St.
+Pancrasius' day (May 12th, that is in four days' time), the Venner
+would come and present himself, and if she refused him, let her never
+call herself his niece again, and starve in her native village for all
+he cared.
+
+But, speaking as a man of honour, I really have never had above three
+of Rosa's letters in my hands for two or three minutes, and in my
+pocket for about an hour; and they were really not so very bad--far
+more moral than their author.
+
+Just as Leibgeber said he would assume the office of consistory, and
+divorce Nathalie from Rosa before their marriage, she came driving up,
+with one or two lady friends, and got out of the carriage; but instead
+of going with them to where the company were assembling, she went away
+alone, by a solitary side walk, to the so-called Temple. In her haste
+she had not noticed her friend Leibgeber sitting opposite the stables.
+I ought to explain here that when the Bayreuthians go to the Hermitage
+they have been in the habit, ever since the days of the Margrave, of
+sitting in a little wood, all breezes and cool shade, in front of the
+extensive farm-buildings and stables, but having the loveliest of
+prospects just at their backs, which they could easily substitute for
+the blank wall upon which they feast their gaze, by merely getting up
+and going a little way out of the wood on either side.
+
+Leibgeber told Siebenkæs he could take him to her in a moment, as she
+would be sure to sit down in the temple (as she usually did) to enjoy
+the enchanting view of the city towers and the hills, as they lay in
+the light of the evening sun beyond the shrubberies. He added that,
+unfortunately, she cared too little about appearances; and _would_ go
+to the summer-house all by herself, greatly to the distress of the
+English lady, who, after the manner of her countrywomen, didn't like
+going anywhere alone, and wouldn't trust herself to go near even a
+gentleman's clothes cupboard without an Insurance Company and Bible
+Society of women with her to protect her. He said he had it on good
+authority that a British lady never permitted the _idea_ of a _man_ to
+enter her head without at once surrounding it with the number of ideas
+of _women_, necessary to bridle and restrain him, should he begin
+behaving (in the four chambers of her brain) with that amount of
+freedom which he might employ if _at home_ there.
+
+They found Nathalie in the open temple, with some papers in her hand.
+"I bring you our author of the 'Selections from the Devil's Papers,'"
+said Leibgeber, "which I see you are just reading; will you allow me to
+introduce him to you?" After a passing blush at having mistaken
+Siebenkæs for Leibgeber, in Fantaisie, she said to him, very kindly and
+pleasantly, "It would take very little to make me mistake you for your
+friend again, Mr. Siebenkæs; and you seem almost exactly alike in mind,
+as well as in body. Your satire is often exactly like his; it is only
+your graver 'Appendices' which I was just reading, and which I like
+very much, that seem to me as if they hadn't been written by him."
+
+I have not at present time to make--(for Leibgeber's unauthorized
+communication to one friend of the papers of another)--excuses
+occupying long pages of print to readers who may insist upon extreme
+delicacy in matters of this description. Suffice it to say that
+Leibgeber took it for granted that every one who liked _him_ would join
+with him in liking his friends, and that Siebenkæs (and even Nathalie)
+would see nothing in his unhesitatingly communicating these papers, but
+a mere passing on of a friendly circular letter, pre-supposing, as he
+did, the existence between them of a triple elective affinity.
+
+Nathalie scanned the pair--particularly Leibgeber, whose big dog she
+was stroking--with a kindly and observant look of comparison, as if she
+were trying to find out dissimilarities between them; for, in fact,
+Siebenkæs seemed to her to be scarcely as like his friend as she had
+thought. He was taller and slighter, and younger in the face; but this
+was because Leibgeber, whose shoulders and chest were more strongly
+built, bent his strange, earnest face more forward when he talked, as
+if he were speaking into the earth. He himself said he never _had_
+looked really young, not even at his baptism--as his baptismal
+certificate would prove--and wasn't likely to grow much younger now
+till he arrived at his second childhood. But when Leibgeber
+straightened his back somewhat, and Siebenkæs bent his a little, they
+looked very much like one another; however, this is more a hint for the
+drawer-up of their passports than anything else.
+
+Let us felicitate the Kuhschnappel lawyer on this opportunity of
+enjoying a few minutes' conversation with a lady of position, and of
+such many-sided cultivation as even to be capable of appreciating
+satires. All _he_ wished was that a phœnix of this sort--such as,
+hitherto, he had only seen a pinch or so of the ashes of in actual
+life, or a phœnix-feather or two preserved in a book--might not take
+wing and disappear _instanter_; but that he might be lucky enough to
+listen to a long talk between her and Leibgeber, as well as help to
+spin it out himself. But suddenly her Bayreuth friends came hurrying up
+to say that the fountains were just going to play, and there wasn't a
+moment to be lost. The whole party, therefore, went towards the
+waterworks, Siebenkæs' whole care being to keep as close as he could to
+the noblest of the spectatresses.
+
+They stood by the basin, and looked at the beautiful water artifices,
+which, no doubt, have long since played before the reader, either on
+the spot, or in the pages of the various writers of travels, who have
+expressed themselves on the subject of them at sufficient length, and
+in adequate terms of laudation. All kinds of mythologic demigod-ical
+demibeasts spouted forth streams; and from out this world, peopled with
+water-gods, there spouted a crystal forest, whose descending branches,
+liana-like, took root again in the earth. They enjoyed for a long while
+the sight of this talkative, intercommingling water-world. At length
+the fluttering, ever-growing water-forms sank down and died; the
+transparent lily-stems grew shorter and shorter, as they watched them.
+"Why is it, I wonder?" said Nathalie to Siebenkæs, "that a waterfall
+lifts up one's heart; but this dying-down of these springing jets, this
+visible sinking away of these grand streaming beams of water, always
+makes me sad and anxious? We never see any such falling in of high
+things in real life."
+
+Siebenkæs was thinking out the apt and comprehensive reply to this true
+and just expression of Nathalie's feeling, when all at once she jumped
+into the water to rescue, with as little delay as possible, a child who
+had fallen in, a few steps away from her; for the water was there about
+waist-deep. Before the men who were present had so much as _thought
+about_ it, she had _done_ it; and she was right, for in this case
+rapidity without reflection was the good and true thing. She lifted the
+child out, and gave it to the women; but Siebenkæs and Leibgeber took
+her hands, and lightly raised the fiery creature (all blushes, of body
+and of soul) on to the bank. "What does it matter?" she said, with a
+smile, to the alarmed Siebenkæs, "I shall be none the worse," and
+hurried away with her friends (who were all shocked into
+speechlessness), having first begged Leibgeber to come next evening,
+with his friend, to Fantaisie. "That of course I shall do," he said;
+"but first of all, I am coming to see you by myself early in the
+morning."
+
+The crying need of our two friends was now to be alone with one
+another. Leibgeber, under the new excitement, could scarce wait to
+attain the birch wood, where he meant to continue their previous
+conversation regarding Siebenkæs' domestic and conjugal affairs. With
+respect to Nathalie, he briefly pointed out to his astonished friend
+that what so much delighted him in her was just the unhesitating,
+downright straightforwardness which marked all her thoughts and
+actions, and her manly cheerfulness, athwart which the world, and
+poverty, and chances and accidents of every kind merely passed floating
+away, like light, shining summer clouds, never darkening her day. "Now
+as regards you and your Lenette," he went on (when they reached the
+solitude of the little wood), as quietly as if he had been talking
+continuously up to that instant, "if I were in your place, I should
+take an alterative, and get rid of the hard gall-stone of matrimony for
+good and all. You will never really be able to bear the pain of the
+bonds of wedlock, though you scrape and scratch away at them for years
+to come with all your finest hair-saws and bone-saws. The Divorce Court
+will give _one_ grand cut and tear--and there you are, free of one
+another for ever and ever."
+
+The idea of a divorce terrified Siebenkæs, although he saw very clearly
+that it was the only possible breaking-point for the storm-clouds of
+his life. He was far from grudging to Lenette either her freedom, or
+the marriage with Stiefel, which would infallibly result; but he
+felt quite sure that, however much she might wish for it, she never
+would consent to an enforced separation, on account of her strong
+regard for appearances,--also that on their road to this parting both
+she and he would have to pass many a bitter hour of heart-strain and
+nerve-fever,--and that they could hardly afford to pay for a betrothal,
+much less for a divorce.
+
+It was likewise an accessory circumstance, that it was more than he
+could bear to think of the sight of the poor innocent soul, who had
+shivered at his side through so many a cold storm of life, going away
+for ever from his home, and from his arms--ay, and with _that
+handkerchief_ in her hand, too!
+
+All these considerations, with many stronger, and many weaker, he laid
+before his friend, finishing up with this final one: "I assure you,
+moreover, that if she went away from me, tag and baggage, and left me
+by myself in that empty room (as in a grave), and in all the blank,
+cleared-out spaces, where, when all's said and done, we have sat
+together through so many kindly happy hours, and seen the flowers
+growing green about us--she never could pass by my window (while she
+bore my name, at all events, though no longer mine), but something
+within me would bid me throw myself down, and dash myself in pieces at
+her feet. Would it not be ten times better," he continued in an altered
+tone, "to wait till I fall down upstairs in the room (or what does my
+giddiness mean), and be taken out of the window, and out of the world,
+in a better fashion? Friend Death would take his long erasing knife,
+and scrape my name (and other blots into the bargain) out of her
+marriage-lines."
+
+Contrary to all expectation, this seemed to make Leibgeber merrier and
+livelier than ever. "Do so!" he said; "it's the very thing! Die by all
+means! The funeral expenses can't possibly come to anything approaching
+the costs of the other kind of separation; and besides, you belong to
+the Burial Society." Siebenkæs stared at him in astonishment.
+
+He went on in a tone of the utmost indifference: "Only I must tell you
+it will do neither of us much good, if you dawdle a long time at your
+saddling and bridling, and take a year or two about your dying. I
+should think it much more to the purpose were you to be off to
+Kuhschnappel as soon as ever you can, take to your sick-bed and
+death-bed directly you get there; and die as quickly as ever you can
+manage it. And I'll give you my reasons. For one thing your Lenette's
+year of mourning would be out just before Advent, so that she would
+require no dispensation, if she wanted to marry Peltzstiefel before
+Christmas. It would suit me very well, too, for I could then disappear
+in the crowd, and I shouldn't see you again for some considerable time
+to come. Besides, it is anything but a matter of indifference to
+yourself, for of course the sooner you're appointed Inspector the
+better."
+
+"This is the very first of your jokes, dear old Henry," said Siebenkæs,
+"of which I don't understand one single word."
+
+Leibgeber, with a disturbed countenance, whereon a whole history of the
+world was legible, and which indicated, as well as gave rise to, the
+greatest possible anticipation of something of immense importance to
+come, pulled a letter from his pocket and handed it to Siebenkæs in
+silence. It was a letter of appointment by the Count von Vaduz,
+constituting Leibgeber Inspector of the Chief Bailiwick of Vaduz. He
+next handed him a letter in the count's handwriting. While Firmian was
+reading the letter, Leibgeber brought out his pocket-diary, and calmly
+muttered to himself, "From the quarter-day after Whitsunday, it says,
+does it not? to the time when I am to enter upon my office; that is to
+say, from to-day--St. Stanislaus' Day. Ah! only think of that--how odd
+it seems--from St. Stanislaus' day one, two, three, four--_four_ weeks
+and a half."
+
+Firmian, much pleased, was handing him back the letter, but he wouldn't
+take it, but pressed it back to him, saying, "I read it long ago, long
+before _you_ did. Put it in your pocket."
+
+And here Heinrich, in a burst of solemn, impassioned, humoristic
+enthusiasm, knelt down in the middle of a long narrow path, which
+looked between the trees of the thick grove like some subterranean
+passage (the weathercock of the distant steeple ended off the
+perspective of it as if with a turnstile)--knelt down facing the west,
+and gazed through the long green hollow way upon the evening sun,
+sinking earthward like some brilliant meteor, its broad beams darting
+down upon the long green path, like forest-water gilt by the spring; he
+gazed fixedly at it, and his eyes all blinded (and lighted up) by its
+sheen, he began to speak as follows:--
+
+"If there be a good spirit near me, or a guardian angel of mine or of
+his, or if _thy_ spirit surviveth still thine ashes, oh! my old,
+_kind_, loving father, so deep in thy grave, then draw near, oh! thou
+dim and ancient shade, and grant to thy stupid, silly son (still
+limping about here in this fluttering, ragged shirt of a body) this
+one, one favour, the first and the last, and enter into Firmian's
+heart, and (while giving it a good sound shaking) address it as
+follows: 'Die, Firmian, for my son's sake, though it be but in jest and
+in appearance only. Throw away your own name, go in his (which was
+yours before) to Vaduz as Inspector, and give yourself out to be him.
+My poor son here (like that _Joujou de Normandie_ whereon he is
+sticking, which circles round the sun upon strings of sunbeams) would
+fain go whirling about _upon_ said Joujou himself for a little while
+longer. Before all you parrots the ring of eternity is still hanging,
+and you can hop on to it and rock upon it if you will. But he does not
+see the ring; don't deprive the poor Poll-parrot of the pleasure of
+hopping about on the perch of this earth till, when he has wound his
+life's thread some sixty times about its reels, the reel gives a ring
+and a snap, the thread breaks, and all his fun is over and done!' Oh!
+kind spirit of my father, stir up my friend's heart this day, and guide
+his tongue, that it may not say 'No,' when I ask him, 'Will you do all
+this.'" Blinded by the evening sun, he felt for Firmian's hand, crying,
+"Where's your hand, dear friend? and do not say 'No.'"
+
+But Firmian, quite carried away by emotion (for this sudden outburst of
+Leibgeber's long pent-up excitement was most contagious), speechless,
+and all in tears, like an evening shade, knelt down before his friend
+and fell on his breast, and said in a low tone (for he could do no
+otherwise), "I am ready to die for you a thousand deaths, any death you
+please: only say what death I can die for you. All I ask is, tell me
+plainly what you would have me do. I swear to you beforehand that I
+will do whatever you tell me; I swear it by your dear father's soul. I
+will gladly give my life for you, and you know I have nothing but that
+to give." Heinrich said, in a most unusually subdued voice, "Let's get
+away in among the Bayreuthians. I certainly have an attack of
+hydrothorax this afternoon, or else a hot mineral spring inside my
+waistcoat; 'pon my word, any ordinary heart ought to have a
+swimming-belt on, or a scaphander, in a vapour-bath of this kind." But
+up at the table under the trees, among the people come to keep the
+Whitsuntide fair, the great holiday and festival of spring--up there
+among people all happy and enjoying themselves, emotion was easier to
+conquer. Here Heinrich quickly unrolled the ground-plans and elevations
+of his castle in the air, the building grants of his Tower of Babel. To
+the Count von Vaduz (whose ears and heart opened and expanded to him
+hungrily) he had given his sacred word of honour that he would return
+to him as Inspector. But his idea was that his dear coadjutor and
+substitute, _cum spe succedendi_, Firmian, should take his place and
+personate him: Firmian, who was such a tautology of him in mind and
+body, that both the count, and the theory of distinctive differences
+itself, would have been puzzled to tell one of them from the other.
+Even in the worst of years the Inspectorship brought in an income of
+1200 thalers; that is to say, the exact amount of Firmian's whole
+inheritance (now sealed up with the law's leaden signet); so that when
+Siebenkæs re-assumed his old name of Leibgeber, he would regain just
+what he had lost by changing it. "For," said Leibgeber, "now that I
+have read your 'Devil's Papers,' I can't endure or swallow the notion
+of your lying fallow any longer in Kuhschnappel; sitting there in
+solitude, like a pelican (or an unicorn, or an unknown hermit) in the
+wilderness. Now, will it take you as long to think about the matter as
+it takes the Chief Clerk of the Chancellery there to shake the ashes
+out of his pipe, when I tell you that, though _you_ are a fellow who
+could fill any and every office in the world splendidly, there's only
+one calling I can follow--that of a _Grazioso_; for though I _know_
+more than most people, I can't put my knowledge to any practical use
+except satirising, and my language is a parti-coloured _Lingua Franca_,
+my head a Proteus, and I myself a delightful compilation of the devil
+and his grandmother. Besides, if I _could_ do anything else, I
+_wouldn't_. What, am I, in the very flower of my days, to stamp
+and neigh, like a state draught-horse, a government prisoner in
+the donjon-keep, the shoeing travis of some miserable office
+counting-house, with nothing to look at but my saddle and bridle
+hanging on the stable-wall, and the loveliest Parnassuses and Tempe
+valleys wooing the free feet of the sons of the Muses just outside! In
+the very years when my milk of life is inclined to throw out a little
+cream--(and the years when a fellow sours and turns to curds and whey
+come on so fast)--shall I go and throw the rennet of an appointment
+into my morning milk? Now, as for _you_, _you_ have a different song to
+sing altogether; you are half a man of office already, and you are
+married into the bargain. Ah! it will beat all 'Bremish Contributions
+to the Pleasures of Wit and Understanding;' it will be a business far
+beyond every existing comic opera, and every funny novel that ever was
+written, when I go back to Kuhschnappel with you, and you make your
+will and depart this life. And then when, after we have paid you the
+last honours, you jump up again (in a good deal of a hurry) and take
+yourself off to receive greater honours still; not to enter into the
+bliss of the departed so much as to become a _bonâ fide_ live
+Inspector; not to appear before a tribunal, but to take your seat upon
+one yourself. Joke upon joke wherever we turn! I can't quite see _all_
+the consequences of it yet, or only in a very half-and-half sort of
+way; the burial club will have to pay your afflicted widow (you can
+pay them back again when you're in cash). Death will fop off your
+ring-finger, all swollen with the betrothal ring. Your widow will be
+able to marry anybody she pleases (yourself if she likes), and so will
+you."
+
+Here, all of a sudden, Leibgeber slapped his leg forty times running,
+and cried, "Ey! Ey! Ey! Ey! Ey! I can hardly wait till you're fairly
+dead and off the hooks; only think of this, your death may make two
+women widows instead of one. I will persuade Nathalie to insure herself
+a pension of 200 dollars a year, payable on your death, in the Royal
+Prussian Provident Widows' Fund[63] (you can pay them it back again as
+soon as you get your money). When your widow that is to be gives the
+Venner the sack, _you_ must privately provide _her_ with a sack of
+breadfruit. And supposing you really could never pay them back, and
+were to die in sober earnest, _I_ should take care that their treasury
+was none the worse for it as soon as I was in funds again." For
+Leibgeber lived in a constant mysterious state of intermittent fever
+between riches and poverty (which he has never explained), or, to use
+his own expression, between the inspiration and expiration of that
+breath of life (Aura Vitalis) called money. Any other but this man, who
+played his game of life with such a dashing boldness, whose blazing
+fire for the true, the right, and the unselfish, had gleamed upon the
+advocate for so many a year as if from a lighthouse-tower, would have
+startled Siebenkæs, particularly in his capacity of lawyer, or have
+made him very angry, instead of over-persuading him. But Leibgeber
+thoroughly saturated him, nay, burnt him through and through with the
+etherial playfulness of his humour, and hurried him resistlessly on to
+the commission of a mimic deception, which had no aim of selfish
+untruthfulness or deceit.
+
+Firmian, however, notwithstanding his intoxication of mind, retained
+sufficient control over himself to think, at least, of the risk which
+Leibgeber would run in this transaction. "Suppose," said he, "anybody
+should come across my dear _real_ Heinrich (whose name I steal) in the
+vicinity of me, a coiner of false names, what then?
+
+"Nobody ever will," said Heinrich, "for as soon as you have re-assumed
+your own canonical name of Leibgeber, and given up 'Firmian
+Stanislaus,' which was conferred upon me at such a stormy baptismal
+font (and Heaven grant you may do so!), I shall, under names altogether
+unheard of--(perhaps, indeed, that I may have the gratification of
+being able to keep 365 name-days in the course of the year, I shall
+take every name in the calendar, one after the other)--I shall throw
+myself off the dry land (under these names or some of them) into the
+great ocean, and propel myself with my dorsal, ventral, and caudal fins
+(and any others I may have besides), through the waves and the billows
+of life towards the thick, muddy sea of death; so that 'twill probably
+be many a day before we meet again."
+
+He gazed fixedly towards the sun, then sinking in glory beyond
+Bayreuth; his motionless eyes shone with a moister sheen, and he
+continued, more slowly, thus: "Firmian, the Almanac says this is St.
+Stanislaus' Day; it is your name-day, and mine, and the death-day of
+that wandering, migratory name, because you will have to give it up
+after your mock death. I, poor devil as I am, would fain be serious
+to-day--for the first time this many a long year. Go you home, alone,
+through the village of Johannes; I shall go by the alley; we'll meet
+again at the inn. By Heaven! everything is so beautiful here, and so
+rose-coloured, that one would think the Hermitage was a piece of the
+sun. Don't be very long, though!"
+
+But a sharp pang of pain shot, with swelling folds, athwart Heinrich's
+face, and he averted that image of sorrow and his blinded eyes--(which
+were full of radiance, and of water, too)--and marched rapidly off past
+the spectators, looking as if at something very far away with a face of
+apparent attention.
+
+Firmian, alone, with tearful eyes, fronted the gentle sunlight
+dissolving into varied tints over the face of the green-hued world.
+Close beneath the sun-fire the deep gold-mine of an evening cloud was
+falling in drops upon the hill-tops which lay under it; the wandering
+shifting gold of the evening sky lay, all transparently, upon the
+yellow-green buds and red and white hill-tops, whilst a great,
+grand, immeasurable smoke, as if of an altar, cast a strange, magic
+reflection--all shifting, distant, translucent hues--athwart the hills.
+The hills and the happy earth, reflecting the sun as it sank, seemed to
+be receiving him in their arms, and taking him into their embrace. But
+at the moment when the sun dipped wholly beneath the earth, there came
+(as it were) the angel of a higher light into this gleaming world
+(which seemed, to Firmian's tearful eyes, to tremble like some
+flickering fiery meteor of the air); this angel advanced, flashing like
+day, into the midst of the night-torch-dance of the living, who, at his
+coming, turned pale, and halted still. But, as Firmian dried his eyes,
+the sun set, the earth grew stiller and paler yet, and night, dewy and
+wintry, came forth from the woods.
+
+But that melted heart of his longed for its fellows, and for all whom
+it knew and loved; it throbbed insatiate in this lonely prison-cell,
+our life; it yearned to love all humanity. Ah! the soul which has had
+to give up much, or has lost much, is too, too wretched on such an
+evening as this.
+
+In a blissful, tranced reverie, Firmian went his way through the
+blossomy fragrance, among the American flowers which open to the sky of
+_our_ night, through the closed meadows (chambers of sleep), and under
+dew-dropping flowers. The moon stood on the pinnacle of the heavenly
+temple in the midday effulgence which the sun cast up to her from the
+deeps beneath the earth and her evening-blushes. As Firmian passed
+through the leaf-hidden village of Johannes (where the houses were all
+scattered about in a great orchard), the evening bells from the distant
+hamlets were lulling the slumbering spring to sleep with cradle-songs.
+Æolian harps, breathed on by zephyrs, seemed to be sending forth their
+tones from out the evening-red, their melodies flowed softly on into
+the wide realm of sleep, and there took the form of dreams. Firmian's
+heart, moved to its very centre, yearned for love--and for very longing
+he felt impelled to press his flowers into the white hands of a pretty
+child in Johannes--just that he might _touch_ a human hand.
+
+Go, dear Firmian, with that softened heart of yours, to your
+deeply-moved friend, whose inner being, too, stretches its arms out
+towards its likeness; for, to-day, you are nowhere so happy as
+together. When Firmian entered their common chamber (which, was dark
+save for the glow of the red twilight in the west), Heinrich turned to
+meet him; they fell silently into each other's arms and forgot all the
+tears which burned within them, even those of joy. Their embrace ended,
+but their silence did not. Heinrich threw himself on his bed, in his
+clothes, and covered himself up. Firmian sank upon the other bed and
+wept there, with closed lids. After an hour or two of excited fancy,
+heated by visions and by pangs of pain, a soft light fell upon his
+burning eyelids; he opened them, and there hung the pale, glowing moon
+over against his window. He rose up; but when he saw his friend
+standing pale and motionless, like a shadow cast by the moon upon the
+wall--and suddenly there came up from a neighbouring garden (like a
+nightingale's voice awaking), Rust's melody to the words--
+
+
+ "'Tis not for this earthly land
+ That Friendship weaves her holy band"--
+
+
+he fell back under the load of bitter memory; an emotion, too great to
+bear, a spasm, closed his sad eyes, and he said, in hollow accents,
+
+"Heinrich! oh believe in immortality. How can we love, if we perish!"
+
+"Peace, peace!" said Heinrich. "To-day I am keeping my name-day,
+and that is enough; for man, certainly, has no birth-day, and,
+consequently, no death-day either."
+
+
+
+
+ CHAPTER XIII.
+
+ A CLOCK OF HUMAN BEINGS--A COLD SHOULDER--THE VENNER.
+
+
+When, in my last chapter, I spoke of ladies who were given to brevity
+of sleep, and awoke six hours before their sisters at the Antipodes, I
+think I did well not to cram into my twelfth chapter (among the
+numerous events so tightly packed there) a model of a certain clock,
+composed of men and women, which I invented a considerable time ago,
+but to reserve it for this thirteenth chapter, where I shall now
+introduce it, and set it up. I believe this humanity clock of mine was
+suggested to me by Linnæus' flower clock at Upsal, whose wheels were
+the earth and the sun, and the figures on its dial were flowers,
+whereof one always awoke and opened later than another. I was living at
+the time in Scheerau, in the middle of the market-place, and had two
+rooms. From the _front_ room I was able to see all the market-place and
+the palace buildings, while my back room looked into the Botanical
+Gardens. Whoever may be living in these rooms now is in possession of a
+delightful, ready-tuned harmony between the flower clock in the garden
+and the mankind clock in the market-place.
+
+At 3 A.M. the yellow meadow goatsbeard awakes--also brides--and then,
+too, the stable-boy begins rattling and feeding the horses under the
+lodger. At 4 (on Sundays) awake the little hawksweed, and ladies who
+are going to the Holy Communion (_chiming_ clocks these may be called)
+and the bakers. At 5, kitchen-maids and dairy-maids awake, and
+buttercups; at 6, sowthistles and cooks. By 7, a good many of the
+wardrobe women of the palace, and the salad in the Botanical Gardens,
+are awake, as well as several tradeswomen. At 8, all their daughters
+and the little yellow mouse-ear--all the colleges and the leaves of
+flowers, piecrust, and law-papers, are open. At 9, the female
+aristocracy begin to stir, and the marygolds, to say nothing of a
+number of young ladies from the country, in town on a visit, glance out
+of their windows. At 10 and 11, the Court ladies, the whole staff of
+lords of the bedchamber, the green colewort and pippau of the Alps, and
+the Princesses' reader, arouse themselves from their morning slumber;
+and (so brightly is the morning sun breaking in through the many-tinted
+silken curtains) the whole Court curtails a morsel or so of its sleep.
+At 12, the Prince; at 1, his consort, and the carnation in her
+flower-vase--have their eyes open. What gets up at later hours in the
+afternoon--about 4 o'clock, say--is nothing but the red hawksweed and
+the night, watchman (a cuckoo clock), and these two are but evening
+dials, or moon clocks. From the hot eyes of the poor devil who opens
+them only at 5 (with the jalap), we turn our own away in sorrow; he is
+a sick man, who has _taken_ some of it (the jalap), and only passes
+from fever-fancies of being griped with hot pincers to genuine, waking
+spasms.
+
+I could never tell when it was 2 o'clock, because I, and a thousand
+other stout gentlemen and the yellow mouse-ear, were always asleep at
+that hour; though I awoke, with the regularity of an accurate repeater,
+at 3 in the afternoon and at 3 in the morning.
+
+Thus may we human creatures serve as flower clocks to higher
+intelligences when our petals close upon our last bed, or as
+sand-glasses when our sands of life are run so far out that they are
+turned over into the other world. On such occasions, when seventy of
+man's years have ended and passed away, these higher intelligences may
+say, "Another hour already! Good God! how time flies!"
+
+And this digression reminds me that it really _does_ fly! Firmian and
+Heinrich lived on in great cheerfulness of spirit towards the jocund
+morning which was so close at hand, though the former could by no means
+take root upon any chair or room-floor all the forenoon; for, in his
+mind's eye, the curtain kept always rising upon the _opera buffa e
+seria_ of his mock death, and displaying its burlesque situations. And
+at present (as was always the case, indeed) the presence and example of
+Leibgeber heightened his sense of humour and power of expressing the
+same. Leibgeber, who had gone through all the stage-business and
+scene-shifting of the sham death in an exhaustive manner weeks ago (in
+fancy), was thinking little about it now. The problem occupying him at
+present was how to extract the wick (that is to say, the bride) out of
+Rosa's wedding-torch, all painted and moulded as it was. Heinrich was
+at all times forcible, free, and bold, furious and implacable as
+regards anything unjust; and his righteous indignation often had much
+the appearance of vengeance, as here in Rosa's case, and in that of
+Blaise. Firmian was more kindly; he spared and pardoned, often, indeed,
+at the (apparent) expense of honour. _He_ could never have plucked
+Nathalie's epistolary lover out of her bleeding heart with Leibgeber's
+forceps and knife. His friend, at leaving for Fantaisie that day, had
+to promise the gentlest of behaviour, and, for a time, silence on the
+subject of the Royal Prussian Widows' Fund. It would, of course, have
+made a terrific, bleeding wound in Nathalie's feeling of rectitude had
+the most distant hint been uttered of such a matter as metallic
+compensation for a spiritual loss such as that involved in her
+separation on moral grounds from the immoral Venner. She deserved to
+conquer (and was well able to do so), with the prospect of her victory
+reducing her to poverty.
+
+Heinrich did not come back till it was somewhat late, and his face was
+a little troubled, though it was a happy face too. Rosa was discarded,
+and Nathalie pained. The English lady was at Anspach with Lady Craven,
+eating her butter--(for she made butter as well as books). When he had
+read out to Nathalie all that was written on Rosa's black board and
+sin-register (which he did gravely, but perhaps louder than was
+necessary, and with scrupulous truth), she rose up with that grand
+grace which is a characteristic of enthusiasm of self-sacrifice: "If
+you are yourself deceived in this as little as you are capable of
+deceiving, and if I may believe your friend as I do you, I give you my
+sacred word that I will not allow myself to be persuaded, or
+constrained, to anything. But the subject of this conversation will be
+here himself in a few days, and I owe it to him as well as to my own
+honour, to hear him, as I have given my letters into his hands. Oh! it
+is hard to have to speak so coldly!" As the moments passed, the rose
+red of her cheek paled to rose-white. She leant it on her hand, and as
+her eyes grew fuller, and tears dropped at last, she said, strongly and
+firmly, "Be in no anxiety, I shall keep my word; and then, cost what it
+may, I will tear myself from my friend, and go back to my poor people
+in Schraplau. I have lived quite long enough in the great world, though
+not _too_ long."
+
+Heinrich's unusual seriousness had overpowered her. Her confidence in
+his truth was immovable, and that (strange reason!) just because he had
+never seemed to fall in love with her, or to pass beyond the condition
+of friendship, and so did not measure her affection by his own. Perhaps
+she would have been angry with her bridegroom's married attorney
+(_i. e_. Firmian), had he not had three or four of the best possible
+excuses; to wit, his general mental resemblance to Leibgeber, and his
+physiognomical resemblance to him (which his paleness purified and
+refined at this juncture).
+
+Her yesterday's request to Leibgeber to bring Siebenkæs with him in the
+evening was now repeated (to the former's joy), though her heart was
+aching in every corner. But let none take umbrage at her half-mourning
+for the Venner (now setting and near the horizon), or her erroneous
+estimate of him; for we all know that women (Heaven bless them!) often
+think sentiment and integrity, letters and actions, tears and honest
+warm blood, to be equivalent one to another.
+
+In the afternoon Leibgeber took Siebenkæs to her as a sort of
+syllogistic figure in support of his argument, or set of _rationes
+decidendi_ (for the Venner was a collection of _rationes dubitandi_).
+Aquiliana received Siebenkæs with a blush, which came and went in an
+instant; and then with the least dash of _hauteur_ (result of
+modesty!), yet with all the kindness and good-will which she owed to
+his interest in her future. She lived in the English lady's rooms. The
+flowery valley lay without, like a world before its sun. One advantage
+connected with a rich pleasure-garden of this sort is that a stranger
+advocate finds that he can attach the floating spider-threads of his
+talk to the branches of it, until they have been woven into the
+finished art-work of a glittering web, which can float in the free air.
+Firmian could never emulate these clever men of the world, who only
+need a listener to be able to begin spinning a conversation; who, like
+the tree-frogs, can cling firmly to anything they chance to hop on to,
+however smooth, and polished it may be; yea, who can even keep afloat
+in a space devoid of air, and all objects whatever (which a tree-frog
+cannot). A man of Siebenkæs' free and independent soul cannot, however,
+long remain embarrassed by his unfamiliarity with his surroundings; he
+must speedily recover his freedom by virtue of his innate superiority
+to chance, external circumstances; and his unassumed and unassuming
+simpleness soon amply compensates for his lack of the great world's
+artificial and assuming simplicity.
+
+Yesterday he had seen this Nathalie in the happy exercise and enjoyment
+of all her powers, and of nature and friendship, smiling and
+enchanting, and crowning the delightful evening with an act of brave
+self-devotion. Alas! how little remained to-day of all these joys, so
+tender and so bright. In no hour is a lovely face lovelier than at that
+immediately succeeding the bitter one, when tears for the loss of a
+heart have passed over it; for the sight of the loveliness in its
+sorrow, during that hour itself, would be too sad to bear. For this
+beautiful creature, who hid the sacrificial knife deep in her heart,
+where it had been plunged, and gladly let it smart there, that but the
+wound's bleeding might be delayed, Siebenkæs would gladly have died--in
+a way more serious than had been intended--could it have been of any
+service to her. Is it a thing so strange that the bond between them
+grew closer and stronger as the sand run down in the hourglass, when we
+consider that, swayed by an unwonted three-sided seriousness (for even
+Leibgeber was overtaken by this feeling), their hearts, at sight
+of the gala-beauty of the spring, were filled with tender, longing
+wishes?--that Siebenkæs, with his pale face, worn, and stamped with all
+the traces and marks and signs of recent, bygone, trouble and pain,
+shone, this day, with a soft and pleasing sheen, as of evening
+sunlight, on her sight, all weakened by her tears?--that she thought
+with pleasure on his (rather singular) merit of having, at all events,
+embittered some of her faithless suitor's infidelities--and that every
+note he touched was in the minor mode of his tender nature, because he
+was seeking to atone for, and cast into shade, the circumstance that it
+had fallen to his lot to lay waste at one fell stroke so many of this
+innocent, unknown creature's hopes and joys--that even his greater
+share of modest, respectful reserve, became him, and set him off by
+contrast with his counterpart, the bolder and more outspoken Heinrich?
+With all these charms of accidental circumstance (which win the female
+world far sooner than charms of a bodily kind), Firmian was endowed in
+Nathalie's eyes. In _his_ eyes she had attractions greater still, and
+altogether new to him: her cultivation and acquirements; her manly
+enthusiasm, her delicate refinement; her (most flattering) way of
+treating _him_--(none of her sex had ever before glorified him with
+anything like it, and this particular species of charm plunges many a
+man who is unused to female companionship, not only into rapture, but
+into matrimony),--and (two crowning delights) the facts that the whole
+affair was fortuitous and out of the common, and that Lenette was the
+exact antipodes of her in each and every respect.
+
+Alas! poor starved, hungering Firmian. There are always a gallows, and
+a notice-board marked "No thoroughfare," on the banks of the streamlet
+of _your_ life, even now that it has become a pearl-bearing brook. Your
+marriage ring must have pinched you a good deal, and felt very tight in
+a warm, temperature like this, as, indeed _all_ rings feel tight in a
+warm bath, and loose in a cold one.
+
+But either some naiad of a diabolical turn of mind, or some ocean god
+who loved a jest, took always the greatest delight in perturbing and
+disturbing the sea of Firmian's life, and stirring up the sand at the
+bottom of it just when its waters were sparkling and glowing
+enchantingly with phosphorescent sea creatures, or some electric matter
+or other, and his ship leaving a long shining wake behind her in it.
+For just as the glory and the beauty of the garden outside were growing
+moment by moment, and embarrassment vanishing away with equal rapidity,
+the painful memory of the late bereavement fading out of remembrance;
+just when the pianoforte (or, say, the pianissimo fortissimo), and the
+songs, duets, and trios were being opened and got ready; in fine, just
+as the honey-cells of their orangery of happiness, their permitted
+flesh-pots of Egypt, and deep communion cup of love were all ready to
+their lips, who came with a pop into the room but a certain bluebottle
+fly on two legs, who had often flown into Firmian's cup of joy before
+now.
+
+The Venner, Rosa von Meyern, made his appearance on the scene, lovelily
+attired in saffron silk, to pay his bride his privileged ambassadorial
+visit.
+
+Never in all his career did this young gentleman arrive otherwise than
+too soon or too late; just as he was never serious, but either
+lachrymose or jocular. The three faces were now each a long duodecimo
+edition of themselves; Leibgeber's was the only one which was not
+stretched on the wire-drawing press, but it was dyed a fine red by his
+inborn detestation of fops and maiden-hawks of every kind. Everard had
+come primed with one idea (taken from Stolberg's 'Homer'), which was,
+to ask Nathalie, on his entrance, whether she were a goddess or a
+mortal (in the manner of Homer's heroes), since _he_ could only pretend
+to contend with the latter race. But at sight of the masculine pair
+whom the Devil levelled at his head like a double-barrelled gun,
+everything inside it turned to cheese and curd, immobile; _twenty_
+kisses wouldn't have enabled him to get his great idea a-flow again. It
+was five days before he got what little there was inside the bones of
+his head into such a fair way of recovery as to make shift to deliver
+himself of this idea to a distant relation of my own (how else should I
+have known anything about it?) in a tolerable degree of preservation.
+At all times nothing so paralysed him in female society as the presence
+of a man; he would have stormed an entire convent of women sooner than
+have laid siege to a single couple of novices (to say nothing of a
+canoness), had but a single wretched man been alongside them.
+
+A standing troupe of players, such as I now see before my pencil, never
+performed in Fantaisie. Nathalie was lost in amazement (little polite),
+and in a quiet comparison of this original edition with her epistolary
+ideal. The Venner, who took for granted that the result of her
+observations was just the opposite of what it really was, would have
+been delighted had he had it in his power to be a manifest
+contradiction, an antipodes to himself. I mean, he would fain have
+shown himself both cold and angry at finding her in the society of this
+couple, and also confidential and tender, so that this beggarly pair
+might be filled with envy and vexation at the sight of his harvest and
+vintage. And inasmuch as he was quite as greatly (only much more
+agreeably) struck with, and surprised at her appearance, as she with
+his, and as he had time enough before him for revenge and punishment,
+he chose rather to adopt the line of bragging and vaunting with the
+view of seasoning and blessing the visit of these two lawyer fellows
+with a good spice of envy. Moreover, he had the advantage of them in
+possessing a light horse-artillery body, and he could _mobilise_ his
+army of physical charms quicker than they could. Siebenkæs was
+thinking of nothing nearer at hand than--his wife. Before Rosa's
+arrival he had been browsing on the idea of her as on a meadow of
+bitter herbs, for the rough, chapped bark of the conjugal hand was by
+no means capable of touching his self-love with the delicate, etherial,
+gentle, _snail-antennæ_ touch of this unmated beauty's eiderdown
+fingers. But now the idea of Lenette became a pasture of sweet and
+succulent verdure; for his jealousy of Rosa (domiciled in two different
+quarters) was less awakened by Lenette's behaviour to him than by
+Nathalie's relations with him. The grimness of Heinrich's glances
+increased amain; they wandered up and down over Rosa's summer hare-skin
+of yellow silk with a jaundiced glare. In an irritable impulse to be
+doing something or other, he fumbled in his waistcoat pocket, and got
+hold of the profile of Herr von Blaise which he had clipped out (as we
+may remember) on the occasion when he stamped the glass wig to pieces
+(and with respect to which profile the only thing which had been
+distressing him for a twelvemonth past was that it was in his pocket,
+and not affixed to the gallows, where he could have stuck it with a
+hairpin the evening he went away). He pulled it out, and tousling it
+between his fingers, he glided nimbly backwards and forwards between
+Nathalie and Rosa, murmuring to Siebenkæs (with his eyes fixed on the
+Venner), "À la silhouette."[64]
+
+Everard's self-love divined these flattering (and involuntary)
+sacrifices of the self-love of the other two, and he went on firing off
+at the embarrassed girl (with ever-growing superciliousness, directed
+to Siebenkæs's address) fragments from the story of his travels,
+messages from his friends, and questions concerning the arrival of his
+letters. The brethren, Siebenkæs and Leibgeber, sounded a retreat, but
+did so like true males; for they were the least bit annoyed with poor,
+innocent Nathalie, just as though she could have marched up to this
+sponsus and letter bridegroom of hers the moment he came into the room,
+with a salutation such as, "Sir, you can never be lord of mine, even
+were you nothing worse than a scoundrel, idiot, fright, prig,
+man-milliner," &c. But must we not, all of us (for I don't consider
+myself an exception), smite upon our bony, sinful breasts, and confess
+that we spit fire the moment modest girls refrain from spitting it
+instantly at those whom we may have nigrified or excommunicated in
+their presence; that further we insist upon their discarding wicked
+squires instantaneously, although they may not be in such a hurry to
+receive them that they should care as little what forced marches and
+honourable retreats their cottiers and dependents may have to make, as
+we fief-holders do ourselves; and that we are offended with them when
+they have an innocent opportunity of being false; even when they do not
+avail themselves of it? May Heaven improve the class of persons of whom
+I have just been treating.
+
+Firmian and Heinrich roamed for an hour or two about the enchanted
+valley; it was full of magic flutes, magic zithers, and magic mirrors.
+But they had neither ears nor eyes. What they found to say concerning
+events heated their heads to the temperature of balloon furnaces, and
+Leibgeber blew a fanfare of mere satiric insults out of the reverse end
+of Fame's trumpet at every female Bayreuthian he met taking her evening
+walk. He announced it as his opinion that women were the unsafest ships
+in winch a man could embark on the great open ocean of life--slaveships
+in fact, or bucentaurs (or shuttles[65] which the Devil weaves his nets
+and gins with)--and the more so that, like other ships of war, they are
+so often and so scrupulously washed, sheathed on the outside with
+poisonous copper, and have about the same amount of bunting and tarry
+tackle (ribbons) flying about them. Heinrich had gone to Nathalie's,
+indulging the (highly improbable) anticipation that she would at once
+unhesitatingly accept and act upon his friend's deposition of evidence
+in his capacity of an eye- and ear-witness concerning Rosa's canonical
+_impedimenta_ (or ecclesiastical marriage disabilities), and it was his
+disappointment on this score which was so gnawing upon his mind.
+
+But just as Firmian was discussing and expatiating upon the Venner's
+lisping and indistinct mode of speaking (his words seemed to curl about
+the top of his tongue with no power of expression in them), Heinrich
+cried out, "Hallo! there the dirt-fly goes!" It was the Venner,
+floundering as a pike does in the net he has been brought to market in.
+As the woodpecker (naturalists call most gaudy-plumaged birds
+woodpeckers) winged his flight closer by them, they saw, as he passed
+them, that his face was a-glow with anger. Doubtless the cement which
+had attached him to Nathalie was broken and dissolved.
+
+The two friends waited a little while longer in the shady walk, hoping
+that they might meet her; but at length they made their way back to
+town, meeting, as they went, a maid of hers, who was taking the
+following letter to Leibgeber:--
+
+
+"You and your friend were, alas! quite right, and all is now at an end.
+Please to let me rest, and reflect for a time in solitude over the
+ruins of my little future. When people's lips are wounded and stitched,
+they are not allowed to talk, although it is not my lips but my heart
+that bleeds, and that for your sex. Ah! I blush when I think of all the
+letters I have written, which it has been such happiness to me to
+write--and, alas! under such a delusion!--yet I have no real reason to
+do so after all. You have yourself said that innocent pleasures should
+give us as little cause to be ashamed as blackberries, although, when
+the enjoyment is past, there may be a black stain on the lips. But, at
+all events, I thank you from my heart. As I must have been disenchanted
+one day, it was kind that it was not done by the wicked sorcerer
+himself, but by you and your most honest and truthful friend, to whom
+please to offer my very kind regards and remembrances.
+
+ "Yours,
+
+ "A. Nathalie."
+
+
+Heinrich had expected the letter to be one of invitation, "for" (said
+he) "her empty heart must feel a cold void, like a finger with its nail
+cut too short." Firmian, whom matrimony had taught, and furnished with
+barometer scales and meteorological tables for observance of women,
+knew enough to be of opinion that a woman must, in the very hour when
+she had dismissed one lover (on purely moral grounds) be a little
+over-cool towards the person who has persuaded her thereto, even were
+he her _second_ lover. And (I take leave here to add, myself) for the
+very same reasons she will exceed in warmth towards this second
+immediately afterwards.
+
+"Ah! poor Nathalie!" Firmian wished unceasingly "May the flowers and
+blossoms be court-plaister for the wounds of your heart; may the soft
+æther of spring be a milk-cure for your oppressed panting bosom." It
+seemed unspeakably sad to him that an innocent creature like this
+should be thus tried and punished, as though she were guilty, and be
+compelled to draw the purifying air of her life from poison plants, and
+not from wholesome ones.
+
+The next day all Siebenkæs did was to write a letter (in which he
+signed himself Leibgeber), informing the Count von Vaduz that he was
+unwell and as grey and yellow as a Swiss cheese. Heinrich had left him
+no peace until he did this. "The count," said he, "is accustomed, in my
+person, to a fine, blooming, sturdy Inspector; but, if he is properly
+prepared for the thing by a letter, he will really believe you to be
+me. Luckily we are neither of us men who would be asked to unbutton in
+any custom-house; nobody would fancy there was anything inside _our_
+waistcoats but skin and bone."[66]
+
+On the Thursday Siebenkæs, standing at the hotel-door, saw the Venner,
+in an Electoral habit, with a full-dress parade head, and a whole
+Barth's vineyard in his face, driving to the Hermitage between two
+young ladies. When he carried this news upstairs, Leibgeber swore--(and
+also cursed)--to the effect that the scoundrel wasn't worthy of the
+society of any young lady, unless her head was a Golgotha and her heart
+a _gorge_ (or _cul_) _de Paris_. He was quite bent on going to see
+Nathalie then and there, and telling her the news, but Firmian
+prevented him by main force.
+
+On the Friday she herself wrote to Heinrich as follows:--
+
+"I have mustered up courage to revoke my prohibition, and beg that you
+and your friend will come to-morrow to beautiful Fantaisie, when (it
+being Saturday) it will lie depopulated. I keep my arms about Nature
+and Friendship; there is no room in them for anything besides. Do you
+know, I dreamt last night that I saw you both in one coffin there was a
+white butterfly fluttering above you, and it grew larger and larger
+till its wings were like great white shrouds; and then it covered you
+both over and hid you with them, and there was no motion beneath. My
+dear, dear friend arrives the day after to-morrow--and to-morrow,
+_you_. And then, I must bid you all adieu.
+
+ "N. A."
+
+
+The Saturday in question occupies the whole of the next chapter, and I
+can form some sort of idea of the reader's eagerness to be at it from
+_my own_; and all the better, seeing that _I_ have read (to say nothing
+about writing) the said chapter already, which he has not.
+
+
+
+
+ CHAPTER XIV.
+
+ A LOVER'S DISMISSAL--FANTAISIE--THE CHILD WITH THE BOUQUET--THE
+ EDEN OF THE NIGHT, AND THE ANGEL AT THE GATE OF PARADISE.
+
+
+It was not the deeper blue of the sky (which, on the Saturday, was as
+rich and pure as in winter, or by night)--nor the thought of actually
+standing in the very presence of the sorrowing soul whom he had driven
+from Paradise with the Sodom apple of the serpent (Venner)--nor his own
+feeble health--nor memories of his own domestic life;--it was none of
+these matters taken singly, but the combination of all these semitones
+and minor intervals together which attuned our Firmian to a melting
+_maestoso_, and gave to his looks and thoughts (for his afternoon
+visit) much such a kind and degree of tenderness as he expected he
+should find in Nathalie's.
+
+What he did find was precisely the reverse. In and about Nathalie there
+reigned such a noble _cold_, serene gladsomeness as you may find upon
+the loftiest mountain peaks; the cloud and the storm are _beneath_,
+while around there rests a purer, colder air, but a deeper blue, too,
+and a paler sunlight.
+
+It cannot, of course, surprise me that you are on the tenter-hooks of
+anxiety to hear the account she is going to give of her rupture with
+Everard. But her account of it was so brief--it might have been
+written round a Prussian dollar--so that I must supplement it with
+mine, which I have taken from Rosa's own written record of it. The fact
+is, the Venner, five years afterwards, wrote a very passable novel (if
+we may credit the praise bestowed upon it in the 'Universal German
+Library'), into which he artfully built the whole of the rupture with
+Nathalie--(that severance between soul and body); at all events, this
+is the conclusion to which sundry hints of Nathalie's would point us.
+The said novel, accordingly, is my fountain of Vaucluse. Emasculate
+intelligences, such as Rosa's, can only reproduce _experiences_; their
+poetic _fœtuses_ are nothing but adopted children of the actual.
+
+To be brief, what took place was as follows. Scarce were Firmian and
+Heinrich gone out among the trees, when the Venner brought up his
+reserve of vengeance, and asked Nathalie, in a tetchy manner, how it
+was that she could tolerate visitors of such a poor and plebeian sort.
+The haste and the coldness of the departed pair had already set
+Nathalie on fire, and this address made her blaze forth in a flame upon
+her yellow-silken questioner. "A question such as that," she answered,
+"is very little short of an insult;" and she immediately added one of
+her own--for she was too warm and too proud to dissemble in the
+slightest, or to hold other than the straightest course with him. "You
+call at Mr. Siebenkæs's pretty often yourself, do you not?" "Oh!" said
+this empty braggart, "I call on his _wife_ (to speak the simple truth);
+_he_ is merely my pretext." "Really," said she, making her syllables
+last as long as her look of scorn. Meyern, amazed at this behaviour, so
+very unlike the tone of the antecedent epistolary correspondence (he
+gave the twin cronies the credit of it)--Meyern, whom her beauty, his
+own money, and her poverty and dependence upon Blaise (to say nothing
+of his position of betrothed bridegroom), had now inspired with the
+utmost audacity--Meyern, this brave and courageous lion, undertook,
+without a moment's hesitation, a task which nobody else would have
+ventured upon, namely, that of humiliating and bringing to her proper
+senses this irate Aphrodite, by reading to her the catalogue of his
+Cicisbean appointments, and, in general terms, unfolding before her the
+long perspective of the hundreds of gynæcœa and jointure-houses open
+to him. "It is such an easy matter to worship false goddesses and open
+their temple doors, that I am charmed to be restored to the worship of
+the true feminine godhead, through my Babylonish captivity to you."
+
+All her crushed heart sighed forth, "Ah! then it is all true--he is a
+wicked wretch, and I am miserable indeed." But she kept silence,
+outwardly, and went and looked out of the window, in anger. Her soul
+was one of those whose seats are the knight's upper dais of womankind;
+it was ever eager to do rare, heroic acts of self-devotion and
+self-sacrifice; indeed, a fondness for remarkable and out-of-the-way
+greatness was the only littleness about it. And now, when the Venner
+tried to make amends for his braggadocio by a sudden jump into a light
+and sportive tone (a tone which, in minor warfares with the ordinary
+fair sex, heals breaches much quicker and better than a more serious
+one)--and proposed a walk in the pretty park to her, as being a spot
+better adapted for a reconciliation--this noble soul of hers spread
+wide its pure white pinions and soared away from out the foul heart of
+this crooked pike with his silver scales for ever! And she drew near to
+him and said (all a-glow, but dry-eyed wholly), "Mr. von Meyern, I have
+quite decided--we are parted for ever. We have never known each other,
+and our acquaintance is at an end. I will send you back your letters
+to-morrow, and you will have the goodness to return mine to me." Had he
+employed a more serious tone, he might have kept hold of this strong
+soul for some days--perhaps weeks--longer. Without looking at him
+anymore, she opened a casket and began arranging letters. He tried, in
+a hundred speeches, to flatter and pacify her; she answered never a
+word. His heart boiled within him, for he gave the two advocates the
+blame for all this. At length he thought he would humble this deaf mute
+(as well as make her alter her determination), by saying, as he now
+did, "I don't know what your uncle in Kuhschnappel will say to all
+this. _He_ appears to me to set a much greater value upon my sentiments
+towards you than you do yourself; indeed, he seems to consider our
+marriage as essential to your happiness as I think it to mine." This
+was a burden heavier than her back, so sore bent down by Fate, could
+bear. She shut up the casket hurriedly, sat down, and rested her
+bewildered head upon her trembling arms, shedding burning tears, which
+her hands strove in vain to hide. A reproach of our poverty uttered by
+lips we have loved, darts like red-hot iron into the heart, and
+scorches it dry with fire. Rosa, whose vengeance, now wreaked, gave
+place to the most eager love, (in hopes that her feelings were of the
+same selfish type as his own), threw himself on his knees before her,
+crying, "Oh! forget it all! What are we breaking with one another
+_for_, if we come really to think about it? Your precious tear-drops
+wash it all away. I mingle mine with them in rich abundance."
+
+She arose with haughty port, leaving him on his knees. "My tears," she
+said, "have not the smallest reference to anything connected with you.
+I _am_ poor, and I would not be rich. After the base, ignoble insult
+you have put upon me, you shall not stay and see me weep. Have the
+goodness to leave the room." So that he retired; and--when one
+considers the weight of the sacks he had to carry--sacks of every kind
+(including one full of muzzles)--he really did it in a surprisingly
+brisk and lively manner, holding his head pretty high. His command of
+his temper and his apparent good humour strike one the more (for I may
+give him what praise he deserves), that he retained them and took them
+home with him, and this on an afternoon when, with the two finest and
+longest levers in all his collection he had utterly failed in touching
+the smallest point in Nathalie's heart, or the auricles thereof. One of
+these levers was his old one, which he had tried upon Lenette--that of
+gradually twisting himself in, corkscrew fashion, in spiral serpentine
+lines of petty advances, approaches, attentions and illusions; but
+Nathalie was neither weak nor light enough to be penetrated thus. The
+other lever was one from which something might really have _been_
+expected in the way of effect--though it actually _had_ less than even
+the first. It consisted in showing his old scars (like an old warrior),
+and rejuvenating them into wounds; in this manner he bared his
+suffering heart, pierced by so many a false love, and which (like a
+dollar with a hole in it), had hung as a votive offering upon so many a
+shrine. His soul put on Court mourning (of sorrow) of all degrees,
+whole and half, in hopes of being, like a widow, more enchanting in
+black. The friend of a Leibgeber, however, could be softened by manly
+sorrows only--the womanly sort could but harden her.
+
+Meanwhile (as we have said), he left, his _fiancée_ without any pity
+for her self-sacrifice indeed, and equally without the slightest
+indignation at her refusal of him. He merely thought, "She may go to
+the devil;" and he could scarce sufficiently congratulate himself that
+he had so easily escaped the incalculable annoyance of having to endure
+life with a creature of the kind from one year's end to another, and to
+pay her the necessary respect throughout an infernal, long matrimonial
+life. On the other hand, his bile was mightily stirred against
+Leibgeber, but more particularly against Siebenkæs (whom he suspected
+of being the real judge of his Divorce Court), and he laid the
+foundation of several gall-stones in his gall-bladder, and of a slight
+bilious yellow tint in his eyes, with hating the advocate, which he
+could not do enough.
+
+We return to the Saturday. Nathalie derived her calmness and serenity
+partly from her own strength of mind, but also in good measure from the
+pair of horses (and of rose maidens) with whom Rosa had been seen
+driving to the Hermitage. A woman's jealousy is always a day or two
+older than her love. Moreover, I know of no excellence, no weakness,
+shortcoming, virtue, womanliness, _manliness_, in a woman which does
+not tend rather to enkindle than to appease jealousy.
+
+Not only Siebenkæs, but even Leibgeber (anxious to breathe some warmth
+upon her freezing soul, all stripped of its warm plumage), was this
+afternoon serious and cordial, not (as he usually did) dressing his
+rewards and punishments up in irony. Perhaps, too, her gratifying (and
+flattering) readiness to obey him tamed him down to some extent.
+Firmian had, in addition to the reasons above set forth, the more
+powerful ones--that the English lady was expected home the next day but
+one, and her coming would put a stop to all this garden pleasure, or
+interfere with it at all events--that he who knew well, from his own
+experience, what the wounds of a lost love were, had a boundless
+compassion for hers, and would gladly have given his own heart's blood
+to make up for the loss of hers--moreover, accustomed all his life to
+bare, mean and empty rooms, he felt a keen enjoyment in being in the
+richly-furnished, bright and tasteful chamber he was now in, and
+naturally carried over a portion of this to the account of their
+inhabitant and hermit.
+
+The maid-servant, whom we have seen this week already, came in just
+then, with tears in her eyes, faltering out that she was going to
+confession, and hoped she had done nothing to displease her, &c., &c.
+"Anything to displease me?" cried Nathalie; "most certainly not--and I
+know I can say the same in your mistress's name;" and went out of the
+room with her and kissed her, unseen, like some good genius. How
+beautiful are pity and kindness to distress, in a soul which has just
+risen up in might to resist oppression.
+
+Leibgeber took a volume of 'Tristram Shandy' from the English lady's
+library, and lay down with it on the lawn under the nearest tree, with
+the view of making over to his friend the undivided fruition of this
+anise, marchpane and honeycomb of an afternoon of talk, which to him
+was merely so much every-day household fare. Moreover, all that day
+when he made any sign of jesting, Nathalie's eyes would implore him,
+"Please do not, for just this one day. Do not take pains to point out
+every pock-pit which Fate has left upon my inner soul to him--spare me
+for this once." And lastly (which was his principal reason), it would
+be much easier for Firmian to tell this sensitive Nathalie (now upon
+one-eighth pay) all his project of making her his appanaged widow, his
+heiress in jest--to tell it to her wrapped in a triple shroud, written
+in distorted characters.
+
+Siebenkæs looked upon this undertaking as a sort of day's work at
+fortification making, a journey across the Alps--round the globe--into
+the grotto of Antiparos, a discovery of the longitude; he had not the
+slightest notion how even to _begin_ to set about it. Indeed, he had
+previously told Leibgeber that, if his death were but a real one,
+nobody would be more ready to talk to her about it, but that for a sham
+death, he really could not sadden her; so that she would have to
+consent, altogether by some chance, and unconditionally, to become his
+widow. "And is my death a thing so very improbable after all?" he said.
+"Of course it is," answered Leibgeber. "If it were not, what would
+become of our death in jest. The lady will e'en have to make the best
+of it." It would appear that he dealt with women's hearts in a fashion
+somewhat colder and harder than Siebenkæs, in whose opinion (hermit
+connoisseur as he was of rarities in the shape of strong female souls)
+a delicate, suffering one like this could not be too tenderly treated.
+However, I do not set up to judge between the two friends.
+
+When Leibgeber had gone out with Yorick, Siebenkæs went and stood
+before a fresco representing the said Yorick, and poor Maria with her
+flute and her goat. For the chambers of the great are picture-bibles,
+and an _orbis pictus_,--they sit, eat and walk in picture exhibitions,
+which makes it all the harder a matter for them that two, at least, of
+the greatest expanses in nature--the sky and the sea--cannot be painted
+over for them. Nathalie went up to him, and at once cried out, "What is
+there to see in that to-day? Away from it!" She was just as open and
+unconstrained in her manner with him as he could not manage to be with
+her. She displayed the warmth and beauty of her soul in that wherein we
+(unconsciously) un_veil_, or un_mask_ (as the case may be), ourselves
+more completely than in anything--namely, her mode of bestowing praise.
+The illuminated triumphal arch which she erected over the head of her
+English lady-friend, elevated her own soul so that she stood at that
+gate of honour as conqueror, in laurel wreath, and glittering collar of
+the Order of Goodness and Worth. Her praises were the double chorus and
+echo of the other's excellence; she was so warm and so earnest! Ah!
+maidens, fairer are ye a thousand times when ye twine bridal-wreaths
+and laurel garlands for your companions than when ye plait them crowns
+of straw, and bend them collars of iron.
+
+She told him how fond she was of British men and women, both in and out
+of print, although she had never seen any until the previous winter.
+"Unless," she said, with a smile, "our friend outside may be considered
+one."
+
+Leibgeber, out on his grass mattress, raised his head and saw the
+couple looking down at him with faces of regard; and the shimmer of
+love shone forth in three pairs of eyes. One single moment of time thus
+clasped three sister souls together in one tender embrace.
+
+The maid coming back from confession about this juncture in her white
+dress--('twas heavy-wing _cases_ rather than light butterfly wings to
+her)--with a trifle of pretty-tinted ribbon about it here and there;
+Firmian looked at this absolved one for a minute or two, and then took
+up her black and gold hymn-book, which she had laid down in her haste,
+finding inside it a whole pattern-card of silks, besides peacock's
+feathers. Nathalie, who saw a satirical expression dawning on his face,
+drove it away in an instant. "Your sex attaches just as much value to
+adornment as ours. Look at your Court dresses, the Coronation robes at
+Frankfort, and uniforms and official costumes of all kinds. Then, the
+peacock was the bird of the old knights and poets, and if you make vows
+upon his feathers, or wear garlands of them, _we_ may surely wear them,
+or at all events _mark_ (if not reward) songs with them." Every now and
+then a barely polite expression of astonishment at what she knew
+escaped the advocate in spite of himself. He turned over the leaves of
+the festival hymns, and came upon gilt figures of Our Lady, and found a
+picture wherein were two parti-coloured blotches (supposed to represent
+two lovers), and a phosphorescent heart, which the male blotch was
+offering to the female with the words:
+
+
+ "And is to thee my fond love all unknown!
+ How my heart burns is here full plainly shown"
+
+
+--the whole surrounded by a tracery of leafwork. Firmian loved family
+and society miniature pictures when (as in this case) they were
+exceedingly poor as works of art. Nathalie saw and read this; she took
+the book in haste, snapped the clasp to, and then, when she had done
+so, said, "You have no objection, have you?"
+
+Courage towards women is not inborn, but acquired. Firmian had had
+familiar experience of very few; wherefore this natural awe made him
+look upon every feminine body--particularly if of any standing in
+society--as a kind of sacred Ark of the Covenant whereon no finger
+might be laid; (for though it is proper to rise superior to
+considerations of rank where men are concerned, it is otherwise with
+women), and upon every female foot as that on which a Queen of Spain
+stands, and every female finger as a Franklin point emitting electric
+sparks. If in love with him, I might have likened her to an electrified
+person, _feeling_ all the sparks and mock pains she emitted. At the
+same time, nothing could be more natural than that his reverent
+timidity should diminish as time went on, and that at length, (at a
+moment when she was looking the other way) he should take courage to
+deftly snatch hold of the end of one of the ribbons in her hair between
+his fingers--and she never be aware of it. It may have been by way of
+preliminary studies towards the execution of this feat that he had
+previously once or twice tried the effect of taking up into his hands
+things which had been a good deal in hers--such as her English
+scissors, a broken pincushion, and a pencil-case.
+
+Taking heart of grace hereupon, he thought he would venture to take up
+a bunch of wax grapes (which he imagined to be made of stone, like
+those upon butter-boats). He gripped them, accordingly, in his fist as
+in a wine-press, crushed two or three of them to pieces, and then
+proffered as many petitions for mercy and pardon as if he had knocked
+over and broken the porcelain Pagoda of Nanking. "There's no harm
+done," she said, laughing. "We all find plenty such berries in
+life--with fine ripe skins--no intoxicating juice--and as easily
+broken--or easier."
+
+He was in terrible dread lest this glorious, many-tinted rainbow of
+happiness of his should melt away into evening dew, and it disconcerted
+him that he no longer saw Leibgeber reading upon the flowery turf.
+Outside, the world was brightened into a land of the sun--every tree
+was a rich, firm-rooted joy-flower--the valley a condensed universe,
+ringing with music of the spheres. Nevertheless he had not the courage
+to proffer his arm to this Venus for a stroll through the sun, _i. e_.
+the sunny Fantaisie; the Venner's fate, and the fact that there was a
+late harvest of a few visitors still walking about the gardens,
+rendered him bashful and mute. Of a sudden Leibgeber knocked at the
+window with the agate-head of his stick, crying, "Come over to dinner.
+My stick-head is the Vienna lantern.[67] We are sure not to get home
+before midnight." He had ordered a dinner in the café. Presently he
+cried out, "There is a pretty child here asking for you." Siebenkæs
+hurried out, and found it was the very child into whose hand he had
+pressed his flowers on the evening when, after the great feast-eve at
+the Hermitage, he had been soaring along on the wings of fancy through
+the village of Johannis. "Where is your wife, sir?" asked the child;
+"the lady who took me out of the water the day before yesterday? I have
+some beautiful flowers here that my godpapa sent me to give her. Mother
+will come and give her best thanks, too, as soon as she can, but just
+now she's in bed very unwell."
+
+Nathalie, who had heard what the child said, came down, and said, with
+a blush, "Is it I, darling? Give me your flowers, then." The child,
+recognising her, kissed her hand, the hem of her dress, and, lastly,
+her lips, and would have recommenced this round of kisses, when
+Nathalie, in turning the flowers over, came upon three silken
+counterfeits amidst its living forget-me-nots and red and white roses.
+To Nathalie's questions as to whence these costly flowers came, the
+child answered, "Give me a kreuzer or two, and I'll tell you." This was
+done, and she added, "I got them from my godpapa, and he is a very,
+very grand gentleman;" then ran away among the bushes.
+
+This bouquet was a veritable Turkish Selam-and-Flower riddle to them
+all. Leibgeber accounted with ease for the child's sudden marriage of
+Nathalie and Siebenkæs, by the circumstance that the advocate had been
+standing beside her at the water-side, and people, who had seen no one
+so constantly with her as himself, had been misled by the bodily
+likeness between them.
+
+Siebenkæs's mind, however, ran more on the machine-master, Rosa (so
+fond of setting his patchwork life-scenes for every woman to play her
+part before), and the resemblance these silk flowers bare to those
+which the Venner had once redeemed from pawn for Lenette in
+Kuhschnappel struck him at once; yet how could he sadden this gladsome
+time, and spoil the pleasure of receiving these votive flowers, by
+giving words to his suspicions? Nathalie insisted upon a distribution
+of this floral inheritance, inasmuch as each of the three had taken
+part in the rescue, and Siebenkæs and Leibgeber had, at all events,
+rescued the rescuer. She kept the white silk roses for herself,
+allotted the red ones to Leibgeber (who would not have them, but asked
+for a proper, real, living rose instead, which he immediately put in
+his mouth); to Siebenkæs she gave the silken forget-me-nots, and one or
+two living, perfume-breathing ones as well (souls, as it were, of the
+artificial ones). He took them with rapture, and said the tender real
+ones should never wither for him. Nathalie here took a brief temporary
+leave of the pair, but Firmian could not find words to express all his
+gratitude to his friend for the means he had adopted to prolong this
+little day of grace which orbed his whole life round with a new heaven
+and a new earth.
+
+No King of Spain ever took as little out of some six, or so (at the
+outside), of the hundred dishes which, by the laws of the realm, are
+daily served at his table, than Siebenkæs did that day out of one.
+Historians, worthy of credence, inform us, however, that he managed to
+drink a very little--a little wine it was--and that in a considerable
+hurry for he could not be happy enough that day to satisfy Leibgeber.
+The latter, not apt to be easily swayed by heart and feeling, was all
+the more delighted that his beloved Firmian should at last have a pole
+star of happiness shining in the zenith point of the heavens above his
+head, beaming down genial warmth upon the blossoming time of his few
+scattered flowers.
+
+The rapid rate at which his duplex enjoyment kept on moving enabled him
+to steal a march upon the sun, and he arrived once more at the villa,
+whose walls were now tinted red by his beams, while the glory of
+evening was gilding its windows into fire. Nathalie, on the balcony,
+was like some sunlit soul, just ready to take wing after the departing
+sun, hanging with her great eyes upon the shining, quivering world
+rotunda all full of church-music--and on the sun flying downward from
+this temple, like some angel--and at the holy, luminous tomb of night
+into which earth was sinking.
+
+When they came under the balcony (Nathalie beckoning them to come up to
+her) Heinrich handed him his stick, saying, "Keep that for me. I have
+enough to carry without it--if you want me, blow the whistle." As
+regarded his _morale_ and physique, our good Henry had the kindest and
+softest of human hearts within his shaggy, Bruin breast.
+
+Ah! happy Firmian, happy in spite of all your troubles. When now you
+pass through the door of glass and on to the floor of iron, the sun
+confronts you, and sets for a second time. Earth closes her great eye,
+like some dying goddess! Then the hills smoke like altars--choruses
+call from the woods--shadows, the veils of day, float about the
+enkindled, translucent tree-tops and rest upon their many-tinted
+breast-pins (of flowers), and the gold-leaf of the evening sky throws a
+dead-gilt gleam towards the east, and touches with a rosy ray the
+vibrating breast of the hovering lark, far up evening bell of Nature.
+Ah! happy Firmian, should some glorious spirit from realms afar wing
+its flight athwart earth and her spring tide, and, as he passes, a
+thousand lovely evenings be concentrated into one burning one--it would
+not be more Elysian than this, whereof the glow is now dying out around
+you as the moments fly.
+
+When the flames of the windows paled, and the moon was rising heavily
+behind the earth, they both went back into the twilight room, silent,
+and with full hearts. Firmian opened the pianoforte and, in music, went
+through his evening once more. The trembling strings were as tongues of
+fire to his full heart; the flower-ashes of his youth were blown away,
+and two or three youthful minutes bloomed back into life.
+
+But as the music poured its warm life-balsam upon Nathalie's swollen
+heart in all its constraint (for its wounds were only closed, not
+healed), it melted and gave way, the heavy tears which had been burning
+within it flowed forth, and it grew weak and tender, but light.
+Firmian, who saw she was passing once more through the gate of
+sacrifice towards the sacrificial knife, stopped the sacrificial music,
+and tried to lead her away from the altar. Just then the first beam of
+the moon alighted, like a swan's wing, upon the waxen grapes. He asked
+her to come out into the silent, misty, after-summer of the day, the
+moonlit evening. She placed her arm in his without saying yes.
+
+What a sparkling, gleaming world! Through the branches, through the
+fountains, over the hills and over the woodlands, the flashing molten
+silver was flowing, which the moon was fining from out the dross of
+night. Swiftly shot her glance of silver athwart the rippling wavelet,
+and the glossy, shining, gently-trembling apple-leaves, pausing to rest
+upon the marble pillars and birch-tree stems. Nathalie and Firmian
+paused upon the threshold of the magic valley (it gleamed like some
+enchanted cavern, where night and light were playing, and all the
+founts of being--which by day cast up sweet odour, melody of songs and
+voices, feathery wings, translucent pinions--seemed sunk in voiceless
+slumber deep into some silent chasm). They looked up to the mountain,
+the Sophienberg, with its summit flattened as by the weight of years; a
+great mist Colossus was veiling all its Alp-like peak; next at the
+pale-green world, lying asleep beneath the shimmering radiance of the
+far-off silent suns, gleaming depths of silver star-dust, flowing faint
+and far before the ever-brightening rising moon; and then at one
+another, with hearts full to the brim of holy friendship, such a gaze
+as only two blest angels, new created, free and gladsome, bend in
+rapture on each other. "Are you as happy as I?" he asked. "No," she
+answered, involuntarily pressing his arm, "that I am not; for, on a
+night like this should follow, not a day, but something far lovelier
+and richer--something that should satisfy the heart's thirst, and
+staunch its bleeding for ever." "And what should that be?" he asked.
+"Death," was her answer. She lifted her streaming eyes to his and said,
+"You think so, too, do you not? Death for _me_." "No, no," he added
+quickly, "for _me_, if you will, not for _you_." To break the course of
+this overpowering moment, she added hurriedly, "Shall we go down to the
+place where we first met, and where, two days too soon, I became your
+friend;[68] and yet it was not too soon. Shall we?"
+
+He obeyed her; but his soul was still a-swim among his precious
+thoughts, and as they went down the long, hollow, gravel-way, besprent
+with the shadows of the shrubs, and moonlight rippling over its white
+bed (flecked with shadows for stones), he said, "Yes, in an hour like
+this, when death and sleep send forth their brothers to us, a soul like
+yours may think of death.[69] But I have more cause than you, for I am
+happier. Oh! of all guests at Joy's festival-banquet, Death is the one
+whom she loves best to see; for he is himself a joy, the last and
+highest rapture upon earth. None but the common herd can associate
+humanity's lofty flight of migration into the distant land of spring
+with ghosts and corpses here below on earth; as when they hear the
+owls' voices when they are going away to warmer countries they take
+them for the cries of goblins. But, oh! dear, dear, Nathalie, I cannot
+and will not bear to think of what you say as in any shape connected
+with _you_. No, no, so rich a soul must come into full bloom in a far
+nearer, earlier spring than that beyond this life! Oh, God! it _must_!"
+They had reached a wall of rock over which a broad cascade of moonlight
+was falling; against it leant a trellis of roses, whence Natalie
+gathered a spray, all green and tender, with two young rose-buds just
+beginning to swell, and, saying "You will never blow," she placed it on
+her heart, and said (looking at him with a strange expression), "While
+they are young they scarcely prick at all."
+
+And when they got down to the stone water-basin--the sacred spot where
+they first met--and could as yet find no words to utter what was in
+their hearts, they saw some one come up out of the dry basin. Though
+they smiled, it was a smile full of emotion--in all three cases--for
+this was their Leibgeber, who had been lying in wait for them in
+hiding, with a bottle of wine, among the imaged water-gods. A certain
+something there had been in his troubled eyes, but it had been poured
+out by way of libation to this spring night from our cup of joy. "This
+port and haven of your first landing here," said he, "must be properly
+consecrated, and _you_ (to Nathalie) must join in the pledge. I swear
+by Heaven that there is more fruit hanging on its blue dome to-night
+within reach than ever hung on any green one." They took three glasses,
+pledged one another, and said (some of them, I imagine, in somewhat
+subdued tones). "To friendship! may it live for ever! may the spot
+where it commenced be always green! May every place blossom where it
+has grown, and, though all its flowers may fade, and its leaves fall
+and wither, may it live on for ever and for evermore!" Nathalie was
+obliged to turn her eyes away. Heinrich laid a hand upon the agate head
+of his stick (but only because his friend's hand which was holding it
+was over the top of it, that he might give the latter a warm and hearty
+pressure), and said, "Give it me; you shall have no clouds in your hand
+to-night;" for nature had graven cloud-streaks on the agate in her
+subterranean studio. Any heart--not Nathalie's only--must have been
+touched by this bashful cloaking of the warm token of friendship. "Are
+you not going to stay with us?" she asked somewhat faintly, as he was
+leaving them. "I'm going up to the landlord," he said, "to see if I can
+get hold of a flute or a horn, and if I do I shall come out and
+musicise over the valley, and play the springtime in."
+
+When he was gone his friend felt as if his youth had gone with
+him. Suddenly he saw, high above the whirling may-beetles and the
+breeze-born night-butterflies, and their arrow-swift pursuers, the
+bats, a great train of birds of passage winging their way through the
+blue, like some broken cloud, coming back to our spring. Then flashed
+upon his open heart the memory of his lodgings in the market-town, and
+the time when he saw a similar flight of (earlier) birds of passage,
+and thought that his life would soon be at an end. These recollections,
+with all their tears, brought back the belief that he was soon to die;
+and this he must tell Nathalie. He saw the wide expanse of night
+stretched over the world like some great corpse but her shadowy limbs
+quiver under the moonlit-branches at the first touches of the morning
+breeze awaking in the east. She rises towards the coming sun as a
+dissolving vapour, an all-embracing cloud, and man says "It is day."
+Two crape-covered thoughts, like hideous spectres, fought within
+Firmian's soul. The one said, "He is going to die of apoplexy, so he
+never can see her more." And the other said, "He is going through the
+farce of a pretended death, and then he never _must_ see her more."
+Overborne by the past as well as by the present, he took Nathalie's
+hand, and said, "You must pardon my being so deeply moved to-night. I
+shall never see you more. You are the noblest of your sex that I have
+ever met, but we shall never meet again. Very soon you must hear that I
+am dead, or that my _name_, from one cause or other has passed away,
+but my _heart_ will still be yours, be _thine_. Oh! that the present,
+with its mountain-chains of grave-hillocks, but lay behind me, and the
+future were come, with all its open graves, and I stood on the brink of
+my own! For I would look once more on _thee_, then throw myself into it
+in bliss."
+
+Nathalie answered not a word. She faltered suddenly in her walk, her
+arm trembled, her breath came thick and fast. She stopped, and, with a
+face as pale as death, said, in trembling accents, "Stay here on this
+spot; let me sit alone for a minute on that turf-bank. Ah! I am so
+headlong!" He saw her move trembling away. She sank, as if overwhelmed
+with some burden, down upon a bank of turf. She fixed her blinded eyes
+upon the moon (the blue sky around it seemed a night, the earth a
+vapour); her arm lay rigid on her lap; she did not move, except that a
+spasm, distantly resembling a smile, played about her lip; her eyes
+were tearless. But to her friend, life at that moment seemed a realm of
+shadows, whose outlines were floating and blending in endless changes
+of confusion; a tract all hollow, sunken mine-shafts full of mists in
+the likeness of mountain-spirits, with but _one_ single opening of
+outlet to the heavens, the free air, the spring, the light of day; and
+_that_ outlet so narrow, so remote, and far above his head.
+
+There sat Nathalie in the white crystal shimmer, like some angel upon
+an infant's grave; and, suddenly, the tones of Heinrich's music broke
+in, like bells pealing in a storm, upon their souls as they paused, all
+stunned (like Nature before the thunder breaks), and the warm river of
+melody bore away their hearts, dissolving them the while. Nathalie made
+an affirmative sign with her head, as if she had come to some
+conclusion: she rose and came forward from the green, flowery grave
+like some enfranchised, glorified spirit; she opened her arms wide, and
+came towards him. Tear after tear came coursing down her blushing face,
+but as yet her heart could find no words; sinking under _the_ WORLD
+which was in her heart, she could totter no further, and he flew to
+meet her. She held him back that she might speak the first, her tears
+flowing faster and faster, but when she had cried, "My first _friend_,
+and my last--for the first and last time," she grew breathless and
+dumb, and, overburdened with sorrow, sank into his arms, upon his lips,
+upon his heart.
+
+"No! no!" she murmured; "Oh! Heaven, give me but the power to speak.
+Firmian! my Firmian! Take all my happiness away with you--all that I
+have on earth. But never, by all you hold most sacred, never see me
+more in this world. Now" (she added very softly), "you must _swear_
+this to me." She drew her head back, and the tones of Heinrich's music
+flowed between and around them like the voice of sorrow. She gazed at
+him, and his pale care-worn face wrung her heart with agony; with eyes
+dim with tears, she implored him to swear that he would never see her
+more.
+
+"Yes, noble, glorious soul," he answered, in trembling tones; "yes,
+then, I _swear_ to thee I will never see thee more." Mute and
+motionless, as if smitten by the hand of death, she sank with drooping
+head upon his breast; and once again, like one dying, he said, "I will
+never see thee more." Then, beaming like some angel, she raised her
+face, worn with emotion to him, saying, "All is over now; take the
+death kiss, and speak no more." He took it, and she gently disengaged
+herself from his arms. But as she turned away, she put back her hand
+and gave him the green rosebuds with the tender thorns, and saying,
+"Think of to-night," went resolutely away (trembling, nevertheless),
+and was soon lost in the dark-green alleys, where but few beams of
+light struck through.
+
+And the end of this night every soul that has loved can picture for
+itself without the aid of any words of mine.
+
+
+ FIRST FRUIT PIECE.
+
+ LETTER OF DR. VICTOR TO CATO THE ELDER, ON THE CONVERSION OF _I_
+ INTO _THOU_, _HE_, _SHE_, _YE_, AND _THEY_; OR, THE FEAST OF
+ KINDNESS OF THE 20TH MARCH.
+
+ Flachsenfingen, 1st April, 1795.
+
+MY DEAR CATO THE ELDER,
+
+A breaker of his word like you--who made such a solemn promise to come
+to my feast, and yet did not come--will have to be punished by
+having his mouth--not stitched up (which is what savages do to
+word-breakers,) for that would be a loss only to your hearers--but
+_made to water_. When I shall have painted a full and faithful picture
+of our peace-festival of the soul for you, I shall stop both my ears
+against the curses which you will pour out on your evil genius. At this
+feast we all philosophised, and we were all converted, except me, who
+could not be reckoned a convert, inasmuch as I was myself the converter
+of the heathen.
+
+Our flotilla of three boats--(the third we were obliged to take in
+deference to the timidity of the ladies)--got under way about one
+o'clock in the afternoon of the 20th of March, ran into the stream,
+gained the open water, and soon after one we were well in sight
+of the very anther-filaments and spider's-webs on the island. At a
+quarter-past two we landed--the professor, his wife, and a girl and
+boy--Melchior--Jean Paul--the Government Counsellor,--Flamin--the
+lovely Luna--(off goes the first of your curses here!)--the
+undersigned, and his wife.
+
+Some Burgundy was then disembarked. At the commencement of spring
+(which was to take place that day at 38 minutes past 3 o'clock) we
+meant to enter upon a "stream of life," coloured and sweetened after a
+most superlative sort. With the island, Cato, many of us were quite
+enraptured, and nearly all of us wished we had paid a visit to this
+beautiful bowling-green in the Rhine--thin pleasure camp amid the
+waves--long before. Luna, elder Cato--if I mistake not thou hast seen,
+certainly once at the very least, that tender soul, which ought to
+dwell in (and heighten the tint of) a white rose in place of a
+body--Luna shed tears, half of delight (for they were half of sorrow
+for _everybody_ who was not there), half of delight not so much at the
+families of alders upon the rounded bank, or the Lombardy poplars lying
+trembling in intoxication of bliss in the gentle air which breathed
+about them, or the sunny green paths, as at _all this_ together (in the
+first place), and at the spring sky and the Rhine (which was showing
+that sky a picture, as it were, of its antipodean sky somewhere over
+America), and at the peace and gladness of her soul--but (above all) at
+the Alp in the centre of the island.
+
+The Alp will be sketched, if an opportunity offers, in this letter. I
+at once asked Luna where _you_ were. She said, "At the Frankfort Fair."
+Was she right?
+
+When a party arrives at a place it is not, like the _Anguis Fragilis_,
+to be broken into ten twitching fragments by every touch of chance.
+Even the ladies kept with us, for I had deprived them of all
+opportunity of doing anything in the shape of household labour, by the
+arrangements I had made for the dinner. This Barataria Island was going
+to be an intellectual _Place d'Armes_ and theatre of war that day. I
+love disputation. Intellectual bickerings further and heighten the
+happiness of congenial society, just as lovers' quarrels are a renewal
+of love, and fisticuffs a necessity of Marionette operas. Certain
+people are like the Moravians, among whom the confessor and penitent
+change places, each laying a picture of his soul before the other, his
+own police-notice of an absconded criminal--his own advertisement in
+the "Hue and Cry"; and I am like them. Any blemish or shortcoming which
+I discover in myself or other people I immediately publish over half
+the town in a universal German gazette, as ladies do the witnesses'
+depositions of evidence concerning strangers. For the last three weeks,
+dear Cato, my soul has been glowing in the brightest sunlight of peace
+and love, cast upon me by the deceased chief _Piqueur_ (a man who had
+not a trace of either the one or the other about him)--and now I cannot
+rest till I entail this precious legacy upon all of you.
+
+As _Lieutenant de Police_ of the island, I possessed the power of
+issuing police regulations with respect to the conversation permissible
+thereon, and I directed the thread of _our_ talk towards the _Piqueur_
+in question. But the wasps came buzzing out of their nests; the first
+of them being your brother, Melchior, who drove his sting into the
+_Piqueur's_ avarice, saying that people who didn't bestow their plunder
+upon the poor till they were in their own coffins, were like pikes who
+eject their (swallowed) prey when caught themselves; they should rather
+do as Judas Iscariot did--cast their pieces of silver into the church
+_before_ their hanging. The next wasp was your second brother, Jean
+Paul, who said, "Misers are the only people who haven't had enough of
+life when they die. Even when they are in the very grip of Death's
+hand, they would fain grasp hold of money with their own. Like
+cap-mushrooms, when they are broken off, they cling terribly to the
+earth's surface with, their bleeding moiety."
+
+"Ah!" said I, "_everyone_ is a thorough miser as regards something or
+other, I am sorry to say. I cannot now be so hard upon a man who
+confines himself to mortifying and chastening _himself_ as I used to
+be. Where is the extraordinary difference between one of your learned
+antiquary mint-assayers who distils, evaporates, and injects all the
+pleasures of his life into the rust of a collection of coins--and a
+miser who counts and weighs the specimens in _his_ cabinet like so many
+votes at an election? Not, in reality, so great a difference as there
+is between _our opinions_ of the two." I thought I had a fine chance of
+turning deftly to the subject of the _Piqueur_ at this point, but the
+entire company called out to me to tell them what o'clock it was. In my
+capacity of Viceroy, I had disarmed all the islanders of their watches
+at the landing-place (as if they had been so many swords), that they
+might pass their day in a blissful eternity, where time was not. The
+only one allowed to keep his was Paul--and this was because it was one
+of the new Geneva sort, whose hands always point to 12 o'clock, only
+telling the real time when one touches a spring.
+
+It was now past three. In thirty-eight minutes, spring, that pre-heaven
+upon earth--that _second_ paradise--would make her grand processional
+progress over the ruins of the _first_. Already the clouds were all
+cleared away from the sky, spring breezes played coolingly about the
+sun, burning in the blue; on a vine-clad hill by the Rhine shore, a
+solo-singer from the great choir of spring--a nightingale--sent on in
+advance of her--was pouring out her song in a smooth-grown thicket of
+pruned cherry-trees; through the open trellis-work of the boughs we
+could see the notes vibrate in the feathers of her throat.
+
+We climbed up the artificial Mount St. Gothard. It was set round with
+turf-banks and leafy niches; an oak stood on its summit by way of
+crown. Man (day-fly, as he is, playing above a ripple of time) cannot
+do without watches and date-indicators on the banks of the time-stream.
+Although every day is a birthday and a new year's day, he must have one
+of his own into the bargain. Thirty-eight minutes struck in us. And
+down from the waves of throbbing blue above us came floating a broad
+breath of breeze, rocking the swelling grapes and the bare grafts, the
+delicate young branchlets, and the strong, sharp-pointed winter-corn,
+and lifting the soaring pigeons higher in their flight. The sun, above
+Switzerland, looked, in blissful intoxication, at his own face
+reflected in the sublime glittering ice-mirror of Mont Blanc, parting
+(unaware) day and night into equal halves, as if with two arms of fate,
+and throwing down equal portions to every land and every eye. We sang
+Goethe's "Hymn to the Spring." The sun sent us down (like dew) from the
+hill-top to the valley--the earth swelling loose fell rustling at our
+feet; and wine (Lethe of life) hid from our sight the misty bunks
+within which it rolled its way--mirroring only heaven and flowers.
+Clotilda said (not to us, but to her Luna)--(and here, dear Cato, I am
+drank with remembering; and I beg, accordingly, to invite you, at once,
+for the 10th of April), "Ah! dearest, how beautiful the world is
+sometimes. We ought not to think so poorly of it. Are we not like
+Orestes in the 'Iphigenia'--fancying we are in exile, though we really
+are in our own native land."
+
+With every downward step from the hill we sank back into the workaday
+marsh-meadow of life. "What the better are we," cried Melchior, quite
+angrily, "for all this splendour in and around us, when to-morrow a
+single passionate earthquake may hurl down an avalanche of snow-masses
+upon all that is warm and blooming in us? it is the April of the human
+heart--not the April of the universe--that causes me such vexation. We
+are always at our hardest just after an _attendrissement_--and moved to
+tears just after some murderous rage--as earthquakes set warm springs
+flowing. Now I know quite well that, to-morrow, at the sitting of the
+council, I shall attack and oppose everybody and everything. Pitiable!
+pitiable! And you are not a whit better, Flamin."
+
+"Not a whit," said Flamin, with touching candour. Luna and my wife took
+the Professor's wife between them (each taking one of her children in
+her lap), and sat down upon the green nether slope of the hill, on the
+sunny side of the nightingale. We, however, were too restless to sit
+down. "Alas!" (said Jean Paul, walking up and down, with his hands
+folded and hanging, and his hat thrown away, so that his _eyes_, at all
+events, might be higher and freer). "Alas! is _any_ one a whit better?
+We take a vow of universal love to our fellow men whenever we are
+deeply touched--when we have buried some one, or have been thoroughly
+happy, or have committed some grand transgression, or looked long and
+closely at Nature, or are intoxicated with love, or some earthly form
+of intoxication: but we are really only perjurers, not philanthropists,
+as we fancy ourselves. We long and thirst for the love of others--but
+it is like mercury, it feels and looks like fountain water, and flows
+and glitters like it--but it _is_ cold, dry, and heavy in reality. It
+is just those very people upon whom Nature has bestowed most gifts (and
+who, consequently, should not covet other people's, but be content with
+distributing their own), who, like princes, demand the more from their
+fellow men the more they _have_ to give them, and the less they _do_
+give them. Dissensions are the more bitterly painful, the more alike
+the souls are between whom they take place, just as discords are
+harsher the nearer they approach the unison. We forgive without reason
+because we have found fault without reason, for a rightful and
+righteous anger must, of necessity, be everlasting. Nothing is a
+stronger evidence of the miserable subordination of our reason to our
+ruling passion than the fact that we place such a flat every-day matter
+as _time_ among the cures for hate, grief, love, &c.; our impulses are
+to _forget_ to conquer, or to grow _tired_ of doing so--our wounds are
+to be sanded over with the Margrave's sympathetic powder of drift-sand
+out of Time's sand-glass! Too miserable a business altogether! But can
+anything make a better of it? Certainly, least of all my complaints of
+it!"
+
+"The fact is," said the serene, gentle, Professor (who only uses a
+_very_ few pedantic tints in his style of painting), "_feelings_ of
+love to our fellow men[70] are useless without _reasons_." "So are
+reasons without feelings," said Paul.
+
+"Consequently," continued the Professor (for I could _not_ manage to
+get my _Piqueur_ brought to bear anyhow, but had to keep him idly
+in reserve), "the two have to be combined like _genius_ and
+_criticism_--of which the former can produce only master-pieces and
+scholar-pieces, the latter only something of an everyday sort between
+the two. What I think is, that our lack of love arises, not from our
+coldness, but from a conviction that others do not deserve it. The
+coldest of men would acquire a greater warmth of feeling for their
+fellows if they acquired a higher opinion of them."
+
+"But," asked Clotilda, "must we not forgive even the _wrong_ done by
+our enemies? The _right_ is not matter for forgiveness."
+
+"Of course it is not," he answered, but would let himself be no further
+diverted from his point. "The only ugliness and hatefulness which we
+can truly experience hatred for is that of a _moral_ sort."
+
+"In opposition to that view of the question," said Jean Paul, "I might
+adduce the fierce combats of animals, and nurseries in a state of war;
+for in neither of these cases is there any idea of _immorality_ of the
+enemy, although _hatred_ of him exists. But were I to adduce these
+cases, I could answer myself--at least, so so. If we directed our
+hatred against things other than the immoral, we should be just as
+angry with the hanging branch which strikes us in the face as with the
+person who broke it so that it should be so placed as to do so. The
+rage of a chastised child is quite a different thing from the alarmed
+instinct of self-conservancy--the feeling of avoidance of nitric acid,
+or of bodily hurt. The former has in it a duplex sense of dislike, the
+two components of which are most dissimilar--the one referring to the
+cause, the other to the effect. We must distinguish between beings
+which are capable of morality, and such as are not, in _kind_--not in
+_degree_; those _incapable_ of morality can never be made capable of it
+by the mere lapse of time, or step by step. Whence, if children at any
+period of their age were _utterly_ non-moral beings, it would follow
+that they could never, at _any_ period, _begin_ to _become_ moral
+beings. In brief, their anger is nothing other than a dim sense of
+other people's injustice. As to the animals, I don't know what else to
+say than that there _must_ be in them something analogous to our moral
+sense. Those who (like us) believe them to have immortal souls, must,
+as a matter of course, concede them _some_ beginnings some
+pre-existent germs of morality--although these may be overpowered and
+kept in the background by their animal natures even to a greater extent
+than (for instance) conscience is in sleep, drunkenness, or insanity.
+But alas! all this is night within night! And I hope this obscurity
+will be considered some excuse, Professor, for the manner in which I
+have obstructed and built out _your_ light."
+
+"Now," he went on, "since hatred only concerns itself with _moral_
+defects, how strange it is that we never hate _ourselves_, even for the
+gravest moral defects."
+
+"_I_ think," said Flamin, "that one _does_ sometimes feel the
+_deadliest_ hatred of one's self, for over-haste."
+
+"And then," said Jean Paul, "your argument would apply just as well to
+love--at least it would half apply. Come, let's hear what you've got to
+say to that?"
+
+"We never _hate_ ourselves," I said. "We _despise_ and _pity_
+ourselves, when we have done wrong. Although--I _must_ add this--we
+hate all men, our ownselves excepted, for vices. Can this be right?"
+"Self-hatred," went on the Professor, "is not possible, for hatred is
+nothing but the wishing of evil to the object of it--_i. e_., a desire
+to punish, not for _bettering's_ sake, but for _punishing's_. But the
+most repentant of sinners never can wish himself made the subject of a
+chastening of this kind; and even if he could, such a wish would be
+merely a _disguised_ desire for _bettering_--_i. e_., for greater
+happiness. But to a transgressor other than ourselves we hardly can
+concede _rapidity_ of conversion, not, at all events, until he has gone
+through a proper expiation. What distinguishes our feeling concerning
+other people's errors from our feeling concerning our own is a sham
+self-love. The very minutest particle of hatred desires the unhappiness
+of its object; that is what I have got to prove now."
+
+His own wife here interrupted him with the words, "My heart tells me,
+as plainly as possible, that I could never wish any serious misfortune
+to happen to my bitterest enemy--such as money troubles, or anything
+about her children. I could not bear even the idea of a tear being
+brought to her eyes on my account."
+
+"No, I suppose not," he went on. "The better nature within us never
+wishes its antipode a broken leg, would not leave him without a strip
+of lint, or a wish for his recovery. But I know that that same 'better
+nature' does take a delight in his minor skin-wounds--his being put to
+confusion, his sleigh slipping down hill backwards, his losing his
+hair. The gentlest of souls hides, at the back of its tender sympathy
+with great troubles, its _untender_ satisfaction with small ones, such
+as call for condolence (_a smaller thing than sympathy_). The tenderest
+of people, people incapable of indicting the smallest wound imaginable
+on their enemy's _skin_, are delighted to make a thousand deep ones in
+his _heart_." "Ah!" said Luna, "how can that be possible?" "I don't
+think it _would_ be possible," Clotilda answered her, "if the pain of
+the soul had as definite a physiognomy, and as real tears, as that of
+the body."
+
+"Exactly," said the Professor; "that is just where it is. To make
+ourselves feel more gently towards the wicked we have only to think of
+them as delivered wholly over into our hands. For what harm would one
+do them then? The moment they _acknowledged_ their fault we would stay
+the rack, and bid the torture cease. What redoubles our indignation,
+and renders it everlasting, is the very impossibility of inflicting any
+punishment."
+
+"Yes, that is quite true," said Melchior. "The oftener I read of these
+two live guillotines of their age, Alba and Philip (whose lips were
+shears of the Parcæ), or of those two other mowers of mankind, Marat
+and Robespierre, the deeper does the aquafortis of anger etch their
+condemnation into my heart, although death has drawn up their Acts of
+Amnesty."
+
+"And yet, after all," I put in (leaving the Piqueur in the rear for the
+present), "if anybody would deliver over the King and the Duke to you
+and me here this afternoon, and a couple of caldrons of boiling oil
+into the bargain, _I_ feel quite certain I couldn't throw one of them
+in--at any rate till the oil had stood a long time in the cold. I
+should let them off with a good flogging--say 100 lashes, or so. Ah!
+what a cast-iron sort of fellow were he who should not soothe, and
+comfort with cooling, healing touch (had he the power) a heart breaking
+with anguish, a face whereon the worm of suffering was ploughing its
+tortuous track! At the same time (I continued, rapidly; for I was
+determined to bring in my Piqueur somehow or other), where emotion is
+concerned, the memory of past errors is not the smallest safeguard
+against new ones."
+
+"You see, you won't allow me to speak," the Professor broke in. "I
+still owe you a tremendous number of proofs, and I am most anxious to
+acquit the debt. Our _hatred_, being an emotion, always turns every
+_action_ into a _whole life_; every _attribute_ into a _personality_
+(or, to speak more accurately, because our only mode of _seeing_ any
+personality is by its reflection in the mirror of its attributes)
+converts _one_ attribute into the sum of them. It is only in the case
+of liking--of friendship--that we find it easy to separate the
+attribute from the personality. Hatred can not do it. Nay, in the case
+of liking, the _converse_ transformation takes place--that of the
+personality into the attribute. We hate as if the object of our hatred
+had never possessed any virtues, or inclination to them--neither pity
+nor truthfulness, love of the young, one single good hour, anything
+whatever. In brief, since it is with the _individuality_ of the person
+whose punishment we are decreeing that we are angry (not with its
+characteristic of the moment), we make him out to be a _wholly_ wicked
+being. Yet such a being is not conceivable. The voice of conscience
+speaking in that being would be of itself _one_ goodness in him, even
+though it spoke in vain; the pain of that conscience would be another;
+each joy and each impulse of his life another."
+
+"Ah! how delightful," said Luna, "that there is nobody so utterly bad;
+nobody whom one would have to hate altogether."
+
+"You see," he continued, "it cannot be the _me_ of a person that we
+hate; for the _me_ is still the same _me_ when it improves, and wins
+our regard."
+
+In the warmth of our discussion we were losing sight altogether of one
+of the two concave mirrors which distort other people's moral
+distortions for us even more wildly than they are distorted to begin
+with--I mean, our own egotism. Often, when I have seen and heard women
+squabbling in the market-place (women of whom one was just as good as
+the other, and with just as good an opinion of herself), and one
+hurling her invectives with delight, like a red-hot stone, at the
+other's head, which seethed and swelled in waves of anger around that
+stone, while a third woman kept calm and cool in the midway-path
+between, I have been ashamed of the human race--ashamed that the
+self-same reproach, or immorality, which _ought_ to produce exactly the
+same effect upon all the three, should make _too_ strong an impression
+on the one, too weak a one on the other, none whatever on the third.
+
+Paul pointed to the _second_ of these distorting mirrors--our bodily
+senses. For these render the vinegar of hatred doubly bitter by
+throwing into its fermenting-vat these parts of the enemy which _they_
+take cognizance of--his clothes, movements, gestures, tones, &c.
+
+Here we reached the Gordian knot which only I could cut with the
+Piqueur. "Who is to save us from these bodily senses?" I inquired (with
+a certain amount of hopeful expectancy). Melchior answered, "I do not
+allow them to influence my philanthropy, at all events. They are the
+straw which feeds the flame under that ascending windbag balloon, the
+heart."
+
+Jean Paul thrust me back from the Gordian knot. "I," he said, "have an
+admirable sweetener at all times in readiness to apply when a sinner
+embitters my senses. I take him, and (like a victorious enemy) strip
+all the clothes off him, not leaving him so much as his hat or his wig.
+When once I've got him standing there before me, cold and wretched as
+any corpse (I mean, of course, in imagination), I begin to feel sorry
+for the scoundrel. But this is not enough. I have got to sweeten myself
+a good deal more than this; so I proceed to slit him up with a long,
+slicing cut from top to bottom into three cavities (as if he were a
+carp), so that I can see his heart and brain pulsating. The mere sight
+of a red human heart (Danaid's bucket for happiness--safe storehouse of
+so many a sorrow) makes my own soft and heavy; and I have often not
+forgiven a street robber till the Professor has been shewing us his
+heart and brain in the anatomical theatre. 'Thou unhappy, sorrowful
+heart,' I have always found myself thinking, with deep, sympathetic
+emotion, 'how many a blood-billow has gone surging through thee,
+glowing and freezing in the same moment.' But if all this process
+failed to have its effect, I should proceed to extremities, and smite
+my enemy dead; then take the naked, fluttering, trembling soul--like an
+evening moth--out of its brain-chamber chrysalis, and, holding up the
+quivering night-creature between my forefinger and thumb, gaze at it
+without a trace of rancour left in me."
+
+"To picture one's enemy to one's self as unclothed, or disembodied,"
+said I, "so as to be able to put up with him, as though he were dead
+(perhaps that is the chief reason why we love the dead), is just the
+operation _I_ perform too. I often try to soften the unpleasant effect
+which some repulsive physiognomy produces upon me by thinking of it as
+scalped, and with its skin folded back."
+
+And now I determined, seriously and in earnest, that the sceptre and
+throne insignia of the conversation, should no more depart from my
+hands. Wherefore I commenced as follows: "But who is to provide us with
+the time and the power, not only to remember, but to act upon, this
+precious and reliable principle, or rule of conduct, right in the thick
+of this world's Pyrrhic war-dance, and the rapid evolutions of our
+emotions? Who is to stoke the æther-flame of philanthropy with a
+sufficient supply of combustible matter, seeing that there are such
+hosts of people continually drowning it out, smothering it up, and
+building it in! Who is to make up to us for the lack of a gentle, quiet
+temperament? Who, or what?"
+
+Just as I was going to fix the Piqueur on to this lance-shaft by way of
+point, the cold dinner was brought, and the Professor's wife went to
+fetch her children. For the dinner had to be over before sunset;
+because, like a fresh supply of green firewood, it would drown out the
+flame of enthusiasm for a time, and break the unity of its vertical,
+purple fire pyramid. The company, therefore, waited in vain for me to
+go on with what I had to say. I shook my head, expressing, by nods,
+that I should do so when we were all together again, and sitting down.
+
+While we were at dinner I was able to set up my speaking machine, and
+set it a-going at my ease.
+
+"I asked you once or twice before dinner," I commenced, "_who_ can
+invigorate and quicken our principles of love to our fellows, and set
+them fully to work? I answer, the chief Piqueur can; only I'm afraid
+I've made so many false starts, and baulked in so many of my runs
+before making this grand jump of mine, that I have led you to entertain
+far greater expectations concerning it than it (or I) may be able to
+fulfil. A day or two before the stump-end of the chief Piqueur's
+life-candle fell down and went guttering out in its candlestick-socket,
+he sent for me to the side of his bed of suffering and begged me--not
+to prescribe for him, but--to make a thorough inspection of his house.
+He drew my head down close to his wretched pillow, and said, 'You see,
+doctor, Death has got his hunting-knife at my throat. But I'm not sorry
+to go, and what little I leave behind me in the shape of worldly gear
+goes all to the poor. It's but little that I have ever thought of
+scraping together for _myself_, and that is a comfort to think on now.
+It's for the _poor_ that I have screwed and saved, pinched and pared;
+and when a man has done that it's a pleasure to him to make his will;
+he knows it will be paid back again _elsewhere_. But there's one hard
+stone at my heart still. You see I have neither chick nor child
+belonging to me, and when the breath is out of my body, the old woman
+who keeps my room in order will be in the house by herself. She's an
+honest body enough, but as poor as a church mouse, and pretty sure to
+help herself to something before the seals are put on my effects. Now,
+doctor, you are a man who are just as good to the poor as I am myself;
+you often prescribe for them gratis; I want to ask _you_ to go through
+the house with the notary (I don't trust _him_ a bit more than I do the
+old woman), take an inventory of what there is, and have a regular
+notarial instrument drawn up concerning my property. I've left the
+whole of it to the Poor-house and the Institution for Destitute
+Gamekeepers. The notary must begin with my breeches under the pillow
+here, because my purse is there.'
+
+"A man whose stubble Death is in the very act of turning up with his
+plough, has, upon me, a more powerful claim than that of the _first_
+request--that of the _last_. I came the next day, bringing with me the
+notary, and also my dislike to the dying man and his distrustful
+suspicions. With gay indifference I helped to protocol the effects in
+the sick-room--his shooting-jacket, worn into shining patches by his
+old game-bag--his old guns and knives--even such matters as a leather
+over-shoe for his thumb, and a long mummy bandage for his nose, which
+he had worn on occasions when he had hurt himself in these members with
+his gun.
+
+"As we went through the other silent chambers--empty snail-shells of
+his shrivelled, dried-up life--my frozen blood began to thaw within me,
+and to move in warm, light mercury-globules. But when I came to the
+lumber-room, with the notary, and tuned over the rag-fair of his old
+night-shirts--(caterpillar cases and blood-shirts of his feverish
+nights, in which I seemed still to see him groaning and thirsting)--and
+his _Pathebrief_,[71] and his name copied from thence with all its
+flourishes on to his pointer's collar--and the picture of his pretty
+mother with him as a smiling infant in her lap--and his wife's bridal
+garland of wire, covered with green silk--(Oh! for goodness' sake do
+_not_ interrupt me with talk--I've had enough of that, Heaven knows).
+When I took in my hands these opera-costumes, these theatrical
+properties, in which the sick player down-stairs had performed his
+_probe-rolle_[72] of a Harpaxus for the benefit of the poor--not only
+did the poor fellow's _moral_ emptiness of treasury, and miserable rate
+of monthly salary, strike me with pain, but, moreover, I wished him _no
+heavier suffering, no severer punishment, than he would wish for
+himself, were he really to repent in good earnest before his plunge
+into the depths of the soil_. No, not so much, for the matter of that.
+Therefore, my dislike to him was gone. For I put myself in his
+place--not _outwardly_ only, as people generally do, fancying
+themselves in another person's physical place with _their_ own souls,
+_their_ own wishes, habitudes, &c.--but _inwardly_--in _his_ mind, his
+youth, wishes, sufferings, thoughts.
+
+"'Poor _Piqueur_,' I said, as I went down-stairs; 'I have no more
+satiric pleasure now over your gnawing suspicion, your errors, your
+self-shooting covetousness, your hungry avarice. You have got to live
+through a long eternity with that self, that "me" of yours, the best
+way you can, just as I have with mine. You have got to rise with that
+self of yours at the Resurrection, and go about with it, and look after
+it, and care for its welfare. And, of course, you can't but be _fond_
+of _yourself_, just as _I am_ of _myself_, and put up with all that
+self's defects and shortcomings whether you will or not. Go in peace
+then into the other world, where the broken glasses of your harmonica
+of life will be replaced with fresh-tuned ones--in the great home of
+all the spirits!'
+
+"The old woman met us on the stairs crying out that the man was dying.
+I went to his bed-side, looked upon his cold, yellow, senseless form,
+and saw that he would very soon throw off his last stage-dress, his
+body. Next day the tolling bell announced that, he had returned to the
+dust--gone back into the ground--that, stage dressing-room of souls and
+flowers. (And we are _rung_ off and on to that stage, as well as
+others.)
+
+"Meanwhile I made an experiment with my modified and mildened system of
+treatment, upon the poor notary devil; the day after I tried it on the
+jurists who came from the college. (Jean Paul! communicate your idea to
+us by-and-bye--do _not_ interrupt me just now)--I did this, I say, and
+found that I was able to establish a heart-peace even with the
+plebeians among them--who dishonour their calling--the only really
+_free_ one in all the body politic. For in the cases of these lawyers,
+and those of my own medical colleagues from whose breasts I have been
+so often in such a hurry to cut off, and melt down, the medals of
+honour which they have cast for themselves, I have had merely to take
+away the roof from over their heads, lift the rafters from their walls,
+and bare their houses to the four winds of heaven. Then I could look in
+and see everything there--their housekeeping, their unoffending wives,
+their sleep (_i. e_., mock-death), sicknesses, sorrows, birth-days, and
+funeral-days, and this reconciled me to them! Of a truth, to love a
+man, I have only to think of his children, his parents--the love he
+feels and inspires. One can easily perform this philanthropic
+transmigration of soul at any moment, without help of the balloon of
+phantasy, or the diving-bell of profound reflection. Good heavens! it
+_does_ seem hard (and a shame and disgrace into the bargain) that it
+should have taken me thirty years of my life to understand properly
+what it is that self-love is really driving at--my own and everybody
+else's--what it wants is, to be surrounded with mere repetitions of
+its own 'me.' It insists upon every infant on earth being a parson's
+son (as I am)--that everybody shall have lost, and gained, noble
+friends--that everybody shall be an M.D., and have studied at
+Göttingen--that his name shall be Sebastian, and that he shall be an
+overseer of mines, and write his life in forty-five dog-post-days--in
+brief, that this world shall contain a thousand million Victors instead
+of one. I beg that everybody may send spies into his soul, to look
+carefully about them and see whether it be not the case that there are
+thousands of instances in which what we hate a man for is, either that
+he is as fat as a prize pig, or as lean as a stick of vermicelli--or
+that he is a district secretary, or a Roman Catholic watchman in
+Augspurg, and wears a coat white on the one side, and green on the
+other--or that he eats his veal with melted butter;[73] (or, at all
+events, hate them _more_ for these reasons; for when we are
+_indifferent_ to people, all their external characteristics, beautiful
+or ugly, merely increase our indifference). People are so deep sunk in
+their dear selves that everybody yawns at the _menu_ of everybody
+else's favourite dishes, but expects _them_ to be interested when _he_
+reads out _his_ to _them_."
+
+That feathered echo, the nightingale, was singing to us phrases of the
+music of the spheres, to us inaudible until thus repeated to us by her.
+But I had my rapid descent from my Mont Cenis to finish, and could but
+give utterance to my applause (of the bird and her music) by a hasty
+nod. "Heavenly! Elysian! I've been hearing it every now and then. But,
+one thing more. Since my sentimental journey in other people's souls, I
+have been happier and fatter than I used to be, in ball-rooms,
+anterooms, and large assemblages (hot lark-spits which roasted all the
+fat out of a Swift). This enduring of transgressors includes a greater
+enduring still of fools and dunces, although the great world makes war
+on these three tolerated sects in just the contrary ratio.
+
+"The amnesty thus granted to humanity makes the duty of loving more
+easy to perform; moreover, it renders the deep blissfulness of
+friendship and love more justifiable; for the glow, the fire of the
+latter often vitrifies and calcines the heart towards the rest of
+mankind. And this is the reason why the last and best fruit...."
+
+Clotilda looked inquiringly here, as if begging to be allowed one word
+of remonstrance with me for forgetting to put myself in the place of
+those whose transformation I was thus extolling. I reddened, and
+paused. "This," observed Jean Paul, "is the reason why a concert-room
+audience cries out the loudest against noise or disturbance just
+during the loveliest adagios--when people are most deeply touched--and
+swear and weep at the same time."
+
+"I cannot help being ashamed of an experience of my own," said
+Clotilda. "The other day I cried so at reading Silly's letters (in
+Allwill's Papers) that I was obliged to put the book down. Then I went
+to the casino with my head full of what I had been reading--and I
+dare not tell you what hard opinions I entertained, several times that
+very evening, of several people of my acquaintance. I expected of
+_them_ that they should all be in exactly the same mood of mind as
+myself--although, of course, they had not just come from reading
+Silly's letters."
+
+"That is exactly what I was coming to," concluded I. "The last and best
+fruit, which ripens late in a soul ever warm, is tenderness towards the
+hard--patience with the impatient--kindly feeling for the selfish--and
+philanthropy towards the misanthropic."
+
+It is a very odd thing, beloved Cato, but Jean Paul has just come and
+told me a murder-tale of human iniquity, which goes hissing through my
+heart like a red-hot iron. All my _theories_ stand bright and clear as
+stars around my soul, but I can do nothing save look inactively down
+upon the billows in which my blood is foaming, heated by this
+subterranean earth-fire, and wait until they cool down and subside.
+Alas! we poor, poor mortals! Jean Paul, who knew the story the day
+before yesterday, and had consequently all that time to put the cooling
+process in practice in advance of me, is going to take charge of the
+picture exhibition of our insular flower-pieces in my stead, and add a
+postscript to this. Which is well, for to-day I really could not do it.
+By the 10th of April the air will have cooled; then _you_ are sure to
+be coming, as the French election meetings begin then. We must keep the
+"settling weeks" of your great feast and fairtide here. Alas! in what a
+disquiet condition have I to stop writing to you. _You_ will go on
+reading, but not
+
+ Your
+ Victor.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+ POSTSCRIPT BY JEAN PAUL.
+
+DEAR BROTHER.
+
+Our Victor's virtuous indignation will soon be over and past. The
+reason why he, and I too, now, have made a written confession of the
+cure of our disposition to censure our fellows, is, that we may be
+compelled to be excessively ashamed of ourselves if ever we chide for
+more than a minute, or hate for more than a moment. This all embracing
+love demands a sacrifice, which is made with greater hesitation than
+one would expect--the sacrifice of the pleasure of being satisfied with
+one's self--which anger adds to the contemplation of other people's
+faults (and satire to the contemplation of other people's follies)--by
+way of a sweetening ingredient, and whose place is taken by a pure and
+unalloyed regret at the frequency with which the disease shifts its
+seat, and at the chronicity of the bleeding of the wounds and scars of
+helpless man.
+
+However, for the present, what I would fain do is to steer our floating
+island, and its blessed twilight, close up to your view.
+
+The sun was sinking towards the cloud Alps, and glowing white over
+France in the west as if it should shortly drop down on its plains as a
+gleaming shield of freedom, or fall into its billowy ocean as a
+wedding-ring between heaven and earth. The shades of evening were
+already overflowing the first two steps of the hill, and the darkening
+Rhine seemed to be passing an arm of night around the earth. We
+ascended our little steps as the sun descended his great ones, seeming,
+as we ascended, to rise from his burning grave with the face of a saint
+at the Resurrection. The hill lifted up our eyes and our souls.
+Remembering my shortcomings I took Victor's hand, and said, "Ah! dear
+Victor! could it but come to pass that one could make a treaty of peace
+with all mankind, and with one's own self--if one's shattered heart
+could absorb and retain, from out the leaven of the hating and hated
+world, nothing but the sweet, mild, life-sap of love--as the oyster,
+amid mud and slime, takes nothing save bright pure water into his
+house. Ah! if one but knew that such an event were about to come to
+pass of a truth, an evening of happiness such as this would refresh
+and fill one's thirsting breast, (all _cracked_ with thirst and
+dryness)--would still the everlasting sigh." Victor answered (not
+looking round, but keeping his glowing and beglowed face--which his
+loving heart suffused with a brighter tint--turned to the sun, now
+burning half sunk in the earth), "Perhaps," he said, "that time may
+come; a time when we shall all be happy when a human being smiles--even
+should he not deserve it--when we shall speak kindly to every one--not
+by way of a mere sacrifice to the laws of polite society, but for very
+love--and there will be no difficulties, no complications, for hearts
+which will no longer have any inward annoyance to conceal. To-day the
+spring sun rests upon the world like the eye of a mother, and shines
+warm upon every heart, the wicked as well as the good. Yes, thou
+Eternal One, we here now give our hands and our hearts to thy whole
+creation, and no longer hate anything which thou hast made." We were
+overpowered, and we embraced with tears, and no words, in the first
+darkening of the night. Over the sun's burial place stood the zodiacal
+light, a red grave pyramid, flaming unmoved up into the silent deep of
+blue.
+
+The City of God which hangs displayed on high above our earth, built on
+the arch of the Milky Way, appeared from out the endless distances with
+all its shining sun-lights.
+
+We came down from the hill--each spot of earth was a hill just then; an
+unseen hand lifted our souls on high above the dark vapour-circle, and
+they looked down as if from alps, seeing nothing save gleaming peaks of
+other mountain ranges--for all the mean, all that was not the high, all
+graves, petty goals, and life careers of humanity, were veiled in heavy
+mist.
+
+We lost each other amongst the paths, but in our hearts we were all
+together. We met again, but the silence in our souls was not broken,
+for each heart beat just as did all the others, and there was no
+difference, save the being alone, between a prayer and an embrace.
+
+The scattered flames of our emotion had gradually merged into one
+glowing sun sphere, as the ancients believed that the fluttering
+after-midnight fires thickened ere morning into a sun.[74]
+
+But I, a stranger, alas! in this paradise stood beneath the leafless
+branches, sad, and alone, beside the dark-blue Rhine stream where the
+stars were mirrored--it glided, with gently heaving wavelets, over the
+German soil, binding two great republics[75] together, like some
+heavenly band; and to me it seemed as though the thirst, the fire, of a
+breast no broader even than mine could be quenched with nothing less
+than the waters of this great river. Alas! we are all like this. In the
+transient clasp of our little grandeurs and blisses, we long to rest,
+and _die_, upon something _great_. We long to cast ourselves into the
+depths of the heavens when we see them glitter and sparkle above us--or
+down upon the many-tinted earth, when her flowers and grasses wave--or
+into the endless river, flowing as if from out the past onwards into
+the future.
+
+Our ladies and the children had gone away--departing in silence from
+this anchorage of hours so happy--I saw them as they floated over the
+wavelets, singing like swans, and dropping spring flowers into the
+ripples, that they might float back as souvenirs to us upon our island
+shore. The children were sleeping softly in their arms, between the
+glories of the heaven and of the earth, lulled by the arms, the songs,
+and the ripples.
+
+When it was 12 o'clock, and the first morning of spring was come,
+Victor summoned us all to the hill, we knew not wherefore. All around
+and beneath us was the music of the rush of the Rhine, and through it,
+came gliding clear the bright spring-melody of the nightingale; the
+stars of the twelfth hour sank, drop by drop, into the darkened grave
+of the sun, and went paling out among the grey ashes of the western
+clouds. Suddenly a straight, beautiful flame shot up in the west, and
+music came palpitating through the darkness.
+
+"Do you not think of your France," said Victor, "the first hour of day
+is breaking for _her_ this 21st of March--the day when the six thousand
+primary assemblies form themselves, like stars, into one constellation,
+that one law may burst into being from out a million hearts."
+
+As I looked up to the sky, the Milky Way struck me as being the beam of
+the balance of hidden destiny, in whose weighing-pans (which are
+worlds) the broken, shattered, bleeding nations are weighed out for
+eternity. These destiny scales waver up and down as yet, because it was
+only a century or two ago that the weights were put into them.
+
+We drew closer together, and (inspired by the night and the music)
+said, "Thou, poor country! may thy sun and thy day rise higher ere
+long, and cast away the blood-shirt of its morning red. May the higher
+genius wipe away the blood from thy hands, and the tears from thine
+eyes! Oh! may that genius build, support, and guard for ever the Grand
+Freedom Temple which is vaulted over thee like a second heaven: but
+also comfort every mother and every father, every child and every
+wife--and dry all eyes which weep for the beloved, crushed hearts which
+have bled and fallen, and now lie under that temple as basement
+stones."
+
+What I am going to say now can only be said to my brother, for nobody
+else would pardon it. Victor and I got into a boat, which was made fast
+with a rope to the bank, and which was drifting about with the current.
+We worked ourselves back to the bank, and then let the boat drift
+northwards again upon the ripples. In our souls (as in the world
+without us) sadness and exaltation were strangely blent: the music on
+the bank came and went--tones and stars rose and fell. The vault of
+heaven showed in the Rhine like some shattered bell, and up above us
+the dome of the temple wherein dwelleth Eternity lay in calm and
+motionless rest, with all its unchanging suns. From the eastward the
+spring breathed upon us, and the tree skeletons in the churchyard of
+the winter felt the presage of a near resurrection. Of a sudden Victor
+said--"It feels to me as though the river here were the stream of
+Time--our fluctuating life is carried along upon the waves of both
+towards the midnight." Here my brother called to me from the island,
+"Brother, come into harbour and sleep; it is between one and two
+o'clock."
+
+This fraternal voice, coming to me athwart the music of the wavelets,
+suddenly brought a new world--perhaps the under-world--into my open
+soul. For a lightning flash of memory gleamed in a moment over all my
+dim being, reminding me that it was on this very night two-and-thirty
+years ago that I had made my entry upon this overclouded earth,
+shrouded with daily nights--and that this hour, between one and two
+o'clock, in which my brother was calling me into haven and to sleep,
+was the hour of my birth (which so often deprives man of both).
+
+There come to us moments of twilight in which it seems as though day
+and night were in the act of dividing--as if we were in the very
+process of being created or annihilated; the stage of life and the
+spectators fly back out of view, our part is played out, we stand far
+off, in darkness and alone, but we have still got on our theatre dress,
+and we look at ourselves in it, and ask, "What is it that thou art,
+_now_, my _me_!" When we thus ask ourselves this, there is, beyond
+ourselves, nothing of great or of firm--everything has turned to an
+endless cloud of night (with rare and feeble gleams within it), which
+keeps falling lower and lower, and heavier with drops. Only high up
+above the cloud shines a resplendence--and that is God; and far beneath
+it a minute speck of light--and that is a human "Me"!
+
+The heart is made of heavy earth, and therefore it cannot long endure
+such moments. I passed on to those sweeter seasons in which the full,
+tear-intoxicated heart neither can, nor will, do aught but simply weep.
+I had not the courage to drag my dear Victor down from the sublime
+region in which he was to my trifling pettinesses--but I asked him to
+remain beside me for a little time in this stillness which lay so
+silently upon the dark stream as it went flowing toward midnight and
+the south. Then I leant and pressed myself fondly to his side--and my
+little tears fell unseen into the great river--as though it had been
+the great stream of Time itself, into which all eyes drop their tears,
+and so many thousand hearts their blood-drops--for all which it neither
+swells nor flows the faster.
+
+I thought as I gazed at the Rhine, "And thus, too, the dancing, billowy
+current of Life goes flowing on its course from out its source--hidden
+like the Nile's. How little, as yet, have I done, or enjoyed! Our
+deserts, and our enjoyments, what petty things they are! Our
+_metamorphoses_ are greater; our heads and our hearts go into the
+ground irrecognisable--altered a thousandfold--like the head of the man
+with the iron mask.[76] Ay! and _did_ we but change! but we change so
+little in the earth, or even in ourselves. Every moment is to us the
+goal of all that have come before it. We take the seed of life for the
+harvest of it--the honey-dew on the ears for the sweet fruit--and we
+chew the flowers, like cattle! Ah! thou great GOD! what a night lieth
+around our sleep! we _fall_ and _rise_ with closed eyelids, and fly
+about blind, and in a deep slumber."[77]
+
+My hand was hanging into the water, and the cool ripples buoyed it up
+and down. I thought, "How straight and immovable the little light
+within us burns, amid the blasts of Nature's storm! Everything around
+me contends and clashes together with gigantic might. The stream seizes
+upon the islands and the cliffs--the night-wind comes upon the river,
+and stalks across it, thrusting its wavelets back, and wages its strife
+with the forests--even up there in the tranquil blue, worlds are
+working against worlds--the eternal, endless mights flowing and
+rushing, like rivers, one against another, they come together in whirl
+and roar--and on the face of that eternal whirl the little worlds float
+eddying round the sun-vortex; nay, those shimmering constellations
+themselves rising zenithwards with that grand and gentle peace and
+calm--what are they but mountain ranges of raging sun-volcanoes,
+stretching into infinity beyond the reach of mind to follow. And yet
+the human spirit lies at rest amid this storm, peaceful as a quiet moon
+above a windy night. In me, at this moment, all is gentle peace. I see
+my own little life-brook running by me, falling, with all the rest,
+into the river of Time. The clear-eyed soul looks through the raging
+blood-rivers which are flowing round it, and through the storms which
+darken and obscure it, and sees, beyond them all, quiet meadows,
+gentle, peaceful waters, moon-shimmer, and a lovely, beautiful,
+tranquil, placid, peaceful angel slowly wandering there." Yes, yes;
+within my soul there was a quiet Good Friday--wind-still, rain-free,
+and mild--neither cold nor over-warm--though shrouded in a tender
+cloud.
+
+But a clear consciousness of rest is speedily the undoing thereof. I
+saw, floating near the island, three hyacinths which Clotilda had
+dropped into the wavelets as she went away. "Now, in this, thy
+birth-hour," I said to myself, "the ocean of eternity is washing
+thousands of little hearts on to the stony shore of this world; how
+will it be with them one day when their birthday feast comes round? And
+what are your countless brothers who, with you, came thirty-two years
+ago into this vapour-ball, thinking now? Perhaps some terrible sorrow
+makes them think with bitterness of their first hour. Perhaps they
+sleep now--as I have slept--and must again--only deeper, deeper." And
+then all my younger and older friends, now sleeping that deeper sleep,
+fell heavy upon my broken breast.
+
+"I know, I think," my Victor said, "what you are reflecting on so
+silently, and regretting so mutely." I answered "No," and then I told
+him all.
+
+Then we went quickly back, and I put my arms about my other brother,
+and my heart went out in longing towards thee. At length we took our
+departure from this building-place of a more peaceful system of
+doctrine for our hearts--this quiet island; and the lofty hill--grand
+pedestal of the vases of our joy-flowers, chancel of the great temple,
+light-house tower in our haven of rest--seemed to gaze long after us,
+the hanging garden of our souls lying upon it in starry light.
+
+And as we came to the shore, Hesperus, as star of the morning (spark
+which springs and shines so near the sun), rose up above the morning
+mists, and earlier than even the Aurora of morning, proclaimed his
+sire's approach. And as we thought that he shines, too, as the star of
+evening upon our nights here below, and yet adorns the east, and the
+after-midnight hours with the first of the glittering pearls of dew,
+each said to his gladsome heart, "And so shall all the evening stars of
+this our life shine upon us as stars of morning at a future day."
+
+Think thou, too, of morning, my brother, when thou art looking upon the
+even; and when a sun is setting for thee, turn thee about and thou
+mayest see a moon rising in the east. The moon gives warrant that the
+sun is shining still--as Hope says, there still is happiness. But come
+now soon to thy Victor--and to
+
+ Thy Brother,
+
+ J. P.
+
+
+
+ END OF BOOK III.
+
+
+
+
+
+ BOOK IV.
+
+
+
+
+ CHAPTER XV.
+
+ ROSA VON MEYERN--TONE-ECHOES AND AFTER BREEZES FROM THE LOVELIEST
+ OF ALL NIGHTS--LETTERS OF NATHALIE AND FIRMIAN--TABLE-TALK BY
+ LEIBGEBER.
+
+
+If on some dewy, warm and starry night of spring the miners in some
+salt mine were to have their great penthouse-roof of earth lifted away
+from over their heads, and find themselves thus, of a sudden, brought
+out from their confined, candle-lit cellar into the wide, dim,
+sleeping-hall of nature--out of their subterranean stillness in among
+the breezes, the perfumes, the whisperings of the spring--these miners
+would be exactly in Firmian's case, whose heretofore prisoned, silent,
+and serene soul the night just past had driven out of its prison with
+might, darkening it with new sorrows and joys, and a whole new world.
+Heinrich maintained a most speaking silence concerning the night in
+question, and, on the other hand, Firmian betrayed a mute hunting after
+speech. Strive as he might to fold those wings of his (which had been
+stretched all moist from under their wing-covers on that foregoing
+night for a first time), they _would not_ fold quite short enough to go
+back under them again. Matters got to feel very oppressive and sultry
+for Leibgeber after a time. On that previous night they had come back
+in perfect silence to Bayreuth and to bed, and he wearied at the
+thought of all the demi-shades and demi-tints which would have to be
+got ready on the palette before so much as four bold touches could be
+given to the picture of the night.
+
+Perhaps there is nothing more regrettable than that we do not all have
+the hooping-cough at one and the same time--or are not all suffering
+the sorrows of Werther--or are not all twenty-one, or sixty-one--or
+have not all hypochondria--or are not all spending our honeymoons--or
+indulging in games of banter. How charming it would be (were we all
+choristers singing in the same coughing-tutti) to find everybody else
+in just the same condition as ourselves--and put up with them
+therefore, and forgive in them that in which they were just like _us_!
+But as things really are--now when the one coughs to-day, and the other
+not till to-morrow (the simultaneous company-coughing in church always
+excepted); when one has to be taking dancing-lessons while another is
+saying his prayers in the conventicle; when one father's daughter is
+being held up at the font while the other's son is being lowered into
+his little grave;--_now_, when destiny is always striking on the hearts
+about us chords quite unrelated to the key of our own, or, at any rate,
+superfluous sixths, major sevenths, minor seconds;--now, as things are,
+in this universal lack of unison and harmony, what can be expected but
+a screeching cat-charivari--and, if we can't have a little melody, we
+must be content with a little _arpeggio-ing_ up and down.
+
+By way of a fever for conversation, or pump-handle wherewith to force a
+drop or two up from the heart, Leibgeber caught hold of Firmian's hand,
+and embraced it softly and warmly with all his fingers. He put one or
+two unimportant questions concerning what walks and expeditions they
+should think of for the day. But he had not foreseen that this
+hand-clasp would be the means of landing him in deeper difficulties of
+embarrassment,--for he found that it was now incumbent on him to keep a
+control on his _hand_ as well as on his tongue--and he couldn't let
+Firmian's hand drop all in a moment, like a hot potato, but found it
+necessary to let it out of his clasp by a gradual _diminuendo_. This
+species of careful watch over his feelings was a process which made
+Leibgeber blush with shame, and drove him nearly frantic; and, indeed,
+he would have thrown even this description of mine of it into the fire.
+I am given to understand that he never could bring himself to utter the
+word "heart" even to women--who always have their _heart_ (namely the
+word) on their tongues, like a kind of _globus hystericus_. He said,
+"It is the bullet-screw of their real hearts,--the button on their
+fanfoil; and, to _me_, it is a poison _bolus_, a pitch-ball for the Bel
+of Babel."
+
+So his hand escaped, on a sudden, from its close arrest; he seized his
+hat and stick, and cried: "I see you are just as great a goose as I am
+myself: _instanter_, _instantius_, _instantissime_, in three words, did
+you talk to her about the Widows' Fund? Yes or no--not another
+syllable. I go Out at that door this instant!" Siebenkæs brought out
+all his items of news on this subject as rapidly as possible, so as to
+be quit of each and all of them for ever. "She is certain to agree to
+it. I said nothing to her about it. I _can_ NOT. But _you_ can quite
+easily. And you must. I am going no more to Fantasie. And we shall have
+a grand time of it this afternoon, Heinrich! The music of our lives
+shall be of a sounding sort. The pedals of the joy-notes are all ready
+on our harps to be pressed down; and we'll press them!" Heinrich,
+partly recovering his equanimity, said, as he went out, "The Cremona
+strings of the human instrument are made of living membrane, the breast
+is only the sounding board--and the head is the damper."
+
+Solitude lay around our friend like some beautiful country--all the
+echoes, driven away from him, and wandering, lost and astray, could
+find their way back to him now athwart it. And on the crape-veil, woven
+of the twelve past hours, which had laid itself over his life's
+loveliest historical picture, he could tremblingly trace that
+picture's lines with crayon-pencil, and trace, and trace them over
+again, a thousand and a thousand times! But a visit to the beautiful
+Fantasie--blooming richer and fairer as the hours went by--this he must
+deny himself; for he must not be a _living_ hedge, to fence and bar
+Nathalie from that Valley of Blossom. He must pay for bliss with
+privation. The charms of the town and neighbourhood had still their
+bright, many-tinted skins--but their sweet kernels were gone.
+Everything was to him as some dessert dish which had, in the older
+time, had coloured sugar sprinkled over it, which was now, somehow,
+turned to coloured sand. All his hopes--all the flowers and fruit of
+his life (as is the case with our higher ones)--now grew and matured
+beneath the ground, like those of the subterranean vetch;[78] I mean,
+in the sham grave into which he was going. How little he had--and yet,
+how much! His feet were upon prickly rose branches, and all round the
+Elysian fields of his future he saw thorny bushes, bristly undergrowth,
+and a wall built, beginning at his grave. His Leipzig rose valley was
+dwindled into the one green rosebud-twig, which had been transplanted,
+unblown, from Nathalie's heart to his. And yet, how much he _had_. A
+forget-me-not, from Nathalie, for all his life to come (the silken ones
+she gave him were but the hulls of that whose blossom was immortal and
+eternal); a springtime in his soul at last, at last after all these
+many springs--to be _so_ beloved, for the first time by a woman as an
+hundred dreams and poets had pictured to him that men _might_ be
+beloved. To pass, in an instant, at a single step, from his dingy
+lumber room of old law papers and books into the fresh, green, flowery,
+golden age of love,--for the first time, not only to gain a rare and
+priceless love like this, but to take away with him _such_ a parting
+kiss, like a sun into all his coming life, to light and warm it through
+and through for ever! _This_ was bliss for one who had had his cross to
+bear in former days. But, more than this, he was free to let himself be
+borne along upon the beauteous waves of this river of Eden without care
+or constraint, inasmuch as Nathalie never could be his, nor should he
+ever see her more. In Lenette he had loved no Nathalie as in the latter
+no Lenette. His wedded love was a prosaic summer day of sultry
+hay-making, but _this_ was a poetic spring night of starlight and
+flowers, and his new world was like the name of the spot where it was
+created--Fantaisie. He did not deceive himself as to the fact that, as
+he was going to die before Nathalie, he was loving, in her, merely a
+departed spirit, and that _as_ a departed spirit--nay, while yet in
+this life, of a truth, for _him_, a pure and glorified risen soul; and
+he freely put the question to himself whether there were any reason why
+he should not love this Nathalie (thus departed into the past, for
+_him_) as truly and fondly as any other, departed long since into a yet
+remoter past--the Heloise of an Abelard or St. Preux, or a poet's
+Laura, or a Werther's Lotte for whom his dying was not even to be as
+real as Werther's.
+
+With all his efforts, he could not manage to say more to Leibgeber
+than, "She must have been very, very fond of _you_, this rare,
+exceptional soul--for it is only to my resemblance to you that I can
+ascribe her heavenly kindness to _me_--who am so little like other
+men--and have never been cared for by women." Leibgeber--and he himself
+as soon as he said it--laughed at this almost idiotic statement; but
+what is any and every lover, during his May month, but a dear, genuine,
+simple sheep?
+
+Leibgeber soon came back to the hotel with the news that he had seen
+the English lady on her way to Fantaisie. Firmian was very glad of it.
+She rendered his resolve to shut himself out of the entire circle of
+delight easier to execute. For she was the Count von Vaduz's daughter,
+and consequently must not see him (Siebenkæs) at present, having to
+believe him hereafter to be Leibgeber. Heinrich botanised, however, the
+whole day on the flowery slope of Fantaisie, with the view of
+discovering and observing the flower _goddess_, rather than the
+flowers, with his botanical glasses (to wit, his eyes). But no goddess
+appeared. Alas! our poor wounded Nathalie had _so many_ reasons for
+keeping aloof from the ruins of her loveliest hours--for fleeing the
+scene of conflagration (now overgrown with flowers) where she might
+encounter him whom she meant to meet no more.
+
+A few days after this, the Venner Rosa von Meyern honoured the company
+at the _table d'hôte_ in the 'Sun' with _his_.... If the author's
+calculations as to dates do not wholly mislead him, he was at
+dinner there on that occasion himself. But I have only an indistinct
+recollection of the two advocates, and none at all of the
+Venner--because coxcombs of his description are an uninteresting
+species of animals, and there are whole game-preserves and zoological
+gardens full of them to be met with at all times. I have more than once
+met with characters, in the body, whom I have subsequently taken
+careful wax casts of from the crowns of their heads to the soles of
+their boots, and then exhibited them about the country in my collection
+of wax-work figures. But I wish I always knew beforehand exactly
+_which_ of the people whom I happen to be dining or travelling with
+chances to be the one who is going to have his portrait painted in this
+way. I should note down, and store up a thousand trifling, minute
+peculiarities, and lay them down in my epistolary cellars. As it is, I
+sometimes find myself obliged (and I confess it freely) to set to work
+and _coolly lie_ a number of matters of minor importance--for instance,
+that a thing takes place about six o'clock, or about seven--if I happen
+to be wholly without documentary evidence on the point. Wherefore it is
+a moral certainty that if three other authors had sat down, on the same
+morning with me, to give the world an account of Siebenkæs's wedded
+life derived from the same historical sources as mine, that we four,
+however great our devotion to truth, would have produced family
+histories containing much the same amount and description of inaccuracy
+as we find in those which the four Evangelists have given us; so that
+our tetrachord would have stood in need of a good tuning with a
+tuning-pipe in the shape of a "Harmony" of our Gospels.
+
+Meyern dined at the 'Sun,' as we have said. He told Siebenkæs with a
+triumph, which was not without a dash of menace, that he was going back
+to Kuhschnappel next day. He was vainer than ever--probably he had
+offered his hand to some fifty of the fair sex of Bayreuth, as though
+he had been the giant Briareus, with fifty wedding-rings on his hundred
+hands. He was as greedy of the fair sex as cats are of _marum verum_;
+which is why both are surrounded with _metallic_ guards by their
+possessors. When the clergy rivet poachers of this description,
+alive, to one particular animal of their chase by means of a strong
+wedding-ring, and the animal of the chase in question drags them
+through every thicket till they are scratched and bled to death,
+philanthropic weekly-papers would say that it is too severe a
+punishment; and it is so, no doubt, for the poor animal of the chase.
+
+On the following day Rosa really did send to ask whether Siebenkæs had
+any message to send to his wife, as he was going back to see her.
+
+Nathalie was invisible still. All that Firmian saw of her was a letter
+for her which he saw shaken out of the post-bag when he went (as he did
+every day) to see if there was one from his wife. Lenette did not
+require more hours to write a letter than Isocrates did years for a
+panegyric on the Athenians--no more, but just the same number, namely
+about ten. Judging by the handwriting and the seal, the letter for
+Nathalie was from the (step) father of his country, Herr von Blaise.
+"Thou darling girl," thought Firmian, "with what deliberation he will
+pass the burning focus of his burning-glass (formed of the ice of his
+heart) over every wound of thy soul! How many secret tears wilt thou
+weep--and no one to count them; and thou hast no hand now to dry them
+and hide them, except thine own!"
+
+One exquisite, blue afternoon he went alone to the only pleasure garden
+which was not barred against him--the Hermitage. Memories met him every
+where--all painfully sweet memories. At every spot he had lost, or
+renounced, something of life or heart--had become a hermit, in
+accordance with the place's name. Could he forget the great, dim glade
+where, beside his kneeling friend, and before the setting sun, he had
+sworn to die, and part from his wife and from all the world he knew?
+
+He left the joy-place, turned his face to the setting sun (which almost
+hid, in its brightness, the prospect from his sight), and strolled in
+circles round the town. With a deeply moved heart he gazed after the
+gently radiant luminary as it sank, amid the glowing cloud-embers,
+towards that distant spot where his widowed Lenette would be standing
+in her silent room, with her face lighted up by the evening red. "Ah!
+dear, good Lenette," the voice within him cried, "why can I not press
+thee to this full, tender heart, here in this paradise, in bliss? I
+should love thee better here, and forgive thee easier."
+
+Yes, of a truth, it is thou, kind Nature--never ending Love, who
+changest, in us, distance of body into nearness of soul. It is thou
+who, when we are utterly happy in some distant spot, bringest to us
+from afar, in fancy, the beloved forms of those whom we have had to
+leave--they come like beautiful music, or like happy years--and we
+stretch out our arms to the clouds that go soaring over the hills
+beyond which lie the dwellings of those whom we love the best. Our
+severed hearts open to those distant ones as the flowers which open to
+the sun unfold their petals even on days when there are clouds between
+them.
+
+The splendour died away, leaving the blood-like track of the sunken sun
+in the blue; the earth with her gardens seemed to stand out brighter
+and clearer. Then suddenly Firmian came on the green Tempè Vale of
+Fantaisie, lying before him all loveliness of sight and of sound,
+tinted with the red of the evening clouds and with the white of
+blossoming boughs. But over it stood an angel with a gleaming cloud
+streak for sword, saying, "Here enter thou not! Knowest thou not the
+Eden from whence thou hast gone out?"
+
+Firmian turned him about, and there, in the gloaming of spring, leaned
+upon the wall of the first of the Bayreuth houses he reached on his
+homeward way; so that the wounds of his eyes might have a chance to
+grow whole--that he might not meet his friend bearing scars which would
+have to be "explained." Leibgeber was not in, however, but there was
+something there of a very unexpected kind--a letter from Nathalie to
+him.
+
+Ye who have keenly felt--or deeply regretted--that there is a
+Moses-veil, an altar-railing, a prison-grating, made both of body
+and earth--stretched out for ever and aye, between one soul and
+another--_ye_ cannot well blame this poor, deep-touched, solitary
+FRIEND, that he took up the cold paper unseen, and pressed it to his
+burning lips, and to his trembling heart. For of a truth, every
+_body_--even the human body, is, from the soul's point of view,
+merely the sacred _reliquiæ_ of an invisible spirit; and not only the
+letter, which you kiss, but the hand which wrote it, too, is, like the
+lips, whose kiss _you think_, assures you--(but it is a deceptive
+assurance)--of the _closeness_ of your union, your _flowing_ or
+_fusing_ into one, only the sacred outward and visible sign of a
+something higher and dearer; and these deceptions differ only in their
+sweetness.
+
+Leibgeber came in, opened the letter, and read it aloud:
+
+"To-morrow morning at five o'clock, I shall be turning my back upon
+your beautiful town. I am going to Schraplau. But I cannot leave this
+lovely valley, oh dear friend, without once again giving you the
+assurance of my unchanging friendship, and conveying to you my thanks
+and wishes for yours. I should so have liked to say good-bye to you in
+a more living manner; but my long leave-taking from my English friend
+is not yet over, and I have now _her_ wishes to combat (as I had my
+_own_ before) before I can bury myself in, or rather, wing my flight to
+my village solitude. This beautiful spring has sorely wounded me, and
+that with joys as well as with sorrows. But (if I may go so far afield
+for a comparison), my heart, like Cranmer's, is left for those I love,
+unconsumed amid the ashes of my funereal pyre. May all go well! well!
+with you--better than can ever be the case with me, a woman. Fate
+cannot take much from you, nay, nor give you much either. There are
+smiling eternal rainbows playing around _all_ the waterfalls for you;
+but the rain-clouds of a woman's heart must drop for many a long day ere
+they are brightened by the sad, yet cheering tints of the Iris which
+memory casts upon them at length. _Your_ friend is with you still, no
+doubt. Press him warmly to your heart, and tell him, all that _yours_
+wishes, and _gives_ him, mine _wishes_ him; and never will he, or you,
+whom he loves, be forgotten by me. Always
+
+ "Your NATHALIE."
+
+
+During the reading of this, Firmian stood with his face pressed to the
+window, and lifted towards the evening sky. Heinrich, with a true
+friend's delicacy of perception, took the answer out of his lips, and
+said, looking to him, "Yes, this Nathalie is good and kind, in very
+truth, and a thousand times better than thousands of other people are;
+but I will let myself be driven over by her carriage, and crushed
+beneath the wheels of it, if I don't wait for her at four o'clock in
+the morning, get into the carriage, and sit down beside her. Ay,
+verily! I will get her to lend me both her ears, and I will fill them
+full--or my own are longer than any elephant's, though he _does_ use
+his for fly-flappers."
+
+"Yes, do, dear Henry," said Firmian, in the most cheerful tones he
+could force from his oppressed throat. "I shall give you three lines to
+take in your hand, just that you may have something to give her, since
+I am never to see her again."
+
+There is a certain lyric intoxication of heart, during which people
+never ought to write letters, because, in the course of fifty years or
+so they may, perhaps fall into the hands of people who are without
+either the heart or the intoxication. However, Firmian wrote, and did
+not seal; and Leibgeber did not read.
+
+
+"_I_ bid you farewell, too! But _I_ cannot say 'Don't forget me.' Ah!
+forget me! But leave me the forget-me-not which you gave me--to keep
+for evermore. Though Heaven is past and over, death has yet to come.
+And mine is now very near, and it is for this reason alone that I, and
+my dear Leibgeber even more urgently, have a favour to beg of you; but
+such a _strange_ favour. Nathalie, do not refuse. Your soul's sphere is
+far, far above that of the feminine souls which are shocked and
+frightened at everything out of the commonplace track. _You_ can dare,
+and can venture, nor need you fear to risk that great heart of yours
+(and happiness) on any cast. And now, as I spoke to you on _that_
+night, for the last time, this is the last time I shall write to you.
+
+"But Eternity remains for thee and me!
+
+ "F. S."
+
+
+His sleep was nothing but dreams all night, that he might be sure to
+awaken Leibgeber in the morning. But as early as three o'clock, the
+latter, in his capacity of letter-carrier, and _Maître des Requêtes_,
+was posted under a great linden-tree, whose hanging beds, thronged with
+a sleeping world of inhabitants, overhung the alley by which Nathalie
+was to come. Firmian, in bed, enacted Henry's part along with him, in
+fancy, thinking to himself, "Now she is bidding the English lady
+good-bye; now she is getting into the carriage; now she is passing the
+tree, and he is taking her horses by the bridle." He phantasised
+himself into dreams which stabbed his heart with pictures of her
+repeated refusals of his petition. What a quantity of dark and cloudy
+weather is born of one single, bright, starry night, in the physical
+world as well as in the moral. At last he dreamed that she stretched
+her hand to him, from her carriage, with tears in her eyes, and the
+green rose-twig on her breast, and said, in low sweet tones, "I _must_
+say no! Could _I_ live long, if _you_ were dead?" She pressed his hand
+so warmly that he awoke. The pressure was there, and lasted, and before
+him was the beaming daylight, and his beaming friend, who said, "She
+has agreed, while you've been snoring here."
+
+He had been within a hair's breadth of missing her. She had not taken
+so much time to dress and depart as others do to _un_dress and arrive.
+A rose-branch, wet with dew, whose leaves pricked sharper than its
+thorns, was on her heart, and the long parting had tinted her lids with
+red. She was delighted to see him, though a little frightened, and
+anxious to hear. He gave her Firmian's open letter, to begin with, by
+way of credential. Her eager eyes shone out once more through two
+tear-drops, and she asked, "What am I to do?" "Nothing," said
+Leibgeber, in an artful manner, half jest, half earnest, "except allow
+the Prussian Treasury to remind you of his death twice a-year, as if
+you were his widow." She answered, "No!" pronouncedly, on one note,
+behind which, however, there was only a comma, not a full stop. He once
+more went through his petitions, and his reasons, adding, "Do it, at
+least, for _my_ sake, if for no other reason. I can't bear to see him
+baulked of a wish, or disappointed in a hope. He is a bear whom that
+bear-leader, the State, keeps dancing all the winter, without a wink of
+winter sleep, whereas _I_ seldom take my paw out of my mouth, but suck
+away continually. He kept awake all last night, so as to make sure of
+calling me in time, and he is counting the moments anxiously at home
+now." She read the letter again, syllable by syllable. He did not ask
+for a final answer, but spun out a talk on other subjects--the morning,
+her journey, the village of Schraplau. The morning had already raised
+her pillar of fire beyond Bayreuth, the town kept adding pillars of
+smoke; in a few minutes he must out of the carriage and back. "And so,
+fare you well," he said, in the softest of tones, with one foot on the
+carriage-step; "may your future grow brighter and brighter, like the
+day about us. And now, _what_ last word am I to carry to my _good_,
+_dear_ beloved Firmian?" (I shall make a remark in a minute or two.)
+She lowered her travelling-veil like the drop curtain of a drama which
+is done, and said in low and stifled accents, "If I must, I must; so
+let _this_ be, also. But you are giving me _another_ great sorrow to
+take with me on my way." Here he jumped down, and the carriage, bearing
+this poor soul--poor now in so many ways--rolled on with her over the
+shattered ruins of her youthful life.
+
+If he had got a "No" instead of this hard wrung-out "Yes," he would
+have caught her again on the other side of the town, and been her
+fellow-traveller for another fragment of her journey.
+
+I said above, that I should "make a remark;" it is this: that the
+friendship or love which a woman has for a man is fed by that which she
+sees existing between him and his friends, and grows visibly in
+consequence--converting it, polyp-fashion, into its own substance. It
+was for this reason that Leibgeber, by instinct, had given such warm
+expression to _his_. In the case of us, masculine lovers, again, this
+sort of electric coating, or magnetic armature of our love with the
+friendship of our beloved object with other women is most uncommon.
+What pleases _us_, is to see her shrinking from everybody else, growing
+hard and frozen to them on our account, handing _them_ nothing but ices
+and cold pudding, but serving us with glowing goblets of love. This
+process of making the heart, like wine, more fiery and strong,
+and generous, by freezing it at the boiling-point, may please a
+short-sighted selfish soul; but never a clear-seeing, kindly, loving
+one. At all events, the author declares that, whenever _he_ has caught
+a glimpse--in a mirror or in water--of the reverse side of the
+Janus-head, of which the other side has been smiling in love upon him,
+frowning in dislike upon the rest of the world, he has made a face or
+two of the same disliking sort on the spot--at the Janus-head. For the
+mere contrast's sake, a girl should never slander, find fault, or
+dislike, at all events, while she is a lover; when she is a married
+woman, the mistress of a house, and has children, and cows, and
+servants, of course no reasonable man or husband, can possibly object
+to a moderate amount of bad temper, and a little scolding now and then.
+
+Nathalie had acceded to the strange proposal for many reasons; just
+because it _was_ a strange one; and then the word "widow" would, to her
+romantic heart, be constantly weaving a mourning-band of sorrow,
+binding her and Firmian together, and winding in charming and fanciful
+wreaths round the events, and the vows, of the night of their good-bye.
+Besides, to-day, she had been gradually ascending from one emotion to
+another, and had reached a height where her head began to reel.
+Moreover, she was boundlessly unselfish, and consequently never
+troubled herself to think whether a thing had the _appearance_ of
+selfishness or not. And, lastly, she cared less about appearances in
+general, and the conclusions people drew from them than, perhaps, a
+young lady _should_ care.
+
+Leibgeber, now that all his goals were reached, emitted a long,
+gladsome zodiacal light; and Firmian did not darken it with the full
+depth of his mourning night shadow, but only with the half-tints
+thereof. At the same time, he felt he could not visit either of
+Bayreuth's pleasure-places, Eremitage or Fantaisie, which were
+Herculaneum and Portici to him now. Yet he _must_ pass by the latter on
+his homeward way, and disinter many things that were buried. He did not
+care to delay his return much longer; not only was the moon set now,
+which had shed a new silvery radiance upon all the white flowers and
+blossoms of the spring, but Leibgeber, besides, was a death's head
+_memento mori_, always saying, in the most unmistakable manner--though
+with neither lips nor tongue--"It must be borne in mind that thou hast
+got to die, in Kuhschnappel, in jest." Leibgeber's heart burned for the
+world without, the flames of his forest-conflagration were eager to
+dart and play uncontrolled over alps, islands, capital cities; the
+Vaduz water reservoir of acts of parliament--paper _lit-de-parade_ and
+_lit-de-justice_--would have been to _him_ a heavy, suffocating,
+feather-bed, such as people in a hopeless state of hydrophobia used to
+be smothered by out of compassion. In fact, a small town could as
+little endure him as he could endure a small town. Indeed, even in
+Bayreuth--a larger place--there were sundry _Commissaires de Justice_
+at the _table d'hôte_ at the 'Sun' Hotel, who told me with their own
+lips, that when Leibgeber spoke his table-speech (reported in Chapter
+XII.) on the subject of Crown Princes, they thought it was a deliberate
+satire on a particular Margrave then reigning; whereas all his satires
+were really directed against the human race in _general_, not against
+individuals. Again, how thoughtlessly he conducted himself during the
+poor eight days which he spent in our good town of Hof im Voigtlande.
+Are there not credible "Varisker" (as according to some authorities the
+inhabitants of Voigtland were called in Cæsar's time--though others
+consider "Narisker" to have been the word), who have assured me that he
+bought bergamot pears in the open market-place, near the court-house,
+and cakes at a baker's stall, in his best suit of Sunday clothes? And
+are there not Nariskers of the fair sex, who, having observed his
+proceedings thereafter, are ready to depose that, though stall-feeding
+is a matter of universal enjoinment, he nevertheless ate this
+food-offering in the open air like a prince, and on the march, like a
+Roman army? There are witnesses, who waltzed with him, to testify that
+he went to masked balls in a _robe de chambre_ and a cocked-hat and
+feathers, and that he had worn both all the previous day in earnest,
+before putting them on in the evening in jest. A Narisker not without
+some brains, and possessing a good memory, who was not aware that I had
+the fellow under my historical hands, repeated the following somewhat
+audacious utterances of Leibgeber's.
+
+"Every man is a born pedant. There are very few who are hung in chains
+_after_ they are dead: but almost every one _is_ hung, in most accursed
+chains, _before_ death; and, therefore, in most countries, 'Freeman'
+means provost-marshal, or hangman. Jest, as such, ought to be serious;
+therefore, as long as one is only in jest, it is wrong to jest in the
+slightest degree. He held, that the spirit which brooded, creating,
+over the ink of colleges was (as many Fathers of the Church held that
+to be which, according to Moses, moved upon the face of the waters)
+_wind_. In his eyes, worshipful councils, conferences, deputations,
+sessions, processions, &c., were not, at bottom, wholly without a spice
+of comic salt, looked upon as grave parodies of stiff and empty
+seriousness, more especially as in general there was but one member of
+the conclave (or perhaps his wife) who really voted, decided, or ruled,
+the mystic _corpus_ itself, sitting at the green table, chiefly for the
+joke of the thing; just as, in flute clocks, though there is a
+flute-player screwed on outside whose fingers work up and down upon the
+flute, which grows out of his mouth, and children are beyond themselves
+with delight at the talent of the wooden imposition, every clockmaker
+knows that it is _inside_ that the wheels are which act on the hidden
+pipes with their pinions." I answered that these sayings showed that
+Leibgeber was of a rather audacious and ironical turn of mind. It is,
+perhaps, to be desired, that everybody were in a position to do what
+the author does in this place, namely, beg all Nariskers to have the
+goodness to point to any single word or deed of his which can be called
+satirical, or not exactly adapted to fit on to the cap-block of a _pays
+coutumier_. If he is not speaking the truth, he begs that he may be
+contradicted without the slightest hesitation.
+
+The winnowing-fan which blew Siebenkæs out of Bayreuth on the following
+day, was a letter from the Count von Vaduz, in which he expressed his
+friendly regret on account of Leibgeber's cold-fever and tallowy
+appearance, at the same time begging him to hasten his entry upon the
+duties of his office. This letter was to Siebenkæs as a wing-membrane
+wherewith to hasten his flight to his seeming cocoon-grave, in order to
+issue forth from it a young full-fledged inspector. In our next chapter
+he turns him about, and quits the beautiful town. In what remains of
+this, he is taking private lessons in silhouette clipping from
+Leibgeber, whose _rôle_ he is to succeed to by dying. The
+master-cutter, and scissorial-mentor did nothing, in this connection,
+worthy of being handed down to posterity by me save one thing, as to
+which I do not find a word in my documents, which was told me by Mr.
+Feldmann, the keeper of the hotel, who was carving at table when it
+occurred. It was only that a stranger who was dining there clipped out
+a profile of Leibgeber, among others; while Leibgeber, seeing what he
+was about, clipped out, under cover of the table-cloth, a silhouette of
+this supernumerary copyist's _own_ head and shoulders, and when the
+latter handed him his, Leibgeber returned the compliment, saying "_al
+Pari_!" thus paying him in his own coin. This stranger made airs of
+various kinds, as well as silhouettes, but succeeded best with the
+_phlogistic_ sort, which he made with his lungs, without any difficulty
+to speak of, and in which he throve and took on colour, as plants do;
+this sort of air can be breathed, and is designated by the name of
+"wind," to distinguish it from the other phlogistic gases which can not
+be inhaled. When this phlogistic wind-maker (who gave admirable
+lectures from town to town, on the other gases, from that portable
+professorial chair, his body) had departed with his cutter's wages,
+Heinrich contented himself with the following remarks.
+
+"Thousands of people ought to travel and teach both at once. He who
+limits himself to three days can certainly (as a species of private
+tutor extraordinary) in that time read excellent lectures on every kind
+of subject which he knows little or nothing about. Thus much I
+see already, that there are brilliant comets--shining wandering
+stars--revolving round me and others, and throwing flying lights upon
+us concerning electricity, gases, magnetism, in short natural science
+in general; but this is but a small matter. May this duck's wing choke
+me if these rostrum carriers, and travelling professors (travelling
+scholars they are not), might not lecture upon science of _every_ kind,
+with great advantage, at all events, upon the minuter branches. Could
+not _one_, for instance, travel and read lectures upon the first
+century after Christ's birth, or the first millenary before it (which
+is no longer), I mean, tell ladies and gentlemen all about it in a
+lecture or two, a second undertaking the second, a third the third, an
+eighteenth our own? I can quite imagine travelling medicine-chests for
+the soul of this kind. But as far as I am concerned, I should by no
+means stop at this point--I should advertise myself as a peripatetic
+private tutor in branches of the minutest possible order; _e. g_., in
+electoral courts, I should give lessons concerning the obligations to
+be entered into by the nominees to government appointments; in all and
+every place I should give exegetical instruction concerning the first
+verse of the first book of Moses--the _kraken_, the devil (who _may_,
+perhaps, be more or less the same as the other), on Hogarth's
+tail-piece, in connection with Vandyke's headpieces, on coins and in
+portraits; on the true distinction between the Hippocentaur, and the
+Onocentaur, which is more like that between genius and German criticism
+than anything else; on the first paragraph of Wolf, or even of Pütter;
+on the funeral bier of Louis (XIV.) the be-grandised, and the public
+rejoicings under it; on the academic licences which a passing
+lecturer may allow himself to take, in addition to that of pocketing
+his fee--the greatest of which is often that of shutting the
+lecture-room door, (to make a long story short) on _everything_, in
+fact. If we go on in this way (I can't help being struck), that
+when circulating high schools have got to be as common as village
+schools--when savants ply backwards and forwards like live shuttles
+between the towns (and they have begun to do so already), attaching
+Ariadne threads (of _talk_, at all events) everywhere, to everything,
+with the view of weaving them into something or other--if we go on on
+this road, I say, when each sun of a professor--on the Ptolemaic
+system, moves about among the dark orbs (fixed upon necks), which
+surround him, and casts his light upon each in turn (a state of things
+wholly opposed to the Copernican system, according to which the sun
+stands still on the professorial rostrum in the centre of the orbits of
+the revolving planets or students)--if we go on (I say once more, on
+this road), one may be pretty sure that the world will really come
+to be something at last; a _learned_ world, at the very least and
+lowest--philosophers will obtain the true philosopher's stone--gold;
+what fools will obtain will be the philosophers, and knowledge of every
+kind: and moreover the restorers of science will get set upon _their_
+legs. All soil would then be classic soil--so that people would of
+necessity have to plough, and fight on, classic soil. Every gallows
+hill would be a Pindus, every prince's throne an oracle-cave of
+Delphi--and I should be obliged to anyone who should show me such a
+thing as a single ass in the whole of Germany, _then_. This is what
+would necessarily happen if all the world were to set out upon learned,
+and instructive, journeys--that portion of it being, of course,
+necessarily excepted which would be obliged to stay at home if there
+were to be anybody to listen and pay (like the _point de vue_, in
+military 'evolutions,' for which the adjutant is generally told off)."
+
+Here he suddenly jumped up, and cried, "I wish to Heaven I could go to
+Bruckenau;[79] there, on the bath tubs, should be my professorial
+chair, and seat of the Muses. The tradesman's, the country gentleman's
+wife or daughter should lie, like a shell fish, in her closed basin and
+relic-casquet, with nothing sticking out but her head (just as is the
+case in her ordinary costume), her head which it would be my business
+to instruct. What discourses, _à la_ St. Anthony of Padua, should I not
+hold with these tender tench--or sirens--though they might better be
+described as fortresses protected by moats, or wet ditches. I should
+sit lecturing and teaching upon the wooden holsters of their glowing
+charms (phosphorus-like, kept in water!) But this would be nothing
+compared to the benefits I should bestow upon society were _I_ to have
+_my_self cooped into an _etui_, or scabbard of the kind, and then be
+net a-going like a water-organ, and, like some water-god, devote my
+pedagogical talents to the edification of the class of students sitting
+on my tub-lid! True, I should have to make my illustrative gestures
+under the warm water, because the only part of me out of my sheath
+would be my head (like the hilt of a dagger), with my master's cap on
+it. But the loveliest of doctrine,--luxuriant rice-ears, and succulent
+aquatic plants sprouting in the water--a play of philosophic
+water-works, and so forth, should be emitted from the bath, and send
+away all the beauties (whom, in fancy, I see thronging round my
+quaker's and Diogenes' tub) besprinkled with learning and instruction
+of the most superlative description. By Heaven! I ought to be off to
+Bruckenau this instant, not so much as a watering-place guest as in the
+capacity of a private tutor."
+
+
+
+
+ CHAPTER XVI.
+
+ THE HOMEWARD JOURNEY, WITH ALL ITS PLEASURES--THE ARRIVAL AT HOME.
+
+
+Firmian took his departure. He was sorry to leave the hotel, which had
+been a royal "Sans Souci" and "mon repos" to him, and turn his face
+away from its comfortable chambers towards his own bare comfortless
+rooms. To him who had never known any of the comforts--the soft
+_paddings_, so to speak, of this hard life of ours--who had never had
+any other Jack but the boot-jack, it had been an enormous pleasure and
+enjoyment to have the power of ringing that leading actor, John the
+waiter, up from his _coulisses_ with such facility, and that too with
+plates and glasses in his hand, out of which said actor enjoyed
+nothing, only Siebenkæs and the public so doing. Just at the door of
+the hotel, he made to Mr. Feldmann, the landlord, the following
+eulogistic address, which shall be made him once more in print by me,
+by way of an additional blazon to his coat of arms, the moment it gets
+through the press. "There is only one thing which your guests have to
+desire, that they have not got, and that is the most important of all
+things--time. May your sun reach the sign of the crab, and remain in
+it." Several Bayreuthians who were standing by thought this was a
+miserable satire.
+
+Henry went with Firmian some thirty paces beyond the Reformation
+church, as far as the church-yard, and tore himself away from him with
+less difficulty than usual, for he expected to see him again in a few
+weeks' time--on his death-bed. He would not go as far as Fantaisie with
+him, wishing to allow him to sink, in silence and undisturbed, and lose
+himself in the enjoyment of the magic echoes of the spirit-harmonies of
+that night of bliss wherewith all the garden would be vocal.
+
+Alone, then, Firmian entered into the valley as into some holy temple,
+all sacredness and awe. Every thicket seemed, to his eyes, glorified
+with super-earthly light, the stream, a stream flowing out of Arcadia,
+and the whole valley a Vale of Tempè, transported thither and unveiled
+to view. And when he came to the dear and holy spot where Nathalie had
+prayed him to "think of that night," it seemed to him that the sun was
+shedding a heavenlier brightness; and that the hum of bees in the
+blossoms was music of spirit-voices wafted on the air, and that he must
+needs prostrate himself and press his heart upon the dewy sward. Upon
+this trembling sound-board he once more retraced the old path by which
+he had walked with Nathalie, and, now in a rose espalier, now from some
+streamlet, now from the balcony, now from some leafy nook or trembling
+stem, string after string, breaking from silence, gave forth once more
+its old lovely tone. His enraptured heart swelled, even to pain; a
+moist transparent shimmer was over his eyes, and dissolved into a great
+tear-drop. His eyes, drunken with weeping, distinguished nothing save
+the brightness of the morning and the whiteness of the flowers; details
+were hid by the flowery vail of dreaming, in whose lily perfume his
+soul sank down, soothed to a restful sleep. It was as if hitherto, in
+the enjoyment of being with his Leibgeber he had only felt half the
+real strength of his love for Nathalie; with such a new might and
+breeze of heaven did that love come breathing upon him in this solitude
+with ethereal tire. A world all youth burst into blossom in his heart.
+
+Of a sudden the bells of Bayreuth came ringing into this world,
+striking for him the hour of his farewell to it; and there fell on him
+that anxious sadness with which we linger, too long, beside a place
+where we have been happy, when the time has come when we must say
+Adieu. He went upon his way.
+
+What a brightness fell upon all the hills and meadows, with the thought
+of Nathalie, and that imperishable kiss! The green world, which had
+been but a series of pictures for him, as he came, was now all speech
+and language. There was a light-magnet of happiness all day long in the
+dimmest corner of his being; and when, in the thick of distractions,
+conversations and the like, _en route_, he cast a sudden glance into
+himself, he found a continual sense of blissfulness within him.
+
+How often he turned back to the Bayreuth hills, beyond which he had
+lived real days of youth, for the first time in his existence! Behind
+him Nathalie was journeying on towards the east, and breezes from that
+quarter--airs which had breathed gently around the distant, lonely
+one--came wafting back to him, and he drunk the æther-stream like the
+breath of one beloved.
+
+The hills sunk low on the horizon; his paradise was whelmed in the blue
+of heaven. His west and Nathalie's east flowed asunder, and parted
+wider, faster and faster as the moments sped. One beautiful plain
+receded, flying behind him, after another; and he hastened past the
+flower-decked limbs of Spring as she lay outstretched on earth,
+alternating between looking and enjoying, as in early days gone by.
+
+Thus he came at evening to the village in the valley by the Jaxt, where
+on his journey to Bayreuth, he had passed in review, with tears, his
+loveless days; but he came with a new heart, full to the brim with love
+and happiness; and tears flowed this time too. Here where, amid the
+melting magic lights of evening, he had asked himself, "What womanly
+soul has ever loved _you_ as your old dreams have so often pictured to
+your heart you _might_ be loved by one," and had given himself so sad
+an answer; here he could think on that Bayreuth night, and say, "Yes!
+Nathalie has loved me!" And then the old sorrow rose again, but
+glorified, from the dead. He had made to her a vow of invisibility here
+on earth; he was now journeying on towards his own death; he was to
+die, and never see her more. She was gone before him--had _died_ first,
+as it were; she had merely taken away with her into the long, dim,
+coming years of her life the grief of having loved and lost, _twice_.
+"And I look into my own life here, and weep, away from her," he said,
+wearily, and closed his eyes undried.
+
+Another world altogether opened upon him in the morning--not a new
+world by any means--the old, old familiar one. Just as if the
+concentric magic circles which surrounded Nathalie and Leibgeber
+reached no further than the little Valley of Longing on the Jaxt, and
+could include nothing beyond it. Every step towards home translated the
+poetry which had come into his life to poetic prose. The Imperial
+market-town (that frigid zone of his life) was nearer to him; his
+torrid zone, over which the faded petals of his ephemeral joy-flowers
+were fluttering still, was far away behind him.
+
+But, on the other hand, the pictured imagery of his domestic life kept
+growing clearer and brighter, taking the form of a picture-bible, while
+the paintings of his month of bliss died away into a dark picture
+gallery. I think the weather, which was rainy, had some connection with
+this.
+
+Towards the end of the week the weather, as well as penitents and
+churchgoers, puts on other shirts and clothes.
+
+It was Saturday, and cloudy. Damp weather affects the walls of our
+brains as it does the walls of our rooms; the paperings of both imbibe
+the moisture, and get curled up into clouds, until the next dry day
+smooths both out again. Under a blue sky, I long for eagles' pinions;
+under a cloudy one, I only want a goose's wing to write with. In the
+former case we are eager to be off and out, into the wide world; in the
+latter, all we want is to sit comfortably down in our arm-chair. In
+short, clouds, when they drop, make us domestic, citizenish, and
+hungry, while blue skies make us thirsty, and citizens _of the world_.
+
+These clouds of this Saturday formed a kind of palisade about the Eden
+of Bayreuth. Every big drop which fell on the leaves made him think
+longingly of the wifely, wedded heart, which was his lawful property
+(and which he was soon to lose), and of his poor little lodging. At
+last when the ice-floes of the rugged-clouds melted into grey foam,
+and the setting sun was drawn like a sluice, out of this suspended
+mill-pond, and it poured down in consequence, Kuhschnappel came in
+sight.
+
+Discordant, jarring fancies clanged in contention within him. The
+commonplace, narrow-minded, provincial town, seemed, when contrasted
+with freer and more liberal places and societies, so crowded and
+crushed together, so official in style, and full of Troglodytes--with
+doggrel, and table-verses by way of poetry--that he felt it would be a
+satisfaction to drag out his green trellis-bed into the market-place in
+broad daylight, and go to sleep beneath the very windows of the local
+"quality," without minding a brass-farthing what the upper council
+might think, or the lower council either. The nearer he came to the
+stage he was to die upon, the more difficult did this first rôle of his
+(and last but one) appear to him.
+
+_Away_ from home we are bold and daring: we resolve, and undertake;
+_at_ home, we pause and hesitate, and delay.
+
+Yes, and the smoke and smells of the mean streets gnawed into him,
+matters which, of themselves unaided, so sorely affect and depress us
+that there are very few indeed who can raise their heads wholly beyond
+these effluvia. For in man there nestles an accursed tendency towards
+still-sitting ease and comfort; like a big dog he lets himself be poked
+and pinched a thousand times before he takes the trouble to get up,
+rather than growl. Once fairly on his legs, however, he is not in a
+hurry to lie down again. The first heroic deed (like the first earned
+dollar, according to Rousseau) costs more than the next thousand. The
+prospect of the long, difficult, tedious and risky financial and
+surgical operation of a stage death stung our Siebenkæs on the domestic
+bolster.
+
+But the nearer he drew to the gallows-hill (that mouse-tower of his
+old, narrow life), the quicker and the clearer did the thoughts of the
+heart-oppressing stamping-mills of past days, and of his approaching
+salvation, vibrate in alternation in his mind. He kept thinking that he
+would have to suffer care, anxiety, and struggle of all sorts, as of
+old, because he kept losing sight of the open sky of his future, just
+as we go on suffering the pain and fear of a painful dream for some
+time after we have awakened from it.
+
+But when he saw the house where dwelt his Lenette, whose voice he had
+not heard for so many a day, the pain all vanished from his heart, the
+trouble from his eyes, nothing being left in them but affection and its
+warmest tears.
+
+"Ah! am I not going to tear myself, so soon, from her for ever, and
+make her shed tears of delusion, and wound her with the terrible wounds
+of a funeral and mourning? and then, poor darling soul, we shall see
+each other no more!" he thought.
+
+He quickened his pace. He squeezed close past the shop windows of his
+co-commandant, Meerbitzer, with his head thrown back, and his eyes
+fixed upon the up-stairs windows. Meerbitzer was in the house,
+splitting the Sunday wood; and Firmian signed to him not to give note
+of his presence by any sort of sentry-challenge. The old associate czar
+signed back to him, with outstretched fingers, that Lenette was alone
+in the room up-stairs. The old familiar ripieno voices of the house,
+the querulous scolding of the book-binder's wife, the damper-pedal
+effect of the eternal prayer and curser, Fecht, met him like so much
+sweet provender, as he climbed the stairs. The waning moon of his
+movable pewter property shone silvery and glorious upon him from the
+kitchen, everything fresh from its font of regeneration; a copper
+fish-kettle, which poisoned no vinegar as long as it was unmended,
+glowed upon him through the kitchen smoke like the sun in a November
+fog. He opened the door of the sitting-room gently; he saw no one in
+it, but heard Lenette making the bed in the bed-room. With a whole iron
+foundry hammering in his breast, he made a long, noiseless stride into
+the room, which was all in apple-pie order, with its Sunday shirt of
+white sand on already (upon which the bed-making river goddess and
+water nymph had expended all her aquatic arts in the production, of a
+highly-finished masterpiece). Ah! everything was so full of rest and
+peace, so tranquilly reposing after the whirl and turmoil of the week.
+The rain stars had risen upon everything, except his ink bottle, which
+was quite dry.
+
+His writing-table was, so to speak, _manned_ by two or three large
+heads, which, being cap-blocks, had on their Sunday bonnets, already,
+which would be transferred from them in their capacity of _Curatores
+Sexus_, next morning, to the heads of the ladies of the members of
+council.
+
+He pushed the bed-room door wider open, and there, after this long
+separation, he saw his dear wife, standing with her back to him.
+
+Just then he fancied he recognised Stiefel's fulling-mill steps coming
+up stairs; and, that he might pass his first minute on her heart unseen
+by a stranger eye, he said twice, softly, "Lenette!"
+
+She started round, crying "Oh good gracious! is it you?" He had clasped
+her in his arms, before she got these words out, and rested on her
+kiss, saying, "Good evening, good evening, and how are you, and how
+have you been?"
+
+His lips stifled the answers. But suddenly she pushed him back and
+struggled out of his arms, while two other arms clasped him swiftly,
+and a bass voice said, "Here am I as well; you are welcome back, praise
+and thanks be to God." It was the Schulrath.
+
+Poor, fevered human creatures that we are! driven back and repulsed
+asunder by our own lackings, and those of others, yet continually drawn
+together again by never-ceasing longings, in whom one hope of finding
+love falls away to dust after another, whose wishes come to nothing but
+_memories_. Our feeble hearts are at all events glowing and right full
+of love in that hour when we _come back_ and meet again; and in that
+other hour when we part, disconsolate,--as every star seems milder,
+larger, and lovelier when it is rising, than when it is overhead. But
+to souls which _always_ love, and are _never_ angry, these two
+twilights (when the morning star of meeting, and the evening star of
+parting shine) are too sad to bear for to _them_ they seem like
+_nights_.
+
+
+
+
+ CHAPTER XVII.
+
+ THE BUTTERFLY ROSA IN THE FORM OF MINING CATERPILLAR--THORN-CROWNS,
+ AND THISTLE-HEADS OF JEALOUSY.
+
+
+The last chapter was as brief as our delusions. It was one itself,
+alas! poor Firmian. After the first stormy mutual catechisings, and
+particularly, after the giving and receiving of all the mutual news, he
+saw more and more clearly that Lenette's invisible church, in which
+Stiefel filled the part of soul's bridegroom, was become very much of a
+_visible_ one. It was as if the earthquake of the recent happiness had
+rent in twain the veil of the Holy of Holies, the inmost sanctuary,
+wherein Stiefel's head fluttered by way of cherub. But, to speak the
+truth, I am telling a lie here, because it was Lenette's special
+_object_ to _show_ and _display_ a _particular_ liking for the
+Schulrath, who, in his delight thereat, went fluttering on from Arcadia
+to Otaheite, and from thence to Eldorado, and from thence to Walhalla,
+which was a certain indication, that, up to this point, his good
+fortune, during Firmian's absence, had been _less_. He related that,
+"Rosa had broken with the Heimlicher; that the Venner, whom the latter
+had wanted to utilise as a spinning machine, had turned into an engine
+of war against him. The cause of all this had been the niece in
+Bayreuth, whose engagement the Venner had broken off, because he had
+caught her being kissed by a gentleman there."
+
+Firmian grew red as fire, and cried "Miserable cockroach! It was _she_
+who broke off her engagement with that wretched lying scoundrel, not
+_he_ who broke off his with her. Ah! Herr Schulrath, be that poor
+lady's true knight and champion, and run this wretched abortion of a
+lie through and through wherever you came across it. From whom did you
+get hold of this evil weed?" Stiefel pointed calmly to Lenette, saying,
+"From _her_!" "And where did _you_ get hold of it?" Firmian cried to
+her in amazement. "Mr. Von Meyern," she answered, with her face all
+glowing red, "was here calling, and told it me himself." "But I was
+fetched immediately," Stiefel interrupted, "and I skilfully sent him
+about his business." Stiefel then asked for a correct version of what
+had happened. Firmian thereupon, timidly, and with many changes of
+tone, made a highly favourable report of the rose-maiden and her
+conduct of the matter ("rose-maiden" in a threefold sense, on account
+of the roses in her cheeks, of her victorious virtue, and the green
+rosebuds she had given to him). But on Lenette's account he awarded her
+a _proxima accessit_ only, not the gold medal. He had to bind the
+Venner, by way of sacrificial ram, to the horns of the altar in place
+of Nathalie, or, at all events, harness him by way of saddle-horse to
+her triumphal car, and relate without disguise how Leibgeber had been
+the person who broke off the engagement, and, as it were, dragged her
+back by the sleeve, as she was making the first step into the
+Minotaur's cave--by means of his satiric sketches of Meyern.
+
+"But it was _you_, of course," said Lenette, _without_ any tone of
+interrogation, "who told Leibgeber all about him, to begin with."
+
+"Yes," said he.
+
+We of the human race give to words of one syllable, to "Yes," and "No,"
+at all events, more intonations, and shades of intonations, than the
+Chinese themselves. The yes in question was a rapid, toneless, cold
+yes, being merely meant for a "What then," or "Suppose I did." She
+interrupted a digressive speech of Stiefel's with a point-blank,
+target, bull's-eye question:
+
+"_When_ had you been with her V"
+
+At last Firmian, with his battle-telescope, saw hostile movements of
+all kinds going on in her heart; he made a playful diversion, and said,
+"Herr Schulrath, _when_ did you come to see Lenette?"
+
+"Three times every week at least, and, very often, oftener than that;
+always about this time of the evening," he answered.
+
+"_Very_ well," said Firmian, in a kindly and playful fashion. "I'm not
+going to be jealous, but be good enough to remark--and my Lenette will
+please to do so too--that _I_ was with Nathalie, _along with Leibgeber,
+twice_ in all; once in the afternoon, once in the evening, walking
+about the grounds of Fantaisie.
+
+"Well, Lenette?"
+
+She parted her cherry lips, and her eyes were like Volta's electric
+condensers.
+
+Stiefel went away, and Lenette (from a countenance on which there
+seemed _two_ fires burning, the fire of anger and a lovelier fire)
+flashed after him a spark of eye love, calculated to blow up the whole
+powder-mill of a jealous husband. The married pair were scarce alone,
+when, by way of propitiating her, he asked her if that confounded
+Venner had been plaguing her again; and then the firework which had
+been fixed ready on the scaffold of her face, went hissing off.
+
+"Oh! of course _you_ can't endure him. You are jealous of him, on
+account of this beautiful, _learned_, INTELLECTUAL, Nathalie of yours.
+Do you suppose I don't know quite well about you and her going about a
+whole night among the trees--and hugging and kissing! A pretty story!
+Ah fie! I never would have believed it of you. No wonder Mr. Meyern
+said 'Good morning' to her, learning and all. Oh yes! you'll excuse
+yourself, no doubt."
+
+"I should have talked to you about all that most innocent affair,"
+answered Firmian, tranquilly, "while Stiefel was here, if I had not
+seen quite well that you knew of it. Am _I_ annoyed because _he_ kissed
+_you_ while I was away?"
+
+This irritated her still more; firstly, because it was impossible
+that Firmian could know of a certainty that it was true--(and it
+_was_!),--and secondly, because she thought "You can forgive it very
+easily now that you care more for another woman than you do for me."
+But then, for the self-same reason (inasmuch as _she_ cared more for
+another man than she did for _him_), _she_, of course, ought to have
+found no difficulty in forgiving him too. But, as usual, instead of
+answering his question, she put one herself: "Did _I_ ever give anybody
+silk forget-me-nots, as _somebody_ did to _somebody_? Thank goodness!
+mine are still in my drawer."
+
+Here _two_ hearts contended within him--a _tender_ heart which was
+pierced by this unintentional association of forget-me-nots so
+dissimilar--and a _man's_ heart, which was powerfully stirred and stung
+by this detestable defensive and offensive alliance with the fellow
+who, as was evident now, had sent the innocent child, whom Nathalie had
+rescued, to Fantaisie by way of a stalking-horse, behind which to
+conceal and mask himself, and the toils he had spun. As Siebenkæs now,
+with an outburst of anger, converted his judgment-seat into a stool of
+repentance for the Venner, whom he stigmatised as a canker-worm of
+feminine buds, a sparrowhawk, a housebreaker as regarded matrimonial
+treasures, and a crimp, trepanner, and soul-stealer of mated
+souls--vowing with the utmost warmth that it was Nathalie who had
+scornfully sent Rosa to the right-about, not Rosa who had rejected her:
+and as, of course, he interdicted her in the most peremptory terms from
+everything in the nature of dissemination or repetition of the Venner's
+lying demi-romance, he turned his unfortunate wife into a sour,
+pungent, Erfurt radish, from head to foot.
+
+Let us not fix our eyes too long, or too magisterially, upon this
+heat-rash or purulent fever of poor Lenette's. For my part, I am going
+to leave _her_ alone, but make an onslaught on her entire sex at once.
+I shall be doing so, I trust, when I assert that women never paint with
+more caustic colours (Swift's black art is but weak water-colour in
+comparison) than when they have to portray the bodily unlovelinesses of
+other women. Further, that the prettiest of faces roughens and bristles
+into an ugly one, when it expresses anger with the feminine recruiting
+officer more than pity for the deserter. To speak accurately: Every
+woman is jealous of all other women, because--not, perhaps, her own
+husband (or lover, as the case may be), but--all other men are
+attracted by them, and are consequently not true to _her_. Therefore
+every woman takes the same vow concerning these vice-queens of this
+earth that Hannibal took concerning the Romans, and keeps it just as
+religiously. For which reason every woman has the power which Fordyce
+says all animal bodies possess--that of making all others cold; and,
+indeed, every woman must of necessity be an enemy and persecutor
+of a sex which consists entirely of rivals. And it is probable that
+many--for instance, nuns in their convents, and Moravians--call each
+other sisters, or sister-souls, with the view of giving some sort of
+expression to the nature of their sentiments for each other; since
+sisters are just the very people who quarrel the most. This is why
+Madame Bouillon's _parties quarrées_ consisted of three men and only
+one woman. It may be that it led St. Athanasius, Basilius, Scotus, and
+other teachers of the Church to entertain the belief that, with the
+single exception of the Virgin Mary, all women would rise as men at the
+Day of Judgment, in order that there may be no anger, or envy, or
+bickerings in heaven. There is but one queen who is beloved, nourished
+and cherished by many thousands of her own sex--the queen-bee of the
+workers (who are of the feminine gender, according to the most recent
+observations).
+
+I shall close this chapter with a sort of preliminary word for Lenette.
+The foul fiend Rosa, by way of giving like for like (or rather _worse_
+for like) had emptied whole basketsful of the seed of evil-weeds into
+Lenette's open heart, and unpacked compliments, to commence with, and
+news of her husband; then, afterwards, disparaging matter. She had
+believed him all the more readily because it was a clever, learned, and
+intellectual woman whom he was nigrifying, breaking with, and offering
+up as a sacrifice. What she most hated in Nathalie _was_ her
+cleverness, her learning, and intellectualness; for it was the want of
+those that had brought _herself_ to such shame. Like many women, she
+thought that the _heads_ of Venuses were not "the true article" (as
+some connoisseurs think is the case with the Venus de Medici). What
+provoked her most of all was that Firmian should take another woman's
+part more than his own wife's--nay, at his own wife's expense; and that
+Nathalie, in her _conceit_ and _pride_, had got ready a _sack_ to give
+such a nice, _rich_ gentleman, instead of weaving a _net_ to hold him
+with. She was also very much annoyed that her husband had _admitted_
+everything, as she considered his candour was only lordly indifference
+as to what she might feel on the subject.
+
+What did Firmian do? He forgave. His two reasons for doing so were good
+ones--"Bayreuth" and "the grave." The former had parted him from her so
+long; the latter was soon to part him from her for ever. A _third_
+reason might perhaps be this: Lenette, as regarded his love for
+Nathalie, was _not_ so very utterly the reverse of right.
+
+
+
+
+ CHAPTER XVIII.
+
+ AFTER SUMMER OF MARRIAGE--PREPARATIONS FOR DEATH.
+
+
+Although Sunday was come, and the Vicar's eyes were no more open than
+his congregation's (because, like many of the clergy, he kept his
+physical eyes shut while preaching), my hero went to him to get his
+certificate of birth, because this was wanted for the Brandenburg
+Widows' Fund.
+
+Leibgeber had charged himself with the rest. Enough of the subject--for
+I don't care to say more about it than I can help; because some years
+ago--long after all Siebenkæs's pecuniary affairs had been settled up
+to the last farthing, and his debt to the Fund duly paid--the 'Imperial
+Gazette' publicly accused me of bringing discredit upon Integrity and
+Widows' Funds by the last book of this story of mine, and considered it
+to be its (the 'Gazette's') duty to take me pretty severely to task on
+the subject, according to its measure of ability. But are the advocate
+and I the same person? Does not everybody know that my proceedings as
+regards my married life in general, and the Prussian Widows' Fund in
+particular, have been quite unlike those of Siebenkæs in every respect,
+and that to this very hour I have never departed this life, either in
+jest or in earnest, in all these years during which I have regularly
+paid a considerable annual contribution to the institution in question?
+Nay, do I not mean--(and I need have no hesitation in saying so)--to go
+on paying my yearly _quotum_ for as many more years as I can--so that,
+when I die, the fund may have got more out of me than out of any other
+contributor?
+
+These are my views on the subject; but I must do Siebenkæs the simple
+justice to state (to his credit) that the views by which he was
+actuated differed very, very little from my own. The only thing was,
+that, in Bayreuth, he had immolated his own truthful heart to the
+stormy urgency of his friend, Leibgeber, which had imbued and
+intoxicated him, in a moment of enthusiasm, with that cosmopolitan
+spirit of his which, in the boundless soul-transmigrations which, in
+the course of his never ending journeyings he passed through, had come
+to look upon life too much as a mere game at cards, and stage-play--as
+a Chicken-hazard, and Opera Buffa and Seria combined. And as, besides,
+he knew Leibgeber's pecuniary circumstances, and his contempt for money
+(and his own into the bargain), he had undertaken a _rôle_ which was
+anything but well suited to him, and as to which he had as little
+foreseen the torture of difficulty which it would cost him to act it,
+as the penitential sermon which was to be preached from Gotha
+concerning it.
+
+At the same time it was a great piece of good luck that it was _only_
+Becker's 'Gazette' that found out about Nathalie's straw-widowhood, and
+not Lenette! Heavens, if the _latter_, with her silk "Forget-me" (for
+the "not" had altogether disappeared from it), in her hand, had got
+wind of Firmian's adoptive marriage! I neither desire to judge the fair
+sex, nor to be judged by them. But at this point I would fain put to
+all my lady readers (and most particularly to _one_ of them), two
+rather weighty and important questions.
+
+"Would _you_ not bend down from your judge's seat, and hand my hero, if
+not a _flower_-wreath, an _oak_-wreath, at all events, for his good and
+kind behaviour to this feminine couple? Or (inasmuch as there are four
+female hands playing a duet sonata on his heart), a bouquet for his
+button-hole at the very least?" Dearest lady readers, you could not
+possibly have given a better verdict--although my surprise at it is not
+so great as my gratification. My second question nobody shall put to
+you but yourselves. Let each of you ask herself, "Suppose _you_ had
+this fourth book of my story put into your hands, and _were_ Lenette
+her very self, and consequently knew to a hair all about the whole
+business from beginning to end; what would you _think_ of your husband
+Siebenkæs' proceedings? What would you _do_?"
+
+I will answer the question for you: "Weep, storm,[80] chide, be very
+angry, not speak a word, break things, &c." So terribly does
+selfishness falsify, corrupt and degrade the most delicate moral
+feelings, coercing them into the giving of two totally diverse verdicts
+upon one and the same case. Whenever I am wavering, or in any
+hesitation, concerning the worth of a character, or conclusion, I
+always find it helps me to come to a decision in a moment if I
+represent it to my mind's-eye as coming wet from the press in a novel
+or biography. If it seems right _then_, it is certain to _be_ right.
+
+It was far better, and more becoming, for Graces to dwell hidden in the
+Satyrs of old, and in Socrates, than to reverse the process, so that
+Satyrs should dwell hidden within Graces. The Satyr who _possessed_
+Lenette butted about him in all directions with horns of very considerable
+sharpness. Her unreciprocated anger began to take the shape of
+sneering banter, for her husband's present meekness and gentleness were
+so strikingly in contrast with his former Job's-disputations, that she
+came to the conclusion that his heart was frozen altogether. In old
+times he had wanted to be served by mutes (like a Sultan), until his
+satirical fœtus, his book, should be brought to the light of day by
+help of the Roonhuysian lever and Cæsarian operation of the penknife;
+even as Zacharias was dumb until the child ceased to be so, and was
+born, and cried simultaneously with him. Formerly, their married life
+had been like most other people's; for the majority of wedded pairs are
+like those twin-daughters,[81] grown together as to their backs, but
+continually quarrelling (though they could never look each other in the
+face), and always trying to go towards opposite quarters of the globe,
+till the one succeeded in forcing the other in the direction in which
+she wanted to go. Now, on the contrary, Firmian allowed all Lenette's
+discords to jar on as long as they pleased, without the slightest trace
+of irritation. A soft, peaceful light now fell upon all her angles,
+upon her works of supererogation in washing, on the water-sproutlings
+of her tongue; and the tint of the shadow which her heart (made of dark
+earth, like everybody else's) cast, as a matter of course, was very
+much lost in the blue of heaven, as shadows cast in starlight are
+(according to Mariette) as blue as the sky overhead. And was there not
+always a grand, blue, starry sky spread out above his soul, in the
+shape of death? Every morning, every evening, he said to himself, "Why
+should I not go on always forgiving everything! We have such a very
+little while to be together now." Every opportunity of forgiving did
+something to sweeten the bitterness of his voluntary farewell; and, as
+those who are going away, or going to die, are eager to pardon,--the
+deep, warm spring and fount of love in his heart was never chilled from
+morning till night. He was fain to pass along the brief, dark, alley of
+weeping willows, which led from his home to his empty grave (a _full_
+one, alas! as regarded his love), leaning only on beloved arms; and to
+rest on the mossy banks by its side, between his friend and his wife,
+with a beloved hand in each of his own. Thus it is that death not only
+beautifies our bodies when the soul has fled (as Lavater points out),
+but even in life the thought of death gives new beauty to our
+lineaments, and new strength to the heart, as rosemary both winds as a
+garland about the dead, and revives the fainting by its cordial
+essence.
+
+"There is nothing surprising to me in this," quoth the reader.
+"Everybody in Firmian's position would have felt just as he did; at all
+events, _I_ should." But, dear reader, _are_ we not _all_ in Firmian's
+position? Does the nearness or the remoteness of our everlasting
+good-bye make any difference? Ah! inasmuch as, here below, we are
+nothing but images, delusively firm, and red of colour, standing on the
+edges of our holes, into which (like the ancient princes) we totter,
+crumbling to dust, when the unknown hand gives the mouldering images a
+shake--why do we not say (like Firmian), "Why should I not forgive? We
+have so short a time to be together." We should have four better
+fast-days, and prayer- and penitence-days, than we usually have if we
+had but four days of bitter, hopeless sickness to go through, one after
+the other, every year; because we should look down from our sick bed
+(that ice-region of life beside the crater) with loftier and sublimer
+glance upon the pleasure-gardens and pleasure-forests of life as they
+shrunk and shrivelled away; because _there_ our wretched racecourses
+would seem shorter, and only the _people_ larger, and we should _there_
+love nothing but _hearts_, magnify and detect no other faults but our
+own, and because we leave our sick beds with better resolutions than we
+take to them with. For the first day of convalescence of the body,
+after its winter of sickness, is the blossoming time of a lovelier
+soul, which issues forth as if transfigured from the earth's cold crust
+into a mild warm Eden; longing to press all things to her breast
+(feeble yet, and short of breath)--mankind, and flowers, and spring
+breezes, and every other bosom which has sighed for her upon her bed of
+pain. Like all the newly risen from death, she longs to love _all
+things_ throughout an eternity; and the whole heart is a warm and dewy
+spring-time, rich in buds, beneath a youthful sun.
+
+_How_ Firmian would have loved his Lenette, had she not constrained him
+to be always pardoning, instead of petting and caressing her! Ah! she
+would have rendered his approaching death a terribly difficult task for
+him if she had been like what she was in their honeymoon days!
+
+But their byegone Paradise was now yielding a harvest of ripe _Grains_
+of Paradise (the old name for peppercorns). Lenette piled fuel on the
+fire of her hell's ante-chamber of jealousy, brewing there, for him,
+the draught of the coming heaven of Vaduz. A jealous woman can be cured
+by no kind of speech or treatment; she is like the kettledrums, which
+are the most difficult of all instruments to tune, and the quickest to
+get out of tune when tuned. A loving, tender look was, to Lenette, a
+blister; for he had looked at Nathalie with one like it. If he seemed
+happy and glad, it was evident he was thinking of the past. If he
+looked _un_happy and sad, he was thinking of the past too, but with
+longing. He had to consider his face in the light of an open warrant of
+caption, or billposter and placard, of the thoughts which were behind
+it. In short, her husband merely served her as fiddle rosin to roughen
+her horse-hair with, in order to bow her _viole d'amour_ with it from
+morning till night. He dare not allow himself more than an occasional
+word about Bayreuth, scarce so much as the name of it; for if he did,
+she knew whom he was thinking of. Nay, he could not say anything at all
+strong in disparagement of Kuhschnappel without raising a suspicion
+that he was comparing it with Bayreuth, and thinking the latter much
+the better place (for reasons well known to _her_). Wherefore (and
+whether in earnest, or from consideration for her, I really do not
+know) he restricted his laudations of Bayreuth merely to the
+_buildings_ there, not venturing to extend them to their inhabitants.
+
+There was only one object of praise concerning the praising, whereof he
+ignored every idea of difficulty and miscomprehension, and this was
+Leibgeber, his friend. But--thanks to Rosa's calumnies, and the fact of
+his having aided and abetted in affairs at Fantaisie--it so chanced
+that Leibgeber had come to be more unendurable by her now than he had
+been in the old days, by reason of his indecorous conduct, and his
+great dog. She knew, moreover, that Stiefel had several times expressed
+grave disapproval of him and his doings.
+
+"My dear Henry will be here very soon now, Lenette," said Firmian.
+
+"And that horrible brute with him, I suppose, of course?" she asked.
+
+"I do think," he answered, "you might like my friend a little better
+than you do; if not because he is so very like myself, at any rate, on
+account of the faithfulness of his friendship. If you did, you wouldn't
+be so terribly set against his dog; you used not to mind mine when I
+had one. He _must_ have _some_ faithful creature to follow him about on
+his everlasting journeys; through thick and thin, through good times
+and bad, as Saufinder does. And he looks upon _me_ as just such another
+faithful creature, and is every bit as fond of me. But for that matter,
+the whole faithful trio of us are not likely to trouble Kuhschnappel
+very long."
+
+Meanwhile, no amount of love enabled him to gain his _suit_ for love.
+It here strikes me that this was only a most natural matter, and that
+the recent warm proximity of the Schulrath had raised Lenette's
+temperature (of love) to such a point that _her husband's_ felt like a
+blast of cold wind by comparison. The jealousy of hatred proceeds just
+like the jealousy of love. There is but one sign for the cypher of
+nothing and the circle of infinity.
+
+The time had arrived when Siebenkæs had to pave the way, and give a
+colour to, his sham death, by a feigned sickness of some sort; but this
+voluntary bending over the grave, and drooping towards it, gave his
+conscience a pretext for trying to win back Lenette's embittered heart.
+Thus it is that deceived, and deceiving, man always magnifies and
+elevates his false shows, his cheateries, and deceptions either into
+_less_ ones than they really are, or into beneficently intended ones.
+
+The Greek and Roman lawgivers invented dreams and prophecies, which
+contained the ground-plans and elevations of their projects, as well as
+the building-conditions, and building-materials of them. For instance,
+Alcibiades lied forth a prophecy of the conquest of Sicily. Firmian
+imitated this process, with alterations suitable to the circumstances
+of his case. He often said, in Stiefel's presence (for Stiefel took a
+deep and tender interest in everything, and, consequently, so did
+_she_), that he should soon be going away for ever--that he should soon
+be playing in a game at hide-and-seek, and hide himself so effectually
+that no friendly eye should be able to find him again--that he would
+soon slip behind the bed-curtain of the coffin-pall, and vanish. He
+told them a dream (which, perhaps, was no invention). He said, "The
+Schulrath and Lenette were looking at a room in which a scythe was
+moving of its own accord;[82] then, in a while, Firmian's _clothes_
+were walking about in the room, empty, without any _body_ in them. 'He
+must have _other_ clothes on,' they both said. Then all at once the
+churchyard passed along the street, with a fresh grave in it, no grass
+on it as yet. But a voice cried, 'Seek him not there; it is over and
+past now.' And a second (softer) voice cried, Rest--rest--thou art worn
+and weary. And a third said, 'Weep not, if ye love him.' But a fourth
+cried out, in terrible tones, 'Jest--jest--all human life and death.'"
+Firmian was the first to shed tears; his friend was the next, and his
+angry spouse wept, _with the latter_.
+
+But now he looked with eager longing for the coming of Leibgeber, whose
+hand would lead him quicker and more pleasantly through the dark
+foreground, and the hot, reeking, sultry, breathless, fore_hell_ of his
+artificial death. For he himself was now too feeble and too tender to
+pass through them alone.
+
+And upon one particular, unusually lovely, August evening he was so,
+more than ever before. There played and rested on his face that
+glorified and celestial bliss of self-devotion--that tearless
+depth of emotion and smiling gentleness, which sometimes come to us
+when pain and sorrow are--_weary_ for the time, rather than over and
+past--something like the blue sky when the brightness of the rainbow
+falls in light athwart its radiant beauty. He resolved to bid good-bye,
+in solitude, that day to all the beautiful country which lay around the
+town.
+
+The face of Nature was veiled (but not for his eyes, for his soul
+only), in a thin, soft mist, which went hovering before the breeze in
+ever-changing wreaths, like the tender vapouriness--not amounting to a
+shrouding--which Berghem's and Wouvermanns' pencils have cast upon
+their landscapes. As though to say farewell, he went and touched, and
+gazed upon, every leafy tree beneath whose branches he had been wont to
+read--each little darkling brooklet, purling on its way beneath its
+thickets of forest-roots, laved bare of earth by its ripples--each
+rocky crag, all green and sweet of scent with moss and flowers--each
+stair-way of rising hillocks which, in the days gone by, he had climbed
+to see the sun set (or gone down to watch his risings) many times
+instead of once--and every spot where wide creation had brought tears
+of rapture from his happy heart. But everywhere--amid the long harvest
+corn-ears, amid Creation's oft-repeated tale in Nature's brooding-oven
+with all its swarming life, in the seed-nursery of the ripe and
+endless garden--a hollow, broken voice cried out, in long-drawn tones
+which mingled with, and sounded clear above, the bright, rejoicing,
+trumpet-clang of Nature's 'Alexander's Feast,' "What are these dead
+men's bones that move about amid this life of mine, defiling all my
+blossoms?" And to him it seemed as if, from out the glory of the red
+West sky, a something sang to him, "Wandering skeleton! with strings of
+nerves clasped in thy bony hand, thou playest not on thyself. The
+breath of endless life is breathing on the Æolian harp, which answers
+back in music, and thou art played _upon_." But soon this mournful
+error fell away from him, and he thought thus: "I am both playing and
+answering back in music. I both _think_ and _am thought_. It is not the
+green bark that holds _my_ Dryad, my _spiritus rector_ (the soul). The
+latter holds the former. The life of the body depends as intimately on
+the life of the soul, as that of the latter on that of the former. Life
+and force are at work, with power, everywhere. The grave hillock and
+the mouldering body are each a _world_ of powers at work. We _change_
+our stage, but do not _retire_ from it."
+
+When he got home, he found the following letter from Leibgeber for
+him:--
+
+"I am on _my_ way; set out on _yours_.--L."
+
+
+
+
+ CHAPTER XIX.
+
+ THE APPARITION--HOMECOMING OF THE STORMS IN AUGUST, OR THE LAST
+ QUARREL--THE RAIMENT OF THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL.
+
+
+One night, at about eleven o'clock, a tremendous blow was heard to
+strike the roof-tree, as if two or three hundredweights of Alps had
+come down upon it. Lenette went upstairs with Sophia to see whether it
+was the devil, or only a cat. They came back with wintry faces, the
+colour of flour, and as long as one's arm; and Sophia cried out, "Oh!
+it's the Poor's Advocate (may the Lord have a care of him!) he's lying
+up yonder on the camp-bed, like a corpse." The _live_ Poor's Advocate,
+to whom this tale was being told, was sitting in his room. He said it
+could not be true, or _he_ would have heard the noise as well as the
+others. From this deafness of his, all the women at once inferred what
+the occurrence really portended--to wit, his death. The cobbler Fecht
+(who, by right of royal succession, was night-watchman regnant that
+night), glad of an opportunity of showing the pluck that was in
+him, armed himself with the watchman's spear-staff (his entire
+artillery-park), but, when nobody was looking, stuck a black leather
+hymn-book in his pocket--by way of a species of saintly host--in case
+it _should_ turn out that it _was_ the devil that was upstairs. On his
+way up he repeated a good many fragments of the Evening Service, which
+was more than could, perhaps, have been required of him on that evening
+when, as Archon of the Watch, his calling of the hours was, in fact, a
+species of _expanded_ Evening Prayer, distributed in small modicums
+about the streets. He was marching bravely up to the camp-bed, when,
+alas! _he too_ saw the white powdery face before him, and, behind
+the bed, a hell-hound with eyes of fire, watching the corpse in a
+grim and ferocious fashion. He stood still instantaneously, as if
+petrified--like a watchman carved out of alabaster, _hard boiled_ (so
+to speak), in a perspiration of terror, with his weapon held out before
+him. He foresaw, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the moment he
+turned his back to go flying down the stairs, _the thing_ would clasp
+its arms about him from behind, saddle him, and ride him down. By the
+greatest good luck, a voice from downstairs here fell into his heart
+like a cordial or courage-water, and he heaved up his boar-spear with
+the view of striking _the thing_ dead, or, at all events, gauging the
+cubic contents of it. But when, at this juncture, the snowy-looking
+thing began to rise slowly up, as if growing--his head began to feel as
+if he had on a bonnet of pitch, and somebody were screwing this cap,
+and the hair inside it, tighter and tighter every moment; and he
+could not keep hold of his eel-spear because the top of it felt as
+heavy as if his biggest journeyman was hanging to it. So he let his
+sticking-iron go, and flew bravely from the topmost, three-ledger-lined
+octave of the stair, like a flash of lightning, down to the double-bass
+key or step.
+
+When he got down, he swore, in presence of the master of the house and
+all the lodgers assembled, that he was going to do his watchman's duty
+without his halberd, for the ghost had got hold of that; and in fact,
+he quivered like an aspen-leaf and his blood ran cold in his veins,
+every time his eye so much as rested for a moment on the Advocate's
+face. Firmian was the only one of the company who had the courage to go
+upstairs for the weapon. When he got upstairs he found what he had
+expected to find, namely, his friend Leibgeber, who had whitened
+himself with the powder out of an old wig by way of gradually paving
+the way and preparing people's minds for Siebenkæs's artificial death.
+They quietly embraced, and Henry said he would come upstairs, in an
+orthodox fashion, next day.
+
+When Firmian returned to his room, he said there was nothing upstairs
+but an old wig; here was the swift-footed spearman's spear, and he
+counted here before him two timid hares of the female sex and one of
+the male. But the entire conventicle knew as well as possible what all
+this _meant_. Nobody, with as many brains as a turnip in his head,
+would give a halfpenny for Siebenkæs' life; and these ghost-seers
+thanked Heaven most devoutly that they _were_ thus frightened to death,
+since it was a proof that their own lives were in no immediate danger.
+Lenette could not bring herself to sit up in bed all night, for fear
+she should see her husband's likeness.
+
+When morning came, Henry mounted the stair (with his dog), in dusty
+boots. Siebenkæs felt as though his hat and his pockets must be full of
+flowers from the Bayreuth Eden; he was like a garden statue from the
+lost garden. To Lenette, just for this very reason, this palm-tree from
+Firmian's East India possessions at Bayreuth (we shall say nothing of
+Saufinder), was nothing but a prickly holly-bush, and never less than
+now could she take any pleasure in such a gooseberry-bush, such a
+thistle-head--beautiful as if fresh from Hamilton's pencil.[83] I must
+admit, however (and I say it right out, without going about the bush),
+that his affection for Firmian made his mode of treating Lenette (who
+was in the wrong and in the right in about equal proportions) a little
+too reserved and cool. We never hate a woman so heartily as when she is
+torturing somebody who is very dear to us; just as, on the other hand,
+a woman is so grim to nobody as to the tormentor of her pet female
+friend.
+
+The scene which I have now got to describe in a minute or two makes me
+feel, in the keenest degree, sensible of the depth of the chasm which
+lies between the novel-writer (who can skip annoying matters, and sugar
+up anything he wishes for himself, his hero, or his readers) and the
+mere biographer, or writer of actual history, like myself, who has to
+dish up everything in a strictly historical form, without asking
+whether it has got to be sugared or salted. If I formerly, then,
+excised and omitted the scene in question altogether, I was perhaps to
+blame: but there was nothing surprising in my doing so, seeing that in
+these days I preferred delighting my readers to instructing them, and
+thought more about pretty colouring than truthful drawing.
+
+Leibgeber (and all belonging to him) had for some time been wholly
+unendurable in Lenette's eyes, chiefly for this reason (amongst others)
+that he, a man without anything in the shape of an official title or
+appointment of any sort, should be on such very familiar and intimate
+terms with her husband--a man who had held the post of "Poor's
+Advocate" of Kuhschnappel for a considerable time. Also that, like her
+said husband (by him misled and perverted), he went about without a
+pigtail, so that people pointed at the pair of them, and cried, "Ey!
+look at that nice couple!" or "_Par nobile fratrum_." These sayings,
+and worse besides, Lenette could draw from the most authentic of all
+sources of history. Of course, it is true that, _now-a-days_, it
+requires about as much courage to _put on_ a tail as it then did to
+_take it off_. A canon of a cathedral does not, now-a-days (as he did
+in bygone times), find it incumbent on him to make himself a pigtail,
+and pleasant society by help of it; consequently he has not got to
+_cast_ it twice a year (as peacocks do their tails) that he may legally
+earn his salary of two thousand florins by appearing in the choir at
+vespers with close-cropped hair; the latter he wears at the card-table
+now, us well as in the pulpit. In the few countries where the pigtail
+still obtains, it is more in the nature of a duty-pendulum and
+state-perpendicular than anything else; and long hair (which formed
+part of the royal insignia of the Frank kings) is a badge of
+servitude in the case of soldiers, so long as it is worn tied up with a
+pigtail-ribbon, and not flying unbound and loose. The Frieslanders were
+long in the habit of taking hold of the pigtail when swearing an
+oath--calling this "the Bœdel Oath;" and to this day in many
+countries the military or standard oath presupposes the existence of a
+queue. And as among the ancient Germans a pigtail carried on a pole
+represented a parish, of course a company or regiment (of which each
+soldier has his own tail at the back of his head) must be considered to
+represent a company-queue of patriotic union and of German nationality.
+
+Lenette now made little secret of it to her husband (and Stiefel stood
+by her in the background), that she was very little pleased, on the
+whole, with Leibgeber and his on-goings. "My dear poor father" (she
+said, in Leibgeber's presence), "was copyist to the Council, but he was
+always just like other people in his dress, and everything else."
+
+"Well, dear!" Siebenkæs answered, "as he was a copyist, of course he
+had always to _be_ copying, with pens, or coats, as the case might be.
+But _my_ father loaded guns for princes, and did not trouble his head
+about what else might happen or not happen." Ere this, when opportunity
+had offered, she had held up and measured the copying clerk as against
+the gun-charger, distantly suggesting, as it were, that Siebenkæs had
+not had anything like so great and distinguished a father as she had,
+and, as a consequence, had not received the sort of superior education
+which teaches people manners, and how they ought to behave. This
+preposterous and ludicrous looking down upon his genealogical tree so
+annoyed him always that he often laughed at himself. At the same time,
+the little by-blow at Leibgeber did not surprise him so much as her
+remarkable _bodily_ repugnance and antipathy to him. Nothing would
+induce her to shake hands with him: "And I'm sure," she said, "if he
+were ever to _kiss_ me, it would be my death." With all his laborious
+urgency and questions as to the reason of this, he could get no answer
+out of her but that she "would tell him after Leibgeber was gone."
+Unfortunately, by that time _he_ would be gone himself, too, and in his
+coffin, _i. e_. on the road to Vaduz.
+
+And even this extraordinary obstinacy (as of an unyielding
+bonnet-block) he could endure at a time when one of his eyes warmed
+itself at his friend, while the other cooled itself at his grave.
+
+At last something was superadded; and as I am sure that nobody can
+narrate it more faithfully than I, I beg that I may be believed. It was
+in the evening, before Leibgeber went back to his hotel (the Lizard, if
+I remember), and the deep black, half-orb of a thunder-cloud had
+gathered silently in the West, shrouding the sun, and mounting higher,
+and hanging more and more threateningly over the expectant world.
+The two friends were talking of what a glorious thing a thunderstorm
+was, and of the espousals of heaven and earth--the highest with the
+lowest--of the "descent of heaven to earth" (as Leibgeber put it); and
+Siebenkæs remarked how, properly speaking, it was only one's "Fantasy"
+which pictured the storm, and "Fantasy" only which brought about the
+union of the highest and the lowest. I wish he had followed the advice
+of Campe and Kolbe, and used the home-grown word "Fancy" (or
+"Imagination"), instead of the foreign word "Fantasy;" for that
+word-purist Lenette pricked up her ears as soon as ever it passed his
+lips. She who had nothing in her breast but jealousy, and nothing in
+her head but the "Fantaisie" (at Bayreuth), put down to the score of
+the latter every word that the two men were saying in eulogy of
+"Fantasy" in man; for instance, how _it_ (namely, "the Markgrave's
+Fantaisie," thought Lenette) blessed us through the beauty of its
+sublime creations--how, but for the enjoyment of its lovelinesses, a
+Kuhschnappel could not be borne with for a moment (of course, because
+he thinks of that Nathalie of his, thought she); how it clothes and
+adorns the bare spots of life with its beautiful flowers "two or three
+silk forget-me-nots," said Lenette to herself; and how it (the Bayreuth
+Fantaisie) gilds, not only the pills of life, but also the nuts, nay,
+the Paris apples of beauty themselves.
+
+Heavens! what double meanings in every corner, and on every side! For
+how triumphantly Siebenkæs could have refuted the error of confounding
+Fantasy with Fantaisie, if he had merely shown how little of the poetic
+Fantasy there was in the Fantaisie at Bayreuth, and how (in the latter)
+French "taste" had trimmed, behung, and begarlanded the lovely,
+romantic hills and valleys of Nature's inventing with rhetoric edifices
+of flowers, periods, and antithesis; and that what Leibgeber said about
+Fantasy's gilding the Paris apples of life, applied in quite another
+sense to the Bayreuth Fantaisie, because there the French Christmas
+silver-foil would have to be scraped off from Nature's apples before
+they could be bitten.
+
+Scarce was Leibgeber gone out from the house, and off into the storm
+(which, according to his custom, he enjoyed in the open air), when
+_Lenette's_ storm broke, ere the atmospherical one did. "There, you
+see, I heard with my very own ears," she said, "how that Unbeliever and
+Kill-joy there goes about coupling and marrying you in the Fantaisie at
+Bayreuth; and _this_ is the fellow an honest woman is expected to
+shake hands with, or touch with the tip of one of her fingers." She let
+a few more peals of thunder roll--but it is my duty to the poor woman
+(turned into a fermenting vat by the addition to her of such a quantity
+of mash) not to give too accurate a record of all her frothings.
+Meantime, all the acid matter in her husband began to effervesce in its
+turn. To find fault with his friend to his face, no matter _what_
+misunderstanding this might arise from (and he did not trouble himself
+to ask what the misunderstanding was, inasmuch as _none_ could be any
+excuse)--was, in his eyes, a sin against the Holy Ghost of his
+friendship. Accordingly, he thundered most roundly in reply. It is some
+excuse for the husband, and for the wife, too, for that matter, that
+the storm in the air fanned the fuel in his head into a brighter blaze,
+so that he strode up and down the room like a man demented, and
+instantly, and on the spot, blew to the four winds of heaven his
+resolve not to be put out with anything Lenette might do till after he
+was dead; for he would not, and could not, suffer that "his last friend
+in life and death should be wrongfully accused by the inheritress of
+his name, either in his sayings or in his doings." It will give some
+idea of the violence of his volcanic eruptions (all of which, for his
+sake, I mean to pass by in silence), if I say that, vieing in loudness
+of thundering with the sky itself, he shouted--
+
+"Such a man as _he_!" and with the words, "_you_ are a female
+head, too, curse you!" administered a ringing box on the ear to a
+bonnet-block, which had a grand hat, with feathers upon it. As this
+head was Lenette's favourite Sultana of all the blocks--one which she
+often fondled--nothing was to be _expected_ but an outbreak as violent
+as if he had given the box to her very self, just as Siebenkæs stormed
+at the insult to _his_ friend. Nothing came, however, but a gentle
+shower of bitter tears. "Oh! good heavens! don't you hear what a
+terrible storm?" was all she said. "Thunder here, thunder there!" cried
+Siebenkæs (who, once set rolling down from the lofty peak where he had
+been reposing, went on, according to both the moral and the physical
+laws of falling bodies, increasing in velocity and momentum, until he
+reached the bottom). "I wish the lightning would shatter all the
+rag-tag and bob-tail in Kuhschnappel that dare to say a syllable
+against my Henry."
+
+As the storm grew fiercer she spoke more and more gently, saying, "Ah!
+gracious, what a peal! Oh, please repent! Suppose it were to strike you
+in your sin?" "My Henry is out in it," he said. "Oh that the lightning
+would strike us both dead, him and me, with the same flash! I should be
+spared all this miserable business of dying, and we should always be
+together then."
+
+His wife had never seen him so angry, or so contemptuous of life and
+religion, and consequently, could only expect the lightning to fall on
+the Merbitzer's house, and strike both him and her dead, by way of an
+"example."
+
+And at this moment, a flash of such brilliance illumined the heavens,
+and such a shattering peal of thunder followed close upon it, that,
+stretching out her hand to him, she said, "I will do anything and
+everything you wish me to do; only, for Heaven's sake, be a God-fearing
+man again! I will even give Leibgeber my hand; yes, and a kiss too, if
+I must--no matter whether he has washed his face after the dog's
+licking it, or not--and I shall neither listen, nor mind, when you say
+what a delightful, beautiful place the silvery, flowery Bayreuth
+Fantaisie is."
+
+Heavens! how this lightning-flash illumined the depths of two of
+Lenette's labyrinths for him, letting him see her innocent confounding
+of Fantasy and Fantaisie (already noticed), and _his own_ confounding
+of her strong, personal, idiosyncratic repugnance to (what she
+considered) uncleanness, with real dislike. The latter was on this
+wise. Inasmuch as her feminine proclivity for excessive cleanness and
+beautifying and polishing were more akin to the feline race than to the
+canine (which cares little about either, or about the feline race, for
+that matter), Leibgeber's hand, after Saufinder's tongue had touched
+it, was to her as a thumbscrew, and Esau's hand all Chiragra. Her sense
+of cleanliness shrunk from touching it; and as for Henry's lips! though
+ten days had elapsed since the dog had jumped up to them with his, they
+would have been considered the most fearful bugbears, and scarecrows,
+which abhorrence could set up for her. Even time itself was no lipsalve
+in her eyes.[84]
+
+This time, however, the discovery of the error did not bring about
+peace (as it used to do in former times), but only a renewal of the
+decree of separation. Tears came to his eyes, indeed, and he gave her
+his hand, saying, "Forgive me! It is the last time! As the proverb
+says, 'The storms come home in August.'" But he could neither offer nor
+receive a kiss of reconciliation. This, his latest falling away from
+his warm resolves to be patient, irrevocably proclaimed _how wide_
+their inner separation had become. What is the use of _seeing_ one's
+errors, when the _causes_ of them are still in force? What is the good
+of clipping a ripple or two away from the ocean, when there are still
+clouds and billows? The crime against the bonnet-block was what rankled
+most in his breast; it became a Gorgon's head to him, continually
+threatening and avenging.
+
+He sought his friend with a renewal of affection, for he had suffered
+for him; and with new eagerness, that he might arrange the place for
+his death with him.
+
+"Of what dangerous malady do you think you would prefer to give up the
+ghost," said Henry, commencing the medical consultation. "Would
+inflammation of the lungs be to your taste? or inflammation of the
+bowels, or of the uvula; or would phrenitis be more in your line, or
+bronchitis; or would you prefer a quinsy, a colic, the devil and his
+grandmother? We have got all the requisite _miasmata_ and _materia
+epidemica_ ready to our hands; and when we throw in the month of
+August--harvest-month of reapers and doctors--by way of poison-powder,
+you certainly never can get over it all." Firmian answered: "You are a
+sort of master-beggar with all kinds of ailments for sale;[85]
+blindness, palsy, and the rest. But for my part, I am for apoplexy,
+that _volti subito_, that extra post of death. I have had more than my
+share of legal prolixities, verbosities, and delays of _all_ sorts."
+"Well," said Leibgeber, "apoplexy probably _is_ the _summarissimum_ of
+death. At the same time, we must be guided by the best pathological
+works, and make up our minds for _three_ attacks of it. We can't go by
+Nature here, we must be guided by the laws of medicine; and by them,
+death has to forward a set of _three_ bills of exchange before one of
+them is accepted and honoured in the next world. He knocks three times
+with his auctioneer's hammer. I know too well, the doctors are not the
+men to listen to reason on this point; you will have to make up your
+mind to the three apoplectic strokes." "But what the deuce!" said
+Siebenkæs, with comic warmth, "If apoplexy gives me _two_ pretty
+powerful strokes, what more can a doctor desire? The only thing is, I
+can't be attacked for the next three or four days, because I must wait
+for a cheaper coffin-builder." The right of coffin-building (it should
+perhaps be explained) goes its round in a migratory manner among the
+carpenters, and one has got to pay these shipwrights of our last ark
+whatever they demand, because the property we leave behind us at death
+has to be given over as plunder by our executors and administrators, to
+the undertaker, (that excise officer of death) like the palace of a
+dead doge or pope.
+
+"There may be another advantage in this short reprieve, too," said
+Leibgeber. "I have an old collection of family sermons here, which I
+bought for somewhere about half the amount of a police-court fine. I do
+not know anywhere else but in this work where such impressive sermons
+are delivered--it is more especially in the _binding_ that they are
+preached. The binding is wood, you perceive, and there is a live
+preacher in there, preaching as finely as any preacher that can be
+found in a pulpit." This preacher in the wooden boards of the old book
+in question, was the beetle which goes by the name of the death-watch,
+wood-borer, or _Ptinus pertinax_, because when he is touched he keeps
+up the appearance of a sham death, torture him as you will--and because
+the little blows he strikes, which are nothing but knocks at his
+sweetheart's door, are supposed to be Death's knocks at ours. For which
+reason any piece of furniture in which he was wont to knock used to be
+thought a valuable article of commerce, or heirloom.
+
+Leibgeber added that, as there was nothing he so detested as a man who
+tried to outwit God and the Devil (from fear of death) by a sudden
+repentance, he was fond of hiding this sermon-book amongst the
+furniture of a hell-fearing individual of this description, so as to
+give him a good sound terrifying with the beetle's funeral sermons
+(although the insect, for his part, was, in fact, thinking solely of
+mundane matters during his preaching--like many other preachers). "So,
+could I not put the sermon-book, with its funeral preacher, in amongst
+_your_ books, that your wife might hear him, and think of death--of
+yours, that is to say--and so get more used to the idea of it?"
+
+"No, no," said Firmian, "she shall not suffer so much for me before her
+time. She has suffered quite enough already."
+
+"Just as you please," said Henry; "but my beetle and you would have
+gone together capitally. You are going to simulate death, just as the
+_Ptinus pertinax_ does."
+
+For the rest, he was delighted that everything had worked together so
+well, and that it was just a year since he had stamped upon Blaise's
+glass periwig, and insulted, or blackguarded, him. Because (as we
+have seen) libels of this sort are not actionable after the lapse of a
+year, except libels by a _critic_--which (like the Rector in Ragusa)
+only reign for a month--that is to say, the time during which the
+journal in which they appear circulates in the reading society. And a
+book--which may be said to hold the rank of dictator in the realm of
+letters--cannot reign, with all its influence, more than a Roman
+dictator, namely, six months--that is to say, from its birth-fair to
+its death-fair--and, like Grub Street scribblers, it dies either in
+spring or in autumn.
+
+They went back into a new-dressed, freshly-arranged room. Lenette did
+what she could to paint the cracks of her housekeeping over with
+flowers (like the flaws in porcelain), and always opened pieces of
+music in which that particular string (of an article of furniture),
+which chanced to be broken, did not require to be touched. Firmian, on
+this occasion, sacrificed a greater number of the good and entertaining
+ideas (which struck him) than usual to her efforts to place Spanish
+screens between the company and the steppes and fallow-fields of her
+poverty; and more than Henry did even then. All women--even those
+without brains--are the sharpest and most delicately-observant of
+augurs and _clairvoyante_ prophetesses concerning matters which closely
+concern themselves. Lenette was an instance. Stiefel was there in the
+evening--a good deal of argument was going on, and Stiefel openly
+declared that he (with Salvian and other able theologians) was of
+opinion that the children of Israel (whose garments never wore into the
+minutest hole during all the forty years they passed in the wilderness)
+always continued of exactly the same _size_ (so as always to fit their
+clothes exactly) with the exception of children, in whose cases the
+clothes, which had been cut to fit them out of the wardrobes of the
+dead, grew with their bodies in length and breadth. "In this way," he
+added, "all the difficulties of the great miracle are got over easily,
+by means of lesser accessory-miracles."
+
+Leibgeber answered (with sparkling eyes), "I knew _that_ while I was
+yet in my mother's womb. There was not a hole in all the hosts of
+Israel, except those which they brought with them out of Egypt--and
+_these_ never got any bigger. Even suppose anybody made a hole in his
+cheek, or in his coat, when he was mourning--these holes stitched
+themselves together in a trice, of their own accord. What a shameful
+and deplorable thing it is, though, that the host of Israel should have
+been the first, and the last, army whose uniform was a sort of
+delightful over-body, which grew with the soul it enveloped--and where
+the frock-coat developed into an electoral mantle, and from a
+_Microvestis_ to a _Macrovestis_! I see that eating was cloth
+manufacturing (in the wilderness), manna was English wool, and the
+stomach the loom. An Israelite who fed himself up to the proper pitch
+was, by so doing, yielding the produce of the land, and of the
+wilderness. If I had been in the recruiting-service in those days, I
+should simply have hung the recruit's jackets on to the recruit's
+measure. But how go matters in _our_ wilderness here--which leads to
+Egypt, not to the promised land? In _our_ regiments, the _privates_
+grow every year, but the coats do not. Nay, the uniforms are made for
+dry seasons only, and for lean men--in wet years the clothes contract
+like hygrometers, and perspiration steals more cloth than the tailor
+does, or even the contractor. A commanding officer who should expect
+his uniforms to stretch--who should reckon upon a _Periphrasis_ of
+them--going by the example, not only of the Israelites, but likewise of
+the clothes-moths, and the snails (who do not expand to suit their
+shells, but whose shells expand to suit _them_)--this commanding
+officer, I say, would go out of his mind--for his men would be fighting
+in the condition of the athletes of old--and the men themselves would
+be in a nice frame of mind on the subject."
+
+This innocuous sermon (wholly addressed to the account of Stiefel's
+piece of exegetic absurdity) Lenette supposed was directed against her
+wardrobe. She was like the Germans in general, who search after some
+_special_ satiric kernel hidden in every rocket and firework serpent of
+humour. Wherefore Siebenkæs begged him to pardon this poor wife of his
+(over whose heart so many a sharp sorrow besides was strewn) the
+inevitable and invincible ignorance of her exegesis--or rather, to
+spare her the knowledge of it altogether.
+
+At length a Kuhschnappel bath-keeper departed this life, and fell under
+the plane of the costly carpenter. "I have not a minute to waste over
+my apoplexy now," said Firmian, in Latin; "who is to be my warrant that
+nobody shall die before I do, and so the cheap carpenter slip through
+my fingers?" So it was arranged that he should be taken ill the
+following evening.
+
+
+
+
+ CHAPTER XX.
+
+ APOPLEXY--THE PRESIDENT OF THE BOARD OF HEALTH--THE NOTARY-PUBLIC--
+ THE LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT--THE KNIGHT'S MOVE--REVEL, THE MORNING
+ PREACHER--THE SECOND APOPLECTIC ATTACK.
+
+
+In the evening Henry drew up the curtain upon this tragedy (full of
+comic gravedigger business), and discovered Firmian lying on his bed
+speechless, with apoplectic head, and all his right side paralysed. The
+only mode in which the patient could bring himself to endure the
+torture of the deception, and of the pain he was causing Lenette, was
+by making a mental vow to send her the half of his yearly income as
+inspector at Vaduz, anonymously, and by remembering that by his death
+she would obtain happiness, freedom, and her lover. The occupants of
+the house formed a circle about the apoplectic patient, but Leibgeber
+drove them out of the room, saying, "the sufferer must have quietness
+and rest." It delighted him beyond expression to be able to go on
+uttering humourous lies without cessation. He assumed the office of
+Imperial Hereditary Doorkeeper, and shut the door in the doctor's
+face (whom people insisted upon prescribing). "I am going to prescribe
+a little prescription for the patient myself," he said, "but, little
+as it is, it will restore his speech for a time. These cursed
+death-rivers, doctors' potions, Mr. Schulrath," (for that gentleman had
+been fetched immediately) "are like those rivers which demand a dead
+body every year." So he wrote a recipe for a simple sedative powder, as
+follows, reading aloud as he wrote;--
+
+
+ Rx Conch: Citratæ Sirup: j.
+ Nitri Crystallisatæ gr. x.
+
+ D.S. "The Sedative Powder."
+
+
+"But above all things," he added, in the most imperative tones, "we
+must place the patient's feet in warm water."
+
+However, everybody in the house knew well enough that nothing would be
+of the slightest avail, as his death had been but too unmistakably
+foretold by the floury face; and Fecht felt a kind of sympathising
+satisfaction that he had hit the mark.
+
+Scarcely had the sick man swallowed the powder, than, to the
+astonishment of the Death-Assurance Association in his bedroom, he
+found himself able to speak, intelligibly, if not very loud. The
+domestic Vehmgericht was _not_, perhaps, altogether pleased with this.
+But our good Henry had a pretext now for resuming his cheerful mien. He
+comforted Lenette by reminding her that "here below pain was but an
+initiation ceremony to something higher--the box-on-the-ear, or
+sword-accolade whereby a man is dubbed a knight."
+
+The patient had a very fair night after his sedative powder, and began
+to have some slight hopes of himself. Henry would not allow Lenette
+(whose eyes were heavy with tears and sleep) to sit up by his bed
+during the night. He said he would prefer to be at hand himself, in
+case there should be any danger; of which, however, there was no great
+risk, as they made their agreement together (doing so in Latin, like
+princes) that Death, the fifth act of this tragic interlude, (only one
+of the _scenes_ of the tragedy of Life,) should take place on the
+evening of the following day. "Even till to-morrow," said Firmian, "is
+too long to wait. I am so unspeakably grieved for my poor Lenette's
+sorrow. Like David, alas! I have to make a melancholy choice between
+famine, war, and pestilence, and have no way out of it but his. You,
+dear brother, are my Cain, and send me on my journey, and believe in
+the world to which you despatch me not a bit more than he did.[86]
+Before you prescribed the sedative power which obliged me to talk, I
+was really wishing, in my silent gloom, that the jest might become
+earnest. For I _must_ one day pass through that underground portal
+which opens into the fortress of futurity, in which we shall be safe.
+Ah! it is not the _dying_ that is painful, it is the _parting_--I mean
+from those we love." Henry said, in reply, "Nature holds a broad
+Achilles-shield before us to protect us from that final bayonet-thrust
+of life. On our death-beds we grow cold morally before we do so
+physically, a strange courtier-like indifference towards all we are
+leaving creeps frostily through the dying nerves. Sapient spectators
+say, 'See, nobody but a Christian can die with such resignation and
+trust.' Never mind, dear Firmian; the two or three painful burning
+minutes which you have to bear till to-morrow arrives are a capital
+warm bath of Aix water for the sick spirit. It has an infernal smell of
+rotten eggs _now_, no doubt, but that will go away completely as the
+bath grows cool."
+
+Next day Henry eulogised him as follows. "As Cato the younger slept
+quietly the night before his death, (history heard him snore,) so you
+appear to have afforded these debilitated, unnerved, and degenerate
+days a fresh example of a similar magnanimity. If I were your Plutarch
+I should record the circumstance."
+
+"In sober seriousness, though," answered Firmian, "I should be rather
+pleased if, several years hence, when Death has presented his _second_
+of exchange, some literary West, the historical painter, should honour
+this odd _first_ death of mine by describing it for the press." This,
+we see a biographical West has now actually done, but I beg to be
+permitted to confess, without hesitation, that it has afforded me
+sincere gratification to find among the documents this death-bed speech
+and wish, which I am so completely carrying out. Leibgeber answered,
+"The Jesuits in Löwen once published a little book in which the
+terrible end of Luther was minutely described in Latin. Old Luther got
+hold of the book and translated it, as he did the Bible, merely adding
+at the end, 'I, Dr. M. Luther, have read and translated this narrative
+myself.' If I were you, when I translated my death into English, I
+should write that at the end of it too." Do please write it, dear
+Siebenkæs, as you are still in life--but translate me, at all events.
+
+Morning brings refreshing to the laid corn of humanity, whether it be
+laid upon the hard bed of sickness, or on the softer mattress of
+ordinary health; its breezes lift the bowed heads of both flowers and
+men: but _our_ sick man remained prostrate. Things seemed distinctly
+worse with him--he could not disguise from himself that he was losing
+ground; at all events he resolved to "set his house in order." This
+first quarter of the hour of death which the death bell tolled, smote
+like a sharp and heavy bell-hammer upon Lenette's heart, whence the
+warm stream of the old love burst forth in bitter tears. Firmian could
+not bear the sight of this disconsolate weeping; he stretched his arms
+beseechingly, and the suffering creature laid herself between them in
+gentle obedience, on to his breast, their tears, their sighs, and their
+hearts mingled in the warmest affection, and thus they rested in
+happiness (though only upon wounds) at this brief distance from the
+boundary-hill of parting.
+
+For this poor soul's sake, then, he grew visibly better. Another
+improvement in his condition was necessary, moreover, to account for
+the happy frame of mind in which he executed his last will and
+testament. Leibgeber expressed satisfaction that the patient was able
+to take some dinner on the table-cloth of the bed-quilt, and swallow
+the contents of a sick man's soup-dish about the size of a pond. "The
+good spirits," said Leibgeber to Peltzstiefel, "which our invalid is
+beginning to exhibit again, give me very considerable hopes indeed;
+though it was evidently only to please his wife that he took the soup."
+
+Nobody was fonder of lying, or lied oftener, _out of satire_ or humour,
+than Leibgeber and no one more utterly detested serious untruthfulness
+than he. He could tell a thousand lies in fun, but not two in a case of
+serious necessity. For the former he had at his finger's end every
+possible deceptive trick of face and language; for the latter not one.
+
+In the forenoon the Schulrath and Merbitzer, the landlord, were
+summoned to the bedside. "Gentlemen," began the sick man, "I am
+thinking of having my last will this afternoon--of declaring, at
+Nature's place of execution, the three things which I desire--as the
+condemned in Athens were allowed to do; but what I wish to do at the
+present moment is to open one of my testaments before I make my second,
+or (to speak more accurately) the codicil of my first. I wish my friend
+Leibgeber to pack up, and keep possession of, all my scribblings as
+soon as I myself am stuck into my last addressed envelope. Further (and
+in this I follow the precedent of the Danish Kings, the old Dukes of
+Austria, and the noble Spaniards--of whom the first were interred in
+their armour, the second in lion's skins, the third in miserable
+Capuchins' gowns)--I will and ordain that there shall be no hesitation
+about planting me in the bed of the next world in the very self-same
+old pod and shell in which I have vegetated in _this_; in brief,
+exactly as I am while now testating. This injunction necessitates my
+making my third that the woman who comes to lay me out shall be paid,
+and at once sent about her business, because all my life through I have
+had a most special antipathy to two women--the woman who washes us
+_into_ life, and the woman who washes us _out_ of it (though in a
+bigger bath-tub)--the midwife and the woman who lays out the corpse.
+She is not to lay a finger upon me, nor is anybody except my Henry
+there." His hatred of these servants of life and death may probably
+have proceeded from the same causes as my own, namely the imperious and
+rapacious nature of the controlling power which these she-planters and
+caterers for the cradle and the bier exercise in squeezing us just in
+the two unarmed and weaponless hours of our deepest gladness and our
+deepest sorrow.
+
+"I further will that as soon as my face has made the signal of adieu,
+Henry shall roof it over and shield it for ever with our long-necked
+mask, which I brought down from the box upstairs. I also desire that,
+when I take my departure from all the fields and plains of my youthful
+days, and hear nothing behind me but the rustle of the haycocks of the
+aftermath, I may, at all events, have my wife's silken garland laid
+upon my breast, by way of game-counter to mark the joys I have lost. A
+man can't go more suitably than with mock insignia, such as that, out
+of a life which has dished him up such a number of pasteboard pasties
+full of nothing but wind. Lastly, I will that, when I am gone on my
+journey, nobody shall clang after me from the church-steeple (like the
+people of Carlsbad), for we sick and transient watering-place visitors
+of life (like those of Carlsbad) are received and sent on our way with
+music from the steeples, especially as the Church's servants are more
+expensive than the Carlsbad steeple-man, who only asks three pieces for
+blowing people in and out."
+
+At this point he asked that Lenette's profile-portrait might be given
+him in bed, and he said, in a faltering voice, "I should like my dear
+Henry and the landlord to leave the room for a minute, and let me be
+alone with the Schulrath and my wife."
+
+When this was done he gazed fondly, a long while, in silence, upon
+the little likeness. His eyes ran over with sorrow like a broken
+river-bank. He gave the picture to the Schulrath, paused, overcome by
+emotion, and said at length: "To you, my faithful friend, and to you
+alone, can I give this beloved portrait: you are _her_ friend, as well
+as mine. Oh God! there is not a soul in the great, wide world that will
+take care of my dear Lenette if _you_ forsake her. Don't cry so
+bitterly, my darling; he will be everything to you. Ah! dearest of
+friends, this helpless, innocent heart will break in desolate
+loneliness of sorrow unless _you_ protect it and console it. Oh! never
+abandon it, as I am doing!"
+
+The Schulrath swore by the Almighty that he would never leave her, and
+he took her hand and pressed it (without looking at her) as she wept,
+and hung, with eyes raining down with tears, upon the face of his
+friend, whose voice was so soon to be mute for ever. But Lenette forced
+him away from her husband's breast, and liberated her hand, and sunk
+down upon the lips which had so deeply touched her heart. Firmian
+clasped her with his left arm, and stretched his right hand to his
+friend--thus holding to his oppressed bosom the two things on earth
+that are nearest heaven, friendship and love.
+
+And it is even this very matter which is an endless source of comfort
+and delight to me in you deluded and disagreeing mortals--that you all
+love one another heartily and utterly when you only get a chance of
+_seeing_ one another divested of coverings and fogs--that when we fear
+we are growing _blind_ we are only growing _cold_--and that, as soon as
+ever Death has raised our brothers and sisters up clear of the clouds
+of our own errors, our hearts melt into bliss and love when we see them
+soaring as beautiful human creatures, no longer distorted by the mists
+and concave mirrors of this world, up in the translucent æther; and
+cannot but sigh forth, "Ah! I should _never_ have misunderstood you if
+I had always seen you _thus_." This is why every loving soul stretches
+its arms out to those whom poets exhibit to our low-placed eyes, as
+geniuses, in their cloud-built heaven, though, could he let them sink
+down upon our breasts, they would lose their beauteous transfiguration
+in a few short days upon the dirty earth of our necessities and
+mistakes: as the crystal glacier-water which refreshes, without
+chilling, must be caught in the air as it drips from its ice-diamond,
+because it is made impure by the air the moment it touches the
+earth.[87]
+
+The Schulrath went out, but only to the doctor. This distinguished
+Generalissimo of Friend Death (who did not bear the title of
+"Councillor of the Supreme Board of Health" for nothing, but for money)
+was very willing to come and see the patient: firstly, because the
+Schulrath was a man of means and consideration; and, secondly, because
+Siebenkæs in his capacity of a member of the Corpse Lottery (of which
+the doctor also was a corresponding member and _frère servant_), ought
+not to be allowed to die. For this burial-fund was, in one of its more
+important aspects, a species of Government Savings' Bank, or Imperial
+Treasury for members of the better classes. The sight of this Supreme
+Councillor of Health, advancing in battle-array, terrified Leibgeber to
+death. He could not but fear that the advent of the doctor might make
+matters take a more serious turn, so that Siebenkæs might transmit to
+posterity a celebrity like that of Molière, who died on the stage while
+performing the part of the 'Malade Imaginaire.' The relation between
+doctor and patient seemed to him as indeterminate as that between
+woodpeckers, or bark-beetles, and trees; inasmuch as it is still a moot
+question whether the trees wither in consequence of these creatures
+boring into them, and laying their eggs in them, or if (on the
+contrary) it is because the bark is worm-eaten and the trunk dead, that
+the beetles come flying to the trees. My opinion as regards beetles and
+woodpeckers (and doctors as well) is that each is alternately cause and
+effect; and that there is no such thing as a living creature whose
+existence can possibly be taken as pre-supposing decay, because, if so,
+at the creation of the world there would have had to be a dead horse
+created for the bluebottles, and a rotten cheese for the mites.
+
+Well, Dr. [Oe]lhafen (of the Supreme Board of Health) marched straight
+up to the sick man (shooting past the one who was not sick, with angry
+rudeness), and instantly swooped upon life's seconds'-hand, the medical
+divining-rod, the pulse. Leibgeber set the plough of satirical anger
+into the soil of his face, ploughed crooked furrows, and determined
+upon a course of deep subsoil-ploughing.
+
+"This," said the professor of the healing art, "is a case of genuine
+nervous apoplexy, supervening on an undue determination of blood to the
+head, and a plethora of the vessels. There ought to have been medical
+attendance at a much earlier stage of the case; the full, hard pulse
+threatens a repetition of the attack. An emetic powder, which I shall
+prescribe, will, in the circumstances, produce the best possible
+effect." And with this he pulled out some emetic _billets-doux_,
+wrapped up like _bonbons_. This preparation was one which he kept for
+sale himself, hawking it about from house to house like a Jew pedlar.
+There were few diseases to which he did not apply these emetics
+of his by way of "means of grace," screwjacks, pump handles, and
+purgatorial fire; but he worked them most assiduously of all in
+apoplexy chest-inflammation, headache, and bilious fever. What he said
+was that he "began by clearing the principal passages," and in so doing
+he occasionally cleared the proprietor of said principal passages out
+of this world, so that he found himself passing through the final
+"passage" of all flesh.
+
+Leibgeber kneaded his odd visage into a new form, and said, "There
+seems nothing, Doctor [Oe]lhafen (my colleague and _protomedicus_), to
+prevent our holding our _concilium_, or _consilium_, or _collegium
+medicum_, here where we stand. I cannot but think that my sedative
+powder had a good effect, seeing that it restored _apoplectico_ there
+the power of speech, yesterday." The _protomedicus_ took Leibgeber for
+some quack, and without so much as letting his eyes touch his
+colleague, said to Peltzstiefel, "Will you get them to bring some warm
+water, and I will give him the powder myself." "He and I will take it
+both together," burst in Leibgeber, in anger; "_both_ our gall-bladders
+are acting at present; the _patient_ shan't, won't, and mustn't."
+
+"Are you a regular practitioner, Sir?" asked the Councillor of the
+Supreme Board of Health, with contempt.
+
+"I am a Jubilee Doctor, or Doctor Jubilant, and have been so ever since
+I ceased being a fool. You no doubt remember in Haller the case of the
+fool who thought his head was off, until they cured him by putting a
+lead hat on to him. A head roofed and insulated with lead has about as
+distinct a sense of individuality as one cast in that metal. I was very
+nearly in the same boat with that fool myself, brother colleague. I had
+inflammation of the brain, and did not find out so soon as I should
+have done that it had been put out, and cured. To make a long tale
+short, I fancied that my head had peeled away (or shall I call it
+'exfoliated,' or 'desquamated'), just as one's feet moulder and drop
+off, like crab's claws, when one takes too much ergot. When the barber
+came in, and threw down his purple tool-bag, or quiver, I said, 'My
+dear Surgeon-General Spœrl, it may be perfectly true that flies,
+tortoises, and adders have been known to go on living after their heads
+were off, as I do, but there wasn't much on them to shave. A man of
+your sense must see that it is as impossible to shave _me_ as to shave
+the Torso at Rome--where were you thinking of _soaping_ me, Mr.
+Spœrl? Scarce was he out of the door when in came the wig-maker.
+'Another time, Mr. Peisser,' said I, 'unless you propose to curl the
+circumambient air around me, or the hair on my chest, you can put your
+combs back into your waistcoat pocket. Since twelve o'clock last night
+I have been carrying on existence without either frieze or cornice,
+and, like the tower of Babel, I have no cupola. But if you will go and
+see whether you can find my head in the next room there, and put a
+_queue_ and a _toupée_ on to that _caput mortuum_ of mine, I should
+have no objection to that, and I don't mind wearing the head by a way
+of a _queue_-wig.' By good luck in came the Rector Magnificus. He was a
+doctor, and saw what distress I was in, when I smote my hands together
+and cried, 'Where are my four brain chambers and my _corpus callosum_,
+my _anus cerebri_, and my uniform _centrum_ (which, according to
+Gläser, is the seat of the imagination)? How can a Rump Parliament wear
+spectacles, or use ear trumpets? The reasons are obvious. Is it come to
+this with the monæcius head of the world, that it has _no_ head left
+for a seed-vessel?' But the Rector Magnificus sent to the University
+wardrobe for an old, tight-fitting, doctor's hat; he put it on me with
+a gentle push, and said, 'The faculty never places a doctor's hat on
+anything but a head; it could not possibly put it on to a nothing.' And
+this hat made a new head grow on to my imagination, like a decapitated
+snail's. And ever since I was cured myself. I have taken to curing
+other people."
+
+The Board of Health councillor turned a basilisk's eyeball away from
+Leibgeber, and lowered himself downstairs by the ribbon of his cane
+like a bale of merchandize, omitting to pocket his emetic permit for
+the world to come, which the patient had, consequently, to pay for.
+
+But our good Henry had another war to wage with Stiefel and Lenette,
+until Firmian threw himself between them as mediator, with the
+assurance that he would have sent the powder packing in any case,
+because it would have been anything but good for an old pain in his
+heart (alas! he spoke figuratively), and two or three Gordian knots in
+his lungs (the "knots of the plot of his earthly drama").
+
+But all this time, however good a face he might put on matters, there
+was no concealing the fact that he was steadily growing worse. The
+_ricochet_ of the apoplectic shot was clearly imminent, and to be
+looked for at any moment. "It is time I made my will," he said. "I long
+ardently for the Notary Public." This functionary, as is well known,
+has the drawing up of all last wills and testaments, according to the
+laws of Kuhschnappel. At length he arrived, Bærstel by name, a
+shrivelled and dried-up snail of a man, with a round, shy, listening
+button-face, all hunger, anxiety, and attention. Many people thought
+his flesh was merely smeared over his bones, like the new Swedish
+_carton pierre_. "What is it your pleasure to have written to-day,
+Sir?" began Bærstel. "One of my pretty little codicils," said
+Siebenkæs. "But before we begin hadn't you better try me with a
+catch-question or two, as is usually done with testators, to find out
+(without letting me know what you are at, you understand) whether I am
+all right in my head?" "Do you know who _I_ am, Sir?" said Bærstel.
+"You are Mr. Bærstel, Notary Public," answered the patient. "Not only
+is that quite correct," answered Bærstel, "but it renders it quite
+clear that you are wandering very little, if at all, and we may proceed
+at once to draw up your testament."
+
+
+ LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT OF SIEBENKÆS,
+ POOR'S ADVOCATE.
+
+"The undersigned, now yellowing and falling from the tree with the rest
+of the August apples, desires, being thus nigh to death, which looses
+the spirit from the thraldom of the body, to execute a few more merry
+back-steps, sidesteps, and Sir-Roger-de Coverleys, three minutes before
+the Basle dance of Death begins."
+
+The notary paused, and asked in amazement, "Am I to put this stuff, and
+more like it, down upon paper?"
+
+"_Imprimis_, I, Firmian Siebenkæs, alias Heinrich Leibgeber, do hereby
+will and ordain that my guardian the Heimlicher von Blaise shall (and
+must) pay over, within a year and day after my decease, to my friend,
+Mr. Leibgeber, inspector in Vaduz,[88] the 12,000 florins of trust
+money whereof he has godlessly defrauded me, his ward: the said Mr.
+Leibgeber making over the same hereafter faithfully to my beloved wife.
+In the event of the said Herr von Blaise declining so to do, I here
+lift up my hand and swear, upon my dying bed, that after I have
+departed this life I will pursue him, not legally, but spiritually, and
+will terrify him by appearing to him, either as the devil or as a tall
+white man, or by my voice merely, according as my circumstances, after
+my decease, may permit."
+
+The notary's feathered arm hovered in air, and he ceased not to shrink
+and shudder with terror. "All I am afraid of," he said, "is that if I
+write down things of this kind, the Heimlicher will get hold of me."
+But Leibgeber, with face and body, barred his retreat through that
+hell-gate, the door of the room.
+
+"Further, as reigning sovereign of the shooter's company, I will and
+ordain that no war of succession shall convert my testament into a
+powder of succession for innocent people. Further, that the republic of
+Kuhschnappel (into the office of Gonfaloniere and Doge whereof I was
+balloted with rifle bullets) shall wage no defensive war, seeing that
+it cannot defend itself if it does--but offensive wars only, with the
+object of enlarging the boundaries of its territories, they not being
+easy to protect. And that its members may, in their generation, be as
+wood-economising as their country and royal burgh's father has been in
+his. Now-a-days, when forests are burned to charcoal faster than they
+grow again, the only thing to be done is to warm _the climate_ a good
+deal, and turn it into a great brooding-oven, kiln, and field-oven, so
+as to save the trouble, and obviate the necessity, of having stoves in
+the houses. And this has been in some measure attended to by careful
+Commissioners of Woods and Forests, who have cleared away the forests
+as much as they could, they being full of late winter. When one thinks
+how very beautifully modern Germany contrasts with that which Tacitus
+mapped, warmed as it is by the mere cutting down of the forests, we
+have little difficulty in feeling convinced that a time will come when,
+there being no more timber at all, we shall arrive at such a
+temperature that the atmosphere itself shall be our fur pelisse. The
+reason the present superfluity is burnt to ashes as rapidly as possible
+is, that the price of raft-wood may be raised, just as a million
+_livres_' worth of nutmegs were publicly burnt at Amsterdam in 1760, to
+prevent the price from falling.
+
+"Moreover, as King of the Kuhschnappelian Jerusalem, it is my desire
+that the senate and people thereof (senatus, populusque
+Kuhschnappeliensis) be not damned, but contrariwise blessed,
+particularly in this present world. Further, that the town magnates may
+not devour the Kuhschnappelian nests (houses) as they do the Indian
+ones, and that the taxes, though they have to pass through the four
+stomachs of the tax-gatherers,[89] may nevertheless issue thence
+converted from milky chyle into red blood (from silver into gold), and
+after circulating through the lacteals and the thoracic duct, be
+impelled in due course into the veins of the body politic. Further, I
+will and appoint that the greater and the lesser council----"
+
+The notary would fain have stopped here, and shook his head most
+energetically, but Leibgeber was playing with the rifle with which the
+testator had elevated himself to the throne of the marksman (whereas it
+is upon leaping-poles consisting of _other men's_ ramrods that thrones
+are usually attained to), and Bærstel wrote on in the sweat of his
+brow.
+
+"That the mayor, the treasurer, the Heimlicher, the eight members of
+council, and the serjeant of court, may listen to reason, and reward no
+merit but that of other people. And that the rascal Blaise, and the
+scoundrel Meyern may daily lay castigatory hands upon each other, as
+relations, so that there may at all events always be one to punish the
+other."
+
+Here the notary jumped up, declared it took his breath away, and went
+to the window to get a little air. And as he saw that there was a pile
+of tanner's bark within easy shot of the window-sill, his terror,
+shoving at him from behind, impelled him up on to the sill in question.
+Having taken this _first_ step, before a testament witness could seize
+him by the coat-tails, he made a _second_ (and long) one out into the
+open air, so as to be in a position to reach that modelling-table the
+heap of bark. Being thus a falling artist (not a rising one), he could
+do no better on his arrival there than make use of his face as a
+graving-tool, plastic "form," and copying machine, and execute
+therewith a faint bas-relief impression of himself upon the heap of
+tan. His fingers worked busily as graving-tools, making copies of
+themselves, whilst, as a matter of pure accident, he countersigned
+this, his report of the incident, with his notarial seal, which he had
+taken with him in his descent. So easy is it for one notary to create
+another, like a Count Palatine. But Bærstel left his co-notary and the
+entire _lusus naturæ_ behind him, thinking on his homeward way of
+matters of a wholly different kind. Stiefel and Leibgeber, again,
+looked out of window, and (the notary having vanished, bag and
+baggage,) gazed upon his _second_ outward man as it lay outstretched
+before them upon its anatomical theatre, smelling of Russia leather.
+Concerning which the author will not add another word of his own, but
+only these of Henry's.
+
+"The notary wished to seal the testament with a larger seal than
+usual--one which nobody might forge--so he sealed it with his own body,
+and there we see the sphragistic impression all complete."
+
+The will, such as it was, was duly subscribed by the witnesses and by
+the testator, and anything but a demi-military testament of this kind
+was scarcely to be expected in the circumstances. Evening was now
+drawing on,--the time when sick and sorry man turns him from the sun
+(as does the earth he dwells on), and _towards_ the twilight evening
+star of the other world,--when the _sick_ pass away to the latter, and
+the well gaze at the former--and when Firmian thought to give his wife
+the long kiss of parting, and then begin slowly sinking. But
+unfortunately Deacon Revel (the assistant preacher) came rustling in in
+an electrically stormy fashion. He came arrayed in his ecclesiastical
+armour, gorget, sash, and all, to administer a befitting rebuke to the
+invalid (round whose neck he had tied the band of matrimony in a double
+knot) for trying to evade payment of the confession fee--that toll for
+the communion of the sick and sound on the highway between heaven and
+hell. As (on the authority of Linnæus) the ancient botanists--a Croll,
+Porta, Helvetius, Fabricius--thought that certain plants which had more
+or less resemblance to particular illnesses were remedies for these
+complaints, prescribing yellow plants, such as saffron and turmeric,
+for jaundice, dragon's-blood and catechu for dysentery, cabbage-heads
+for headache (as well as prickly things, such as fish-bones, for
+stitches in the side), so, in the hands of able Gospel ministers, the
+spiritual _materia medica_, such as sermons and admonitions, assume the
+appearance of the spiritual maladies for whose cure they are
+administered--anger, pride, avarice, and so on. Thus there is often no
+difference, but one of condition, between the bed-ridden patient and
+his physician. This was the case with Revel. One of his great objects
+in life was, in an age when people are so prone to defame the Lutheran
+clergy by calling them mere Jesuits in disguise, or monks, to give the
+most unmistakable proof, more by deeds than by words, that he was, at
+all events, none of _the latter_ (who call nothing their own, and are
+not allowed to possess property), and for that reason to be at all
+times on the hunt, and on the snatch, after worldly possessions. Hoseas
+Leibgeber did his best to make himself a barrier-rope and turnstile for
+the parson, and stopped him on the threshold, saying, "I fear it won't
+be of much use; I tried my own hand yesterday at converting and
+recoining him flying, (if I may use the expression,) post-haste, _volti
+subito citissime_, but all that came of it was that he threw it in my
+teeth that I wasn't converted _myself_--and no more I am. There are
+whole flocks of heretical singing-birds pecking away at the summer
+rape-seed of _my_ opinions." Revel answered (vacillating between a
+major mode and a minor), "A servant of the Lord bides his time, keeps
+diligent watch, and does the duty of his sacred calling, striving to
+save souls--from atheism, as well as from other sin. The _event_
+concerns the sinner, and the sinner only."
+
+So this black storm cloud, charged to the brim with Sinai-lightnings,
+rolled on into the dim-lit chamber; the parson waved his great,
+flapping gown-sleeve, like a standard of spiritual healing and
+rehabilitation, over the atheist (as _he_ thought him) stretched on his
+bed, and told him in a "sick-bed exhortation" (which is generally the
+very antipodes of a funeral sermon)--in a "sick-bed exhortation" (I
+say) such as may one day overtake me and my reader under our last
+bed-cover, and which I shall therefore avoid sending all the way from
+Bayreuth to Heidelberg to be put in type, since it may be heard _en
+route_ going on in any sick-chamber. At the same time he _told_ him, in
+the said sick-bed exhortation to his face, like a plain-speaking,
+straight-forward man, that he was a roast for the devil's table, just
+done to a turn, and ready to be dished and served. The roast (thus
+pronounced to be done to a turn), closed his eyes, and endured it.
+But Henry, whom it pained to see the parson pinching the ears and the
+heart whom he loved with red-hot pincers, and who was furious at the
+thought that it was done solely to frighten the sick man into the
+Confessional--Henry seized his waving arm, and gently reminded him--
+
+"I did not think it would have been very polite, Mr. Kevel, to mention
+it before--but the patient's hearing is a good deal impaired. You will
+find you will be obliged to scream. He has not heard a syllable you
+have said up to this point. Mr. Siebenkæs, do you know who this is? You
+see how little he hears. Set to work now at converting _me_, over a
+glass of beer--I should prefer that very much, and _I_ hear a great
+deal better. I'm very much afraid he has a touch of delirium, and, if
+he sees you at all, thinks you are the devil--for it is with _him_ that
+the dying have to fence their last bout. It's a pity he didn't know
+what you were saying. He would have been very angry and annoyed--(for
+confess he will _not_)--and on the authority of Haller, in the 8th
+volume of his 'Physiology, a proper amount of annoyance and vexation
+has often been known to add weeks to a dying person's life. But, after
+all, he _is_ a _kind_ of a true Christian, after a fashion, when all's
+said, although he no more dreams of _confessing_ than any of the
+Apostles did, or the fathers either. When he is gone, you shall hear
+from my own lips how peacefully a true Christian passes away--no
+convulsions--no contortions--no agonies of death. He is as completely
+at home in the world of spirits as the screech-owl is in the village
+steeple--and just as the owl sits in the belfry while the bells are
+ringing, I will be bound that our Advocate will never stir when the
+death-bell tolls for him--for he has acquired, from your sermons, the
+conviction that he will go on living after he dies."
+
+In the above speech there was some pretty hard hitting, in the shape of
+jest, at Firmian's mock death, as well as at his faith in immortality;
+such jests, in fact, as none but a Firmian could both understand and
+pardon. But Leibgeber was, at the same time, making an attack, in all
+seriousness, on those good people who believe accidental, physical
+tranquillity in dying to be tranquillity of soul, and bodily struggles
+to be storms of conscience.
+
+Revel contented himself with replying, "You are of those who sit in the
+seat of the scorner--whom the Lord will find. I have washed my hands."
+But as he would have infinitely preferred _filling_ them, and,
+moreover, could not succeed in transforming this child of the devil
+into a confessing penitent, he took his departure, red and silent,
+escorted downstairs by Lenette and Stiefel with many deferential
+curtseys and bows.
+
+Let us not make out Henry's gall-bladder (which is likewise his
+swimming-bladder, and, alas! often his ascending _globus hystericus_)
+to be any bigger than it really is. Let us form a judgment, all the
+more favourable, of this natural foible of his from considering than
+Henry had, in the course of his previous career, seen spiritual _frères
+terribles_, and gallows preachers of this sort, strewing salt upon the
+faint, withered hearts on so many deathbeds; and because it was his
+belief (as it is mine) that of all the hours of a man's life his last
+must be the most indifferent as regards religion, inasmuch as it the
+most unfruitful, and no seed can sprout in it which will bear any fruit
+of action.
+
+During the brief absence of the courteous couple, Firmian said, "Oh! I
+am sick, sick, and weary of it all. I _cannot_ carry on the joke any
+longer. In ten minutes more I intend to lie my last lie, and die--and
+would to GOD it were not a lie. Don't let them bring in any lights, but
+cover me up at once with the mask, for I see very plainly that I shall
+not be able to control these eyes of mine, and when the mask is on, I
+shall, at all events, be able to let them weep as much as they like.
+Ah! Henry, my good, kind friend!"
+
+The infusory chaos of Revel's exhortation had made this weary
+_figurant_ and mimicker of Death tender and grave. Henry--out of his
+delicate and loving solicitude--had undertaken all the lying parts of
+the _rôle_, and enacted those himself. He therefore (as the couple were
+coming back into the room), cried out, in a loud, anxious voice,
+"Firmian, how do you feel now?" "Better," said Firmian, in a voice of
+emotion. "There are stars shining in this world's night, though I,
+alas! am clamped to the dust, and cannot soar up to them. The bank of
+the lovely spring-time of eternity is steep, and, close as we day-flies
+are swimming to the shore of Life's Dead Sea, we have not got our wings
+yet." Yes! Death--sublime and glorious after sunset-sky of our St.
+Thomas's Day--grand amen of our hope, spoken to our ears from the other
+world--would come to our beds in the likeness of a beautiful giant,
+with a garland on his brow, and lift us gently up into the æther, and
+rock us there to rest, were it not that we go to him only as maimed,
+stunned creatures, who are _thrown_ into his giant arms. What robs
+Death of his glory is sickness; the pinions of the soul when it rises
+on its heavenward flight are heavy, and stained with blood, and tears,
+and mire. The only time when death is a flight--not a fall--is when
+some hero is smitten by one, single, mortal wound, when, as he stands
+like a spring-world, all new blossom, and old fruit, the next world
+suddenly flashes by him, like some comet, bearing him (miniature world
+as he is) all unwithered, along with it in its flight, to soar with it
+beyond the sun.
+
+But this mental exaltation of Firmian's would have been an indication
+of reviving strength and returning health to sharper eyes than
+Stiefel's. It is upon the _looker-on_ only--not upon the victim who is
+smitten down--that the battle-axe of Death casts a flash of light. It
+is with the death-bell as with other bells; it is those who are _at a
+distance_ who hear the solemn, inspiring boom and music--not those who
+are _within_ the sounding hemisphere. And as every bosom grows more
+sincere and more transparent in the hour of death--like the Siberian
+glass-apple, the kernel of which, when ripe, is covered only by a
+crystal case formed of sweet, transparent flesh--so Firmian, in
+this dithyrambic hour--near as he was to the bare edge of Death's
+sickle--could have gladly sacrificed (that is, discovered) all the
+mystery and blossom of his future, but that by so doing he would have
+broken his word and grieved his friend. But nothing was left him now,
+save a patient heart, dumb lips, and weeping eyes.
+
+Alas! and were not all his ostensible farewells _real_ ones after all?
+As he drew his Henry and the Schulrath to his heart with trembling
+hands, was that heart not oppressed by the mournful certainty of losing
+the Schulrath on the morrow, and Henry in a week's time, for ever? So
+that the following address which he made to them was nothing but the
+plain truth, mournful though it was. "Alas! we shall be scattered
+asunder by the four winds of heaven in a very, very little time. Ah!
+human arms are rotten bands. How short a time they hold! May all be
+well with you--and better than I ever deserved it might be with me. May
+the chaotic stone-heaps of your lives never come rolling down about
+your feet, or about your ears--may spring overspread the crags and
+cliffs around you with berries, and the freshest green! Good night for
+ever, dearly loved Schulrath, and you, my Henry!" He pressed the latter
+to his heart in silence, thinking how near the veritable parting was.
+
+But he should have avoided stimulating his heart into feverish
+excitement by these pricks and stings of farewell, for he heard Lenette
+mourning out of sight behind the bed, and (with a deep death-wound in
+his overflowing heart) said, "Come, my beloved Lenette, and bid me
+good-bye;" and stretched out his arms in a wild manner to receive her.
+She came tottering, and sank into them, and on to his heart, while he
+was speechless under the crushing weight of his emotions; till at
+length, as she lay there trembling, he said, in a low voice, "Ah! poor,
+patient, faithful, tortured soul! how constantly and unceasingly have I
+caused you sorrow! Will you forgive me? Will you forget me?" (A spasm
+of sorrow clasped her closer to him.) "Ah! do _but_ forget me, and
+forget me _quite_; for heaven knows you have never been happy with me!"
+Their voices were lost in sobs, only their tears could flow. A drawing,
+thirsting grief was grinding at his weary heart, and he went on: "No,
+no; with _me_ you have truly had nothing, nothing but tears; but there
+are happy days coming for you, when I shall be gone from you." He gave
+her his parting kiss, saying, "Live happy now, and let me be gone!"
+"But you are _not_ going to die," she cried again and again, with a
+thousand tears. He put his arms about her, he gently raised her
+fainting form from his breast, and said, very solemnly, "It is over
+now. Fate has sundered us; it is over and past."
+
+Henry gently led her weeping away; and he cried himself, too; and
+cursed his plot; and signed to the Schulrath, saying, "Firmian needs
+rest now." The latter turned his face, swollen and drawn with pain, to
+the wall. Lenette and Stiefel were mourning together in the other room.
+Henry waited till the greater billows had subsided somewhat, and then
+quietly put the question: "Now?" Firmian gave the signal, and Henry
+yelled out, "Oh! he is gone!" like a man beside himself; and threw
+himself down upon the motionless body (to prevent anybody from touching
+it), with genuine, bitter tears at the thought of the nearness of
+parting. An inconsolable couple came bursting from the next room.
+Lenette would have thrown herself upon her husband (whose face was
+turned away), and she cried, in agony, "I must see him; I must bid my
+husband good-bye once more." But Henry told the Schulrath
+(confidentially) to take hold of her, and support her, and get her away
+out of the room. The two former things he was able to accomplish
+(although his _own_ self-control was only an artificial one, assumed
+with the view of demonstrating the victory of religion over
+philosophy), but get her out of the room he could not. When she saw
+Henry take up the mask of death, "No, no," she cried; "I insist upon
+being allowed to see my husband once more." But Henry took the mask,
+gently turned Firmian's face (on which the tears of parting were scarce
+yet dry), and covered it up, thus hiding it for ever from his wife's
+weeping eyes. This grand scene lifted up his heart; he gazed upon the
+mask and said, "Death lays a mask like this over all our faces; and a
+time will come when _I_ shall stretch me out in death's midnight sleep
+as _he_ has done, and grow longer and heavier. Ah! poor Firmian! has
+that war game of yours been worth the candles and the trouble? We are
+not the _players_, it is true; we are the things _played with_: and old
+Death sends our heads and hearts rolling like balls over the green
+billiard-table, and pockets them in his corpse-sack; and every time one
+of us is pocketed there, the death-bell gives a toll. It is true you go
+on living in a sense[90] (if the frescoes of ideas can be detached from
+the walls of the body), and oh! may you be happier in that postscript
+life than in this. But what is it, this postscript life, after all?
+_It_ will go out too; every life, on every world-ball, will burn out
+one day. The planets are licensed only to retail liquor to be drunk on
+the premises. They can't board and lodge us; they merely pour us out a
+glass of quince-wine, currant-juice, spirits; but for the most part
+_gargles_ of _good_ wine (which we must not swallow), or else
+sympathetic ink (i. e. _liquor probatorius_), sleeping-draughts, and
+acids; and then, on we go, from one planet-inn to another; and so from
+millennium to millennium. Oh! thou kind heaven; and whither, whither,
+whither?
+
+"However, this earth is the wretchedest village tap-room of the lot; a
+place where mostly beggars, rogues, and deserters turn in, and which we
+have always to go five steps _away_ from to _enjoy_ our best pleasures;
+that is to say, either into memory or into imagination.
+
+"Ah! peaceful being there at rest, may it fare better with you in other
+taverns than here; and may some restaurateur of life open the door of a
+wine-cellar for you in _lieu_ of this vinegar-cellar!"
+
+
+
+
+ CHAPTER XXI.
+
+ DR. [OE]LHAFEN AND MEDICAL BOOT AND SHOEMAKING--THE BURIAL
+ SOCIETY--A DEATH'S HEAD IN THE SADDLE--FREDERICK II. AND HIS
+ FUNERAL ORATION.
+
+
+As a step preliminary to everything else, Leibgeber quartered the
+sorrowing widow down stairs with the hairdresser, with the view of
+rendering the intermediate state after death easier to the dead man.
+"You must emigrate," he told her, "and keep out of the sight of these
+sad memorials round us here, until _he_ has been taken away."
+Superstitious terror made her consent, so that he had no difficulty in
+giving the dear departed his food and drink. He compared him to a
+walled-up vestal, finding in her cell a lamp, bread, water, milk, and
+oil (according to Plutarch, in 'Numa'); and added, "Unless you are more
+like the earwig, which, when cut in two, turns about and devours its
+own remains." By jokes like these he brightened (or, at all events,
+strove to brighten) the cloudy and autumnal soul of his dear friend,
+who could see nothing all around him save ruins of his bygone life,
+from the widowed Lenette's clothes to her work. The bonnet-block, which
+he had struck on the day of the thunder-storm, had to be put away in a
+corner out of his sight, because he said it made Gorgon faces at him.
+
+Next day, our good corpse-watcher, Leibgeber, had to perform the
+labours of a Hercules, an Ixion, and a Sisyphus combined. Congress
+after congress, picket after picket, came to see the dead man and speak
+well of him--for it is not until they make their _exit_ that we applaud
+men and actors, and we think people are _morally_ beautified by death
+as Lavater thought they were physically. But Leibgeber drove everybody
+away from the death-chamber, saying it had been one of his friend's
+last requests that he should do so.
+
+Then came the woman to lay out the corpse (Death's Abigail), and wanted
+to begin washing and dressing it. Henry tussled with her, paid her, and
+banished her. Then (in presence of the widow and Peltzstiefel), he had
+to pretend to _be_ pretending to hide a bleeding heart behind outward
+resignation. "But I see through him," said Stiefel, "without the
+slightest trouble. It is because he is not a Christian that he is
+striving to play the Stoic and the Philosopher." Stiefel was here
+alluding to that specious, empty, and frivolous hardness which is
+exhibited by Zenos of the world and of the court, who are like those
+wooden figures which are made to look like stone statues and pillars by
+being smeared over with a coating of stone-dust. Also the share, or
+dividend, of the burial-fund was got together (by being collected on a
+plate from the members of that body), and this led to its coming to the
+knowledge of our old acquaintance Dr. [Oe]lhafen, who was one of the
+paying members. He took occasion, on his morning round of visits, to
+drop in at the house of mourning, with the view of provoking his
+brother in science to as great an extent as he could. He therefore
+affected not to have heard a word about the death, and began by asking
+how the invalid was getting on. "According to the _latest_ bulletins,"
+said Henry, "he is not _getting_ on at all--he has _got_ on; in a word,
+Herr Protomedicus [Oe]lhafen, he is gone. August, March, and December
+are months when Death sends out his pressgang and gathers in his
+vintage."
+
+"That lowering powder of yours," said the vindictive Doctor, "seems to
+have lowered _his_ temperature pretty effectively; he's cool enough
+_now_, eh?" This pained Leibgeber, and he answered, "I am sorry to say,
+he is. However, we did our best with him. We got your emetic down his
+throat, but the only thing he got rid of was that most terribly
+morbific of all matters in man--his soul. You, Mr. Protomedicus, are
+judge in a criminal court, having the power of life and death; whereas,
+you see, I am only an advocate, and possessed of a jurisdiction so far
+inferior that _I_ didn't dare meddle with anything, least of all the
+fellow's _life_; a nice face he would have made if I had."
+
+"Well, so he _has_ made a face at it, and a long face, too--the
+hippocratic face," answered the Doctor, not wholly without wit. "I
+can't but believe you," answered Leibgeber, in a gentle manners "I have
+not the least doubt you are perfectly right. We laymen, you see, have
+so few opportunities of seeing those faces, whereas doctors can study
+the hippocratic countenance in their patients every day of their lives.
+And, of course, an experienced doctor is always distinguished by a
+quickness of eye which enables him to tell at a glance if a patient be
+going to die--which is an impossibility to other people, who, not being
+doctors in practice, have not many opportunities of seeing people
+depart this life."
+
+"A medical connoisseur of _your_ cultivation and experience as a matter
+of course put mustard poultices to the patient's feet? Only, I presume,
+it was too late for them to be of any use, was it?"
+
+"I _did_ manage to hit upon the notion of trying that trick of soling
+my poor friend's feet with mustard and vinegar" (answered Leibgeber),
+"and paper-hanging the calves of his legs with blisters; but the
+patient (at all times rather fond of his joke, as you know), called
+that sort of thing 'medical boot and shoemaking,' and called us
+doctors 'Death's shoemakers,' who, when Nature has cried to a poor
+fellow 'Look out! Mind your head!' go and put Spanish flies on to him
+by way of Spanish boots, mustard-plasters by way of _Cothurni_, and
+cupping-glasses by way of leg-irons: as if a man could not make
+his appearance in the next world without red heels consisting of
+mustard-blister marks, and red cardinal stockings of plaster blisters.
+And so saying, the deceased aimed a skilful kick at my face and the
+plaster, and said the connoisseurs were like stinging-flies, which
+always fasten upon the legs."
+
+"He wasn't far wrong, I suspect, as regarded _you_. A 'shoemaker of
+Death' might perhaps put something on just under that _caput tribus
+insanabile_ of yours which wouldn't fit so badly," said the Doctor, and
+made off as fast as he could.
+
+I have already said a few words concerning those emetic powders of his,
+and I now wish to add what follows. If he _does_ send people to their
+long homes by means of them, the chief difference between him and a
+fox[91] is that (according to the ancient naturalist), the latter
+imitates the distant sound of a man being sick to make the dogs run to
+him, that he may attack them. At the same time even those whose opinion
+of the members of the medical profession is the highest conceivable
+must admit that there are certain limits to their criminal
+jurisdiction. As by European International Law, no army can shoot down
+another with glass bullets, or poisoned ones, but only with leaden
+ones--further, as no nation may put poison into the enemies' food, or
+wells, but only dirt--so, although the medical police allow a
+practising physician (of the higher jurisdiction) the utmost freedom in
+the administration of narcotics, drastics, emetics, diuretics, and the
+whole pharmacopœia, in a word (so that it would be a breach of the
+police regulations to attempt to prevent him), yet were the most
+celebrated of doctors, town or country, within the limits of his
+jurisdiction to set to work and give people poison-balls in place of
+pills, or ratsbane by way of a strong emetic, the upper courts of
+justice would take a pretty serious view of the matter--unless it were
+for ague that he prescribed the mouse-poison. Nay, I suspect that an
+entire medical _collegium_ would scarce escape some judicial inquiry if
+it were to take a sword and run a man through with it (though it might
+open his veins with a lancet at any hour of the day or night if it
+pleased), or if it were to knock him down with a warlike but
+nonsurgical instrument. Thus we find in the criminal records that
+doctors who threw people into the water from bridges have by no means
+got clear off--that being a different affair altogether from putting
+them into a _smaller_ bath, mineral or otherwise.
+
+When the hairdresser heard that the corpse-lottery money had safely
+arrived in its harbour of refuge, he came upstairs and offered to curl
+his deceased lodger's hair, make him a pigtail, and let his comb and
+pomatum accompany him under the sod. Leibgeber was obliged to be
+economical on the poor widow's account, for more than half her feathers
+were plucked out of her already by the innumerable insect-feelers,
+vultures'-talons, and boars'-tusks of the domestics of death, and he
+said the most he could do was to buy the comb and put it in the
+deceased's waistcoat-pocket, so that he might do it himself after his
+own taste. He said the same to the barber, and added that, of course,
+as hair goes on growing in the grave, the whole secret society (and
+fruit-bearing society) therein is adorned with fine beards, like Swiss
+of the age of sixty. These two collaborateurs in hair (who revolve
+round the same central-sphere like two of the satellites of Uranus)
+went off with abbreviated hopes, and elongated faces and purses, the
+one wishing, in the excess of his gratitude, that he had at that moment
+the shaving of the undertaker Henry, the other wishing _he_ had the
+cutting of his hair. On the stairs they grumbled out, "It would be no
+wonder if the dead man should not be able to rest in his grave,
+but went about frightening people."
+
+Leibgeber thought of the risk there was of losing the reward of all
+this long process of deception, should anybody go to have a look at the
+deceased gentleman while he was in the next room (for whenever he was
+going further he locked the door). So he went to the churchyard, took a
+skull out of the charnel-house, and brought it home under his coat. He
+handed it to Siebenkæs, saying, "If we were to shove this head in
+beneath the green trellis-bed whereon _defunctus_ is lying, and keep it
+connected with his hand by means of a green-silk thread, it might be
+brought into play (in the dark, at all events), as a species of
+Belidor's globe of compression, or jawbone of an ass as against
+Philistines, who have got to be frightened away if they come disturbing
+the repose of the warm dead." To be sure (had the most extreme
+necessity to do so arisen) Siebenkæs would have come to himself,
+revived out of his prolonged insensibility, and repeated his apoplectic
+seizure for the third time--much to the gratification of medical
+systems of theory. However, the death's head was better than the fit.
+The sight of this garret-lodging of a soul, this cold hatching-oven of
+a spirit, made Siebenkæs sad. He said, "No doubt the wall-creeper finds
+a quieter and safer nest here than did the bird-of-paradise,[92] which
+has flown away from it."
+
+Leibgeber now chaffered with the servants of the Church and School,
+and (with whispered curses) paid the necessary surplice-fees and
+bridge-tolls, saying, "The day after tomorrow we will lay the deceased
+to rest as quietly as we may, without fuss or ceremony." It was a
+matter of indifference to them; all _they_ cared about being the
+pocketing of the postage which franks people into the next world,
+which they were all glad enough to do--all except one old and poor
+School-servant, who said he thought it a sin to take a farthing from
+the poor widow, for he knew what poverty was. But this was exactly what
+the rich could not know.
+
+In the morning, Henry went down to the hairdresser and Lenette, leaving
+the key in the door--for, since the recent ghost story, the lodgers who
+lived upstairs were too frightened to put so much as their heads out of
+their own doors. The hairdresser, who was still annoyed that he had not
+been allowed to curl the deceased's hair, bethought him that it would
+at least be something if he were to slip upstairs, and cut and carry
+off the entire hair-forest. The demand for hair and firewood is in
+excess of the supply (now that the former is made into rings and
+twisted into letters), and we should never leave any dead person a
+coffin or a single hair. Even the ancients sheared off the latter for
+the altars of the subterranean gods; so Meerbitzer crept on tiptoe into
+the room, and opened his scissor-feelers. Siebenkæs could easily look
+askew into the room through the eye-holes of the mask, and from the
+scissors and general aspect of his landlord, he divined the impending
+misfortune and 'Rape of the Lock.' He saw that in his strait he could
+reckon more upon the bare head under the bed than upon his own. The
+landlord, who, in his timidity, had carefully left the door wide
+open behind him to secure his retreat, drew near to the plantation of
+human pot-plants, with intent to play the part of reaper in the
+harvest-month--to combine the _rôles_ of beard-shearer and hair-curler,
+and avenge them both. Siebenkæs wound up the thread as well as he could
+upon his covered fingers, so as to roll out the skull; but as the
+latter came much too slowly, and Meerbitzer far too quickly, he was
+obliged to come to his own assistance in the meantime (and this because
+evil spirits so often _breathe_ upon men, or _inspire_ them) by
+breathing out of the mouth-hole of his mask a long night-breeze upon
+the landlord. Meerbitzer could not explain to himself this most
+suspicious blast, which blew real azote, and a deadly simoom-wind, upon
+him; and all his warm constituent principles began to shoot into
+icicles. But, unluckily, the dead man had soon shot all his breath
+away, and was obliged to re-load his air-gun slowly. This suspension of
+hostilities brought the lock-raper to himself, and to his legs again;
+so that he made fresh preparations to take hold of the nightcap-tassel,
+and remove that gossamer (said nightcap) from the field of hair. But
+just as he was in the act of taking hold of it, he became aware that a
+something was beginning to move under the bed; he paused, and waited
+quietly (for it might be a rat) to see what this noise would turn out
+to be caused by. But, as he thus waited, it was all of a sudden borne
+in upon his mind that _a round thing_ was rolling up his legs, and
+coming higher and higher. In one instant he made a clutch at it with
+his empty hand (the other held the scissors), and, powerlessly as a
+pair of callipers, that hand rested on the ascending, slippery ball,
+which kept pressing it up and up. Meerbitzer grew visibly stiff in the
+legs, and his blood ran cold; but a fresh upward shove of his hand, and
+a glance at the ascending head, administered to him (ere he was felled
+to earth, wholly curdled to cheese), such a kick of terror that he flew
+like a feather across the floor, and out of the door like a cannonball
+shot straight at the bull's eye by the cannon-powder of fear. He landed
+in the room downstairs with the open scissors in his hand, his mouth
+and eyes wide open, and a pallid spot on his face, compared to which
+his hair-powder and his shirt were court-mourning. Nevertheless, in
+this novel situation (I am glad to say it to his honour) he had the
+presence of mind not to say a word about what had happened; partly
+because ghost-stories cannot be related till nine days are over without
+the greatest danger to the narrator, partly because he could not well
+talk about his hair-shearing and privateering on _any_ day at all.
+
+At one in the morning, Firmian told this tale to his friend with the
+same fidelity as I have endeavoured to observe in recounting it to the
+reader. This gave Leibgeber a useful hint to set a trusty body-guard
+over the noble corpse; and to this office, in the absence of
+chamberlains and other court officials, he could appoint no other than
+Saufinder.
+
+On the last morning, which was to give our Siebenkæs "Notice to quit,"
+arrived the _casa santa_ of mankind, our _chambre garnie_, our last
+_seed capsule_--the coffin for which we have to pay whatever is
+demanded. "This is the last building grant of life," said Henry, "the
+carpenter's final piece of cheatery."
+
+At half an hour after midnight--when neither bat nor night-watchman,
+nor beer-guest from the public-house, nor night-light was any longer to
+be seen; and only a field-cricket here and there could be heard in the
+sheaves, and a mouse or two in the houses--Leibgeber said to his sad
+and anxious friend, "March, now! Since you shuffled off this mortal
+coil, and entered into eternity, you have not known a moment of
+happiness or peace. All the rest is my affair. Wait for me at Hof on
+the Saale. We must see each other yet once more after death." Firmian
+fell in silence on his burning face, and wept. In this twilight hour he
+once more revisited all the flowery places of the past, behind which he
+was sinking as into a grave. His softened heart took delight in
+depositing a parting tear upon every piece of dress belonging to his
+sorrowing, bereaved Lenette--on every piece of her work--on every trace
+of her housewifely hand. He pressed her betrothal wreath of roses and
+forget-me-nots hard to his burning bosom, and placed Nathalie's
+rosebuds in his pocket. And thus--mute, oppressed, with stifled sobs,
+and like one cast out by an earthquake from this earth on to the icy
+coasts of a strange world--he crept down the steps after his friend;
+pressed his helping hand once more at the door; and then night built
+the funeral vault of her gigantic shadow all over him. Leibgeber wept
+heartily as soon as he was lost to view. Tears fell on every stone
+which he pocketed, and upon the old block which he took in his arms, to
+imbed in the coffin-shell so as to give it the due weight of a corpse.
+He filled up that haven of our bodies, and closed that ark of the
+covenant, hanging the coffin-key, like a black cross, upon his breast.
+And now for the first time he slept in peace in the house of mourning.
+All was done.
+
+In the morning he made no secret of it, before the bearers and Lenette,
+that he had placed the body in the coffin with his own two arms, and
+not without considerable effort. She sighed to see her departed husband
+once again, but Henry had thrown away the door-key of the painted house
+in the darkness. He helped most diligently in the search for it (he had
+it about him all the time), but it was in vain, and many of the
+bystanders soon guessed that Henry was only deceiving, anxious to spare
+the widow's weeping eyes any further sight of the cause of her sorrow.
+So they went forth, with the mock passenger in the quasi coffin, to the
+churchyard which lay glistening in dew beneath the fresh blue sky. An
+icy thrill crept to Henry's heart as he read the words on the
+gravestone. It had been lifted from off the flat, Moravian-like grave
+of Siebenkæs's great-grandfather, and turned over, and on the smooth
+side glittered the newly-graven inscription--
+
+
+ "STAN: FIRMIAN SIEBENKÆS,
+ Departed this life, 24th August, 1786."
+
+
+This name had once been Henry's own, and on the reverse side of the
+monument was his present name, Leibgeber. Henry reflected that in a few
+days _he_ would fall (with his name cast away from him) as a little
+brook into the world's great ocean, and flow there without shores, and
+be lost amongst strange and unknown billows. He felt as though he
+himself with his old name, and his new, were going down to the grave.
+So strangely mingled were his feelings that he seemed to himself as if
+he were sticking fast in the frozen stream of life, while overhead a
+burning sun was beating upon the ice-field, and he was lying between
+the glow and the frost. In addition to this, the Schulrath just then
+came running (with his handkerchief to his eyes and nose), and, in
+stammering accents of sorrow, imparted the news which had just reached
+the town--that the old King of Prussia had died on the 17th of the
+month.
+
+The first thing that Leibgeber did was to look up to the morning sun,
+as though Frederick's eye was beaming morning fire from it over the
+earth. It is easier to be a great king than a just one; it is easier to
+be admired than justified. A king lays his little finger upon the long
+arm of the monstrous lever, and, like Archimedes, lifts ships and
+countries with the muscles of his fingers; but it is only the _machine_
+that is great--and the machinist, Fate--not he who works it. The voice
+of a king re-echoes like a peal of thunder amongst the numberless
+valleys around him; and every gentle ray he emits is reflected in the
+form of a burning beam condensed into a focus, from the countless
+plane-mirrors which are upon his throne. But Frederick could, at most,
+only be _lowered_ by a throne, by having to _sit_ upon it. His head
+would only have been _greater_ without the close-binding crown (its
+crown of thorns) and magic circle. And happy, thou great spirit,
+couldst thou still less become! For, although thou hadst broken
+down within thee the Bastilles and the prison-walls of all ignoble
+passions--although thou hadst given thy spirit what Franklin
+gave to earth, namely, lightning-conductors, musical glasses, and
+freedom--although no kingdom was to thee so lovely as that of truth,
+and there was none which thou so lovedst to enlarge--although thou
+didst permit the emasculate philosophy of French encyclopædists to hide
+from thee eternity only, but not divinity, only the _belief_ in virtue,
+but not thine own--yet did thy loving bosom accept nothing from
+friendship and humanity but the echoes of their sighs--the flute. And
+thy spirit, which, with its great roots like the mahogany-tree, often
+shivered the rocks it grew upon--thy spirit, in the fell battle of thy
+wishes with thy doubts, in the contest of thy ideal world with the real
+one, and the one in which thou didst believe, felt a painful discord
+which no mild faith in a _second_ softened to harmony. And therefore
+there was upon thy throne no place of rest but that which thou hast now
+attained.
+
+Some men bring all humanity before our eyes at a glance, as certain
+events bring our whole lives. There fell upon Henry's breast strong
+splinters of the fallen mountain whose crash he heard.
+
+He placed himself before the open grave, and delivered this speech more
+to invisible than to visible hearers:--
+
+"So, then, the epitaph on the tomb is _versio interlineario_ of this
+small, small printed life of ours. The heart does not rest until, like
+the head, it is set in gold.[93] Thou hidden Infinite one! make, for
+me, the grave a prompter's tube, and tell me what I am to think of the
+whole theatre. Indeed, what _is_ there in the grave? Some ashes, a few
+worms, coldness, and night--by Heaven! there is nothing better _above_
+it either, except that one _feels_ it. Mr. Schulrath, Time sits behind
+us, and reads the calendar of life so cursorily, and turns over the
+page of month after month at such a rate, that I can fancy this
+grave--this moat here about our castles in the air--this fortress
+trench--lengthening out and extending till it reaches my bed, and I am
+shaken out of the bedclothes into this cooking-hole, like a heap of
+Spanish flies. 'Go on,' I would say, 'Go on. I shall come either to old
+Fritz, or to his worms--and therewith _Basta_! 'By Heaven! one is
+ashamed of life when the greatest of men no longer possess it. And so
+_holla_!"
+
+
+
+
+ CHAPTER XXII.
+
+ JOURNEY THROUGH FANTAISIE--RE-UNION ON THE BINDLOCHER MOUNTAIN--
+ BERNECK--MAN-DOUBLING--GEFREES--EXCHANGE OF CLOTHES--MUNCHBERG--
+ SOLO-WHISTLING--HOF--THE STONE OF GLADNESS AND DOUBLE-PARTING.
+
+
+Henry now plied more wings than any seraph, that he might fly up
+with his friend as soon as possible. He packed up the latter's
+manuscripts in haste, and addressed them to Vaduz. The sealed will and
+testament was lodged with the proper authorities, from whom, also, the
+necessary certificate of death was obtained to show the Prussian
+Widows' Fund that it was not being defrauded. And then he got fairly
+afloat, and pushed off, having first bestowed some weighty grounds
+for consolation--as well as some weighty ducats--upon the downcast
+straw-widow, who mourned in the striped calico-dress, as was right and
+proper.
+
+Let us now overtake and accompany his departed friend, even before he
+himself does so. During the first hour of his night-journey, vague and
+disordered pictures of the past and of the future struggled in
+Firmian's heart; and it seemed to him as if, _for him_, there were no
+such thing as a present, but that a wilderness stretched between the
+past and the future. But the fresh, rich harvest month of August soon
+gave him back the life he had (so to speak) played away; and when the
+gleaming morning was come in earnest, the earth was lying all lighted
+up with a new-fallen thunderstorm, now emitting lovely lightning only
+from drops hanging on the corn-ears, as if over-silvered by the moon.
+It was a new earth; he was a new creature, just burst, with ripened
+pinions, through the egg-shell of the coffin. Oh! a broad, marshy,
+overshadowed desert-waste, where a long, long troubled dream had kept
+driving him to and fro, had vanished _with_ that dream, and he was
+awake, and gazing deep into Eden. The last week (and that last week
+especially) had stretched out to enormous length those twisted
+convolutions of suffering which give to our brief lives a false
+appearance of being much too long (as we make the short walks of a
+garden seem longer by laying them out in curves and sweeps). On the
+other hand, his lightened breast, now free from all its old burdens,
+was heaved by a great sigh, which was partly both sorrow and joy. He
+had been too far into the Trophonius cave of the tomb--had looked death
+too closely in the face--and it seemed to him that all our country
+mansions, our pleasure-castles and vineyards, were built and laid out
+upon the verge of the crater of the volcano of the grave-hillock, and
+that the next night they would be shaken into dust. He felt alone,
+upheaved, a dead man come back to life, but scarce alive; wherefore
+every human face he met beamed upon him like that of a new-found
+brother. "These are my brethren whom I left on earth," said his heart;
+and a fruit-bearing love, warm like the spring, expanded all its veins
+and fibres; and it crept and grew round every _other_ heart with
+tender, clinging, ivy-like filaments. But the one he loved best was
+still--too long--away; and he went on as slowly as he could, that so
+Leibgeber (of whom he was in advance both in distance and time) might
+overtake him before he got to Hof. A hundred times, on his journey, he
+almost involuntarily looked round _for_ this overtaking, as if it were
+already a thing to be actually seen.
+
+At length he came to the Fantaisie of Bayreuth, on a morning when the
+whole world gleamed and glittered from the drops of dew up to the
+little silver cloudlets. But stillness was over all. The breezes were
+asleep; nor had August, in air or in thicket, one single songster left.
+It seemed to him as though, having left this mortal life, he was
+wandering in a second, transfigured world, where the form of his
+Nathalie might move by his side, with love in her eyes--and, in words
+straight from the soul, no longer fettered by earthly bonds, say to
+him, "_Here_ you looked up in gratitude to the starry night; _here_ I
+gave you my wounded heart; here we spoke our earthly parting-vow; and
+here I came, often, alone, and thought of the brief, bright vision."
+"And this is the spot," he said to himself, when he came to the
+château, "where she wept her last tears when she said farewell to her
+lady-friend."
+
+And now, again, it seemed that only _she_ was the one transfigured.
+(_He_ seemed to his fancy to be the one left behind.) He _felt_ that he
+should never see her more on earth; "but" (he said) "people must be
+able to _love_, though they cannot meet or see each other." All his
+meagre future was to be illuminated by transfigured and glorified
+dream-pictures only. But as the tree (according to Bonnet) is planted
+as much in the air above it as it is in the earth beneath it, and
+derives nourishment quite as much from the one as from the other, so it
+is with every true human-creature. And thus Firmian lived in the
+future with more vivid life than in the past--only with fewer of his
+root-fibres in the visible ground. The whole tree, top-shoot, branches,
+and all, stood under the open sky, drinking the free breeze of heaven
+with its every blossom--where all he had to invigorate and cheer him
+were two invisible friends--the one a woman, the other a man.
+
+At length the thin, beautiful vapour of his dreams thickened to a fog.
+Nathalie's sorrow for his death came hovering over him, and his
+lonesomeness struck heavy on his heart, which longed unutterably for
+some living being which should stand there and love him with all its
+heart. But this being was still behind him, doing its best to overtake
+him--Henry, to wit.
+
+"Mr. Leibgeber," the voice of some one coming up after him suddenly
+cried, "stop a moment, please. Here is your handkerchief; I picked it
+up down below there."
+
+He looked round, and there was the girl whom Nathalie had helped out of
+the water, coming running up with a white handkerchief. But as he had
+his own in his pocket, and the girl, gazing at him in astonishment,
+said he had dropped it near the basin about an hour before (though he
+had not then had so long a coat on)--a gush of gladness streamed into
+his heart. Leibgeber had arrived, and had been down by the basin.
+
+He hastened to Bayreuth as fast as he could, all in a whirl, with the
+handkerchief in his hand. It was moist, as if his friend's weeping eyes
+had rested on it. He pressed it warmly to his own, but it would not dry
+them, for he thought how Henry passed his life in solitude,
+exemplifying the truth of his own saying, "He who spares his feelings,
+and puts armour upon them, keeps them most delicately sensitive--just
+as the skin under the nails is the easiest hurt of all." At the Sun
+Hotel, Firmian learned from John the waiter that Leibgeber had actually
+arrived, and was gone on about half-an-hour ago. Firmian ran off after
+him, up and down the streets of Hof, blind and deaf, in such
+tempestuous pursuit of his friend that he forgot all about the moist
+handkerchief.
+
+After a long while, he caught sight of him climbing the long hill
+behind the village of Bindloch, a mountain-road, in the true sense of
+the words, not to be either ascended or descended at any great speed.
+Leibgeber was straining up it as fast as he could, however, with the
+view of unexpectedly overtaking Firmian before he got to Hof, perhaps
+in Münchberg, or in Gefrees, if not in Berneck itself (which is at no
+very great distance from Bayreuth).
+
+But was not everything destined to turn out ten times better? Did not
+Siebenkæs, at the bottom of the hill, at last catch sight of him near
+the level place on the summit, and call out his name--which he did not
+hear? Did not Siebenkæs then run at an extraordinary pace after his
+ascending friend (with the handkerchief in his hand), and did not the
+latter chance to turn round, by accident, to have a glance at the sunny
+landscape, and see all Bayreuth, and--at long and at last--his friend
+hastening after him? And finally, did they not rush together, the one
+down the hill, the other up (not like two hostile armies, however, but
+like two wreathed and foaming goblets of joy and friendship)?
+
+Henry speedily perceived that in his friend's breast there was much of
+a powerful and dissolvent kind--belonging both to past and to future
+times--at work, wherefore he sought to appease and calm all the "Naiads
+of the rivers of tears."
+
+"Everything went off divinely," he said, "and everybody is well. Now you
+are as free as I am. Your chains are off--the world is before you--so
+in you plunge into it, fresh and merry, like me, and begin to live your
+_real_ life, for the first time _in_ your life." "You are right," said
+Firmian, "this is like meeting you again after death. Heaven is above
+us, peaceful and quiet, gladsome, serene, and warm." For that very
+reason, he had not the courage to ask after those he had left behind,
+particularly his widow. Leibgeber expressed great joy that he had
+caught him up four post-stations on that side of Hof, and all the more
+that, this being so, they could be together for a good long while
+before they must part in Hof (which latter was the very point which he
+was anxious to establish and emphasise).
+
+He now commenced a series of jokes on the subject of dying (with the
+view of preventing anything in the shape of an _expression_ of the
+emotions which they both felt), and these jokes recurred like
+milestones, or stone-benches, all along the turnpike-road to Hof; we
+have no way of escaping them on the journey, unless we turn back. He
+asked him if the diet had been sufficient which he had given him, as
+the old Germans, Romans, and Egyptians did to their dead. He said that
+Firmian must be excessively pious, inasmuch as he had risen from the
+dead when he had barely shuffled off this mortal coil, confirming
+Lavater's doctrine that there are two resurrections, a first for the
+good, and a later one for the bad. He said, further, that he could not
+have had a better Archimimus[94] after his departure from this life
+than himself. Leibgeber's spirit and body _sprang_ rather than walked.
+"I am always in high spirits, and free, while I am in the open air.
+Beneath the clouds, I have no clouds. When we are young, the raw north
+wind of life whistles only on our backs, and, by Heaven! I am younger
+than any reviewer."
+
+They passed the night in Berneck, between the lofty bridge-piers of
+mountains, through which once streamed those seas which have overspread
+our globe with fields. Time and Nature--grand and almighty--were
+reposing side by side on the confines of two kingdoms--between the
+steep, lofty, memorial-pillars of creation--amongst firm mountains,
+empty castles crumbling into ruin, rock-barriers and stone-tumuli lying
+about the rounded green hills, like broken tables of the law of earth's
+first creation.
+
+When they arrived here, Henry said, "The clergy between this and Vaduz
+must not find out that you have exchanged time for eternity, or they
+will ask you for the surplice fees which every corpse has to pay in
+each parish which it passes through. If we were in old Rome (and not in
+Berneck)," said he, before the inn, "the landlord would never let you
+into his house except down the chimney. And if we were in Athens, you
+would be obliged to creep through a hoop-petticoat just as if you were
+going into holy orders."[95] On an occasion of this sort, he never
+could cease from his witticisms, in which he differed (to his
+disadvantage) from me; and he said that metaphors and similes were like
+gold pieces, of which Rousseau says that the first is harder to get
+than the next thousand.
+
+Therefore it was beyond his power not to be struck with an idea when,
+in the evening, he saw Firmian paring his nails. "I can't understand,"
+he said "(now that I see it in your case), why Katherine Bieri--whose
+nails had to be cut 250 years after she was dead--couldn't have done it
+just as well herself as _you_ do after having given tip the ghost." And
+when he saw him turn over on his left side in bed, he simply observed
+that he made his bed-quilt rise and fall in the same manner as St. John
+the Evangelist does _his_ earthen one--the grave--to the present
+hour.[96]
+
+In the morning, it rained a little upon these flowers of humour. As
+Leibgeber was laving that lion's breast of his with cold water, Firmian
+noticed that he pushed aside a little key, and asked what it opened.
+"It _un_fastens nothing," he said; "but it _fastened_ the leaden
+_cenotaphium_."[97] Firmian was obliged to lean out of window with his
+eyes, and dry them unobserved. Then (with his head still outside) he
+said, "Give me the key. It is the wax-impression of a future one. I
+want to make it the music-key of my inner music. I shall hang it up,
+and look at it every day; and if ever my resolution to be better should
+run down, I shall wind it up again with this watch-key." He got it.
+Then Leibgeber chanced to look into the mirror; and he cried, "I seem
+almost to see myself double, not to say triple. _One_ of me must be
+dead, the one in there or the one out here. Which of us in this room is
+it that is the real dead man appearing to the other? Or are we only
+appearing to ourselves? Heh! you my three _me's_, what say you to the
+fourth?"--he asked, and turned to the two-reflected images, then to
+Firmian--and said, "_Here I_ am, too!"
+
+There was something in these sayings calculated to cause a shudder for
+his future. Firmian, whose calmer reason made him dread a dangerous
+growth of this metamorphic self-reflecting during the solitude of
+Leibgeber's wanderings, said, with tender anxiety, "My dear Henry, if
+you are going to be always so much alone upon your eternal journeys, I
+can't help fearing it will do you harm. God himself is not alone. He
+beholds His universe." "I can always triple myself, in the profoundest
+solitude, not excepting that of the universe itself," answered
+Leibgeber, strangely moved by the coffin-key--and he went to the
+looking-glass, and pressed his eyeball sideways with his finger, so as
+to see his reflection double; "but _you_ can't see the third person
+there." Then he went on in a merrier tone, with the view of cheering
+Firmian (who was _not_ much cheered by what he said, nevertheless),
+leading him to the window. "But it is a far finer affair as regards
+the street. I have a much larger company there. I put my finger to my
+eye, and produce the twin of everybody, be he who he may; double the
+landlord, as well as his chalk-score. Not a president on his way
+to his meeting but 'finds his fellow' and meets his match. I provide
+him with his Orang Utang, and the pair of them march past me,
+_tête-à-tête_. Does a genius want an imitator? I take my finger--and
+hey! presto!--a living facsimile of him on the spot. Every learned
+collaborator has a collaborator collaborating with him. Associates
+have associates associated with them. Only sons are made out in
+duplicate, because, as you see, I carry my plastic nature, author, and
+embossing-instrument--my finger to wit--always about with me. And I
+seldom let a solo-dancer caper with fewer than four legs; he has to
+hang in air as a _pair_ of men. But it would amaze you to see how much
+I can make out of a single fellow and his limbs by this sort of
+grouping. Try to form some idea (by way of wind-up) of the crowds and
+masses of people I have when I double such things as funerals and other
+processions, with _doppelgänger_, and strengthen every regiment with an
+entire regiment of flügelmen, repeating and imitating everything. For
+(as we have been saying), like a grasshopper, I have my ovipositing
+instrument--my finger--always with me. From all which, Firmian, you may
+at all events draw the consolation that I enjoy more society than any
+of you--_just as much again_, in fact. And, moreover, it consists
+entirely of people who afford me endless amusement without trouble or
+inconvenience, by aping their own gestures and proceedings."
+
+Hereupon they looked each other in the face, full of joyful affection,
+and wholly freed from any unpleasant traces of their recent wilder mode
+of jesting. A third person would have been almost terrified at their
+bodily resemblance in this hour, for each was a plaster-of-Paris cast
+of the other; but their affection for each other made their faces seem
+_un_like to themselves. Each saw in the other only that which he liked,
+because it was not in himself; and it was with their features, as with
+good deeds, which inspire us with, emotion and admiration in others,
+but not in ourselves.
+
+When they were out in the air again, and on their way to Gefrees, and
+the coffin-key, as well as their recent conversation, continually
+brought to mind their parting (whose death sickle bent, closer around
+them with every milestone on their road), Henry endeavoured to cast a
+rosy beam or two into Firmian's mist by putting into his hands an
+accurate protocol of everything he had arranged and agreed upon with
+the Count von Vaduz concerning his duties. "The Count," he said, "would
+of course think you had merely forgotten the conversation; but it is
+better thus. Like a negro slave, you have killed yourself to obtain
+your freedom and reach the _Gold Coast_ of your silver coast; and it
+_would_ be damnable, indeed, if you were to be damned now after your
+decease." "I can never thank you enough, you dear friend," said
+Firmian; "but you should not make things harder for me than they are,
+and draw yourself back like a hand from the clouds the moment you
+have emptied yourself. _Why_ is it that I am not to see you again
+after we have said good-bye? Tell me." "First," he answered, "because
+people--the Count, the Widow's Fund, your widow--might find out that I
+was extant in two editions, and that would be an accursed misfortune in
+a world where a fellow can hardly be allowed to sit and sleep in peace
+in his _first_ original edition. Secondly, I intend to make my
+appearance in several of the broad comedy characters which there are so
+many of to be played on this ship of fools of an earth; and as long as
+not a single devil among the audience knows me, I shall not be ashamed
+of my parts. Ah! I could give you plenty more reasons into the bargain.
+Besides, it delights _me_ to come down with a flop, as if out of the
+moon on to this earth; and in among mankind, unknown, uprooted,
+untrammelled; a _lusus naturæ_, a _diabolus ex machina_, a monstrous
+moon-_lithopædium_. Firmian, it is a settled thing. Perhaps in a few
+years' time I may send you a letter now and then, more particularly as
+the Galatians[98] placed upon the funeral pyre letters directed to the
+dead, as they might have put them in a post-office. Hut it really is a
+settled thing now--positively." "I should not give in to all this so
+quietly," said Siebenkæs, "if I did not feel convinced that I shall
+very soon see you again. I am not like you. _I_ look forward to _two_
+meetings with you--one here below, one there above. And would to God
+that I could bring you to die as you did me, and we met afterwards on a
+Bindloch hill, but were going to be longer together."
+
+If these wishes chance to remind the readers of Schoppe in Titan, they
+may consider in what sense Fate often interprets and fulfils our
+wishes. Leibgeber merely answered, "People must love, though they may
+not be able to see each other; and, when all's done, it is only Love
+that we can love after all, and _that_ we can each see in the other
+every day."
+
+In Gefrees, Leibgeber proposed that, as there was such ample leisure
+(there being nothing to see in, or out of, the one street of the town),
+they should exchange clothes, and that particularly in order that the
+Count of Vaduz (who had not for years seen him in any other dress than
+the one he now wore) should not find anything to be struck with about
+Siebenkæs, but that everything about him should be exactly as it always
+had been, even to the nails on the heels of his shoes. The thought of
+being, in future, embraced (so to speak) by Henry's sleeves, and
+clasped and warmed by all his external _reliquia_, fell like a broad
+ray of warm February sun on Siebenkæs's breast. Leibgeber went into the
+next room, and, to begin with, threw his short green jacket through the
+half-open door, crying, "Come in, coat with skirts!" then followed up
+with necktie and waistcoat, and long trousers with leather stripes,
+saying, "Come in, breeches!" and ended up with his shirt, and the
+words, "Here with the winding-sheet!"
+
+The shirt thus thrown in was, to Siebenkæs, as an astrologer (or
+interpreter of signs), with respect to Leibgeber. He saw that he
+had a higher motive in view in this bodily transmigration into clothes
+than mere dressing for a certain character at Vaduz; to wit, the taking
+up of his abode in the shell, or cocoon, which had contained his
+friend. Not in a whole volume of Gellert's or Klopstock's 'Letters
+on Friendship,' not in a whole week of Leibgeberian days of
+self-sacrifice, did there seem anything so beloved and delicious as in
+thus falling heir to his clothes. He would not profane this surmise
+which made him so happy by alluding to it in words, but he was
+confirmed in it when Leibgeber came out transformed into a Siebenkæs,
+looked at himself in a satisfied manner in the mirror, and then laid
+his three fingers, in silence, on Firmian's forehead. This was his
+highest token of love; wherefore, to my own and Firmian's great joy, I
+mention, that he repeated this sign more than three times during dinner
+(the conversation running on wholly indifferent subjects). What
+different and interminable jokes would he not have made upon this
+moulting at another time, and under the influence of other feelings!
+Merely to guess at a few. How much he would have made of the rebinding
+of their two folio volumes, so as to involve Herr Lochmüller (the
+landlord at Gefrees) in the deepest and most diverting embarrassment,
+which that polite gentleman could by no means have extricated himself
+from one minute before this, my fourth book, came to his aid, which at
+this moment is only in Bayreuth, and not even gone to press! But
+Leibgeber did nothing of all this; and even of witticisms he only
+delivered himself of a few weak ones; about their being changelings,
+about the sudden French transition of people _en longue robe_ into
+people _en robe courts_. And he said he would no longer call Siebenkæs
+a transfigured being in boots, but one in shoes, which was more
+befitting, as well as sounding somewhat more sublime. It was with
+particular pleasure that he saw how his dog, Saufinder--between the old
+bodies and the new clothes, as if between two fires of love--could not
+properly make out the matter in the least degree, and often went from
+one to the other with a most uneasy face. The _concordat_ between the
+two parties--the shortening of the one, and the lengthening of the
+other--puzzled the creature, and he could make neither head nor tail of
+it all. "I like him twice as much as I did," said Leibgeber; "believe
+me. If he is faithful to you, that is not being unfaithful to me." He
+could not possibly have said anything more complimentary than this.
+
+All the bleak way from Gefrees to Muenchberg, Firmian, from gratitude,
+took the greatest pains to reflect back on Leibgeber that sunshine of
+cheerfulness into which Henry was continually trying to lead him. It
+was no easy matter, especially when he saw him striding after him in
+the long coat. He concentrated himself to an extreme effort in
+Muenchberg, the last post-station before Hof, where the corporeal arms
+with which they clasped each other were, so to speak, to be cut off by
+a long separation.
+
+As they were going along the road to Hof, more silent than before,
+Leibgeber being first, and feeling refreshed by the pine-covered
+mountain on his right, began (as he usually did on his journeys) to
+whistle national airs, both merry and sad, for the most part in minor
+keys. He said he thought there were many worse town-and-street-fifers,
+and that he performed on the foot-passenger's post-horn which Nature
+had given him in a manner deserving of some applause. To Firmian,
+however (now that their parting was so near), these tones, which seemed
+to come echoing back from Henry's long journeys of the past, and
+forward from his coming lonely ones as well, were as a kind of Swiss
+_Ranz des Vaches_, which went to his very heart; and it was well he was
+walking last, for he could scarce restrain his tears. Ah! take music
+away when the heart is full and must not overflow!
+
+At length he brought his voice sufficiently under command to be able to
+say, without any apparent emotion, "Are you fond of whistling as you
+go, and do you do it often?" In the tone of this question there was a
+something as if the fluting was not quite so much of an enjoyment to
+him as to the musician himself. "Always," answered Leibgeber. "I
+whistle[99] away life, and the world's stage, and all there is upon
+it--and all that sort of thing--a great many matters in the past; and,
+like a steeple-warder at Carlsbad, I _whistle in_ the future. Do you
+dislike it? Is my fuguing incorrect, or my whistling a breach of the
+rules of pure composition?" "Oh! only too beautiful," answered
+Siebenkæs.
+
+And then Leibgeber began again, but with tenfold power, and performed
+such a lovely and melting mouth-organ voluntary, that Siebenkæs came up
+to him with four long strides, and, putting his handkerchief to his
+eyes with his left hand, while he laid his right gently on Henry's
+lips, he said in broken accents, "Henry, spare me! I don't know why,
+but every note of music moves me too deeply to-day." The musician
+looked at him--Leibgeber's whole inner world was in his eyes--then
+nodded in a decided manner, and strode rapidly onwards in silence,
+without looking round or letting his face be seen. But his hands,
+perhaps involuntarily, went on making little movements, beating time in
+continuation of the melody.
+
+At length they arrived, oppressed and anxious, at the Grub-street
+or Mint-city where I am now seated, pasting and colouring these
+assignats--this paper-money for half the world--namely, Hof.[100] It is
+by no means in my favour, indeed, that at that time I knew nothing
+whatever of all these matters which half Europe is now being made
+acquainted with through me. I was a good deal younger then--sitting
+alone at home like a cabbage-lettuce, with the best will in the world
+to close to a head--which process of closing, in men as well as in
+lettuces, is hindered by nothing so much as by the contact of the
+neighbouring salad-plants. It is easier, pleasanter, and more
+advantageous, for a youngster to go from solitude into society (from
+the seed-bed into the garden), than the converse--from the market-place
+into the corner. Unmitigated solitude and unmitigated society are both
+bad: and, with the exception of their _order_ of succession, nothing is
+so important _as_ their succession.
+
+In Hof, Siebenkæs engaged two rooms at the inn, thinking Leibgeber
+would not part from him till the morning. However, _he_ (whom his own
+pre-determination to say good-bye, and his dread of saying it, had
+fretted and annoyed immensely for a considerable time) had taken a
+mental vow that their two spirits should be torn asunder that day, and
+that, immediately thereupon, he should be off into Saxony as hard as he
+could, though it should want but a quarter of an hour to midnight; but,
+at all events, before that particular day should come to a close. He
+went into his room, smiling and pleasant, and thought of the airs he
+had been whistling (which were still running in both their heads, if
+not in their hearts). But he soon enticed him out of that empty
+deaf-mute of a room into the diverting tumult and stir of the
+coffee-room--not remaining long there, however, either--but as the
+moon, in her first quarter, was standing like a lighted lamp just above
+a post in the market-place, he asked him to go for a cruise round the
+town with him. So they went, and climbed up the avenue, and looked down
+at the gardens in the city-moat (which, perhaps, deserve to take the
+_pas_ over other artificial meadows, inasmuch as they are more
+specially sown for cattle than others). I presume this was the reason
+why Leibgeber (who had been in Switzerland) remarked late at night
+(when the country, adorned and adopted by Nature, but disinherited by
+Art, lay extended before him) that the people of Hof were like the
+Swiss, whose whole country was a garden, except the few gardens in it.
+
+The pair went on drawing wider and wider parallels around the town.
+They crossed a bridge, from which they saw a gallows-hill overgrown
+with grass, which reminded them of that other ice-region, with its
+crater, where, exactly a year ago, they had bidden each other good-bye
+at night, but with the sweeter hope of an earlier meeting. Two friends
+such as they are always struck with the same ideas in the same
+circumstances. Each is--if not the unison--at all events the octave,
+fifth, or fourth to the other. Henry tried to rekindle a little light
+in his friend's dark house of sorrow and mourning by aid of the
+bird-pole, which stood like a commandant's flag-staff, or a burning
+stake, not far from the Supreme Criminal Court's place of judicature.
+He said, "A shooter-king has his Sinai, where he can both promulgate
+his laws and vindicate them, close at his hand here, in a delightful
+manner, beside his lever and leaping-pole, such as you heaved yourself
+up by to the dignity of Great Negus and Grand Mogul of Kuhschnappel.
+Button's law--that every elevation has another of equal height and
+similar composition opposite to it--applies to a great number of
+eminences which correspond to one another; gallows-hills and thrones,
+for instance, in this case; the two sides of the choir in churches; the
+fifth story and Pindus: show-booths, and the Chairs of Professors
+Extraordinary."
+
+As Firmian did not speak, but remained sunk in sadder similes, Henry,
+too, held his peace. He led him towards another stone (for he was
+intimately acquainted with the whole country), one with a prettier
+name, the "Stone of Joy." At last, while they were toiling up the hill
+towards this stone, Firmian took heart and said, "Tell me right out--I
+am quite prepared--tell me at once, on your honour, when are you going
+away from me for ever?" "Now," answered Henry. On the pretence of its
+being easier so to climb the hill-side, all flowers and perfumed
+mountain-plants, they were holding each other by the hand, and as they
+went they pressed hands sometimes, as if from accidents of mechanical
+motion. But pain struck great roots that waxed amain into Firmian's
+heart, roots that split it asunder as the roots of trees split rocks.
+Firmian laid himself down on the grey projecting rock, which divided
+the green slope like a boundary-stone, and he drew his departing friend
+down to his breast. "Sit down very close beside me this once more," he
+said. As the manner of friends is, each pointed out to the other
+everything he saw. Henry showed him the camp of the town pitched all
+about the foot of the hill, and looking as if fallen into a deep
+sleep, nothing moving in it but some flickering lights. The river went
+coiling along beneath the moon round the town like a great serpent with
+a sparkling back, then stretched itself out through two bridges. The
+half-shimmer of the moon, and the white transparent vapour of the
+night, lifted the hills, the woods, and the earth, up to the heavens;
+and the water on the earth was spangled with stars like the blue night
+above, and the Earth, like Uranus, had a doubled moon, as it wore a
+child in either hand.
+
+"In reality," Leibgeber began, "we can both always see each other
+whenever we please. All we have to do is to look into a looking-glass.
+That is _our_ moon-mirror."[101] "No," said Firmian, "we will fix on a
+time when we will think of each other--on our birthdays--and on the day
+of my pantomime death, and on _this_." "Very well," said Leibgeber,
+"these shall be our four quarter-days."
+
+Of a sudden, the hand of the latter rested upon a dead lark, which had
+probably been shot. He clasped Firmian's shoulders, and, raising him
+from the ground, said, "Stand up; we are men. What is all this fuss
+about? Fare you well! If ever I let you out of my head, or out of my
+heart, may God dash me to atoms with a thousand thunderbolts. You are
+and shall be for ever in my bosom as warmly as my own living heart. And
+so, good-bye, and all good attend you; and in all the Berghem Seapiece
+of your life may there not be a single wave the size of a tear.
+Farewell!" They clung together, and wept heartily, and Firmian did not
+answer as yet. His fingers stroked and pressed his Henry's hair. At
+last he leaned his cheek against the beloved eyes; before his _own_
+eyes the wide abyss of night shimmered, and his lips uttered (but with
+no cadence in the tone), "'Fare you well,' do you say to me? Ah! _that_
+I _cannot_, when I have lost my truest, my oldest friend. The earth
+will always be as dark to me as it is now around us here. It will be
+hard for me when I am dying, and, in my feverish fancy, think I am only
+_pretending_ to die again, and stretch out my hand in the darkness to
+feel for you, and say, 'Henry, close my eyes again, I cannot die
+without you!'" Henry whispered, "Tell me what else to say to you, and
+then may God punish me if I utter another syllable." Firmian stammered,
+"Will you always like me, and shall I see you soon again?" "Not soon;
+not for a long time," he answered, "and I shall never cease to love
+you." As he was starting to go, Firmian held him back. "We will look at
+each other once more," he said. And they bent back, their faces
+channelled by streams of emotion, and looked at each other for the last
+time, while the night-wind, like the arm of a stream, mingled with the
+deep river, and then rushed on united with it in deeper billows, while
+the great mountain-range of creation trembled before the tearful eyes.
+But Henry tore himself away, made a sign with his hand as if to say all
+was over, and took his flight down the hill.
+
+After a little, Firmian was impelled after him--not knowing why--by the
+goad of pain and sorrow. His inner man, compressed by the tourniquet
+into insensibility, did not feel the amputation of his limb just then.
+They both hurried along the same road, though separated by hills and
+valleys. Whenever Henry stopped and looked back, so did Firmian. Alas!
+after a sultry storm, such as this, the waves all freeze to spikes of
+ice, and the heart lies upon them transfixed. As Firmian went on
+broken-hearted, by unknown, darkling paths, it seemed to him as if all
+the death-bells on earth were tolling behind him, as if the stream of
+life were running dry before him fast; and when he saw the blue of the
+sky cut across by a black storm-tree[102] which lay upon the stars like
+the bier of the future, a voice seemed to cry, "With this foot-rule of
+vapour, Fate is measuring you, your world, and your love, for your last
+coffin."
+
+From the circumstance that the distance between him and the other
+figure kept always the same, Henry at last became aware that it was
+following him, and halted only when he halted. So he made up his mind
+that he would lie in wait in the next village for the coming up of this
+form which was creeping after him. In the next village then, Töpen
+(which lies deep in a valley), he awaited, in the broad shadow of a
+gleaming church, the arrival of this unknown being which was on his
+track. Firmian came hastening along the broad white street, dazed with
+sorrow--blind in the moonlight--and stopped, as if frozen, close by
+Henry from whom he had so recently been severed. There they stood
+facing each other, like two spirits above their corpses, each taking
+the other for a ghost (just as the superstitious think the noises made
+by the buried-alive are caused by spirits). Firmian trembled lest
+Leibgeber should be vexed with him, and opened his arms and stammered
+out, "It is I, Henry," and went to him. Henry gave a cry of pain, and
+threw himself upon the faithful breast; but his vow sealed his lips.
+And thus these two miserable, or blessed beings, speechless, blind and
+weeping, pressed their beating hearts close together once more. And
+when this moment--wordless, full of torture, full of bliss--was over
+and past, an iron, cold one, tore them asunder, and Fate seized them
+with two almighty arms, and hurled the one bleeding heart to the south,
+and the other to the north; while the dejected, bleeding corpses passed
+slowly and alone, along the widening path of parting, in the night.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+And why is it that _my_ own heart breaks in twain with such a pang? Why
+should it be that, long ere I came to their parting, I could not keep
+my own tears back? Ah! my dear Christian, is it not because in this
+church those who once lay upon your heart and mine are mouldering into
+dust? No, no, I am used to it now; in the black magic of our lives to
+see skeletons suddenly start up in our friends' places; that of every
+two who put their arms about each other _one_ has to die;[103] that an
+unknown breath blows the brittle glass which we call a human breast,
+and a cry, which we know not of, shatters it in a moment. It does not
+pain me now so much as of old, ye two brothers sleeping in the church,
+that the hard, cold hand of death struck you away so soon from the
+honey-dew of life, and that ye stretched your wings and have vanished
+away. Oh! either your sleep is sounder than ours, or your dreams are
+happier, or your awaking is blither. But what agonises us in every
+grave-hillock is this thought. "Alas! beloved heart, _how_ I would have
+loved you had I known you were going to die!"
+
+But, since none of us can take a corpse's hand and say, "Pale one! at
+all events I have sweetened thy transitory life a _little_; I have, at
+any rate, never given that faded heart of thine anything but love and
+happiness;" and as when time, sorrow, and the loveless winter of life
+have beautified our hearts, at length we must all go up, with
+unavailing sighs, to the overthrown forms which are lying beneath the
+landslip of the grave, and say to them, "Oh! that, now that I am better
+and gentler, I have thee with me no longer, and can no longer love
+thee! Oh! that the beloved breast is transparent and broken in, and no
+heart in it which I would love more fondly, and gladden as I never did
+before." What have we left but an unavailing sorrow, a dumb repentance,
+and never-ending bitter tears?
+
+Yes, my Christian, we have something better left still--a warmer,
+truer, lovelier, love for every soul which we have not yet lost.
+
+
+
+
+ CHAPTER XXIII.
+
+ DAYS IN VADUZ--NATHALIE'S LETTER--A NEW YEAR'S WISH--WILDERNESS OF
+ DESTINY AND THE HEART.
+
+
+We next meet our Firmian (promoted to higher rank on his retirement
+from the world, as officers are on theirs from the service, to that of
+Inspector, namely) in the Inspector's quarters at Vaduz. He found he
+had to twist his way through so many thickets of prickly-pear and
+impenetrable thorn-hedges, that, amid his labours, he almost forgot
+that he was alone--so utterly alone--in the world. No one could endure
+and overcome solitude, if it were not for the hope of companionship in
+the future, or for the belief in invisible companionship in the
+present.
+
+With the Count he had only to seem to be what he really was, and then
+he was most like the unconventional Leibgeber. He found the Count to be
+an old man of the world, living alone, with neither wife, sons, nor
+female servants--a man who filled up and adorned his grey years with
+the arts and sciences, the last, and most lasting, enjoyments of a life
+enjoyed to the end--and who cared for nothing on earth (saving always
+the amusement of jesting upon it) except his daughter, who (as we are
+aware) had been Nathalie's greatest friend in the starry and flowery
+days of youth.
+
+As he had devoted all his powers of body and soul, in early life, to
+climbing to the tops of all the slipperiest _mats de cocagne_ of
+pleasure, and carrying off the prizes from them, he had come down to
+earth with both sides of his being a little wearied. His mental life
+was now a kind of nursing, and lying in a tepid bath, which it required
+a shower of cold water to make him raise himself from, and into which
+fresh warm water had to be constantly being poured. The point of honour
+of keeping his word, and the greatest possible happiness for his
+daughter, were the only unbroken reins by which moral laws had ever
+restrained him; for he looked upon all their other covenants more in
+the light of flower-chains, or strings of pearls--matters which a man
+of the world breaks and mends often enough in his career.
+
+As it is easier to imitate lameness than straight walking, it was not
+difficult for Siebenkæs to enact the part of his beloved _Diable
+Boiteux_. The Count was somewhat struck with his white-painted face
+(which was natural to him), and with his melancholy, and a heap of
+nameless divergences (variations and aberrations) from Leibgeber. But
+the Inspector accounted for these to his patron by saying that he was
+so changed that he scarce recognised himself--that he seemed to have
+become the changeling of his former self since his illness, and since
+he had seen his college friend Siebenkæs depart this life in
+Kuhschnappel. In brief, the Count could not but believe what he was
+told; who would think of such an absurd story as the one I am telling
+here? And if the reader had been present in the room himself, I am sure
+he would have believed the Inspector in preference to me, if it were
+for no other reason than that he remembered more of his old
+conversations with the Count than the latter did himself. ('Tis true he
+got this knowledge out of Leibgeber's diary.)
+
+At the same time, as he had to speak, and act, in the capacity of
+chargé-d'affaires, or resident consul, and proxy of his beloved
+Leibgeber, there were two things which he was, in a high degree,
+constrained to be--cheerful and kindly. Leibgeber's humour had a
+greater power of colour, a greater freedom of drawing, and a more
+poetic and citizen-of-the-world-ish, and ideal compass and range, than
+Firmian's own[104] and this assumed brightness of temper by and by
+became genuine. Moreover, his delicacy of feeling, and his friendship,
+kept constantly before his mental vision, as on a Moses-cloudy-pillar
+on his path of life, a shining, magnified image of Henry with a glory,
+and a crown of laurel on his brow and every thought within him cried,
+"Be glorious, be godlike, be a Socrates, to do honour to the spirit
+whose ambassador you are." And which of us could assume the name of a
+beloved person, and go and act unworthily?
+
+Nothing on earth is so often deceived--not even women or princes--as
+the conscience. Our Inspector tried to make _his_ believe that his
+name had really _been_ Leibgeber in early days--just as he signed it
+now--and that he really _was_ helping the Count in his work. Moreover,
+who could be more ready than he to make a perfectly clean breast of the
+whole story to the Count as soon as ever the proper time came? It was
+easy to see that a humourous, juristic forgery, and pictorial illusion
+of this sort would please him better than any amount of truths founded
+upon reason, or _responsa prudentum_--to say nothing of his
+gratification at finding he could have his friend, humorist, and
+jurist, with two heads, two hearts, four legs and arms--in duplicate,
+in short. Besides, the fact must not be lost sight of that the lies he
+told were more _unavoidable_ lies than lies for the amusement of the
+thing--inasmuch as he touched as seldom as he could upon Leibgeber's
+previous conversations and relations, and as much as possible on his
+own, which involved no breaches of truth.
+
+Thus it is with--not our Inspector only--but man in general. He has an
+indescribable fondness for _halves_, perhaps because he is a colossus
+and demi-god standing, with out-stretched legs, upon two worlds. He
+particularly delights in half-romances, half-postage of selfishness,
+half-proofs, half-scholars (smatterers in knowledge), half-holidays,
+half-spheres--and (consequently) better halves.
+
+Siebenkæs's new labours of various kinds concealed his own pains and
+sufferings from him for the first few weeks (at all events, when the
+sun was not shining). But what gave him his largest extra-ration of
+pleasure was the Count's satisfaction with his legal knowledge, and
+careful and accurate style of doing his work. Once, when the Count said
+to him, "Friend Leibgeber, you are keeping your promise like a man.
+Your ability and accuracy over your work are deserving of all praise,
+and I do not conceal from you that I felt just the slightest shade of a
+misgiving on this very head, notwithstanding my high opinion of your
+other talents. For, like your Frederick II., I consider talk and work
+to be two wholly distinct things; and as regards the latter, I look for
+the most accurate and methodical attention to all its details in every
+one I have to deal with." Firmian rejoiced within himself, as he
+thought, "At all events I have turned aside some little matter of blame
+from my dear Henry, and gained a little modicum of praise for him;
+though he could have done it all much better himself, if he had
+chosen."
+
+After a pleasure of self-sacrifice such as this, one always wants to go
+on enjoying _fresh_ pleasures of self-sacrifice, and making new
+sacrifices, just as children, who, whenever they are given anything,
+cannot cease giving. He brought out his 'Selections from the Devil's
+Papers,' gave them to the Count, and told him plainly and openly that
+they were his own work. "This is not a deception in the slightest," he
+thought; "though he supposes they are by Leibgeber; I have no other
+name now." The Count never wearied of reading and praising these
+papers, and what particularly pleased him was, that, in the path of
+satire, he followed the guidance of his own two compatriots, the
+British Castor and Pollux of humour, Swift and Sterne. Siebenkæs
+listened to the encomiums on his book with such delight that he seemed
+exactly like a conceited author--whereas, in reality, he _was_ nothing
+but a _lover_ of his Henry, who had managed to conjure a few extra
+laurel-crowns on to his image in the Count's mind.
+
+This single enjoyment of his was, of a truth, necessary to him by way
+of consolation and cordial for a life which was flowing on, beshaded
+and chilled between two steep banks of legal business, week after week,
+month after month. Alas! with the exception of the good Count's talk
+(whose extraordinary kindness to him would have made his heart beat
+even more warmly than it did, could he have thanked him for it in
+another's name as well as his own),--he heard nothing better than an
+occasional murmur of the waves of his life. He found himself, every
+day, in his old, disagreeable post of a critic, compelled to read
+what he had to give judgment upon. Formerly it had been books--now it
+was lawyers. He saw into so many empty heads, into so many empty
+hearts--saw such darkness in the former, such blackness in the
+latter. He saw how very much the common-herd (when it comes to the
+Egeria-fountain of the juristic ink-bottle to benefit its _calculi_),
+is like Carlsbad bath-guests, in whose case the hot-springs bring all
+diseased matter to the surface of the skin. He saw that most of the
+oldest, and worst, members of the legal profession are, in only one
+beautiful respect, like poisonous plants--namely, that they are not
+half so poisonous, but more innocuous, while they are young. He saw
+that a just judgment often did as much harm as an unjust one, and
+that the one was appealed against just as much as the other. He saw
+that it was easier, and, at the same time, more distasteful, to be a
+judge than an advocate; although neither of them loses anything by an
+injustice--for a judge is paid for a judgment reversed on appeal, just
+as an advocate is for a case which he loses. He saw that, in dealing
+with defendants, the principle of grooms is applied (who look upon the
+currycomb as a good half of the forage). And, finally, he saw that
+nobody fares worse in the affair than he who _sees_ it, and that the
+devil is the very last of all things that the devil _takes_.
+
+Amid labours and views such as these, the tender fibres of the heart
+contract, and the open arms of the inner man are paralysed--the
+overweighted soul scarce has the _strength_ to love, let alone the
+_time_. When we love, and seek after _things_, it must be at the
+expense of _persons_. If we _work_ too much, we must _love_ too
+little. There was but one place where poor Firmian gave vent, once
+in the twenty-four hours, to the longings and prayers of his tender
+soul--namely, his pillow; and its cover was the white handkerchief
+waiting for his weeping eyes. A deluge (made of tears) was over all his
+former world--nothing floating on its surface but the two withered
+funeral-garlands of departed days--the flowers which Lenette and
+Nathalie had worn on their breasts, like petrified medicine-flowers of
+his sick soul.
+
+Living so far away, and so wholly outside the elliptical vault, he
+could hear as little of Kuhschnappel as of Schraplau--of Lenette and
+Nathalie not a word. He merely learned, from the 'Messenger of the Gods
+and Advertiser of German Programmes,' that he was dead, and that the
+critical profession was thereby deprived of one of its ablest and most
+zealous members. Thus our Inspector was honoured by the necrologium
+sooner than any other German scholar ever was--as soon, in fact, as the
+Olympic conqueror Euthymus,[105] to whom, by a decree of the Delphic
+Oracle, sacrifice and divine worship was adjudged during his lifetime.
+I do not know which kind of ears--long ears or deaf--the German trump
+of fame prefers to blow to.
+
+And yet, in the depths of this ice-month of his love-imploring heart,
+and in the wilderness of his loneliness, Firmian still had one living,
+resplendent flower--and that was Nathalie's parting-kiss. Ah! ye who
+waste and pine because of our insatiableness, did ye but know how a
+kiss, which is a first and a last, blossoms and blooms throughout a
+life--imperishable double-rose of speechless lips and burning souls--ye
+would search for bliss more enduring--aye, and find it too! That kiss
+sealed, in Firmian, and confirmed the spirit-bond immortalising and
+eternising love at its loveliest and brightest hour of bloom. The
+speechless lips were still eloquent, to _him_. The spirit breathed
+between them as of old; and often as he saw, by night, behind the veil
+of his closed, tearful eyelids, Nathalie going away from him, with all
+her sacred sorrows, and vanishing down the darkling path--he never had
+enough of the parting, the anguish, and the love.
+
+At last, when six months had passed, one beautiful winter morning, when
+the white hills with their snow-crystal woods lay bathed in the
+rose-blood of the sun, and Aurora was stretching her pinions more
+widely as she gently laid them down upon the glittering earth--there
+flew a letter into Firmian's empty hand, as if borne upon the
+morning-breeze of a spring as yet among the things to be. It was from
+Nathalie, who, like the rest of the world, supposed him to be the Henry
+of former days.
+
+
+"DEAR LEIBGEBER,--I can restrain or control my heart no longer. Every
+day it longs to break in pieces before yours, and show you all its
+wounds. You were _once_ my friend, I know; am I quite forgotten? Have I
+lost _you_ too? Ah! surely not; it is only that you cannot speak to me
+for sorrow, since your Firmian died upon your breast, and still rests,
+vanishing into the frost of death, upon the aching spot. Ah! why did
+you persuade me to accept the fruit that grows upon his grave--and, as
+it were, open that grave anew every year?[106] The first day I received
+this fruit was bitter--bitterer than any other. You will see from a
+little New Year's Greeting, which I addressed to myself (and which I
+enclose), how I sometimes feel. One passage in it refers to a white
+rose in my room, from which I managed to gather a flower or two in
+December. My friend, now grant me a request, the making of which is
+really my object in writing this letter--my most earnest prayer for
+sorrow, a bitterer sorrow than is mine even now--for this will give me
+consolation. Tell me--for there is no one else who can--and I know no
+other--tell me everything about our dear one's last hours and moments;
+what he said and what he suffered; how his eyes closed, and how his
+life ended? All this, everything, though it will pierce my heart, I
+_must_ be told. What can it cost you and me but tears?--and tears
+soothe suffering eyes.
+
+ "I remain, your friend,
+
+ "NATHALIE A.
+
+"P.S. If there were not so many causes to prevent me, I would go myself
+to his resting-place and gather relics for my soul; but, if _you_ keep
+silence, I do not answer for anything. I send you my congratulations on
+your new appointment, and I hope I may be able to wish you joy some day
+by word of mouth; my heart may become so far whole once more that I
+shall be able to come and pay my dear friend a visit at her father's,
+and see _you_ without dying of sorrow, at the likeness you bear to your
+buried friend, _un_like you now."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+I venture to translate[107] the pretty poem as follows:
+
+
+ "MY NEW YEAR'S GREETING TO MYSELF.
+
+"The New Year's gates are open, and Fate, standing between the sun and
+the burning morning clouds upon the mound of ashes of the year which
+has fallen to dust, deals out the days according to their lot. What
+dost thou pray for, Nathalie?
+
+"Not for joy. Alas! all the joys which have been in my heart have left
+but black thorns there; their rose-juice soon, was gone. The heavy
+thunder-cloud grows as the sun-gleam brightens--and what shines upon us
+is the ray reflected from the sword which the coming day will hold to
+our happy hearts. No, no; I pray not for joys; they make the thirsting
+heart so void. It is but sorrow that can fill it full.
+
+"Fate deals the days according to their lot. What dost thou long for,
+Nathalie?
+
+"Not love. Oh! those who press the thorny white rose of love to their
+hearts draw blood from out them; the warm tears of bliss which fall
+into the blossom soon grow chill, and are dried up amain. Love, all
+gleam and bloom, hangs on the morning sky of life, like some great
+rose-red Aurora in the heavens. Ah! do not enter that bright glittering
+cloud--it is but mist and tears. No, no; long not for love; die
+of a lovelier sorrow. Sink into the chill of death under a nobler
+poison-tree than is the lovely myrtle.
+
+"Thou art kneeling at the feet of Destiny, Nathalie; tell him thy
+desire!
+
+"Neither do I desire more friends. No; we stand all, side by side, on
+undermined graves--and when we have _so_ long held each other so fondly
+by the hand, and _so_ long suffered together, our friend's empty mound
+breaks in, and he turns pale, and sinks--and I am left alone, my life
+all frozen, beside the filled-up grave. No, no: but when at last there
+comes the hour when the heart will die no more, but has put on immortal
+being--and when friends stand side by side in the eternal world--then
+let the firmer breast beat warm and high, then let the eye, which is to
+beam for ever, weep blissful tears, then let the lips, which never more
+grow pale, murmur in rapture, '_Now_ come to me, beloved soul, we will
+love _now_, for we shall never have to part, again.'
+
+"Oh! thou bereaved and widowed Nathalie! what would'st thou have on
+earth?
+
+"A grave, and patience; nothing else beside. But these deny me not,
+thou silence-keeping Fate! Dry thou mine eyes, then close them! Still
+my heart, then break it!--Yes, _one_ day, when the free spirit spreads
+her wings in a fairer heaven, and when the New Year breaks upon a purer
+world--when we _all_ meet, and love, again--_then_ shall I lay my
+longings, prayers, and wishes at thy feet. But none for _me_; for _I_
+shall be too blest."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+In what words could I depict the _inward_ speechlessness and
+motionlessness of her friend, when he had read the paper, and still
+held and gazed at it, although he could no longer either see or think.
+Oh! the ice-floes of the glacier of death spread wider and wider, and
+filled up one warm Tempè valley after another. The only bond by
+which our solitary Firmian now held to humanity was the cord of his
+death-bell and coffin--his bed was but a broader bier--and every joy
+seemed a theft from the withered, leaf-stripped heart of another. And
+thus the stem of his life, like that of many flowers,[108] went deeper
+and deeper down, its top becoming its hidden root.
+
+The abyss of a difficulty yawned on every side, and to do _anything_
+was just as perilous as to do _nothing_. I shall lay the difficulties,
+or resolutions, in their order as they struck his mind, before the
+reader. In man, the devil flies up always sooner than the angel,--the
+evil intention comes before the good one.[109] _His_ first was
+non-moral, namely, that he should answer Nathalie, and tell her what
+she wished to hear--that is, should _lie_ to her. We find the black
+mourning coat as becoming, when others wear it for _us_, as warm when
+_we_ wear it for _others_. "But I shall melt her heart" (said _his_)
+"into fresh anguish with a continuation of wound and lie; ah! not
+_even_ my actual death would be worth such pain and sorrow. Therefore I
+shall keep utter silence." But _then_, she must think Henry annoyed,
+and that she has lost _this_ friend too; nay, she might, in this case,
+travel to Kuhschnappel, and go to his grave, and bear it as an
+additional burden upon her oppressed and trembling soul. In both these
+cases there was the risk of the _third_ danger--that she should come to
+Vaduz, and that he should then have to convert the written lies, which
+he had spared her, into spoken ones. There was but one way of escape
+that he could see--the most virtuous, but the steepest--he could tell
+her the truth. But with what danger to every relation of his life this
+confession was fraught, even if Nathalie kept counsel--also, a yellow,
+cross light would fall upon Henry in Nathalie's eyes, especially as she
+had no means of knowing anything as to the nobleness and generosity of
+his aims and deceptions. On the whole, there was least for his heart to
+suffer on the precarious path of truth, and ultimately he resolved to
+go by it.
+
+
+
+
+ CHAPTER XXIV.
+
+ NEWS FROM KUHSCHNAPPEL--WOMAN'S ANTICLIMAX--OPENING OF THE SEVENTH
+ SEAL.
+
+
+It is a matter which often quite puts me beyond myself that, although
+we _do_, in the end, duly accept and honour the bills which Virtue
+draws upon us, we only _pay_ them after such a vast number of days of
+grace and double-usances--although neither the devil nor Constantinople
+will hear of either the one or the other. Firmian urged no further
+pleas of objection, except for delay. He merely _postponed_ his
+confession, thinking that as Apollo is the best consoler (Paraclete) of
+man, and as Nathalie had shown the basilisk of sorrow its own image in
+the mirror of poetry, the sight of _itself_ would be sufficient to kill
+it, Thus it is that all virtuous motions in us are weakened by the
+friction of time and of our inclinations.
+
+One single letter, however, sent all the scenery of his theatre into
+confusion again. It came from Schulrath Stiefel:--
+
+
+"HONOURED SIR,--You doubtless remember more than too well the
+testamentary instruction which our mutual friend, the late lamented
+Poor's Advocate, Siebenkæs, left behind him, to the effect that Herr
+von Blaise should make payment of the trust-funds in his hands--and,
+indeed (as you are aware), to your respected self in order that you,
+might remit it to the widow--which failing, it was the testator's
+avowed intention to appear as a ghost. Be this as it may, thus much is
+matter of notoriety in this town and neighbourhood, that, for some
+weeks past, a ghost, in the likeness of our lamented friend, has
+pursued the Herr Heimlicher everywhere, who has, in consequence, become
+so ill and bedridden, that he has taken the Holy Sacrament, and made up
+his mind to pay over the above-mentioned moneys in good earnest. I now
+beg to inquire of you whether you would wish to receive them in the
+first instance, or whether (as would be almost more natural) they shall
+be paid at once to the widow. I have yet to mention that--in accordance
+with the desire of the testator--I sometime since married the former
+Mrs. Siebenkæs, and that I expect very soon to be the happiest of
+fathers. She is a most admirable wife and housekeeper. She is by no
+means a Thalæa,[110] and would lay down her life for her husband as
+gladly as he would lay down his for her; and I often have nothing left
+to desire, but that my predecessor, her good, never-to-be-forgotten
+first husband Siebenkæs (who _had_ his little whims and eccentricities
+at times), could be a spectator of the happiness in which his beloved
+Lenette is now bathed. She weeps for him every Sunday as she goes
+through the churchyard, but at the same time she confesses that she is
+happier now than in former times. It grieves me much that it is only
+now that I have learnt, from my wife, in what miserable circumstances
+the dear departed found himself, as regarded his purse. How eagerly,
+had I been aware of this, I should have taken him and his wife by the
+arms, and assisted them as becomes a Christian! If the deceased, who
+_now_ possesses more than any, or all, of us, can, in his glory, look
+down upon us, I am sure he will forgive me. I would respectfully beg
+for an early reply to this letter. One cause of the restitution of the
+trust-funds may also be, that the Heimlicher (who is an honest enough
+man upon the whole) is now no longer influenced by Herr von Meyern.
+They have completely fallen out, as all the town knows, and the latter
+has broken off engagements with five ladies in Bayreuth, and is about
+to enter into the state of holy matrimony with a native of
+Kuhschnappel.
+
+"My wife is as bitter against him as Christian love permits, and says
+that when she meets him she feels like a hunter who encounters an old
+woman in his path of a morning; for he was the cause of much needless
+vexation between her and her husband, and she often tells me with
+pleasure how cleverly you, esteemed Mr. Inspector, often set this
+dangerous fellow down, and kept him in his place. However, he does not
+dare to set foot in _my_ house. I defer, for the present, a more
+detailed request--as to whether you would not feel inclined to fill our
+departed friend's vacant place as Collaborateur in the 'GOD'S Messenger
+of German Programmes,' which (I may say without undue boasting) is
+taken in, and looked upon with approval in Gymnasia and Lycæa, from
+Swabia as far as Nürnberg, Bayreuth, and Hof. There is rather a
+superfluity than a lack of miserable Programme-scribblers; and (let me
+say it without flattery) _you_ are the very man to wield the satiric
+scourge over the heads of these frog-spawn in the Castalian springs, as
+few others _could_. But of this more on another occasion. My wife
+desires to add _her_ most cordial remembrances to her departed
+husband's highly-esteemed friend; and, hoping for a speedy answer,
+
+ "I remain, your most obedient humble servant,
+
+ "S. R. STIEFEL, Schulrath."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The human heart is shielded by _great_ sorrows from the impact of
+_small_ ones--by the waterfall from the rain.[111] Firmian forgot
+everything in remembering, suffering, and crying out to himself, "Thus
+I have lost thee for ever, wholly. Oh! _thou_ wert good always, it was
+_I_ who was not. Be happier than thy solitary friend whom thou mournest
+justly every Sunday." He now cast all the blame of his bygone
+matrimonial lawsuits upon his own satirical whimsies, and ascribed the
+failure of his crop of happiness to his own ungenial climate.
+
+But in this he was doing himself greater injustice than he had formerly
+done Lenette. I mean to make the world a present of my thoughts on this
+subject, on the spot. Love is the Perihelion of the fair sex; nay, it
+is the transit of every one of those Venuses over the sun of the ideal
+world. At the epoch of this "higher style" of their souls, they love
+_everything_ that _we_ love, even the sciences, and the whole _best_
+world within the breast--and they despise what _we_ despise, even
+clothes and news. In this spring of theirs these nightingales go on
+singing until the summer solstice; the wedding-day is their longest
+day. Then the devil runs away with--not exactly everything, but
+something every day. The bast-band of wedlock binds the poetic wings,
+and the bridal-bed is (for the imagination, the phantasy), an
+Engelsburg, and prison-cell, with bread and water. During the honeymoon
+I have often followed these poor birds of paradise, or peacocks of
+Psyche, and in this moulting-season of theirs picked up the glorious
+wing and tail-feathers which they have dropped; and then, when a
+husband has fancied he has married a naked crow, I have held out the
+bunch of feathers to him. Why is this? For this reason: marriage
+overlays the poetical world with the rind of the actual; as (according
+to Descartes) our earthly sphere is a sun covered over with a dirty
+crust, or bark. The hands of everyday labour are unwieldy, hard, and
+full of indurations, and find much difficulty in going on holding, or
+drawing the delicate threads of the woof of the ideal. Hence it is
+that among the upper classes (where, instead of work-_rooms_ there are
+only little work-_baskets_, and where the little spinning-wheels are
+turned on the lap with the finger, and where love still endures after
+marriage--often even for the husband) the wedding-ring is not so often,
+as among the lower orders, a Gyges-ring, which renders books and the
+arts of music, poetry, painting, and dancing--invisible. Upon high
+places plants of all sorts, and particularly female plants, have more
+vigour and aroma. A woman has not, as a man has, the power of
+protecting the outer side of her inner air-and-magic-castles against
+rough weather. What then is she to hold to? Her husband. He ought
+always to stand beside the liquid silver of the female spirit with a
+spoon, and keep skimming off the scum which gathers on it, that the
+silver-glittering sheen of the ideal may always keep bright and
+shining. But then there are two sorts of husbands--Arcadians, or
+lyric-poets of life, who love for ever, like Rousseau, when their hair
+is grey--and these are not to be controlled or comforted when they can
+no longer see any gold on the feminine anthology (bound with gilt
+edges) because they have turned the leaves of the little book over one
+by one, (as is the case with all gilt-edged books). Secondly, there are
+shepherd-hinds and sheep-smearers, I mean master-singers by profession,
+men-of-business, who thank God when the _enchantress_ turns, at last,
+like other witches, into a grumbling _house_-cat, keeping down the
+vermin.
+
+Nobody has to suffer more anxiety and alarm, combined with tedium and
+ennui (and therefore I intend some day to awaken the pity of my readers
+for this very condition, in a comic biography) than a portly,
+energetic, pushing, pompous, ponderous _Basso_ of a "business-man," who
+finds himself (like the elephants in Rome of old) constrained to dance
+on the slack-rope of love; and whose deportment and play of feature, in
+the circumstances, _I_ think more like those of a marmot than anything
+else, when the warmth of a room has awakened him from his winter's
+sleep, and he finds he can't get properly into the knack of moving. It
+is only with widows (who wish less to be loved than to be married)
+that a weighty office-holder of this sort can begin his romance at the
+place where all the novel-writers leave theirs off--namely, at the
+altar-steps. A man, built after this simplest of styles, would find a
+great weight lifted from his heart if anybody would only love his
+shepherdess _for_ him till such time as he should have nothing to do
+but go and be married; and no one would have greater pleasure in taking
+up this burden, or cross, from them than myself. I have often thought
+of announcing in the public newspapers (except that I was afraid it
+would be looked upon as a joke) that I was prepared to swear Platonic,
+eternal love to any number of endurable girls (whom men of business
+might not even have _time_ to love), and make them all the necessary
+love-declarations as plenipotentiary of the bridegroom-elect--in a
+word, to lead them on my arm, as _substitutus sine spe succedendi_, or
+_cavalier de société_, athwart the whole of the unlevel land of love,
+till, on the frontier, I should hand over my charge, duly prepared, to
+the bridegroom; which would be lovemaking, rather than marrying, by
+ambassador. If, according to this _systema assistantiæ_, there should
+be any one who would care to employ the writer even during the
+honeymoon (when a certain amount of love may still be expected to crop
+up), he must take care to establish all the necessary conditions in
+good time, beforehand.
+
+In Siebenkæs's Lenette (from no fault of his) the ideal isle of the
+blest had sunk away, miles deep, in an instant, at the very marriage
+altar. The husband could in nowise either help or hinder this. On the
+whole, dear Mr. Education-Counsellor Campe, you really should not
+strike so hard upon your writing-desk with your school birch-rod
+whenever a solitary she-frog croaks out something or other out of the
+nearest marsh, which is capable of being sent to an almanack. Ah me!
+don't tear away from the good creatures (who _do_ put the loveliest
+dreams, all full of fantasy-flowers, into this empty life of ours) the
+terribly short dream of a delicate, sentimental love. They will be
+awakened to reality only too soon without that, and neither you nor I
+will be able to put them to sleep again, let us write as much as we
+choose.
+
+Siebenkæs wrote off that day a brief and hurried reply to the
+Schulrath, saying "he was extremely glad that he had stood to the will,
+and the laws, and enclosed him a power of attorney to enable him to
+draw the money. Only he entreated him, as a great scholar and man of
+letters (one of a class who of ten, perhaps, suppose they understand
+matters of business better than they really do), to put the whole
+affair into a lawyer's hands to be transacted, inasmuch as _Jus_ is of
+little use without jurists--nay, often not of very much even _with_
+them. To _review_ 'Programmes' he had no time, let alone to _read_
+them; and he sent his kind regards to his wife."
+
+It is not displeasing to me that (as I perceive) my readers have all
+discovered of themselves that the ghost, or supernatural bow-wow, and
+mumbo-jumbo,[112] who had got the trust money out of the Heimlicher's
+clutches more effectually than the whole _posse-comitatus_ of the Court
+of Exchequer, was none other than Heinrich Leibgeber, who had availed
+himself of his resemblance to the departed Siebenkæs to play the part
+of _Revenant_. I need not, therefore, tell the reader what he knows
+already.
+
+When one has at last managed to creep up a steep Alp with the hands
+of a tree-frog, one very often finds that, what one looks down at from
+the summit is a fresh yawning abyss. Firmian saw a new one under his
+feet; he had to abandon the resolution he had taken. I mean, he did not
+now dare to say a word to Nathalie about his resurrection from the
+charnel-house--his immortality after death. Alas! the happiness of his
+Lenette, who (in the utmost innocence) had two husbands, would then be
+hanging on the tip of a tongue. The blame would be his, the misery
+Lenette's. No, no (he said); Time will, by slow degrees, lay dust upon
+my pale image in Nathalie's kind heart, and draw the colours out of it.
+
+In brief, he kept silence. The proud Nathalie kept silence also.
+In this terrible position of matters, face to face with the hard,
+eternal _knot_ of the drama, he passed his anxious hours upon the
+stage. The raven-flight of cares and sorrows cast their flitting
+shadows over every charm and beauty of the spring, and poisonous dreams
+fell upon his sleep like mildew. Every dream-night cut the falling
+planetary-knot, and his heart along with it. How would Fate rescue and
+recover him from this poison-vapour, this azote-gas, of anguish and
+anxiety? How would it cure the finger-worm in his ring finger? By
+taking his arm off. One evening, to wit, shortly before bedtime, the
+Count was as confidential with him as a man of the world can ever be.
+He had something very pleasant to tell him, he said; only he must be
+allowed to say something beforehand, by way of a preface or
+introduction. It struck him--he went on to say, that, now that his
+Inspector had entered upon his duties, he was no longer quite so gay
+and full of humour as he had found him to be of old, but rather (if he
+might speak openly) downcast at times, and over-sentimental. Yet he had
+formerly said himself (but this was the _other_ Leibgeber) that he
+would rather hear a man swear at a mischance than lament over it; and
+that one might have his feet sticking in the winter, and his nose in
+the spring, and smell a flower, though in the midst of snow. "I forgive
+it, at once, for perhaps I guess the reason of it," he added. But his
+forgiveness was really not quite genuine. For, like all the great, to
+him strength of feeling, even of a loving sort--but still more, of a
+sorrowful--was an annoyance; and a strong handclasp of friendship was
+almost as bad as a crunch on the toes. He demanded of pain that it
+should pass before him with a smile--of wickedness and evil, that they
+should pass him by laughing, or, at all events, laughed _at_--as,
+indeed, the coldest men of the world are like the physical man, whose
+highest temperature is about the region of the diaphragm.[113]
+Consequently, the previous Leibgeber--that storm-windy, but, at the
+same time, serene blue sky--naturally suited the Count better than this
+so-called Leibgeber. But how differently from us who _read_ this little
+reproach quietly, did Siebenkæs listen to it! These _solar eclipses_ of
+his Leibgeber (which really were not even so much as _sun spots_
+belonging to _him_, but merely _apparent_ shadows cast on him by
+Siebenkæs, by reason of the position he chanced to occupy) the latter
+reproached himself with as so many deadly sins against his friend,
+which he felt it absolutely necessary to confess and do penance for.
+
+As the Count now went on to say, "This melancholy of yours can scarcely
+be caused altogether by grief at the loss of your friend Siebenkæs,
+because since his death you have never spoken to me of him with such
+warmth as when he was alive. Pardon me this frankness,"--a fresh pang
+at this shadowing of Leibgeber cut across his brow, and it was with
+difficulty that he could allow his patron to finish his explanation.
+"But this is not a shortcoming in _my_ eyes, dear Leibgeber: on the
+contrary, it is an excellence. We ought not to go on eternally mourning
+for the dead; if we grieve at all, it should be for the living. And
+even the latter species of grief may come to an end with you next week,
+for then I expect my daughter, and" (he spoke here very deliberately)
+"her friend Nathalie with her. They have met _en route_." Siebenkæs
+sprang hastily up, stood speechless and motionless, held his hand
+before his eyes, not to hide them, but to keep the light out of
+them, so that he might look through, and follow the course of, the
+cloud-masses of thought which were piled one over another and rolling
+in all directions, ere he should give his answer.
+
+But the Count--misconstruing him (as Leibgeber) in all points, and
+ascribing his sentimental metamorphosis to Nathalie's account, and the
+fact of his being deprived of her--begged him merely to hear him out
+before speaking, and to accept his assurance that he would be delighted
+to do everything in his power to retain his daughter's lovely friend
+always in the neighbourhood. Heavens! what thousandfold entanglement
+the Count made of a matter so wholly simple!
+
+Here Siebenkæs, stormed at from fresh points of the compass, had to beg
+for a moment to think--for there were now _three_ souls at stake--but
+he had scarcely taken one or two hasty steps across the room, when he
+stood firm again, and said to the Count, and to himself, "Yes, I shall
+do what is right." Then he begged the Count to give his word of honour
+that he would keep inviolate a secret which he would confide to him,
+and which neither related to, nor would injure, himself or his daughter
+in the slightest degree. "In that case why should I not?" answered the
+Count, to whom the discovery of a secret was as the clearing away of a
+thick woodland before a fine view.
+
+Then Firmian opened his heart, his life, and everything, like a stream
+let loose and dashing into a new channel, not yet to be measured with a
+glance. The Count several times detained him by fresh misunderstandings,
+because he had only preassumed, out of his own imagination, a love on
+Nathalie's part for the real Leibgeber, and had never heard from any
+one of her real love for Siebenkæs.
+
+And now the astonished Count, in his turn, astonished the Advocate;
+and, of all the many faces which in such a case he might have put
+on--faces offended, angry, startled, embarrassed, delighted, cold--he
+only showed the Inspector an exceedingly contented one. It only
+particularly pleased him, he said, that he _had_ observed so many
+little matters which rather vexed him, and that in certain points he
+had _not_ thought over-highly of Leibgeber; but what delighted him most
+was his good fortune at possessing, in this manner, a _double_
+Leibgeber, and the knowledge that the absent one was not sorrowing for
+a dead friend.
+
+Let no one be surprised at the Count's maintaining his good-humour and
+serenity who has seen a bright order-star sparkle on an aged, and
+extinguished, breast. When our old man of the world beheld the little
+shuttle of this chain of friends flying to and fro between love and
+sacrifice on either side; when he held in his hand the bright
+Raphael-tapestry of friendship which it wove, and looked at it closely,
+there came to him the enjoyment of _something new_, for the first time
+for many years. So that, up to this point, he had been sitting in his
+front box before a living comic-historical drama, of which he himself
+unravelled the plot, and which could be performed all over again in his
+head at any given moment. Moreover, his Inspector had become a new
+being for him, full of fresh entertainment, inasmuch as he had gone off
+the stage, changed his dress and re-entered as the pseudo-deceased
+Siebenkæs; and could, in the future, tell him as much as he
+pleased of the narrator. In this way both the friends had become
+flatteringly-precious to him, by reason of the dependent interest in
+him with which they had interwoven the bond which bound their souls.
+
+He who has tasted the bliss of sticking to the truth can understand
+the new delight with which Siebenkæs could now pour himself
+out unrestrained concerning everything--himself and Henry and
+Nathalie--inasmuch as it was not till now that he felt the full weight
+of the burden he had got relieved of--that of working the light,
+jest-falsehood of a moment into a yearly comedy, in 365 acts. With what
+ease he explained to the Count that, before Nathalie's arrival (whom he
+could neither undeceive, nor go on deceiving), he must fly, and that
+straight to Kuhschnappel. As the Count listened, he told him all the
+reasons urging him to go; longing to see his tombstone, and unhallowed
+grave, so as to do penitence and expiation; longing to see Lenette,
+unseen, from afar, perhaps her child near; longing to hear from
+eye-witnesses a minute account of her happy married life with Stiefel
+(for Stiefel's letter had wafted the flower ashes of bygone days into
+his eyes, and opened the leaves of the sleeping-flower of his conjugal
+love); longing to wander, romantically (erect now, and with his burden
+off), about the scenes of his old oppressed life; longing to hear, in
+the market-town, something of his Leibgeber, who had been there so
+recently; longing to celebrate August, the month of his death, in
+solitude--the month when it had been with him as with the vine, whose
+leaves are taken off in August, that the sun may shine more warmly on
+the grapes.
+
+In three words, for why give many reasons--since when once there is a
+_will_, there can never be any lack of _reasons_--he set off.
+
+
+
+
+ CHAPTER XXV., AND LAST.
+
+ THE JOURNEY--THE CHURCHYARD--THE SPECTRE--THE END OF THE TROUBLE,
+ AND OF THE BOOK.
+
+
+I see more clearly every day that I and the other 999,999,999 human
+beings,[114] are nothing but so much skin-and-bone stuffed (like cooked
+chickens), full of a mass of incongruities, contradictions,
+inconsistencies, irremediable insufficiencies, and resolves, of which
+every one has its antagonist muscle (_musc. antagonista_). We do not
+contradict other people half as often as ourselves. This last Chapter
+is a fresh proof of it. Up to this point, the reader and I have been
+labouring together with the sole object of finishing this Book, and now
+that we see the shore, and have all but reached it, we are both sorry
+for it. I shall, at all events, be doing something--the most that I
+can--if I conceal, and hide away (so to speak) the end of it, as we do
+the end of a garden, and say several things which will help to lengthen
+out the work a little.
+
+The Inspector sprang out into the open country, among the corn-ears,
+fortified with a muscular, full breast--the Alp of silence and
+deception no longer weighed upon him as it had done. The avalanche
+which had overwhelmed his life had melted to a third of its original
+size Tinder the sun of his present fair fortune. His electric
+Leyden-jar coating with a better income, and even the fact of his
+having a great deal more to do, had charged him with fire and courage.
+His appointment was a mountain permeated by so many veins of silver and
+gold, that even in this first year of it he had found he was enabled to
+send sundry anonymous contributions to the Prussian Widows' Fund, so as
+to make amends for a good half of his fraud upon it, and see his way to
+finally clearing it off altogether. I should not lay this act of duty
+before the public gaze were it not that Kritter, in Göttingen--who
+reckons that this fund will be exhausted in the year 1804--or even
+calculators more moderate in their results, who think its extreme
+unction will be received in 1825, might take occasion, from these
+Flower-pieces of mine, to lay its death wholly at the Inspector's door.
+If this should prove to be the case, I should very deeply regret having
+alluded to the subject, in the remotest manner, in my Flower-pieces.
+
+He did not take his way by Hof or Bayreuth, or any of the old romantic
+journey-roads. He dreaded lest the hand of Fate (which sows behind the
+clouds) might bring his phantom-body before Nathalie's eyes. And yet he
+hoped a little that this said hand might bring him just the least bit
+in contact with his Leibgeber, since _he_ had been so recently
+cruising in these waters. As a matter of course, he had embodied
+himself, _en route_, in the said Leibgeber's shirt, jacket, and
+complete exterior--the same which he had swopped with him in the inn at
+Gefrees and this costume was a mirror which continually showed him the
+absent one's image. A "Saufinder," like Leibgeber's, who lifted his
+head up to him in a forest-cottage, sent a throb of joy through his
+heart; but the dog's nose knew him as little as did the dog's master.
+
+And yet, the nearer he drew to the hills and woods, behind whose
+Chinese churchyard-wall stood his two empty houses--his grave and his
+old lodging--the tighter did Anxiety draw her drag-net about his
+heart. It was not the fear of being recognised; this, by reason of his
+resemblance to Leibgeber (particularly in his present dress), was an
+impossibility. Nay, people would sooner have taken him for his own
+wraith and Prophet Samuel than for Siebenkæs still in the body. But,
+besides love and anticipation, there was a something which made him
+anxious--a something which once hemmed in and oppressed myself when I
+came back among the Herculanean antiquities of my own childhood. There
+clasped themselves once more around my breast the iron bands and rings
+which had crushed it in my childhood--a time when the little human
+creature is still tremblingly helpless and comfortless in presence of
+the sorrows and sufferings of life and death--when we stand between the
+footstool we have cast away, the handcuffs and ankle-chains which we
+have burst asunder, and the great sighing and singing tree of
+philosophy which is to guide us to the free, open battle-arena and
+coronation city of this earth. In every thicket round which Firmian had
+wandered in his poverty-stricken, miserable winter-autumn, he saw the
+cast-off skins of the snakes sticking, which in former days had twined
+themselves about his feet. Remembrance (that after-winter of his hard,
+cruel days) fell into this lovelier time of his life, and the
+combination of these dissimilar feelings--the clasp of the old fetters,
+and the breeze of freedom of the present--generated a third sensation,
+which was bitter-sweet, as well as anxious and uneasy.
+
+When it was twilight, he walked slowly and observantly through the
+streets, which were strewn with scattered ears of corn. Every child he
+met going home with the supper-beer, every familiar dog, and every
+well-remembered cling of a bell, was full of fossil-impressions of
+joy-roses and passion-flowers, the originals of which were all fallen
+to dust. As he passed the house where he used to live, he heard two
+stocking-looms clattering and rattling there.
+
+He took up his quarters in the Lizard Inn, which cannot have been the
+grandest hotel in the town, inasmuch as the Advocate ate his beef on a
+pewter-platter, which (to judge by the marks and _stigmata_ of a
+facsimile of his own knife which it bore), seemed to have once been
+enrolled as a soldier of his own pawned-plate-militia regiment.
+However, the inn had this advantage--that Firmian could occupy the
+little room, number seven, on the third story, and there establish a
+star-observatory, or mast-head crow's-nest, which commanded Stiefel's
+study just opposite, at a somewhat lower elevation. But his Lenette
+never came to the window. Ah! if he had seen her, he would have knelt
+on the floor for sheer sorrow. Not till it was quite dark did he see
+his old friend Stiefel, who came and held a printed sheet--probably a
+proof of the 'German Programme Advertiser'--against the red western
+sky, it being too dark to see it inside. He was surprised to see the
+Schulrath look so worn and bowed--and he had a crape on his arm too.
+"Can my Lenette's poor baby be dead?" he thought.
+
+When it was quite late he crept, all trembling, to that garden, whence
+we do not all return, and which is bounded by the hanging Eden-Garden
+of the second life. In the churchyard he was safe from the approach of
+spectators, thanks to the ghost-stories by means of which Leibgeber had
+forced his inheritance out of his guardian's clutches. On his way to
+his own vacant, subterranean bed, he passed by the grave on which
+(while it was black, it was grass-grown now) he had placed the
+flower-garland which he had _meant_ to give Lenette a pleasant surprise
+with, though it _did_ only cause her an unexpected sorrow. At last he
+came to the bed-curtains of that grave-siesta, his own tombstone, and
+he read the inscription with a cold shudder. "Suppose this stone
+trap-door were lying upon your face," he said to himself, "building you
+in from the wide heavens!"--and he thought what clouds, what coldness,
+and night, reign around the two poles of life, as about the poles of
+our earth--about the beginning and the end of man. He considered it a
+very wicked thing to have aped the last hour--the crape-streamer of a
+long, dark cloud was over the moon, his heart was tender and anxious;
+when suddenly a something with colour in it, near his grave, seized his
+attention, and caused a revulsion in his soul.
+
+For there, close beside it, was a fresh grave, quite recently covered
+in, surrounded by a painted wooden-frame, not unlike a bedstead. And
+upon these painted boards Firmian (as long as his streaming eyes
+allowed him) read what follows:--
+
+"Here reposes in God, Wendeline Lenette Stiefel, born Engelkraut of
+Augspurg. Her first husband was the lamented Poor's Advocate, F. St.
+Siebenkæs. On the 20th of October, 1786, she entered, for the second
+time, into holy matrimony with the Schulrath Stiefel, of this place,
+and after three-quarters of a year of a peaceful union with him, she
+fell asleep in childbed, on the 22nd of July, 1787, and lies here, with
+her little still-born daughter, awaiting a joyful resurrection."
+
+"Oh! poor creature, poor creature!" More he could not _think_. Now--now
+that her day of life was better and warmer, the earth must swallow her,
+and she take nothing with her but a hand roughened by labour, a face
+furrowed with the death-bed sickness, and a contented, but empty heart,
+which, hemmed down among the hollow-ways and mine-shafts of this world,
+had seen scarcely any stars or flowery meadows. Her troubles had
+gradually clouded over her life so thickly and darkly, that no
+picturing fancy could brighten and purify them by the colour-play of
+poesy, just as no rainbow is possible when the whole sky is black with
+rain. "Why did I vex you so often, and pain you, even by my death, and
+be so unforgiving to all your little innocent crotchets?" he said,
+weeping bitterly. An earth-worm came twining out of the grave, and he
+threw it forcibly away, as though it had come straight from the beloved
+cold heart; although that which satiates this creature is what satiates
+_us_ also at last--EARTH. He thought of the child (mouldering to dust)
+which laid its thin, withered arms about his soul, as if it had been
+his own, and to which Death had given as much as a God gave to
+Endymion--sleep, eternal youth, and immortality. At length he tottered
+away from this place of mourning with his heart wearied, not lightened,
+by his tears.
+
+When he went back to the inn, a woman with a harp was singing in the
+public room (a boy accompanying her on a flute) a song, of which the
+_ritournelle_ was, "dead is dead, and gone is gone." It was the same
+woman who had been playing and singing on the New Year's eve when his
+Lenette, now departed and at peace, had buried her face in the
+handkerchief, weeping and desolate. Oh! the burning arrows of these
+music-tones went hissing through his heart--the poor soul had no
+shield. "I tortured her terribly in these days" (he went on constantly
+saying). "_How_ she sighed! _How_ she kept silence! Ah! if you could
+but see me now from on high, now that you are happier! If you could but
+behold this bleeding soul of mine--not that you should forgive me, no,
+only that I might have the consolation of suffering something for your
+sake! Oh! how different would I be to you _now_!"
+
+And this is what we all say when we bury some one whom we have
+tortured; but on that very same evening of mourning we go and dart the
+javelin deep into some other breast which is still warm. Oh! weaklings
+that we are, strong only in resolves! If that form, now resolved into
+its elements, whose mouldering wounds (which we ourselves inflicted) we
+expiate with tears of penitence and warm resolves to do better, were to
+come back to us to-day, new-created, and in the brightest bloom of
+youth, it would be but for the first week that we should clasp the
+newfound soul, more fondly loved than ever, to our hearts; and then we
+should apply the old martyrdom instruments to it again, just as of old.
+That we should do this, even to our beloved dead, I deduce from the
+fact (to say nothing of our rude unkindness to the living) that, in our
+dreams, when those whom we have lost revisit us again, we act over
+again everything which we now repent. I do not say this to deprive any
+mourner of the consolation of repentance, or of the thought, that his
+love for the lost one is purer and fonder than before, but to lessen
+the pride which may be grounded upon the repentance and the data of
+feelings.
+
+Later in the night, when Firmian saw the face (gnawed and sunken with
+sorrow) of his old friend (who had now so little left to him), looking
+up to heaven, as if seeking there among the stars his friend of whom he
+was bereaved, sorrow pressed the last tear from his anguished heart,
+and in the madness of grief he cast the blame upon himself of his
+friend's sorrow; jut as if the latter had not a great deal to thank him
+for in the first instance, before setting about pardoning him.
+
+He awoke in all the exhaustion of sorrow, i.e. in that _bled-away_
+condition of the feelings which at last resolves itself into a sweet
+melting-away and longing for death. For he had lost everything--even
+what was _not_ buried. He dared not go to the Schulrath for fear of
+being recognised, or, at the very lowest, staking upon a most dangerous
+chance the peace of mind of that most innocent creature, who would
+never be able to reconcile it to either his conscience or his sense of
+honour, that he had married a woman whose husband was still alive.
+
+But he could go and see Meerbitzer, the hairdresser, with, less danger
+of discovering himself, and could carry away from him a great dowry of
+news. Moreover, the sickle of Death had cut through all his _other_
+chains and knots, together with his bonds of love. He would be doing no
+injury to any one but himself if he took off his mask of death, and
+showed himself unmouldered to other people, nay, even to the sorrowing
+Nathalie; particularly as on very beautiful evenings, and whenever he
+did any good action, his conscience claimed the arrear-interest of the
+unpaid debt of truth, refusing to grant any further letters of respite.
+Also his soul swore, as a God swears to his own self, that he would
+only stay there this one day, and then never come back.
+
+The Friseur knew in a moment, from the lameness, that he could be
+nobody but the Vaduz Inspector, Leibgeber. Like posterity, he decked
+his own lodger, Siebenkæs, with the richest of rosemary-garlands, and
+declared that these ragamuffins of stocking-weavers whom he had got
+upstairs now were not to be spoken of in the same day with poor
+lamented Mr. Siebenkæs. The whole house creaked when they rattled and
+stamped in their upstairs-room. He then called attention to the
+circumstance that the departed had taken his wife away to him within
+the space of a year and day; and dwelt on the fact that she had never
+forgotten the Meerbitzer's house, but had often looked in of an evening
+in her widow's weeds (which she had been buried in according to her
+desire), and spoken with them about all her various vicissitudes, and
+about her new life. "They lived together just like two children," the
+hairdresser said, "Stiefel and she." This conversation, the house, and
+his old rooms, so noisy now, were all so many waste places of his
+ruined Jerusalem. A stocking-loom now stood where his writing-table
+used to be, and so on. All his questions about the past were so
+many conflagration-relics, collected for the fresh building of his
+burnt-down pleasure-chateaux from out their Phœnix ashes. Hope is
+the morning Aurora of joy, and memory its red evening sky; but the
+latter is terribly apt to drop down in grey dew or rain, with no colour
+left in it. The blue day, which the red sky gives promise of, _does_,
+indeed, break in brightness; but it is in another world, where there is
+another sun. Meerbitzer unknowingly cleft, deep and wide, the split
+into which he grafted the sundered flower-twigs of the bygone days on
+to Firmian's heart; and when, finally, his wife related how, when
+Lenette had taken the Communion of the Sick, she said to the evening
+preacher, "I _shall_ go to my Firmian when I am dead, shall I not?"
+Firmian averted his breast from this blind dagger-thrust, and hurried
+out into the open air, that he might not encounter any one to whom he
+should be constrained to lie.
+
+Yet he could not but long for some human creature, even were one to be
+found nowhere else but beneath his lowliest roof of all--in the
+churchyard. The electrically-charged atmosphere of the evening brooded
+and hatched melancholy longings of every kind; the sky was overspread
+with scattered unripe fragments of a thunder-cloud, and in the west
+horizon a muttering storm had begun, scattering its lighted pitch-rings
+and full-charged clouds down upon unknown lands. He went home; but as
+he passed by the tall railings of Blaise's garden, he fancied he saw a
+figure like Nathalie, dressed in black, glide into the arbour. And
+then, for the first time, he turned his mind to something which
+Meerbitzer had said about a lady in mourning, who had come a few days
+before, and wished to be shown all over the house, lingering
+particularly in Siebenkæs's old rooms, and making a great many
+inquiries. That she should have come out of her road on her way to
+Vaduz was by no means unlikely; indeed, it was very consistent with her
+romantic turn of mind, particularly as she had never seen Siebenkæs's
+former home, and the Inspector had not answered her letter--as Rosa
+was married, and Blaise reconciled to her (since he had seen the
+ghost)--and the month of Firmian's death would naturally suggest to her
+a visit to his last resting-place.
+
+So that her friend could not but dwell all this evening with feelings
+of painful fondness upon her memory--the one unclouded star which
+beamed on him from the overcast heaven of his bygone days. It was deep
+in the gloaming now, a cooler air was stirring. A storm had spent its
+force in other regions, and there remained only some broken, lurid
+clouds, piled in the sky like glowing, half-burned firebrands. He
+betook himself, for a last time, to the place where death had planted
+the red carnation, with its little buds snapped so untimely from its
+stem. But within his soul, as without him, the air breathed less
+sultrily now, and fresher; tears had blunted the sharp edge of the
+first bitterness of his sorrow. He felt, with far more of gentleness,
+that the earth is only our CARPENTER'S YARD, not our BUILDING-GROUND.
+In the East, where the stars were rising, a long blue streak shone
+above the sunken thunder-clouds. The moon (light-magnet of the sky) was
+lying, like a fount of light, upon the foil of a cleft cloud, and the
+wide vaporous veil was melting motionlessly away.
+
+When Firmian, approaching the beloved grave, raised up his downcast
+head, he saw a dark form resting there. He stopped short, and gazed
+more piercingly. The form was a woman's. Her face, frozen into the ice
+of death, was fixed on him. As he drew nearer, he saw his dearest
+Nathalie leaning overpowered against the painted railing of the grave.
+The autumnal breath of death had tinted her lips and cheeks with white;
+her wide eyes were sightless, and nothing but the tear-drops which hung
+on her lashes gave proof that she was in life, and had taken him for
+the apparition of which she had heard so much. In the excess of her
+romantic sorrow at his grave she had longed, in the strength and
+loneliness of her heart, that his spirit might appear to her; and when
+she saw him approaching, she thought Heaven had granted her prayer. And
+then the iron hand of chill terror turned this red rose to a white one.
+But ah, her friend was the more wretched of the two. His tender,
+unshielded heart was crushed motionless between the impact of two
+worlds which rushed crashing together. In tones of utter distress he
+cried out, "Nathalie! Nathalie!" Her lips quivered spasmodically, and a
+breath of life gave back a shade of brightness to her glance; but the
+spirit was still there before her, and she closed her eyes again, and
+said, with a shudder, "Oh God!" It was in vain that his voice called
+her back to life; when she looked up at the apparition her heart failed
+her again, and she could only cry "Oh God!" Firmian seizing her hand,
+cried, "Angel of heaven, I am not dead! only look at me! Nathalie,
+don't you know me? Oh! merciful God, don't punish me so terribly, don't
+let me be the cause of her death!" At length she slowly lifted her
+heavy eyelids, and saw her old friend trembling beside her, with tears
+of anxiety and terror. His tears were happier, but more abundant, and
+he smiled sorrowfully upon her as she still kept her eyes open, and
+said, "Nathalie, I am still upon this earth, in very truth, and suffer
+as you do yourself; don't you see how I tremble on your account? Take
+my warm, living hand. Are you still afraid?" "No," she answered
+faintly; but she still looked at him in an awe-stricken fashion, as at
+a super-earthly being, and had not courage to ask for an explanation of
+the riddle. He helped her to rise (gently weeping), and said, "But,
+dear innocent one, come away from this place of sorrow, where so many
+tears have been shed already. For _your_ heart mine has no secrets now.
+Ah! I can tell _you_ everything, and I _will_ tell you everything." He
+led her out, above the quiet dead, through the back gate of the
+churchyard. She leaned on his arm heavily and languidly, shuddering
+again often as they climbed the little height, and only the tears which
+joy, relief from terror, grief, and exhaustion combined, had brought to
+her eyes, fell like warm balsam upon her chilled and wounded heart.
+
+When they reached the top of the height she sat down to rest, and the
+black night-woods, railed round by white harvests, and cut across by
+the moon's silent sea of light, lay before them. Nature had drawn out
+the "pianissimo lute" organ-stop of midnight, and by Nathalie's side
+stood one of her beloved dead, new-risen from the grave. He told her
+now all about Leibgeber's entreaties; the short story of his mock-death;
+his residence with the Count; all the longings and tears of his long
+solitude; his firm determination rather to fly from her than to deceive
+or wound her beloved heart, either by speech or in writing; and the
+disclosures he had made to her friend's father. She sobbed at the
+account of his last moments and parting from Lenette, as if it had all
+been real. She thought on many things as she merely said, "Ah! it was
+only for other people's happiness that you sacrificed yourself. But
+you will be able to have done with all this deception _now_, and to
+make amends for it, will you not?" "I shall," he said, "to the very
+utmost of my power; and my heart and my conscience shall be free and
+clear once more. Have I not even kept the vow I made to _you_--that
+I should not see you again till after my death?" She smiled gently.
+
+They both sunk into a dreamy and blissful silence. At last, seeing her
+lay a mourning-cloak butterfly[115] (disabled by the night-dew) down
+upon her lap, the fact that she was in mourning herself struck him for
+the first time, and he hastily asked, "_You_ are not in mourning for
+any one, are you?" Alas! she had put it on for _him_. "Not _now_,"
+Nathalie answered, and, looking at the butterfly, she said pityingly,
+"a few _drops_ and a little _chilliness_ have benumbed the poor thing."
+Her friend reflected how easily Fate might have punished _his_ temerity
+by benumbing the even more beautiful, black-attired creature by his
+side, who had, moreover, had her full share already of shivering in the
+night-frosts of life and the night-dew of tears. But he could not
+answer her for love and pain.
+
+They kept silence now, reading each other's thoughts, lost, half in
+their hearts, half in the grandeur of night. The wide æther had
+absorbed all the clouds (only those of the sky, alas!); Luna bent down,
+with her saintly halo, like a glorified Madonna, from the tranquil
+blue, to greet her pale sister of the earth. The voice of the stream
+was heard, as it flowed on its course unseen, hidden by a light
+mist--like the stream of time, hidden from sight by the haze of
+countries and nations. Behind them the night-breeze had laid itself to
+rest upon a swelling, rushing bed of corn, bestreaked with blue
+corn-flowers; and before them lay the reaped harvest of the world to
+come--precious stones (as it were) in their coffin-settings, cold and
+heavy in death.[116] The pious and humble ones (forming an antithesis
+to the sunflower and the mote in the sunbeam) turned as moon-flowers to
+the moon, and played as moonbeam-motes in her cool rays, feeling that
+there is nothing under the starry sky so great as hope.
+
+Nathalie leant on Firmian's hand, that he might help her to rise, and
+said, "I feel quite able to go home now." He kept hold of her hand, but
+did not rise nor speak. He was gazing at the dry, prickly stalk of the
+old rose-twig which she had given him. Unwittingly, and without feeling
+what he was doing, he pressed the thorns into his fingers. His laden
+bosom heaved with deeper, warmer sighs; burning tears stood in his
+eyes, and the moon's light trembled before them like a shower of
+falling light. A whole universe lay upon his soul and upon his tongue,
+and kept both motionless.
+
+"Firmian," said Nathalie, "what would you have?" He bent his fixed eyes
+widely opened upon her gentle form, and pointed down to his grave in
+the valley. "My house down there," he answered, "which has been empty
+so long. For the bed on which we dream this dream of life is terribly
+hard."
+
+He lost command of himself, for she wept so terribly--and her face, all
+heavenly kindness, was so near--and he burst forth, with the bitterest
+and strongest emotion, "Are not all my loved ones gone, and are not
+_you_ going too? Ah! why has torturing destiny laid the waxen image of
+an angel upon all our breasts,[117] and lowered us into the chill life?
+Oh! the soft image melts away, and there is no angel. Yes, _you_ HAVE
+appeared to me, it is true, but you disappear, and time will crush to
+atoms your image on my heart, ay, and my heart with it. For when I have
+lost _you_, I _shall_ be alone in earnest. But, fare you well! I
+_shall_ actually die one day, and _then_ I shall appear to you; but not
+as I have done to-night. Ah! nowhere but in eternity, and then I shall
+say to you, 'Oh! Nathalie, I loved you there below with infinite,
+unending grief and sorrow; make amends to me _here_!'" She strove to
+answer, but her voice broke and failed her. She raised her great eyes
+to the starry sky, but they were full of tears. She tried to rise, but
+her friend held her, with his hand all thorns and blood, and said,
+"_Can_ you leave me, Nathalie?"
+
+She arose here, sublime and grand, bent her head back, looking upward
+to the sky, rapidly swept away the tears from her eyes; her soaring
+soul found words, and, clasping her hands in prayer, she said, "Oh!
+THOU who art all love, and lovest ALL, he has been lost to me, I have
+found him again; eternity is here on earth; make THOU him happy through
+me!" And her head sank down on his, tenderly and languidly, and she
+said,
+
+"_We are going to be always_ TOGETHER."
+
+"Oh God!" stammered Firmian; "Oh angel! you are going to be always
+_with_ me--in this world and the next!"
+
+"For ever, Firmian!" said Nathalie, softly. And our friend's troubles
+were over and past.
+
+
+
+ FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 1: Name of one of the author's other works.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Other works of his.]
+
+[Footnote 3: Second Book in the translation.]
+
+[Footnote 4: The chapters in one of the author's books are called "Dog
+Post Days," for a reason therein explained.]
+
+[Footnote 5: This means, in German, one who pays no fare. Puns which
+are not translatable must be "explained," or else the sentence left
+out.]
+
+[Footnote 6: This is how all these pieces were really arranged in the
+first, unimproved edition; but I am sure Pauline won't be offended
+that, in the second edition (so strikingly improved) I have adverted
+more to the entire German empire, and arranged them very differently.]
+
+[Footnote 7: I earnestly beg that section of the public the description
+of which is here levelled at the head of the shopkeeper-captain not to
+suppose it is meant for _them_; they must see that I am only joking,
+and my intention, of course is clear.]
+
+[Footnote 8: The Koran says, the devils were compelled to serve and
+obey Solomon. After his death he was stuffed, and, by means of a stick
+in his hand, and another propping him up about the _os coccygis_, kept
+on such an apparent footing of being alive, that the devils themselves
+were taken in by it, until the hinder axis of him was eaten by worms,
+and the sovereign rolled over topsy-turvy.--See Boysen's Koran in
+Michaelis' 'Orient. Bibl.']
+
+[Footnote 9: Untranslatable pun.]
+
+[Footnote 10: Or "Poor's Advocate" (more literally). The appointment so
+named, exists, or lately existed, in Scotland.]
+
+[Footnote 11: The "Grandfather Dance" is equivalent to the English "Sir
+Roger de Coverley."]
+
+[Footnote 12: Wilhelm's 'Recreations in Natural History. Insects.' Vol.
+i.]
+
+[Footnote 13: Siebenkæs means "seven cheeses."]
+
+[Footnote 14: Sky-blue is the colour of the order of the Jesuits, as
+also of the Indian Krisna, and of anger. The hypothesis of the natural
+philosopher Marat, that blue and red together make black, should be
+experimented upon, by mixing the cardinal's red with the Jesuit's blue.
+Ho himself, subsequently, during the French Revolution, produced from
+blue, red, and white the most beautiful ivory black, or the Indian ink
+with which Napoleon afterwards painted.]
+
+[Footnote 15: He styles mankind his brethren, as many monks, princes,
+and religious persons are given to do to each other, and perhaps he is
+right in so doing, seeing that he treats these brethren of his just as
+many eastern princes treat theirs, and, in fact, more kindly,
+beheading, blinding, and cutting them up in a spiritual sense only, not
+in corporeal.]
+
+[Footnote 16: The same robbing, strangling paw is masked in both under
+the likeness of the track of a man.]
+
+[Footnote 17: 'Sp.' 547, N. Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 18: The Heimlicher of Freyburg is inviolable for three years
+during his tenure of office, and for three years after it expires.]
+
+[Footnote 19: It consisted chiefly of curious coins, vicariat-dollars,
+&c.]
+
+[Footnote 20: Plato likens our lower passions to animals kicking inside
+us.]
+
+[Footnote 21: He happened to have the case of one to defend, just
+then.]
+
+[Footnote 22: The book was published in 1789, by Beckmann of Gera, and
+was entitled, 'Selections from the Devil's Papers.' I shall venture to
+express my opinion on these satires further on.]
+
+[Footnote 23: The fashionable waistcoats of those days had animals and
+flowers upon them.]
+
+[Footnote 24: For the next six pages or so the original literally
+_bristles_ with untranslatable puns and plays upon words.--Translator.]
+
+[Footnote 25: Mosheim's 'Ecclesiastical History.']
+
+[Footnote 26: Gold in leaves, of two colours, used by bookbinders.]
+
+[Footnote 27: According to Klüber's notes to Delacurne de Sainte Palaye
+on Chivalry, this was the title of the official who superintended the
+tourney, or gymnastic practices and exercises. There are at the present
+day certain private tutors in aristocratic families who are feeble
+imitations of him.]
+
+[Footnote 28: In this last speech Lenette makes use of several of the
+obsolete forms of verbs referred to in a previous chapter as "religious
+antiquities out of Luther's Bible." I cannot give English equivalents.
+Of course what follows would be unintelligibly without this
+explanation.--Translator.]
+
+[Footnote 29: The French academician, N. Beurion, made out that Adam
+was 123 feet 9 inches high, and Eve 118 feet 9-3/4 inches. The rest is
+related by the Rabbin, that Adam went through the ocean after his
+fall.]
+
+[Footnote 30: The members of this celebrated sect went to church
+without any clothes on them.]
+
+[Footnote 31: It seems almost to indicate a crossing of the breeds
+between the grave tiger and the playful ape, that the Place de Grève in
+Paris is the place where malefactors are executed, and where the
+populace assemble for fêtes--that on the selfsame spot horses tear a
+regicide to pieces and citizens celebrate the accession of a new king;
+the fire wheels of the fireworks and of the people who are broken on
+the wheel whirling at the selfsame time and place. Frightful contrasts!
+we may not adduce others lest we should get to imitating those whom we
+have here found fault with.]
+
+[Footnote 32: This is an allusion to 'Hesperus.']
+
+[Footnote 33: Jocular discourses were delivered on Easter Sunday in the
+middle-ages, and went by the name of "Christian Easter-Merriment."]
+
+[Footnote 34: In the 3rd part of the Lichtenberg Philosophical
+Magazine,' the case is mentioned of a woman, who, while smelling at a
+flower, inhaled a worm into her brain, which tormented her with
+delirium, headache, &c., till it came out at her nose again, still
+alive.]
+
+[Footnote 35: Voltaire proves that a person who is 23 years old, has
+only lived 3½ years in the proper sense of the word.]
+
+[Footnote 36: The poisonous Boa Upas, beneath which one loses one's
+hair in a few minutes.]
+
+[Footnote 37: The musicians among the ancients wore them. Bartholin de
+Tib. Vet. iii. 4.]
+
+[Footnote 38: The common German dinner-time then.--Translator.]
+
+[Footnote 39: So do men forget it, though in a lesser degree. Suppose a
+man who does ninety things every day, accurately remembering them,
+should once or twice forget a ninety-first thing, he'll go on
+forgetting that afterwards, though he remembers all the rest. There's
+no remedy for this unless some person happens to come in, or something
+chances to occur just at the instant of forgetting, and recalls the
+ninety-first thing to his mind. If he once forgets to forget, he won't
+forget any more.]
+
+[Footnote 40: According to the Rabbin, the pains of the damned are
+intermitted on the Sabbath; the Christians hold that the same was the
+case during the descent into Hades.]
+
+[Footnote 41: In Bern and the Pays-du-Vaud, two male witnesses, or four
+female, are necessary for a legal proof.]
+
+[Footnote 42: The sand-glass is upright during the time the torture
+goes on.]
+
+[Footnote 43: We cannot say, however, that it is by carrying away
+noxious vapours that the wind purifies the air, since while it blows
+_my_ noxious emanations to the person behind me, it brings me those of
+the person before me; and because stagnant water does not become putrid
+solely because there is no current to carry away decaying matter.]
+
+[Footnote 44: A woman finds it much easier to yield and say nothing
+when she is in the right than when she is in the wrong.]
+
+[Footnote 45: Heller = half-a-farthing.]
+
+[Footnote 46: _I.e_. a sum which people pay to the exchequer for
+permission to leave the country.]
+
+[Footnote 47: Jews were formerly obliged to stand with bare feet on
+pig's-skin when they took oath.]
+
+[Footnote 48: Animals may not carry anything on the Schabbes; even the
+lappets which fowls sometimes have tied to them as marks of
+distinction, have to be taken off on that day; and the Jews must get
+non-Jews to milk for them; they may not even wipe off dust or moisture
+from their persons.]
+
+[Footnote 49: Prizelius trained war-horses to stand the beating of the
+drums in battle, by strewing oats on the tops of drums, and beating on
+the lower side of them while the horses ate the oats as they jumped
+about on the top.]
+
+[Footnote 50: There is no plant with eleven stamens.]
+
+[Footnote 51: Two holes in a hazel-nut show that the beetle which
+gnawed away its kernel, in the shape of a little larval worm, has crept
+out in its transformed state.]
+
+[Footnote 52: Allusion to the fable that the male birds of paradise
+hatch the eggs on the backs of the females up in air.]
+
+[Footnote 53: Particularly on cold bright winter mornings and evenings.
+I (and Siebenkæs for the same reason) have been troubled with this
+complaint for more than twenty years, and I have had an attack
+of it on this coldest of Christmas eves, just as I was describing
+it. It is nothing but a passing paralysis of the nerves of the
+lungs--particularly of the _nervus vagus_--and in course of time (for
+you see even twenty years have not been enough), lends to that
+pulmonary apoplexy which Leville in Paris, und recently Hohnbaum, have
+held to be a new form of the disease, and which, perhaps, after the
+precedent of "Miller's Asthma," may receive the name of "Siebenkæsian,"
+or "Jean Paulish apoplexy."]
+
+[Footnote 54: Buffon.]
+
+[Footnote 55: The husband should always play the lover by rights--and
+the lover the husband. It is impossible to describe the amount of
+soothing influence which little acts of politeness and innocent
+flatteries exercise upon just the very people who usually expect, and
+receive, none--wives, sisters, relations--and this even when they quite
+understand what this politeness really amounts to. We ought to be
+applying this emollient pomade to our rude rough lips all day long,
+even if we have only three words to speak,--and we should have a
+similar one for our hands, to soften down their actions. I trust that I
+shall always keep my resolution never to flatter any woman, not even my
+own wife, but I know I shall begin to break it four months and a-half
+after my betrothal, and go on breaking it all my life.]
+
+[Footnote 56: Sander, on "The Great and Beautiful in Nature."]
+
+[Footnote 57: The anchor proof consists in casting the anchor forcibly
+down upon a deep hard bottom.]
+
+[Footnote 58: Servants were _called_ "knaves" of old, and deserve the
+name pretty often at the present day.]
+
+[Footnote 59: Lack of money and of health.]
+
+[Footnote 60: One continued until fainting supervenes.]
+
+[Footnote 61: Persons condemned by the secret tribunals were so
+styled.]
+
+[Footnote 62: The former plant opens after eight in the morning, the
+latter at eleven.]
+
+[Footnote 63: It is explained in a long note in the original, that she
+_could_ do this even before being married.]
+
+[Footnote 64: The Silhouette took its name from the Controller-General
+so called. In Paris, an empty, blank physiognomy is called a face "à la
+silhouette."]
+
+[Footnote 65: Which are called "weavers' ships" in German.]
+
+[Footnote 66: In Engelhardszell, for instance, the Austrian
+custom-house officers unbutton paunches to see whether they be fat--or
+cloth.]
+
+[Footnote 67: We have all read in the newspapers that at the Vienna
+balls a paper lantern is carried through the rooms, with the
+inscription "Supper ready." This may be called Vienna lanterning.]
+
+[Footnote 68: Alas! that the English word "friend" is such a poor
+representative of the German original. Yet I cannot hit upon any
+other.--_Tr_.]
+
+[Footnote 69: Death sends sleep, Heaven the dream.]
+
+[Footnote 70: In all this discussion what we are talking of is not that
+_practical_ love of our fellow men, and of our enemies, which expresses
+itself in action, and in refraining from revenge (and which must be
+easy to every properly constituted person), but that _feeling_ of
+misanthropy, or of philanthropy (as the case may be), over which the
+moral sense has but little power--of inward love, as distinct from
+actions; of secret indignation with sinners and fools. It is easier to
+sacrifice one's self for people than to love them--easier to do good to
+our enemies than to forgive them. The longing of love, as well as its
+seldomness, have had but one painter--F. Jakobi: we do not need a
+second.]
+
+[Footnote 71: A paper, printed with symbols, &c., in which the present
+for a godchild is wrapped.]
+
+[Footnote 72: Part which a player selects as a specimen of his powers.]
+
+[Footnote 73: A Frenchman vowed he could not abide the English: "_Parce
+qu'ils versent du beurre fondu sur leur veau rôti_."]
+
+[Footnote 74: 'Pomp. Mel. de S. O.' i. 18.]
+
+[Footnote 75: Switzerland and Holland.]
+
+[Footnote 76: Which was so altered in appearance after his death by
+innumerable wounds, that they masked it as effectually us the iron one
+had done.]
+
+[Footnote 77: There is a kind of sea-bird which sleeps on the wing, or
+floats up and down; and the motion of the sea is often what awakes it.]
+
+[Footnote 78: This vetch has some of its flowers and fruit above
+ground, but most of them _under_ it; though the latter are
+white.--Linnæus.]
+
+[Footnote 79: At page 163 of the 'Pocket-Book for Watering Places, and
+Visitors to them,' it is stated that while the ladies are lying bolted
+into their baths, young gentlemen sit on the covers and entertain them
+while they are under water. Against which arrangement _Reason_
+certainly can urge no valid objection, for the wood of the baths is
+quite as thick as silk; and when all is said, Everybody is, if covered
+at all, always in some covering _inside_ of which he or she is
+altogether _devoid_ of covering--though perhaps _Fancy_, and
+_Imagination_ may urge this objection, that a bed-quilt a quarter of a
+yard thick would not be quite so becoming, or close-fitting a
+ball-dress as a gauze. If once the Innocence of the imagination be
+offended, there is no other to spare; the senses cut neither be
+innocent nor the contrary.]
+
+[Footnote 80: The white-flowering sort would weep--the red-flowering
+sort would storm, as the pale moon indicates rainy weather, and the red
+moon high wind. (_Pallida luna pluit, rubicunda fiat_.)]
+
+[Footnote 81: In the neighbourhood of Comorn (Windisch's 'Geography of
+Hungary'). Buchan mentions a similar twin-birth in Scotland.]
+
+[Footnote 82: There was a superstition that the Headsman's sword moved,
+of itself, before cutting off somebody's head.]
+
+[Footnote 83: Who distinguished himself by _painting_ thistles as much
+as Swift by _writing_ them.]
+
+[Footnote 84: There is nothing more unreasonable, uncontrollable, and
+inexplicable, than this feeling of repugnance to the unclean--this
+inconsistent alliance between the will and the coats of the stomach.
+Cicero says, "the modest do not willingly use the word 'modesty'" (a
+transcendental form of disgust with the impure)--and those who feel the
+repugnance in question deal with it in a similar manner, particularly
+as bodily and moral purity are neighbours (which the chaste and cleanly
+Swift exemplified in his own person). Even physical loathing (of which
+the subject-matter is mental, more than physical), affects the moral
+sense more than is supposed. Cross the street with undigested food, or
+antimonial wine, in your stomach, and you will feel a stronger distaste
+to a score of faces (and for more books when you come home) than at
+ordinary times.]
+
+[Footnote 85: A beggar in England who keeps a shop full of crutches,
+eye-plaster, false legs, &c., which every one who wants to be lame,
+blind, &c., must be supplied with. 'Britt. Annal.']
+
+[Footnote 86: The Rabbis maintain that Cain killed his brother because
+the latter disagreed with him when he (Cain) denied the immortality of
+the soul. So that the first murder was an _auto-da-fe_, and the first
+war a religious one.]
+
+[Footnote 87: According to de Luc, in the third volume of his 'Little
+Journeys for Amateur Travellers.']
+
+[Footnote 88: That is, to himself. He wishes his inheritance to be paid
+to himself, and not to his wife, because she might have married a rich
+husband in the interval; besides, he would have less trouble in knowing
+whether or not the Heimlicher did what he told him, and could, if
+necessary, carry out the threat which he is about to make.]
+
+[Footnote 89: Here follow, in the original, puns on the (German)
+medical names of the four stomachs of the _Ruminantia_, for which I am
+unequal to finding equivalents.--Trans.]
+
+[Footnote 90: Leibgeber means, at once, the second life (in which he
+does not believe), and Firmian's continuation of his _present_ life in
+Vaduz.]
+
+[Footnote 91: Plin. H. N., viii 30.]
+
+[Footnote 92: Which, like a greater Psyche, makes its nest in skulls.]
+
+[Footnote 93: King's hearts are enshrined in golden cases.]
+
+[Footnote 94: The actor (among the Romans) who mimicked the deceased in
+all his gestures and movements at his funeral.]
+
+[Footnote 95: People who had been taken to be dead, and honoured with a
+funeral, had to go through these ceremonies.--Potter.]
+
+[Footnote 96: Augustin, Commentar. ad Johann. xxi. 23.]
+
+[Footnote 97: This name, or that of _Tumulus Honorarius_, was given to
+the _empty_ monument which friends erected to a dead person whose body
+was not to be found.]
+
+[Footnote 98: Alexand. ab Alex. iii. 7.]
+
+[Footnote 99: There is a pun here in the original, where this
+expression means also "to hiss off" (_e.g_. an actor from the
+stage).--Trans.]
+
+[Footnote 100: I speak of 1796.]
+
+[Footnote 101: Whatever Pythagoras wrote with bean-juice on a certain
+mirror could be read on the moon.--'Call. Rhodogin,' ix. 13. When
+Charles V. and Francis I. were fighting near Milan, everything that
+happened by day at Milan could be read at night on the moon in Paris by
+means of a mirror of this sort.--'Agrippa de Occ. Philos.' ii. 6.]
+
+[Footnote 102: A long cloud, with branch-like streaks, which bodes a
+storm.]
+
+[Footnote 103: There is a superstition that when two children kiss
+without being able to speak, one of them must die.]
+
+[Footnote 104: "Therefore I foresee that Leibgeber's Pastoral Letters
+in these 'Flower Pieces' will, for most of my readers, be insufferable
+letters of denunciation or defiance. Most Germans do understand a
+joke--it cannot be denied of them--but they do not all understand
+_badinage_--and few understand humour--least of all the Leibgeber sort.
+Therefore, at first--because it is easier to alter a book than a
+public--I thought of falsifying all his letters, and substituting
+pleasanter-flavoured ones. However it can always be arranged that, in
+the second edition, the falsified letters shall be inserted in the body
+of the work, and the genuine ones given at the end as an Appendix."
+
+This has not been found necessary. Heavens! how can first editions make
+such mistakes, and misunderstand such a number of readers--to whom
+second editions afterwards offer the warmest and sincerest apologies.]
+
+[Footnote 105: Plin. H. N. vii. 48.]
+
+[Footnote 106: She refers to the widow's pension.]
+
+[Footnote 107: Because it was supposed to be in English verse.--Trans.]
+
+[Footnote 108: In the ranunculus, brown wort, the lower part of the
+stalk sinks deeper into the ground every year, to replace the root as
+it rots away.]
+
+[Footnote 109: In enthusiasm, the converse order of things prevails. To
+learn to know what your firmly established principles of morality are,
+with more certainty than you can from your resolves and actions, you
+have only to notice the joy or the sorrow which a moral claim, a piece
+of news, a disappointment, calls up in you with lightning speed, but
+which disappears again at once under the influence of reflection and
+self-control. What great, rotting pieces of the old Adam one finds
+about one still, now and then!]
+
+[Footnote 110: The wife of Pinarius, under the government of Tarquinius
+Superbus, was the first woman to quarrel with her mother-in-law (Plut.
+in Numa). German history will, perhaps, some day make honourable
+mention of the first married woman who did _not_ quarrel with her
+mother-in-law; at least a German Plutarch should set about hunting her
+out.]
+
+[Footnote 111: Allusion to a certain waterfall which dashes from its
+rock with a sweep so wide that one can walk under it, and thus be
+protected front rain.--'_An Artist's Journey in the Alps_.']
+
+[Footnote 112: A bugbear, nine feet high, made of bark and straw, with
+which the Mandingoes terrify and better their wives.]
+
+[Footnote 113: Walter's 'Physiology.']
+
+[Footnote 114: There are one thousand millions of us crawling on this
+sphere.]
+
+[Footnote 115: _Vanessa Antiopa_ gets this name in Germany.--Trans.]
+
+[Footnote 116: The purer precious stones are colder and heavier than
+the less perfect.]
+
+[Footnote 117: Waxen angels used to be put into the grave with the
+dead.]
+
+
+
+ THE END.
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FLOWER, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES ***
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